Man and World 28: 65-81, 1995.

(~) 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Sartre and hermeneutics *

ISTV,h,N M. FEHER

ELTE BTK, Filoz6fiat~r Tsz., H-1364 Budapest, Pfi 107, Hungary

Hermeneutic philosophy has come to be one of the major philosophical tendencies of twentieth-century philosophy. Although the terms "hermeneutics,"
"hermeneutical," turn up just haphazardly in Sartre's philosophical works and
their occasional use does not seem to be technical,1 I think it can be shown
that some of the leading insights, as well as methodological strategies and
devices, of hermeneutic philosophy- of the sort developed by Heidegger and
G a d a m e r - are very much at work in his thought, notably in his critique of
Marxism in Critique of Dialectical Reason, but in several important respects
already in Being and Nothingness (or even earlier).
In the first part of my paper I wish to reconstruct, viz., sum up briefly, those
aspects of hermeneutic philosophy which I think are relevant for selecting
Sartrean parallels. I then proceed, in the second part, to show how some of
these aspects, or strategies, are present (whether explicitly or implicitly) in
Sartre's philosophical works. Finally I shall briefly assess Sartre's hermeneutic relevance in contemporary American pragmatism. Implicit in this sketch
is also my understanding of, and answer to, one of the issues raised nowadays
within Sarte scholarship in terms of"what is left of Sartre's thought. ''2 Since
hermeneutic philosophy is undoubtedly one of the prominent philosophical
trends of contemporary philosophy (a fact which I think is unquestioned even
in analytically minded American philosophy), to show Sartre's relevance for,
and implicit use of, hermeneutics, is to show one possible way of his presence
in present day philosophical discussions.

* Paper presented to the Biannual Meeting of The Sartre Society of North America held
on 7-9 May 1993, at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario (Canada). The following is a
revised version. I am grateful to William L. McBride and Richard Rorty for comments and
suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. This paper was written during my stay at the
University of Virginia in the academic year 1992-93; I am indebted to the American Council
of Learned Societies which made my stay possible. Thanks are also due to the Hungarian
National Research Fund (OTKA) for its support.

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ISTVANM. FEHI~R

.
In its traditional sense, hermeneutics can be defined as the theory of rules
which govern the interpretation of texts, and which should permit us to
establish their possibly objective meaning. The problem of understanding and
interpreting texts handed down by the tradition is about as old as philosophy
itself. Due to a number of circumstances, such as the cultural crisis of our
century, the expansion of technology and world civilization, the encounter
of different cultures, the loss of sense of classical humanistic tradition, etc.,
the problems of interpretation have come to assume an ever more important
role in recent philosophy. The hermeneutic problematic has emerged as a
central topic, and has been given autonomous philosophical elaboration, in
the thought of at least two of the most influential philosophers of our century:
Heidegger and Gadamer. The hermeneutic turn of philosophy which they
carried out implies that interpretation is no more seen as an auxiliary discipline
o f human sciences - as the rules of interpretation of classical texts. Rather,
it emerges as an autonomous philosophical problem insofar as humans are
viewed in all kinds of their everyday activities- not only in their handling of
classical texts - as interpreting animals. In assessing the full import and the
radicality of this turn, we have reason to speak about an overall hermeneutic
reconception of philosophy. The radicality of this change would be wholly
misunderstood and to a considerable extent underestimated if we conceived
of it in terms of a change whereby our description of just one being among
many others had been changed, while that of the others had remained basically
the same. Rather, what this change implies is that all our habitual conceptual
strategies and linguistic devices, together with the underlying comportment
and worldview, are to undergo an overall reconsideration and reconceptionone often called destruction (Heidegger) or deconstruction (Derrida).
One of the implications of the hermeneutic reconception of philosophy
which Heidegger carried out in the twenties is that hermeneutics itself is no
more wissenschaftstheoretisch-oriented(or validity-oriented). This follows
from Heidegger's tendency to challenge the priority of epistemology and
theory o f science in philosophy, and to reaffirm the primacy of ontology.
One o f his main arguments is that scientific cognition is preceded by, and
derived from, man's Being-in-the-world. In the elaboration of his philosophical stance, Heidegger transformed phenomenology in an ontological way
- which is very much the case with what he did with regard to hermeneutics itself. Like phenomenology, hermeneutics was also given an ontological
dimension that it formerly did not have.
In accordance with this reconception of philosophy, Heidegger no longer
views understanding and interpretation as just regional concepts, confined to
particular domains - to the methodology of the human sciences. As Riceeur

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67

puts it: "The usage o f interpretation in the historico-hermeneutic sciences is

only the anchoring point for a universal concept of interpretation.'3
This re-evaluation o f interpretation implies that hermeneutics cannot remain
a subordinate discipline of the human sciences, but becomes, as Heidegger
explicitly states, "the self-interpretation of facticity.''4 It is important to see
that this "self-interpretation of facticity" is not a kind of anthropology, simply
a matter of our having to do with ourselves, implying that other beings of
the world are left untouched. Insofar as humans are precisely the beings who
describe the world in its entirety, hermeneutics gets linked to ontology - a
major reason why in the title of the 1923 course "hermeneutics of facticity"
and "ontology" occur together, clearly anticipating the correlation between
fundamental ontology and existential analytic in Being and Time.
Understanding is, on this view, no more a way of knowing, proper to the
human studies, in contradistinction to explanation as the way of knowledge
characteristic of the natural sciences. It is, rather, a way of being of the being
called human. Humans are understanding, so to speak, all along. What they
understand are not matters of fact out there in the world, but the way they
find themselves in the world, involved in it and coping with it.
With regard to hermeneutics, this reconception of philosophy implies furthermore that interpretation does not presuppose "recorded expressions," as
with Dilthey, 5 but vice versa: making assertions whatsoever presupposes
preliminary interpretation. Assertion is for Heidegger a derivative mode of
understanding. 6 A hammer, e.g., is primarily encountered as a tool for pounding nails into the wall; and in this counter it has always already been preliminary understood, or interpreted, as such. If the hammer proves to be too heavy,
"[i]nterpretation is carried out primordially not in a theoretical statement but
in an action [...] - laying aside the unsuitable tool, or exchanging it, 'without
wasting a word"'. 7 To put it bluntly: for Heidegger, in order to do interpreting
one need not speak or make assertions, but in order to speak one must have
done interpreting. 8
I think it suffices to have reconstructed some of the major claims and aspects
ofhermeneutic philosophy up to this point (whereby further developments of
hermeneutics, as well as the "consequences" of the hermeneutic turn, its relevance for the social sciences, have not yet been mentioned at all) so as to see
that a vast philosophical landscape opens up, against the background of which
Sartre's work can be revisited with the justified hope to discern interesting
convergences, departures, variations, contributions, etc. This is of course an
undertaking which, due to space limits, must fall outside the scope of this
paper. I propose to exhibit a cross-section of this philosophical landscape,
highlighting some parallels, and eclipsing and forcing others into the background. But before I proceed to do so I would like at least to take as it were a

