Sacred Language, Sacred World: The Unity of Scriptural and Philosophical Hermeneutics 9780567664860, 9780567664891, 9780567664877

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. Introduction
1. How to Read This Book
2. Narrative and World
3. A Tale of Interpretation
Chapter 2. Being and Time
1. On The Very Possibility of Reading Wrongly
2. What Sort of Book is Being and Time?
3. The Argument in Being and Time
Chapter 3. Tools in the World
1. A Phenomenology of Tools, §15
2. The Inhabited Taxonomy: A Reading of §18
3. Language as an Everyday Tool
Chapter 4. Scripture in the World
1. The One Thing Named by ‘Scripture’, ‘Tradition’, and ‘Reason’
2. The Unity of Background Commitments
3. Language and Taxonomy
4. Finite Reasoning
Chapter 5. Truth and Method
1. Looking Back, Looking Forward
2. Gadamer
3. The Scope and Argument of Truth and Method
4. Preliminary Concerns
Chapter 6. Reading Rightly
1. The ‘Hermeneutical Circle’ and the Ethics of Thought
2. Gadamer’s First Ethical Principle: Start Right
3. The First Principle Continued
4. The Second Ethical Principle: Wait Long
Chapter 7. Reading in the World
1. ‘The Principle of Wirkungsgeschichte’
2. Gadamer’s Use of Hegel
3. Alterity in the Metaphor of Horizons
4. The Logic of Unity
Chapter 8. Conclusion
1. The Pitt Rivers Museum
2. Cutting the Gordian Knot of Self-Consciousness
3. What Can Theologians Say?
4. Sacred Language, Sacred World
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

SACRED LANGUAGE, SACRED WORLD

SACRED LANGUAGE, SACRED WORLD

The Unity of Scriptural and Philosophical Hermeneutics

Joshua D. Broggi

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Joshua Broggi, 2016 Joshua Broggi has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Broggi, Joshua D. Sacred language, sacred world : the unity of biblical and philosophical hermeneutics / Joshua D. Broggi. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-567-66486-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Hermeneutics. 2. Bible–Hermeneutics. 3. Philosophical theology. 4. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. 5. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1900-2002. I. Title. BD241.B76 2016 230.01–dc23 2015018456 ISBN: HB: 978–0–56766–486–0 PB: 978–0–56768–365–6 ePDF: 978–0–56766–487–7 ePub: 978–0–56766–488–4 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Prefacevii Acknowledgementsviii Abbreviationsix Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION1 1. How to Read This Book 1 2. Narrative and World 8 3. A Tale of Interpretation 12 Chapter 2 BEING AND TIME19 1. On The Very Possibility of Reading Wrongly 19 2. What Sort of Book is Being and Time?28 3. The Argument in Being and Time33 Chapter 3 TOOLS IN THE WORLD41 1. A Phenomenology of Tools, §15 41 2. The Inhabited Taxonomy: A Reading of §18 72 3. Language as an Everyday Tool 78 Chapter 4 SCRIPTURE IN THE WORLD83 1. The One Thing Named by ‘Scripture’, ‘Tradition’, and ‘Reason’ 83 2. The Unity of Background Commitments 96 3. Language and Taxonomy 100 4. Finite Reasoning 106 Chapter 5 TRUTH AND METHOD117 1. Looking Back, Looking Forward 117 2. Gadamer 122 3. The Scope and Argument of Truth and Method124 4. Preliminary Concerns 127

vi Contents

Chapter 6 READING RIGHTLY131 1. The ‘Hermeneutical Circle’ and the Ethics of Thought 131 2. Gadamer’s First Ethical Principle: Start Right 133 3. The First Principle Continued 136 4. The Second Ethical Principle: Wait Long 139 Chapter 7 READING IN THE WORLD151 1. ‘The Principle of Wirkungsgeschichte’151 2. Gadamer’s Use of Hegel 158 3. Alterity in the Metaphor of Horizons 162 4. The Logic of Unity 172 Chapter 8 CONCLUSION187 1. The Pitt Rivers Museum 187 2. Cutting the Gordian Knot of Self-Consciousness 192 3. What Can Theologians Say? 198 4. Sacred Language, Sacred World 210 Bibliography215 Index221

P R E FAC E

Some books risk raising more questions than they answer. If I have, at least, raised the right sorts of questions, that owes much to the fine people who have been a support throughout the work. Of course, the shortcomings of the argument are all my own. I would like to thank Nicholas Adams for his unfailing encouragement while I was writing this book; his work is a model of clarity and vigour that has significantly improved my own. In Oxford, I have had the good fortune of knowing many fine people, but I am especially grateful for the generous hospitality and intellectual creativity of Graham Ward. Other members of the Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought have fostered a collegial research environment, especially Johannes Zachhuber, Joel Rasmussen, and Simeon Zahl. I have also had excellent colleagues at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, including Erasmus Mayr, Joshua Hordern, and Cleo Hanaway-Oakley. Fortnightly gatherings of the Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar have been a source of invaluable discussion; I am particularly grateful for Stephen Mulhall’s encouragement, and for his comments on an earlier draft of this book. Good conversation has been the intellectual mainstay of my writing in Oxford, and I have had the pleasure of good company, including Gary Slater, Nandan Mani Ratnam, Josh Roe, Andy Stiles, Hannah Mitchell, Kaitlin Staudt, Nakul Krishna, Arlyn Culwick, Erica Lombard, Steven DeLay, and John Fletcher – among others. Their rich perspectives and friendship has been an important source of motivation. Lena Möller and Quirin Koch in Berlin, and Corey and Tricia Williams in Leiden, were generous and refreshing hosts during stays in those cities. With an improbably tall stack of books from Dartmouth College, part of my research was conducted during a stay in Vermont, for which I would like to thank Rich and Ellen Broggi. During a trip to Harvard, I was the happy guest of Tim and Elke O’Donnell. And while visiting California, I was given perfect conditions for writing, for which I would like to thank Chris and Marcia Braun. At Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, I am grateful for the helpful and patient work of Anna Turton and Miriam Cantwell, who oversaw the transformation of my manuscript into a book, and special appreciation should also be expressed for the anonymous reviewers. In all, Alicia has been my constant companion and to her I dedicate the book. JDB Oxford March 2015

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A book which comments on modern primary sources depends on the liberality of copyright managers, and I would like to acknowledge the generous permissions supplied by several excellent publishers. Sheik Safdar at Wiley-Blackwell helped provide permissions for Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), which is the translation I recommend. For fielding numerous queries and ensuring the appropriate use of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, I am grateful to Daniela Unterwieser at Vittorio Klostermann, especially concerning Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1910–1976, Vol. 2, Sein und Zeit, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), but also Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe II. Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1923–1944, Vol. 21, Logik – Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, ed. Walter Biemel (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976). For helpfully solving copyright puzzles, I am also thankful to Tanja Linhardt at De Gruyter, and to Peter Froehlich at Indiana University Press. Claire Weatherhead at Bloomsbury helped in granting invaluable permission for Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edn (London: Continuum, 2004), and Elizabeth Wener kindly oversaw Mohr Siebeck’s permissions for Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1: Hermeneutik I: Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophizchen Hermeneutik, 7. durchgesehene Auflage (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), for which I am very grateful.

ABBREVIATIONS Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main) GA 1 GA 2 GA 3 GA 9 GA 16 GA 17 GA 18 GA 19 GA 20 GA 21 GA 22 GA 23 GA 24 GA 25 GA 36/37 GA 56/57 GA 60 GA 63 GA 64

Frühe Schriften (1912–17), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1978. Sein und Zeit (1927), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1977. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 2. Auflage 2010. Wegmarken (1919–61), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 3. Auflage 2004. Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (1910–76), ed. H. Heidegger 2000. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Wintersemester 1923/24), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1994. Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (Sommersemester 1924), ed. M. Michalski, 2002. Platon: Sophistes (Wintersemester 1924/25), ed. I. Schüssler, 1992. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (Sommersemester 1925), ed. P. Jaeger, 3. Auflage 1994. Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (Wintersemester 1925/26), ed. W. Biemel, 1976, 2. Auflage 1995. Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie (Sommersemester 1926), ed. F.-K. Blust, 2. Auflage 2004. Geschichte der Philosophie von Thomas von Aquin bis Kant (Wintersemester 1926/27), ed. H. Vetter, 2006. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Sommersemester 1927), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 3. Auflage 1997. Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Wintersemester 1927/28), ed. I. Görland, 1977, 3. Auflage 1995. Sein und Wahrheit (Sommersemester 1933 und Wintersemester 1933/34), ed. H. Tietjen, 2001. Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (Kriegsnotsemester 1919 und Sommersemester 1919) ed. B. Heimbüchel, 2. Auflage 1999. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens (Wintersemester 1920/21 und Sommersemester 1921), ed. M. Jung, T. Regehly, et C. Strube, 1995. Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität (Sommersemester 1923), ed. K. Bröcker-Oltmanns, 2. Auflage 1995. Der Begriff der Zeit (1924), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 2004.

Gadamer Gesammelte Werke (Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen) GW 1

Hermeneutik I, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophizchen Hermeneutik, 7. durchgesehene, Auflage 2010.

x Abbreviations GW 2 GW 3 GW 4

Hermeneutik II, Wahrheit und Methode: Ergänzungen, Register, 2. durchgesehene, Auflage 1993. Neuere Philosophie I, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, 1987. Neuere Philosophie II, Probleme, Gestalten, 1987.

Chapter 1 I N T R O DU C T IO N

1. How to Read This Book Many theologians seek to negotiate a settlement between the resources of scripture, tradition, and reason. In this book I test the claim that these name the same phenomenon – one thing viewed three ways. If my argument is right, then we misunderstand ourselves in every effort to balance these resources, or to emphasize the authority of one over the others. I will advance the claim that some well-ordered forms of reasoning are only rightly used reflexively – when employed to think about what we do when we think. Theology, I will seek to show, entails just such a practice of reflection. In everyday life, there are good reflective reasons for imagining that the three terms ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name different entities, rather than a melange in which the book of Leviticus, Christmas, and mathematics are ‘the same thing’. But theology’s maintenance of these distinctions beyond certain reflective practices, in its arguments and its disagreements, and above all, in how it sometimes imagines the independence of these entities, can be damaging. This is a book about the unity of philosophical hermeneutics (how there is any meaning at all) and textual hermeneutics (what some piece of language means). It explores the relation between the meaningful world one inhabits, and the meaning of specific entities found in that world, like scripture. I will defend the idea that what something means cannot be disentangled from the kind of world one inhabits. More precisely, I will try to show just how the relationship between a book like the Bible and a meaningful world holds together. Practically, I will conduct a reading of two central figures of twentieth-century hermeneutics, Martin Heidegger and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer. The claim about unity has roots in Hegel, who observed that the meaning of an object and a world are always in relation. He put it particularly well in his 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, when he said that there was a difference between our modern understanding of a Greek divinity, and understanding what it was like to live in a world with a ‘sense of genuine adoration toward a divine image of that kind’.1 Statues of Apollo once stood in a meaningful world, a world 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stuart (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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that simply does not exist anymore; instead, we find these statues in a context of museums and art and high culture. It is only with great difficulty that we might get anything like the sense of what such a statue meant in a context of Greek choirs and festivals and sacrifices. So too, I will be arguing, it is exceptionally difficult to get a sense of what happens when a textual object like the Bible changes from one world to another, whether through great leaps in time, or between neighbouring communities. A text can originate in one context but be used in another, and precisely what happens through a change of setting will be of central importance if philosophical and textual hermeneutics are kept together. The thesis that textual and philosophical hermeneutics should be united is worked out through the claim that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name the same thing. This might at first seem immoderate, and it certainly needs further clarification. If this book is successful, the unity of these entities will at least appear plausible by its end. The claim is wholly sincere: if we understand Christians to rely on ‘tradition’ in order to ‘reason’ about ‘scripture’, then our analysis of the practice of reading entails tautologies that prevent us from doing better theology and unnecessarily lead us into all sorts of problems. If the claim seems immoderate, perhaps that is because it addresses itself to an immoderate situation. Christianity has never before occupied so many corners of the world and it has perhaps never been so diverse in its beliefs. Never before has one book, the Bible, meant so many different things to so many different people. In any case, we have certainly never had such untrammelled access to that diversity. Sacred Language, Sacred World is about the relation between language and history and thinking. I defend the idea that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name a single phenomenon. It is a grand topic. In making its case, this book concentrates on a relatively narrow line of argument. The book must therefore presuppose a range of things. It has presuppositions that are not the chief object of its enquiry. Here at the start I intend to air out a few of the controversial points that will buttress my argument without receiving special treatment, particularly about the way ‘reason’ is conceived. My argument, for example, will presuppose (a) that we largely inherit our ability to reason and, further, (b) that this inheritance orients the way in which we reason, including (c) how we come to see and evaluate our own chains of reasoning. Inheritances vary, and thus (d) I will make comprehensive assumptions about the diversity of reason (whether that diversity can be fitted within a single frame is another matter). These are not theses I will be defending, although my argument will show how they might plausibly hang together. If, at the very outset, what gets to count as ‘reason’ seems prodigal to the reader, then disappointments are in store – the scope will be widened even further. The task of finding what ‘reason’ names will conclude that there is no 2007), 536. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen: Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte, Vol. 4, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985), 434.

Introduction

3

isolatable phenomenon, at least nothing which can be divorced from tradition and language, which are themselves equally diffuse. Many accounts of reason differ from this one, especially those depicting our access to reason as a process of discovery, wherein pre-existing or even eternal truths (perhaps those of geometry) are brought into human history and speech. Or those accounts in which reason consists exclusively in features of our own thought which are already necessary and universal. I will not try to dismantle those ways of using ‘reason’ to name something, at least not directly. If readers finally decide that the phenomena analysed in this work ought not to count as ‘reason’, then very well. We could name them differently (‘practical reason’, etc.) with little consequence for the argument. This book reasons about how we reason when we make meaning. But in arguing that ‘reason’ is the ‘same’ as ‘scripture’ and ‘tradition’, we can see that any effort to understand our reasoning is no less an effort to understand the other two. That we inherit this ability to understand ourselves I will assume, whereas I will argue that this inheritance obscures that self-reflection. Some of our present habits of imagining what we do when reasoning prevent us from clearly seeing the phenomenon; in particular, the present argument will examine the notion that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name different things. We have inherited a way of thinking that commits us to seeing these as distinct entities. Sacred Language, Sacred World contests that way of thinking. If its central claims are persuasive, then Heidegger and Gadamer will be found to provide a way of uniting philosophical and textual hermeneutics, so that our enquiries into the meaning of a piece of language must be seen as no less enquiries into the kind of world that one inhabits. The assumptions or commitments guiding the central argument might be arranged in a more concise and orderly way. Again, these are not the points I will defend but they will come progressively closer to the central thesis that is pursued: 1. An enquiry must rely on commitments. 2. These cannot be the object of that enquiry. 3. Such commitments may be the object of a separate enquiry. For ‘enquiry’ we might equally substitute ‘chains of reasoning’ or ‘human understanding’ or even simply ‘taking things to be so’. Notably, the latter appears devoid of the activism, temporal dynamism, and change permitted by the former two, but it remains firmly in the scope of these claims. In what is to come, the way time bears on reasoning will provoke a good deal of discussion. If these first three assumptions highlight certain limitations of reason, by claiming that all reasoning must be committed to some presuppositions, they do not yet locate reason very firmly within the scope of human history. Reasoning might be finite with respect to the commitments it must employ, thereby preventing it from reasoning about everything at once, but these limiting commitments might themselves be valid under all conditions, perhaps discovered as the necessary grounds of thought itself, or even as remaining (in some undefined sense) ‘true’ whether we are aware of them or not.

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To capture the historical finitude which defines the ‘reason’ examined in this book we can add two further presuppositions or claims: 4. Commitments have origins. 5. Most commitments originate in the social life of a community. Perhaps some ways of reasoning are biologically anchored, or rely solely on a priori categories or rules, like the ‘law of non-contradiction’. Claims four and five leave open the possibility that reason can be guided by commitments which are not the product of social invention, political settlement, or cultural history. But they assert that most commitments are so produced, and thus have a datable historical origin. And all commitments, even any putatively necessary ones, will have a history of reception among other commitments. A profusion of diversity is thereby introduced into the activity of reason. This does not deny that there may be a limit to the diversity, a universal and necessary frame that guides all possible propositional attitudes and informal logics. Perhaps Aristotle made explicit certain rules to which all reasoning must subscribe. Kant may well have discovered a necessary framework to all understanding, including the two forms of sensibility, the twelve categories of our understanding, and the three ideas of reason. But someone like Hegel undertook the effort to describe what actually appears in that universal frame, accounting for the way people reason in the messy contexts of religion, politics, and art. No one reasons about universal reason in just the same way as Kant because no one lives in eighteenth-century Prussia. Suggesting that commitments have a datable historical origin is practically too ambitious. Their origins may, on examination, dissipate into a stupefying variety of historical factors; and any particular commitment, say to the parliamentary form of political constitution, is likely to be without clear origin in the social history of its evolution. Like the source of a river, the point at which a thing is determined to have started is a matter of classification. And once we pin down the origin of a commitment, we may find that it was so different in that context that it can hardly be said to be the ‘same’ thing. Commitments change, and even apparently durable commitments may be repurposed when situated among a different configuration of commitments. Commitments developed for one historical assignment are often employed for another. Three further claims can be added to this book’s list of background commitments: 6. Origins do not determine use. 7. Commitments can be revised. 8. To understand, repurpose, or revise our own commitments are reflective tasks necessarily determined by those commitments. These eight presuppositions, among others, guide the argument of Sacred Language, Sacred World. They delineate the territory in which the argument is conducted. The argument itself will focus on the relation between scripture, tradition, and

Introduction

5

reason; it will defend the view that these name a single phenomenon, and that consequently we should conceive of philosophical and textual hermeneutics as a single enterprise. Taken as a whole, these eight background theses are committed to a picture of our ability to understand as being constituted by a variety of commitments that we inherit. The eighth thesis makes explicit the way this inheritance will also shape our understanding of that ability. So even something like Kant’s discovery of a priori principles that guide all thought must itself have been mediated by other commitments; not only his selection of time and space, but what he conceives of these to mean will reflect the Newtonian world he inhabited. My argument will put pressure on this fault line between what we do when we understand, and what we see ourselves as doing. In this case, scripture is the thing understood, and, as it turns out, understood by an impressive diversity of Christians with an equally broad range of understandings. That the words ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ are used to name three different phenomena might be useful for certain tasks in everyday life, but it is a form of self-understanding which fails to capture the unity of what these name. In other words, I will examine the difference between consciousness and selfconsciousness, between our understanding and our reflective reasoning about that understanding, and I will claim that at the heart of this difference is the imposition of a diversity upon what is already united in conscious experience. It is not unlike the difference between worship and theology. In its arguments, this book takes some risks and it tests claims that are perhaps counter-intuitive. It is an essay, and a somewhat adventurous one. There are two arguments for unity that would be much easier to defend than the one advanced here. I will not claim that these three phenomena (‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’) are genuinely different and independent entities although equally reliant on a common condition for their possibility – some fourth thing. And I will not argue that these three are ‘interrelated’ so as to be inseparable and dependent on each other – a kind of unity with distinctions. These apparently sensible claims might be victories ample enough after a therapy of the more difficult argument tested here: ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ are three names directed towards a single thing which we consistently (but falsely) imagine to be appropriately classified as a plurality; a plurality which, in turn, produces a variety of confusions that ought to be dissolved. It may be some relief to readers that I locate the source of this strange argument in two big books by major figures in recent intellectual history. My hope is that in returning to two classic texts of twentieth-century hermeneutics we can not only rediscover their meaning but, at the same time, revise their effect on our way of imagining the theological task. On the face of it, the argument is simple. There is a single consistent activity which we imagine to be three different activities – one thing named three ways. It is difficult to overcome this habit of classification, not least because it is our own activity that we reflexively classify. The argument of Sacred Language, Sacred World takes the form of a commentary on the work of Martin Heidegger and his student Hans-Georg Gadamer. Each of these figures presents an account of language in which a degree of freedom and

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creativity is necessary when readers engage a text – if it is to speak at all. And although my readings will be very close, it remains that they will depart from some of the standard interpretations. This should not surprise us if both figures are correct about the workings of language. How do these figures matter for theology? To engage in some broad generalizations, Heidegger and Gadamer are typically read by different kinds of philosophers and theologians. In theology in particular, Heidegger tends to be read by those examining his contribution to matters of doubt, existential finitude, and atheism. Gadamer tends to be read by those with an interest in interpreting classic texts like the Bible, especially by theologians with more optimistic and confessional sensibilities. In both cases, Heidegger and Gadamer have general associations with specific theological positions. Sacred Language, Sacred World challenges this arrangement and defends an alternative appropriation of their work through a close engagement with portions of their argument. I take from Heidegger that physical words are a part of the world, like rocks and birds and the sky. His work reminds us that the most important question is not, ‘What is the relation between words and stuff and the world?’ (as if they were not a part of that world). Nor is the first question, ‘Do words gain their meaning by a connection to something in the world?’ (as if inscribing a word on an object could create that connection). Rather, Heidegger would have us ask, ‘How do things come to have meaning at all: rocks, birds, words, and the sky?’ And, ‘How is one thing ever brought into relation with another – how do things refer?’ That an utterance with the sound ‘blue’ can be used to consider the colour of the sky is not different, for Heidegger, from the fact that a latch can be used open a door. Words (like rocks and birds) only come to have meaning for us when we classify them in a meaningful way, as part of our world, and they are only brought into relation with each other when classified relationally, with other features of our world. I take from Gadamer that to read an old book is a reflexive activity as much about the world one inhabits as about the world in which the text originated. And to whatever extent it is about that ‘original’ world, it is thus also about our capacity to imagine the original world within the resources of our own horizon. The ethics of good reading are as much about the ethics of inhabiting the right kind of world as about our brute philological skills. Heidegger is not read as supporting an agnosticism or existential pessimism; Gadamer is not read as providing a practical aid for reading classic texts. Rather these figures are shown to supply a theologically significant account of what it means to inhabit a unitary world, a world that defines (and is defined by) language, tradition, and reason. I will argue that efforts to distinguish between the language of scripture, the resources of tradition, and the power of reason end in a puzzling failure – these entities are only ever superficially separated from a unitary experience of inhabiting the world. Thus disagreements about the meaning of scripture, or about the revision of tradition, or about Christian reasoning are better conceived as conflicts about the kind of world one inhabits, or ought to inhabit. The account that emerges in the work of Heidegger and

Introduction

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Gadamer suggests that one misdiagnoses the site of contention when debates concentrate on a particular entity like scripture. Heidegger’s Being and Time and Gadamer’s Truth and Method are classic works of modern hermeneutics, and whether recognized or not, they form a crucial part of the inheritance guiding contemporary approaches to scripture. This book makes the case for a paradigm shift in the reception of these works. Routine emphases on ‘Heidegger and death’ or ‘Heidegger’s atheism’ recede into the background, while Heidegger’s logical arguments about the relation between (religious) commitments and the inhabited world are thrown into relief. Standard references to Gadamer’s theory of a ‘fusion of horizons’ as a rule for textual interpretation are shown to be both textually problematic and implausible in view of his wider claims, whereas his effort to articulate how a world is formed by a community in history is made prominent. In returning to these texts I hope to reassess their legacy and defend an alternative picture of the resources they make available. My approach to these texts will be consonant with the account of language I depict them as presenting. Therefore, I will not aim to reconstruct the interior motives of the authors, nor will I principally seek to recover the original audience that received these texts. Rather, I seek to show how these texts now make available to us a persuasive vision of human life and the place within it of history, thought, and language. The commentarial style will allow my argument to emerge from the ground of their writing, but I hardly think my readings are the only ones available – I have been judicious in my selection of passages, and I have made these to answer specific questions. The Heidegger who emerges is concerned strictly with the claims of this book and with defending its argument, and my reading of Gadamer varies starkly from widely received interpretations. Yet I intend to convince readers to adopt my interpretation as the best understanding of these texts, and my expositions are closely argued, moving paragraph by paragraph. If my reading of Heidegger is right, then it will suggest revisions to a number of contrasts which are widespread in the secondary literature – for example, the contrast ingredient to the question of whether basic experience is conceptual or non-conceptual, or the question of whether practical concerns are primary. My alternatives fit together in a single framework wherein one reads Heidegger as exploring a particular kind of taxonomy and its relation to human experience. So too with Gadamer, my reading rejects, for example, what has become the most widely accepted trope of the interpretive literature in English, namely that he proffers a ‘fusion’ between two independent horizons. However, it is not at all the aim of this book to contest these others readings. I remark on these points only to alert the reader that this book differs from some of the wider philosophical literature on these figures. Sacred Language, Sacred World will not concentrate on these points of difference in the course of its argument. Rather, it will ask more positively how a fresh look at these texts can address a central question in theology about the relation between scripture, tradition, and reason. This is not a polemical work, and I do not aim to dismantle existing interpretations of either Heidegger or Gadamer. I aim, constructively, to provide an

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alternative picture. This book presents a case for viewing scripture, tradition, and reason as a single phenomenon. It takes the form of a commentary on two philosophical texts which have much to say on these matters, and it finds in them the resources for an account of this unity. The commentarial style allows the primary sources to dictate the architecture of the book, which examines Being and Time in the first half and Truth and Method in the second. If this book’s argument stimulates readers to return to these texts with renewed vigour, equipped with fresh questions, that will be a satisfying outcome; if it aids readers in reconceiving the relationship between scripture, tradition, and reason, then its argument will have been successful. But above all, I intend to persuade readers of the single phenomenon thesis: that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name the same phenomenon. If my theological and philosophical interpretation is convincing, if readers adopt my view of Being and Time and accept the supplementation provided by Truth and Method, then they will have moved into a position that reinforces my scholarly strategy. I read these texts as defending a view of scripture, tradition, and reason in which the apparent ‘threeness’ of the terms must give way to an account in which they name a single phenomenon: that of inhabiting a ‘world’. Arguments about these classic texts will go astray if they attend to one or all of these three elements while failing to grasp the central claim about their unity. My strategy is thus to argue about the world in which a text like Being and Time ought to be located, rather than simply addressing some disputed feature of the text (and I have already begun to make that world explicit by articulating some of its background presuppositions). In their commentarial style, my arguments have a performative aspect, providing a world in which these texts can be placed, a world that animates their language with a meaning that goes to the heart of certain theological concerns. If my argument is right, then this is what happens whenever we read a text.

2. Narrative and World It is not customary for books of theology to contain stories, but narratives weave worlds and help us to see the context in which a text can be read. Thus I want to begin with a story. This one will be wholly true, recounting the adventures of the Kimbanguists, a religious movement that began in central Africa in the first decades of the twentieth century. By calling it a story I want to avoid provoking the sorts of intensive empirical enquiries that allowed me to write it.2 In fact, I will later explore a similar theme in The Gods Must Be Crazy, so a good fiction or 2.  Such empirical work is available in the second chapter of my Diversity in the Structure of Christian Reasoning: Interpretation, Disagreement, and World Christianity (Leiden: Brill, 2015). The initial research for the story made up a chapter of my doctoral dissertation and was improved by the expert guidance of Brian Stanley. I am also grateful to the Angus Library and Archive in Oxford for allowing me generous access to their holdings.

Introduction

9

piece of literature might have been sufficient, though, in this case, the film could not carry the weight of analysis I want this story to bear. My point in appealing to this tale as a story rather than as empirical history is not the one Bernard Williams made when he said, ‘What philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.’3 My story might very well make for bad literature. Rather, my point in de-emphasizing the empirical nature of the material on which I draw is to say that what concerns us is whether this story is possible. If it is possible, then that says something about the scope of human nature that is touched by contingency. Even if my narration of the case of the Kimbanguists proves deeply flawed (of course, I do not think it so), what is important is that we are the kind of animal or creature that inhabits a world, and that someone else can inhabit a different world than one’s own, and that we have a world long before we get to decide whether we like it. Even if there were no Kimbanguists, even if there were no plurality in the world at all, even if there were only one vantage point from which all things were experienced and understood, then it would remain an important question whether this single perspective was, on the whole, contingently constructed, whether it might, in time, become something else – whether only the thinnest frame of necessity governed its stance on the world, whether this one outlook was reducible to the habits and customs it so happened to have inherited. Even if it were not an obvious fact that today many people inhabit conflicting ‘worlds’, even if there were a comprehensive harmony or homogeneity of perspective and forms of life, or perhaps Kant’s ‘perpetual peace’, even then, it would be possible that there was nothing ‘natural’ about the human view of things, nor anything necessary about it. Only a story could break the myth of the naturalness of things. This kind of human diversity, or rather, contingency, would remain true even if there were only one person. That my particular story is composed of true facts matters only incidentally. Conveniently, it introduces the fact that most Christians are outside the West. I assume that makes the relation between scripture, tradition, and reason all the more important to discern – important for Christians who practise theology in ‘new’ contexts, but more proximately, important for those trying to understand the Christian religion in those contexts. In the social scientific study of religion, there are habits that would have to be revised if the identification of categories like ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ were put into question. And getting into view the way a world is formed elsewhere will help European theologians query even those features of their own world that seem natural and given. The story of the Kimbanguists, like the film The Gods Must Be Crazy, is about an object falling out of one world and landing in another. In my story, that object is the Bible; in the film, it is an empty bottle of Coca-Cola. I should say that it is merely coincidental that both stories are set in Africa. Of course, the 3. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 13.

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sort of cultural boundary crossing my story displays is no less a part of Europe’s own Christian heritage, and the apparently strange theology we will see in the Kimbanguist community is hardly meant to be representative of African religion or African Christian theology, much less ‘world Christianity’. Rather, what I aim to show are dynamics common to theology and human understanding as such, and thereby to introduce the problem of the unity of scripture, tradition, and reason. Both the story and film have something in common: they explore what happens when an item is lifted from its context and placed into a different one. Such events are commonplace in a century when goods and ideas are frequently moved and exchanged, when Christianity crosses cultural boundaries. These scenarios raise interesting questions about the relation between what something is, and the context which supplies the purposes, significance, and assumptions bearing on that thing. What matters for our analysis is not the item which changes contexts, or the fact that such boundary crossing has occurred, but the way in which that change opens a view of the fact that there is a context at all, a context of commitments which might otherwise go unnoticed or be difficult to discover. More precisely, what matters for our analysis is the relation of the parts to the unity of the whole, that what an item is, is continuous with the world in which it appears. In general, Europe’s colonial empires provide many good examples of such exchanges – in which political elites are reclassified as slaves, in which land is entangled in various notions of property, and in which cultural values are transferred from centres of power to nascent colonial cities and back again. The rapid expansion and transformation of Christianity in that context raises critical questions for theology – not for specialists in a sub-discipline of exotica, but for Christian theology as such. The item of exchange I want to examine in my story is a piece of European language, the piece of European language. The Christian Bible, more than any other text in Europe, has had chronicled the uses and meaning which it apparently makes available. Its textual controversies and interpretive settlements are so much a part of the fabric of European history that it is perilous to separate the two. And in the empire-making adventures of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the missionaries who transferred this text often played an ambiguous role, for while their activity often buttressed the public justification for the political enterprise as paternalistic and civilizing, the social instability produced by their work threatened the profit margins which had required political protection in the first instance, and thus their activities faced legal suppression by authorities such as the British Parliament. In many cases in sub-Saharan Africa, the first item to be written in an indigenous language, often alongside colonial laws, was the European text. But if Europeans assumed that centuries of debate had settled the range of possible meaning afforded by this item, then surprises were in store. It was not simply that translators faced the task of rendering Greco-Roman, Neoplatonic, and Hebraic thought into local categories designed for different tasks; the problem was far

Introduction

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bigger than specific terminology. A growing body of local elites, fluent in the language of their colonizers, and an even larger contingent of converts, using the book in their own language, were finding an unprecedented variety of uses for the text as a whole and the religion of which it was a part. I am going to recount a case in which the relations between scripture, tradition, and reason seem to become disordered. If considered patiently, it is a story which places in question our ability to imagine the appropriate interactions between these three phenomena. It is a story in which the Christian Bible is joyfully received by a local community, yet to the great disappointment of the Belgians, and the French, and the British – a disappointment that turned to violence – the text is rendered as the essential evidence for the displacement of Europeans from the centre of divine favour, and as a proclamation of God’s immediate incarnation in Africa. My interest here is not to become involved in the details of the doctrinal and political controversy that developed in the Belgian Congo. The point is to see the way in which objects are defined by the world wherein they appear, and to articulate much more precisely what this means for the phenomena of language, tradition, and reason. The appearance of the European text in what I will call the ‘Kimbanguist world’ allows us to question how that world affects its use. The jarring nature of that use provokes us to articulate the way in which the Kimbanguists ‘misuse’ scripture and disorder its appropriate alignment with tradition and reason. Here one simply needs to ask what has happened; one does not need to be a colonial administrator or a historian to be intrigued by the situation. It was obvious to the Kimbanguists that the European text was about God’s incarnation in Africa and the establishment of Jerusalem in a small rural village. Of course, we could simply attribute naïveté to these Bible readers, but to do so would end all intellectual enquiry before it begins. The Bible is a book about the prophet Simon Kimbangu. This is not a secret message requiring specialized interpretive skills, it is plainly about Kimbangu, on the surface; the announcement of his divinity is distributed across every page. That the European text might be classified as a book about an African man could strike many theologians as historically unsound and patently ‘unreasonable’. But perhaps it is analogous to the normality felt by generations of Europeans who read the Hebrew Bible as a detailed text about a first-century man named Jesus. And if contemporary historical sensibilities do not always lead readers to find the same evidence for the Christian messiah in texts preceding his birth, it remains that the deep commitments of apparently secular Europeans are still tenaciously rooted in their Christian inheritance. It is my observation that scholars of religion and theology in the United Kingdom are accustomed to finding that cohorts of barely churched European students, when first formally introduced to the study of theology, consistently produce the most mundane readings of the Bible imaginable, utterly conventional readings determined by the hermeneutical settlements of the first Christian centuries – readings that are either broadly orthodox or fall into narrow heresies

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of the most predictable kind. Many of these same students would deny any theory of language or any theology of scripture that could support their interpretation as ‘obviously correct’. More broadly, for all of their secularity, modern Europeans are often incapable of producing an interesting heresy, practically incapable of doing to the exemplar of their language what the Kimbanguists could do, and it is this which belies the power of residual commitments, at least those directed towards the sort of thing the Christian scripture is (its ontology). In fact, in the broadest terms, it shows both Europeans and Kimbanguists to be using this object in precisely the same way: relying on deeply rooted background commitments to define the purpose and meaning of a piece of language as a phenomenon that shows up in the context of their world. Debates about the meaning of scriptural language are surreptitiously debates about the kind of world in which it ought to be located. What I will argue is that these sorts of contextual appropriations occur whenever we encounter objects, like tables and chairs and kotatsu; these are what they are in virtue of the world in which they appear. Crucially, such appropriations also occur throughout the history of the commitments on which we rely to objectify objects, so that our present use of commitments does not always reflect their original purposes. And to complicate matters, this disparity between the historical origin and the contemporary use of a commitment has an analogy in the disparity between the commitments that we use and our understanding of them, our commitments deployed in self-reflection about those commitments. We have commitments about ourselves, applied reflexively to our everyday understanding of the world. It is in this scenario that self-conscious persons (mistakenly) employ the categories of ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ to understand what they have been doing in their practices of reasoning. We are – which is to say that I am – so prone to seeing a plurality of items as the furniture of our conscious experience that the effort to classify our own experience renders it into this plural configuration. And like the meaningful classification of rocks and birds and books, these acts do not necessarily change what has been so classified. Readers should settle in and prepare themselves for story.

3. A Tale of Interpretation Born in 1887 and ritually immersed by the British Baptists in 1915, Simon Kimbangu spent his entire life in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was not a particularly remarkable convert to Protestantism, and there was little attention given to him at the time. No one suspected that he would initiate a movement with millions of followers and threaten the stability of the Belgian empire. It also seems he had no such designs himself. But others would invest every detail of his life with significance, both African intellectuals in the colonial capital, and countless devotees who would see him as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Simon and his wife Marie (Muilu Kiawanga) lived in Bakongo territory and spoke Kikongo. Prior to colonial intervention, the Kingdom of Kongo had relied

Introduction

13

on a sophisticated political structure covering a coastal region that became divided by French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial borders. Networks of exchange and communication residual within this territory facilitated Simon’s meteoric rise to fame. Local categories of analysis presupposed robust relations between the living and the dead, between the political and the religious, and between one’s bodily health and one’s spiritual condition. Social unrest with both political and religious dimensions had well-established precedents – a famous prophetess, Dona ‘Beatrice’ Kimpa Vita (1684–1706), began a mass movement aimed to re-establish the ancient Kingdom of Kongo. After falling ill she received visionary instructions from Saint Anthony, and soon claimed that Jesus was Congolese. The movement was violently suppressed by Italian and Portuguese authorities in 1706, and she was burnt at the stake as a witch. More proximately, a political uprising had begun in 1914 on the Angolan side of the border, and a revival of traditional ‘fetish cults’ was evident in 1916. The global flu epidemic of 1918 reached the area and seems to have further provoked religious sentiments. Traditionally, sickness might indicate the direct efforts of a spirit to get one’s attention, demanding propitiation in return for health. In 1918 Simon Kimbangu fell ill. Thus began a religious and political movement that would engulf the region. Unlike traditional malady cults, the spirit appearing to Simon in dreams and visions held a Bible and demanded that he study and preach. Although Simon, Marie, and their three sons were enthusiastic members of the local church, his efforts to establish himself as a preacher within the community were continually frustrated. Simon and his family lived in Nkamba (today, the centre of the universe). At that time Nkamba did not have its own church, and so everyone had to walk to the neighbouring village on Sundays. Simon wanted to start a church in his own village. For several years Simon tried to find an official post within the Protestant church, but to no avail, which meant that his visions could not be satisfied. When a position for church leadership in Nkamba was announced in March of 1921, Simon Kimbangu applied. He received approval from the regional leadership, but was rejected by elders in his own village. Rejection precipitated a new and more radical vision that very evening – his authority and calling came directly from God and could not be hindered. Simon began to try to heal the sick. At first, many seem to have lacked the requisite faith to be healed, but news of his activity spread, and spread very rapidly indeed. Crowds began to gather in Nkamba. By the beginning of April, regional church authorities sent a delegation to investigate, and by the end of the month, the Belgian colonial administrator of the region, Léon-Georges Morel, would depart with soldiers to assess the situation. The crowds were a problem, both to the colonial church leaders and to the colonial authorities. And the crowds were growing. In fact the agricultural cycle was jeopardized by the number of people consuming local resources, and by those leaving their fields unattended. From an ecclesiastical point of view, it was problematic that both local Christians and the ‘pagan’ villagers had surrounded

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Simon, forming an administration to regulate access to the healer and prophet. From a political point of view, the sheer scale of his popularity was an issue, and crowds were arriving from increasingly further afield. Within weeks others were discovering their talent as prophets. Many came to Simon Kimbangu for his blessing, though the surviving eye-witness reports show him rejecting these as ‘demon possessed’ and ‘heretics’. These other prophets would be far more radical than Simon in their claims. Although all of the evidence suggests that Simon himself never claimed to be divine, it is clear that he did model his work on the life of Jesus. At that time, missionaries were busy producing various translations of the Bible into various dialects of Kikongo, and the publication of these books, along with hymnals and colonial law codes, was an ongoing event in the community. Simon kept at least two scribes who recorded the events of his ministry as they unfolded – the language of this text, and the structure of the narrative, closely resemble the gospel accounts of the New Testament that were being freshly printed. Newspapers in the capital began to report that 5,000 Africans were travelling to Nkamba per day. This required extra cars to be added to the trains, and it began to threaten some of the infrastructure of the region. Porters formed a key link between certain towns and the rest of the country, supplying the needs of colonial authorities, and these porters were abandoning their posts in order to see Simon Kimbangu. His message demanded faith and repentance, proclaimed that the final judgement was on hand, and he offered the opportunity for miraculous healing. Léon-Georges Morel arrived in Nkamba with soldiers to assess the situation and report to his superiors during the first weeks of May. He happened to arrive during a hymn festival, in which Simon’s followers were to sing day and night for ten days while parading around the village. Unwittingly pitching his tent in the path of their marching, he slept poorly, had a few short but frustrating episodes of miscommunication, and failed to negotiate any kind of political concessions. Dispersing the crowds would require force, he concluded, and he departed to report to his superiors. Meanwhile, the uproar in the area was becoming more serious. Beyond the Belgian border, French troops were stationed along their side of the Congo River to prevent pilgrims from reaching Simon, but this mattered less and less. Other prophets were preaching the end of the world, the overthrow of white rule, the return of the ancestors, and the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Kongo. Simon’s own ministry, although certainly the epicentre of this activity, was itself the most politically innocuous. He was a staunch pacifist, demanded that his followers continue to pay their taxes, and that they render their services to the ‘whites’. The colonial capital, Leopoldville, was a hotbed of political intrigue. Elite Africans with a European education saw in Kimbangu an opportunity and began to send him money. One of these ‘évolués’, André Yengo, collected a large sum of money for Simon and sought to convince his followers to divest themselves of connections to the ‘whites’. No longer were white medicine, white employment, and white religion necessary. All these things were found in Nkamba, and with the imminent end of the world, the need to secure one’s material future was largely

Introduction

15

mitigated (though in a few areas prophets were claiming the imminent return of the ancestors and villagers were labouring to increase agricultural production to feed them all). After a consultation between Belgian Catholic and British Protestant leaders, Léon-Georges Morel received orders from his superiors at the end of May to disperse the crowds and to arrest Simon and the leaders of the movement. He marched with twenty-four soldiers, camping outside the village on 5 June. Simon had been actively preaching for only about three months. The next morning Simon Kimbangu urged the crowds not to resist the authorities, and shouted, ‘God hates the shedding of blood’. He walked to the edge of the village and gave himself up for arrest. Taking him captive, the soldiers proceeded to move into the village, but the public display of Simon under their control was traumatic. Chaos ensued. Stones were thrown. Shots were fired. Some of the soldiers began looting the huts, and in the midst of the upheaval Simon was left alone. He walked away, unscathed. Simon eluded Morel’s soldiers. Ten days later one hundred more soldiers were sent to Nkamba but these too failed to find him. The lower Congo was in an uproar, and three military occupations would be required in the coming months. The other prophets were preaching messages that now had overt political claims, and some of these promoted direct resistance and violence. The soldiers continued to search for Simon, who was considered to be the principal inspiration behind the entire movement. By the end of June many of Simon’s followers had been arrested, but not Simon. When asked, villagers refused to give information about his whereabouts. Relations between Europeans and Africans became deeply strained throughout the lower Congo. Even the purchase of basic goods and foodstuffs was made difficult, with many sellers refusing to do business with the ‘whites’. Records describe the intensity of every encounter between Africans and Europeans, and the whole social arrangement suddenly seemed fragile and insecure. It was September when rumours began to circulate that Simon was on his way to Nkamba to present himself for arrest. He stopped on the way at an important British church. Standing outside the doors while a missionary preached to an African congregation, he shouted so that all could hear, ‘As the Apostle Paul said, “He that is not against us is on our part.” If you do not believe me, I shake off the dust of my feet to condemn you.’ The entire congregation, save a few, simply got up and followed him. He arrived in Nkamba the next day, going directly to the authorities in order to be arrested. He, and a few with him, were immediately chained. But crowds swelled, pressed in, and demanded that they too be arrested. They begged for it. Over one hundred were taken into custody and escorted to the regional headquarters, Thysville (Mbanza-Ngugu). The arrested huddled together and sang the prophet hymns of Simon Kimbangu. Simon Kimbangu was condemned to death. The British missionaries secured a reprieve from the King of Belgium, and he along with his followers were shipped off to the remote corners of the Congo. Many were forced into hard labour and

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very soon died under conditions of extreme brutality. Simon himself lived out the remainder of his days in prison in distant Élisabethville (Lubumbashi). Rebirth For thirty years the movement was illegal but spread in secret. Simon’s wife, Marie, was the unofficial matriarch, but could not provide any serious oversight of the adherents. A diversity of beliefs flourished without public control, and as the stories of Simon’s life and ministry were retold, every detail became increasingly momentous. Simon’s own death in prison in 1951 passed largely unnoticed. It was the British Protestants, far more than the Belgian Catholics, who had inspired an emphasis on reading scripture. Whatever the case, the followers of Kimbangu read their Bibles. In this book they found stories which could not be pried apart from the stories of Simon Kimbangu. In Christian scripture they found the proclamation of his divinity and they found all the events of his life foretold. As the Congo neared independence, the followers of Kimbangu became increasingly vocal. Marie was frail; shortly before her death, her second son, Diangienda, took charge of the community. He petitioned the Belgian government for recognition, and by Christmas of 1959 they were registered as a church with 60,000 members. Like the bones of the Jewish patriarch Joseph, which were carried from Egypt to the Promised Land, in April, Simon Kimbangu’s body was publicly exhumed, transported with much fanfare across the African continent, and interred in Nkamba as a site of pilgrimage. Nkamba was now referred to as Nkamba-Jerusalem. Diangienda’s career was characterized by the effort to gather the various groups which looked to Simon as a figurehead under one roof. From 1960 until his death in Switzerland in 1992 he aimed to clarify what it meant to be a part of the Church of Jesus Christ on earth by his Prophet Simon Kimbangu. The church grew rapidly as more followers of Kimbangu joined the central body, but many groups were deemed unfit. Diangienda produced a number of works that taught Kimbanguists how to read the Bible. From a European perspective these were overwhelmingly mundane. Yes, a few peculiarly local traits are evident, but on the whole there was nothing extraordinary. In fact, it was very much Diangienda’s leadership, his elite catholic boarding school education, his cosmopolitan travels, and his fluency in French that earned the Kimbanguists international recognition and membership in the World Council of Churches. But the Kimbanguists already knew how to read the Bible. Whether Diangienda’s efforts to establish a Kimbanguist hermeneutic were successful in changing the habits of believers at the village level is probably shown in the years following his death. Even during the period of his rule, his older brother Dialungana was producing commentaries on the Bible with a wholly different character. Dialungana never had a boarding school education, never learned French, and never left the Congo – he had stayed in the village Nkamba

Introduction

17

with his mother Marie. When his brother died he took charge as the Chef Spirituel, his proclamations were hailed with enthusiasm. Dialungana’s work, even during his brother’s reign, always emphasized the close identity between Simon Kimbangu and the Holy Spirit. He saw the Bible as presenting a basic narrative: God sends a series of prophets, these instigate the building of a series of temples, and between each episode the sinfulness of God’s people leads to the destruction of the temples and the removal of his favour. The colonists had obviously lost God’s favour. God’s most recent prophet was Simon Kimbangu, and his most recent temple was Nkamba, now identified as Jerusalem. In fact, both Nkamba-Jerusalem, and Simon Kimbangu the Holy Spirit are discussed plainly and in detail throughout scripture. It was a point of no small significance that the same Kikongo words for Israel’s ‘ark of the covenant’ could be used to describe a coffin of the sort in which Simon Kimbangu was transported across the Congo and interred in Nkamba-Jerusalem. The earthly site of God’s presence and favour was firmly established. If any ambiguity remained about the official status of Simon Kimbangu as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit this was clarified in the final years of Dialungana’s life. In 1999 the church ratified 25 May as the official date of Christmas. This was supported by a whole range of historical evidence and analysis; conspicuously absent from the pronouncement was the fact that 25 May was Dialungana’s own birthday. Born of Simon the Holy Spirit and Marie the mother of Christ, Dialungana was Jesus. Shortly before his death in 2001 he declared himself to be ‘the Jesus Christ whom the world was looking for.’ The response was euphoric because the church leadership had affirmed and extended the commitments of the common believer. Simon and Marie had three sons. Each came to be identified with a member of the trinity. Dialungana had admitted that he was Jesus. Like God the Father, the oldest son Kisolukelo was always distant from the affairs of his people. And just as scripture promises, the presence of the Holy Spirit was sustained among his people – first in Simon Kimbangu, then in his son Diangienda, and today in his grandson Kiangani. Kiangani took charge on the death of Dialungana. Like all the previous leaders of the church, he affirms the centrality of the Bible to the life of a Kimbanguist. He quotes from it to support every decision in daily affairs. In 2005 he declared a Kimbanguist doctrinal code, which repeated formulations given by the previous leaders; it states that the message of the Kimbanguists is the message of the Bible, that the Bible’s message is clear and plain, that the Nicene Creed is true, that Kimbanguists believe in the Holy Trinity, and that they practise love of neighbour, moral uprightness, and good works. The pronouncement offered no changes to those given by previous leaders. The affirmation of the Bible as the foundation of all Kimbanguist beliefs coheres with the practices of the community: scripture is cited from memory to prove every claim about Simon’s divinity, every claim about Nkamba as the centre of the world, and every claim about the appropriate Trinitarian relations between the members of the Kimbangu family. It is obvious that the language of scripture

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is designed for these tasks, and that it is suitable for negotiating the concerns of everyday life. Today the Kimbanguist drama continues. It is the drama found in the Bible, an object which appears in the Kimbanguist world and coheres with it. The European text is the Kimbanguist book. It describes in detail the sacred geography of the Congo and the biography of the Kimbanguists, beginning with Simon Kimbangu and continuing to the present day. And as their story unfolds, the Kimbanguists continue to read their Bibles, finding there all the answers to their questions. The size of the Kimbanguist church is hard to estimate, but it is a community of about 8 million people, and for generation after generation of children raised within this world, having only ever encountered the language of the Bible as a Kimbanguist text, there is no serious question about its meaning and purpose.