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ISTVfi~NM. FEHI~R

loose inventory of topics which, though cannot be discussed here, would surely merit detailed examination. These include investigations centering around
such notions which are decisive for both hermeneutic philosophy and Sartre
- n a m e l y , the concepts of experience (or lived experience), project, meaning,
significance, situation, temporalization, furthermore the common rejection o f
an absolute philosophy or Hegelian absolute knowledge, the affirmation of
the specificity and singularity of history, the common insistence on human
finitude, the common appreciation of practice over above Knowledge, etc. 9
Not to mention such wide research areas as the hermeneutic import of Sartre's
critique of psychology in his early "Theory of Emotions" or his conception
o f existential psychoanalysis in Being and Nothingness. lo

The first theme I wish to single out relates to the hermeneutic problem of
understanding, as it has been conceived in the hermeneutic version given to
it by Gadamer.
What is intrinsically at issue for hermeneutic philosophy is the concept and
practice Of understanding. Central to Gadamer's view is the insight that past
philosophies address us together with their claims to knowledge and truth, and
that unless we read them with regard to their truth claims we carry out no real
understanding of them. To neglect truth claims of past philosophies amounts
to closing ourselves off from the past, to giving them no chance to participate
in our discussion of them. Detachment from the past turns out, as Gadamer
has convincingly shown in his critique of historicism, to be detachment from
the present, from one's own contemporaries. II Understanding a text should
then be understanding it together with its truth claims, on the one hand, and
letting the text challenge our own criteria of judging it on the other. The
main hermeneutic deficiency in interpreting philosophical texts lies, on a
Gadamerian view, not so much in applying false or bizarre criteria. Rather,
it lies in making the criteria of our evaluation of, or confrontation with, the
text inaccessible to critical scrutiny. "The text that is understood historically,"
writes Gadamer in his critique of historicism, "is forced to abandon its claim
that it is uttering something true." Apropos of this, Gadamer speaks of a
"conversation that we have with someone simply in order to get to know him,
i.e., to discover his standpoint and his horizon." But it is easy to see that
[t]his is not a true conversation, in the sense that we are not seeking
agreement concerning an object, but the specific contents of the conversation are only a means to get to know the horizon of the other person.
Examples are oral examinatios, or some kinds of conversation between

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69

doctor and patient. [...] In both cases, in our understanding we have as

it were withdrawn from the situation of trying to reach agreement. [...]
By including from the beginning the other person's standpoint in what
he is saying to us we are making our own standpoint safely unattainable.
[...] [This kind of] acknowledgement of the otherness of the other, which
makes him the object of objective knowledge involves the fundamental
suspension of his claim to truth. 12
To make our standpoint "safely unattainable", or suspend the other's "claim
to truth" are paradigms of hermeneutic closure- attitudes that were far from
being unknown to Sartre. Indeed, we should realize that a number of objections Sartre moved to contemporary Marxism, for example in Search for a
Method, center around the claim that the source of Marxist dogmatism is,
hermeneutically speaking, closure in front of the claim of the other, preliminarily neutralized by applying stigmatizing terms like, e.g., "bourgeois."
This critique has its anticipation, and is based on methodological devices,
worked out in those parts of Being and Nothingness which treat the problem
of, and the various ways of, Being-for-others. Let me quote first from Sartre's
characterizations of what might be called hermeneutic closure:
The open concepts of Marxism have closed in. They are no longer keys,
interpretive schemata; they are posited for themselves as an already totalized knowledge [ . . . ] . [The Marxist's] sole concern, at the moment of
analysis, will be to "place" these entities. 13 [Marxist method] has already
formed its concepts; it is already certain of their truth. 14
Sartre's procedure may be called a hermeneutique critique of Marxism
precisely insofar as it is not particular tenets or doctrines that he challenges,
but rather the way those tenets or doctrines are affirmed and re-affirmed. In
other words, Sartre does not question the truth of, e.g., the Marxist thesis
concerning the priority of being over consciousness; what he questions is just
the dogmatic way this thesis is put forward. At a closer look, the contrary is
true: what Sartre claims to be doing in a good many parts of his Critique (but
essentially already in the essay "Materialism and Revolution") is the attempt
to give a (so to speak) phenomenological-hermenenticalfoundation to historical materialism; he starts out from the individual experience and attempts to
interpret it. What his Critique offers in a series of important passages about
the series, the group-in-fusion, and various other collectives, are interpretive
descriptions (hermeneutic phenomenology) of lived experiences. He can thus
justify his materialistic thesis, while he rejects the Engelsian dogmatic way
of putting it forward. Indeed, he argues that matter as such does not occur in
any part [nulle part] of the human experience. 15

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ISTV,h.NM. FEHI~R

Analogously, what he provides in his re-examination of the claims of materialism in his essay "Materialism and Revolution" is the attempt to describe
the specific situation of the revolutionary (worker or other oppressed) which
makes him susceptible to adopting the metaphysical doctrine of materialism
a genuine and quite unique phenomenological-hermeneutic description of
the origins of materialism rooted in lived experience. It is again this interpretive stance, or comportment, centering around the attempt to hermeneutically
decipher the individual's lived experience, that leads him to reject Engels'
dialectics of Nature, both in "Materialism in Revolution" and the Critique
(although in the latter he attributes it to Marx). "The materialist conception
of the world signifies simply the conception of nature as it is without any foreign addition, ''16 sounds Engels' central thesis, which is for Sartre typically
an example of what he calls "de-situated look on the universe from above."
The concept of de-situated look shows obvious parallels with what Heidegger
calls "free floating" speculation. And what is even more remarkable is that
man appears in this perspective as nothing more than a "foreign addition." By
virtue of this concept Engels isolates himself from his fellow human beings;
he suggests that what he is doing is a priori incommensurable to what other
people are doing; as opposed to the sense of essential human solidarity, shared
typically by hermeneutic philosophers, by way of this distinction he claims
to belong to a different species:
he makes himself into an objective observation and claims to contemplate
nature as it is absolutely. Having stripped away all subjectivity and having
assimilated himself into pure objective truth, he walks in a world of objects
inhabited by object-men.17
In such a universe of hermeneutic closing, he immunizes himself from all
sorts of criticism; he is unattainable; there is no way of challenging him. Every
criticism is a priori neutralized as belonging to some kind of"subjective," i.e.,
distorted view, caused by class other or bias. If there is no way to challenge
you, you tend to feel free from obligations or responsibilities of justifying, or
arguing for, your position. Where critique has become impossible,justification
is becoming ever more superfluous. Phenomena such as debate, discussion,
conversation disappear; they are irrevocably replaced by blind apology and
intolerant combat of all unorthodox positions. In this universe all answers
have been found; foundations therefore need no more to be re-examined,
inquiries into how things are become superfluous and indeed obsolete, rediscoveries and redescriptions impossible, for the Truth has now been found
for ever. What it comes down to from now on is only to defend it as firmly
as possible, affirm and re-affirm it, and - rather than convince or persuade
others, or engage in a conversation with them - prevent them from tending,

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71

not purely to question it, but only to inquire about it or just to appropriate
it. Concepts become "dictates. ''18 The dogmatic Marxist's sole concern is, as
Sartre puts it, merely to "place" diverging views, e.g., to define the degree to
which they can be labelled as "subjective idealist," or "agnostic," or "petty
bourgeois. ''19 "The more he is convinced that they represent truth a priori,
the less fussy he will be about proof. ''2 It becomes ever more impossible
to inquire into the origin or source of these interpretive c o n c e p t s - just as
inconceivable it is to ask what on earth makes the complementary concepts
of materialism, dialectics, socialist, etc., true. An ingenuous childish question
of this sort might well be the source of scandal, indignation, and, indeed,
excommunication and even persecution. Hermeneutically seen, all concepts
and knowledge are context dependent, situated; they represent, as Sartre puts
it, "past Knowledge." The dogmatist by contrast "makes of it an eternal
knowledge, ''21 - a context-free, or, more hermeneutically speaking, "freefloating" ["freischwebend"] validity.
In this universe of closure, if you take Marxist doctrines "as guiding principles, as indications of jobs to be done, as problems"-rather than "as concrete
truth" - as "assertions [ . . . ] capable of numerous interpretations, ''22 you
can no more be a good Marxist. It is worth stopping at the word "interpretation." For in a world o f hermeneutic closure what is most impossible o f
all is interpretation. If hermeneutics has to do with the theory and practice
of interpretation we can see now the essentially anti-dogmatic character of
hermeneutics. In a universe of dogmatism (be it Marxist or other) Gadamer's
description, which we have just quoted, holds to a maximum degree. Discussions here are no more "conversation[s] in the sense that we are not seeking
agreement concerning an object, but the specific contents of the conversation
are only a means to get to know the horizon of the other person" in order to
switching into Sartrean terms - "place" him. If you are doing apology or
fighting the enemy you have surely "withdrawn from the situation of trying to
reach agreement." Put in the Sartrean context, what Gadamer calls "including from the beginning the other person's standpoint in what he is saying to
us" means precisely applying o u r previously established, unquestioned and
unquestionable interpretive concepts (e.g., of "subjective idealism," "bourgeois consciousness," etc.) to the other while "making our own standpoint
safely unattainable." That dogmatic Marxism made its "standpoint safely
unattainable" is I think obvious enough. 23 Nor does, I believe, the extent
to which Gadamer's final sentence from the quoted passage applies to the
case described by Sartre require further c o m m e n t s - namely, that this kind of
"acknowledgement of the otherness of the other, which makes him the object
o f objective knowledge involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to
truth."
-

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ISTVAN M. FEHI~R

Gadamer's concept of the "othemess of the other" leads us to Sartre first

main work, Being and Nothingness. This is the second theme (and connected
pretty much to the first) which I wish to single out. If the basic hermeneutic
comportment from Heidegger to Rorty is typically seen to be in openness
to the strange, to the unfamiliar,24 then we should realize that this kind of
openness is very much at work, put to practice, in Sartre's description of the
"look." In a sense, we may even say that Sartre provides an unprecedented and
(on my view in some respects) unsurpassed phenomenologic-hermeneutical
description of how we encounter the strange in the form of the Other, viz., how
the strange or unfamiliar affects us through the Other. This description may be
called hermeneutical precisely insofar as what is at issue is the deciphering of
meaning. What Sartre explicitly attempts to do is "to explain the meaning of
the Other's look," to explicate the "implicit comprehension of his existence."
"this "pre-ontological' comprehension. ''25
This experience of the strange in the form of the O t h e r - Sartre calls this
experience "the cogito of the Other's existence''26- is like an earthquake, or,
as Sartre says, an "upsurge": "The other's look touches me across the world
and is not only a transformation of myself but a total metamorphosis of the
world. ''27
Sartre starts out by remarking that "the problem of Others has generally
been treated as if the primary relation by which the Other is discovered is
object-ness; that is, as if the Other were first revealed [...] to our perception. ''28
The original relation to the other is, however, not a knowing one. The knowing or perceptive relation is capable only of grasping the Other-as-object.
This relation is in fact derivative, it is "the result of the conversion and the
degradation of that original relation. ''29 This in turn "represents an irreducible
fact which cannot be deduced either from the essence of the Other-as-object,
or from my being as subject, ''3 and which is epitomized by the Other's look,
i.e., by my "being-seen-by-another".
Looked at more closely, "the Other is in no way given to us as an object."
On the contrary: "[t]he objectification of the Other [ . . . ] is a defence on the
part of m y being-for the Other. ''31 The original mode of givenness of the
Other is, by contrast, "as a subject beyond my limit, as the one who limits me.
In fact nothing can limit me except the O t h e r . ''32 "The other-as-subject can
in no way be known nor even conceived as s u c h . ''33 Originally, the Other "is
experienced as a subject-totality," as "infinite freedom. ''34 "He is given not
as a being o f m y universe but as a pure subject" - a "pure subject which by
definition I am unable to know. ''35 " [ . . . ] through the look I experience the
Other concretely as a free conscious subject [...].,,36 _ "In short, the Other
can exist for us in two forms: if I experience him with evidence, I fail to
know him; if I know him, if I act upon him, I only reach his being-as-object