Chapter 2 BEING AND TIME

1. On the Very Possibility of Reading Wrongly One might be inclined to think that the Kimbanguists have failed to read rightly, that they have in some way misused language. I will argue that such a notion is misguided. In order to see why that is so, we will need a clearer account of what happens in that traditioned act of reasoning about scripture that we call ‘reading’. To be more precise, the idea that the Kimbanguists read wrongly imagines a particular set of relations between ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ and then determines that the Kimbanguists have confused or disordered these relations. In this book I am arguing that we need to reimagine how we use these categories. Although it might be easy to adopt a dismissive attitude towards practices of Kimbanguist reasoning, this would end serious intellectual enquiry and prevent the acquisition of significant insights. Considering the fact of Kimbanguist reasoning, persisting with the phenomena displayed in their practices, will allow some important assumptions to emerge about the categories of ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’. We must get a clearer picture of how it is that, for the Kimbanguists, scripture does in fact speak of their community, of their village, and of their prophet. We need to take this phenomenon seriously – in the same way that we are accustomed to taking the phenomenon of European reasoning seriously; perhaps it is comparable, I suggested earlier, to the fact that for centuries European Christians considered the Hebrew Bible to talk about Jesus in detail, or perhaps, I suggested, it is comparable to the fact that cohorts of ‘secular’ European students are today incapable of producing an interesting heresy from Christian scripture. For a Kimbanguist to reason that scripture is not about Simon would be irrational. It would be transgressive. It would be a madness in the face of their logic, the very grammar of their community. It is not merely that individual words in the text refer directly to members of the Kimbanguist leadership and to the history of their activity – words like Jesus, or Simon the Cyrene, the helper who carries the cross of Christ; it is that the text as a whole is a Kimbanguist text, referring to Kimbanguist things. My reading of Heidegger will offer a depiction of scripture that is able to account for its appearance within the world of everyday reasoning, including Kimbanguist reasoning.

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This raises an interesting point of classification: should the Kimbanguist Bible be considered the ‘same’ thing as Europe’s preeminent text? Linguistically, it is no different from any other Bible in French or Lingala or Kikongo. Is it still the paradigmatic European text when a Kimbanguist reads it? Is it still Christian scripture? If reclassifying the Bible as a Kimbanguist text seems improbable, we might scale down our question, posing something more manageable: if, within the Kimbanguist community, ‘Jesus’ is a Kimbanguist word that simply refers to Dialungana, is this still the same word used by Europeans, or are these two words merely homophones, false friends from different languages? If we concede the possibility of homophones for a word like ‘Jesus’, can we concede the possibility of a whole text functioning as a homophone? How far are we willing to go, and what of all the messy in-betweens? It is true that we do not have to treat matters of classification as terribly important. Perhaps they are just a way of naming and renaming things. After all, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. We can imagine scenarios in which schemes of classification are used and discarded without great consequence, without changing the way things stand in the world. This chapter is going to be concerned with matters of classification. Sceptical readers may point out that naming and renaming do not change states of affairs in the world, at least not immediately. But even sceptical readers might concede that how we classify things might, at some point, shape how we perceive them, and perhaps even how we will subsequently contribute to a state of affairs (advertisements capitalize on this). If we were to use, for instance, British categories to describe the political process of another country, distortions could prevent a good understanding of their governance. We may supply a taxonomy that is poorly fitted to local practices, distorting our reading of the situation. Perhaps this is exactly the kind of situation we have when Kimbanguists ‘wrongly’ think that the Christian Bible is about Simon Kimbangu. Perhaps the Kimbanguist ‘confusion’ is one of misguided classification. I am going to provide an account of language’s place in the world that makes such a judgement very difficult. The whole effort to consider how, exactly, the Kimbanguists misunderstand the Bible will produce antinomies unless we revise the categories of our analysis. The impulse is to ask, ‘How does their community go wrong when they rely on tradition to reason about the meaning of scripture?’ But this question is committed to a picture of scripture, tradition, and reason that is misguided, one which, I am claiming, produces a confused muddle for answers. I will argue that when we ask whether Kimbanguists read scripture rightly, we ourselves rely on a taxonomy of relations between ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ that tends to obscure what is happening in their act of reading. The poor fit of our taxonomy leads us to imagine that, however the Kimbanguists themselves classify scripture (perhaps as a book about Simon), it will have no bearing on the text’s ‘real’ meaning. It is the very question of a putative misfit between their taxonomy and their book that is committed to a false picture of the discontinuity between tradition, reason, and language. Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time treats matters of classification as fundamentally important rather than superficial or dispensable. More precisely, Being



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and Time investigates acts of fundamental classification rather than acts of superficial classification. I am supplying this distinction (it is not explicitly from Heidegger)1 and it will be important that readers grasp what it names; it will guide our basic interpretive strategy for Heidegger’s work. According to Being and Time, acts of classification are not only a provisional way that we occasionally treat things for our convenience – of course they can be that, but such cases are not of primary interest to Heidegger. Rather, in Being and Time, classification is also depicted as the basic way in which things are known in the first instance, ordering the world we inhabit, determining what any item is, and constituting its relations with everything else. For something to be what it is, is for it to be classified in a particular way. This ‘fundamental’ classification is required for something to show up at all, for it even to be recognized. The limits of classification are therefore limits of being. What is, is what is within the scope of classification. If ‘superficial’ classification is responsible for naming and renaming a rose that we have, ‘fundamental’ classification is responsible for having the rose at all. Being and Time depicts a system of classification spatially, and imagines people as inhabiting the ‘clearing’ made by their system of classification.2 A fundamental taxonomy is not something in your head, but something out in the world. The light of understanding is coterminous with what is out there; and understanding is not in the first instance the naming of entities, but includes (as we will discuss) one’s habits and ‘know-how’. The semantic scope of this taxonomic structure creates the space of this clearing, the horizon within which things can be known. ‘World’ is the name of this clearing. One can ‘see’ as far as one can classify. The limits of a system of classification are the limits of what there is; these limits mark out the clearing or world one inhabits and these limits orient all the possibilities of the items found within it. The Bard may have said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but found in another ‘clearing’, another inhabited taxonomy, a rose is something English. In a comical way, we can imagine Mel Gibson in the film Braveheart demanding we see the rose as a product of control and over-cultivation, something with a sickly aroma that smells of patrician sensibilities; but a thistle, now that is something both wild and tender – the aroma of a thistle is as pure and fresh as it is delicate. It is a silly example, but we may begin to grasp how fundamental acts of classification constitute or ‘clear’ a particular world as what it is, in contrast to superficial acts that rename, distinguish, or regroup items already classified in that world. For the English Bard, the rose can go by any other name, 1. Heidegger does, however, occasionally broach the topic in similar terms. See GA 18, 10–12. 2. GA 2, 133. As noted in the abbreviations and acknowledgements, I follow Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften 1910–1976, Vol. 2, Sein und Zeit, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977) and rely on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) for English translations. I use the marginal pagination, common to both the English and German editions and referred to as GA 2.

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but under all names it remains within that particular world of English fondness for gardening and cultivation. The question of whether we should classify Kimbanguist scripture as the Christian Bible is interesting but not terribly significant for our enquiry. The question of fundamental importance is how Kimbanguists constitute the purpose of their text. We might name and rename Kimbanguists as a new religious movement, or as a Protestant denomination; we might name and rename the scriptures that they use. The question is how the language of the Bible shows up within the Kimbanguist world, within their system of ‘fundamental’ classification. Treating matters of fundamental rather than superficial classification raises questions that can be posed more dramatically. Is what the Kimbanguists read the Bible or is it not? What is the ‘Bible’ that shows up in their world? This question is not about a superficial renaming of scripture as Kimbanguist or as Christian. It is, we might say, a question of hard fact. Is that which they read an item in their world that exists as Christian scripture? Is it the Bible? Is it possible for it to mean Christian things, or is it already constituted as something else, something which is, by virtue of its fundamental classification, oriented towards other, specifically Kimbanguist, possibilities? My reading of Heidegger will ask how it is that language shows up as part of a world, and this will give us powerful conceptual tools for understanding the language of scripture in its putative relation to tradition and reason. Questions of fundamental classification ask, ‘Is it, or is it not?’ rather than, ‘Is it named this way or not?’ The difference is not simply verbal or rhetorical, but rather addresses itself to two different kinds of thing. Heidegger calls questions of the first kind ‘ontological’, but I will neglect that term because it tends to cause confusion, obscuring more than it reveals. The difference between fundamental and superficial classification is worth grasping. A fundamental classification provides the scope of what is – the ‘clearing of being’, the world one inhabits; what I am calling fundamental classification is responsible for presenting the world in a particular way – the way one already knows the world to be. Superficial classification relies upon that presentation to regroup or distinguish material within it in conscious ways. So, it is an act of fundamental classification that presents the world in three dimensions and presents items like apples and oranges on a table in a room. It is an act of superficial classification that reflects on that world, determining that there is a group of twenty-three apples and another group of sixteen oranges. This limited example is inadequate in a number of ways, but it is a good start because it usefully suggests a key difference between these two kinds of classification: superficial classification is always parasitic on what fundamental classification has already made available. In the months before Heidegger finished writing Being and Time, he described this two-levelled system of classification with extraordinary frankness. ‘Every form of speaking about things is … already grounded in existence [Dasein] as world-open. That is, all speech speaks about something that is somehow already



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disclosed.’3 Over a few short pages he describes the experience of inhabiting an entire world that is ‘before’ our explicit and conscious efforts to think about it. It is a familiar world that we are always already engaging. It is the condition for the possibility of our efforts to describe, examine, and reclassify its items using explicit forms of speech. It is a meaningful world that we always already inhabit. As he will say, words ‘accrue to meaning’.4 In the entire scope of what is classified fundamentally, everything exists without conscious linguistic naming or self-conscious, reflective consideration; every thing is known in terms of its use, its purpose, its teleology – everything appears in terms of how it matters for us. It is a familiar world, and we are already adept at engaging all its features: already actively walking and sitting, posturing our body, holding books and turning pages, relying on floors, entering and exiting, drinking and eating. And, as we will see later, it is the world in which we use tools and engage in activities like manual labour. It is the world in which we turn on a light or pick up a hammer without needing to look at them sharply saying, ‘That is a light-switch’ or ‘That is a hammer’. It is a way of living that is ‘pre-predicative’, a ‘primary making-sense-of-things in terms of what-they’re-for’, and it is the normal experience of everyday life.5 This is the picture of our experience of the world that Heidegger gives in his lectures from 1924 to 1927, and it is the picture that is presented in Being and Time. I describe these two levels in our experience as those of fundamental and superficial classification. This is intended to keep clear what each mode of engagement does and how each differs. Heidegger describes these two kinds of engagement in various ways at various times. He sometimes (confusingly for his readers) refers to them both as speech or language, such as in the following, ‘Knowing or considering is always a speaking, whether vocalized or not. All disclosive comportment, not only everyday finding one’s way about, but also scientific knowledge is carried out in speech.’6 There are some technical claims in this sentence that we will examine later (especially ‘disclosive’), but here we can note that Heidegger is stretching his vocabulary to describe the two kinds of classification and the way in which each behaves like language. Being and Time keeps clear the difference between superficial and fundamental modes of classification. It also displays the inclination to describe both with linguistic terminology, so readers will need to pick their way through a carefully 3. GA 21, 144 [E 121]; see GA 2, §32–4. As noted in the Acknowledgements, I quote from Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe II. Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1923–1944, Vol. 21, Logik – Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, ed. Walter Biemel (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976). English pagination is given in brackets and follows the standard translation. Martin Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010). 4. GA 21, 151 [E 127]. 5. GA 21, 144 [E 121]; cf. GA 2, 148–9. 6.  GA 19, 27 [E 19]. English in brackets follows Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophists, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997).

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controlled vocabulary. For instance, ‘talking’ or ‘discourse’ (Rede) is used for unspoken fundamental classification, whereas language (usually Sprache) names the totality of physical words that have accrued to what has already been fundamentally classified in discourse (Rede) and the meaningful relations that discourse makes available.7 The investigations of Being and Time are firmly directed towards the fundamental variety of classification (for reasons I will outline below), but it provides an account of the complex interaction between the habit of fundamental classification, which supplies the scope of the world we already inhabit, and the parasitic mode of superficial classification, which may aim to revise that initial picture.8 In a rough and ready way, theologians might see a similar difference between first-order worship and the second-order reflection conducted by theology. As soon as the difference between fundamental and superficial classification is grasped, we must begin to muddy the distinction. It is important to recognize that there is finally no historically stable contrast between fundamental and superficial modes of classification. The initial presentation of the world, on the one hand, and the whole body of explicit names for consciously regrouping things appearing in that world, on the other – are two processes that tend to affect each in complex ways over time. And the timescales here include everything from daily life to human history.9 Heidegger associates both superficial and fundamental varieties of classification with the Greek concept of ‘logos’; he reads Plato and Aristotle as taking ‘logos’ to refer principally to spoken words, but he criticizes them for failing to grasp the ‘logic of the logos’ in which spoken words only accrue to the meanings and relations made available by fundamental classification.10 It is Heidegger’s effort to clarify the concept of logos that stimulates his vocabulary of languagerelated words for describing various activities of classification. In this effort, he binds together reason and the ‘language’ of a system of classification. Speaking, thinking, and being cannot be isolated from each other. Speaking relies on the world made available through habits of fundamental classification, but those habits involve sedimentations of superficial speech. The ‘logic’ of the logos and the ‘speech’ of the logos are united in the fundamental ordering of the world and the talking this provokes; the ‘rationale’ of the ordered world and the ‘speaking’ of an order into being are kept together. Both activities of classification involve a kind of speech which is a kind of reason.11 These matters will be treated in more detail in the next two chapters. 7. GA 2, 160f. 8. GA 2, §32–4, §68–9, especially 359f. 9.  So, for example, GA 2, 150, ‘Even if it has undergone such a [thematic] interpretation, it recedes into an understanding which does not stand out from the background. And this is the very mode in which it is the essential foundation for everyday circumspective interpretation.’ 10. GA 2, 160–1; or even more explicitly, GA 21, 159–62. 11. GA 2, §33, esp. 158–60. See also GA 21, §11. Compare GA 2, §7.



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If fundamental classification is a kind of silent speaking – without conscious words – this is partially because it has been formed by prior acts of superficial classification more commonly known as speaking. (And we will later see that superficial classification itself is not always a speaking aloud but a way of approaching items in the world, an ‘intentional attitude’.) Being and Time outlines a cyclical process in which superficial acts of classification are sedimented into fundamental habits of constituting the world, which in turn support altered forms of superficial classification.12 Heidegger calls this a ‘hermeneutical circle’. This relation between superficial and fundamental acts of classification suggests that most of the taxonomical structure, used to constitute the world we know, the ‘clearing’ of what is, has been supplied by prior acts of superficial classification. For Heidegger, language, reason, and being all embody a particular social history because they are the use of an inherited taxonomy. We can already note, here at the outset, that divergences in habits of classification can occur at both the fundamental and the superficial level. I am reminded of a case in which a group of refugee adolescents were enclosed in a small room shortly after arriving in a country of asylum; there arose a hint of panic when it became clear that no one in the group was familiar with the operation of door knobs, and the spot where one ought to exit the room began to seem quite obscure. How was one supposed to get out of the box? Matters of fundamental classification did not accommodate the material culture of their new environment. Here we can import a question which matters to the overall argument of this book: what role does ‘tradition’ play in these matters of classification? In this book, ‘tradition’ is simply the name for those prior acts of superficial classification that now compose the scheme of fundamental classification. ‘Tradition’ thus does not name something past, but the constitution of the world in the present. ‘Tradition’ simply names the current fundamental taxonomic structure, the current system of categories, to the degree that it has been created in a community over time. And unlike superficial classification, which is parasitic upon fundamental classification, the latter admits of no distinction between something ‘in your head’ and something ‘out in the world’. This tradition is not distinguishable from the world. If the system of classification used in that ‘reasoning’ which is called ‘fundamental classification’ is itself called ‘tradition’, then here at the outset there is no easy contrast between reason and tradition – between the inherited categories of classification and their use to classify things fundamentally, to make them what they are. If ‘reasoning’ also names an activity of superficial classification, then it too displays a close relation to ‘tradition’, to the extent that superficial classification is always parasitic on the categories of fundamental classification, however much it may aim to revise them, and further, because superficial categories, like words, are the inheritance of a community. Finally, if Heidegger is right about the identification between classification and ‘being’, then there is no division between being and reason, between what is and what is classified, but rather the act of 12. GA 2, §32, especially 150, §68–9, especially 359f.

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fundamental classification makes something what it is within any particular finite scheme of classification. These statements are only preliminary sketches and the unity they suggest is rudimentary. Even so, we can begin to discern how Heidegger’s work will support an account of ‘reason’, ‘tradition’, and ‘language’ in which these three categories actually name a single activity or phenomenon – a way of inhabiting the world. It is an account in which one makes a text what it is, even before it is read. We can begin to imagine how the European book might be constituted within a particular world so as to speak reasonably about all things Kimbanguist. But for now many ambiguities remain. Heidegger took the important step (he was obviously not the first) of recognizing that most of the material in any classificatory scheme is formed by a particular past, and thus the world that one finds oneself to inhabit – the clearing of being, the scope of a taxonomy – is a world that one inherits rather than makes anew. In Heidegger’s more dramatic language, we are ‘thrown’ into that particular clearing and it orients or determines all the ways we live in it. ‘Thrownness’ is Heidegger’s description of the inheritance of a world, of an entire scheme of fundamental classification constituting what is. ‘Projection’ is Heidegger’s description for the way we reason about the world that we that have inherited, the way we move forward on the basis of ‘what is’, and adjust our inheritance according to where we want to go. In the last few pages, I have been describing this Heideggerian relation in terms of fundamental and superficial acts of classification. We might try mapping the distinction between thrownness and projection, between fundamental and superficial classification, onto our three phenomena. How do tradition, reason, and language fit into this relation? Perhaps ‘tradition’ names our thrownness whereas ‘reason’ names our projection. But we have already observed that the historical relation between superficial and fundamental forms of classification is cyclical, and we have already noted that ‘reason’ names something important about fundamental classification, even while ‘tradition’ might well name a community’s habits of superficial classification. Further, we have already seen Heidegger use ‘language’ to treat both kinds of classification. (Thus, not only is there a cyclical relation between superficial and fundamental modes of classification, but each one contains aspects we might describe by any of the terms.) The profusion of relations needed to treat these phenomena is merely an initial indication that our efforts here rely on a classificatory scheme which is not fit for purpose – it is the reflexive effort to classify our very reliance on a taxonomy which has gone awry. One of the most important ways such descriptions go astray is in their commitment to a certain kind of temporal sequencing. This is particularly acute when we aim to understand the relation between fundamental and superficial modes of classification. Imagine, for example, that the relation between tradition and reason is a relation between the world we inherit and the activities we intend to pursue, between our thrownness and our projection. This presents us with a temporal sequence: first we have one thing, and it serves as the condition for the possibility of the second thing. First we have a world, and then we reason about



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something that appears in it. The problem with this application of time is that it fails to consider the way in which every reasoning on the basis of tradition, every projection on the basis of thrownness, is itself no less a change of the second term, a change of thrownness, a change of the taxonomy which one inherits. In Chapter 4, this matter will be treated in detail and will provide an important step, I argue, in dispelling the confused distinctions between tradition, reason, and scripture. Being and Time is an investigation of fundamental classification. Heidegger thus generally ignores acts of superficial classification, even while acknowledging that fundamental classification is a process that is formed by prior, superficial acts. Furthermore, within the scope of fundamental classification, Heidegger directs his interest towards those features of any given taxonomy which are necessary to support the rest of the structure. Necessity here might be contrasted with contingency. In summary, Being and Time does not investigate at great length the relation between fundamental and superficial modes of classification, and Heidegger is least interested in the historically contingent, traditioned features of fundamental classification – even though he suggests that these compose the majority of any taxonomic scheme. Such tasks are, however, taken up by his student Gadamer, who in Truth and Method examines the historical accumulations and revisions to any taxonomy in the oscillation between fundamental and superficial acts of classification. In Being and Time, Heidegger’s interest remains firmly directed towards fundamental modes of classification, and further, he limits his concern to those features of classificatory systems which are necessary and universal. Any historically contingent aspect of our experience is a chance for Heidegger to pursue the more fundamental question, ‘What sort of being must we be for that to be a possible experience?’ For a text that depicts a relation between ‘thrownness’ and ‘projection’ as basic to human existence, for a text that treats the inheritance of categories as the ground of thought, Being and Time does not pay much attention to the vast body of material that accumulates in any given cultural taxonomy from the history of that community. When Heidegger observes this material, he does so as a clue to the more fundamental commitments that lie behind it. However, his observations along the way are extraordinarily insightful. In the next chapter we will carefully read a specific section from Being and Time. Here, I want to outline the argument of Being and Time in broad strokes so that we can rightly narrow our focus to that particular fragment as it is found within the larger argument. This fragment investigates the way tools exist within a particular taxonomy. Our examination of that fragment will be detailed, and the details will reveal both strong merits and particular blind spots in Heidegger’s investigation. I have chosen the passage about tools for two reasons. First, I view it as opening up the entire account of fundamental classification that Heidegger provides in Being and Time. That account of fundamental classification will make available powerful strategies for examining the relation between scripture, tradition, and reason. Second, an investigation of tools within such an account is particularly fitting for our purposes: language has tool-like characteristics, and by attending to the relation between tools and systems of classification we can grasp more clearly how it is that Christians reason about the scripture that appears in their world.

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2. What Sort of Book is Being and Time? Being and Time is an investigation of background commitments; it takes phenomena from everyday life and seeks to uncover the background conditions that make those phenomena possible. Getting a broader picture of Heidegger’s project in Being and Time will help us to see how the activity of reading is related to such background conditions, and reading is a good opportunity to test the relation between ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’. Notably, we are mostly limiting our considerations to Being and Time, and a fragment at that; I will rely on some of his lectures immediately preceding its publication, but not much more. Heidegger’s intellectual career was long and immensely fruitful. During periods of intense production, Heidegger’s writing sometimes displays rapid intellectual developments. Impressions of Heidegger the man, and impressions of Heidegger’s work, suffer (on my view) when they fail to treat his thought chronologically. It is my own rule that Heidegger should never be read in the light of something he later wrote or said. Such a task is much easier now that his collected works have expanded to almost one hundred volumes. Today’s readers have an advantage over those of a generation ago, who were likely to encounter summaries and quotes of Heidegger compiled from considerably different periods of his work. Our discussion of fundamental acts of classification has suggested that taxonomies are always already in use before we begin to examine them. (This makes their examination particularly tricky.) In other words, these fundamental schemes of classification are presupposed – they form a body of commitments that structure the inhabited world. They are the background. One always already inhabits such a fundamental scheme of classification; it is the world that already exists, the background on which specific entities show up. Reading Being and Time as an investigation of this background is to read it as a work that is concerned with the classificatory conditions and constraints which render the world as we experience it. To repeat what has already been said, for something to be what it is, is for it to be classified in a particular way. Classification is required for something to show up at all, for it even to be recognized. The limits of classification are the limits of what is, of ‘being’. What exists, is what is within the scope of classification. A system of classification is not best analysed as a homogeneous entity. It is best described as composed of categories, which themselves contain categories, which in turn contain categories, and so forth. In such a scheme, one can begin at any given point and move in either a superordinate or a subordinate direction, finding more general or more specific categories. Many philosophers have asked whether there is a terminus in either direction, especially whether there might be one category which contains all the others (or perhaps twelve). This is not a question we will consider now. What is important to our present discussion is that a body of categories is presupposed; this is what makes them operate as categories of fundamental rather than superficial classification. I call these categories ‘commitments’, and we will be examining the way that commitments form hierarchical groups, or rather, can be described as so doing. Descriptions of a taxonomy that is always already presupposed must be analyses of a superficial



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kind – they are parasitic efforts of self-reflection, or if we examine other people, efforts of inference. When we talk about fundamental classification we are doing superficial classification. Heidegger, I have noted, views commitments as the condition for the possibility of thought or reason. He is particularly interested in those commitments which are universal and necessary. Before we consider Heidegger’s work further, we should take a moment to consider the necessity and importance of having commitments. That we must necessarily have commitments is notably different from considering which specific commitments might be universally necessary. All investigations rely on commitments, even investigations of commitments. Consider a scientist who asks, ‘What caused that water to freeze?’ The question is already committed to a range of things – we might call them ‘judgements’ – not least of which is the existence of causes. In this case, causes function as the condition for the possibility of a particular case of causation, which the scientist hopes to find. Causation is a category the scientist presupposes. The scientist does not ask whether there are such things as causes; only an instance of cause is sought. The scientist has already classified the situation he will be examining in terms of causality. For our purposes, what is important about the judgement ‘there are causes’ is simply that it is presupposed; it is a commitment. The commitment to causes is specific and the scope of committing may be limited to the activity of the investigation.13 The commitment to the category acts as the condition for the possibility of discovering a particular instance of that category, a case of causation. Commitments are categories or judgements that are presupposed. Commitments are not open to examination while they are relied upon. It remains possible that these commitments were once the object of an enquiry, categories that once elicited careful scrutiny, and that they were adopted for well-considered reasons. But now, as commitments, they are presuppositions guiding an investigation, or even simply guiding an attitude towards the world. They are in the background, shaping how and what one sees. Commitments are required for every investigation and for every activity. This should not be surprising after our discussion of their status in the activity of fundamental classification. The categories to which any thought or experience is committed supply the space in which further thinking and acting is conceivable – for that which is, is that which is categorized as what it is, and the limits of categorization mark the limits of what is, the limits of ‘being’. Particular commitments orient the questions asked in any investigation, for they supply the limited range of possibilities within which potential answers will be discovered. Searching for causes is different from searching for laws. Similarly, Heidegger depicts commitments as orienting every experience, every ‘taking things to be so’, wherein commitments positively supply the basis for the experience and negatively limit the horizon of that experience. Positive 13.  For an account of metaphysics as the science of a special variety of presuppositions, see R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). Collingwood is most interested in the presuppositions of scientific investigations.

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possibilities and negative limitations are two basic features of commitments and warrant their characterization as ‘orienting’. The broad orientation of every world and the specific limited range of possibilities afforded by every item within it are both effects of the way they are classified, and we should expect that specific entities are typically oriented within the range of possibilities afforded by the world in which they are found. I noted earlier that Heidegger imagines humans as standing at the centre of a clearing made by their taxonomy. Being and Time depicts people as fundamentally defined by the fact of inhabiting such a world. It depicts humans as fundamentally oriented by whatever possibilities are made available by the specific world in which they stand, by the taxonomy which they inhabit. Situating people inside that clearing and insisting that they are a part of that clearing is something Heidegger will do in contrast with any account wherein humans stand outside the world and apply their schemes of classification to it. Above, I suggested that asking what caused the water to freeze was a question with very different commitments from the one asking about the laws by which the water froze. Similarly, asking what caused the water to freeze is different from the question asking who caused the water to freeze. The orientation towards causes in terms of natural processes opens up a range of possibilities distinct from discovering which family member turned down the refrigerator thermostat (and maybe turned it down too far). Even in this small example it is possible to see the way in which commitments supply the finite possibilities of discovery. Commitments form a background on which a limited number of things can be found and brought into association. Heidegger, we will see, depicts commitments as forming the backgrounds necessary for any association between any two items; I will call such associations acts of ‘reference’. A commitment to natural laws, for instance, orients an investigation by supplying the field of possible discovery, allowing for an association between the frozen water and (perhaps) various temperatures. That the frozen water is situated against background commitments which allow for an association with a range of temperatures is a scenario described by ‘orientation’; that the number zero is chosen is a scenario described by ‘reference’. Investigating the frozenness of the water with different background commitments will orient the investigation towards different possible referents. So asking, ‘Who caused the water to freeze?’ might result in a reference to a specific family member. My examples have depicted simple questions posed as sentences in the course of scientific investigations. Of course, the correlation between commitments and the grammar of a sentence is not always straightforward. Not only can statements and questions display complex layers of commitments, but, further, the commitments which matter most might never be displayed in the language of a sentence. Commitments are not reducible to spoken language (a point which should be clear after our discussion of fundamental and superficial classification); commitments remain effective regardless of whether they have been formulated into sentences. An investigation of what caused, or who caused, the water to freeze does not require its commitments to be explicitly theorized and fashioned into



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sentences. And such an investigation differs little from simply taking things to be so – perhaps the fleeting impression that ‘apparently someone turned down the refrigerator thermostat too far!’ Not only do commitments remain effective without the additional step of speaking, but the task of exhaustively formulating the commitments implicit to even the most basic of sentences or actions might well be endless. But, of course, Heidegger does not think it will be endless if that investigation is itself properly oriented, for then it will arrive at the final category or process holding it all together. In my examples, the commitment to a ‘who’ or a ‘what’ is orienting. And their orientation is in turn oriented by the wider context within which the investigation is conducted. Orienting commitments build on each other. They are nested. Some are describable as superordinate to others, which are subordinate. ‘Who’, in the above case, not only signals personal agency but a family member – and there remains a long list of other commitments about refrigerators, thermostats, not wanting the water frozen, and so on. In being committed, the body of presuppositions hangs together. I am going to read Being and Time as an investigation of the commitments that shape everyday life. When Heidegger pursues his enquiry he uses the technique of ‘phenomenology’. As Heidegger employs it, this technique is not terribly difficult to understand. He examines specific instances of human experience (manual labour, signs, anxiety, gossip, death, guilt), and he asks what conditions must be in place for these phenomena to become part of our experience. ‘Commitments’ is our term for naming those conditions. Heidegger asks, ‘What sort of clearing must there be for these items to show up?’ Or put differently, ‘What kind of taxonomy must I presuppose to have produced such experiences?’ This is his ‘phenomenology’: a sustained and orderly account of the conditions for the possibility of a phenomenon that occurs in everyday life. Confusing many readers of Being and Time, Heidegger often names the condition after a phenomenon it facilitates. This would be like naming birthdays ‘presents’ if we thought birthdays were the condition for the possibility of presents. Readers (and even a few writers) have been known to suppose that Heidegger is discussing an interesting phenomenon precisely when he is examining the conditions that make it possible. For example, ‘care’ (Sorge) is roughly his name for the way the present appears to us on the basis of a past that we reimagine according to a future that we intend. It is this threefold structure that allows people to care about anything at all (which, among other things, he refers to as Besorgen and Fürsorge).14 Thus one version of ‘care’ is actually the background condition for a variety of cases of caring. There might not be anything especially caring-like about the care which makes everyday caring possible. There is care, and then there is care. Methodologically, Heidegger moves from phenomena to their grounds – the commitments that make them possible – and he is more interested in the latter than the former. It is because he names those grounds after the instances which facilitated their discovery that he must employ a series of tricks to keep them 14. GA 2, 5, 180; see also 121.

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distinct (such as quotation marks or slight variations of vocabulary). To add to this confusion, these distinctions are then variously rendered by various English translations (such as capitalization). This makes for a tangle of names. Broadly, one must remember that whenever some phenomenon is discussed, such as death, there is always the condition for its possibility, death (said in a dramatic voice). If Heidegger were to examine human care and to conclude that care was a rather fundamental feature of human existence, we should not immediately assume that there is anything caring about it, even if everyday caring were the phenomenon that lead him to the condition he names care. Similarly, there might not be anything biologically morbid about that condition named death, or anything typically truth-like about truth (said in a dramatic voice). Why would Heidegger use this confusing system of naming? Broadly, it does not really matter if we are aware of it and if we are able to keep in view the difference between a phenomenon and the condition for its possibility. However, a simple example might be useful. In the United States there is a widely revered political document called ‘the Constitution’. When most Americans speak of ‘the Constitution’, they are referring to this document. The Constitution of the United States is a set of laws. Heidegger might try to remind Americans that the real constitution is whatever social and political arrangements actually constitute the relations between various branches of government. There is ‘the Constitution’ and there is the condition for the possibility of such a document, the constitution (said in a dramatic voice). Of course many Americans might query whether the order of relations should be reversed, but to ask the question is to grasp the difference between a phenomenon and the condition for its possibility, and it is to grasp that these will sometimes share a common name. It is true that, in Heidegger’s account, many of the background conditions he aims to discover are involuntary, necessary, and universal. They are like Kant’s a priori categories or forms of sensibility. This should not prevent us from seeing them as commitments. Their origin as ‘necessary’ does not change their effective status as a ‘commitment’. An example might clarify what I mean. Consider gender. It is an orientation. Such orientations are, on our use of the term, constituted by commitments and entail many subordinate commitments, but that does not require us to consider whether such orientations are also necessary – perhaps even biological. That an orientation (or features of it) is possibly biological in origin does not change that it is installed as a commitment. Here, we simply should not confuse the difference between origin and use – biological origins (if they exist) do not change the fact that commitments are in place. Of course, if there are some necessary commitments (and Heidegger thinks that there are), it remains that many will follow which are not; commitments support other commitments, thus becoming superordinate to those which are subordinate. Heidegger begins by asking what commitment supports a particular phenomenon, and then asks what superordinate commitment supports that one, and so forth. Phenomenology is the story Heidegger tells us about those commitments. Heidegger’s principal interest is the discovery of those commitments which are the condition for all the others. (He calls one of these ‘temporality’.) His route



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to those big superordinate commitments is phenomenology, which means he starts with everyday actions or experiences and seeks the conditions that make them possible, and then, in turn, he asks what conditions makes those conditions possible. Every condition can be viewed as a phenomenon in relation to a bigger, more superordinate, background condition. Examining everyday acts of care leads Heidegger to an account of the condition for its possibility (similarly named care, but said in a dramatic voice), a condition which he thinks is (roughly) a structural relation whereby the present appears on the basis of a past that we imagine according to an intended future; this structure is in turn made possible by a condition that he names temporality (Zeitlichkeit), but which is unlike an ordinary concept of time.15

3. The Argument in Being and Time Above, I described Being and Time as an investigation of fundamental classification (§1). In the following section (§2) I described Being and Time as a phenomenology which exposes the background commitments in everyday life. I have been asking what Heidegger does in Being and Time, and I have suggested that he looks at everyday experiences in order to find the classificatory commitments that support them, ultimately aiming to find the most superordinate commitments – the big categories supporting the rest of a taxonomy. The language of ‘being’, ‘existence’, and ‘ontology’ is prominent in the text we are investigating, but I want to keep our attention on what these words do, the way these words work. I take them to describe, in part, issues of classification, particularly fundamental classification. I have noted that classifying something as something is an act which determines what something is (its ‘being’), thus defining its range of possibilities. An act of fundamental classification coincides with any given item’s appearance in experience, in so far as it, in some respect, distinguishes an item from its surrounding environment as the particular item which it is. To speak very roughly (and too literally), if a little commitment is required to classify an apple, separating it from its surrounding environment, then we should observe that a bigger commitment has already been used to classify that surrounding environment. It is the background on which any item appears (perhaps a room with furniture), a background which makes possible all the little acts of classification that occur within it. Any background orients or ‘determines’ what appears within it, shaping how they appear. Backgrounds both make possible and determine the items that can show up within their context. For now, we can roughly correlate increasingly large backgrounds to the increasingly superordinate commitments of a system of classification. However overstated this identification between physical spaces and the semantic breadth of commitments, it gives us a good starting point for understanding the route of enquiry Heidegger takes in Being and Time. 15. GA 2, 180–5, 301–4, 323–7, 404–6.

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Heidegger asks, ‘What is the being of beings?’ I am going to read that as ‘What is the most superordinate commitment which supports the others and which allows them to operate?’ Or, ‘What is the background behind all the backgrounds?’ Heidegger observes that if there is one category named ‘being’ which coordinates all the subordinate categories, then it may have special characteristics requiring it to be treated differently.16 Such a problem will not yet concern us, as we are only considering a fragment of Being and Time, one which examines less elevated categories. At the outset we can simply note that the special characteristics and problems associated with the terminal category in a system of classification play an important role in the organization of his investigation. Heidegger recognizes that questions and investigations rely upon commitments that orient and supply the limited range of possible discoveries.17 As an investigation, Being and Time will need to pursue its question in a way that does not predetermine the results, or rather, does not predetermine them as somehow obscured or disfigured. This leads Heidegger to begin by investigating those who ask the questions about being – namely humans. It is people who ask about being, and their commitments shape the investigation. People supply ‘the conditions on which the possibility of any ontological investigation depends.’18 This should not be particularly surprising, given that for Heidegger what exists, what ‘is’, is what is classified by a person. Verbs of existence do not apply to what is left unclassified. We might add that spoken language classifies what has already been made available by fundamental classification, and thus language cannot, by definition, extend beyond being, although it might well provoke an expansion of one’s fundamental horizon of being, an expansion of one’s fundamental taxonomy. In short, Heidegger recognizes that people presuppose a system of classification in any investigation, a taxonomy that has been formed by a particular history, thus people supply the horizon within which an investigation of ‘being’ will proceed.19 Moreover, an investigation of the way in which a human taxonomy orients the question of being must itself rely on such a taxonomy, and we will find that there is a reflexive dimension in Heidegger’s work. When Heidegger attempts to answer the question about ‘the being of beings’ he will begin by examining some particular entity because ‘being is in every case the being of some entity’.20 We have seen that his method (phenomenology) is to start with some particular thing and query the commitment which makes its appearance in experience possible, before proceeding to ask what further commitments support that commitment, and so forth. It is important to remember that none of these conditions are unhinged from our everyday experience, no matter how abstract. There is not some big category supporting the others which operates independently of our experience. When we see an apple, we do not lose our 16. GA 2, 4, 6, 38. 17. GA 2, 7. 18. GA 2, 37. 19. GA 2, 38. 20. GA 2, 37.