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73

[...].,,37 The attempt to objectify the Other can prove to be so successful that,
eventually, "there are men who die without - save for brief and terrifying
flashes o f illumination - ever having suspected what the Other is. ''38
The attitude, described by Gadamer, of making the Other "the object of
objective k n o w l e d g e " - an attitude which "involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth"-parallels, as can be seen, to a considerable extent,
and can aptly be retranslated into, one of the Sartrean ways of relating oneself
to the Other, namely, to the "Other-as-object," i.e., to the attitude "to contain
the Other within his objectivity. ''39
In summary, we can say that Sartre's characterization of the encounter with
(and experience of) the Other in terms of a "transformation of myself" as well
as a "total metamorphosis of the world" fits well into the horizon ofhermeneutic philosophy characterized by its claim to openness to the strange, to the
unfamiliar. Indeed, the susceptibility to transform yourself and your world
upon this unpredictable "upsurge"- this kind of vulnerability- more than sufficiently satisfies the basic hermeneutic requirement of openness, while (from
m y present point of view) Sartre's exaggerated emphasis on the conflictual
aspect of the relation with others can be viewed as an overblown dramatization of the irreducibility of this relation, extrinsic and indeed inessential to
the basic hermeneutic stance adopted. 4

Sartre's relevance for hermeneutics does not seem to have been appropriately explored or discovered;41 to my knowledge, we owe the first significant
valorization or appreciation of this sort of relevance, curiously enough, not
to a continental but to an American philosopher, Richard Rorty. In the closing chapter of his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, notably in working
out what he called "the 'existentialist' view of objectivity" and the ensuing
distinction between "systematic philosophy" and "edifying philosophy," he
drew heavily on Sartre, whose name appears frequently together with those
o f Heidegger and Gadamer. Indeed, that is the first time that, to my knowledge, these three names are listed one after the other: Heidegger, Sartre,
Gadamer. 43
Rorty's drawing upon Sartre is obviously conditional upon his own understanding o f hermeneutics as an edifying rather than a systematic philosophy
- a philosophy of continuing conversation, of solidarity - a comprehension
which, on its turn, relies for his version of hermeneutic philosophy upon
the pragmatic tradition of American philosophy and may be said to provide some kind o f an Anglo-American equivalent of German "praktische
Philosophic."

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ISTV,h,NM. FEHI~R

Let me finally expand on this point in somewhat more detail. Understanding

is, for Gadamer, always basically self-understanding. Strictly speaking, in a
Gadamerian sense we can be said to have understood something only if, in
it and by it, we have come to understand ourselves - what we are and have
become. Self-understanding is, therefore, self-transformation, self-formation.
At this point, hermeneutics becomes practical philosophy. 44
Self-understanding as self-formation is clearly also edification. Gadamer
claims, in a provocative manner, that the specific scientificity of the human
sciences [Geisteswissenschafien]lies in Bildung.45 Since Bildung is a central
concept to his hermeneutics as well, he thereby recuperates- in opposition to
the attempt of modern philosophy to conceive philosophy in terms of science
the notion of philosophy as wisdom. This notion was not only pushed into
the background by modern philosophy, but also swept away as something
old-fashioned and w o r n out. 46 And in his influential book, Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty analogously contrasts "systematic philosophy" and "edifying philosophy". 47 At this point, hermeneutics becomes
linked to practice, praxis. 48 Rorty's re-appropriation and redescription of
hermeneutics in terms of "edifying philosophy" (as opposed to "systematic
philosophy") is therefore perfectly justified by Gadamer's wissenschaftstheoretisch legitimization of the concept of Bildung, although Rorty not only
does not seek for such a legitimization, but on the contrary, he opposes it
as firmly as possible. Indeed, he draws on Gadamerian Bildung in a more
anti-scientistic (that is, in a way, more poetic, and precisely more "edifying")
way than Gadamer himself does. 49 (In other words: whereas for Gadamer
there is a kind of Bildung proper to the Geisteswissenschafien,Rorty sees
Bildung as standing apart from all kinds of sciences, even though he then after disjuncting Bildung from the sciences - readily acknowledges that any
kind of scientific activity may be a kind of Bildung.)
Against the background of such a broad understanding of hermeneutics
Sartre's relevance does not remain confined to the achievement of offering
specific descriptive strategies in our encounter with the Other, or of remaining open to his claims, or of providing valuable hermeneutic devices for
deciphering the meaning of individual, historic experience, or of offering a
powerful hermeneutic critique of Marxist dogmatism (roughly, these are the
viewpoints in terms of which we have been considering him above). Indeed,
this relevance attains an overall significance in virtue of the moral message
implicit in Sartre's work, which Rorty spells out as follows:

Sartre [...] sees the attempt to gain an objective knowledge of the world,
and thus of oneself, as an attempt to avoid the responsibility for choosing
one's project. For Sartre, to say this is not to say that the desire for
objective knowledge of nature, history, or anything else is bound to be

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75

unsuccessful, or even bound to be self-deceptive. It is merely to say that

it presents a temptation to self-deception insofar as we think that, b y
knowing which descriptions within a set o f normal discourses apply to
us, we thereby k n o w ourselves. 5
If, for Sartre, the for-itself is a being that is what it is not, and it is not
what it is, it implies that every assertion conceming m y s e l f becomes false
at the m o m e n t o f its being made. 51 "Objective" description and "bad faith"
b e c o m e thus connected; the former is reduced to the latter. The attempt to
grasp ourselves in an objective description is not merely futile, but, more
importantly, the v e r y wish is conceived in bad faith, for it wants to turn the
for-itself into an in-itself. 52 Sartre's hermeneutic relevance assumes here decisively moral a s p e c t s - and this specifically against the background o f Rorty's
"protest against attempts to close o f f the conversation". 53 I f hermeneutics
has definitely - in some ways or o t h e r - to do with continuing interpretation,
appropriation and re-appropriation, Rorty's hermeneutic use o f Sartre must
be seen as being in the service o f a broader and more intrinsically hermeneutical concern - namely, the attempt to avert the danger that "some given
vocabulary, some way in which people might come to think o f themselves,
will deceive them into thinking that from now on all discourse could be, or
should be, normal disclosure"; shortly, to avert the dogmatic "freezing over
o f culture.'54

Notes
I. E.g.: "If we read Heidegger [...] we are struck [...] with the inadequacy of his hermeneutic descriptions" (Being and Nothingness [hereafter:BN], trans. Hazel E. Barnes [New
York: Philosophical Library, 1956], p. 430). For a technical use, see nevertheless the last
quotation in note 10 below.
2. See the newsletter of the Sartre Society issued before the 1993 Sartre conference.
3. P. Ric~eur, "Phenomenology and Hermeneutics." In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p.
107. See also Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher,
Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p.
130: "Hermeneutics as methodology of interpretation for the humanities is a derivative
form resting on and growing out of the primary ontological function of interpreting. It is
a regional ontology which must be based on the more fundamental ontology."
4. Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizittit), ed. K. Br0cker-Oltmanns, Gesamtausgabe, vol.
63 (Frankfua/Main: Klostermann, 1988), p. 14.
5. Dilthey defined understanding as "the process by which we know some inner content from
signs received by the senses from outside" ("Vorgang, in welchem wir aus Zeichen, die
von aul3ensinnlich gegeben sind, ein Inneres erkennen" [Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, p.
318]); interpretation was for him "the artistic [arts-like] understanding of life manifestations objectified in written form." ("Das kunstm~il3igeVerstehen von schriftlich fixierten
Lebensaul3erungen," ibid., p. 332). He conceived hermeneutics as "the methodology of
the understanding of recorded expressions" (ibid.). For a more detailed reconstruction,

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ISTV,~N M. FEHI~R

see Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies, 2nd ed. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 258f., and, for Dilthey's revisiting his standpoint
with regard to the distinction of natural and human sciences reconstructed from recently
edited manuscripts, the Afterword to the Second Edition (pp. 423ff.). On the difference between Dilthey's and Heidegger's understanding of hermeneutics see Rudolf A.
Makkreel, "The Genesis of Heidegger's Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Rediscovered 'Aristotle Introduction' of 1992," in Man and Worm 23 (1990): 31 Off.
6. See Heidegger Being and 7~me, 33.
7. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper &
Row, 1962), p. 200.
8. On Heidegger's hermeneutic turn in his postwar lecture courses recently published in his
Gesamtausgabe, see my papers "The Early Heidegger: Phenomenoiogy, Hermeneutics,
Lebensphilosophie on His Way to Being and Time," Existentia, II (1992): 69-96; "Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Lebensphilosophie: Heidegger's Confrontation with Husserl,
Diithey, and Jaspers," forthcoming in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His
Earliest Thought, eds. Th. Kisiel and J. van Buren (Albany, New York: State University
of New York Press, 1994).
9. Compare just a few the statements from a Search for a Method (New York: Vintage
Books, 1968), which would well deserve hermeneutic treatment: "Man is, for himself and
for others, a signifying being" (p. 152); "Man defines himself by his project" (p. 150);
"the meaning of the lived experience" (p. 143); "Existentialism reacts by affirming the
specificity of the historical event [...]" (p. 126; compare this with the Neokantians' and
Dilthey's effort to restore history its character of specificity and singularity), etc. Sartrean
"hermeneutics" is then put to work in his monumental work on Flaubert; his hermeneutic
method inspired recently a comprehensive interpretation of Heidegger's work (see Dieter
Thoma, Die Zeit des Selbst und die Zeit danach: Zur Kritik der Textgeschichte Martin
Heideggers 1910-1976 [Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1990], and my article "Identitat und
Wandlung der Seinsfrage: Eine hermenutische Annaherung," inMesotes: Supplementband
Martin Heidegger [Wien: Braumtiller, 1991], pp. 105-119).
10. Sartre's critical observations with regard to the "effort to reduce the complex personality
of an adolescent [Flaubert] to a few basic desires, as the chemist reduces compound
bodies to merely a combination of simple bodies" (BN, p. 558) are in the best German
tradition of Dilthey's hermeneutic critique of naturwissenschafilich psychology, and have
clearly a hermeneutic flow. Compare also his criticism of the thesis (based on the outlook
and procedure typical of natural sciences) that "an individual fact is produced by the
intersection of abstract, universal laws" (ibid.). See also Sartre's use of the concept of ~
"pre-ontological comprehension" in his sketch of existential psychoanalysis here, and the
ensuing claim that "indications contained in a gesture, a word, a sign" are meaningful
revelations which "each human individual is capable of deciphering". The truth these
indications contain is not such that "one must seek it without ever having any presentiment
of its location, as one can go to look for the source of the Nile or of the Niger. It belongs
a priori to human comprehension and the essential task is an hermeneutic" (ibid., p.
568 f.; the last italics is mine). This is a fairly good recapitulation and application of
Heidegger's concept of pre-ontological understanding in Being and Time (see 2, 4). On
the hermeneutic import of the Theory of Emotions and of Being and Nothingness, see
Calvin O. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality: .4 Response to the Postmodern Challenge
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 82. See also his Communicative
Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986),
p. 187. On Sartre's drawing on "the German social science tradition" in elaborating his
concept of comprehension in Search for a Method- a concept which "takes on a social
dimension lacking in the Cartas(an background of the non-positional self-consciousness"
-, see Thomas W. Busch, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in
Sartre's Philosophy (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 66.
For Sartre's relevance for the methodological kind of hermeneutics, see, e.g., his stress
on the specific context-dependence of explanation, i.e. his rejection of what he calls the
negative principle of intelligibility in Critique of Dialectical Reason. By this he means
the following kind of explanation: Napoleon lost the battle at Waterloo because he did not
possess airplanes (see Critique de la raison dialectique, vol. 1 [Paris: Gallimard, 1960],

SARTRE AND HERMENEUTICS

11.
12.
13.
14.