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commitment to the room in which it appears, nor do we lose our commitment to the wider world and the kind of life that we are pursuing, nor finally do we lose our commitment to ‘being’ itself. An investigation which takes the terminal category as its goal, will be an investigation directed towards the persons who supply that category (and even if that final category is special or potentially ‘different’ than other categories, it will need to begin in this fashion). Heidegger begins his search for the big commitment named ‘being’ by examining humans as his particular chosen entity. The reflexive nature of this choice might at first seem convoluted, since it is people who are using taxonomies in the first instance, but if the story told in Being and Time is correct, then this complexity would be wholly unrelieved by starting with some other item like an apple and working one’s way up the chain of background commitments. Who one is, and what is out there in the world one inhabits, are not so easily distinguished. The complexity would be unresolved because Being and Time does not present a picture of items, like apples, as standing outside a human – as if apples could be characterized as being ‘not people’, or as essentially separate from them. Rather, apples are only ‘not people’ within taxonomies supplied by people. It is people who use taxonomies. A thing (like an apple) is not separate from the person supplying the system of classification in which it is, in which it matters, in which it shows up as it has been classified. Apples exist as apples only in a particular human scheme of classification, only within a person’s world. Thus to simply ask what an apple is, is to already be querying the taxonomy of a person, but potentially to be blind to this fact. One does not find words like ‘person’ used very much in Being and Time, which was completed in 1926 and printed in 1927. In the summer of 1923, Heidegger argued that the inheritance of categories like ‘human’, ‘man’, or ‘person’ predetermines an investigation of humans in an unhelpful way.21 To classify oneself with one of those terms is to presuppose a great deal about the sort of thing one is, and, moreover, to imagine that these terms are universal descriptions is (mistakenly) to classify others as inhabiting the same taxonomy as oneself. Being and Time refers to people as ‘Dasein’. This was not a novel word in German philosophy, but Heidegger gave to it a particular meaning, and the word is rarely translated into English. Dasein simply means existence, but Heidegger recovers a more literal meaning for it. Philology, etymology, and genealogy are strategies that Heidegger employs to expose the way people are thrown into traditions of classification, inheriting the world that they inhabit. These systems of classification change over time, metaphors become stale, and the original purpose of a category might be lost. We might even presuppose that the world is a pretty stale place. In Being and Time, the word ‘Dasein’ takes on the literal meaning of ‘being there’. What does it mean to be there? To be there is to inhabit a particular scheme of fundamental classification – not merely to use a taxonomy, but to be ‘within’ it. Spatially, to ‘be there’ might be depicted as the way a person is always there in the middle of a place, a place that in concentrically larger circles has already 21. GA 63, 21f.

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been ‘made’ or ‘revealed’ or ‘categorized’ by a system of classification. To be there is to be in a place that has been ‘opened up’ as being the place that it is, for ‘to be something’ is to be classified as that something. Inhabiting a system of classification makes sense in so far as the limits of ‘what is’ are coextensive with the limits of classification. Temporally, to ‘be there’ is to be in some particular moment, a moment that is shaped by the possibilities made available by that place, and a place viewed in light of specific possibilities. Being and Time depicts that moment as one in which humans always relate to the present in terms of a past that is seen in light of the future; on the basis of an anticipated future we reimagine our past and realign our inherited scheme of classification, by which we understand the present, and in doing this we tend to revise our understanding of the future that we are pursuing, and thus the circle continues. This is true not only of how persons understand any given item in their environment – that this thing is for drinking tea – but how persons understand their own selves.22 Above, I offered an anecdote about some children who were unfamiliar with Western buildings (including doors); my point was to suggest that everyday spaces can be perceived in a variety of ways. Heidegger indicates on various occasions that any two ‘clearings’ might differ or even contrast dramatically. Contrasting schemes of fundamental classification, contrasting habits of making a world what it is, or revealing it as a particular kind of world, are not explored in Being and Time, though there are indications that Heidegger’s account recognizes this possibility. It is certainly a theme taken up elsewhere. In a 1919 lecture, he asked the audience to consider his lectern. It was a familiar item in their world, its purposes and status were well known, and even its material origin, as wood from the Black Forest, formed part of the background on which the lectern was encountered. He then had the audience imagine what would happen if a Senegalese villager were ‘unexpectedly transplanted here from his hut’. How might the lectern be encountered? What would happen to the lectern? Perhaps it would appear as a part of his own Senegalese world, maybe as something for ‘magic’, or as something for protection from arrows – or perhaps rather unsuccessfully, it would appear as a strange complex of surfaces.23 Heidegger did not have a particularly sophisticated understanding of contemporary life in Senegal, but his broader point is clear: it is possible for different communities to inhabit different taxonomies, different ‘worlds’. Much later, Heidegger’s notorious misadventure in fascist politics was very much motivated 22. GA 2, §32, §65, §79. Heidegger is not always perfectly clear whether the circularity of this time structure runs (1) future, past, present; or (2) past, future, present. It is a curious fact about the circular structure that there is apparently little consequence if the circle ran in the opposite direction: if on the (present) basis of the past we (presently) envisioned a future by which we understood the present and revised its reception of the past. The difficulty in determining a logical sequence presumably arises from the chronological simultaneity. 23. GA 56/7, 70–2.



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by his worry that whole communities might inhabit conflicting worlds while occupying the same political space.24 To inhabit a system of classification is also to be an item classified within it, to inherit commitments about oneself – as a person in God’s creation, or as a Greek under eternal heavens, or as an evolved species, and so forth. This is why Heidegger avoids the language of ‘man’, ‘person’, and the like. These all presuppose, in deeply held ways, what it means to be.25 Being and Time takes the simple fact of having commitments, of having a system of classification at all, as the most important feature of people, rather than some specific commitment they might have inherited. Heidegger is concerned with the fact that one must inhabit a taxonomy, rather than with this or that taxonomy, rather than with the kind of world that contains ‘people’ or ‘creatures’ or ‘humans’. This is what is communicated in using the term ‘Dasein’ to designate the way people are always ‘being there’ in a clearing made by a system of classification. It is people or humans or creatures who use taxonomies and ask questions about their own taxonomies; people have, query, and take ownership of their schemes of classification. Or as Heidegger puts it, Dasein is ‘distinguished by the fact that, in its very being, that being is an issue for it.’26 In summary, I am depicting Heidegger’s investigation of ‘being’ as an investigation of fundamental classification (or at the very least as requiring us to start the investigation in this way). The strategy used in Being and Time is to begin this investigation with some particular item, and ‘Dasein’ is the item which is chosen. After all, only Dasein (a person inhabiting a taxonomy) cares about questions of being, and if Dasein, with its particular ‘being there’ in a system of classification, its particular ‘thrownness’, is not understood, then the way that this being there shapes the whole investigation will be ignored. We are going to plough ahead using terms like ‘person’ with the caveat that we know Heidegger has good reasons to be wary of the baggage such terms carry. Heidegger’s goal is to understand being. In order for that terminal category to be laid bare, Heidegger examines entities, for being ‘is in every case the being of some entity’. The entity he has chosen is Dasein (people), the entity for whom being is an issue.27 He thus begins with people rather than apples. But it is worth examining more carefully the chain of reasoning that Heidegger employs to justify and orient his reflexive examination of Dasein because Heidegger’s investigation of Dasein actually proceeds by first examining items in the world like apples and rocks and hammers. And for Heidegger, it makes all the difference that he examines these items as an investigation of Dasein rather than as an investigation of those items qua items. Heidegger characterizes the ‘fundamental structure of Dasein’ as being-inthe-world; on my reading this means that people inhabit their fundamental 24. GA 36/7, particularly the first lecture, from the summer of 1933. 25. GA 63, 21f; compare GA 2, 48–9. 26. GA 2, 12. 27. GA 2, 37.

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taxonomies. Heidegger opposes this model to the one provided by Descartes, arguing that it had wrongly presupposed a contrast between two kinds of substance: thinking things and the world as a spatially extended thing.28 Without that contrast, our understanding of people as being-in-the-world will require an understanding of the world. Heidegger insists that people are not ‘subjects’ surrounded by the ‘object’ of the world. Rather, there is no such fixed division – Dasein and world do not simply correspond to subject and object. Dasein as ‘being there’ does not perceive or interact with the world by going ‘out’ into it and returning ‘inside’ with knowledge to the ‘cabinet of consciousness’.29 Being-in-theworld is a unitary phenomenon.30 If you point at an apple, you can safely declare, ‘That is part of me.’ Where is your fundamental taxonomy? It is the world that you already inhabit. People are always already ‘out’ in the world, and the description of Dasein as ‘being-in-theworld’ indicates the way in which the world itself is ‘something constitutive for Dasein’. As Heidegger says, ‘World’ is not a description of what Dasein essentially is not, but a characteristic of Dasein itself.31 That is hardly surprising if ‘Dasein’ just means inhabiting or ‘being there’ in the world of one’s taxonomy. Everything that shows up in the world is part of a person’s scheme of fundamental classification. For this reason the investigation of Dasein, as the first item Heidegger will examine, leads him to examine the being of the world. To investigate Dasein it is appropriate to select some feature of it, and Heidegger selects the world. Being and Time depicts people as inhabiting the clearing made by their taxonomy. People use their commitments to classify things, and the extent of their system of classification is the horizon of their world. Heidegger captures this way of inhabiting a system of classification by defining people as ‘Dasein’ and as ‘being-in-the-world’. Thus to get a clear understanding of people will require an investigation of their world,32 and because phenomenology moves from the little to the big, from a phenomenon to its background commitments, Being and Time first aims to get a clear picture of the local environment rather than the whole world. And the local environment is known through particular items within it – stuff like apples and hammers and chairs. We are back where the investigation might have started, with things like apples, but now they can be approached in a specific manner: as providing access to the environment, in order to provide access to the world, in order to provide access to people as being-in-the-world, in order to provide access to being itself. (Or, perhaps more preliminarily, to see how people will shape the investigation of being, once that investigation commences.) Within the local environment Being and Time identifies two kinds of items, and Heidegger selects one as more appropriate than the other to start his enquiry. He employs special terminology to make a distinction between these two different 28. GA 2, 42. 29. GA 2, 60–2. 30. GA 2, 53. 31. GA 2, 62, 52, 64. 32. GA 2, 63.



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kinds of items because we are normally prone to seeing them as the same kind of thing. This special terminology is made even more cumbersome by its translation into English, and confusingly, it is rendered variously by English texts about Being and Time. Some items in the local environment are characterized by their ‘presence-at-hand’ (Vorhandenheit) and some are characterized by their ‘readinessto-hand’ (Zuhandenheit). Things that just stand there while we consciously gaze at them are ‘present-at-hand’, while things that are fully integrated into something that we are doing are ‘ready-to-hand’. When we consciously think about items in the local environment, we tend to think about things in a way that classifies them as simply present-at-hand, but Heidegger argues that most of our life is filled by encounters with the ready-to-hand. We are already using tables and chairs and shoes and books; we do not even need to think about it. The ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand are cases of what we have been calling fundamental and superficial classification. Heidegger often insinuates that the whole history of Western philosophy has failed to grasp the distinction.33 To put the insinuation briefly, people normally classify items fundamentally while going about their daily affairs, but philosophers insist on examining them as superficially classified because they stop to think about them. The cumbersome terminology is not itself particularly important. What we need to grasp are the two phenomena named by ‘readiness-to-hand’ and ‘presenceat-hand’. This is where our everyday experience of tools like keyboards and hammers and doorknobs becomes important. In the passage of Being and Time that we will examine in the next chapter, Heidegger offers an account of everyday tools like hammers. Engagements with these tools provide the phenomena for his phenomenology. I have been using the distinction between fundamental and superficial classification to clarify the work that Heidegger does in Being and Time. Below, I will argue in more detail that this distinction characterizes the basic difference between that which is present-at-hand and that which is ready-to-hand.34 I would suggest the reason Heidegger provides a phenomenology of tools is to bring into focus the pervasive experience of fundamental classification so that we are able to grasp its essential importance to everyday life. The point is certainly not to understand hammers better. Tools are a good site of examination because there is something important about what it is to be a tool that involves fundamental classification, but which is destabilized or destroyed by any act of superficial classification. One cannot use a hammer effectively while examining the hammer. The specific tool-ness of a hammer, what it really is to be that hammer, normally shows up in our experience when we are using it without thinking about it in an explicit or conscious manner. If we stare at a hammer while using it, we will get into trouble. This makes something like hammering a good site of investigation; it contrasts with other activities in which we indeed do not even notice the shift between fundamental and superficial modes of classification – which is putatively 33. GA 2, e.g. §6, 58–60; GA 21, 159. 34. See GA 21, 158–9.

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why so many philosophers were able to persist in their analyses of things as only ever superficially classified. The important shift happens, but it goes unnoticed. All of this matters, we will see, because the physical stuff of language gets used in a way that is similar to tools like doorknobs and hammers and pavements. If we fail to see the difference between fundamental and superficial classification, we will be led into a thicket of confusions about how language works and where it gets its meaning. To put it crudely, the Bible is a tool like a hammer, and its language becomes meaningful when it is fundamentally classified as part of a larger taxonomy. And that matters because taxonomies such as those used by the Kimbanguists are rather different, and orient the possibilities of their items rather differently, than those used by British Baptists; and the latter differ in specific ways from the Belgian Roman Catholics. But all of this to get ahead of ourselves. Being and Time §15 is the passage we will analyse in the most detail. It examines the phenomena made present in the use of tools, and it investigates the conditions for their possibility, providing us with a story about those conditions (a phenomenology). Heidegger attempts to show that the cumbersome difference between ‘presence-at-hand’ and ‘readiness-to-hand’ is important for two reasons. First, other philosophers have usually written about items exclusively in terms of their ‘presence-at-hand’. Second, only in terms of their ‘readiness-to-hand’ is it made evident that tools are integrated into an environment, which is integrated in a world, which is a feature of Dasein as being-in-the-world, and finally part of the clearing of being itself. In other words, the difference between something which is merely present-at-hand and something which is ready-to-hand will be used by Heidegger to reveal the difference between fundamental and superficial classification, and to move up the chain of fundamental classification in order to expose that big commitment named ‘being’. In the next chapter we will turn to the text of Being and Time.

Chapter 3 TOOLS IN THE WORLD

1. A Phenomenology of Tools, §15 I said at the outset of the previous chapter that we would consider the passage about tools for two reasons, each supporting the aims of this book. These differ somewhat from Heidegger’s purpose in examining tools. They bear repeating. First, the passage about tools is used to reveal the important difference between fundamental and superficial modes of classification. Fundamental classification is responsible for bringing into experience a world that we rely upon and presuppose; we therefore hardly notice its role in everyday life, even though it is constant and pervasive. Heidegger’s account of tools exposes this all-important feature of the way people are always already ‘being there’ in a world, a world which has been revealed or made by their system of classification. The account of tools is thus a particularly good fragment for revealing Heidegger’s enterprise in Being and Time. That enterprise can be summarized as the search for the most superordinate commitment or process in a system of fundamental classification. This is named ‘being’. Or perhaps ‘temporality’. Heidegger does not reach a definitive conclusion and, anyway, it is well beyond the scope of our passage. The logic of Heidegger’s search for being, as I outlined it in the previous chapter, looked like this: Being → people → world → environment → items in it → tools This is the chain of reasoning that leads Heidegger to investigate tools as the first item in his search for the being of beings. Each item in this chain is viewed as a feature of Dasein, as a feature of the taxonomy which one inhabits. Heidegger starts at the bottom of this chain and moves upwards, searching for increasingly superordinate commitments, the conditions that make possible the phenomena he examines. He calls this phenomenology. Heidegger, we saw, has a habit of naming a condition after the phenomenon that led to its discovery; this is potentially confusing. I note it so we remember not to assume there is anything immediately communicated by a name like ‘care’ or ‘being’ or ‘time’. Second, an investigation of tools within such an account is particularly fitting for our purposes: language has tool-like characteristics. By attending to the relation between tools and taxonomies we can grasp more clearly what goes wrong

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when we imagine that people ‘rely on tradition to reason about their scriptural language’, or that people like the Kimbanguists disorder the relations between these elements. Our investigation of tools will produce an account of language that makes it possible to re-evaluate the three categories of ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’. I will argue that these three terms name a single phenomenon, making it imprudent to separate textual and philosophical hermeneutics. For Heidegger, a tool such as language is best understood as having its meaning and purpose within the contexts of a particular environment, which is in turn oriented and defined by the world. The kind of world one inhabits, and the kind of meaning that language produces, cannot be pried apart, and so our disciplinary approach to meaning will need to account for that unity. We begin our investigation of Heidegger’s account of tools in Being and Time §15. My presentation of Heidegger’s argument will follow a simple pattern. I will assume readers have Being and Time open to read along, and I will quote a key sentence from each paragraph, commenting on its advancement of his argument. We will progress sequentially. Some paragraphs are long or dense, or both. I will quote further sentences within a paragraph when this seems helpful. I will signal each new paragraph within §15 by using a decimal number. The translators, Macquarrie and Robinson, break at least one long German paragraph into two English paragraphs; and the Gesamtausgabe (produced after our English translation) also varies from some of the earlier editions of Sein und Zeit. So the paragraphing is meant only as a guide, and pagination will be consistently footnoted.

1. A Phenomenology of Tools, §15 Readers should prepare for a slight change of pace as we conform to Heidegger’s text and allow it to dictate the structure of the argument. Our training in philosophical texts like Heidegger’s is designed to help us think more clearly about language and about how we put it to use – how it has meaning for us before we even reflect upon it. That is going to prepare the way for an account of scripture in which its putative relations to tradition and reason can be evaluated. In short, we will begin to see just how philosophical and textual hermeneutics are intertwined. §15.1 Heidegger begins at one extreme of the taxonomy – that hierarchy of commitments identifiable with the world we inhabit, and to an important extent, identifiable with ourselves. He begins by examining tools and the particular kind of experience associated with their use. His strategy will be to show that there are aspects of our experience that tend to be ignored when we explicitly and consciously reflect on the world around us; this basic experience is particularly evident in the use of tools, and the manipulation of our environment.



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The kind of dealing which is closest to us is, as we have shown, not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge’. Die nächste Art des Umganges ist, wie gezeigt wurde, aber nicht das nur noch vernehmende Erkennen, sondern das hantierende, gebrauchende Besorgen, das seine eigene ‘Erkenntnis’ hat.1

Everyday activities rely upon fundamental classification; superficial classification is parasitic on what is already made available by fundamental classification. That much is familiar from Chapter 2. We will need to explore further the relation between practical activities and fundamental classification. Now we can add that mere ‘perceptual cognition’ is a version of superficial classification that does not require any actual speaking aloud in order to consciously regroup, reclassify, or name a world already available through fundamental classification. In short, superficial classification is a mode of approaching things rather than simply a way of talking about things. Any region of the world appears to us by virtue of fundamental classification and is available for superficial reclassification. And that might happen through a simple act of ‘bare perceptual cognition’. If that sounds overly subtle, we will see that Heidegger thinks the consequences are serious. Superficial classification has the effect of disintegrating and abstracting some item out of its environment, thereby breaking its superordinate and subordinate relations to the surrounding world. And for Heidegger, it is precisely the integrity of such relations that allows use to ‘manipulate things and put them to use’, that allows there to be tools. This will become clearer as we go on. §15.2 Heidegger rehearses his phenomenological method of moving up a taxonomy’s chain of commitments. A fundamental taxonomy is by definition presupposed, which means that its most superordinate commitments are already in operation – even our everyday engagement with tools already relies on an understanding of the world and on an understanding of being; we are always already using even the most superordinate category. Roughly, this is because tools only appear on the background of the environment, which appears on the background of the world, which appears on the background of ‘being’, the widest horizon in which we live. Every item within that horizon is part of that world; every item participates in being. An understanding of being is thus ingredient to Dasein, to ‘being there’ in a particular world. The unity of this world will be central to the effort to understand how a case of language like Christian scripture stands in a British or Kimbanguist or Belgian world. Heidegger now depicts this ‘world’ as a pre-predicative environment embracing our familiar everyday activities, one we are already engaging and relying upon 1. GA 2, 67.

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before we consciously and explicitly think about it or name what we are doing. It is a world in which we already know our way about. In this context, Heidegger then says: This is the way in which everyday Dasein always is: when I open the door, for instance, I use the latch. Das alltägliche Dasein ist schon immer in dieser Weise, z.B.: die Tür öffnend, mache ich Gebrauch von der Klinke.2

If we want to understand what happens when we use a door handle, Heidegger demands we thrust aside our first tendency to explicitly interpret what is happening. One must not add a superficial layer of interpretation on top of the experience of opening the latch; one must resist the habit of telling a story about what has happened. Rather, one needs to grasp the phenomenon itself and pursue the background conditions that make this phenomenon possible. In other words, the experience of using a door handle, if properly analysed, is going to make available the pre-predicative way of knowing and inhabiting a world, and this will lead us to superordinate commitments on which one must always already rely. The big category of ‘being’, or whatever is closest to it, is always already in use. Everyday ‘being there’ just means inhabiting a particular clearing made available by the activity of fundamental classification, and the biggest category in that scheme of classification (perhaps ‘being’) determines the broadest horizon of that clearing. To reclassify our use of a door handle in a superficial manner would be to disassociate and distil one phenomenon from the world in which it appears, or, better, to make its relation to that world static, requiring a conjunction to join them back together: the door handle and the world. Understanding Heidegger’s account here will give us valuable strategies for approaching what Christians do when they read scripture; those strategies promise to reveal dynamics of a first-order experience in the use of a tool like language, dynamics that are potentially obscured in the second-order reflections of theology. §15.3 Heidegger warns us against superficially reclassifying the items of our world before beginning our analysis. What, he asks, do we encounter in everyday life when we engage items like doorknobs? We might say ‘things’, but Heidegger claims this will mislead us. Recall from Chapter 2 how the categories of ‘person’ and ‘human’ and ‘creature’ each presupposed a certain kind of world and their own ways of being because each implied a particular cultural and religious inheritance; in a similar line of reasoning Heidegger wants to avoid the language of ‘objects’ and ‘things’ to describe the stuff we encounter in everyday life. It’s not that one word is better 2. GA 2, 67.



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than another, but that a less familiar word might help to slow down the pace of our presupposing. For in addressing these entities as ‘Things’ (res), we have tacitly anticipated their ontological character. Denn in diesem Ansprechen des Seienden als ‘Ding’ (res) liegt eine unausdrücklich vorgreifende ontologische Charakteristik.3

One way that we could interpret the everyday experience of using a doorknob would be to say that it is a thing, and we might then begin to examine how that thing fits into our life. Heidegger maintains that having one category, ‘thing’, is perfectly capable of describing a certain range of items in the local environment, but he argues that, as a form of superficial classification, it will obscure the fundamental experience of many items, including doorknobs. In short, he suggests there are two kinds of items rather than simply one kind of ‘things’. It is only because people have the one superficial category for the two kinds of engagements with things that they convince themselves of one kind of experience. Closer inspection of the phenomena makes this difficult to maintain. We will need two categories. I have already gave away the answer in the last chapter – he will eventually provide us with the categories of ‘ready-to-hand’ and ‘present-at-hand’ to describe the two kinds of items we encounter in our everyday environment. These correspond to our experience of things when engaging them in the modes of fundamental and superficial classification. The difference here is difficult to grasp because every time we examine something we tend to shift into a superficial mode of enquiry, an intentional attitude that obscures the more primary experience. Heidegger will eventually give us a strategy to overcome this difficulty, but we will have to wait. §15.4 Heidegger starts this paragraph by looking at some Greek words. This is part of his overall effort to investigate the categories we use by employing philology to peel back the layers of our inherited commitments, showing how they have been repurposed in the course of history. Heidegger thinks that we cannot simply use categories as we have them now in order to understand how they were used in the time of a philosopher like Plato. Whatever a term like ‘truth’ or ‘being’ meant then might well be different from what it means now, and if we presuppose that we know how to use the term, we will import our contemporary understandings into the text. Rather, as Heidegger peels back the layers (a method he calls ‘destruction’), each successive meaning for a term provides the clue to the meaning that preceded it. Heidegger’s own seemingly strange German vocabulary is the result of his effort to provide language which names phenomena in a direct 3. GA 2, 67–8.

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and fresh way, and much of this lexicon is the result of his effort to render Greek concepts into German without passing through Latin. This is evident throughout his commentaries on Plato and Aristotle during the 1920s.4 Heidegger continues the paragraph by saying two things relevant to our investigation. First, he lists some tools we encounter in everyday life. This is interesting because it begins to indicate the wide scope of stuff that might count as equipment – or more accurately, the range of stuff we engage with the same disposition as when using a tool (i.e. fundamental classification). Then he tells us that he will seek the defining characteristic of tools. We need the characteristic phenomena of tools before we can seek the conditions for their possibility, the background on which these phenomena show up (and Heidegger is, above all, aiming to expose that background). In our dealings we come across equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement. The kind of Being which equipment possesses must be exhibited. The clue for doing this lies in first defining what makes an item of equipment – namely, its equipmentality. Im Umgang sind vorfindlich Schreibzeug, Nähzeug, Werk-, Fahr-, Meßzeug. Die Seinsart von Zeug ist herauszustellen. Das geschieht am Leitfaden der vorherigen Umgrenzung dessen, was ein Zeug zu Zeug macht, der Zeughaftigkeit.5

§15.5 Heidegger has prepared us to hear some of the things one experiences when dealing with tools, the characteristic phenomena associated with equipment. The passage with which we are presented is dense and we will examine it in some detail. Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is. Ein Zeug ‘ist’ strenggenommen nie. Zum Sein von Zeug gehört je immer ein Zeugganzes, darin es dieses Zeug sein kann, das es ist.6

Attention is drawn to the fact that tools are not freestanding entities, but are always embedded in a network of references. Materially, we can observe that when we use tools they are not isolated, but related to other things – hammers are part of a set of relations which includes nails and boards of an appropriate 4. Providing etymologies for Heidegger’s terms has become a scholarly enterprise in its own right. For an example of Heidegger’s own discussion of this strategy see GA 17, §49. 5. GA 2, 68. 6. GA 2, 68.



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thickness; salt shakers are sized to be used by a hand, they have a place to hold salt for a number of occasions, their way of shaking salt is appropriate to the size of plates – and so forth. Temporally, a tool that is in use is a tool that is integrated into an active flow of relations between the other items associated with it: door handles connect to tumbler pins, releasing doors on hinges, turning from doorframes, and opening a passage in the walls to a room. We will see Heidegger argue that any such relation between items, any ‘reference’, requires a background on which that relation can be formed. (Eventually we will see that the very language of ‘relation’ is merely a descriptive strategy for treating entities which are not individuated within their network of ‘relations’, except when viewed in the discursive activity of superficial classification.) He continues: Equipment is essentially ‘something in-order-to … ’. A totality of equipment is constituted by the various ways of the ‘in-order-to’, such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability, manipulability. Zeug ist wesenhaft ‘etwas, um zu …’ Die verschiedenen Weisen des ‘Um-zu’ wie Dienlichkeit, Beiträglichkeit, Verwendbarkeit, Handlichkeit konstituieren eine Zeugganzheit.7

There are some ambiguities in this passage, but important features are clear. The in-order-to character of tools is a defining characteristic. This characteristic is lost if we simply call them ‘things’, examining them in a superficial way – we need to recognize the way tools are integrated with other things, the way we take them to refer. We know that Heidegger will soon introduce the language of ‘ready-to-hand’, in contrast to ‘present-at-hand’, to distinguish this purposive dimension. A tool that is in the hand, a tool that is in use, is one that is presupposed while its purposes are pursued. One aims at the nail while using the hammer. And it is while tools are presupposed that the phenomenon specific to them shows up in our experience – the handiness of a hammer is best encountered while hammering, and only while the nail is the object of our concern. Tools remain fundamentally classified during their use; they remain classified in this manner because we approach them in this way, without adding an additional layer of superficial classification. It is this which allows us to look beyond them, and it allows them to have some particular ‘in-order-to’. Heidegger continues: In the ‘in-order-to’ as a structure there lies a reference of something to something. Only in the analyses which are to follow can the phenomenon which this term ‘reference’ indicates be made visible in its ontological genesis.8 7. GA 2, 68. 8. I will silently amend all of Macquarrie’s translations of ‘Verweisung’ related words as ‘reference’.

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In der Struktur ‘Um-zu’ liegt eine Verweisung von etwas auf etwas. Das mit diesem Titel angezeigte Phänomen kann erst in den folgenden Analysen in seiner ontologischen Genesis sichtbar gemacht werden.9

The matter of reference was introduced in Chapter 2 when I discussed scientific investigations. There is, for Heidegger, no such thing as a relation merely between two entities, because every such relation is only possible when a third thing facilitates the relationship. Any two items can be brought into relation only on a shared background. This background is here indicated with the phrase ‘ontological genesis’ – a background commitment is the condition for the possibility of reference; a background commitment allows a reference to be carried out within the ‘clearing’ it makes available. In the example of scientific investigation, we saw an enquiry about frozen water that was committed to natural laws, and this provided the background (the ‘ontological genesis’) on which it was possible to have a reference between the water and a particular temperature. The finite possibilities supplied by some particular background commitment led me to describe them as ‘orienting’; the fact that some possibility of relation between two or more items was actualized was described by ‘reference’. Throughout §15 Heidegger seems to consider two different kinds of referring, two ways of forming groups of equipment, but he does not always clearly distinguish between them. Consider a group of equipment such as the following: hammer, saw, chisel, and ruler. We might say that they are all equals when directed towards the same goal, perhaps the ‘in-order-to’ of building a house. We could plot these items in a taxonomy as bearing equal relations to each other within a single shared superordinate category, thus imagining them sideby-side on a horizontal axis while classed together by a vertically superordinate commitment – building a house. Consider another group of equipment: hammer, nail, and boards. Do these exhibit a slightly different set of relations? Is each one oriented towards the next? Perhaps each is superordinate to the next on a vertical axis. So we might ask Heidegger, is ‘referring’ a phenomenon that transpires between equal items, an event of relation within the clearing of a particular background commitment? Or is ‘referring’ constituted by a relation between the superordinate and the subordinate? These are ambiguities we discover when we begin to press Heidegger’s account, but the appearance of such questions means that we have already grasped the outline of Heidegger’s enterprise as an investigation of the role of fundamental schemes of classification in everyday life. This can be said: fussing with the exact taxonomical relations here is less important than grasping that there are relations. The whole group of equipment forms a network of relations because of the way it is approached as ‘ready-to-hand’ (though Heidegger has not yet given us the term). The entire group of equipment is able to be in relation to the extent that it has all been presupposed in the scheme of fundamental classification. The question of whether these relations are best 9. GA 2, 68.



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described as standing within the clearing of a single commitment or accumulated as progressively subordinate is of little consequence here. Being and Time describes people as being-in-the-world. In the same way that one’s own body is presupposed in everyday life, in the same way that one’s hands are presupposed while shovelling snow, so too the shovel as ‘ready-to-hand’ has already been absorbed into an extended scheme of fundamental classification. When classified with fundamental commitments rather than superficial categories, a shovel is known in a way that might be described as implicit. While shovelling snow, the shovel is presupposed as part of a person – which is similar to the way in which the hand is presupposed as part of the person. And if the difference between body and shovel has been mitigated, this is also true of the snow that is being shovelled. This begins to expose what is meant when Heidegger says, ‘“world” is not a way of characterizing those entities which Dasein essentially is not, it is rather a characteristic of Dasein itself ’.10 With fundamental classification, everything hangs together; a person is united and integrated with a shovel, and with the environment, and with the world. For Heidegger, this is not an extraordinary situation. This is the normal way people live their lives. It is occasionally interrupted to a small extent by the posture we take towards specific items in the world, when we arrest our daily activities, or as we will see in §16, when something stops us from continuing our pursuits. Of course, even if the judgement ‘not me’ is made of any item, it is a constituent judgement of a person’s system of classification. Attributing ‘not I’ is a part of I. Something classified as ‘not I’ is part of a person’s taxonomy; it is part of the scope of what exists, part of their ‘clearing’ of being. There is a unity which is more fundamental than the apparent relation of distinction. The ability of tools to refer to other items will be determined by particular background commitments. Those commitments are in some yet-to-be-defined way identified with the physical environment. Commitments are not in your head, they are out there in the world. It is worth investigating this issue further because it relates closely to the overall project of this book, in which the capacity for physical texts to refer to particular meanings is oriented or determined by background commitments that are already in place. When this referring happens, when someone reads Christian scripture, all these apparently separate items are part of the fundamental taxonomy. In the inhabited world, there is a basic unity between ‘tradition’, ‘reason’, and ‘language’, a unity that is only superficially divided by acts of superficial classification. The phenomenon of reference presented a philosophical problem that Heidegger addressed at length from the very beginning of his career. Just how is it that something can ever refer to something else? As we have seen, for Heidegger, the answer to this question is bound to the issue of commitments and the orientations of limited possibilities they supply. Sign and signified are an everyday variety of referring. The sign and the signified are heterogeneous items according to Heidegger. This is evident as early 10. GA 2, 64.

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as his 1916 Habilitation dissertation on Duns Scotus.11 Commenting on Scotus’s example, he notes that a wreath on the door of a medieval tavern, which signified that wine was served inside, is not an item in any way connected with the wine. ‘The sign itself is not even similar to the wine.’12 It was only a sign for those drinkers who were in the know.13 So how is it that the relation is formed? How is it that one item can ever connect with another? (We might note that even inscribing a name on an object would not perform the task of referring to it – if it did, then every use of ‘this’ might well refer to the page on which it was printed.) How does referring happen? How are two things ever brought into relation? In rehearsing Scotus’s account, Heidegger contrasts it with that of Aquinas. He observes that objects are by nature individual and unrelated. They are heterogeneous. They are specific items in a specific place at a specific point in time. Of course, a few years later Heidegger would be more clear about the fact that the individuality of objects is a feature of the taxonomies we inherit, rather than something inherent to the items themselves, but the key point remains: these heterogeneous objects can only be brought into relations with each other when set into a ‘homogeneous medium’, a third thing containing them all.14 One must already possess the relevant background commitments to know that a wreath on the tavern door can stand in a referring relation to wine. So too, our scientist possessed a relevant background of laws that allowed for the association between frozen water and a temperature. Backgrounds orient a person to some possibilities but not others; for one person, wreaths suggest booze rather than Advent. The fact that some background commitments supply a range of possible referents which include booze but not Advent is a scenario described by ‘orientation’; that an association is drawn between the wreath and wine in the tavern is a scenario described by reference. Stated concisely: no superordinate commitments, no orientation; no orientation, no referring; no referring, no hammering. Background commitments must be in place for a link between hammer and nail. Thus tools are a good place to look if we want to discover the workings of backgrounds. A similar account persists in Heidegger’s 1924 lecture on Aristotle.15 Interestingly, the ‘homogenous medium’ of a background is depicted as a literal feature of Greek thought – the eternal sky forms the unchanging background against which all events are knowable. Within the eternal horizon of the sky, increasingly smaller concentric rings could be drawn around Greek life, with 11.  GA 1. The text Heidegger examines, Tractatus de modis significandi seu Grammatica speculativa, is now attributed to Thomas of Erfurt. See Thomas of Erfurt, Grammatica speculativa, Classics of Linguistics, ed. and trans. G. L. Bursill-Hall (London: Longman, 1972). 12. GA 1, 271. 13. GA 1, 271. 14. GA 1, 249. 15. GA 19. Lectures on Aristotle and the Greek worldview formed the lengthy introduction to the 1924–5 course on Plato’s Sophist.



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the courtyard of the family home at the very centre, a site of constant activity and change. The courtyard is a place within which people busied themselves with the everyday ‘objects of production’.16 Items are brought into changing relations on the background of the courtyard, while ‘home and courtyard’ appear on the background of the eternal heavens. The eternal world of nature ‘is in a certain sense the background from which what can be other and different stands out’.17 What we see here is that increasingly superordinate commitments are identified both with increasingly broad physical spaces and with regions of increasingly stable temporality or durability; there is a physical and taxonomic movement from the everyday changes of one’s own courtyard all the way up to the eternal heavens. This should immediately alert us to the close relation between being and time in Heidegger’s taxonomy. An item ‘stands out’ by virtue of its own temporal character vis-à-vis the background which is temporally more stable; plurality is formed because there is temporal diversity. We will later return to this theme in detail. Being and Time aims to discover the most superordinate commitments forming the context for human life, which Heidegger presents as both necessary and universal. He thus generally passes over the vast body of commitments that accumulate in particular communities over time. In the example about Greek life, we can already see that an account of the intervening concentric rings, the intermediary commitments of a taxonomy, would query, for instance, the role of a particular republic and its social and religious traditions in shaping the activities of the courtyard – it would index the space between necessary or stable conditions and individual actions. Heidegger practically jumps from tools in the courtyard right to the eternal heavens. In the example about Greek life, we can see that what it means to ‘be there’, what it means to exist (Dasein) in that world, is most broadly defined by the specific Greek commitment to the eternal character of the heavens – and we might contrast this (as Heidegger elsewhere does) to a Christian commitment about the heavens as part of God’s creation. What it means to be a (Greek) ‘human’ or to be a (Latin) ‘person’ differs with each respective way of ‘being there’; these different ways of being there amount to having different worlds, but in both cases there is some way of being there. And we should indeed be so simple, at least initially, as to ask ‘where’ the commonality between differing worlds is ‘located’. The descriptive strategy of a taxonomy will have to impute to every subordinate item something of what is superordinate – is the universal and necessary being (or the process of temporality) ‘above’ the heavens, beyond the world? After all, both Greeks and Christians are shown to inhabit differing worlds. Both have some way of being there, and in both cases time is used in a special way to diversify the taxonomy. Such preliminary questions, however odd they may appear, help to expose the logic guiding Heidegger’s account. 16. GA 19, 29 [E 20]. 17. GA 19, 29 [E 20].

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The first draft of Being and Time was written largely during the year following these lectures on Aristotle.18 The strategy of phenomenological description is always to move from the subordinate to the superordinate conditions, from tools in the courtyard up to the heavens. The very possibility of experiencing any subordinate item always depends on the superordinate conditions making that experience available. Heidegger begins with a specific phenomenon, like using a tool, and he observes that tools are characterized by their association with other items of equipment. He argues that we must infer a background containing the other items, a superordinate horizon that we supply, in order to bring the group of tools into relation. Hammering a nail can only happen within the horizon of a clearing that is already implicitly known, a clearing which has been made what it is by the activity of fundamental classification. This returns us to §15 in Being and Time. As Heidegger says in the remainder of the paragraph we have been examining: Equipment – in accordance with its equipmentality – always is in terms of belonging to other equipment: inkstand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves, so as to add up to a sum of realia and fill up a room. What we encounter as closest to us (though not as something taken as a theme) is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical spatial sense, but as equipment for residing. Out of this [room] the ‘arrangement’ [of equipment] emerges, and it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before it does so a totality of equipment has already been discovered. Zeug ist seiner Zeughaftigkeit entsprechend immer aus der Zugehörigkeit zu anderem Zeug: Schreibzeug, Feder, Tinte, Papier, Unterlage, Tisch, Lampe, Möbel, Fenster, Türen, Zimmer. Diese ‘Dinge’ zeigen sich nie zunächst für sich, um dann als Summe von Realem ein Zimmer auszufüllen. Das Nächstbegegnende, obzwar nicht thematisch Erfaßte, ist das Zimmer, und dieses wiederum nicht als das ‘Zwischen den vier Wänden’ in einem geometrischen räumlichen Sinne – sondern als Wohnzeug. Aus ihm heraus zeigt sich die ‘Einrichtung’, in dieser das jeweilige ‘einzelne’ Zeug. Vor diesem ist je schon eine Zeugganzheit entdeckt.19

When we read that the room is not discovered in a geometrical spatial sense, Heidegger is not trying to dissuade us from identifying our commitments with physical spaces. Rather, he is attempting to ensure that we understand this identification in terms of fundamental classification rather than superficial classification. The room is always discovered logically ‘before’ any two subordinate items can be brought into relation within it. It is interesting to note that, because it is presupposed when we use it, the room is also describable as equipment – but this 18. GA 20. 19. GA 2, 68–9.



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simply means that it bears the same phenomenal property as ‘normal’, familiar equipment like hammers, namely the condition of being fundamentally classified or presupposed. Naming the room ‘equipment’ alerts us to the continuity that exists between our use of the items that appear in it, our use of things like light switches and doorknobs, and our use of the whole room itself. The chair that one uses in a room is in a continuum with the room itself, also used as equipment. Using a room as ‘equipment’, classifying it fundamentally, presupposing it, relying on it to do something, is the condition for the possibility of using items in the room. In everyday life, the superordinate conditions must always be ‘known’ first; they must be installed as commitments that function as the background on which any item can be related to another – even before any single item can show up at all. The role of background commitments is so important to Heidegger that he describes human existence as ‘being there’ within the world of these commitments. Commitments are not in your head, but out in the world. §15.6 I have suggested that a change between fundamental and superficial modes of classification does not require a shift from merely perceiving the world to talking about it; it is not simply a shift from the whole carving and ordering of experience which is accomplished by fundamental commitments, to the application of verbal categories for the reorganization of that experience. Superficial modes of classification are necessarily parasitic on fundamental modes, and it is true that this is easily grasped in cases of speaking aloud. But it is also true that both fundamental and superficial modes can be understood as ‘language’ in which the categories are somewhat like ‘words’. Yet the shift from fundamental to superficial modes of classification can rely upon silent changes of disposition towards items in the world. Heidegger aims to show that what is most characteristic about tools can never be known through superficial modes of classification, particularly superficial ways of looking at something: No matter how sharply we just look at the ‘outward appearance’ of things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand. Das schärfste Nur-noch-hinsehen auf das so und so beschaffene ‘Aussehen’ von Dingen vermag Zuhandenes nicht zu entdecken.20

This sentence points us to that mode of engaging the world which is necessary both for an item to be ‘ready-to-hand’ and for it to be known as ready to hand, for it to show up in our experience that way. I have argued that this is a mode in which a tool, while it is in use, remains integrated with a whole scheme of fundamental classification. In the hammering, the hammer is presupposed, one is committed 20. GA 2, 69.

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to it – one looks beyond the hammer to the nail. Nothing about this experience is discoverable by simply staring at a hammer as a thing; such a disposition stops presupposing the hammer as ready-to-hand and sees it as simply present-athand. However sharply we stare, or however clever the categories of superficial classification we supply, the dynamic relations between items cannot be directly apprehended this way. Careful speculation might group the hammer with other tools, but this will not make available the everyday experience of their dynamic relations, that purposeful involvement with other items which is obvious and constantly experienced when they are presupposed whilst one goes about some ordinary task. The hammer will simply stand there, present as a static thing, or as part of a group of static things only superficially classified as related to each other. All this sharp staring is very different from using something because when we use a hammer, for instance, we do the opposite of stare at it – we ignore it. It is part of a scheme of presuppositions, and gazing at it will arrest our ability to use it well. We will eventually see the consequences of this for the use of language, especially reading the Bible, which becomes meaningful precisely when it is integrated with some particular presupposed world, whether Kimbanguist or Roman Catholic or Baptist, etc. The difference between something being ‘discovered’ as ready-to-hand and something being ‘discovered’ as present-at-hand is the difference between fundamental and superficial modes of classification. Something is made what it is in so far as it is classified as that thing. Heidegger wants to show us that there is a basic (though unstable) difference between fundamental and superficial modes of classification. Tools are a good case because they are only properly tools when they are classified in a fundamental mode. A tool might be known as a ‘hammer’ by classifying it either fundamentally or superficially – but it will only be useful as a tool if it is classified as a hammer with a fundamental commitment, as presupposed in such a way that it is integrated with the body, with the other equipment, with the environment, and ultimately with the world. Investigating tools is thus a good strategy for understanding people as being there in the world, as inhabiting the scope of the clearing made by their fundamental classification. Before we return to the text of Being and Time it is important that we take a moment to consider what it means to discover things through fundamental classification. The union between a category and something in the world is a matter of importance to Heidegger’s whole argument. It is at the heart of the identification between the world one inhabits and the taxonomy of commitments that one has. All of the things that show up in our experience are a unity between categories and whatever they classify, which is why the categories of fundamental classification are not best conceived as in your head but out there in the world. This unity is formed by a relationship between fundamentally heterogeneous items, without any supporting background or intervening link (at least this is the case for every act of fundamental classification). Although we know that the relation between any two commitments in a taxonomy, and thus between any two classified items in the world, always relies on a homogeneous background commitment for that relation, Heidegger depicts the relation between categories



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and that-which-is-to-be-categorized as unqualified; it is without any supporting background. It is a jolting and difficult moment at the very foundation of Heidegger’s system. This direct relationship is what is denoted with the word ‘discover’ or ‘uncover’. How does Heidegger explain the union between a category and the thing it classifies? In the sentence we are examining we see the word ‘discover’ or ‘uncover’ (entdecken) used to describe this union, this act of classification. This is not accidental. Heidegger spent years developing a technical account of how one ‘uncovers’ something and what it means to do so. This effort is displayed in various lectures of the 1920s, and although it is treated rather briefly in §44 of Being and Time, its importance permeates the entire text.21 It is not an obscure interest, but addresses itself to a classic problem, which, whenever solved, reappears in a new way: the relation between mind and matter, between res cogitans and res extensa, and between things in themselves and human understanding. Heidegger uses several words in addition to ‘discover’ to describe the union between a category and some uncategorized item. His technical vocabulary is variously (and inconsistently) rendered by English translations. This should not worry us. If we can get a clear grasp of the phenomenon Heidegger describes, then we will see past most of these variations of description. It is confusing for many readers that Heidegger also uses the word ‘truth’ to describe acts of fundamental classification, acts which ‘uncover’ things in the world. This too should not unsettle us because we know Heidegger names a superordinate condition after the phenomenon that led to its discovery.22 This is indeed the case with his account of ‘uncovering’, which was developed through his close reading of Aristotle’s account of truth. So, whenever Heidegger talks about truth we should simply remember to ask, ‘Is he talking about truth or truth (said in a dramatic voice)?’ We are thus relieved of the task of finding anything truth-like about truth. Heidegger depicts uncovering as the condition for the possibility of all varieties of truth – including coherence and correspondence patterns of truth – but this is not something we need to investigate in order to understand the phenomenon of uncovering and the present passage. Heidegger’s account of uncovering is strikingly simple. In fact, it is so simple that there is a genuine danger we will add something to it, and by this, radically change it. The habits of our imagination lead us to add features to his account and negate its distinctive claim. When something is uncovered, a category is related directly to something. A fundamental category is not used to refer to our experience of something, but rather, produces that experience. The appearance of something in the field of our experience is always the result, on Heidegger’s account, of some prior unity of a category and that something. To what does the category refer? Every effort 21.  GA 17, §1; GA 18, Handschrift zu §24; GA 19, §2–5; GA 20, §6, §20; GA 21, §10–14; GA 22, §42–3; to some extent this is evident in GA 23, §6. GA 19 and GA 21 provide the most detailed accounts. 22. As discussed in Chapter 2.