15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

20.
21.
22.
23.

24.

25.

77

p. 215). It is easy to see that this ahistorical kind of explanation is common to a good
many philosophical and historical (Whiggish or other) attempts applying various sorts of
anachronistic criteria.
Worthy of more thorough investigation would also be, finally, the ties linking Sartre's
interpretation of Flaubert to the classical hermeneutical tradition in general. Manfred
Frank has formulated the thesis according to which Schleiermacher's "procedure of 'reconstructing [Nachkonstruieren] the given speech in a historical, divinatory, objective and
subjective manner' proved its overall effectiveness first of all in Sartre's great interpretation of Flaubert"; "certainly," he added, "from among today's existential-hermeneutical
attempts, no one comes nearer to Schleiermacher's project than Sartre's" (Manfred Frank,
"Einleitung." In: F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. by M. Frank
[Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977], p. 63; for more details, see Manfred Frank, Das
individuelle Allgemeine: Textstrukturierung und Textinterpretation nach Schleiermacher
[Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1985], pp. 293ff.).
See Wahreit undMethode, 4th. ed. (Ttlbingen: Mohr, 1975), pp. 260, 253.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth andMethod (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), p. 270.
Search for a Method (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 27; see ibid., p. 32 footnote.
Ibid., p. 37. Sartre's example of this kind of dogmatism is Luk~cs. For a comparative
examination of Sartre's and Luk~ics' respective critiques against the background of their
philosophical developments, see my papers "Luk~ics e Sartre: Due intinerari filosofici
a confronto", in I1 marxismo della maturitt~ di Luk~cs, ed. G. Oldrini (Napoli: Prismi
Editrice, 1983), pp. 159-190, and "Luk~cs e i rapporti con l'esistenzialismo sartriano", in
Lukitcs e il suo tempo. La costanza della ragione sistematica. Atti del Convegno di Roma,
Dicembre 1981, ed. M. Valente (Napoli: Pironti, 1984), pp. 97-121.
See Critique de la raison dialectique, vol. 1, p. 247.
Search for a Method, p. 32.
Ibid. On Sartre's discussion of the dialectics of nature, see William L. McBride, Sartre's
Political Theory (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 119f.
Search for a Method, p. 28.
From an originally hermeneutic point of view, "a person trying to understand a text
is prepared for it to tell him something"(Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 242). Such
preparedness is in our present case inexorably replaced by the sole concern of "placing,"
the underlying assumption being that of having found the absolute truth. Approaching a
text with the preparedness to let it tell us something would clearly imply suspending this
absolutistic claim.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid. See also ibid., p. 30.
Ibid., p. 35.
"Its sole purpose is to force the events, the persons, or the acts considered into prefabricated
molds." (Ibid., p. 37.) As a consequence, the unique "originality" of the fact is typically
overlooked or ignored (see ibid., p. 29 footnote). "The heuristic principle-'to search for the
whole in its parts' - h a s become the terroristic practice of'liquidating the particularity"' a procedure which, as Sartre remarks in a footnote attached to this sentence, "corresponded
to 'the physical liquidation' of particular people" (p. 28).
See, e.g., Heidegger's "Offenheit zum Geheimnis" in Gelassenheit ([Pfullingen: Neske,
1959] p. 24), and Rorty's reference to hermeneutics as "a description of our study of the
unfamiliar" (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1979], p. 353).
BN, p. 257 (italics mine), 251. It is also phenomenological in that it is an interpretation of
"a concrete, daily relation which at each instant I experience" (ibid., my italics). See also
p. 266 f.: "The appearance of the Other's look is manifested for me through an Erlebnis

[...]."

26. BN, p. 251. See also p. 282; further p. 275: "The Other does not appear to me as a being
who is constituted first so as to encounter me later; he appears as a being who arises in an

78

27.
28.
29.
30.
31.

32.
33.
34.

35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.

42.
43.

44.

45.

ISTV,~N M. FEHI~R
original relation of being with me and whose indubitability andfactual necessity are those
of my own consciousness."
BN, pp. 268 f. Sartre calls it also a "disintegration" of my world (see BN, p. 272). See
also p. 362: "[...] the upsurge of the Other touches the for-itself in its very heart."
BN, p. 253.
BN, p. 257.
BN, p. 257.
BN, p. 268. See p. 297: " [ . . . ] the Other-as-object is an explosive instrument which I
handle with care because I foresee around him the permanent possibility that they are
going to make it explode and that with this explosion I shall suddenly experience the flight
of the world away from me and the alienation of my being. Therefore my constant concern
is to contain the Other within his objectivity [...]."
BN, p. 287.
BN, p. 293.
BN, pp. 293, 270. It was already Kant's thesis that freedom is unknowable; what we can
grasp is only its unconceivability; see his distinction between "erkennen" and "begreifen"
in Critique of Pure Reason, B XXVI, XXVIII, etc.; Grundlegung einer Metaphysik der Sitten, Akademie-Ausgabe, vol. IV, p. 463 (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans.
J. W. Ellington, 2nd ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985], p. 62), etc. See also Sartre's claim
that what I can experience with regard to the Other is his "inapprehensible subjectivity"
(BN, p. 270).
BN, p. 270.
BN, p. 271.
BN, p. 302.
BN, p. 381. Compare this with the following quip of the young Heidegger: "Secure
objectivity is indeed an insecure flight from facticity" (Gesamtausgabe, vot. 61, p. 90).
BN, p. 297.
See BN, p. 364: "Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others."
For example, in Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics As Method, Philosophy and
Critique (ed. J. Bleicher, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) chapters are dedicated
to the following thinkers: Betti, Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, Apel, Habermas, Ricoeur.
Sartre's name appears just parenthetically.
See Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 360ff., 375ff.
It would be worth while examining the reasons of this omission in continental philosophy.
These probably go back to Heidegger's criticism of Sartre in his postwar "Letter on
Humanism" for failing to ask the "Being-question." Disciples of Heidegger like Max
Mt~ller seem then to have whole-heartedly adopted this standpoint (see, e.g., his dismissal
of Sartre in his book Existenzphilosophie im geistigen Leben der Gegenwart, whose
first edition appeared in 1949; see now the 4th enlarged ed., Existenzphilosophie: Von der
MetaphysikzurMetahistorik, ed. A. Halder [Freiburg/Mtlnchen: Alber, 1986], pp. 22, 70ft.,
esp. p. 73), as a consequence of which a productive confrontation could not take place.
The name of Sartre does not turn up in Gadamer's Truth and Method. Characteristically,
the most detailed and thorough comparative study of Heidegger and Sartre stems, again,
from an American author (see Joseph P. Fell, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being
and Place [New York: Columbia University Press, 1979]).
See H.-G. Gadamer, "Hermeneutik als praktische Philosophie," in Rehabilitierung der
praktischen Philosophic, ed. M. Riedel (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 342
f.: "Verstehen [ . . . ] vermag in besonderer Weise dazu beizutragen, unsere menschliehen
Erfahrungen, unserer Selbsterkenntnis und unseren Welthorizont auszuweiten. Denn alles,
was das Verstehen vermitteit, ist mit uns selbst vermittelt". "Verstehen [...] ist immer auch
Gewinn eines erweiterten und vertieften Selbstverstandnisses. Das heil3t aber: Hermeneutik ist Philosophic, und als Philosophic, praktisehe Philosophic."
See Wahrheit undMethode, pp. 15, 7: "Was die Geisteswissensehaften zu Wissenschaften
macht, la6t sich eher aus der Tradition des Bildungsbegriffes verstehen als aus der

SARTRE AND HERMENEUTICS

79

Methodenidee der modemen Wissenschaft. Es ist die humanistische Tradition, auf die
wir zurackverwiesen werden. [ . . . ] Angesichts des Ausschliel31ichkeitsanspruchs dieser
neuen Wissenschaft [sc. of the 17th century natural science] stellte sich die Frage mit
verst~irkter Dringlichkeit, ob nicht im humanistischen Bildungsbegriff eine eigene Quelle
von Wahrheit gelegen sei. In der Tat werden wir sehen, dab es das Fortleben des humanistischen Bildungsgedanken ist, aus dem die Geisteswissenschaften des 19, Jahrhunderts
ihr eigentliches Leben ziehen, ohne es sich einzugestehen". "Der Begriffder Bildung [...]
war wohl der grOSte Gedanke des 18. Jahrhunderts, und eben dieser Begriff bezeiehnet
das Element, in dem die Geisteswissenschaften des 19. Jahrhunderts leben, auch wenn sie
das erkenntnistheoretisch nicht zu rechtfertigen wissen."
46. See Husserl, Philosophie alsstrenge Wissenschafi, ed. W. Szilasi (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1965), p. 57 ("das altmodische Wort Weisheit"); E. Husserl, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," in Husserl, Shorter Works, eds. P. McCormick and F. A. Elliston (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 189 ("the old-fashioned word 'wisdom"').
47. See Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 357 ft. For Rorty's explicit retrieval of the
concept of wisdom, see, e.g., the following observations (p. 372):
One way of thinking of wisdom as something of which the love is not the same
as that of argument, and of which the achievement does not consist in finding the
correct vocabulary for representing essence, is to think of it as the practical wisdom
to participate in a conversation. One way to see edifying philosophy as the love of
wisdom is to see it as the attempt to prevent conversation to degenerate into inquiry,
into an exchange of views.
48. See Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. R. Hollinger (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1985). One way of spelling out the similarities between hermeneutics and
pragmatism is provided by Hollinger in his Introduction as follows (p. xiii):
For both hermeneutics and pragmatism the social practices and traditions of a specific
historical or cultural world are the horizons of existence. There are no "free floating"
universal truths, although the hope always exists that there will be some consensus
among cultures about, say, moral ideals, e.g., through what Gadamer dubs "the fusion
of horizons": the merging of different outlooks through dialogue and interpretation.
But dialogue rests upon the willingness and ability of people in different traditions,
or differing people within one tradition, to work toward mutual understanding and
cooperation through continued dialogue.
49. One possible reason is that for Rorty "science" has - in the mainstream Anglo-American
philosophy - specifically positivistic connotations, which the German "Wissenschaft"
surely does not have, and that, consequently, in his distancing from "scientificity" and
"scientific" (or "systematic") philosophy, Rorty relies for his concept of"scientificity" on
the positivistic-analytickind of scientificity, as a negative point of reference. One implication of this is that his split or distinction between "edification" and "truth" is too sharp, the
latter having for him just the typical epistemological meaning, as is clear, e.g., from the
passage stating that "the quest for truth is just one among many ways in which we might
be edified." (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 360; compare p. 364: "'discovering
the facts' [is] one project of edification among others.") "Truth" stands here obviously
for something like commensurable scientific research, whereas for both Heidegger and
Gadamer, truth is not exhausted in these connotations. The paradigmatic truth in Being
and Time is, e.g., the "truth of the existence" (and not of knowledge or of the assertion); the
primary meaning ("unconcealment") has for Heidegger ontological rather than epistemological meaning, indicating a certain mode of being of Dasein ("resolute decision" is for
Heidegger such a paradigmatic state; see Sein und Zeit [Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1979], 44,
60, 62, esp. 213ff., 221,297, 307); and also Gadamer makes it clear that what he suggests