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to imagine or name the ‘something’ to which a category refers is risky because it entails classifying it as something; it entails putting the cart before the horse, and thus cannot imagine fundamental classification. Being and Time suggests that there is a constant risk of misunderstanding this account. So ingrained are our habits that we need to slow down when we think through it. The problem is that when we try to conceive of this direct relation we are likely to slip a representation in between the category and that which it classifies – such representations are always the result of the process rather than a part of it. Such an additional step must be vigilantly avoided if Heidegger’s account of uncovering is to be understood.23 The act of uncovering relies on an original and unsupported relationship between two fundamentally heterogeneous kinds of things. Thus, there is no possible correspondence between categories and that to which they refer because they cannot bear any similarities. If we in any way whatsoever suppose that categories can be like that which they classify, then we have already failed to imagine this process by slipping a representation in between the two terms. Again, categories and what they classify cannot be alike. It is hard to articulate this heterogeneity because every description of it will classify the unclassified portion (and thus slip in a representation). We might say that it is a relation between mental stuff and physical stuff. This allows us to begin to grasp the simplicity of relation between heterogeneous items: there is nothing round about the idea of a circle. There is nothing physical about the idea of a rock – there is nothing about an idea, a mental thing, which is like a physical thing. But even this fails. There is not yet a sufficient contrast. After all, for Heidegger, rocks and birds and trees – physical stuff and round stuff – are part of us as being-inthe-world. The mental–physical contrast is a story we tell ourselves on reflection, but it is one that is riddled with errors. There is no stable, fundamental contrast between what in superficial classification we call physical stuff and mental stuff. According to Heidegger, a category refers directly to something (not our experience of it) and produces our experience. We might try to say that, from a rock’s perspective, there is nothing rock-like about the idea of a rock. Of course, Heidegger wholly denies us the ability to narrate the entire relation because such stories fail to capture the fundamental difference that he demands – and the fundamental heterogeneity cannot be between ideas and what we might know as physical things, because ‘physical’ names our experiences of the physical world. Anything ‘physical’ is already within our horizon, part of a person as ‘being-inthe-world’, already a product of the union between categories and that which they classify. What is ‘physical’ is already part of a taxonomy, part of our phenomenal experience, an extension of ourselves that Heidegger calls the world. We might say that in order to produce phenomena ‘discovering’ or ‘uncovering’ involves a relation between ideas and ‘reality’, or between categories and things in themselves, but Heidegger thinks these descriptions fail to do justice to the act in so far as they involve a classification of the unclassified part of the process of uncovering, and in so far as they attribute being to that which is outside the 23. GA 2, 217.



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scope of a taxonomy. Further, these descriptions misconstrue, in various ways, the nature of persons, which Heidegger depicts as being-in-the-world rather than as subjects surrounded by the object of the world. We might say that if the world is a basic part of a person (because it is the clearing made by their taxonomy), then what uncovering uncovers is something underneath or beyond the world that is known phenomenally.24 It is apparently also something which can be classified or ‘uncovered’ in a variety of ways – Christians see the world differently than atheists – and yet it is something that remains resistant to some forms of classification. Rocks do not float. If we grasp the heterogeneity that obtains between categories and that to which they refer, then we can begin to investigate Heidegger’s claim more closely. This is worth doing because I am presenting Being and Time as a text about fundamental classification, and Heidegger’s whole account requires ‘uncovering’ to be the activity that is able to bridge the difference between ‘reality’ (or non-being or whatever) and a system of classification.25 The structured world we inhabit is the result of a prior relation between a whole taxonomy of categories and that which they classify, a relation that produces our world. Fundamental classification is everything that has already happened when you glance around at the manyfaceted world. We could imagine a scenario in which there must be a direct relationship between a taxonomy and ‘reality’ if there were to be any phenomenal experience at all. Consider what would happen if someone’s entire taxonomy were erased, save the terminal category. This is a story of ontological impoverishment. A myth of taxonomic nudity. Imagine a table. On the table are placemats. If we remove the category of placemats from one’s scheme of fundamental classification, then perhaps it is simply a table with some irrelevant objects on it. We might not even care to distinguish the mats from the table, any more than we typically care to distinguish dirt and bits of rubbish from the pavement. What if we kept stripping away categories? What if houses became meaningless obstacles, odd-looking boulders in the terrain of the world. Imagine someone who had only one big commitment in their taxonomy, just enough to stand, as it were, naked in the clearing of being. If we were to remove one more category from their scheme of classification, then all the lights would go out. Their single category is doing the whole job of ‘uncovering’ the bare world. We can imagine this person recognizing that they are in some place, but being incapable of recognizing or describing any item within it. They are incompetent to recognize the difference between rocks and the soil on which they rest. Perhaps there is no up and down, or forwards and backwards. The footpath, the stonewall, the shovel, the sheep, the hut, the sky – these are all simply part of the ground – and without the category of ‘obstacles’ they do not 24. Anything ‘underneath’ the known world is strictly meaningless, and, Heidegger insists, not ‘being’, GA 2, 152. 25. Compare to GA 21, 164.

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even stand out from the ground in a way that matters. In fact, the ground is not even distinguished from the sky. Yet it remains that all these things – which we consider distinct items – are in some way ingredient to this experience, though individually invisible to the extent that they are undifferentiated. The key point of progressively stripping categories from a scheme of classification in this way is to get into view the job performed by this final category, which stands, as it were, between light and darkness. To what does this category relate? How is this relation possible? Here we can ask, might all subsequent acts of classification rely upon the phenomena made available by the operation of that single big commitment? Might they be acts of classifying the phenomena of experience rather than acts which pose the direct, original relation between fundamentally heterogeneous things? Would this give to the terminal category a unique status, requiring it alone to overcome the divide in order to form the scope of what is, the clearing of being? It is, however, not logically required to think that the unity between heterogeneous kinds of things happens only between the most superordinate commitment in a taxonomy and … well, whatever it is to which that category relates (‘reality’, or things in themselves, etc.). For Heidegger, the direct relationship posed by ‘uncovering’ can happen at every level of a taxonomy. Indeed this is the difference between fundamental and superficial modes of classification: everything in a fundamental scheme of classification hangs together and directly uncovers the world in one go, while superficial classification identifies entities that have already been brought within the horizon of our experience. Heidegger provides mundane examples wherein we are given an ordinary category and then incorporate it into our fundamental scheme of classification, using it to ‘discover’ something in the world, something that would have remained unnoticed or invisible – that the picture frame on the wall is crooked, for instance.26 How a category is acquired may differ from how it is later used. Even though one might develop or be given a category through phenomenal experience (stumbling over the stone wall or being told about the crooked picture), this does not mean one will later use the category to refer to phenomenal experience. We must be sensitive to the difference between a category’s origin and its use. A category might be developed on the basis of phenomena made available by a terminal category of ‘being’, but this does not change the fact that, when it is later used fundamentally, it does not refer to those phenomena but rather refers directly to the ‘things themselves’. This is not simply a difference between multiple temporal points at which a category might be used (obviously we do not use the category of ‘coffee’ only to refer back to the first coffee we ever had), but a difference between (a) presently using a category to classify phenomena we already have and (b) presently using a category to produce phenomena. The origin of a category does not need to impinge on its use. A category might be learned verbally or by examining the already available world, but then later used to refer directly to things. Our benighted and taxonomically impoverished 26. GA 2, 217.



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nude in the ‘clearing of being’ might stumble upon how handy a hammer can be, even on the basis of phenomena made available by his single category, or some sparse set of categories, but once he or she has commitments about the hammer, they can be used in an ‘original’ way, directly ‘uncovering’ the hammer and bringing it into experience. The category of hammer (if we can properly think of it as distinct at all), will hang together with the biggest category of the world, and they will ‘both’ be uncovered in one go. It will be the kind of world that has hammers, and the hammer will belong to that kind of world. Of course, we will eventually be interested in what this means for Bibles and vellum codices of the gospels rather than hammers. Before we go on to Heidegger’s next sentence, we should notice that the ‘first’ act of uncovering performed by the terminal, most superordinate, category does not have any phenomena available to it. Its act of uncovering necessarily entails a heterogeneous relation. But every subsequent category has the possibility of either being used to refer to phenomena, that is, according to its origin in some prior use, or being used to refer directly to ‘things’. Again, every subordinate category can either refer directly to things or refer merely to phenomena made available by superordinate categories. ‘After’ the ‘first’ direct uncovering, all subordinate categories bear the risk of failing to refer directly to the things themselves, failing to perform an original relation between heterogeneous things. This is the difference between fundamental and superficial forms of classification. Although we cannot investigate it here, categories might be used to classify phenomena made available on the basis of some prior act of uncovering, or perhaps even on the basis of someone else’s uncovering. Gossip, for instance, fails to connect spoken categories to the things themselves. Being and Time has a whole list of such failures; unsurprisingly, these are taken to be subordinate indicators of even greater failures, occurring at a superordinate level. There is gossip, and then there is gossip (said in a dramatic voice). Heidegger suggests that one’s whole life might be lived on the basis of such a failure, that something about the whole taxonomy one uses, something about the whole way one understands oneself as inhabiting the world, might fail to make the direct connection between categories and the things to which they refer. He calls this ‘inauthenticity’. It may be worth repeating the sentence that provoked these lengthy considerations of ‘uncovering’ or ‘discovering’. No matter how sharply we just look at the ‘outward appearance’ of things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand. Das schärfste Nur-noch-hinsehen auf das so und so beschaffene ‘Aussehen’ von Dingen vermag Zuhandenes nicht zu entdecken.27

Once one has a facility with the order of events in the act of uncovering – a category refers directly to ‘something’, which produces the experience of that 27. GA 2, 69.

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thing – then one can see that a category may be used in two ways. It might be used in the fundamentally heterogeneous manner that produces the phenomena of experience. Or it may be used to refer merely to an experience, to a phenomenon, thus only bear an indirect relation to the ‘thing’ (thus producing a secondary experience of that thing). Fundamental classification produces phenomena; superficial classification reclassifies that phenomena. According to how I read Being and Time, the difference between fundamental and superficial classification is also the defining difference between Heidegger’s ‘ready-to-hand’ and ‘present-at-hand’. This makes his claim in the quote above true by definition: considering outward appearances is what superficial classification does, and ‘uncovering’ things is what fundamental classification is about. In §15 and §16 Heidegger’s account supports this, but he also asks questions which could be interpreted to suggest that we might directly ‘uncover’ something as a static, present-at-hand entity. These questions are rhetorical, and most ambiguities dissipate when Heidegger returns to the topic in §32 and §69.28 Such questions are a strategy Heidegger often uses to provoke reflection on the account he provides. If one asks questions like ‘Which grounds the other, the ready-to-hand or the present-at-hand?’ or ‘Must one have a logical or a temporal priority?’ then one gained a facility with Heidegger’s account. In summary, the short sentence we have examined led me to account for the difference between something which is ready-to-hand and something which is present-at-hand as the difference between classifying it fundamentally or superficially. In either case we might speak as if the tool is classified as a tool, but only by ‘uncovering’ it with fundamental categories, only by presupposing the tool and taking it up into the fundamental taxonomy, can its specific characteristics as a tool be revealed – only then can it be purposively related to other items in the fundamental taxonomy and usefully accomplish some end. That categories have the ability to uncover specific items like tools, and that an entire taxonomy uncovers an entire world, are crucial to Being and Time’s whole account of what it means to be a person, to ‘be there’ in the world uncovered by one’s taxonomy. Uncovering is the only bridge between the fact that one has a taxonomy and the fact that one inhabits that taxonomy as the world which constitutes who one is as being-in-the-world. As §44 will later state: The uncoveredness of such entities is equiprimordial with the being of Dasein and its disclosedness. Mit dem Sein des Daseins und seiner Erschlossenheit ist gleichursprünglich Entdecktheit des innerweltlichen Seienden.29

28. GA 2, 149, ‘It is not more primordial than that kind of seeing, but derived from it.’ See also 356–64. An even clearer account is found in GA 21, §12 (see especially 159), which I discuss below. 29. GA 2, 221.



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It is worth noting, even at this early stage, another way in which this claim is important. It suggests that, in one crucial respect, inhabiting a taxonomy, having an entire world, cannot be separated from having specific items in that world (and vice versa). Even if we can describe these as distinguishable and hierarchically ordered when we reflect on our own habits of fundamental classification, this will be a form of superficial classification, a second-order reflection on our habits of uncovering and inhabiting a world. In short, Heidegger is attentive to a unity of the parts and the whole in our everyday experience of inhabiting a world that has always already been ‘discovered’ fundamentally. To rely on a tool like language in order to make it refer to meaning, just is to integrate that tool inseparably with a particular world – whereas to imagine that Christian scripture can be considered without such a world would fundamentally obscure how it becomes meaningful in the first place. But we will discuss this below. The final two sentences in the paragraph we have been examining (§15.6) give us a new vocabulary for describing the difference between superficial and fundamental modes of classification. Dealings with equipment subordinate themselves to the manifold assignments of the in-order-to. And the sight with which they thus accommodate themselves is circumspection. Der Umgang mit Zeug unterstellt sich der Verweisungsmannigfaltigkeit des ‘Um-zu’. Die Sicht eines solchen Sichfügens ist die Umsicht.30

The claim here is familiar, even while some of the vocabulary is not. When dealing with a tool one ignores the tool, having presupposed it. One looks past the tool to the other items it engages; one looks to the work that is being done. Heidegger presents us with phenomena we experience when we use equipment that has been fundamentally classified. We have already seen that if we ‘uncover’ a tool with fundamental categories, its specific characteristics as a tool are revealed, and we know that if we ‘uncover’ it with superficial categories it will simply stand there while we stare at it. Heidegger has given us a name for the tool’s character in each scenario: readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand. Now he gives us a name for our disposition, for our way of uncovering things in each scenario: sight (Sicht) and circumspection (Umsicht). I have been referring to these two modes of engaging the world using the cumbersome (and slightly ugly) vocabulary of fundamental and superficial modes classification. I think my choice is worthwhile in so far as it communicates the difference between these approaches in terms of the taxonomy which is used. There is a clever wordplay in our sentence. Dealings (Umgangs), in-orderto (Um-zu) and circumspection (Umsicht) all describe how one goes about everyday work. The main benefit of the term Umsicht (circumspection) is that it is a kind of ‘looking-past’ or ‘looking-around’ rather than a direct gaze (Sicht). 30. GA 2, 69.

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The phenomenon is easily grasped if we consider the way a hammer is presupposed while hammering, the way it is part of a fundamental taxonomy. One gets absorbed into the task of making something. The whole activity (Umgang) has a kind of looking-past (Umsicht), in the same way that when one is absorbed in an activity like shovelling, the whole environment is a kind of extension of the body. In the case of hammering a nail, one does not stare at the nail as a static entity, abstractly theorizing that it can be grouped in the same category as a hammer. And so too, one rarely notices the mere material stuff of one’s language, or hears it without its meaning. §15.7–8 Heidegger describes further the way tools are presupposed while in use, while classified as part of a fundamental taxonomy. He reiterates the experience of looking beyond the tool to the work that is done. That with which our everyday dealings proximately dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we primarily concern ourselves is the work – that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered. Das, wobei der alltägliche Umgang sich zunächst aufhält, sind auch nicht die Werkzeuge selbst, sondern das Werk, das jeweilig Herzustellende, ist das primär Besorgte und daher auch Zuhandene. Das Werk trägt die Verweisungsganzheit, innerhalb derer das Zeug begegnet.31

Heidegger now includes within the scope of fundamental classification the work that is produced by tools. This is unremarkable because everything can be included within the scope of fundamental classification; everything – the whole world – is normally ready-to-hand, assumed and integrated into what we are doing. Swinging a hammer, driving a car, and walking into a room are all comparable activities: in each case we approach something as ready-to-hand and rely on it to do something. Heidegger’s argument opens up the wider world of fundamental classification by a chain of references to progressively more superordinate regions of our experience, which is to say, more superordinate regions of our taxonomy. Recall that when Heidegger began to list items of equipment, the scope of his description progressed from the subordinate to the superordinate: ‘inkstand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room’.32 We could extend the list by adding increasingly wider categories at one end of the spectrum, or at the other end of the spectrum we could proliferate the number of specific 31. GA 2, 69–70. 32. GA 2, 68.



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items associated with tools in the room. Just as it is a characteristic of tools to refer to other items, so too a product of tools carries its own references to other equipment. Tools produce more tools, at least in the sense that they are ready-tohand, things which we presuppose. A hammer may be used to build a room in a house, and as we saw in §15.5, this is also equipment, ‘equipment for residing’.33 §15.9–10 Equipment refers, and now will we see that it refers ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’. Referring forwards means being directed towards subordinate areas of the taxonomy; we have already seen how this might be possible in the case of a hammer referring to a nail. Heidegger now wants to demonstrate more explicitly a tool’s connection to more superordinate commitments. We should not become overly concerned with the details of these relations so long as we grasp that they exist and so long as we can see the structure of the larger taxonomy into which they fit. Heidegger is giving us a picture in which the whole taxonomy hangs together, from the tools in the courtyard, right up to the sky. We know that when an item of equipment is classified fundamentally it is presupposed. If a hammer is presupposed, one looks beyond it to the nail. Under these conditions the hammer is what it is as part of a taxonomy of fundamental classification, and its status as something which refers to the nail, the mere fact of its referring, alerts us to more superordinate areas of that taxonomy because references always require backgrounds. If an item of equipment is integrated with the whole system of fundamental classification, if a tool is part of a whole world which is ready-to-hand, then its connections to more superordinate commitments will reveal the architecture of that entire taxonomy. This is useful to Heidegger’s enterprise, which I earlier summarized as: Being → people → world → environment → items in it → tools Heidegger outlined this chain, and then proceeded to begin working his way up it from the bottom. First he attends to references within a subordinate region, and then progresses to consider the broader areas that support such referring. The work to be produced, as the ‘towards-which’ of such things as the hammer, the plane, and the needle, likewise has the kind of being that belongs to equipment. The shoe which is produced is for wearing; the clock is manufactured for telling time. Das herzustellende Werk als das Wozu von Hammer, Hobel, Nadel hat seinerseits die Seinsart des Zeugs. Der herzustellende Schuh ist zum Tragen (Schuhzeug), die verfertigte Uhr zur Zeitablesung.34 33. GA 2, 68. 34. GA 2, 70.

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So equipment refers forward to the equipment that it makes, and this equipment refers to its own purposes. The hammer, the plane, and the needle are all involved in making the shoe, and the shoe, as a product of that process, will be involved in its own activities of production. Whether a product involves more or less superordinate areas of the taxonomy depends on what has been produced. A house, for instance, might be equipment that is finally superordinate to a hammer, but during production perhaps it is subordinate (again, these are not points we need to pin down; rather we need to get a view of the larger taxonomic structure that Heidegger presents). All that has been done at this point is to expose relations of subordination during production. In the work there is also a reference to ‘materials’: the work is dependent on leather, thread, needles, and the like. Im Werk liegt zugleich die Verweisung auf ‘Materialien’. Es ist angewiesen auf Leder, Faden, Nägel u. dgl.35

Every piece of equipment is the product of other equipment, and carries materials which potentially demonstrate relations to more superordinate areas of a system of classification. Heidegger aims to expose the architecture of the taxonomy in which an item appears. A piece of equipment is what it is, not merely by effect of some one category that classifies it, but also in virtue of the entire chain of superordinate commitments which bear upon it. Leather is, moreover, produced from hides. These are taken from animals, which someone else has raised. Leder wiederum ist hergestellt aus Häuten. Diese sind Tieren abgenommen, die von anderen gezüchtet werden.36

Shoes are equipment for walking. They are also the product of other equipment, and physically contain some of that equipment. Heidegger sees the leather in a pair of shoes as part of the entire world which a person inhabits, signalling the natural and social scope of the taxonomy which is related to the shoes. Hammer, tongs, and needle, refer in themselves to steel, iron, metal, mineral, wood, in that they consist of these. In equipment that is used, ‘nature’ is discovered along with it by that use – the nature we find in natural products. Hammer, Zange, Nagel verweisen an ihnen selbst auf – sie bestehen aus – Stahl,

35. GA 2, 70. 36. GA 2, 70.



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Eisen, Erz, Gestein, Holz. Im gebrauchten Zeug ist durch den Gebrauch die ‘Natur’ mitentdeckt, die ‘Natur’ im Lichte der Naturprodukte.37

An entire natural environment has already been ‘uncovered’ along with the act of uncovering a hammer; along with the act of presupposing a familiar hammer we presuppose the world in which hammers can be produced. To contemporary readers, that natural world might seem to be far more obscured by intervening processes in which anonymous workers and shadowy corporations manufacture the materials of our everyday world, but we could position these in the place of Heidegger’s neighbour who raised the livestock to produce the hides so he could make his leather shoes. In either case, the kind of world that one inhabits, whatever its ‘natural environment’, is revealed along with the items of daily life. The readiness-to-hand of the tool includes the readiness-to-hand of an entire world – in presupposing the tool, the whole presupposed taxonomy is brought into relation to it; they hang together. This is important because I will be arguing that our experience of fundamental classification is unitary, even if our reflection on that experience carves it into a diversity of taxonomic categories (but that is getting ahead of ourselves). §15.11 Here, however, ‘nature’ is not to be understood as that which is just ‘present-athand’, or as the power of nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountains a quarry of rock, the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails’. As the environment is discovered, the ‘nature’ thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this ‘nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. Natur darf aber hier nicht als das nur noch Vorhandene verstanden werden – auch nicht als Naturmacht. Der Wald ist Forst, der Berg Steinbruch, der Fluß Wasserkraft, der Wind ist Wind ‘in den Segeln’. Mit der entdeckten ‘Umwelt’ begegnet die so entdeckte ‘Natur’. Von deren Seinsart als zuhandener kann abgesehen, sie selbst lediglich in ihrer puren Vorhandenheit entdeckt und bestimmt werden.38

Heidegger continues to use the technical language of ‘discover’ or ‘uncover’. I am interpreting this as an act of classification that makes something what it is, which brings it within our experience as that particular thing. When a tool is ‘uncovered’ as ready-to-hand, the environment is uncovered along with it, and along with the environment the natural world is uncovered as well. Heidegger indexes the increasingly wide commitments which are presupposed when dealing with a single tool. And because these are fundamentally classified, all the areas of 37. GA 2, 70. 38. GA 2, 70.

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the world to which they correspond, which they uncover, have the character of readiness-to-hand. How can we think of these broader spaces as equipment? Earlier Heidegger gave an indication when he described a room as ‘equipment for residing’, now he indicates that whole regions have the character of equipment, which is merely to highlight their status as being part of the purposes of someone’s world – someone takes a whole forest to be for some particular purpose, or takes the river to be for some purpose. These regions matter and have meaning, they are part of the fabric of a place. We always already inhabit a world which has been classified by layers of commitments, each layer affecting the next, from the superordinate to the subordinate. When a tool is taken up into this taxonomy at the subordinate end of a chain of commitments, an entire background affects its classification, shaping the way its possibilities and characteristics have been uncovered and determined or oriented (entdeckt und bestimmt). It is only on the basis of this background that the tool can show up at all, and it shows up as something which is within the range of possibilities of this background – whether that background is Kimbanguist or European. In the same way that staring at a tool fails adequately to reveal its character as related to other tools and as integrated into our environment, so too staring at the local environment will fail to discover how it is meaningful and how it is affected and oriented by the larger world. Only the accumulative force of commitments in a taxonomy of fundamental classification, only the relations between the categories that are used to uncover these spaces, can account for the phenomenon of inhabiting a world, can account for what it means to ‘be there’ in that world and to make references within it. There are no commitments which locate their correlative objects outside the world. After all, the horizon of what exists, the horizon of what gets called ‘the world’, is the horizon of classification. This is rather Aristotelian. Where is Heidegger going to locate commitments to abstract entities, such as to God or to human flourishing or to a political party? Where is he going to locate things that happened in the past? Heidegger does not have a lot to say about these things in Being and Time, but some cautious speculation might indicate part of a coherent answer. It is an interesting feature of Heidegger’s increasingly superordinate commitments that they can, at times, be correlated in an almost literal way to increasingly broad physical spaces (there are obvious limits to this correlation, however). He begins to develop this view in his reading of Aristotle. A good way to understand how this correlation works for Heidegger is to see each commitment as not merely opening or revealing a space as physical, but rather, revealing it as something that matters for one’s life, as something which is for something, that is, as something that orients the purposes and goals of one’s own life, and thus orients the activities within that space. Recall that Heidegger rejected various categories for classifying Dasein, words like ‘person’, because he thought these were commitments that uncovered people as oriented within a specific world – as God’s creation, or as pagans under the eternal heavens, and so forth.



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Commitments to abstract entities like God will obtain as basic features of what it is to have superordinate commitments about the world as God’s creation, or similarly for any item in that world as a part of that creation. Incidentally, even though I am describing these commitments with the language of ‘something as something’, this need not signal that the relevant commitments are somehow composite;39 rather the world is simply opened as divine creation, or as the realm of a thousand gods, or as the stage for one’s subjective enjoyment, or as a frightening and meaningless place, or as the creation of Simon Kimbangu. As we have seen, a room is not simply uncovered as a physical space between four walls, but ‘as equipment for residing’.40 It is opened as one’s very own space in which certain kinds of affairs are going to be pursued, or perhaps it is revealed as someone else’s space in which one is intruding or staying as a guest. In Heidegger’s account, commitments determine the fundamental meaning and possibilities of any item that exists within the space they have opened or uncovered – and human existence is depicted as ‘being there’ in the clearing made by such commitments. The orientation of the world and the orientation of entities found within it hang together. It should come as no surprise if Aristotle were to argue that the city exists to promote human flourishing or if Augustine were to argue that it exists to glorify God – in both cases, the city is set within a particular world, which is uncovered in a particular way, and humans are set within the city for a particular kind of life. Yet there are approaches to the world which ignore these dynamics. In §24 Heidegger will return to the theme of spatiality, and his comments are now relevant: When space is discovered non-circumspectively by just looking at it, the environmental regions get neutralized to pure dimensions. Places – and indeed the whole circumspectively oriented totality of places belonging to equipment ready-to-hand – get reduced to a multiplicity of positions for random things. Das umsichtsfreie, nur noch hinsehende Entdecken des Raumes neutralisiert die umweltlichen Gegenden zu den reinen Dimensionen. Die Plätze und die umsichtig orientierte Platzganzheit des zuhandenen Zeugs sinken zu einer Stellenmannigfaltigkeit für beliebige Dinge zusammen.41

Only rarely is the world uncovered in this way – during specific scientific exercises, for instance. That it can happen at all should not be very surprising to us. We already have seen that when a tool is ready-to-hand, it is presupposed and thus integrated into a whole taxonomy which treats the world as ‘ready-to-hand’. And we have already seen that shifting the way we classify a tool can change it from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand, thereby extracting it from its references 39. GA 2, 149–50, ‘This would be a misunderstanding of the specific way in which interpretation functions as disclosure … ’. 40. GA 2, 68. 41. GA 2, 112.

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in the environment and world. We should expect that the disintegration of subordinate items like tools can be applied further up the chain of commitments. What if a more superordinate commitment stops being presupposed? What if the whole environment stops being presupposed? If we simply stare at it, we will uncover it as merely present-at-hand. §15.12 Heidegger outlines the way both a social and a material world are uncovered when circumspection is directed towards equipment. He reinforces these now familiar claims with some interesting examples. When we look at a clock, we tacitly make use of the ‘sun’s position’, in accordance with which the measurement of time gets regulated in the official astronomical manner. When we make use of the clock-equipment, which is proximately and inconspicuously ready-to-hand, the environing nature is ready-to-hand along with it. Wenn wir auf die Uhr sehen, machen wir unausdrücklich Gebrauch vom ‘Stand der Sonne’, darnach die amtliche astronomische Regelung der Zeitmessung ausgeführt wird. Im Gebrauch des zunächst und unauffällig zuhandenen Uhrzeugs ist die Umweltnatur mitzuhanden.42

This example aims to expose the integration of tools with their superordinate commitments, with the broader and directive background within which they appear. As tools, clocks are determined by the environment in which they are found, and the environment is, in turn, determined by the whole astronomical order, which defines the conditions of that environment – whether it is daytime or night, for instance. It is simply part of our continuous presuppositions that we know whether it is day or night, and it can be thoroughly disorienting if we realize that we have lost this background commitment. In the remaining sentence, Heidegger suggests that whenever we approach equipment in circumspection, whenever we uncover a tool, we presuppose a world to which that tool belongs. Our concernful absorption in whatever work-world lies closest to us, has a function of discovering; and it is essential to this function that, depending upon the way in which we are absorbed, those entities within-the-world which are brought along in the work and with it (that is to say, in the references which are constitutive for it) remain discoverable in varying degrees of explicitness and with a varying circumspective penetration. Es gehört zum Wesen der Entdeckungsfunktion des jeweiligen besorgenden Aufgehens in der nächsten Werkwelt, daß je nach der Art des Aufgehens 42. GA 2, 71.



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darin das im Werk, d. h. seinen konstitutiven Verweisungen, mit beigebrachte innerweltliche Seiende in verschiedenen Graden der Ausdrücklichkeit, in verschiedener Weite des umsichtigen Vordringens entdeckbar bleibt.43

§15.13 The kind of being which belongs to these entities is readiness-to-hand. But this characteristic is not to be understood as merely a way of taking them, as if we were talking such ‘aspects’ into the ‘entities’ which we proximally encounter, or as if some world-stuff which is proximally present-at-hand in itself were ‘given subjective colouring’ in this way. Die Seinsart dieses Seienden ist die Zuhandenheit. Sie darf jedoch nicht als bloßer Auffassungscharakter verstanden werden, als würden dem zunächst begegnenden ‘Seienden’ solche ‘Aspekte’ aufgeredet, als würde ein zunächst an sich vorhandener Weltstoff in dieser Weise ‘subjektiv gefärbt’.44

Heidegger entangles his readers in questions of priority: does readiness-tohand depend upon presence-at-hand or is the contrary true? Is one logically or temporally prior? The point of these rhetorical entanglements with an imaginary interlocutor is to ensure that the reader is not misled into considering either kind of classification as a personal colouring of something which is at rock bottom The Real Thing As It Really Is In Itself – as if an item existed alone and neutrally before we decided to construe it one way or another. His point is easy to grasp if we understand Being and Time as a text concerned with taxonomies and classification: something only ever is that which it is classified as. Strictly speaking, what is unclassified does not ‘exist’, or, to soften the blow, it does not exist in any possibly meaningful sense. What is not classified is not within the scope of existence; it is beyond our vision; it does not stand in the horizon of being. Elsewhere Heidegger is much clearer in saying that what we encounter is generally ready-to-hand, and only on the basis of this normal experience of stuff-as-for-some-particularpurpose in our world can we then think carefully about it in such a way as to get it to become present-at-hand.45 Let us return to our mythical villager standing taxonomically ‘naked’ in the clearing of being. There are no individuated items, no stones, no animals, no rivers, no tools. If this taxonomy acquires a new category, then it might separate some item out of this landscape: the river is not the ground! It exists differently, 43. GA 2, 71. Heidegger provides a footnote on the following page which alerts the reader that he has been arguing these points in his lectures since the winter of 1919/20, when he began investigating the ‘environment’ with a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’. This forms the title of the 1923 GA 63. ‘Jeweiligkeit’ is a major theme of GA 63. 44. GA 2, 71. 45. GA 21, §12, but also GA 2, §32 (149, ‘It is not more primordial than that kind of seeing, but derived from it.’) and §69.

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perhaps as something to avoid or something to drink. Different people, with different ways of life, often have different taxonomies. In the city and suburbs of modern cities, most people employ a taxonomy that might strike a very competent country sheepherder as strange. Imagine her very first arrival in the city, perhaps on a day without much car traffic. Denizens can be seen to divide up areas of the ground on the basis of slight changes in colour or texture and then treat these areas as the only places to walk, however much easier or more efficient it might be to walk directly towards one’s destination. Variations in the ground’s texture are made to present insurmountable or apparently frightening obstacles. It might appear as if urbanites were blinkered into following a tortuously circuitous path that was rather difficult to discern. These people employ special categories for the ‘pavement’ (or ‘sidewalk’), treating these as real and significant entities, though barely differing from the rest of the ground. If Heidegger is right, there is nothing more fundamental ‘beneath’ the surface of the pavement; the pavement is, as ready-to-hand, the fundamental entity. One simply encounters it as that upon which one should walk. We have finally reached the end of §15. Heidegger, in typical fashion, leaves us with a question. §15.14 Have all these explications been of the slightest help towards understanding the phenomenon of the world ontologically? Ist denn mit dem bislang Explizierten das Geringste für das ontologische Verständnis des Weltphänomens gewonnen?46

It is part of Heidegger’s philosophical style to conclude with questions. Our reading of this section has benefited from conclusions that Heidegger has not yet reached at this point in his argument, and it has, consequently, been less uncertain. I have been interpreting §15 within the wider framework of Being and Time (particularly Division One), as well as some of the lectures given near the time of its composition. Of course, my reading has also been designed to prepare us to consider scripture, so it has been oriented by our own enquiry rather than Heidegger’s. To understand the phenomenon of the world ontologically seems here to indicate an understanding of the world in its quality as classified fundamentally rather than simply something we might stare out at and say, ‘Yes, that is the world.’ Heidegger aims to expose the category or categories used to generate the holistic experience of having a world – a universal experience that depends on the activity of fundamental classification – rather than to show the phenomena that might be superficially classed together, grouped as a whole, and named ‘world’. We might pause to remember that an understanding of the world is merely a stage along the way in Heidegger’s larger enterprise. He has been seeking the 46. GA 2, 72.



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largest category within the taxonomy used in the activity of fundamental classification. He wants to expose our biggest commitment, the one that would let us stand naked in the clearing of being even if we had no other categories. To get there, he first wanted to see how people might shape the investigation of this category – perhaps a preliminary task. Since Heidegger views people as integrated with a world, he was led to consider the world first; and to get at the notion of the world, he began with items in the local environment; considering some of these items better qualified to expose their environment, he began his investigation with tools. I outlined the logic of examining tools like this: Being → people → world → environment → items in it → tools Heidegger starts at the bottom of this chain and moves up, and we have seen him expend a good deal of effort on this process, attempting to show how these levels of the taxonomy are related to each other. Heidegger describes this progressive process as ‘phenomenology’. He considers a phenomenon, and then he asks what superordinate conditions must be in place for it to show up within our experience. Since the experience of tools involves relations, and because Heidegger sees relations as possible only on a background that contains them, the experience of tools leads him to infer a particular background. Heidegger ends §15 on a doubtful note, as if perhaps he has failed to present the difference between fundamental and superficial classification, as if we might finally consider the world to be the sum total of things grouped together when we look at them very sharply. Perhaps merely stating, as he did in §15.12, that when we uncover a tool we also presuppose an entire social and material world, failed to show the dynamic relations between these components. Heidegger worries that we will see these components as static entities all lumped together in the same container, constituting a world by numerical force alone – or that we will take his idea of ‘world’ simply to name one big object, as if looking at the planet from space would give us an understanding of ‘world’. Instead, we are supposed to see how the world is composed of our fundamental commitments which orient all of our purposes and the possibilities we find within it. In §16 Heidegger will continue his examination of tools, attempting to demonstrate that there are situations when the world that we presuppose reveals itself phenomenally. There are situations when the whole taxonomy, on which we already rely in uncovering the world, is brought into our experience and we glimpse it in its full dynamism. In the same way that we have knowledge of a hammer while hammering – even though it is presupposed, even though direct consideration of it would disrupt this knowing – so too there are ways that we can know the wider world we presuppose. Unlike hammering, we do not normally lay aside our commitment to the world; the potential alternation that is evident between taking up a hammer as readyto-hand, and releasing it, is more difficult to highlight in the case of the world. And thus it is more difficult to expose the world as we presuppose it. Heidegger suggests, however, that there are scenarios in which we can see how our constant

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presupposition of the world is already in play, and §16 is dedicated to presenting and examining such a scenario. Because I have been reading §15 in light of those sections which precede and follow it, we can briefly summarize its contribution to his investigation. Broken Tools: A Gloss of §16 The scenarios Heidegger describes in §16 are all characterized by an interruption in the use of an item of equipment. The interruption occurs if the item breaks, or if it is lost, or if some obstacle prevents further activity. In each case labour is arrested. The concerned absorption in the activity is stopped.47 The first consequence is that the tool is no longer presupposed. A broken hammer is no longer invisible. It is no longer an extension of the hand which one looks past in ‘circumspection’. Rather, it becomes painfully obvious and obtrusive; one stares at it in disbelief. It is like a key on a keyboard that ceases to make a letter or produce a sound. Its position in a scheme of fundamental classification has disintegrated. It becomes the object of superficial classification – there is that broken hammer thing, just standing there. From being ready-to-hand it has become present-at-hand.48 The second consequence is more important to Heidegger’s enterprise in Being and Time. When the activity is arrested, the whole taxonomy – which has constantly been used to uncover the world in a particular way – is suddenly brought into our awareness. The activity had only ever been possible within that specific range of possibilities supplied by those background commitments within which it was being conducted. This background now becomes visible in its progressively superordinate character. When an interruption arrests the activity of hammering, it has the power to lay bare the purposes for that activity, and those purposes have been supplied by the particular orientation of the background. Heidegger says more about this in §18, and we will consider his comments carefully. (Observe that we are attending directly to those comments, skipping §17.)

2. The Inhabited Taxonomy: A Reading of §18 We have already seen that every act of classification categorizes something as something. I have taken a good deal of effort to distinguish between fundamental and superficial forms of classification. Now Heidegger will argue that there are no isolated acts of fundamental classification. He will try to demonstrate that all of the fundamental commitments which are superordinate to any given category will bear upon its use, determining its possibilities, defining how it classifies. And thus all superordinate commitments are essential to the being of what a category 47. GA 2, 73–4. 48. GA 2, 73–4.



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classifies. We already have seen that using a single category in an act of fundamental classification uncovers something as something, making it what it is. Now Heidegger aims to show that ‘what it is’ always includes the entire world in which it has been uncovered. The act of uncovering something as that thing is always already oriented by a whole presupposed background – whether that background is supplied by a Greek or Christian or secular tradition. And here we can begin to see why the language of ‘tradition’ will fail to name something different from the world – for a scheme of classification is identifiable with the world one inhabits. And the meaning of scripture will not be distinguishable from that world – to place the physical text of scripture in a different world simply is to make it a tool for different purposes. And to reason in the world is not a process that can be imagined without that world defining what counts as reasonable. We will soon address these matters in detail. §18.3 The basic point of §18 is easy to grasp if we read Heidegger as investigating a taxonomy of commitments which very roughly correlate to increasingly broad physical spaces. The purpose of his argument is to demonstrate that superordinate commitments define or determine (bestimmen) all the subordinate categories nested within them; or to render this in spatial language, that one’s commitment to the world being a certain kind of place will orient what kind of place one’s own home is, because it is within that world. Looked at from the opposite end of the taxonomy, the kind of place one’s home might be is already oriented and delimited by the kind of place one takes the world to be. When an entity within-the-world has already been proximally freed for its being, that Being is its ‘involvement’. With any such entity as entity, there is some involvement. The fact that it has such an involvement is ontologically definitive for the being of such an entity, and is not an ontical assertion about it. Bewandtnis ist das Sein des innerweltlichen Seienden, darauf es je schon zunächst freigegeben ist. Mit ihm als Seiendem hat es je eine Bewandtnis. Dieses, daß es eine Bewandtnis hat, ist die ontologische Bestimmung des Seins dieses Seienden, nicht eine ontische Aussage über das Seiende.49

Heidegger describes the participation or involvement of a subordinate entity, like a hammer, in the larger world. This involvement is ontologically determining, which is to say that the finite possibilities of a subordinate item are defined by the accumulative possibilities and limitations of superordinate commitments. This point will become clearer in the rest of the paragraph. Here we can observe that ‘ontologically definitive for the being’ simply means that an item’s involvement with superordinate commitments determines what that item can be. 49. GA 2, 84.

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Heidegger contrasts ‘ontology’ with the term ‘ontic’. To oversimplify, ‘ontic’ just means physical. That an item is physically proximate to another has no bearing on whether it is ‘involved’ with that item – only an act of classification can determine that. Recall Heidegger’s analysis of Scotus’s example: it was not the physical proximity between the wreath on the tavern sign and the wine served indoors which created the relation between them. Rather it was the wreath’s ‘involvement’ in a particular background, supplied by the viewer, which determined what the wreath was, which determined that it was related to the wine. Friends on the far side of the world can be closer to us than our neighbours. Physically (‘ontically’) inscribing a word on something does not create a naming relation. It does not perform the ‘involvement’ of one thing with another, at least not in the sense that Heidegger aims to display. That in which it is involved is the ‘towards-which’ of serviceability, and the ‘for-which’ of usability. With the ‘towards-which’ of serviceability there can again be an involvement: with this thing, for instance, which is ready-tohand, and which we accordingly call a ‘hammer’, there is an involvement in hammering; with hammering, there is an involvement in making something fast; with making something fast, there is an involvement in protection against bad weather; and this protection ‘is’ for the sake of providing shelter for Dasein – that is to say, for the sake of a possibility of Dasein’s being. Whenever something ready-to-hand has an involvement with it, what involvement this is, has in each case been outlined in advance in terms of the totality of such involvements. Das Wobei es die Bewandtnis hat, ist das Wozu der Dienlichkeit, das Wofür der Verwendbarkeit. Mit dem Wozu der Dienlichkeit kann es wiederum seine Bewandtnis haben; zum Beispiel mit diesem Zuhandenen, das wir deshalb Hammer nennen, hat es die Bewandtnis beim Hämmern, mit diesem hat es seine Bewandtnis bei Befestigung, mit dieser bei Schutz gegen Unwetter; dieser ‘ist’ um-willen des Unterkommens des Daseins, das heißt, um einer Möglichkeit seines Seins willen. Welche Bewandtnis es mit einem Zuhandenen hat, das ist je aus der Bewandtnisganzheit vorgezeichnet.50

Reading this passage, one seems to encounter a tangle of prepositions indicating directions of involvement (smoothed out to some extent in English). We do not need to worry as long as we are perfectly clear about the overall structure of these relations. Heidegger describes a hierarchical taxonomy of commitments with the broadest categories at the top and increasingly narrow categories accumulating within them, every category accumulating categories within it. Viewed from the bottom, the hammer is involved in nailing something, which is involved in building a house, which is involved in a person’s flourishing in the world. Described from the top of the taxonomy, a commitment to flourishing permits 50. GA 2, 84.



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and orients many things, including the commitment to building a shelter, which permits and orients the commitment to fastening boards together, which permits and orients the hammering. A hammer is not independent of the world in which it appears. The hammer makes a ‘late’ arrival in a meaningful world. What the hammer ‘is’ depends directly on the world in which it appears. In this book I am claiming that what language is, what a physical text is, similarly depends on the world in which it appears. Conflicts about the meaning of scripture – whether it extols the virtues of Kimbangu or describes the double procession of the Holy Spirit – will be a kind of proxy war concerned with the world in which scripture’s language ought to appear. Such disagreements can be better coordinated. Heidegger is arguing that the entire world bears upon any little item within it. The accumulative force of a chain of a commitments leading to any particular activity progressively defines what that activity is, what the items involved are. This background ‘determination’ (Bestimmung) is not sinister. If Heidegger had a public relations adviser he might have said that a background, although limited, positively supplies all the conditions for the possibility of any activity. More technically we could observe that an infinite number of possibilities are supplied within a limited scope. The logic of my suggestion is easily grasped: there are, for instance, an infinite number of decimals within the measure of a hundred metres, and so too within the measure of one metre. A limited background positively supplies the conditions for the possibility of any activity, and these accumulate from the superordinate to the subordinate. There are implications here for causality and human freedom, but Heidegger does not draw them out in this particular text. A commitment to human flourishing (in the sense outlined by Aristotle) might supply the possibility of an infinite number of flourishing activities, while also ruling out certain forms of, perhaps, puritanical asceticism and so forth. It certainly permits a commitment to building shelters, and we can see that this supplies a range of possibilities as well – there may well be an infinite number of variations when it comes to shelters, but the commitment is still finite: not building a shelter is ruled out, and what counts as a shelter will be determined by one’s cultural history. A commitment to play the viola may permit an infinite variety of music within its range of capability, but that tonal range is limited and the piano is not taken up during its use. Progressively specific commitments determine the activity of hammering, which I have provisionally correlated with progressively specific physical environments. I have depicted Heidegger’s commitments as ‘simple’ or ‘uncompounded’ even though he describes each one as having a ‘something as something’ structure in the act of classification. The world simply is the world as a place for human flourishing, or as the passing site of ascetic self-abnegation, or as whatever it might be. Heidegger wanted to avoid using some particular inheritance of commitments, which would classify the world and humanity in a particular way, so he starts from the very fact that people have commitments at all. This is why he describes persons as Dasein, as ‘being there’ in a world uncovered by their scheme

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of classification. Such schemes, we know, might uncover a world as Islamic or European or Kimbanguist or bourgeois. When an interruption arrests one’s engagement with the ready-to-hand, many more commitments about the world are revealed, potentially exposing links all the way to the top of the taxonomy, exposing the commitments which have been shaping that activity all along. If one reaches for the doorknob but discovers it is locked, one also discovers that one is stuck inside the room, and it is suddenly brought into one’s purview that one is late for an important meeting, which is necessary to preserve one’s employment, which is necessary to preserve one’s residency in the city – and so on. Heidegger claims that such scenarios reveal the dynamic relationship or ‘involvement’ of each commitment with the next within a hierarchy of progressively superordinate categories. Not only does Heidegger prevent us from thinking that classifying something as something is a compounded process, but the involvement of subordinate commitments with superordinate commitments is similarly presented as uncompounded. While presupposed and relied upon, they are united. There are no such things as fundamental commitments in the sense of a plurality of discrete categories; their plurality is a descriptive result of our practices of reflecting on them, of classifying them superficially. In the next sentence of the same paragraph he gives us a concrete example: In the workshop, for example, the totality of involvements which is constitutive for the ready-to-hand in its readiness-to-hand, is ‘earlier’ than any single item of equipment; so too for the farmstead with all its utensils and outlying lands. But the totality of involvements itself goes back ultimately to a ‘towards-which’ in which there is no further involvement: this ‘towards-which’ is not an entity with the kind of being that belongs to what is ready-to-hand within a world; it is rather an entity whose being is defined as being-in-the-world, and to whose state of being, worldhood itself belongs. Die Bewandtnisganzheit, die zum Beispiel das in einer Werkstatt Zuhandene in seiner Zuhandenheit konstituiert, ist ‘früher’ als das einzelne Zeug, ungleichen die eines Hofes, mit all seinem Gerät und seinen Liegenschaften. Die Bewandtnisganzheit selbst aber geht letztlich auf ein Wozu zurück, bei dem es keine Bewandtnis mehr hat, was selbst nicht Seiendes ist in der Seinsart des Zuhandenen innerhalb einer Welt, sondern Seiendes, dessen Sein als In-derWelt-sein bestimmt ist, zu dessen Seinsverfassung Weltlichkeit selbst gehört.51

Heidegger describes the physical and spatial correlates of a taxonomy organized by a hierarchy in which the widest commitments are at the top and the narrowest are at the bottom. I say ‘correlates’, but there is no distinction: the ‘spatial’ regions of being are identifiable with the categories that present them – taxonomies are not in one’s head, but out in the world. This is simply the way that fundamental 51. GA 2, 84.



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classification putatively functions as an act of ‘uncovering’; fundamental classification does not organize or classify phenomena, it is identifiable with phenomena and brings phenomena into experience. And those ‘phenomena’ are, Heidegger claims, in fact not plural in the ordinary way that we might think of a room as filled as with many discrete objects. Instead, our everyday disposition – the umsicht we use while walking or hammering or reading – absorbs us into a unitary experience of the world before we reflect superficially upon it. Put in the strongest terms, inhabiting the world is a phenomenon out of which we might distil phenomena. This amounts to the claim that fundamental classification, the basic experience of uncovering, is unitary. In being committed, the commitments are not plural. Except in discursive reflection, there is not a diverse taxonomy of fundamental classification. Variation in how a world is uncovered differently by different people is helpfully indexed through the language of a taxonomy composed of many fundamental commitments, but in being relied upon to uncover the world, these are not discrete classes, but hang together in a unitary activity. Heidegger is aiming in this discursive analysis to show that the wider superordinate commitments are logically prior to the subordinate items they make possible and orient, and more than this, he seeks to demonstrate that the background is present in any given item, in so far as that background has defined what that item can be in its classification. Or as we saw above, its ‘involvement is ontologically definitive for the being of such an entity’.52 The other direction of influence is less clear at this point – in what way do subordinate items constitute or change the character of that which is superordinate to them? All of these involvements add up to a well-ordered taxonomic account. Examined from the bottom, the involvements expose increasingly superordinate involvements that ultimately lead to big commitments constitutive of the world and human life as being in that world. Heidegger even gives a special name for one big involvement coordinating all the other involvements, an involvement that appears to orient all that is subordinate to it: This primary ‘towards-which’ is not just another ‘towards-this’ as something in which an involvement is possible. The primary ‘towards-which’ is a ‘for-thesake-of-which’. But the ‘for-the-sake-of ’ always pertains to the being of Dasein, for which, in its being, that very being is essentially an issue. Dieses primäre Wozu ist kein Dazu als mögliches Wobei einer Bewandtnis. Das primäre ‘Wozu’ ist ein Worum-willen. Das ‘Um-willen’ betrifft aber immer das Sein des Daseins, dem es in seinem Sein wesenhaft um dieses Sein selbst geht.53

Even in the apparently discrete activity of hammering, big commitments are at play. It is not just that the hammer is fundamentally classified as a hammer, but 52. GA 2, 84. 53. GA 2, 84.

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by being classified within a fundamental taxonomy, the hammer is also defined by the whole background which shapes how life is lived, by all the other commitments which are superordinate to it in the taxonomy. It is classified as a hammer, as directed by particular purposes, as in a particular kind of world. The unity of fundamental commitments means that the character of any ‘single’ classificatory act, construing something as something, is already oriented by and involved with those commitments which are logically prior, that is to say, superordinate (or pick your metaphorical direction of travel, ‘more fundamental’). In being committed to uncovering the world in a specific way, the commitments stack up and work together. To describe a ‘single’ act of fundamental classification, we would have to say that something is classified as something – as something – as something – and so on, right up the taxonomy. Hammering makes sense – it is what it is – because one is already committed to some version of human flourishing. Heidegger concludes the single paragraph we have been reading: We have thus indicated the interconnection by which the structure of an involvement leads to Dasein’s very being as the sole authentic ‘for-the-sake-ofwhich’; for the present, however, we shall pursue this no further. Der angezeigte Zusammenhang, der von der Struktur der Bewandtnis zum Sein des Daseins selbst führt als dem eigentlichen und einzigen Worum-willen, soll fürs erste noch nicht eingehender verfolgt werden.54

Heidegger will go on to depict this knowledge of the interconnections between increasingly superordinate levels of a taxonomy as a knowledge of the architecture of the world and of being in general.55 At this stage we have acquired the intellectual strategies needed to examine the existence and use of scriptural language as something that appears within a world, and we will follow Heidegger’s enquiries no further. Rather, I will ask how his account of equipment might be applied to language. Heidegger himself makes some suggestions about how this link should be made in §17, which I have intentionally passed over, but interested readers are encouraged to consider that account. My own comments on scriptural language will follow a slightly different course, one that has been made available by Heidegger’s account of equipment. My account of language will prepare us to address the phenomenon of scriptural language as it appears in the world, and thus to address the putative relation between scripture, tradition, and reason.

3. Language as an Everyday Tool Before it produces meaning, the physical stuff of language shows up because it is classified fundamentally. The material phenomena of language are presupposed; 54. GA 2, 84. 55. GA 2, 86.



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like swinging a physical hammer, we rarely notice the words we use. Instead, we see beyond them to the meaning we produce. This is true whether we are reading a book or listening to a speech or chatting with a friend. And like using other varieties of equipment, the possibilities of language have been oriented and defined by the world in which it is located and used, by the entire chain of increasingly superordinate commitments in which it is ‘involved’. What a language will mean is not separable from the world wherein it appears. Of course, a world may very well afford language the opportunity to ‘disagree’, but this is itself a kind of agreement with that world. I am describing language as equipment that shows up in a particular world and has its purposes oriented and determined by the possibilities of that world. Above, we saw Heidegger describe the ‘involvement’ (Bewandtnis) of a tool with other tools and with the superordinate environment and world, and we saw that this involvement was inseparable from the purpose of the tool, from what it was. Scriptural language has its purposes defined by the world in which it shows up. Talking about language in this way is liable to some terminological confusion. We have already seen Heidegger describe acts of fundamental classification as both ‘reason’ and ‘speech’ or ‘language’; and we have seen that superficial classification has its most obvious example in what we normally mean by speech or language – renaming or regrouping things made available by fundamental classification; and now I am describing the everyday use of words in terms of fundamental classification. These vocabulary problems will dissipate if we have the phenomena in view. Talk about language as equipment is talk about the physical signs. Here, it is necessary to make a distinction between words and meaning, between words physically presented and physically grouped together in a sentence or text, and the meaning that is produced. Physical presentation, and physical grouping (‘involvement’ with one to another and ‘referring’ to one another) we know to be matters at the heart of fundamental classification. The relationship between various entities is only possible when joined by a shared background. This will have important implications for the meaning produced by words as well, in so far as a reference between words and meaning is made. Imagine a series of words in an unfamiliar language, written in an unknown script, or spoken by a friend – perhaps in Georgian or Tagalog or Cantonese. I am interested here in the phenomenon of encountering language, its physical stuff: the sounds, the printed words, the braille, the song – even memorized material. We are so competent with these items when they are familiar, when they are part of our language, that it is almost impossible to see the bare script of our prose or hear the sounds of our spoken words – without leaping to meaning. This difficulty in keeping separate the material presentation of words and their meaning is a sure sign that they are ready-to-hand, that we have classified this material stuff fundamentally, within a taxonomy of commitments. It indicates that, like the hammer, we presuppose the material stuff as we produce a work of meaning. And like the hammer, we cannot easily examine the physicality of words while producing meaning, even though its physicality is an important part of our experience

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while we produce meaning. Whether our meaning will also be ready-to-hand, or whether it will just stand there, present-at-hand, is not yet our concern. My discussion of language is aimed, in the first instance, at its physical presentation – the phenomena of words and sentences and speech. This stuff is meaningless, but it is used like a tool to produce meaning. Or it is meaningless whenever it is present-at-hand, simply standing there like unfamiliar Italian poetry. And it is meaningless whenever it is ready-to-hand but without its own distinct classification – cases where it is ready-to-hand as something other than language, like a wallpaper of hieroglyphics or artistic Arabic calligraphy. But when this physical stuff, like other equipment, is given a place in a scheme of fundamental classification as language, as a tool for producing meaning, it then has its purposes oriented and defined. And crucially it has these purposes defined before it has produced its work of meaning. Like the hammer that serves a particular version of human flourishing, a version oriented and defined by its logically prior involvement with every superordinate region of the taxonomy, by the very world in which it can be a hammer, so too, scriptural language will have the scope of its meaning oriented in advance. The unity of the categories used in fundamental classification means that the total involvement of one commitment with the others determines its purpose. If we take this account seriously, then the purposes of the equipment of language are not merely oriented by commitments specific to that language, like rules operative within the game, but rather, by the entire accumulation of commitments superordinate to that language. Or more specifically, there is not some isolatable group of taxonomic commitments which pertain to language alone, because the very plurality of commitments is an effect of their superficial classification, produced through our acts of self-reflection, rather than through our committed use of ‘them’. Only as present-to-hand is there a plurality of entities in our fundamental taxonomy, a plurality of entities in the world. The entire taxonomy of fundamental classification is in play when language is used to make meaning. Like a hammer, which is what it is by virtue of even the most superordinate commitments to human flourishing, the condition for the possibility of the appearance of language is its orientation by the world in which it appears. With this distinction between words and the meaning they may produce, we can situate (a) the use of language and texts in relation to (b) the architecture of fundamental commitments and (c) the parasitic activity of superficial classification. These are our phenomena; how are they named? An entire scheme of fundamental classification is called ‘language’ but only in an unusual or a metaphorical sense; we can dismiss the designation for now, although Heidegger does use it. We are at this point familiar with the way a taxonomy of commitments is used to uncover a world and its items; we are hopefully so familiar that any renaming of this whole activity, whether as ‘language’ or as something else, should not mislead us too badly. The present discussion is of such languages as English, and it is concerned with the fact that their material presentation is only possible as an effect of their fundamental classification, which has always already oriented their potential meaning. Of course, if the foregoing account of fundamental



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classification is right, then there does obtain an important unity between language and the rest of the fundamental taxonomy, but if we are going to describe that taxonomy discursively, then we will establish distinctions. Material language is a tool that is subordinated to the world in which it becomes ready-to-hand – and it is superordinated to any meaning that it may produce. Using physical language to make meaning is an activity of fundamental classification like using a hammer. Acts of superficial classification are exemplified by the naming or regrouping of things that already appear in the world. This activity is also-called ‘language’. It is ‘superficial’ because it is parasitic on fundamental classification, naming or regrouping what already appears. If talking is one strategy for superficial reclassification, we should recognize that it is not the physical stuff of words that is used to reclassify, but their meaning – meaning which is produced when the physicality of words is already presupposed, already classified fundamentally. So not only is the activity of superficial classification dependent upon what fundamental classification makes available, but as an activity of ‘language’ it may depend on the fundamental classification of the physical words it uses – for it is the meaning of words rather than their physicality which is able to classify superficially. ‘Language’ in this sense ignores the physicality of words, and uses their meaning for a particular end. That is only one version of superficial classification, we know, because superficial classification might just as well be an intentional attitude, a way of looking at things. The point of clarifying the terminology is to keep the phenomena in view. I am particularly concerned to highlight the apparent difference between the physicality of language and its meaning, and to observe the way each of these can be used in an activity of either fundamental or superficial classification. The purpose of keeping these phenomena clear is finally to demonstrate the unity that obtains between any world in which the physical stuff of language appears, and the meaning that is made of that language. The end product of language (meaning) is continuous with the world in which it is produced. The readiness-to-hand of scripture’s words and chapters and stories is first a description of its material properties. Like hammers, the materiality of language is something we use skilfully when we presuppose it, when we look beyond it to the job that it does, to the work we produce. And like hammers, before they produce their work, the physical phenomenon of language appears on the basis of an inhabited taxonomy, with the consequence that – as with other tools – the plurality of reader and what is read is reduced to a single experience. Recognizing the role of language’s physicality allows the material of language to function as the gateway to meaning, as the equipment used to produce meaning. It demands that, like other equipment, the material of language is located in a subordinate position within the architecture of fundamental commitments. It is a tool in a larger world that already defines its use. And because the material of language is superordinate to the meaning that it produces, this recognition demands that the products of language (meaning) are already delimited by the taxonomy of superordinate commitments that orient and define the purposes of the material equipment. Meaning is continuous with the world.

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Like other equipment, the material stuff of language is classified fundamentally before it is used. It is situated subordinately at the end of a long chain of superordinate commitments. The meaning it produces will be within the range of possibilities supplied by the background world with which it is united, whether Greek or European or Kimbanguist. In the next chapter we will examine more closely the unity of such background commitments and, moreover, the unity of language with the world in which it appears.

Chapter 4 SCRIPTURE IN THE WORLD

1. The One Thing Named by ‘Scripture’, ‘Tradition’, and ‘Reason’ In the last chapter we began to see that ‘reasonable’ or ‘appropriate’ uses of language are measured by the taxonomy that defines the use of language’s material equipment. What is reasonable by effect of one chain of commitments may seem unreasonable by effect of another. In some Christian communities, to think of the Bible as composing a single coherent narrative just is to treat it as the Bible. For some Kimbanguists, understanding that scriptural language has the job of describing the geography and families of the Congo is simply to know how to use its language. In this chapter, I continue the main argument of this book in some technical detail, testing a defence for the claim that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name a single phenomenon. I will focus our attention on the act of reading. My task here is to show why it is misguided to claim that ‘readers rely on tradition to reason about the meaning of language’. ‘Language’, we might recall from Chapter 3, could name either the physical stuff or the meaning it produces. I will keep clear these two ways of using the term. The language we are interested in will be the piece of European language, Christian scripture. The argument that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name a single phenomenon is, on the face of it, immoderate. Similar results might be achieved with less exertion if I prosecuted an easier line of reasoning. I might argue that if only we recognize any change to one’s commitments as necessarily affecting one’s reasoning, and consequently the meaning produced when reasoning about material language, then we would overcome the mistaken diagnosis that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name wholly independent phenomena. Thus we would recognize, for example, that the Kimbanguists do not misuse scriptural language. After all, it is only because we mistakenly imagine that these are isolated entities that it seems silly when Kimbanguists take Europe’s big book to refer to Simon Kimbangu. I do not pursue this apparently more sensible argument because I think it generates irresolvable problems on close inspection, problems I will indicate while advancing an account of wholesale unity as the best approach.

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I defend the single phenomenon thesis. This involves considerably more difficult terrain than simply advocating necessary ‘links’ between three phenomena. It requires the claim that to change one’s commitments, one’s taxonomy, simply is to change one’s reasoning. There is no remove, no chain of cause and effect between changes to commitments and changes to reason and changes to the meaning of scriptural language. There is no fundamental ‘relation’ between the three because they have no individual, fundamental identities. I aim to display a unity that obtains between what appear, on reflection, to be three different phenomena. One advantage of this strong view is that disagreements about the meaning of some passage of scripture will be shown to be fundamental taxonomy disagreements by other means – they are disagreements about the whole world in which physical examples of language ought to be located. So too, a theologian’s effort to balance ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ will actually address itself to the world in which these are apparently entities. In the previous chapter I initiated a line of reasoning to be continued here, namely, that the plurality of commitments in our inhabited taxonomy is an effect of self-reflection, an effect of superficially classifying our own, singular activity of fundamental classification. Inhabiting the world turns out to be a permanent, already ongoing activity, without any consciously perceived internal boundaries and without a plurality of entities. When hammering, we do not consciously distinguish between entities, reflecting on their identities; instead, Heidegger argues, we understand things as flowing together while we skilfully prosecute the activity – an absorbed way of coping with things that is ruptured by selfreflection. So how is it that superficial classification can justify its (putatively arbitrary) identification of various entities? In defending the singularity of the phenomenon named by ‘tradition’, ‘reason’, and ‘language’, I will ask how these three may be accessible to differentiation. I will consider the relation of time to these phenomena, and examine the reliance on ideas of time in the creation of a perceived plurality of contemporaneous phenomena. How do we come to the entrenched conviction of plurality if there is not a phenomenal basis in fundamental experience? How does second-order reflection pick out entities if ‘inhabiting the world’ is a unitary first-order experience? How might temporal differentiation buttress such an enterprise? Consider our apprehension of distinct periods of time. Just what are temporal entities, such as the belle époque or the Great War? And just how far can these be stably or sufficiently delineated and identified? Do we experience ourselves to have episodes in life? What are we doing when we classify a stretch of time as an entity? In this section we will consider how time may be used to identify specific entities and produce the practical conviction of a real difference, within the present, between scripture, tradition, and reason. There might be other ways of delineating these three, but here we will principally consider time-based differences. Heidegger famously analyses a cyclical relation between identifiable moments in the process of understanding – articulating how new understandings become sedimented as commitments that orient and define the production of further understandings. This is his ‘hermeneutical circle’. Whereas Heidegger focuses his



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attention on events of everyday understanding, his student Gadamer sees this cycle operating on larger historical scales. This indicates the first problem I will pose to their accounts, namely that larger scales of analysis will require new, larger ‘single’ moments of a hermeneutical circle to contain what had previously been identified as a plurality of moments, and, moreover, will do so in such a way that logical puzzles follow. The threefold nature of tradition, reason, and scriptural language is potentially supported by a sequence of three identifiable moments. The first section of this chapter will attempt to undermine the temporal basis of this threeness. But even if I am able to show that temporal justifications of plurality are untenable, there may remain logical or even spatial differences supporting the simultaneous ‘threeness’ of the items denoted by our categories. Maybe scripture, tradition, and reason are just different kinds of things. After considering the possibility of a unity of our three items over time, I will turn to these other ways in which our categories might name distinct items. The last chapter offered a reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time which put a fragment of that text to work defending this book’s main argument. We saw a picture of human experience with two levels. First-order experience was unitary, and second-order experience described that by overlaying a superficial scheme of classification. In fundamental experience, it was not possible to pry apart the job assigned to a tool like scriptural language and the kind of world that one inhabited. Now we are asking, by what strategy does superficial classification justify the objects it identifies? I hope to destabilize those justifications, concentrating on temporal differentiation. As I have said, my arguments about the wholesale unity of what gets divided into ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ could be seen as merely therapeutic, staving off any tendency to separate the three, and ensuring that we remember how they all bear upon each other. Yet my arguments are designed to do more than this. I hope to overcome specific puzzles generated by a close examination of the act of reading scripture and the use of language that it entails. I am persuaded that our habits of thinking with these three categories prevent us from seeing certain dynamics of traditioned reasoning about language – whether cases of reading the Bible, or hearing the liturgical proclamation, or singing a psalm. Kimbanguist reasoning about scripture appears silly because of our misguided conviction that tradition, reason, and language are each identifiable and distinct entities. I defend the strong claim about unity rather than the one about the dependence of these phenomena upon each other. The broad point of my argument remains that the activity of reasoning about the meaning of language cannot be understood without attending to the world in which that physical language is located. I want to refer all of our perceptions of threefold plurality to the unitary world that we saw Heidegger identify in Being and Time. I will consider disagreements about the meaning of Christian scripture. It is notable that political documents or Scandinavian sagas or legal judgements are no less affected by these claims. The point is that disputes about language are, at best, proximate disputes about the first-order world in which material language should

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be located, rather than disputes about anything else. What physical language is supposed to do (its meaning) is a feature of its location in a particular world – it only has its purposeful existence as a feature of that world. All disagreements over language, if they are well coordinated, surreptitiously address themselves to the world in which the material stuff of language ought to be located, even though it is rare for such disputes to recognize this fact. In short, I will argue against some prominent ways in which we might conceive of tradition, reason, and scripture as distinct entities. My arguments will concentrate on the act of reading, but I will suggest how they might be applied more widely. My attempts to reimagine our inheritance of the categories ‘tradition’, ‘reason’, and ‘scripture’ are exploratory and hopefully provoke, if not outright collaboration, at least greater clarity among my readers, rather than attempts to dismantle and prevent the effort – I signal here that these arguments are important but experimental in their present condition. Initially, we might outline the three phenomena named by our categories as follows: 1. Tradition. 2. Reason. 3. Scripture. We might correlate these three separate phenomena to three temporal moments in the activity of fundamental classification: 1. Having commitments (we might imagine there to be something past about one’s tradition-supplied commitments) 2. Uncovering the material phenomena of scriptural language (this is what one is doing in the present while reading – ‘uncovering’ is meant in Heidegger’s technical sense) 3. Producing meaning (this is the future towards which one aims while dealing with material language)1 That the first three items might be made to correspond to the second three should not come as a surprise. But if we are dealing with a single phenomenon, then any effort to parse it into three will need to be provisional and will rapidly become unstable on closer inspection. I hope to show that superficial classification cannot get the purchase it wants on these entities if it relies on time to differentiate them. Why should we treat as temporally inseparable the fact of having commitments (tradition), the act of fundamentally classifying the physical material of language (reason), and the production of scriptural meaning (scripture)? Why should we 1. I place ‘language’ in the third position, denoting the meaning that physical language produces. When one thinks of some piece of language, such as a novel, one tends to consider the world of its meaning, rather than the physical tool which brings us there (the braille, song, text, etc.).



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treat these as united? Is not the fact of having a commitment about the purpose of scripture and its meaning patently different from actually reading scripture or producing a particular understanding? I want to begin by restricting the scope of our investigation to that time during which one is in the very act of reading, to the time while one is putatively using one’s commitments to reason about the meaning of the physical stuff of scriptural language. I will subsequently suggest (§3) why this kind of activity has no identifiable beginning or end. Were we to discover that the activity of reading has a beginning, then a temporal contrast between having commitments and using them might be evident within fundamental classification; there would be scenarios in which commitments were in place without obviously being used to classify the material phenomena of language in order to produce meaning. Of course the whole picture of fundamental classification given in the last chapter demanded that all commitments are united in the first-order experience of inhabiting a world, so any such claim would force us to revise that account. There would be a temporal distinction between having commitments about scripture (tradition) and using those commitments (reason). And were the activity of reading to have an end, then we might postulate a further temporal gap between the effort to produce meaning (reason) and the final product (scripture’s meaningful language). Perhaps, after reading, one simply rests in a world of discovered meaning without the attendant effort to classify the empirical stuff of language. Ostensibly, it would only be during the act of reading that all three phenomena are in direct relation with each other, even if temporally sequential – relevant commitments being used to classify scriptural language in order to produce meaning. Again, below, I will defend the notion that there is no such beginning or end to reading. And it remains that there might be other kinds of distinctions between these three phenomena, but first we are considering temporal distinctions internal to the act of reading. Time-based Identities While reading, if we identify our three phenomena on the basis of temporal distinctions, then we have a case of mistaken identity. In what way does any apparent temporal distinction between the three moments, during the act of reading, fail to identify three stably different items? My contention is that the identification of these three separate phenomena suffers from boundary problems and problems of scale. My argument will focus exclusively on the latter. By boundary problems I simply mean that their edges are blurred. There are difficulties in identifying chronologically where one phenomenon ends and the next begins. I will not pursue the blurred boundaries of each apparently unique moment, though I will claim that the act of reading has no boundaries at all. Let us rather consider the problem of temporal scale. The ‘threeness’ produced by our sequential distinction always relies on the fixture of a temporal scale, which is used to group its three moments. The ‘threeness’ also relies upon the claim that this temporal scale is the only scale that

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should be applied to the phenomena – that it is the right scale. The charge I level at the temporal identification of the three is that superficial classification cannot get the purchase it wants on the entities it identifies in the unitary world made available by fundamental classification; the concession I want is that the temporal differentiation of the entities in superficial classification is arbitrary and unstable. So if the diagnosis of sequentially distinct phenomena claims more than a purely arbitrary identity for those moments, then the temporal scope of consideration will have to match the scope of the three phenomena. The time frame must be wider than one ‘real’ moment, and wider than two moments – it must contain all three. It must embrace a threefold process that looks like this: [– – – – – – – – – – – – – – Temporal Scope of Analysis – – – – – – – – – – – –] Time One Time Two Time Three Having Using Producing commitments → commitments → new commitments → Repeat (Tradition) (Reason) (Scripture) My objection is that during the activity of reading scripture, whatever scale is used to distinguish the three periods of our three phenomena, a narrower and wider scale may also be used to re-divide the phenomena, with the result that logical contradictions follow: larger scales will force a larger period to contain other periods; smaller scales will find a plurality within what had been defined as a singular moment. The time of having commitments will be found to include the temporal moments of using them and producing new ones. Any moment will be found to contain what had been all three moments – and so forth. We could depict this point roughly as follows: [– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – New Wider Scope of Analysis – – – – – – – – – → [– – – – – – – – – New Time One: Having Commitments (Tradition) – – – – –] [– – – – – – – – – – – – – – -Old Narrower Scope of Analysis – – – – – – – – – -] (Old Time One) (Old Time Two) (Old Time Three) Having → Using → Producing new → Repeat commitments commitments commitments (Tradition) (Reason) (Scripture) Whatever the scope of analysis, superficial classification picks out three entities, temporally distinguished and neatly arranged in a sequence. The ‘three’ processes are discovered at every timescale of examination, and thus, by relying on the inherited categories of superficial classification, one is led to see the three phenomena arrayed sequentially, even though this produces contradictions when comparing differing scales. The notion that these three phenomena can be parsed into linear moments and set side-by-side is a story that demands, without good reason, we only consider a particular time frame as the one that really contains all three (or worse, that every timescale identifies a unique parallel process, ad infinitum). This is the broad thrust of my argument, and



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readers without an appetite for further technical considerations may want to proceed to §2. That multiple temporal scales might legitimately frame the activity of reading is apparent if we begin to examine the phenomenon itself. Consider, for instance, our three phenomena in relation to the meaning of particular words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, genres, language, social contexts, and so on. It is even evident from the use of Heidegger’s notion of a hermeneutical circle. Whereas Heidegger prominently describes the hermeneutical circle by tracing its moments in relation to short acts of everyday understanding, Gadamer uses it to describe long stretches of European history, with the result that a timescale in which Heidegger might identify our three phenomena is made to fit within a much longer period only representing a single moment. Superficial classification is given a free hand when it reflects on the unitary world presented by fundamental classification. The effort to fix a time frame and distinguish three temporally separate phenomena might be described as an outsider’s perspective, one that generates problems. The framing effort places one outside time and distinguishes three sequential moments, corresponding to three phenomena. If the outsider’s scales of analysis are arbitrary and changing, then getting an exclusive fix on a ‘before’, ‘during’, and ‘after’ will be impossible. What if we attempt to recover a similar account from the subjective perspective of the reader? Will we then discover a neat alignment between tradition, reason, and scripture on the one hand and our apprehension of past, present, and future on the other? No.2 In order for the temporal stance to be subjective in the requisite sense, the examination of the past and future temporal frames must not provoke the problems of scale seen above. So we will ask, from the subjective perspective of the present, how large is the scope of the past that only counts as tradition? And how large is the scale of the future which only covers the period of the meaning language will produce? The answers must claim the entirety of the past and the future, and from this we would be forced to draw an unpalatable conclusion. Scriptural meaning, which is in the future, is never achieved at all (because the future is always what lies ahead and meaning is fixed exclusively to the future); and if the future is made present, the claims about meaning must always be denied (because the present is identifiable only in terms of reason). This is either foolish (because people patently do make meaning out of language) or it simply reclassifies the middle term – ‘reason’ achieves everything, or close enough to everything, we mean by ‘scriptural meaning’. More importantly – and I think fatally – an analysis of the present alone will expose the inclusion of all three phenomena. Note that, again, to do this perspective justice we must guard against the temptation to slide into an outsider’s 2. The distinction, postured in terms of an A series and B series (and later a C series), is famously made in J. Ellis McTaggart, ‘The Unreality of Time’, Mind 17.68 (1908): 457–74. I obviously depart from McTaggart’s analysis in significant ways, and I make no arguments against the reality of time.

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perspective, which will reproduce the problems of scale discussed already. It will do so by making possible a ‘present’ that provides a scope of consideration with flexible boundaries, a present that allows the space for a sequence to obtain between our three phenomena within that scope. There can be no temporal sequence in the present if the present has no scale. My claim is as follows: at every present moment, commitments are in place, the act of classification is happening, and the production of meaning is underway. Our three phenomena are contemporaneous in the present and thus sequentially indistinguishable. This is simply to restate the claims of the previous chapter, in which Heidegger’s experience of uncovering (fundamental classification) was unitary and always ongoing. It does not provide natural entities for superficial reflection to pick out and identify. If used for a present that does not admit of sequence, the three categories of ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’ are applied to phenomena that are contemporaneous with each other, and which are thus perceived to differ in a way that has only been superficially classified as temporal and sequential. What is it about our present experience of having commitments that lends it to the classification ‘past’? And what is it about our present experience of producing meaning that lends it to the classification ‘future’? There is nothing more ‘past’ about the present condition of having commitments; there is nothing more ‘future’ about the meaning now being produced. We might visualize the application of these superficial ‘temporal’ distinctions to these phenomena: ← Past     Present     Future → Having Commitments (past!) Using Commitments (present!) Producing Meaning (future!) There is no reason to put these three in any sequence given their wholly contemporaneous character. If this assessment is right, then it exposes the arbitrariness of superficial classification’s temporal distinctions. There might be some other distinction, but not a temporal one. Superficial classification cannot use a temporal rule to identify the distinct entities of scripture, tradition, and reason when it finds these within the unitary world made available by fundamental classification. But perhaps I am relying on a sudden vagueness of reference. This objection would run as follows. The point is not that in general the three phenomena are in place at the same time, but rather that some particular single commitment will undergo a threefold process which can be plotted temporally – as the past, present, and future of that specific commitment and the use to which it is put. The use to which it is put changes over time – first one is merely having a commitment, but one later relies upon that ‘same’ commitment to classify something and produce new commitments – and thus the activities of having commitments (tradition), using commitments (reason), and producing meaning (scripture) can be temporally distinguished once these activities are linked to the temporal history of some ‘one’



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commitment, which passes through these three stages. Various commitments are at various stages, and thus time-based discriminations will identify important differences between the contemporaneous activities of having, using, and producing. Questions multiply when we consider this objection. Can commitments be practically isolated in such a way that their changes over time can be traced? Are the changes used to determine the individuality of the commitments, or does the individuality found the trajectory of changes? What about a commitment would make it the ‘same’ commitment while it was ‘changing’? Can a single commitment be sequentially subsumed under our three different labels (as an instance of having tradition, using reason, producing scriptural meaning), while remaining the ‘same’ commitment? I will try to ward off this objection by questioning the circular character of its justification of plural entities and by showing that its circularity generates ambiguities and complexities that are unnecessary in view of a simpler option. My aim is to argue against the notion of multiple individual commitments of the kind assumed in the story about their various stages of use. We are faced with a circular justification for the temporal differences between individual commitments in the present. The notion of a commitment’s trajectory of use acts as the condition for the possibility of the apprehension of diverse commitments in the present (each identified according to its own stage of development), which in turn founds their individuality, and thus individual duration in time. Again, the change a single commitment undergoes through time (having, using, producing) founds its identity as an individual commitment in the present, while the present diversity of commitments justifies their unique histories and trajectories of development. I have no intention for my readers to be lost in abstractions. What might this look like? Something like this, I imagine: in the past I had commitments about a variety of things including A and B, but I was only using commitment A and producing new A-related commitments. At that time I was somehow able to avoid using B. Now, in the present, although I retain commitments A and B, I am only using commitment B and producing B-related meaning. In future, perhaps I will only have B, use B, and produce new B-related meanings. The plurality of commitments is linked to a plurality of modes of engagement that are identifiable with scripture, tradition, and reason. The claim here is that even if the condition of simultaneously having, using, and producing commitments is generally true in each time frame, it is not true about particular commitments which must be granted their own temporal processes. It is the case generally that I simultaneously have, use, and produce commitments but all three descriptions are not true of any particular commitment in the present. In the present, different commitments are linked with the phenomena of having (tradition), using (reason), and producing (scriptural meaning), and thus we must say that these three phenomena are ultimately distinguishable on a temporal basis – even though they are, in another respect, simultaneous. What makes us have a plurality of commitments at any single given moment is their putative temporal differentiation when considered alongside other moments

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of analysis. Some commitment B counts as an individual commitment because it has its own trajectory of having, using, and producing. We might attempt to visualize this point as follows: ← Past Had commitments A and B Used commitment A Produced A2

– Present – Having A and B Using B Producing B2

Future → Will have B1–2 Will use B1–2 Will produce B3

This might be tedious, but the patience to think, to overcome our suspicion that nothing significant lies beyond the effort, may produce valuable results. My claim is this: only the histories presently imagined for our specific commitments justify their individuality and, in turn, the ability of having, using, and producing to be identified with some commitment but not others. Even though simultaneous, each one of these phenomena (having, using, producing) is represented as engaged with a different commitment, and only thereby are the three differentiated. But the difference between the commitments is simply the fact of their being engaged by, say, having but not using. So, although generally true that the three phenomena of having, using, and producing are contemporaneous in the present (and while in the act of reading), the supposed status of each commitment imagined for other time frames demands that one views the present engagements as associated only with the past, present, or future of that commitment. And it is this putative trajectory which founds the individuality of commitments, enabling their individual histories, enabling each one’s unique engagement in the present by having, using, and producing, and thus closing the circular argument. In the case of having a commitment in the present, we suppose we have it as the ‘past’ of its future use. In the case of using a commitment in the present, the meaning it will continue to produce demands we consider it a ‘present’ but incomplete phenomenon. And so too, producing scriptural meaning in the present is really the end result of a specific commitment’s past use, and thus its ‘future’ finally realized. In other words, our three phenomena of tradition, reason, and scripture are identifiable on the basis of commitments that are individuated by their putative histories, their progress along individuated teleologies. In an act of self-reflection, the three phenomena are distinguished in the present time frame by their supposed character in other time frames. And a circular logic justifies this picture. Is there an alternative? A response would need to address the reflexive act of superficial classification. Unravelling the Circular Logic Thus far, sameness and difference have been allocated on the basis of (putative) past and future states. Any one commitment A, in some single time frame, is ‘different’ than other commitments which are also in that same frame; whereas A



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counts as the ‘same’ commitment A in a different frame, despite being employed there differently (whether having, using, or producing). Thus, across time, one and the same A is different in terms of both time and use. This ‘sameness’ claims to overcome two impressive hurdles – differences in time and in use – even while denying ‘sameness’ amongst the commitments within any one time frame, such as the present. In a single time frame, the plurality of commitments is established on the basis of their supposedly different temporal stages – each commitment counts as a distinct individual because it is assigned its own trajectory of use in terms of first having, then using, and finally producing. This strategy diversifies commitments in a single time frame, which are thereby made available to the differing engagements, so that some commitments can be had, some used, and yet others produced. It is a circular justification. I want to unravel that circle. The very fact that having, using, and producing are themselves always simultaneously present (even if said of ‘different’ commitments) can be used to undermine the plurality of commitments, and thereby obstruct the circularity of reasoning associated with this picture. How so? I will first address the circular justification that obtains between a plurality of commitments and a plurality of modes of engagement, and I will then consider the effects for our self-reflective effort to classify our habits of fundamental classification. It is granted that each time frame contains instances of ‘having’, ‘using’, and ‘producing’ commitments, so the difference between these modes of engagement is not immediately temporal within the limitations of the frame. Once we have recognized the presence of these three phenomena in each one of the time frames, and thus removed the temporal basis for their plurality within that frame, we must ask about the remaining grounds for differentiating, within a single frame, between having (tradition), using (reason), and producing (meaningful language). The threeness of the three is founded on the diversity of commitments that can be variously had, used, or produced. In other words, the distinguishing difference within one time frame between the three modes of engagement comes down to the fact that they engage different commitments – one, say, has both A and B but only uses A, which sets the using apart. Having is distinguishable from using, in this case, only because it engages different commitments; if having and using engaged the same commitments at the same time, it could be the case that having and using (and producing) were together just what it meant to be committed. In short, it is the plurality of commitments within any one time frame that supports the story of a time-based plurality of our three phenomena of having, using, and producing. But as we know, the very plurality of commitments is itself founded upon the fact that each commitment is distinguished in virtue of its own trajectory through the different stages of having, using, and producing. The difference between having, using, and producing is grounded on the plurality of commitments. The plurality of commitments is justified in terms of having, using, and producing – individual commitments are identified by a lineage with putative links across multiple time frames, a lineage that traces a

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movement through the stages of having, using, and producing. These lineages form a sequential trajectory between having, using, and producing – but never vertically within a single time frame, only across time frames. This results in a plurality of commitments within any given frame because every frame contains commitments at varying stages of these trajectories. The plurality of having, using, and producing in a frame just is the plurality of commitments, which is, in turn, the difference between having, using, and producing. It is a circular chain of reasoning. And it is mistaken, I want to argue, because it fails to consider the consequences of our three phenomena as permanently contemporaneous with each other during the act of reading. In the present time frame, the condition of having commitments is taken to be the past of their future use, whereas only the use of some commitment is truly present, but the meaning that is now being produced is taken to be only authentically realized in the future. For this, one must maintain a story which says that having a commitment B in the past is specifically linked to using B in the present, rather than saying that having commitments in the past is to be linked to having commitments now, and using commitments in the past is to be linked to using them now. In this scenario, one consciously reflects on the present and imagines links across an imagined past and future, creating a diversity of commitments through their links across time. The plurality of commitments (A, B, C, D, E, etc.) founds the plurality of having commitments (tradition), using commitments (reason), and producing new commitments (scriptural meaning). These three ways of engaging commitments are then used to justify the plurality of commitments. I aim to present a viable alternative, the merits of which stop our efforts to repair the unnecessary complexities generated in this form of circular self-understanding. The outlines of such a picture are already evident from the previous chapter’s treatment of the taxonomic unity at the level of fundamental experience: any subordinate item includes the whole chain of superordinate commitments, and the very plurality of this chain is only a convenience of superficial description. It should be clearly stated from the outset, meaning is made, including new meaning – even though it is always produced within the range of possibilities supplied by existing commitments, or more accurately, is itself a revision of those commitments. I am not attempting to deny the temporal development of new meaning, the production of ‘new commitments’. I am trying to show that these temporal changes are simultaneously and equally changes of the all other commitments – of one’s whole taxonomy and therefore of the way it is being had, used, and produced in fundamental experience. This unity of commitments removes the phenomenal basis for differentiating between tradition, reason, and scripture, and as we do so, there is no further reason to project a plurality of commitments onto our first-order experiences. I am not arguing against the existence of time or its relevance to an engagement with language. I am not suggesting that the one phenomenon named by ‘tradition’, ‘reason’, and ‘scripture’ is static. I am claiming that time cannot be used to separate these ‘three’ categories and lay them sequentially side-by-side, perhaps in a



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causal chain, but will affect or describes all ‘three’ simultaneously. To produce a commitment simply is to have that commitment and to reason with it. We might visualize my alternative depiction as follows: ← Past Was having Commitment A Was using Commitment A Was producing A

– Present – Having B Using B Producing B

Future → Will be having C Will be using C Will be producing C

What this story fails to give is an account of the causal reason for the changes that do take place. Can the production of meaning, which itself amounts to a revision of one’s tradition and one’s reason, be causally depicted in a temporal sequence? The difficulty is that if having A just is using and producing A, then a depiction of how B arises cannot entail any division of having, using, and producing. For example, if we tried to modify the above to include such a causal depiction, we would get nowhere: ← Past Having A Using A Producing B (thus having and using B)

– Present – Having B Using B Producing C (thus …)

Future → Having C Using C Producing D (…)

This immediately presents us with two problems. The first is obvious. It appears to contradict itself by reintroducing the plurality it denies. The second is only slightly less obvious: it does not provide any solution to the problem of causality. If the objection about depicting causality holds, then it holds equally for all of the above efforts to depict these temporal relations and amounts to a basic problem of description, the weight of which is greater than these little visual aids are able to bear. We are then returned to the first of the two above diagrams, the one which seems to lack a depiction of causal relations and honestly displays that lack. ← Past Was having Commitments A Was using Commitment A Was producing A

– Present – Having B Using B Producing B

Future → Will be having C Will be using C Will be producing C

In this picture we are no longer justified on temporal grounds in distinguishing between having, using, and producing some commitment. A further simplification can thus rightly be made. Being committed just is having, using, and producing that commitment. Tradition (having), reason (using), and language (producing meaning) are simply aspects of being committed, three limited, superficial descriptions of one broader, singular state of affairs. I want to reach a picture of inhabiting the taxonomy of fundamental experience that looks like this:

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← Past Committed to A

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– Present – Committed to B

Future → Committed to C

In the above, there is not a plurality of commitments in any given frame, and there is not a plurality of engagements variously attached to those commitments. Instead, one is committed to the taxonomy as a whole; one is absorbed in fundamental classification, in uncovering a particular world, in inhabiting one’s taxonomy, in (as Heidegger put it) being there. ← Past – Present – Future → Taxonomy1 Taxonomy2 Taxonomy3

2. The Unity of Background Commitments My argument now turns to the claim that, in fundamental classification, there are no distinct and specific commitments (A, B, C). Given the identity between one’s taxonomy and the world it presents, this amounts to the claim that in fundamental classification there are not distinct entities in the world – a familiar picture from our reading of Heidegger. I hope to place obstacles in the way of any effort to classify the changes in a taxonomy by describing it as ‘really’ containing various commitments, some stable while others vary. Although there remain circumstances when it is useful to imagine or depict our commitments as a plurality, any change to one’s commitments is a change of the whole taxonomy. The homogeneity of our commitments goes hand-in-hand with the unity of our being thusly committed – there is no basis for the distinction between having, using, or producing these commitments, even if our reflexive descriptive efforts identify these aspects of being committed. Tradition, reason, and language are a story we tell ourselves in acts of self-reflection, but the superficial distinctions are not themselves grounded on a phenomenal basis. Textual hermeneutics is continuous with philosophical hermeneutics because the use of a text is continuous with the world in which it appears. This matters for theology because disputes about the meaning of scripture, for example, tend to be coordinated by the presupposition that differing parties share the ‘same’ linguistic tool, the same text. The homogeneity and singularity of the ‘commitments’ relied upon during fundamental classification demands that we recognize such tools as oriented and defined, as made what they are, by the world in which they appear; or more precisely, as wholly united with that world. Debates about scriptural meaning just are debates about the world in which the physical tool of scripture ought to be located – what it means for something to be ‘scripture’ is of a piece with the world in which it shows up. One community has scripture as a tool for making, say, Catholic meaning, and another for Kimbanguist meaning – and what transpires in a change from one to the other is a conversion of the world one inhabits.