80

ISTVAN M. FEHI~R

by separating between truth and method is that truth can be attained not exclusively in
and through (scientific) "method," but that there is, e.g., a "truth" peculiar to the work of
art. Although in a footnote Rorty rightly makes the point that "it would be reasonable to
call Gadamer's book a tract against the very idea of method [...]" (p. 360), we might add
conversely (what he does not add) that it would not be reasonable to call Gadamer's book
a tract against the very idea of truth. (See on this point Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics.
Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, p. 163" "the
title of Gadamer's book contains an irony: method is not the way to truth.")
Due to the separation of edification and truth, edification becomes somehow "irrationalized," or deprived of its "truth" character - an implication which Rorty is nevertheless
somewhat reluctant to accept. As a consequence, there is a constant oscillation in his
position. At one point, he warns us against viewing "edification as having nothing to do
with the rational faculties" (p. 364, my italics); some lines later however he regards "'discovering the facts' as one project of edification among others," thus again "irrationalizing"
edification and thereby approaching to a relativistic position. (From Gadamer's and Heidegger's point of view "discovering the facts" is not really a good project of edification,
and for Gadamer it is surely a self-misunderstanding of the Geisteswissenschafien; it is
even questionable whether for him it is a project of edification at all). On the previous
page, again, Rorty wrote that "even when we know all the objectively true descriptions of
ourselves, we still may not know what to do with ourselves" (p. 363; see also p. 362, where
Rorty refers to the "commonplace that one cannot be counted as educated- gebildet- if
one knows only the results of the normal Naturwissenschafien of the day"). If edification is
rightly seen in "knowing what to do with ourselves" (self-formation, self-transformation),
then "discovering the facts' or "knowing all the objectively true descriptions of ourselves"
is not an edification sui generis. This is pretty much in line with what he wrote some
pages before, namely that "getting the facts right (about the atoms and the void, or about
the history of Europe) is merely propaedeutic to finding a new and more interesting way
of expressing ourselves, and thus of coping with the world" (p. 359, my italics). Is then
"getting the facts right," "discovering the facts," etc., eventually "one project of edification," or is it just propaedeutic to edification? (On this problem, see Kant's distinction
between philosophy "in sensu scholastico" and philosophy "in sensu cosmopolitico"; I.
Kant, Logik. Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen, ed. G. B. J~tsche, in Kant, Werkausgabe, ed.
W. Weischedel [Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp] vol. 6, pp. 447 ff., and my paper "Philosophen
und Philosophieprofessoren-Philosophicund Philosophiewissenschaft: lJberlegungen im
AnschluB an eine Unterscheidung Martin Heideggers," in Mesotes II, 2 (1992): 122-132.
Kant, like Rorty, is reluctant to admit wisdom without knowledge - roughly, that is what
he means by "misologue" - although, like Rorty, he firmly rejects the identification of
wisdom with pure knowledge.) Rorty writes that "[f]or Heidegger, Sartre, and Gadamer,
objective inquiry is perfectly possible and frequently actual - the only thing to be said
against it is that it provides only some, among many, ways of describing ourselves" (pp.
361). But, surely, Heidegger, Sartre, and Gadamer would have assumed that their ways of
describing ourselves, which attempted to put descriptions provided by "objective inquiry"
into broader context, were in some ways better than those provided by "objective inquiry."
They would have thought that there was something more "to be said against it" (than "that
it provides only some, among many, ways of describing ourselves"), namely, that it was
not a good way of describing ourselves at all.
50. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 361. For Rorty's hermeneutic use of Sartre, see
also p. 373, where he claims that the difference he established "between conversation and
inquiry parallels Sartre's distinction between thinking oneself as pour-soi and as en-soi."
For further parallels between Sartre's and Rorty's common "rejection of all theoretical
foundations for knowledge," see Steve Hendley, Reason and Relativism: A Sartrean
Investigation. [Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1991], pp. 176f.
51. See BN, p. 116. Sartre reminds here of the "wisdom of antiquity" according to which
"I can make no pronouncement on myself which has not already become false at the

SARTRE AND HERMENEUTICS

81

moment when I pronounce it." This "amounts to saying that every judgment which I make
concerning myself is already false when I make it [...]."
52. See Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 376:
The attempt to slough off responsibility is what Sartre describes as the attempt to
turn oneself into a thing - into an dtre-en-soi. In the visions of the epistemologist,
this incoherent notion takes the form of seeing the attainment of truth as a matter
of necessity, either the 'logical' necessity of the transcendentalist or the 'physical'
necessity of the evolutionary 'naturalizing' epistemologist. From Sartre's point of
view, the urge to find such necessities is the urge to be rid of one's freedom to erect yet
another alternative theory or vocabulary. Thus the edifying philosopher who points out
the incoherence of the urge is treated as 'relativist', one who lacks moral seriousness,
because he does not join in the common human hope that the burden of choice will
pass away.
Rorty claims further that "Sartre adds to our understanding of the visual imagery which
has set the problems of Western philosophy," namely by helping us see the image of an
"unclouded Mirror of Nature" as the image of God. From this point of view, he concludes,
to look for commensuration rather than simply continued conversation - to look for
a way of making further redescriptions unnecessary by finding a way of reducing all
possible descriptions to o n e - is to attempt to escape from humanity (pp. 376f.; the last
italics is mine).
Sartre's connection of "objective" description to "bad faith" and Rorty's ensuing
insistence on the distinction between necessity and freedom (viz., responsibility) have of
course common Kantian roots (nor does the reference to Kant's "famous passage about
denying reason to make room for faith at Bxxx [of his it Critique of Pure Reason]" fail to
be present in Rorty [p. 383]). Kant was well aware of the fact that if the world provided in
and by knowledge were the real world, the world as it was in itself, then freedom would be
impossible, and this point was given much prominance in regard to historical knowledge
by the Neo-Kantians. "If the future too were object of our knowledge," Rickert wrote, "it
would never be object of our will. In a world that had become wholly rational, nobody
would be able to act." "[...] only as long as we fail to grasp the world metaphysically [...]
is history possible" (H. Rickert, Grenzen der naturwissenschafilichen Begriffsbildung.
2nd ed. [Ttibingen: Mohr, 1913], pp. 464, 579).
53. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 377. Related to this endeavor - and in obvious
correspondence with Gadamer's anti-methodological notion of truth - is Rorty's critique
of a criteriological conception of rationality ("there is no way to evaluate their success
[scil. of the humanities] in terms of antecedently specified criteria"), anticipated at several
points by some essentially Sartrean views, like, e.g., the one claiming that "[n]obody can
tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like." On this point, see Calvin O. Schrag, The
Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge, pp. 53f. This position
of Rorty's is perhaps best epitomized in an earlier paper, in which he urged to adopt
a "relaxed attitude," claiming that "we in the humanities differ from natural scientists
precisely in not knowing in advance what our problems are, and in not needing to provide
criteria of identity which will tell us whether our problems are the same as those of our
predecessors. To adopt this attitude," he went on to argue, " [ . . . ] is to admit that our
geniuses invent problems and programs de novo, rather than being presented with them by
the subject-matter itself, or by the 'current state of research'." ("Philosophy in America
Today," in Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1982], p. 218).
54. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 377.