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My broad point here is that the experience of relying on a system of classification is a unitary one which is superficially describable as a multiplicity. The single phenomenon of inhabiting a world, of using a taxonomy, of standing in ‘the clearing of being’, cannot be stably analysed into a system of classification containing independent, identifiable, distinct commitments. Such a systematic description is an enterprise with important but limited uses. In acts of selfreflection one can differentiate between risks and rewards, between the raw and the cooked, and between scripture and fiction; but if the Heideggerian picture I offered in the previous chapter is right, these acts of superficial classification obscure our everyday experiences of such important contrasts. As Wittgenstein observed, brooms may be usefully recognized as single entities – and so too may broomsticks and brushes.3 In the previous section I concluded that, within a single time frame, the temporal distinction between having (tradition), using (reason), and producing commitments (scripture) was itself founded on a distinction between various commitments, but these were, in turn, founded on the difference between having, using, and producing. I tried to show how we might unravel that circular reasoning and replace it with something more simple, elegant, and true to a close inspection of our everyday experience. In the remainder of this chapter I continue to present a case for treating the distinctions between commitments as only resident at the superficial order of classification, but not at the level of our unitary habit of fundamental classification. As with the commitments, so too the modes of engagement – the three aspects of reading identified as ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ are judgements of merely superficial classification. The present case for unity continues the line of reasoning sketched out above, in which I addressed temporal distinctions. Now we turn to questions about the logical and even spatial differences that might constitute a diversity of taxonomical items at the level of fundamental classification. Descriptive plurality persists solely on the basis of superficial classification, and thus its creation of distinctions does not impinge on the unity of the phenomenon of inhabiting a world. That is the claim. The Bard said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and we might take that as a depiction of the superficiality of superficial classification. But there are cases in which the activity of fundamental classification produces an experience which can be concealed in selfreflection – as if a rose registers first as merely a rose but one then superficially and mistakenly reclassifies it as a ‘love token’. There are also cases when we get on the wrong track by taking the assessments of superficial classification all too seriously – as if there might be a fundamental difference between a dozen roses and twelve roses bunched together. We are discussing the classification ‘diverse’ made of our unitary experience of fundamental classification, what Heidegger called ‘uncovering’. The entire inhabited taxonomy is describable as a plurality of commitments with specific 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, Zweite Auflage / Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edn, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), §60.

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logical relations, but the condition of having such a taxonomy and the fundamental experience of its use is singular, homogeneous, and undifferentiated. This makes our superficial descriptions unstable, however important they might be. There is no final, premise affirming answer to the question, ‘Which is an entity, a broom or a broom handle?’ This example is of precisely the right kind because the site of investigation is the world, the taxonomy we inhabit. The conviction that the world (our taxonomy) is populated by a diverse array of objects is a secondary story produced through self-reflection on that world. As we saw in the previous chapter, talk about a fundamental taxonomy does not refer to something in one’s head but to the world one inhabits – even the contrast between self and world is a result of superficial reflection. The unity here claimed for fundamental experience is more than simply one of general coherence or a continuity of consciousness; it is not merely the coordination of multiple senses when they are subsumed under concepts in order to create the experience of objects and their subsistence through time. It is not Kantian ‘understanding’. It is better captured by the claim that there are no individual objects. And whatever this unitary condition is, it ought to be familiar if it is indeed the basic, immanent experience of everyday life. This is not a secret or mystical or hidden unity, but one that is right under our nose. In our reading of Being and Time, we saw that the baseline experience of everyday activity was a unitary one. When hammering, the difference between body and tool, and between tool and environment, was made fuzzy, even erased. Any good habit of superficial classification would demand that we identify multiple objects (one’s body, the hand, the tool, and items in the local environment), but Heidegger offered us techniques for seeing that, while one is absorbed in the activity, the difference between these items disappears from the field of our experience. I then offered similar claims about the activity of reading. What would a unitary account of reading entail? The logical difference between distinct items will need to be eliminated: one’s commitments, the physical presentation of scripture, the meaning produced. At any given moment during the activity of reading, the relation between these ‘three’ items can be descriptively plotted within a system of classification. Logical relations can be superficially ascribed to fundamentally united commitments. But if reading is like the act of hammering, then (in the language of Heidegger) all three are experienced as ‘ready-to-hand’. They are simultaneously presupposed and relied upon in a unitary manner, and it is this that constitutes their ‘relation’. During the activity of using language, the material stuff of language is united with meaning within a background of existing commitments. In the act of reading, the old commitments, the physical language of scripture, and the meaning that is produced, exist as homogeneous ‘parts’ of a taxonomy of classification, an inhabited world. Consider the typeface of this sentence. Paying close attention to it, and trying to sustain that attention while reading is like the effort to hammer a nail while considering the hammer. Attention to the tools of language tends to undermine our ability to use them in the meaning-making enterprise, and it alerts us to our capacity to use language without attention of that kind. Someone without any



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knowledge of English has, in certain respects, a better grasp of what it sounds like than a native speaker, for whom it shows up in a world of meaning. Another way of approaching this phenomenon is to observe that physical language is like any other physical stuff – birds or rocks or the sky. It always shows up, is always classified, as something. And what we then do with language (make meaning) is something we already do with the whole world, with the whole taxonomy we inhabit. Not only do we make new meaning with language in the same manner as when we engage other things in the world, but to do this is both to use the whole world and to alter it. My task in the next section will be to show why we should increasingly dispense with the plurality of categories we use to approach this single phenomenon. I will focus on the example of reading scripture. I will argue that there is no single item which counts as scriptural language, but rather that scripture (whether the meaning or the linguistic tool) is a feature ‘infecting’ the entire taxonomy. For a religious person, scripture fails to name an isolated aspect of the world because the world sings with scriptural meaning and scripture resounds with the meaning of the world. In examining what counts as scripture, I hope to display the unity of fundamental commitments and the instability of our inherited habits of superficial classification. The kind of reflective activity undertaken in theology entails precisely such an act of superficial classification when it treats the relations it finds between scripture, tradition, and reason; but a close examination of these phenomena makes it increasingly difficult to preserve their identities. The meaning of scriptural language is not unique in its comprehensive effects on a taxonomy. All commitments have this effect. New meaning will affect the whole taxonomy, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, often in moderate ways. Scriptural meaning is useful for displaying those always-pervasive effects because, for Christians, they are more substantive. The next section will turn our attention again to the Kimbanguists and their use of scripture. In terms of making meaning, religious reading is not a special case. It is not different in kind than reading novels or road signs or rocks – and the apparently more general cases of ‘language’ cannot simply be pried apart from the special cases of ‘scripture’. Scripture, however, presents an extraordinary case because its effects are more obvious to us and the record of these effects is unusually well preserved. Religious readers grant to their scriptures licence to have a great effect on their world when they make meaning. We can describe those effects in terms of alterations of a more superordinate kind, but it remains that such descriptions are superficially applied to a world that is in every case comprehensively affected. If our fundamental commitments are only ever available to superficial depictions of diversity, then the consequences will return us to the temporal considerations we explored above. The temporal contrast between having a particular commitment and using it will be made impossible. This will bear out in my argument that there is no beginning or end to the act of reading scripture, which I earlier promised.

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3. Language and Taxonomy The material equipment of language can take various forms: seeing the words in a book, singing a song, remembering a line, hearing a poem, touching braille … All of these are possible presentations of material language. In this section I will try to make the identification of temporally isolated acts of reading more difficult by undermining the physical distinctiveness and isolation of that which is read. Which material stuff in the world is used as material for reading? Which items provoke the leap to meaning of the right kind? Imagine someone searching for a Chinese restaurant in the middle of London, maybe fabled for its cuisine but located on a small side-street. This person knows herself to be near it, but reads no Chinese. Suddenly she sees a restaurant-looking building with Chinese characters written across its front. Found! In what way would these characters (without any knowledge of Chinese) have been meaningfully read? In what way has the restaurant-looking building been read? In what way has the fact that there are no other Chinese restaurant-looking buildings nearby been read? The claim advanced here is that there is no clear-cut boundary between engaging material language and living the rest of life. There is no clear-cut boundary between making meaning with braille and turning a key. These are importantly different activities, but that difference lies not in whether they are meaning-making affairs of the right kind. And in their ‘reading’, they do not split language, tradition, and reason. Consider the Kimbanguists. We might identify in their community a single act of reading, perhaps using the physical book of scripture. It appears to be a distinct moment, but it occurs on a day in a yearly calendar of Kimbanguist events, perhaps Simon’s birthday, which involves singing psalms and knowing the appropriate Bible verses for that day – where does this knowing ‘go’ during the day? As conversation with today’s Kimbanguists will demonstrate, Christian scripture is a basic ingredient of their everyday speech. And with more than one Kimbanguist satellite television network and radio channel, life in the Kimbanguist world is inundated with scripture. When Kimbanguist posters adorn the walls, perhaps displaying the dove of the Holy Spirit (Jn 1.32) along with images of Kimbangu’s family members, when verses of scripture are printed across the top of stationery, when phones ring to the sound of a well-known hymn, when everyday language stitches together quotes, scraps, and allusions to scripture, is shaped by a pious syntax, and everyday thought and prayer bears the same material, one begins to wonder where one engagement with ‘scripture’ ends and another begins. But it is not merely these many identifiable fragments of scripture that inundate their day – it is something broader like the day itself that concerns us, for it is understood in terms of scriptural meaning. If this is true for their scripture, we might be inclined to think it true a fortiori of language as a whole. But if the account advocated here is accurate, then it will not be as easy to distinguish sacred and secular within language, or to distinguish Christian language and Christian world. If there really does obtain the sort of



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unity within fundamental experience that was seen in our reading of Heidegger, then there cannot be distinct, special regions of experience that are Christian while others remain wholly unaffected. We will need a different vocabulary or descriptive strategy for understanding what it means to be more or less Christian – to inhabit a world of meaning that is more or less recognizably Christian – while also maintaining the assertion that the effect of meaning is always comprehensive. The whole material world is linguistic equipment in the sense that it is meaningfully classified (this is how it shows up at all). One can see the world as the creation of the triune God, or as the site of Kimbangu’s incarnation, or as maybe created by God or maybe constituted by atoms bumping in the void. There are three things we are tempted to think are different: scriptural meaning, linguistic meaning, and the meaning of the ‘world’ (in Heidegger’s sense). On my account of fundamental classification, a unity in fundamental experience has these differences known only in the reflective stories we tell ourselves, only when we ‘stop to think about it’. They have no ground in Heidegger’s everyday experience of the world. And the material correlates of these three – a physical Bible, a whole literature, and the lived world – will not present everyday experience with tools for making meaning that is distinctly religious or secular. The tools themselves will be religious for the religious person. It is just as much in the act of treating a work as immoral and unbiblical (say, Madame Bovary) that a work’s meaning is had within the scope of some biblical world and defined in terms of biblical meaning. When one inhabits the world as Simon’s creation, how distinct is the boundary between, on the one hand, the various physical forms in which religious language is presented, and on the other, the objects of everyday life? If the material equipment of scriptural language is consistently used to provoke scriptural meaning, and that material is various (songs, text, spoken quotes, allusions, posters) – so how much material provokes scriptural meaning for the devout Kimbanguist (crosses, removed shoes at the doorway, Kimbanguist clothing, sacred sites, deferential posture, holy water, the sunset …)? The whole world declares the glory of Simon Kimbangu, his sons, and grandson. It is the world of scriptural meaning. There are problems with the spatial isolation of the material tools of scripture in the Kimbanguist community. When one inhabits a scriptural world, one is always reading scripture. True, some readings will be set apart with special rituals, but that cannot be our criterion for identification. To read the material stuff of scripture is to make meaning, including new meaning, but this is itself only to change the world of material stuff, to make it mean differently. Neither meaning nor meaning-making have boundaries in fundamental experience. The identification of one’s taxonomy with the world that one inhabits, that one’s system of classification is coterminous with the horizon of what exists, means that our trouble with the physical boundaries of linguistic objects is equally a logical problem with the classificatory scheme of description. Where in a scheme of classification is scriptural language to be located? Taxonomies are describable in terms of internally distinct categories with logical relations, but the use of such a taxonomy to uncover a particular world is

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not itself experienced as a plurality. The experience of being thusly committed, of using a system of commitments to inhabit a meaningful world, is constant, singular, homogeneous, and undifferentiated. It does not start or stop, and thus reading does not start or stop. This creates problems for superficial descriptions: how are we to depict a scriptural aspect of the entire world – will placing an item named ‘scripture’ in a superordinate category accomplish this task? Will it prevent our ability to describe other comprehensive dimensions of the world one inhabits? The difficulty of representing ‘scripture’ in a scheme of classification turns on the fact that scriptural meaning contaminates the entire system of meaning. Every item in the world is classified in such a way that it will be equipment for provoking meaning (that is just what it is to be classified). The real point here is that ‘linguistic’ meaning is not a special kind of thing. There is only meaning. Meaning precedes and makes possible the identification of any item, including linguistic objects like Bibles, which are in turn used to provoke ‘new’ meaning. It is a whole world of meaning that allows for linguistic objects, which are themselves only those objects as constituted by that meaning, even if their purpose is to revise the very meaning which founds them. Superficial classification permits a variety of descriptive strategies. One strategy for describing the apparently dynamic or unitary relations between commitments would be to say that Heidegger’s ‘as structure’ affects every level of the taxonomy with relevant considerations of scriptural meaning – we considered this in the previous chapter. Not only is some material language classified ‘as’ meaningful and as for making meaning, but there is a similar ‘linguistic’ dimension to the whole world. The material equipment of language can vary in physical form, and any material in the world can be equipment for producing new meaning, as in the case of the Kimbanguists. Any phenomenon can be classified as material ‘language’ for producing meaning, and all phenomena are already classified as meaningful, which is the condition for the possibility of their appearance. Everything is of meaningful consideration, everything is already ‘read’ as language. At the level of fundamental experience, there is no temporal contrast between reading and not reading because there is no contrast between inhabiting the world and leaving it behind. It may be important to reassert at this point that I am not denying the production and accumulation of meaning. I am claiming that such changes are equally changes of one’s entire world and the inhabitation of it. Given that we can describe such changes (even if in superficial terms), how are we to understand what they amount to fundamentally, in terms of the inhabited world of first-order experience? How do we account for our learning and forgetting many things? One strategy (and it can only be a strategy) is to suggest that categories overlap, but in this case, we would need to claim that all categories overlap entirely. Thus, even if they are newly acquired or revised, the field of what exists (and the reasoning it is) is comprehensively changed with every minor variation. This might sound outrageous, but I would suggest that it coheres with our everyday experience: the slightest shifts in digestion (Nietzsche), sobriety (Joyce), or attunement (Heidegger) change or colour our world, open up alternative possibilities, or



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arrest our pursuits. Tourists find Paris to be rotten because their feet hurt. Or imagine it is one’s birthday and consider how this might shape one’s experience of the day and even one’s interactions with complete strangers. Consider how the conviction that it is the last workday of the week might shape all of one’s tasks. Or consider the ‘emptiness’ of the whole world after a distressing loss. But do we really have an experience of our commitments as completely united and singular? Are there not alternatives which are moderate, sensible, and widely accepted? Alternatives to Heidegger’s Unity It is worth briefly recalling how Heidegger’s unity of first-order experience fits within a wider view of modern philosophy. Briefly reflecting on what problems are supposed to be solved by Being and Time is a good reminder that the alternatives to Heidegger’s picture are themselves potentially committed to inexplicable mysteries. On Heidegger’s account, the alternatives both fail (phenomenally) to accommodate our everyday experience of unity, and fail (logically) to explain how mind and world could possibly be in relation. If we turn away from Heidegger’s vision of unitary experience, perhaps hoping to preserve the special status of scripture or tradition or reason, we may find ourselves in a world far more enigmatic and inscrutable. The most obvious contrast supporting a plurality of taxonomical items is the one Heidegger’s account attempts most vigorously to defeat: the contrast between subject and object. Heidegger is famously opposed to the Cartesian picture of a subject–object dichotomy, but he permits something of a similar contrast at a superordinate level of analysis, a contrast beyond the mind–world relationship. Fundamental schemes of classification are different in kind than that which they classify (by which I cannot mean phenomena, since phenomena putatively result from fundamental classification). Said differently, Heidegger’s superordinate contrast is not between you and an object in front of you, but between you and the object together, and whatever is outside the horizon of your experience. Heidegger moves the boundaries of the contrast to the horizon between being and non-being, wherein the latter term denotes something like (but different from) Kant’s thing-in-itself.4 The problem with the Cartesian account is that it naïvely draws a boundary between what happens ‘inside’ human thought and the ‘outside’ world, failing to recognize that the whole world is a basic part of thought and that thought is a basic part of the world, which is to say that the contrast is only formed later, in self-reflection. For Heidegger’s fundamental experience, there is no contrast between thinking stuff and an extended stuff because ‘extension’ and ‘thinking’ are 4. See Chapter 8 §2, where I discuss Kant’s appeals to spontaneity and mystery in the face of the key contrasts. Kant, KrV, A51/B75, A68/B93, 78/B103, A278/B334; of course, statements along the lines that two things must be related do not explain how it is so; cf. Kant’s footnote to Religion, 6: 65, ‘there is no analogy, but a formidable leap’.

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taxonomic claims made in superficial reflection. Descartes was left with a mystery about how res cogitans could possibly be related to res extensa, a chasm that he bridged by appealing to the goodness of God. And the scope of Cartesian contrast between res extensa and res cogitans did not yet extend beyond the domain of res. It failed to recognize how what is beyond our horizon contributes to our world, how what is unclassified is brought into fundamental classification and comes into existence for us. We might say that there is something to which fundamental classification is related, but this suggests a kind of ‘existence’ for it which Heidegger thinks solely a product of classificatory systems. So when Heidegger depicts the most basic feature of humanity as inhabiting a system of classification (‘being there’, Dasein), it follows that all of what is inhabited and known is that which has been uncovered by a scheme of fundamental classification. The limits of classification are the horizon of ‘being’. Heidegger poses a direct relationship between schemes of fundamental classification and that which they classify. This is important. Heidegger putatively solves the mind–matter relationship by relegating it to a superficial distinction made in our reflections on a unitary experience. Yet Heidegger moves that boundary between heterogeneous substances to the horizon of existence itself. As we have seen, for Heidegger, there is no possible correspondence between our fundamental classificatory schemes and what they classify, since they are different in kind, but rather there must be a generative relationship (but even ‘relationship’ is misleading). Thus, although the whole world is a basic part of being a human, there is something ‘underneath’ or ‘beyond’ the world and the human, something that is entirely heterogeneous with thought or experience or anything we can know. This is where Heidegger’s superordinate repetition of the Cartesian contrast comes into view. If Heidegger has successfully resolved a problem generated by the Cartesian split between subjects and objects (the problem of how they can possibly be related), it has been accomplished by shifting that problem into a more superordinate territory, the contrast between being and something like non-being. A taxonomy of commitments is not only required to produce experience, but experience may be used to revise that taxonomy. It remains that between schemes of classification and the un-thought stuff that gets classified, there can obtain a relationship that is either more or less successful. But success itself is measured only by what a scheme immanently deems worthwhile. Some taxonomies will be better at preventing diseases, or promoting peace, or making conversation, or flying aeroplanes.5 Christian theology has spectacular ambitions here, and those are brought into clear view when the unity of scripture, tradition, and reason is accepted. Christianity aims to supply a taxonomy that uncovers the world according to its true order and to orient human worship in the true way. The commitments 5. A more detailed account, especially for those familiar with Henry Allison’s interpretation of Kant, would be William Blattner, ‘Heidegger’s Kantian Idealism Revisited’, Inquiry 47 (2011): 321–37.



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installed and revised by Christian theology aim to reveal God and the world as they are supposed to be, in a basic harmony between taxonomy and what is beyond it. For the most part, these comments should be unsurprising after our previous examination of Heidegger’s account of ‘uncovering’. I have left much of the rich detail unsaid in this brief rehearsal, noting instead how it relates to the supposed mysteries of other accounts in the modern Cartesian tradition. Recall, for instance, that schemes of classification are largely inherited. Recall that there is a dynamic and cyclical relation between fundamental and superficial classification, allowing for changes over time and the formation of potentially contrasting habits of uncovering the world. Recall the adverbial and teleological way in which all categories are used to uncover the world as something that matters for one’s life. Recall there are no strong contrasts between fact and value. This is not only because every commitment used to produce ‘facts’ entails features which can be described as ‘values’; or because entire schemes of classification are inheritances which only ever contain a limited number of commitments, thus exposing some things in their horizon while ‘ignoring’ others; but also because states of affairs, claims like ‘the cat is on the mat’ and ‘my ice cream is better than yours’, involve relations which are features of schemes of classification rather than features of what they classify. ‘Relation’ is for Heidegger a feature of classificatory schemes, not a feature of whatever it is which is un-thought and beyond the field of experience. There are no states of affairs which are not classified into such states. What then of spatial differentiation? Is the linguistic object to be conflated with the subject, with one’s own self? On Heidegger’s account, our effort to establish a contrast between the reader and that which is read will entail misguided apprehensions of one region of thought as an independent item of not-thought, misconstrued by some notion of ‘other’ or ‘object’ or ‘world’. The judgement ‘not I’ is a reflexive and superficial characterization of our own experience and only ever applied to parts of a world that is first and foremost given to experience as united with ourselves and undifferentiated in itself. ‘Not I’ is a superficial story told about our own fundamental experience. (This is a basic difference, incidentally, between Heidegger and Kant, for whom space is an a priori form of sensibility that already differentiates its phenomena from the perceiver.) Only because the material equipment of language is fundamentally classified can it have the power to produce meaning, to change how people think, to speak with force and persuasion. Only fundamentally classified is it ‘ready-to-hand’. Descriptively, the subordinate position of material language within an inherited scheme of classification will determine this tool as for the production of meanings which others, inhabiting other worlds, find unreasonable or absurd. The chain of commitments superordinate to material language will variously define its purposes. Kimbanguists and Europeans find each other’s use of the ‘same’ scriptural language strange. We can usefully describe these absurdities and normalities as the logical function of an accumulation of superordinate commitments – which orient and determine the equipment of language just as it appears within the their respective horizons of being, within the world of a taxonomy. It remains that

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these descriptive strategies are superficial and must ignore the singularity of the phenomenon of inhabiting a world and making meaning.

4. Finite Reasoning Do the Kimbanguists read Christianity’s scriptures? An imaginary scenario will aid our pursuit of an answer to this question about the physical equipment of language, potentially saving us from leaping to habitual conclusions. Consider the film The Gods Must Be Crazy.6 An empty Coca-Cola bottle is thrown from an aeroplane window and falls into the world of a traditional San community. No longer does it exist as a tool among its old group of equipment: fizzy Coca-Cola, refrigerated dispensing machines, bottle openers, glasses, ice, tables, restaurants, bottle collection crates, paper money, central banks, and service personnel – all gone. In the film, the bottle is put to many uses, but none are found to be suitable. It is simply not materially capable of the tasks assigned to it in its new world. Its apparently very narrow purpose remains undiscovered and it thus fails to integrate with its new world.7 An indication of this kind of problem is given by Heidegger in a lecture series from the summer semester of 1925, generally viewed as the first draft of Being and Time. Heidegger suggests that how a tool is understood, how it is classified and defined within a scheme of commitments, how it is located within a taxonomy, will need to be commensurate with the material possibilities of that tool: The tool has the character of being of ‘in-order-to.’ The range of usability of a tool is narrower or wider. A hammer has a wider range of usability than a watchmaker’s instrument, which is tailored precisely to his particular kind of concern. The narrower the sphere of use, the more unequivocal the reference. Das Werkzeug hat den Seinscharakter des ‘Um-zu’; der Umkreis der Verwendbarkeit eines Werkzeuges ist enger oder weiter. Ein Hammer hat einen weiteren Umkreis der Verwendbarkeit als ein Instrument des Uhrmachers, das nun gerade auf seine bestimmte Art des Besorgens zugeschnitten ist. Je enger der Verwendungskreis, um so eindeutiger ist die Verweisung.8

The San community finds it impossible to integrate the bottle with their existing 6. Jamie Uys, The Gods Must Be Crazy (Directed by Jamie Uys, 1981, 109 minutes). 7. The example of the Coke bottle was treated in a lecture by Hubert Dreyfus as an example of ontological change from readiness-to-hand to presence-at-hand. Here I consider the situation but, in contrast, I imagine that there is no such change. Hubert Dreyfus, ‘Being’, University of California, Berkeley, 28 August 2007. 8. GA 20, 259 [E 191]. English in brackets follows Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985).



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taxonomy of commitments, with the world of their everyday activities. It makes for an interesting film. But let us imagine a new place is found for the former soda bottle. Imagine it is used as a musical instrument, let us say the musical instrument for an important daily ritual. After many generations its status is well-established, its history forgotten, and its importance unquestioned. Its use has become unhinged from its origin. It is the sacred chime. Imagine the community learns to make identical replicas of the first chime, which is, incidentally, now long-forgotten and long-lost. It is true that these chimes look very much like Coca-Cola bottles, identical in fact, and it is true that these new chimes have shapes carefully inscribed on their surface that look like exactly the words ‘Coca-Cola’ – but these are not Coke bottles. These are sacred chimes. The act of putting anything inside them has never been considered; further, it is unthinkable, and were it to happen, sacrilegious. The chimes have nothing to do with drinking or carrying liquid; they are the sacred chimes for the ritual. We can notice that the chimes are presupposed in a particular way. They are part of a scheme of fundamental classification, and they are relied upon for a variety of important social tasks. Being and Time would describe them as readyto-hand. What they are has been defined by their classification. How the sacred chimes exist has been determined and oriented by the San world in which they appear. Their use, their purpose, and all their material and social relations are established and known. It is true that their use has become unhinged from their origin, and now, let us suppose, every San child knows how to make a sacred chime and treat it appropriately. However unlikely, imagine our San community has named these sacred chimes ‘oldcokebottles’. If Heidegger’s account of tools is right, then this name, this superficial classification, does not affect what they are. In Heidegger’s winter lectures of 1925 (Logic: The Question of Truth) given a few months before finishing the final draft of Being and Time, he presents a stark contrast between two levels of human experience. I have been calling these levels ‘fundamental’ and ‘superficial’ classification. Rehearsing his account will aid our consideration of those sacred chimes named ‘oldcokebottles’, and I will examine some passages below. In these lectures, Heidegger presents a picture of the everyday world wherein what we encounter is generally already familiar. He asks that we temporarily bracket the question of whether this picture has wider applications (he suggests it does).9 We are already fully competent to deal with this world before offering any descriptions, whether to ourselves or to others, of what it is that we are doing or plan to do. We already inhabit a world in which everything is classified and has meaning, or is in the process of being meaningfully classified. Being and Time, we know, will describe this as a world that is ready-to-hand, and we have examined how its unitary and dynamic character is supposed to constitute meaning and explain the possibility of reference and relation. In the winter lectures of 1925, spoken language is parasitic on this familiar world of meaning and referencing.10 9. GA 21, 143. 10. GA 21, 158–61.

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In exactly what way is everything ‘known’ at this implicit level of our everyday engagement with the world while going about our activities? How does each item that we use get its meaning before language, that is, before the superficial classifications we use to talk about their meaning? How is everything already defined, oriented, and determined? Heidegger’s answer, in short, is in terms of what things will do for us in the future. Things show up according to their purpose. The end for which we will use something determines how it matters, how it has meaning or sense, how it appears in our world. This is why something like ‘time’ will be more superordinate than ‘being’ in Being and Time. Temporality is the meaning of being, but this can only be a funny sort of time, because it names a present habit of prediction rather than the arrival of the future. Of course our present habit of prediction is grounded on the taxonomy we have inherited, but Heidegger observes that we tend to revise that inheritance on the basis of our predictions, and so a circle is formed in the relations between the (imagined) future, the (imagined) past, and the (perceived) present. We relate to the present in terms of an imagined future that relies upon our inheritance of a past which we tend to revise in order to bring into alignment with the present. Heidegger describes the way in which we have always already leapt ahead in time and returned, through the past, to see things as what they are for. Everything has sense in terms of this future end; we are always already coming back from the future to see things – we make sense of them in terms of the end for which we will use them, the end by which they matter to us – and the end is logically first. This is not normally a conscientious and careful process of deliberation. This names how we are already sitting and reading, using chairs and books and tables and rooms and walking on the right parts of the street. Thus he says in the lectures, ‘Do not understand this to mean that we were first given a something that is free of meaning, and then a meaning gets attached to it. Rather, what is first of all given … is the “for-writing,” the “for-entering-and-exiting,” the “for-illuminating,” the “for-sitting.” ’11 Heidegger insists that this way of having a world is ‘pre-predicative’. It is an entire world composed of what Being and Time calls the ready-to-hand. It already contains meaning and referring. The language used in superficial classification makes a late arrival. It takes the things we already have in a meaningful way – the ‘for-writing-on’ – and says, ‘That is a chalkboard.’12 Fundamental classification provides an everyday world of ‘primary meaning, to which words accrue.’13 Words must first be given the meaning of ‘for making-meaning’, or ‘for-revising-meaning’, or ‘for-naming-meaning-that-we-already-have’. Words must be classified fundamentally before being put into the service of superficial classification. Fundamental classification uncovers something as something, a piece of chalk is uncovered as ‘for-writing’, and superficial classification (such as a verbal 11. GA 21, 144 [E 121], cf. 147–51 [E 124–6]. GA 2 repeats these points less clearly, for example, 151. 12. GA 21, 144–5 [E 122], cf. 159. 13. GA 21, 151 [E 127].



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statement) relies on this uncovering for its activity of naming an object and ascribing a predicate: The statement’s modification of the as-structure always presupposes the original as-structure, the underlying understanding of the thing that gets flattened out in and through the statement. Thus, determination-via-statement is never a primary act of uncovering.14 Diese Modifizierung der Als-Struktur in der Aussage setzt aber immer voraus die ursprüngliche Struktur des Als, nämlich das zugrunde liegende Verständnis dessen, was in der Aussage und durch sie nivelliert wird. Daher ist das aussagende Bestimmen nie ein primäres Entdecken.15

Heidegger quickly sketches an account of language’s late appearance in the world of meaning, relying on a distinction between what I describe as fundamental and superficial classification. It remains that the logically secondary status of language does not prevent it from being used to change the world of meaning that can exist without it. This is worth quoting in full. Only in so far as this capacity to understand – to make sense of – already belongs to Dasein, can Dasein express itself in sounds, such that these vocal sounds are words that now have meaning. Because Dasein, in its very being, is sense-making, it lives in meanings and can express itself in and as meanings. Only because there are such vocal sounds (i.e., words) that accrue to meanings, can there be individual words, i.e., the linguistic forms that are stamped by meaning and can be detached from that meaning. We call such a whole of sounds in which Dasein’s capacity to understand has somehow evolved and become existential, language; and when I speak here of a whole of existence [Daseins] I do not mean an individual Dasein, but being-with-each-other qua historical.16 Und nur sofern solche Verständlichkeit – Bedeutung – zum Dasein schon gehört, kann dieses sich lautlich so äußern, daß diese Verlautbarungen Worte sind, die nun so etwas wie Bedeutung haben. Weil Dasein in seinem Sein selbst bedeutend ist, lebt es in Bedeutungen und kann sich als diese aussprechen. Und nur weil es solche der Bedeutung zuwachsende Verlautbarungen gibt, d.h. Worte, deshalb gibt es Wörter; d.h. nun erst können von der Bedeutung die durch sie selbst geprägten Sprachgestalten ablösbar werden. Ein solches Ganzes von Verlautbarungen, in dem gewissermaßen das Verständnis eines Daseins erwächst und existenzial ist, bezeichnen wir als Sprache; wobei, wenn ich vom 14. GA 21, [E 134]. 15. GA 21, 159. 16. GA 21, [E 127]. I have silently amended Sheehan’s English, leaving Dasein un-translated.

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Ganzen des Daseins spreche, ich nicht das einzelne Dasein meine, sondern das Miteinandersein als ein geschichtliches.17

Heidegger adds a historical dimension to language and its potentially interdependent development with the world of meaning.18 Language ‘every day grows and every day dissolves … changes from generation to generation or lies dead for centuries.’19 He depicts language as a historical phenomenon because meaning (the end for which we use things within a particular world) is itself a historical phenomenon: And because Dasein, as understanding and sense-making, is intrinsically historical, so too the particular kind of being of that manifold of words that we call our vocabulary as a whole, or language, is also historical.20 Und da Dasein in sich selbst als verstehendes und Bedeutendes geschichtlich ist, ist die eigentümliche Seinsart der Wortmannigfaltigkeit, die wir Wortschatz im Ganzem oder Sprache nennen, geschichtlich.21

Heidegger’s roughly sketched picture of language is one in which its material properties, its physical vocalization or imprint on paper, is a tool for disclosing and labelling meaning that already exists. The revision of existing meaning and the creation of new meaning are afforded language only within the range of possibilities provided by a world that is already established as meaningful. The horizon of some particular world we know to be coterminous with the scope of a system of fundamental classification; and we know that fundamental classification uncovers or reveals such a world as that world. Existing meaning can be highlighted. New meaning can be added. Both cases rely on the possibilities of the physical tools of material language, which are in turn defined by the world in which they appear. Superficial classification will be parasitic upon and limited by fundamental classification. In brief, language use is inherently self-reflexive. It is parasitic on that world of meaning which allows it to appear, even if it aims to expand or revise that world. The self-reflection which language performs goes unnoticed to the extent that its world is held in common. As a tool for communication, language both presupposes and aims to create a common world. But when the same material tool appears in two contrasting worlds, it may have already been given contrasting purposes. 17. GA 21, 151. 18. See also, for example, GA 2, 150, ‘Even if it has undergone such a [thematic] interpretation, it recedes into an understanding which does not stand out from the background. And this is the very mode in which it is the essential foundation for everyday circumspective interpretation.’ 19. GA 21, 151 [E 128]. 20. GA 21, [E 128], reading ‘Dasein’ for Sheehan’s ‘existence’. 21. GA 21, 151–2.



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So what of our sacred chimes named ‘oldcokebottles’? We imagined a world in which the San community produces sacred chimes that are identical to Coca-Cola bottles, and (ridiculously) they are even called ‘oldcokebottles’. But they are not bottles; they are musical instruments. They are firmly established within a taxonomy that defines their social and material purposes. They are well known and appreciated for their musical qualities, and they are locally produced for this purpose. It remains that they look exactly like old Coke bottles. If Heidegger’s account of fundamental classification and the parasitic abilities of language is roughly correct (and Being and Time provides more nuance to the cyclical relation between these two levels), then ‘oldcokebottle’ names a sacred chime. In the San world it does not name an old Coke bottle. Now imagine that our dashing hero and heroine from The Gods Must Be Crazy arrive in our San village. What will Andrew and Kate make of an entire community which is dedicated to using ‘oldcokebottles’ for sacred rituals? What kind of conversations about ‘oldcokebottles’ might transpire between these two worlds? What if Andrew wants to use the bottle for drinking? It is my contention that this is how things stand with the Kimbanguists’ use of Christian scripture. Or more accurately, what could be Christian scripture in another world, but which is the Kimbanguist book. And in precisely the same way that this is a true contrast between Kimbanguists and British Baptists, it is true for Protestants and Catholics on a smaller scale, and for Lutherans and Calvinists on an even smaller scale. Equipment must not be treated separately from the world in which it exists because it does not exist independently of its world. One of the problems with disputes about the meaning of language is that they typically conceive of themselves as just that. The claim, for example, that the Bible refers to something other than Simon Kimbangu is simply not true; it is empirically false within the Kimbanguist world – conflicting meanings are produced by tools (material language) which are only apparently identical, but which have been constituted as being for different purposes. To what could disputants look for resolution? Disagreements about meaning produced by language cannot look to the equipment to solve the problem. That would be like asserting that ‘oldcokebottles’ are ‘old Coke bottles’ – the dispute stalls there because it does not identify where the conflict lies and because it misunderstands how language works. Any tool, any piece of equipment, arrives ‘late’ in a world of referring and meaning. Said differently, the purpose of equipment cannot be separated from the world in which it is classified. The purpose of equipment is determined by the superordinate commitments which orient and define it. However, if my argument about the unity of tradition, reason, and language is correct, then, in the final analysis, even these descriptions must fail under scrutiny. The analysis of the world of fundamental experience into a taxonomic hierarchy of commitments will only be a superficial description of a unitary phenomenon. The effort to instruct Kimbanguists to balance their reading of scripture with tradition or reason would not direct them to produce Bible readings more agreeable to orthodox Christians. The ‘problem’ with Kimbanguist reasoning

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about the language of scripture cannot be isolated to the language itself or to any apparently discrete act of reading. It is not a problem with their treatment of a book. Disputes about the meaning of that language will continually fail if they look to the language to solve the ‘problem’. The ‘problem’ is the entire world that Kimbanguists inhabit and the reasoning that it entails. Scriptural meaning can be described as ingredient to every level of the taxonomy of commitments that a devoted Kimbanguist might have. The entire logic, the whole accumulative force of these commitments, bears on the meaning of scriptural language and militates against any apprehension of the Bible as subversive to the world of a Kimbanguist – or rather, a subversion which might align it with European commitments. Kimbanguist reasoning is utterly biblical. Scriptural meaning is a world they inhabit. The language of the Bible is the language of their everyday life, and the meaning and images of the Bible permeate existence. The ‘problem’ with Kimbanguist reasoning is a ‘problem’ with their entire world. And exactly the same must be said, from the Kimbanguist perspective, about the ‘problem’ of European Christian reading. The Belgians and French and British inhabit a world which prevents them from understanding the language of the Bible. They fail to see its basic message about Simon and his children. The ability for an outsider to comprehend how a Kimbanguist might understand a particular passage is remarkably different from actually taking scripture to be about Simon Kimbangu, than actually believing. The latter requires the acquisition of an entire taxonomy of Kimbanguist commitments (rather than the production of subordinate meanings already classified as false). For most European or Western Christians, it would require a new world, which is to say it would require one to be a different person. Imagine asking a Kimbanguist to commit to a non-Kimbanguist meaning for a single passage of scripture. What would this require? It would require breaking rules of grammar and logic. It would require misusing the equipment of language to say something that language does not really mean. It would require one to be unreasonable. It is not easier for a devout European Christian to decide that some one passage of Christian scripture is about Simon. It is not easier for a modern scholar, committed to historical criticism, to adopt a Kimbanguist meaning for some pericope of text. The one phenomenon named by ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ – the phenomenon of being committed to a particular world – does not permit easy shifts in reference for the language of the Bible. Why? Why is it more difficult to understand something like scriptural language in a new way than to adjust one’s interpretation of a children’s story? What transpires that makes it more difficult? This might be said: the material stuff of scriptural language shows up and is classified as a tool that exists to refer to meaning that is ingredient to commitments throughout the whole taxonomy. It is defined by the entire world in which it appears. Shifts in its meaning entail changes across the whole world. Of course ‘new’ meaning can be produced, but it is likely to be produced within the range of possibilities supplied by the existing world, reinforcing rather than revising that



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picture. A Kimbanguist may be delighted to discover for the very first time the measurements of Nkamba-Jerusalem in the Old Testament. Concluding Remarks We have been considering the relationship between ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’. A satisfying explanation of our own reading habits, I have argued, will elude us until we appreciate the unity of scripture with the taxonomy constituting our world. We might ask, if this is true, then why are our inherited habits of selfreflection so intractable? Why is the picture of plurality so persuasive? How do we form this story of plurality, and does the very possession of such a story itself threaten the putative unity on which it is founded? Is an account of unity defensible? Answers have begun to form along two fronts. First, logically, Heidegger argues that every relation between any two items requires a superordinate unity as the condition for the possibility of that relation. He starts at the very bottom of a taxonomy and works his way upwards, from the apparently disparate objects of everyday life, to the embracing categories which allow the world to appear. We inhabit these taxonomies, according to Heidegger, because a specific kind of relationship obtains between our schemes of classification and that which they classify: they are identified with each other. This means our thinking, our classificatory scheme, is principally outside our heads. Our fundamental taxonomy is the world we inhabit. Or more precisely, there is no first-order distinction between self and world. Thus the unity of our first-order experience is explainable in terms of the unity of our taxonomy, and it is only in the secondary stories we tell ourselves, it is only in acts of self-reflection, that we postulate a diversity of isolatable objects, and position these in distinction from ourselves as subjects. Like unicorns (which we classify as not being part of the world), and like apples (which we classify as not being part of ourselves), such postulations of diversity rely upon the unity that they deny. For Heidegger unity is logically required to explain our experience of plurality, and a phenomenology of the world will bear this out. The fundamental unity of our experience can be characterized in terms of the unity of our fundamental taxonomy. Heidegger’s careful investigation of first-order consciousness in everyday life aims to demonstrate that this unitary character is already within the field of our experience, before we tell ourselves otherwise. His phenomenology is that investigation. Whether Heidegger achieves a comprehensive depiction of this taxonomy, whether Heidegger is finally able to expose a single category or process underlying all the others, is a different matter. Second, temporally, Heidegger depicts every item in our taxonomy as presently classified according to its future end. ‘Time’ is presently used to distinguish between ends and thus to establish a diversity of entities. Yet upon close inspection, this diversity-constituting temporality is slightly unusual because it does not entail any flow of time, any passing sequence of moments. Rather, it is true of every moment. Heidegger suggests that one organizes present experiences

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on the basis of apparently temporal categories. We see an item as distinctly that item, separating it from its environment and thus forming a plurality of entities, just to the extent and in the manner that the item matters for ‘the future’; it is a future we (presently) imagine on the basis of our (present) reception of the ‘past’. We tend to adjust the (present) inheritance of our taxonomy ‘from the past’ in order to align it with this ‘future’, a circular phenomenon Heidegger observes both in our relation to the items of everyday life and in relation to ourselves. In short, the ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’ which individuate the diverse items of our taxonomy are all equally features of the present. For Heidegger, our present is constituted by a ‘return’ from the ‘future’ through the ‘past’ – and in this return we discover a diverse array of items. In this chapter I have tried to show that when we consider ourselves and imagine our way of inhabiting the world, we employ just such apparently time-related categories to individuate ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’. I argued that the contemporaneous nature of the temporal categories of analysis undermines this perceived diversity and points us towards a more basic unity. The effect of these arguments, I hope, is to interrupt any dismissal of some foreign community’s reasoning, such as the Kimbanguist, as somehow different in kind or quality than European reasoning, as naïve or misguided. The judgement that Kimbanguists misuse scriptural language has been impeded in several ways. Three are worth repeating. 1. What counts as a use or misuse is defined by a particular world, by having certain commitments that we can describe as superordinate to the equipment of scriptural language. 2. The picture in which readers ‘reason’ about ‘scripture’ while relying on ‘tradition’ fails to grasp the unitary and pervasive nature of inhabiting a world. 3. What the Kimbanguists read is simply not Europe’s most famous text but an essential feature the Kimbanguist world. A theologian might want Kimbanguists or Protestants or Catholics or Pentecostals to read a different text, but this is to ask them – and perhaps very reasonably – to inhabit a different world. I have tried to prevent any notion that, say, the Kimbanguists ‘misread’ their scripture according to the immanent rules of their world, thereby orienting us towards a view of the integral and coherent relation between a world and the right use of scriptural language. I have tried to show that language is made before it is used, that it is classified as something which is for something, before its purpose is accomplished. Along these lines I invited us to imagine a different narrative for Jamie Uys’s film The Gods Must be Crazy. This provoked a final outline of the place of language within a system of fundamental classification, a depiction of language as inherently self-reflexive, as directed towards that taxonomy of which it is a part, thereby limiting language’s communication to those capable of sharing their taxonomic worlds.



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Many elements of a picture of inhabiting the world have been displayed, but questions remain about how they fit together. The integrity of the whole architecture is not yet secure. In part, this is because I have refused to be drawn into the details of Heidegger’s larger account – we have had detailed commentary enough on the phenomena of tools and the kind of world they imply we inhabit. Basic issues remain unaddressed, such as how self-reflection provides the enduring vision of diversity and plurality in experience. In turning to Heidegger’s student Gadamer, we will find resources to strengthen and expand the account which has begun to take shape.

Chapter 5 T RU T H A N D M E T HO D

1. Looking Back, Looking Forward ‘Scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name a single phenomenon. In the previous discussion I read Heidegger’s Being and Time as providing a defence of this thesis. My reading portrayed us as inhabiting our taxonomies, and it provided the substantive framework in which it is now possible to describe what is ingredient to such a thesis about unity. In Chapter 1, I made explicit a number of assumptions guiding my argument. These demarcated the broader field in which the argument has been conducted – a field which construes thought as directed by the inheritance of certain commitments, commitments that constitute and determine what thought is. Our investigations of Being and Time have made it possible to extend that list of undefended assumptions and to close in on the centre of the field of our enquiry. These additional points now cross the threshold of undefended assumption and articulate claims immediately supporting the single phenomenon thesis, the claim that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name one thing. I read Heidegger as identifying the world we inhabit with our taxonomy. That identification was achieved by a specific act of classification which Heidegger named ‘uncovering’. The act grounded Heidegger’s entire account. It was not characterized as an act of wilful domination, for the taxonomy identifiable with the world it uncovers is inherited. And so his metaphor was that we are thrown into a particular world or horizon or habit of uncovering. The act itself is inexplicable for Heidegger; a logically necessary assertion at the very foundation of the architecture of his thought; something which cannot be further queried. Every other relation in Heidegger’s account of the world requires a third thing to support that relation, but the relation between the uncovered world and whatever has been uncovered has no such support. For this reason Heidegger’s predicted analysis of Kant’s schematism was important, for Heidegger seems to associate the schematism with a failed effort to show how just such a great gap has been bridged.1 For both Heidegger and Kant there obtains an almost wholly unexplainable relation between two heterogeneous 1. GA 2, 23–4. Cf. GA 21, §31; GA 25, §26; GA 3, §21–3.

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things. It was a problem vexing Descartes and his inheritors: how to get extended stuff to impress upon thinking stuff. It was formulated in a more sophisticated way by Kant: first in the relation between the thing in itself and the manifold of sensory intuition (a relation which does not admit of causal descriptions or descriptions of existence); and then, again, between that manifold and the pure concepts of the understanding, only after which is there conscious experience and the use of concepts like cause and existence. Put simply, Kant divides the older problem of mind and matter into two smaller problems, and even though it is not always clear which split bears more of the weight, Heidegger locates the principal joint in Kant’s system as the point where sensory intuitions are supposed to be related to pure concepts of the understanding – only after which is there a conscious experience of the world. The relation between sensory intuitions and pure concepts is a relation between two heterogeneous kinds of things, and Heidegger takes the schematism to be Kant’s bridge between them – for Heidegger, it is a bridge that fails because it does not explain how the two can be related, because Kant does not show how the schematism is a third thing embracing both concepts and sensory intuitions.2 Heidegger shifts the split between heterogeneous entities to the boundary of his system, or if one is sympathetically inclined, one might say that he repeats the problem at a higher order of sophistication. Rather than placing the great joint between mind and matter at the centre of his system (as he takes Kant to do), Heidegger moves it to the very extremity. It is the problem of how to get the whole of being-in-the-world from what is not being, and because it is not being, there is little to say about it. In Being and Time, there are no divisions between res extensa and res cogitans, or between sensory intuitions and pure concepts, or perhaps even (given its regulatory status within our world) between our knowledge and things in themselves. Such supposedly basic divisions are within the realm of what exists; everything is embraced within the horizon of beingin-the-world. The real mystery is how we get being-in-the-world from what is outside or beneath or beyond that world. Heidegger’s answer is, as we have seen, ‘uncovering’. Thus there is in Heidegger’s account a kind of subterranean moment, a moment which precedes and sustains the identification of our taxonomy with the world we inhabit. No third thing relates our uncovered world to what has not been uncovered. As we saw in Chapter 3, Heidegger carefully observes that the moment of uncovering is a relation of absolute heterogeneity between two kinds of thing: our commitments and that which they will classify. As we discussed, this is not an instance of ostentation, pointing to phenomena we already have, but rather brings phenomena into experience as classified, and thereby makes ostentation possible for superficial classification. We can distil this discussion into two theses that guide the present book, and which are added to the eight introduced in the first chapter. These two commitments about the function of ‘commitments’ or ‘concepts’ now cross the 2. On the schematism see Kant CPR, A137/B176; on the tertium quid see A259/B315.



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threshold of undefended assumptions, and we have examined how they function in Heidegger’s work: 9. Commitments produce the phenomena of experience in acts of fundamental classification. 10. Commitments classify phenomena in acts of superficial classification. In the first case, to put it roughly, what gets classified is non-conceptual; it is non-phenomenal, and only by virtue of classifying it, are conceptual phenomena produced. Properly speaking, what gets ‘uncovered’ does not, prior to that moment, exist. What gets produced, the phenomena of our experience, are thus necessarily and always already classified as something. Heidegger depicts us as inhabiting the world revealed by this activity. We can add: 11. Our taxonomy of fundamental commitments is identifiable with the world that we already inhabit. Heidegger successfully avoids any Cartesian doubts about the ‘external’ world. There is no strong first-order contrast between subjects and objects, between inside and outside, between thinking stuff and extended stuff. Those contrasts are only superficial distinctions overlaying fundamental experience. However, the inexplicable contrast is reproduced at a superordinate level. The contrast is between subjects and objects together (which thus stop being ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ and become a unity called ‘being-in-the-world’), and that which is outside the scope of this togetherness. It is between the taxonomy we inhabit (which includes an account of ourselves) and that which is outside our taxonomy, that which is beyond the horizon of what exists, that which has not been uncovered, or that which is the basis of what is uncovered in our taxonomy. The contrast is between being and non-being. But, to cast it in the light of transcendental idealism, we might ask (like Jacobi did of Kant) whether positing something similar to a thing in itself is still logically necessary to enter and stay within Heidegger’s world – even if at key moments the prose of Being and Time assiduously avoids a discussion of this non-being and neglects to speak of what is outside the horizon of being, outside the world. Unsurprisingly, Heidegger’s investigation concerns life within the taxonomy. In our reading, we attended closely to his account of our experience of the world before we classify phenomena, a world made in fundamental classification. Heidegger tried to lay before us the plain and simple experience of fundamental classification – not some obscure, primitive, occasional experience, but our permanent way of inhabiting the world, not least while coping with sophisticated tasks. He tried to show that, during this baseline experience (something we always already have), there is no distinction between subject and object, or between object and environment, between environment and world. Rather, things flow together. There are no individuated entities, only valences. Our familiarity with this world, our integration with it, can be stated as follows:

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12. All that appears in experience as fundamentally classified is unitary. We clearly stretch language when we identify a unitary taxonomy with a unitary world joined through an inexplicable (but logically necessary) act of classification or ‘uncovering’. The language of a ‘taxonomy’, with its implied plurality of genera and species, its infinitely diverse hierarchies of classificatory categories, is a useful tactic for managing the differences between the worlds uncovered in the act of fundamental classification. Some unitary experiences are different from others, some habits of fundamental classification are different from others – and thus, from the outside perspective of superficial classification (and a book presents just such a perspective), we must have discursive strategies for naming and understanding the basic experience of fundamental classification. If two unitary worlds differ, how can that difference be measured? Do some differ more than others? How does one conceive of changes within one’s own world? How can one superficially depict a fundamental phenomenon without attributing superficiality to it? The basis on which any description and any comparison relies is itself unitary. Any discussion of our fundamental taxonomy as containing many distinct commitments, or as producing a plurality of phenomena, must be misleading if it postures itself as a description of that taxonomy, as a description of the world we principally inhabit. These descriptions are not themselves acts of fundamental classification. They have in fact classified the taxonomy itself. 13. A plurality is an effect of superficial classification. 14. Self-reflection is parasitic; it classifies phenomena. The plurality of items that we find in our world through acts of self-reflection, and thus the plurality attributed to our taxonomy, is persuasive. We believe there to be rocks and birds, facts of mathematics, and civic rituals – or rather, we do when we reflect upon these things. And with apparently good reasons, for in the course of putatively unitary experiences, we find, on reflection, that we negotiate various entities in the world. But if Heidegger is right, then these are all cut from the same cloth during our reflective observation, or better, they name different aspects of the same thing. If Heidegger is right, the pluralities we assert when considering ourselves or when observing others are superficial. There is not one way to carve the world, dividing it up at its natural joints.3 The ‘single phenomenon thesis’ defended in this book hardly comes as a surprise, given the wholesale unity attributed to our basic experience of the world. It is the fifteenth thesis to be added to the list, and it is the purpose of our enquiries. It is important that the claim is situated in this list, for it is oriented and delimited by the commitments which stand behind it; defending the fifteenth thesis as part of the picture outlined in points 1–14 is thus different from considering it as a part of some other chain of commitments or web of meaning.

3. Cf. Plato, Statesman, 259d, 262c, et al.; Phaedrus, 265e.



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15. ‘Scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ are a superficial plurality which name a single phenomenon. If all three of these entities are features of what it means to inhabit a taxonomy, and if fundamental taxonomies are themselves unitary, then it follows that these three phenomena have their plurality only in a story we tell ourselves about that fundamental experience. An examination of these three will generate problems if we try to isolate the phenomena that they name, for they have no natural and stable basis. I have tried to show this in various ways, such as our consideration of which phenomena might count as scriptural language. My argument is that the boundaries of these three phenomena are inscribed upon an experience which cannot secure their differentiation. Descriptions of our fundamental experience, including descriptions of the taxonomy we infer to be operative in that experience, are parasitic on phenomena and thus necessarily superficial. The ‘unity thesis’ has been defended thus far through my reading of Heidegger. I also tried to sharpen that reading by telling the story of the Kimbanguists, showing how their use of a particular tool (scripture) was consonant with the world they inhabited. Introducing such an apparently strange case was useful because their world differs considerably from the world that many Europeans take for granted, and thus what they produced using scripture was quite different from what we might expect. The story was worthwhile because both Kimbanguists and European Christians have the Bible as a feature of their world, and thus both use it to make meaning in similar ways. Yet, we are pulled up short by the meaning Kimbanguists make. Amongst many Christians, especially among post-Christendom secular Europeans, so many background commitments are shared that we can be lulled into believing in the naturalness of particular objects, in their inherent character, or purpose, or meaning. Just as it is obvious what a Coke bottle is, it is obvious that the Bible is not about Simon Kimbangu. We are now prepared to consider an entire chain of commitments (about the nature of commitments) which guide the central enquiry of this book: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

An enquiry must rely on commitments. These cannot be the object of that enquiry. Such commitments may be the object of a separate enquiry. Commitments have origins. Most commitments originate in the social life of a community. Origins do not determine use. Commitments can be revised. To understand, repurpose, or revise our own commitments are reflective tasks necessarily determined by those commitments. 9. Commitments produce the phenomena of experience in acts of fundamental classification. 10. Commitments classify phenomena in acts of superficial classification.

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11. Our taxonomy of fundamental commitments is identifiable with the world that we already inhabit. 12. All that appears in experience as fundamentally classified is unitary. 13. A plurality is an effect of superficial classification. 14. Self-reflection is parasitic; it classifies phenomena. 15. ‘Scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ are a superficial plurality which name a single phenomenon.

2. Gadamer I have been seeking to undermine the distinctions we supply when imagining scripture, tradition, and reason to be different from the world that one inhabits. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) is going to help us in that task. The unity that obtains between language and the world led me to argue that language use is inherently self-reflective: language is either directed towards the world for its disclosure or designed for its revision in some way. This claim embraces ostentation, metaphor, and paradox, which means that the concept of ‘world’ is expansive. Gadamer is concerned with what is at stake in an act of self-reflection, a concern he acquires from Hegel, and which is pertinent to theology considered as a species of self-reflection, especially one that hopes to guide the self-reflective practice of reading scripture. Recall that Heidegger’s phenomenology in Being and Time moves from an individual’s everyday experiences to the grounds that make them possible. Heidegger wants to discover those conditions which are universal and necessary. Categories like ‘being’ and ‘temporality’ are the end of Heidegger’s enquiries. He tends to ignore the middle between what can be described as very ‘superordinate’ and very ‘subordinate’ commitments. Heidegger thus moves from individual particularity (my hammer) to universal necessity (temporality), eliding intermediary phenomena. Gadamer fills this gap. Gadamer’s contributions are important for the argument of this book because scripture, tradition, and reason are all phenomena associated with that ‘middle’: their origins cannot be described as eternal universals or as individual inventions. Their use will be determined by the former but will orient the latter. Here we should pause, for I have made claims about the way in which these ‘intermediary’ associations are purely descriptive, about the fact that our commitments are superficially describable as hierarchically ordered pluralities, but only ever experienced in a way which is fundamentally unitary. To change one commitment simply is to change the whole world. Gadamer is going to help us understand why this must be the case; we will read him as arguing that our encounters with scripture, our reliance on tradition, and our use of reason consist of a single phenomenon. Gadamer’s Truth and Method is not only interested in the accumulation of intermediary commitments – such as those categories formed and transmitted in a church’s history – but he is also concerned with the way these affect the act



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of reading. His work is then well suited to the present enquiry, which has taken scripture reading as the principal site of analysis. We are going to examine a portion of Truth and Method in some detail. I will first rehearse the broad outline of Gadamer’s argument, then focus our attention on the middle of the book. We are going to investigate a short piece of this middle, a fragment which I consider his most important argument. All of our close reading will cover a section called ‘Raising the Historicity of Understanding to the Status of a Hermeneutical Principal’. It is the first section in the second division of Part Two of the book – right in the middle. This section, the only part we will read, is broken into four subsections. Chapter 6 addresses the first three. Chapter 7 concentrates on the fourth and final subsection. So after the broad survey of Truth and Method in this chapter, the next reads the first three subsections with progressively close attention to detail, and Chapter 7 occupies itself entirely with the last subsection. Thus we move from the widest vision of what Gadamer is doing, to a fine-grained interpretation of a particular passage, one that forms the core of his argument. It is true that Gadamer’s work is very much indebted to the thinking of others. He is open about this fact. Admitting it is even a feature of his argument, for he intends to show us that to think is to inhabit and rely upon an inherited taxonomy of commitments. Gadamer’s work would be impossible without his inheritance of Heidegger, and Gadamer’s most ‘original’ insights would be unthinkable without Hegel. I have chosen to examine Gadamer, rather than these two other towering figures, because the argument I am making is best posed in relation to his text. It would contribute to the aesthetic unity of this book if I were instead to treat another text by Heidegger, such as ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, which Gadamer claimed as his inspiration for Truth and Method; or Heidegger’s essay, ‘Hegel’s Concept of Experience’; or even Heidegger’s commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit. But the present argument would suffer. It would be insincere to mine Gadamer’s insights from Heidegger’s work. And much would need to be smuggled into Hegel’s. In Gadamer’s Truth and Method we encounter genuinely original insights – however limited – and these have a direct bearing on my argument about how theologians should conceive of the unity of scripture, tradition, and reason. Incidentally, Gadamer’s Truth and Method has achieved an enormous influence in the academic humanities, especially among theologians. Truth and Method is widely considered to be more easily understood than his teacher’s Being and Time. This is dubious. True, the text does make for easier reading, but the sagacious style of his sprawling prose belies the radicalism of his argument. Another way of saying this is that I am dissatisfied with some of the standard readings of Gadamer, which are not only more tame than his arguments warrant, but have been uncritically adopted by theologians and scholars of religion; supported by close textual analysis, my interpretation will depart from this convention. The reader is duly warned.

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3. The Scope and Argument of Truth and Method Gadamer’s principal book reads like a conversation, or rather, half of a conversation in which he must supply the dialogue of his interlocutors. With whom does he speak? A range of figures in European intellectual history, most of them canonical voices for students in the humanities. Some are louder than others: the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle; a few theologians like Augustine and Luther chime in; Descartes is sporadically introduced (usually to be criticized); other early moderns, especially Vico, but also Leibniz and Spinoza; Kant at great length; and a whole lineage of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophers, especially Hegel and Schleiermacher, but also philosophers of history such as Dilthey, Croce, and Collingwood, as well as phenomenologists beginning with Husserl, and neo-Kantians like Natorp. Gadamer’s conversational style makes his argument resistant to systematic summary and resistant to any effort to rehearse the connection between its individual moments. The broad outlines of the book are clear enough, but he moves freely between historical description, exhortation, philosophical argument, and textual analysis. Topics recur after intervening digressions, and in its details the argument is not strictly progressive. His book differs from Being and Time. Whereas Heidegger’s work might initially appear obtuse, close examination often reveals a sustained and highly systematic argument, one with consistent terminology and a carefully wrought formal structure – in contrast, Gadamer creates a vision that emerges in the course of discussion, but which is often difficult to attach to any particular passage. For our reading, I have selected one of those infrequent occasions wherein Gadamer not only displays his original claims but also defends them with explicit argument. Before analysing that subsection in detail I will give a broad overview of the book, as I read it, and, in the next chapter, an increasingly detailed overview of the material immediately preceding our passage. The book has three main parts. The first part reflects on experiences specifically produced by artworks – it defends the notion that these experiences entail truths which cannot be reduced to modern scientific truths.4 It then investigates how those truths are produced, arguing that a proper account of aesthetic experience is only possible if that account is supplied by hermeneutics. For Gadamer, this means an account that explicitly considers what is entailed in understanding as a historically shaped event.5 4.  I would like, again, to acknowledge the generous permissions given by Mohr Siebeck for the quoted passages of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1: Hermeneutik I: Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, 7. durchgesehene Auflage (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), and similarly provided by Bloomsbury (Continuum) for Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edn (London: Continuum, 2004), here cited as TM. 5. GW 1, 169f [157f.]; TM 157f.



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The second part of the book extends the conclusions of the first. It expands the scope of consideration from works of art, like Greek tragedy and sculpture, to the entire field of the human sciences, arguing that understanding is always a historical reality. It is here that we will be conducting a close reading. The final part of the book is short and addresses the role of language in shaping understanding. It also discusses ontology. These two themes make sense both in light of Gadamer’s overall argument, and in light of Heidegger’s now familiar work (from which this third part derives most of its theoretical underpinnings). Some further explanation of the link between these themes in Part Three will help to expose the logic guiding the architecture of Gadamer’s argument and the connections between all three parts. In Gadamer’s whole argument, the question of what happens when we read old books is central. Exactly like Heidegger, Gadamer places meaningful language in a continuum with other varieties of meaningful items, like rocks and birds and Grecian urns. Material language might be particularly sophisticated in some of the tasks it can be used to accomplish, more sophisticated than a hammer for instance, but there is no break in kind between the items in the meaningful world. As I claimed in the case of the Kimbanguists, one is always reading. Even Part One of Truth and Method treats plastic artworks as objects to be read, although that part is only supposed to prepare us for the textual interpretation required by the human sciences, addressed in Part Two. When Gadamer gets around to examining what happens when we read old books (only in the middle of Part Two), he discovers that there is a conversation between the book and ourselves. Of course, it is the reader who must supply the linguistic meaning of the book, and thus ‘speak’ on behalf of the book, but the reader gets this meaning from the very tradition of which the book is a part. Understanding the book entails relying on language, and language thus shapes that understanding. Hence the theme of language in Part Three. In Part Three we see that this is ‘ontologically’ significant for Gadamer because there is a close relation between language and the whole world that one knows. This is familiar terrain after our reading of Heidegger, though Gadamer does not distinguish as clearly between fundamental and superficial forms of ‘language’. Heidegger’s careful differentiation, which I made into a stark contrast, does still play a role, only now it makes an appearance as the difference between the meaning we predict something will have, and the one we discover it ‘really’ to have, or more precisely, between the way tradition has shaped us, and the way we shape tradition. In both cases, language is the tool we use to discover what something is, to understand its ‘ontology’. Here Gadamer reformulates Heidegger’s famous 1949 dictum, ‘Language is the house of being’,6 linking language and ontology in the claim, ‘Being that can be understood is language.’7 Or as we might say, something is as it is classified. If understanding artworks (Part One) and old books (Part Two) and the world (Part Three) occurs by ‘reading’ them, then we must also recognize that our ability to read is very much shaped by the tradition of which we are a part, the tradition 6. GA 9, 313. 7. TM 470; GW 1, 478 [449/50].

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that supplies our ‘language’, our repertoire of meaningful concepts. The categories of our thought, the language of our reading, our very reason itself, are composed of historically supplied material. Understanding our understanding can only happen if we attend its history and historicity. In summary, Truth and Method is concerned with the relation between human history and human understanding – both how we understand things from the past, and how the past affects the way we now understand. Above, I said that we could situate Gadamer’s contribution between the extremes of permanent, universal categories like ‘temporality’ at one pole, and momentary, particular categories like ‘my hammer’ at the other pole. His contribution seeks to bridge the gap between these extremes by supplying the chain of historically developed commitments linking them together: the way in which my understanding of being is shaped by European history, for instance. Gadamer does not repudiate Heidegger’s early work, he does not deny that there are universal categories which are the necessary conditions for the possibility of understanding, but he aims to supplement that account in its details, showing how universals are mediated by the conventions that accumulate in communities over time. Gadamer provides the link between ‘being’ and ‘my hammer’, showing how it entails a particular tradition of labour, material culture, and social arrangements. This matters for theologians seeking to address the putative relations between the traditions, scriptures, and reasoning found in the community of the church because community traditions are located in this middle. We might get a handle on Gadamer’s argument by imagining the title of his book were Truth not Method.8 Gadamer rejects the idea that we arrive at truths about the world around us by relying on an eternal, universal method. And Gadamer claims that he is not so much interested in providing one method for arriving at truth as he is in understanding how it is that we already arrive at so many truths. In order to understand the genuine truths we often discover, we must excavate the particular traditions of our ‘language’ which supplies the commitments of our understanding. The relevance of this kind of enquiry should be evident, and in the previous chapter I examined the continuity of meaning between ‘language’ and ‘scripture’. Our task in reading Gadamer will not be to further reconstruct his questions and his argument. The task before us is Gadamer’s task: to supplement Heidegger’s work with Hegelian insights in order to provide a better understanding of understanding. Our task is therefore not simply historical, it is not a recovery of Truth and Method in its original context, but rather a reading of this text which allows us to reimagine the relation between scripture, tradition, and reason. Putting old books to such contemporary tasks, Gadamer would have us believe, is precisely what classic texts are called upon to perform, and their ability to do so is what supports their status as a classic. Indeed, what might be identified as the ‘ambiguities’ of Gadamer’s style allowed him to invest his own magnum opus with various meanings for the remainder of his very long life. 8. GW 2, 394.



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4. Preliminary Concerns We will read four subsections, about thirty pages, and the fourth subsection will be our goal. We want to arrive at the subsection, named ‘The Principle of Effective History [Wirkungsgeschichte]’. Or it might be called something else – we will come to the difficulties of translation later. As we come near our destination, my commentary in Chapter 6 will become increasingly detailed, and the third subsection will be almost as important as the last, which we will read in Chapter 7. The formal boundaries of Gadamer’s argument are consistently at odds with the flow of his conversation; Gadamer often reveals his answers before asking the question, but we will still aim for that fourth and final subsection. I am making the tedious effort to locate our reading because small hindrances face any movement between the standard German edition of Truth and Method and the standard English translation. The formal structure of our German text consists of three main parts with divisions and subdivisions – slightly unfamiliar to English readers. The English translation attempts to mirror the German structure, but it adds chapter divisions, introduces a different numbering system, and finally alters the formal hierarchy. This obstructs correlations. Readers may prefer simply to follow the page numbers. For the German, I will follow the Gesammelte Werke, but include the original pagination in brackets (just as it is listed in the margins). For the English, I will follow the standard 2004 Continuum translation which is in wide circulation and still in print by Bloomsbury; notably, Bloomsbury has recently reissued this translation in a new paperback series, and while there are no changes to the text, the pagination has been altered, usually by about fifteen pages. For those who want to follow along by section, we will be aiming for Zweiter Teil II.1.d. The English translation places this in Part II, Chapter 4, Division 1, Part B, Section iv. We might call that II.4.1.B.iv. This little subsection is at the heart of Gadamer’s argument, and its final paragraphs are the site of what I take to be his most original contribution. But it might not seem that way once we reach it, for Gadamer will have anticipated himself so often in conversation that there will be no surprises. Gadamer’s conclusions often outpace his argument. When we do read it, we will find his insight consists in a supplementation of Heidegger’s account with Hegel’s account, and the subsequent application of this to the act of reading. Accounts of what? Recall that my depiction of Being and Time noted a cyclical relation between superficial and fundamental modes of classification. (Heidegger called this a ‘hermeneutical circle’.) In everyday life there are fundamental experiences, as when relying on a hammer, which only show up as a feature of our experience when we reflect on them – one does not constantly think, ‘I am using a hammer!’ Yet what are now the fundamental commitments associated with a particular hammer may have had their origin in superficial modes of engagement – perhaps just a week ago one was instructed in hammering or consciously considered how to improve one’s skill. And any further superficial engagements will rely on what are now fundamental commitments, potentially leading to their revision. Thus

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a cycle of effects can be identified.9 Heidegger sees this same cyclical movement unfold when one asks the question ‘what is being?’; he notices that in order to ask the question we must already rely on some idea of ‘being’.10 Heidegger moves from everyday hermeneutical circles, involving minor commitments, to the investigation of huge commitments like ‘being’, and notably he foreshortens the distance between these enquiries. Of course he recognizes this distance, but he is unwilling to become mired in the historically contingent (putatively ‘ontic’) details of this intermediary space. Gadamer is going to fill in this lacuna between eternal universals like ‘being’ and local particulars like ‘my hammer’ or ‘my Bible’. Gadamer will index the commitments between ‘being’ and specific beings, the medium-sized commitments which influence our everyday understanding of both scripture and the world around us. This will help him to overcome the disparity between parts and wholes, between universals and particulars. Hegel is his aide in that endeavour, and the Phenomenology of Spirit gives Gadamer the resources to prosecute his task. Gadamer relies on Hegel to account for the accumulative effects of a community’s history on one’s everyday understanding, especially one’s understanding of old books. Gadamer is thus interested in how we rely on our ‘tradition’ when we ‘reason’ about the meaning of ‘language’, and we will apply this to ‘scriptural language’. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit not only motivates Gadamer to fill in Heidegger’s gap – to investigate intermediary phenomena related to tradition, reason, and language in the account of human understanding – but Hegel also supplies Gadamer with the intellectual tools to undermine the very differences between these categories. As I noted above, Gadamer’s style of argument is not strictly progressive, and it can be difficult to attach to any particular passage the picture which emerges in the course of his discussion. We are aiming for a passage found within the second half of the second part of the book, what the English translation calls chapter 4. But we will need a broader examination to make sense of this passage. Gadamer aims to provide an account of the basic principles of human understanding as an activity that is always interpretive and always influenced by history in that interpretation. Gadamer is asking, ‘In what way does history influence thinking?’ The kind of thinking he is most obviously concerned about is reading, and given his universal application of ‘reading’, we should specify, reading old books. Gadamer works with two related pairs of terms; they are almost contrasting terms. Truth and method is the first. Description and prescription is the second. The title of Gadamer’s book, as I suggested above, might have been Truth not Method. Gadamer is sceptical of efforts to formulate an eternal art of interpretation, a universal technique that guarantees the truth-results of a reading. One of Gadamer’s most quoted sentences is directed along these lines, ‘The fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself.’11 With 9. See GA 2, §32 for an explicit account of this cycle; see also §63. 10. GA 2, §5. 11. TM 273.



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this, Gadamer suggests that the broad impulses of the Enlightenment produced arguments in favour of universals, which were not themselves universal, but turn out to have been merely local claims, historically situated understandings. What we ought to do is recognize how our particular traditions always affect our discovery of truths. For all of this rhetoric, Gadamer cannot be comfortably located at the opposite pole, as if he were advocating a complete relativism or a wholesale fragmentation into communitarian truths. Gadamer does have universalizing tendencies and he does have strong opinions about the way old books should be treated. In fact, he comes rather close to prescribing a method for appropriately reasoning about a text’s language.12 For Gadamer, some truths are better than others. This leads to his second almost contrasting pair: description and prescription. Gadamer repeatedly claims that his book is descriptive: showing us what happens whenever we understand a text and whenever we understand the world we inhabit. Hermeneutics, for Gadamer, is no longer just that little prescriptive discipline providing normative techniques for reading old books (that is how he depicts German Romantics like Schleiermacher). Hermeneutics is rather the discipline of enquiring as to how we understand at all, the discipline which shows us how everything is understood, whether we are aware of it or not. Gadamer does not admit the distinction between textual and philosophical hermeneutics. If Gadamer’s argument appears to vacillate between these contrasting terms, it may be because the logic of his argument denies the contrast. Gadamer’s ability to reflect on his own logic can be distinguished from his ability to use that logic. Interestingly, this contrast – between what we do and what we take ourselves to be doing – is one that he makes prominent, arguing that we can never complete the latter analysis. Our ability, we will soon see him saying, to reflect on the way our thinking is shaped by history is hampered by the fact that we must rely upon that history when we think. With these preparations in hand, we turn in the next chapter to the text of Gadamer’s Truth and Method.

12. GW 1, 271–2 [251/2]; TM 270.

Chapter 6 R E A D I N G R IG H T LY

1. The ‘Hermeneutical Circle’ and the Ethics of Thought We will now begin reading a fragment of Gadamer’s Truth and Method. In the previous chapter I outlined the position of this fragment, and noted some of the difficulties in comparing the German and English texts. We will examine a section called ‘Raising the Historicity of Understanding to a Hermeneutic Principle’, which is composed of four subsections. As we approach the final and main site of our textual analysis, the ideas will be increasingly relevant, so our reading will need to become increasingly detailed and intensive. Ostensibly, we are only concerned with the final paragraphs of the fourth subsection, but Gadamer’s style leads him to give away the answers far in advance, and the flow of his argument resists the formal structure of his text. In this chapter we will read, with increasing care, the first three subsections, and in the next chapter we will examine the fourth and last subsection. As we approach the final passage, the most relevant points of Gadamer’s discussion will concern the structure of a hermeneutical circle and the habits of thinking that ought to be adopted in view of that structure. It is helpful to think of Gadamer’s hermeneutical principles in terms of ‘ethics’ because they answer the question ‘what should I do?’ and because he extends these principles to all social relations. For Gadamer, reason is always ‘circular’, but in a way that does not prevent developments of thought. An understanding of understanding’s circularity will make it possible to produce better understandings.1 What is this circular structure and what habits of thinking ought it to provoke? Gadamer begins his considerations by quoting one of Heidegger’s descriptions of the hermeneutical circle (from Being and Time §32). He goes on to summarize and apply it to the act of reading. One should pay attention to the distinct steps of the process: A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text. Again, the initial meaning emerges only because he is reading the text 1. GW 1, 271–2 [251/2]; TM 269–70.

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with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning. Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there.2 Wer einen Text verstehen will, vollzieht immer ein Entwerfen. Er wirft sich einen Sinn des Ganzen voraus, sobald sich ein erster Sinn im Text zeigt. Ein solcher zeigt sich wiederum nur, weil man den Text schon mit gewissen Erwartungen auf einen bestimmten Sinn hin liest. Im Ausarbeiten eines solchen Vorentwurfs, der freilich beständig von dem her revidiert wird, was sich bei weiterem Eindringen in dem Sinn ergibt, besteht das Verstehen dessen, was dasteht.3

We can immediately see that Heidegger’s circularity between fundamental and superficial acts of classification is here rendered in terms of what we expect and what we discover, ‘what is there’. The aspiration when reading is to understand ‘what is there’. But ‘what is there’ is known on the basis of our existing assumptions about it; we assume the text as a whole to be a certain kind of text (a comedy, for example) and we thus expect its specific parts to cohere with this assumption. Any particular passage is always read as part of a whole, but that passage may force us to revise our assumptions about the whole. A new vision of the whole would then change how we see particular passages (‘If this is a comedy, then my idea of comedy must change.’) – and so the circle of interpretation continues. The circularity of our understanding of a book’s whole and its parts corresponds to the circular relation between what we assume and what we discover, between our prejudices and what we judge to be the case, between the way it appears ‘naturally’ and the way it appears after inspection. If Gadamer is right, then our judgements always rely on our initial ‘prejudices’. Gadamer tried to revive the importance of the concept of prejudice by rehabilitating the language of prejudice. This was unsuccessful; the word Vorurteil has not overcome the stigma associated with it. However, without any serious damage to Gadamer’s thinking, we can restate the conceptual contrast between pre-judgements and judgements in the language of fundamental and superficial commitments. This also makes clear the origin of Gadamer’s thinking in the thought of Heidegger. If we recognize that all thinking has the structure of a circle, then procedures of good thinking ought to take that into consideration. The constant task, Gadamer tells us, is to revise our anticipations in light of our discoveries until the contrast between them disappears.4 This is the goal of understanding. Restated in the language of classification, the constant task is to revise our habits of fundamental classification on the basis of what we decide through acts of superficial classification. Notably, the circularity of thought is inherently dangerous because our discoveries are always made on the basis of our anticipatory commitments and 2. TM 269. 3. GW 1, 271 [251]. 4. GW 1, 272 [251/2]; TM 270.



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will always be shaped by those commitments. Recall the example of the scientist who asked, ‘Who caused the water to freeze?’ The commitment to personal agency oriented the investigation towards a specific range of potential references: persons. The specific and limited scope of discovery was only capable of provoking specific and limited revisions of one’s starting commitments. Importantly, starting commitments are themselves the end result of prior investigations, which is why the history of thought’s spiralling development is given so much power in Gadamer’s account. Put in our now familiar terms, the habits of fundamental classification are the sedimented results of prior acts of superficial classification. When it comes to reading rightly, this account of circularity puts a good deal of responsibility on one’s starting, fundamental commitments. After all, if one’s initial ‘prejudices’ are misguided, then the effort to revise them is itself likely to be misguided – it might well be a long time before our scientist realizes that nobody caused the water to freeze, that a question with different commitments is required.

2. Gadamer’s First Ethical Principle: Start Right From the First Subsection, ‘The Hermeneutical Circle and the Problem of Prejudice’ Good procedures of reasoning should indicate how to begin with appropriate commitments (‘fore-meanings’), or at least suggest how one might evaluate whether existing commitments are fit to an activity. Our commitments (1) will shape our new understandings in powerful ways, and they (2) will shape the very effort to revise our own commitments. Thus Gadamer asks, ‘How can we break the spell of our own fore-meanings?’5 Gadamer now indicates his first procedure for evaluating our anticipatory commitments, and he will eventually suggest a second. These are occasions when Gadamer displays his inclination to prescribe universal methods (even if, on reflection, he tends to deny he has made such prescriptions). But understanding realizes its full potential only when the fore-meanings that it begins with are not arbitrary. Thus it is quite right for the interpreter not to approach the text directly, relying solely on the fore-meaning already available to him, but rather explicitly to examine the legitimacy – i.e., the origin and validity – of the fore-meanings dwelling within him.6 Das Verstehen kommt nun aber erst in seine eigentlich Möglichkeit, wenn die Vormeinungen, die es einsetzt, nicht beliebige sind. Es hat darum seinen guten Sinn, daß der Ausleger nicht geradezu, aus der in ihm bereiten Vormeinung lebend, auf den Text zugeht, vielmehr die in ihm lebenden Vormeinung 5. TM 270. 6. TM 270.

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ausdrücklich auf ihre Legitimation, und das ist, auf Herkunft und Geltung prüft.7

Gadamer is quick to suggest that this important prescription is only a little more than a description. This basic requirement must be seen as the radicalization of a procedure that we in fact exercise whenever we understand anything.8 Man muß sich diese grundsätzliche Forderung als die Radikalisierung eines Verfahrens denken, das wir in Wahrheit immer ausüben, wenn wir verstehen.9

At this point it remains unclear exactly how his ‘radicalized procedure’ will discriminate between commitments by assessing their origin and validity.10 How do we test which origins are good? What counts as ‘valid’? It will be about twenty pages before Gadamer introduces the second ‘radicalized procedure’ by which prejudices might be sifted and aligned with the object of enquiry. In the intervening discussion he attempts to alleviate our worries about the dangers inherent to the circularity of thought. In most cases, he assures us, if we happen to have any misguided prejudices, they will produce new understandings that are either incoherent or that do not cohere with our expectations – ‘we are pulled up short by the text’ – and thus we are forced to consider alternative possibilities for its meaning.11 Bad starting points are weaker than good ones. If we begin by assuming that a play is a dark tragedy, but all its characters exist in a state of unrelieved bliss, we are likely to revise our assumptions. But what if there is nothing to contradict the understandings produced by misguided commitments?12 Gadamer is quick to dismiss this worry. He is quicker than we might want him to be after our examination of the conflicting reading practices that obtain between communities, or after our consideration of the reading practices of several million Kimbanguists. Theologians and scholars of religion will want sharper tools here. Gadamer reiterates that ‘if a person fails to hear what the other person is really saying, he will not be able to fit what he has understood into the range of his own various expectations of meaning’.13 This is rather optimistic. Gadamer claims a 7. GW 1, 272 [251/2]. 8. TM 270. 9. GW 1, 272 [251/2]. 10. It may be that this prescription culminates on GW 1, 300 (TM 295), where one’s bond to that tradition which produced and preserved a text is possibly suggested as a requirement for an appropriate understanding. 11. TM 270; GW 1, 272. 12. GW 1, 272. 13. TM 271.



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descriptive basis for his optimism, one that apparently elaborates on his earlier prescription to begin with ‘legitimate’ prejudices. It is necessary or at least normal to expect a text or a person to say something unexpected. It is normal because meaning itself, Gadamer insinuates, is produced on the basis of just such an expectation. This is apparently the basis of Gadamer’s optimism, but he leaves this insinuation in a rather undeveloped state – are we to think that meaning can only ever be produced under these conditions? He seems to indicate that the very commitment we need in order to produce any meaning, is the commitment to hearing something unexpected. In Gadamer’s description, the starting point for a conversation is characterized as necessarily expecting the unexpected, and his prescription for the best or most legitimate starting point merely ‘radicalizes’ this everyday requirement. That is why a hermeneutically trained consciousness must be, from the start, sensitive to the text’s alterity. But this kind of sensitivity involves neither ‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self, but the foregrounding and appropriation of one’s own fore-meanings and prejudices. The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings.14 Daher muß ein hermeneutisch geschultes Bewußtsein für die Andersheit des Textes von vornherein empfänglich sein. Solche Empfänglichkeit setzt aber weder sachliche ‘Neutralität’ noch gar Selbstauslöschung voraus, sondern schließt die abhebende Aneignung der eigenen Vormeinungen und Vorurteile ein. Es gilt, der eigenen Voreingenommenheit innezusein, damit sich der Text selbst in seiner Andersheit darstellt und damit in die Möglichkeit kommt, seine sachliche Wahrheit gegen die eigene Vormeinung auszuspielen.15

Gadamer concludes at a high pitch of optimism. The circularity of reason is almost eclipsed by the English rhetoric – apparently Gadamer’s method will allow for the ‘assertion’ of the text against the reader! The German is more tame – the awareness of one’s own bias makes it possible for the text to show up in its alterity, and thus a contrast between the text’s actual truth and our own bias is brought into play. This play is the site of our familiar hermeneutical circle. And if we press his account, if we think through what he is claiming, this circularity acquires a reflexive character: textual ‘alterity’ is the product of something we do in relation to ourselves rather than something the text does in relation to us. Stated more dramatically, but no less accurately, textual alterity is a kind of speaking which we do on behalf of the text.16 14. TM 271. 15. GW 1, 273–4 [253/4]. 16.  TM 370, ‘It is true that a text does not speak to us the same way as does a Thou. We who are attempting to understand must ourselves make it speak.’ GW 1, 383, ‘Zwar redet

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It is because our eventual understanding is necessarily grounded in our starting commitments that the suspension of some of these commitments (‘expecting the unexpected’) widens the scope of potential meaning we might give to the text. Gadamer rejects the idea that we might approach the text neutrally. The text only appears on the basis of our commitments; it appears within a world of commitments that orients its possibilities and directs it meaning. Textual alterity can be understood in terms of our familiar taxonomy of fundamental commitments: it is possible to underdetermine the text’s meaning by stripping it of a few of our own subordinate commitments, thereby widening its potential meaning within the scope of our commitments. We will see this notion discussed in much greater detail below, and alterity will be a major theme in the arguments that follow.

3. The First Ethical Principle Continued From the Second Subsection, ‘Prejudices as Conditions of Understanding’ Gadamer’s effort to reassure us of the benign, even beneficial, nature of circular reasoning is buttressed by claims of necessity. There is no other kind of reasoning. All thought relies on historically derived commitments – not least our thoughts about that which most interests him, the past. Different histories entail different commitments; different commitments entail different practices of reasoning. The ‘prejudicial’ and circular structure of reason is universal, whereas the structure itself is composed of historically contingent commitments determining the local character of reason. This is very similar to the insight which initially led Heidegger to use the word ‘Dasein’, signalling the fact that everyone inhabits a taxonomy, without committing to a particular taxonomy, as was putatively done by words like ‘human’ or ‘person’ or ‘creature’. Gadamer states his claim emphatically: The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice, and removing it opens the way to an appropriate understanding of the finitude which dominates not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness … Reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms – i.e., it is not its own master but remains constantly dependent on the given circumstances in which it operates … In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it … That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his Being.17 Die Überwindung aller Vorurteile, diese Pauschalforderung der Aufklärung, wird sich selber als ein Vorurteil erweisen, dessen Revision erst den Weg für ein angemessenes Verständnis der Endlichkeit freimacht, die nicht nur unser ein Text nicht so zu uns wie ein Du. Wir, die Verstehens, müssen ihn von uns aus erst zum Reden bringen.’ 17. TM 277–8.



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Menschsein, sondern ebenso unser geschichtliches Bewußtsein beherrscht … Vernunft ist für uns nur als reale geschichtliche, d.h. schlechthin: sie ist nicht ihrer selbst Herr, sondern bleibt stets auf die Gegebenheiten angewiesen, an denen sie sich betätigt … In Wahrheit gehört die Geschichte nicht uns, sondern wir gehören ihr … Darum sind die Vorurteile des einzelnen weit mehr als seine Urteile die geschichtliche Wirklichkeit seines Seins.18

Our taxonomies are largely composed of historically derived commitments, what Gadamer calls ‘prejudices’. Who we are and how we reason are features of the world we inherit, of the taxonomy we inhabit. This is an unavoidable fact if Gadamer is right. It is under these conditions that Gadamer is concerned with how we come to understand old books. If we want to understand something from the past, we must recognize that the past differs from the present. This recognition entails what is called ‘historical consciousness’: the recognition that all thinking is historically situated, and thus changes over time. And we can notice, in the passage above, this phrase has a twofold reference: both to the fact that consciousness is historical, and to the consciousness of this fact. Historical consciousness does not itself solve the problem of how to understand the past, for if we want to read an old book, perhaps just as it was read on the day it was written, we cannot simply leap into the past context. Nor can we stand in a position outside history where we could see the text without a context. We cannot remove our historically derived commitments, for that would require us to stop thinking, and we cannot easily swap our contemporary commitments for past ones, because we must ignore our commitments while we rely on them to think. Instead, Gadamer claims, our present thinking about a past moment is already deeply influenced by that very past and by the intervening history. Our present understanding about the past relies on commitments from that past. Even though we now inhabit a different world than the one that produced a work of art or philosophy, our world has been shaped by the previous. As Gadamer puts it: But understanding it will always involve more than merely historically reconstructing the past ‘world’ to which the work belongs. Our understanding will always retain the consciousness that we too belong to that world, and correlatively, that the work too belongs to our world.19 Aber es wird sich in solchem Verstehen immer um mehr handeln, als nur um historische Konstruktionen der vergangenen ‘Welt’, der das Werk zugehörte. Unser Verstehen wird immer zugleich ein Bewußtsein der Mitzugehörigkeit dieser Welt enthalten.20

18. GW 1, 280–1 [260/1]. 19. TM 290. 20. GW 1, 295 [274/5].

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Gadamer is saying that we imagine the past in a way that displays the effects of that past on our imagination – we belong to it, and it belongs to us. The logic of this claim can be seen if we think about a classic work of comedy. Consider the play Clouds by Aristophanes. The work is farcical in the extreme; it is rowdy, bawdy, and immensely enjoyable. Its sole aim is to parody philosophers and discredit Socrates, and its happy climax is the ruin of his school. Yet, in the time between its production and now, Socrates has come to be seen as one of the founders of the entire course of European intellectual history. When we read Aristophanes’ play, we read it as a play lampooning an immensely serious and important person. In fact, many people read the play only because it concerns such a significant and respected figure. In the time between the play’s production, and our reading, Socrates has risen to an indomitable height. But things get more complicated and interesting. The intervening history is even more important. Clouds itself may be part of the reason we now think that Socrates is so important, and thus part of the reason we now think Clouds both worth reading and basically unfair to Socrates. How so? There is the obvious point that even satire adds to the fame of those it caricatures, but there may be a subtler historical dimension as well. Plato suggests in the Apology that the play contributed to the arrest and trial of Socrates.21 And the martyrdom of Socrates is bound to his subsequent fame and credibility. Even if inadvertently, by helping to create Socrates as a revered figure in the years after the play, the power of the play’s comedic effect gained force – the contrast supporting the parody became ever clearer, and the preservation of the play became ever more worthwhile. Gadamer has contended that all thinking is circular, that half of this circle is made of ‘prejudices’, and that this situation is generally a good one. Initially we saw circularity to describe the relation between the parts and the whole of a single book. This circle was then reflexively mapped onto our assumptions about the whole in relation to the parts we encounter. A perception of parts revises our assumptions about the whole, and an understanding of the whole informs our perception of the parts. Gadamer now maps this circle onto the relation between a reader in the present and a book from the past; he thus adds an apparently ‘temporal’ dimension to the relation between our assumptions and our discoveries. What we assume has been given by the past, whereas what we now discover as an item in the past is made by our present assumptions. After Chapter 5’s analyses of temporal labelling, we will be alert to the fact that all of the items in this description, in this temporal circle, are contemporaneous. Organizing phenomena with temporal labels does not necessarily make any of them more ‘past’ or ‘present’ or ‘future’. Gadamer is generally alert to this fact (though perhaps not always), and when he describes the importance of the past for our thinking, he usually does so in terms of our present reception of that past, in terms of the way history now affects our thinking. Much of the reason that today Clouds is such a hilarious play to read is that it is 21. Plato, Apology, 18b–19d.



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unfair to Socrates. Were Socrates merely a rogue, merely some forgotten charlatan peddling insincere sophistry, were he merely a footnote in the margins of history – then the play would lose much of its force. It is less enjoyable to ridicule the incompetent and the weak. (This premise could potentially help to explain Plato’s depiction of the friendly relations between Socrates and Aristophanes in the Symposium.)22 Our present reception of Socrates, the way the history of Socrates affects us, means that he is now anything but an inconsequential quack, and our reading of Clouds is affected by the importance of his person. Gadamer has depicted the structure, necessity, and now, finally, the advantages of reason’s circularity. In my example, the temporal distance between the composition of Clouds and our reading of it today has in fact contributed to its mission as a work of comedy. It is a better, funnier play because of the history that stands between its composition and our understanding. Gadamer’s account of reason’s circularity culminates in an analysis of this intervening ‘temporal distance’ (Zeitenabstand). We will examine it below. But first he seeks to reassure us that the relevance of his account of temporal distance is not limited to important books, to ‘classics’ that have shaped the broad course of European thought. So he asks: Does the kind of historical mediation between the past and the present that characterizes the classical ultimately underlie all historical activity as its effective substratum?23 Liegt am Ende solche geschichtliche Vermittlung der Vergangenheit mit der Gegenwart, wie sie den Begriff des Klassischen prägt, allem historischen Verhalten als wirksames Substrat zugrunde?24

His answer is ‘Yes.’ And ‘historical activity’ proves to be comprehensive in scope because every item in one’s taxonomy is historical.

4. The Second Ethical Principle: Wait Long From the Third Subsection, ‘The Hermeneutical Meaning of Temporal Distance’ Gadamer’s analysis of ‘temporal distance’ generates the second of his two major prescriptions for good reading habits. Attending to his description, and the correlative ethical demand on our understanding, will complete our preparations for examining his ‘main’ argument in the fourth and last subsection, ‘The Principle of Effective History’. Our coverage of Gadamer’s work began at the broadest level, outlining the three movements of the book. Our focus became more detailed as I began to rehearse his claims in the middle of his work – all of our close reading has been 22. Plato, Symposium, 188e and following. 23. TM 290. 24. GW 1, 295 [274/5].

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and will be in the section entitled ‘Raising the Historicity of Understanding to a Hermeneutic Principle’. Now we are going to examine the third subsection. We are closing in on the centre of Gadamer’s argument, which is in the fourth and final subsection, the place he provides his most original contribution, and the text which is most relevant to the present claims of this book. Our coverage will be even more detailed than before. It is characteristic of Truth and Method that its arguments are not restricted to their allotted parts of the book’s formal structure. Gadamer’s conversational style entails a good deal of repetition, and he often displays his conclusions before defending them with arguments. The idea of temporal distance, presented in this third subsection, is closely related to the important claims Gadamer is soon to make about ‘effective history’, and there is much overlap between them. In some ways, this disarms the power of his argument – it can seem that the real force of persuasion always lies somewhere else, in something yet to be said or something already said. To some extent we will overcome this by drawing the relevant points together. Gadamer’s analysis of ‘The Hermeneutical Significance of Temporal Distance’ begins by reminding the reader of the structure of understanding. He recalls the structural features we considered above, namely, the circularity that obtains between our understanding of the parts and the whole of a work, which corresponds to the circularity between our anticipations and our discoveries. Thus far, Gadamer’s account could leave us wondering whether there is something interior about our anticipations and something exterior about our discoveries, and thus a circle between inside and outside. Soon he will clarify his position. Gadamer now contrasts the Romantic hermeneutics of the nineteenth century (represented above all by Schleiermacher) with Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle. Schleiermacher, Gadamer claims, sees the completion of reason’s circularity as a real possibility. Full understanding can be obtained, a text can thus be fully mastered, whenever its parts and its whole are brought in perfect harmony. The circular movement of reason, between parts and whole, can always come to an end when our subjective anticipations become aligned with the objective features of the text; for Schleiermacher, this alignment is, above all, possible when our subjective anticipations are united with those of the original author. The circle closes when we reproduce the work as it first was made. We use the material tool of language to produce the author’s original ‘intended’ meaning.25 In contrast to this account of Romantic hermeneutics (we need not ask whether it is accurate), Gadamer depicts Heidegger as introducing the notion of unending, progressive circularity. Perhaps it would be better to characterize this hermeneutical circle as an infinite ‘spiral’. Understanding is always directed and oriented by its prior commitments, and this is true not only of new discoveries, but of those new understandings that overthrow the original commitments. Starting assumptions will always affect the course of future thought. Every movement of reason that achieves greater understanding provokes yet further movements and there is no rest for thought. 25. GW 1, 298 [276/7]; TM 293.



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The unending circularity of understanding coincides with a shift in emphasis: from what the original author intended, to the subject matter being discussed. Gadamer endorses this Heideggerian picture (and again, we need not ask whether it is fair to Heidegger). What ought to be understood is not the thought of the author as a person, but the point that is being made by the text; the hermeneutical circle is a description of the unending effort to achieve a better understanding of that subject matter.26 Neither the author nor the text as it stands is the object of understanding, but rather the truth to which these point, the claim to which they are directed. Gadamer’s own ‘hermeneutical circle’ names not a prescriptive method for achieving a perfect understanding (Schleiermacher), but a description of what happens whenever we understand (Heidegger). And Gadamer’s hermeneutical circle is committed to a unitary picture of understanding; this circle is not an oscillation between internal expectations and external facts, between subjective anticipations and what we find objectively to be the case; but, instead, the hermeneutical circle describes the indivisible unity of these terms. Gadamer now states this unity in an initial way, but at the centre of his argument (in the next subsection) he will rely on Hegel to refine the claim.27 The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition.28 Der Zirkel ist also nicht formaler Natur. Er ist weder subjektiv noch objektiv, sondern beschreibt das Verstehen als das Ineinanderspiel der Bewegung der Überlieferung und der Bewegung des Interpreten. Die Antizipation von Sinn, die unser Verständnis eines Textes leitet, ist nicht eine Handlung der Subjektivität, sondern bestimmt sich aus der Gemeinsamkeit, die uns mit der Überlieferung verbindet.29

This claim is theoretically sophisticated, and the last part of it displays the circularity of temporal distance. There is no contrast between subject and object, between reader and text, between inside and outside, because each one produces the other. On the one hand, the reader’s ‘subjective’ anticipations of textual meaning are actually given to the reader by the text itself, in so far as the reader already relies on the tradition of that text in order to approach it. On the other hand, the text’s ‘objective’ features are actually given to it by the reader, in so far as the text only exists within the scope of the reader’s horizon of meaning, or as 26. GW 1, 298–9 [276–8]; TM 293–4. 27. Cf. GW 3, 3–28. 28. TM 293. 29. GW 1, 298 [276/7].

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we might say, within the scope of the reader’s system of classification. Gadamer depicts this unity of subject and object, of inside and outside, of reader and text, as a ‘commonality’ between the passive reception of tradition and creative production of the interpreter. On close examination, there is no stable contrast between the tradition that shapes the interpreter, and the interpreter who shapes the item of tradition, but a circular description can trace their unity. It is this relation between tradition and interpreter that is always the true site of the hermeneutical circle as Gadamer understands it, and his claim is that it is always this unitary circle which is in play whenever we confusedly imagine there to be an oscillation between a book’s parts and its whole, between our anticipations and discoveries, between inside and outside, between subject and object, or between reader and text. This is one of Gadamer’s most significant claims. As Gadamer states it in the next sentences, not only do our commitments proceed out of the ‘commonality’ placing us in a tradition, But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. Thus the circle of understanding is not a ‘methodological’ circle, but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding.30 Diese Gemeinsamkeit aber ist in unserem Verhältnis zur Überlieferung in beständiger Bildung begriffen. Sie ist nicht einfach eine Voraussetzung, unter der wir schon immer stehen, sondern wir erstellen sie selbst, sofern wir verstehen, am Überlieferungsgeschehen teilhaben und es dadurch selber weiter bestimmen. Der Zirkel des Verstehens ist also überhaupt nicht ein ‘methodischer’ Zirkel, sondern beschriebt ein ontologisches Strukturmoment des Verstehens.31

Gadamer’s claims about the unitary character of this circle will become clearer once he introduces Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the next subsection. Our goal for now is to see how ‘temporal distance’ fits into the descriptive account of understanding’s circularity, and to see how this leads him to prescribe ethical standards for thought. ‘Temporal distance’ denotes all of the times a book is read between the day of its production and the moment in which we encounter it. Temporal distance not only signals the fact of these intervening events but also their effects, though Gadamer will soon provide these effects with a separate name. For now the term is ambiguous. The accumulative effects of these past readings shape our present effort to understand the book as a historical item located in the past, which is to say, as an item that is first in that series of readings. This span of events does not 30. TM 293–4. 31. GW 1, 298–9 [276–8].



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remain for us a simple linear series, intervening between the past and the present. Instead, the temporal distance shapes our effort to transverse that distance in order to understand the text, and (completing a circle) our understanding of the text will revise the effects of that temporal distance on us. When our understanding of the text changes, we revise the assumptions we receive from the ‘temporal distance’. We must be very clear about one fact. ‘Temporal distance’ is neither temporal nor spatial. It is logical. The text is neither temporally nor spatially ‘located’ in the past. Using these categories is simply a convenient way to organize our reasoning. The temporal distance that putatively stands ‘between’ the ‘past’ and the ‘present’ is a continuous effect on the reader’s understanding here and now. It is laid out neither across time nor across space, and its effect on our efforts to leap over this ‘distance’ (in order to arrive, perhaps, in ancient Greece) are entirely logical. Our reception of temporal distance is a current dimension of our reasoning about an item, a text which is a part of us, and we a part of it. Our imagination of the text as an item in the past is a present feature of this effort, a present fact. Of course this is to deny neither the existence of temporal difference nor the existence of spatial difference. It is simply to keep clear the difference between origins and use. The past origin of a text at a temporal and physical remove, and the intervening gradations of time and space, do not mean that the effort to use the text must negotiate these ‘distances’ as either temporal or physical. They are now present as logical effects. In fact, it is because they involve neither temporal nor physical distance that these logical effects matter so much. It can matter here and now that Renaissance scholars, at a temporal and physical remove from us, found a particular delight in the plays of Aristophanes. It can matter now, in the present, that seventeenth-century Irishmen found a tool for the criticism of English politics in these plays. And it can matter now that Schlegel saw his aesthetic ideals realized in these plays.32 The preservation of these works in the intervening times and spaces, and the tradition of their significance, affect the present approach to them. The organization of these logical effects with spatial and temporal names helps us to visualize a circle of logical relations between the text that makes readers, and the readers who make the text. The image is persuasive and benefits from its simplicity: on the downward arc of the circle, we can picture the text and the whole history of its effects directed towards the reader, and on the upward arc of the circle, the reader, propelled by these effects, returns over the temporal distance to imagine the text at its great remove. Gadamer is convinced that the 32.  Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Vom ästhetischen Werte der griechischen Komödie’ in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Vol. 1, Studien des klassischen Altertums, ed. Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett, and Hans Eichner (München: Schöningh Paderborn, 1979). For an entertaining look at this reception history, see Edith Hall, ‘The English-Speaking Aristophanes 1650–1914’ in Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC–AD 2007: Peace, Birds and Frogs, eds Edith Hall and Amanda Wrigley (Oxford: Legenda, 2007), 66–88.

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‘temporal distance’ ingredient to this circular relation, viz., that downward arc towards the reader, serves as the necessary filter for misguided prejudices and positively produces new and good interpretive assumptions. This description is then radicalized to become Gadamer’s second ethical imperative, namely, to rely upon the winnowing power of temporal distance. Gadamer’s first ethical imperative had been to start with appropriate assumptions, to initiate that upward projective arc of the imagination in the right way, and above all he indicated the expectation of the unexpected as an assumption that would therapeutically restrain our hidden commitments. It remained, of course, that one necessarily relied upon commitments in order to proceed, and the orienting effect of those commitments could never be avoided. Thus every reading was always already directed. Gadamer’s second ethical imperative derives from the logic of temporal distance and it aims to help overcome the problem of starting with the right assumptions. He says of the one seeking to understand: He cannot separate in advance the productive prejudices that enable understanding from the prejudices that hinder it and lead to misunderstandings. Rather, this separation must take place in the process of understanding itself, and hence hermeneutics must ask how that happens. But this means it must foreground what has remained entirely peripheral in previous hermeneutics: temporal distance and its significance for understanding.33 Er ist nicht imstande, von sich aus vorgängig die produktiven Vorurteile, die das Verstehen ermöglichen, von denjenigen Vorurteilen zu scheiden, die das Verstehen verhindern und zu Mißverständnissen führen. Diese Scheidung muß vielmehr im Verstehen selbst geschehen, und daher muß die Hermeneutik fragen, wie das geschieht. Das bedeutet aber: sie muß in den Vordergrund stellen, was in der bisherigen Hermeneutik völlig am Rande blieb, den Zeitenabstand und seine Bedeutung für das Verstehen.34

If one cannot separate in advance good and bad determining commitments, then one must blunder onwards, presumably knowing that the text may say something unexpected. Here Gadamer’s thoroughgoing optimism shows itself. His view is somewhat akin to Darwin’s survival of the fittest, but his optimism suggests that it is only good commitments which are deemed fit to survive ‘temporal distance’, rather than that those which survive are deemed good. Gadamer believes good prejudices will produce meaning whereas bad ones will fail to do so, and thus, over time, bad prejudices will be winnowed out as the chaff that they are. The longer the downward arc of the circle (measured by the upward arcs that have been produced), the better the quality of commitments accumulating in the temporal distance. 33. TM 295. 34. GW 1, 301 [279/80].



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Like the first, the second ethical imperative is a radicalization of something that always happens anyway: temporal distance is an unavoidable fact. In a few moments Gadamer will say that we ought to wait until enough temporal distance has been formed before we think we have an adequate understanding of something. Temporal distance should be sought; it is a requirement for good habits of understanding. It should be clear at this stage that temporal distance itself is not a natural phenomenon describable by physics. It is not an impersonal process. It names a collective history of personal judgements, which themselves rely upon received commitments; temporal distance describes a sequence of human efforts to revise starting assumptions in view of the judgements they produce, i.e. in light of what a text presents. This ongoing effort to improve the understanding of a text is received in the present as a tradition, as a body of starting commitments which have already been winnowed – and Gadamer assumes that future generations will likewise test and improve upon our contribution to these ‘prejudices’, what we have been calling commitments. Rather than time or space, the formation, reception, and use of this body of commitments constitutes what is called ‘temporal distance’. Temporal distance simply names an aspect of our present taxonomy. And the basically good character of the commitments forming the temporal distance leads Gadamer to view reason’s infinite circularity as not only a more accurate description than Romanticism’s putatively closed circularity, but also leads him to view that unending process as far more beneficial to the reader. Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; it is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not something that must be overcome.35 Nun ist die Zeit nicht mehr primär ein Abgrund, der überbrückt werden muß, weil er trennt und fernhält, sondern sie ist in Wahrheit der tragende Grund des Geschehens, in dem Gegenwärtige wurzelt. Der Zeitenabschnitt ist daher nicht etwas, was überwunden werden muß.36

We must be vigilant, when we read such statements, to remain clear about the sometimes literal but often metaphorical character of Gadamer’s ‘time’ and ‘space’. Gadamer contrasts the infinitely productive spiral of reason’s temporal distance with the closed circle of Romantic hermeneutics, which attempted to leap over the past and arrive once and for all, one might say, in the author’s head. This was, rather, the naïve assumption of historicism, namely that we must transpose ourselves into the spirit of the age, think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance towards historical objectivity.37 35. TM 297. 36. GW 1, 302 [280/1]. 37. TM 297.

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Das War vielmehr die naive Voraussetzung des Historismus, daß man sich in den Geist der Zeit versetzen, daß man in deren Begriffen und Vorstellungen denken solle und nicht in seinen eigenen und auf diese Weise zur historischen Objektivität vordringen könne.38

Gadamer’s description is prescriptive. We must not shed all of our present commitments, which were formed during the many readings that intervened between a book’s production and the present; we must not exchange these for the commitments associated with that original moment of production. Rather, we ought to continue revising and contributing to that body of commitments. We ought to increase the temporal distance, rather than eliminate it. In fact the important thing is to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition enabling understanding. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in light of which everything handed down presents itself to us. Here it is not too much to speak of the genuine productivity of the course of events.39 In Wahrheit kommt es darauf an, den Abstand der Zeit als ein positive und produktive Möglichkeit des Verstehens zu erkennen. Er ist nicht ein gähnender Abgrund, sondern ist ausgefüllt durch die Kontinuität des Herkommens und der Tradition, in deren Lichte uns alle Überlieferung sich zeigt. Hier ist es nicht zuviel, von einer echten Produktivität des Geschehens zu sprechen.40

I have tried to show the potentially productive and enabling character of temporal distance with the example of Aristophanes’ Clouds. The play would be less comedic if the historical Socrates were as mundane as, say, Xenophon makes him out to be, rather than as original and provocative as Plato allowed him to become. Like Socrates, Clouds has become better with age. Some jokes are surely lost on us today, but the temporal distance has winnowed out the wheat from the chaff, and the central plot machinery has emerged stronger and more pointed in its comedic effects. In the course of European history, the contrast has deepened between the respect Socrates warrants and his foolishness in the play. Gadamer is arguing that it is not only good wines and classic plays that improve with age. He is making comprehensive claims about the relation between tradition, reason, and language – about what is required for us to understand at all, and to understand better. Were he a theologian, he would say that Christianity’s understanding of scripture has become better over time. Our inheritance of a taxonomy is the condition for the possibility of understanding. The taxonomy is why we understand; it is what we understand; it is 38. GW 1, 302 [280/1]. 39. TM 297. 40. GW 1, 302 [280/1].



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how we understand. Gadamer is indexing the formation of what I have called ‘intermediary’ commitments, the middle ranking categories, the assumptions that stand between universals and particulars, the links between ‘being’ and ‘my Bible’. The scope of an inherited classificatory taxonomy is the horizon of what is knowable, the ‘light’ in which ‘everything handed down presents itself to us.’ It is indeed ‘productive’, as Gadamer says, for nothing exists in our world if it is not classified with these inherited commitments. Gadamer argues that it is the increasing accumulation of these good intermediary classificatory commitments which sheds brighter light on the items of our enquiry. Temporal distance provides these categories; more precisely, ‘temporal distance’ simply names their production and accumulation. And for Gadamer, this process winnows out the misguided ones, ensuring that only the good survive. The converse is also true. Without temporal distance we lack the assurance that our commitments are well fitted to the object of enquiry. Our enjoyment and understanding of Clouds would be seriously hampered if we read the play without any notion of who Socrates was and is, or without any notion of the existence of Greece and its importance for Western civilization. A case in which temporal distance had not refined our commitments, would be a case in which it was required for us to suspend our judgement. Gadamer provides the example of contemporary artworks. Our judgement about their quality and meaning is ‘curiously impotent’ and ‘desperately unsure’. Our close proximity to the artwork means that we rely on assumptions that are untested – prejudices which are likely to distort the true value of the work. Such contemporary pieces are too entangled in the current situation, in our passing trends and fleeting sensibilities. Only when all their relations to the present time have faded away can their real nature appear, so that the understanding of what is said in them can claim to be authoritative and universal.41 Erst das Absterben aller aktuellen Bezüge läßt ihre eigene Gestalt sichbar werden und ermöglicht damit ein Verständnis des in ihnen Gesagten, das verbindliche Allgemeinheit beanspruchen kann.42

If waiting is a good thing, then waiting until an item’s connections to the present have entirely died away might be the goal of correct understanding. Gadamer is quick to prevent readers from drawing this conclusion. Historical periods never close. Events never become freestanding isolated wholes. There is never a break, we could say, between the production and the interpretation of a work. The past can never be extricated from its past, or from our present. Once this is recognized, then the ever-expanding ‘temporal distance’ will sustain an infinite process of understanding. Here we can quote Gadamer at some length. 41. TM 297. 42. GW 1, 302–3 [281/2].

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But the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process. Not only are fresh sources of error constantly excluded, so that all kinds of things are filtered out that obscure the true meaning; but new sources of understanding are continually emerging that reveal unsuspected elements of meaning. The temporal distance that performs the filtering process is not fixed, but is itself undergoing constant movement and extension. And along with the negative side of the filtering process brought about by temporal distance there is also the positive side, namely the value it has for understanding. It not only lets local and limited prejudices die away, but allows those that bring about genuine understanding to emerge clearly as such.43 Die Ausschöpfung des wahren Sinnes aber, der in einem Text oder in einer künstlerischen Schöpfung gelegen ist, kommt nicht irgendwo zum Abschluß, sondern ist in Wahrheit ein unendlicher Prozeß. Es werden nicht nur immer neue Fehlerquellen ausgeschaltet, so daß der wahre Sinn aus allerlei Trübungen herausgefiltert wird, sondern es entspringen stets neue Quellen des Verständnisses, die ungeahnte Sinnbezüge offenbaren. Der Zeitenabstand, der die Filterung leistet, hat nicht eine abgeschlossene Größe, sondern ist in einer ständigen Bewegung und Ausweitung begriffen. Mit der negativen Seite des Filterns, die der Zeitenabstand vollbringt, ist aber zugleich die positive Seite gegeben, die er für das Verstehen besitzt. Er läßt nicht nur die Vorurteile, die partikularer Natur sind, absterben, sondern auch diejenigen, die en wahrhaftes Verstehen leiten, als solche hervortreten.44

The infinite character of reason’s circularity, in other words its inclusion of an ever-expanding ‘temporal distance’, means that the simple reproduction of a work is completely ruled out. We cannot repeat the original production because it never ends. We are, in a sense, included in the first production; there is an unbroken continuity between the first meaning of a text and the meaning it has now. And the later our participation (the more temporal distance between ourselves and the work), the more assured our starting assumptions and consequent understanding. Interpreters of, say, Assyrian cuneiform might initially find this disconcerting – for they have always struggled against the paucity of information left by the vast stretches of intervening time and space. Would it not be desirable to leap over the intervening gap and visit ancient Babylon? The interpretation of many clay tablets is currently marked by uncertainty. If we remember to keep clear the difference between ‘real’ time and space, on the one hand, and the organization of our commitments with the metaphorical labels of ‘time’ and ‘space’, on the other hand, then Gadamer’s point will be reinforced rather than undermined. Scholars of Assyrian cuneiform need only to consider the advances made in their field of study since the excavations of the library of Ashurbanipal in the 43. TM 298. 44. GW 1, 303–4 [281–3].



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1850s to appreciate what Gadamer is depicting. It is the subsequent advances in knowledge that count as his increasing ‘temporal distance’, whereas the paucity of information prior to the discovery of the library meant that tablets of Assyrian cuneiform lacked temporal distance in the requisite sense. Today, a random clay tablet can be approached with a good deal of temporal distance, but in 1700, that tablet of cuneiform lacked temporal distance. Gadamer first described the structure of understanding as circular, a circularity that blurs the distinction between reason, tradition, and scripture. This structure then provoked his two ethical imperatives for good understanding: start right and wait long. It is because our initial prejudices are determinative for our understandings that we must start rightly, and it is because we cannot adequately test all of our own prejudices that we should acquire from the history of a text’s interpretation the prejudices of other readers, patiently forestalling a final understanding. Both are claims about the taxonomy we inhabit. Gadamer’s focus is directed to those commitments we inherit or acquire from a community like the church, ‘prejudices’ that have been formed over significant stretches of human history, such as the time between the first performance of Aristophanes’ Clouds and the present. These are precisely the kind of assumptions that Heidegger tends to elide – remember we saw him move from the activities in a person’s courtyard to shared assumptions about the eternal heavens, skipping the republic in between. Gadamer attends to the fact that thought itself relies upon a particular history of middling commitments, commitments that link huge categories like ‘being’ to individual experiences like ‘my Bible’, and he is principally concerned with how this intermediary space, this community inheritance, shapes the whole scope of human understanding. The circularity of understanding in Gadamer’s account has begun to undermine certain key distinctions we habitually rely upon to organize our thinking. These distinctions – between subject and object, between inner and outer, between past and present, between self and other – crystallize in the difference between reader and text. We should recall that for Gadamer, the scope of what gets read includes the whole world. And as we saw above, Gadamer has signalled that what is at play in these differences is really only a circle of mutual effects between the tradition that shapes the reader and the reader that shapes the tradition. This is, on my reading, a description of our taxonomy. The next subsection of Truth and Method, for which we have been preparing all along, is going to examine this issue more directly. It is going to present an account in which Gadamer’s key contrasts begin to fade away, an account in which scripture, tradition, and reason can be seen as the single phenomenon of inhabiting a world – of making the world that we inherit. In transitioning to that argument, Gadamer closes the discussion of temporal distance by reminding his audience that our reasoning about something in the past includes the effect of the past on our reasoning. We should not fruitlessly try to leap over the temporal distance but, rather, we should aim to increase it. In view of the relation between our understanding and items from the past (and what items are not from the past?), he says,

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The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship that constitutes both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding. A hermeneutics adequate to the subject matter would have to demonstrate the reality and efficacy of history within understanding itself. I shall refer to this as ‘history of effect’. Understanding is essentially, a historically effected event.45 Der wahre historische Gegenstand ist kein Gegenstand, sondern die Einheit dieses Einen und Anderen, ein Verhältnis, in dem die Wirklichkeit der Geschichte ebenso wie die Wirklichkeit des geschichtlichen Verstehens besteht. Ein sachangemessene Hermeneutik hätte im Verstehen selbst die Wirklichkeit der Geschichte aufzuweisen. Ich nenne das damit Geforderte ‘Wirkungsgeschichte’. Verstehen ist seinem Wesen nach ein wirkungsgeschichtlicher Vorgang.46

The unitary event of understanding is the topic to which we turn in the next chapter.

45. TM 299. 46. GW 1, 305 [283/84].

Chapter 7 READING IN THE WORLD

1. ‘The Principle of Wirkungsgeschichte’ In our reading of Gadamer, we have arrived at the principal subsection for which we have been preparing all along. In the previous chapter we examined the first three subsections, and now we arrive at the fourth and last. Its title confronts us as a small problem. I said at the outset that we might translate Wirkungsgeschichte as ‘effective history’. But we might also might translate it as the ‘history of effects’. Or, perhaps, the ‘history that affects’. English makes a number of distinctions that do not exactly help us with the German. English contrasts, for instance, effect (to cause) with effect (result), and it contrasts effect (to cause) with affect (to influence). The Wirkungs found in Wirkungsgeschichte and in the related adjective wirkungsgeschichtlich is less decided on these matters. History affects our thinking; it effects reason’s commitments, which are the effects of its processes. We need not fret about these peculiarities of English. We need to be clear that Gadamer is naming a unitary relation between the past and the present, one in which our thinking is defined by history and one in which what counts as history, or as a historical object, depends on our thinking. Gadamer will eventually name this entire circle of influence ‘wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein’; this is usually translated into English as ‘historically effected consciousness’. Though more cumbersome, we know it can also mean ‘consciousness that has been affected by history’. Further, Gadamer says he wants this term to name both the fact that a particular history is influencing one’s consciousness, and the very consciousness of this fact – the historically conditioned awareness of that history which is shaping one’s awareness.1 We are tracing a hermeneutical circle of influence. The aim of Gadamer’s argument in this section, I said in Chapter 5, is to supplement Heidegger’s account of the hermeneutical circle with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In doing so, he seeks to expose what happens whenever we understand anything, though he is particularly concerned with classic texts. My goal in analysing his argument is to help us reimagine the experience 1. GW 2, 444.

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of inhabiting the world, and do so in such a way that we dispense with the assumption that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’ and ‘reason’ name three different entities. This requires us to dismantle some significant barriers between textual and philosophical hermeneutics, for if we want to know what a text means, then we are no less interested in the world where it shows up – whether that world is British or Kimbanguist or Greek. Gadamer is interested in historical objects, namely, items that are ‘located’ in the ‘past’, and he is interested in the ‘temporal distance’ that separates us from them. We know that these spatial and temporal features of his descriptions are simply metaphors. These categories help us to think about our thinking; they are a form of superficial classification that discursively organizes our experience of fundamental classification. These temporal and spatial categories help us to imagine how our middling commitments should be presently affected by their historical origins. Of course, what we engage in the present is neither physically distant nor temporally removed. But readers of Gadamer are sometimes overwhelmed by the visual force of these ‘distances’, and that produces some fascinating (though inadvisable) interpretations. The relation between our thinking and historical items is circular. For Gadamer, our thinking about items in the past shapes those items qua items, and our thinking is itself shaped by that past. We have seen Gadamer describe ‘understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter’.2 This interplay began to erode the difference between inner and outer, between subject and object, and between reader and book – all of which were reclassified in terms of the tradition that shapes the interpreter, and the interpreter who shapes the item of tradition. This relation between tradition and interpreter was, for Gadamer, the only true site of the hermeneutical circle, and, notably, this puts the circle entirely within the scope of the inhabited taxonomy. In the present subsection, Gadamer is going to examine the unity of this circle in some detail. Gadamer thus returns us to some of the themes we saw in Heidegger’s account of ‘being there’ in the world of our taxonomy, an account in which what is ‘not me’ turns out to be a feature of me, while what is ‘me’ turns out to depend on the world. Claims like ‘not me’ were depicted as strategies for superficially classifying our fundamental experience, rather than discoveries of entities subsisting in the world apart from ourselves. Heidegger’s picture of the inhabited world of fundamental classification included a unity of self and other, of thinking stuff and extended stuff, of persons and the objects of everyday life; indeed it was their very unity which made it logically possibly to form them into parts that could ever be put into relation. Heidegger’s phenomenology sought to expose ever more superordinate commitments ingredient to fundamental classification and to describe how minor experiences are made possible and oriented by those big commitments (like ‘being’). Gadamer supplements that account by including midsized commitments, neither universally necessary nor invented by oneself; rather, he examines 2. TM 293; GW 1, 298 [276/7].



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commitments relevant to one’s historical location in a community, or to one’s efforts to understand items ‘located’ in the past, like old books. Gadamer does not, however, limit himself to minor claims. What gets to count as an item ‘located’ in the past includes everything we might encounter in the present. (This should hardly surprise us if fundamental commitments hang together.) When Gadamer discusses historical phenomena, he intends much more than classic books – over the course of Truth and Method he includes everything from ancient Greek plays to contemporary works of art to our own hopes about the future. The difference is merely the amount of ‘temporal distance’ ingredient to our understanding of them. It is because our kind of consciousness is historical that the items of our world are historical. There is never a question about whether some item escapes the effects of temporal distance. As he says: If we try to understand a historical phenomenon from the historical distance that is characteristic of our hermeneutical situation, we are always already affected by history. It determines in advance both what seems to us worth enquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation, and we more or less forget half of what is really there – in fact, we miss the whole truth of the phenomenon – when we take its immediate appearance as the whole truth.3 Wenn wir aus der für unsere hermeneutisch Situation im ganzen bestimmenden historischen Distanz eine historische Erscheinung zu verstehen suchen, unterliegen wir immer bereits den Wirkungen der Wirkungsgeschichte. Sie bestimmt im voraus, was sich uns als fragwürdig und als Gegenstand der Erforschung zeigt, und wir vergessen gleichsam die Hälfte dessen, was wirklich ist, ja mehr noch, wir vergessen die ganze Wahrheit dieser Erscheinung, wenn wir die unmittelbare Erscheinung selber als die ganze Wahrheit nehmen.4

The standard English translation is here looser than one might hope, but nothing essential is lost. Gadamer notices that our taxonomies are filled with categories that were produced in the course of human history, and which we inherit from our own community. He describes these collectively in terms of historical distance, though we have also seen him use ‘temporal’ distance. Historical distance names a feature of our taxonomy here and now, not something stretching far away into the past. Just like the commitments used to uncover things in Heidegger’s work, Gadamer’s temporal distance both makes possible and provides a determination or orientation (Bestimmung) for any historical item that appears in our world – and everything counts as a historical item. As for Heidegger, something exists as what it is classified as, and Gadamer is interested in the historical chain of classificatory acts. At past moments in the history which now shapes our thought, people relied upon different formations of commitments, viewed entities from a different ‘temporal distance’. Their 3. TM 300. 4. GW 1, 306 [284/5].

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commitments uncovered things as different items, made them show up differently in their world. Temporal distance orients our understanding, our acts of classification, and at different temporal moments people have known things differently. In our reading of Heidegger in Chapter 3, we saw that the purpose of linguistic tools gets decided before we use them to make meaning. A Bible in one world, on this account, does not have the same meaning-making job as in another; we might say it is not the same book as in another. In the last chapter we saw Gadamer suggest that our commitments get better with the increase of temporal distance – if he were more theologically minded he would claim that Christians read a better Bible today than yesterday, just as modern classicists read a better Aristophanes than ancient scholars. Now Gadamer introduces something called a ‘whole truth’. This might appear to be mere casual rhetoric, and in the quotation above there is a rhetorical aspect to the first use of the phrase, but the second use demands we accept the contrast between some particular historical presentation of an item and the ‘whole truth’. The contrast points to a truth that is the opposite of some local understanding from some particular point of ‘temporal distance’. This is not a casual way of saying that we ‘miss the whole point’, but a technical concept. Gadamer is appealing to Hegel. He earlier defined the notion of a ‘whole truth’ as what is achieved in Hegel’s ‘absolute knowing’, and he will now turn back to this concept at the bottom of the page.5 A ‘whole truth’ is a truth that encompasses all acts of classification that have happened in the course of some history. The ‘whole truth’ would be a category possessing all of the orientations, all of the perspectives that were produced in the history of understanding some item. Gadamer gets this from Hegel.6 Unlike Hegel, Gadamer thinks the whole truth is unachievable, which in a moment he will point out. Gadamer’s idea of a ‘whole truth’ is strictly regulative. It functions only to remind us that whatever truths we now have, whatever our habits of classification, these do not exhaust the possibilities afforded by that which is classified. At different points in the ‘temporal distance’ (which means, using different but related configurations of commitments), the object of our enquiry appeared differently – was differently. This notion of the ‘whole truth’ is the polar opposite of the ‘objective truth’ sought by certain scientific methods. The whole truth attempts to employ all commitments and the objective truth attempts to employ no commitments, or in some cases, only those in use at the historical moment an object was produced. In Chapter 6, Gadamer worked to persuade us to be suspicious of any methods offered for achieving an ‘objective’ view of an object – whether these aim to strip away commitments or reproduce the ‘original’ ones. 5. GW 1, 238 [220/1]; TM 228. 6. See G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden, Vol. 3, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 2. Aufl., eds Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), §1–72 (particularly §20, ‘Die Wahrheit ist der Ganze.’), and §788–808.



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One version of the ‘objective truth’ is the re-creation of ‘original’ commitments, another is the removal of all commitments. Both efforts have examples in the history of theology. Gadamer rejects them both. Gadamer reminds the reader that these methods are themselves shaped by the effects of history, and by placing our trust in them we are likely to be blinded to the history that affects our understanding, failing to realize that the impulse to achieve the objective truth is itself historically conditioned and limited. This, precisely is the power of history over finite human consciousness, namely that it prevails even where faith in method leads one to deny one’s historicity.7 Das gerade ist die Macht der Geschichte über das endliche menschliche Bewußtsein, daß sie sich auch dort durchsetzt, wo man im Glauben an die Methode die eigene Geschichtlichkeit verleugnet.8

That ‘objective truth’ which aims to recreate a past taxonomy of commitments is impossible to achieve. The limitations of our horizon, the finitude of human consciousness, are a product of our inheritance: the taxonomy of commitments we rely upon. Any method that attempts to deny this taxonomy and recreate the commitments of the past would need to ignore the way in which this effort is itself influenced by its past, by our present reliance upon a configuration of commitments which determine and orient the whole effort. This sort of objective truth is impossible. That ‘objective truth’ which aims to remove all commitments is impossible to achieve. There is no thinking which is not the use of inherited categories. So any method that would relieve us of all our categories would end our thinking. This is the task of the second variety of objective truth. Notably, such an objective view of scripture would strip us of scripture, tradition, and reason. Another way of saying this is that it would strip us of our world; there would no longer be any things to think about, and no thoughts to direct towards those nothings. This kind of objective truth is also impossible. Like Heidegger, Gadamer has us inhabiting our taxonomies, and what exists for us is what is fundamentally classified. There is nothing outside the scope of classification, outside the horizon of one’s taxonomy. And further, for our own self to exist, is to ‘be there’ in the scope of what is classified. Gadamer always assumes this picture of human existence. The ‘whole truth’ and both versions of the ‘objective truth’ are unobtainable. Gadamer makes many arguments against the ‘objective truth’. We have seen him work to persuade his readers of the structural necessity, as well as the benefits, of the temporal distance on which our thinking must rely. Hegel’s contrasting idea of the ‘whole truth’ has now been introduced, but as a regulative principle. Hegel’s ‘absolute knowing’ – namely a commitment which encapsulates the entire history of commitments – is simply impossible on Gadamer’s reckoning. We must live in 7. TM 300. 8. GW 1, 306 [284/5].

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our historically finite taxonomies. Our efforts to understand our own taxonomies, and our efforts to improve them, no matter how important, will always be limited. That we should become completely aware of effective history is just as hybrid a statement as when Hegel speaks of absolute knowledge, in which history would become completely transparent to itself and hence be raised to the level of a concept.9 Daß Wirkungsgeschichte je vollendet gewußt werde, ist eine ebenso hybride Behauptung wie Hegels Anspruch auf absolutes Wissen, in dem die Geschichte zur vollendeten Selbstdurchsichtigkeit gekommen und daher auf den Standpunkt des Begriffs erhoben sei.10

If both forms of truth are unobtainable, it remains that the ‘whole truth’ is far more desirable. It is, Gadamer says, ‘urgent’ that we seek this ‘whole truth’, that we strive to become aware of the chain of commitments that have accumulated in our own taxonomies, that we strive to bring into our present awareness the past commitments that were once brought to bear on the item we seek to understand. The greater our awareness, the closer we move towards the ‘whole truth’, and the more conscious we become of exactly how history has affected our consciousness.11 Consciousness of being affected by history is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation.12 Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein ist zunächst Bewußtsein der hermeneutischen Situation.13

Gadamer adopts the category ‘situation’ from Karl Jaspers. What is a hermeneutical situation? For Gadamer it is the world we already uncover. It is the taxonomy we already inhabit. This is the world in which scripture, for instance, shows up as already directed towards a particular range of possible meanings, as a tool for certain ends. It is the world in which the items we try to understand only make their appearance on the basis of our commitments. The hermeneutical situation is also the world in which it is sensible to strive for an understanding of that situation, a moment in history that orients us to the effects of history. The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside of it and hence are unable to have an objective knowledge of it. We always find ourselves 9. TM 300–1. 10. GW 1, 306 [284/5]. 11. GW 1, 306 [284/5]; TM 300–1. 12. TM 301. 13. GW 1, 307 [285/6].



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within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished. This is also true of the hermeneutic situation – i.e., the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to the tradition that we are trying to understand.14 Der Begriff der Situation ist ja dadurch charakterisiert, daß man sich nicht ihr gegenüber befindet und daher kein gegenständliches Wissen von ihr haben kann. Man steht in ihr, findet sich immer schon in einer Situation vor, deren Erhellung die nie ganz zu vollendende Aufgabe ist. Das gilt auch für die hermeneutische Situation, d.h. die Situation, in der wir uns gegenüber der Überlieferung befinden, die wir zu verstehen haben.15

However impossible it may be to complete, Gadamer wants us to pursue the ‘whole truth’. He wants us to strive to uncover our situation. He would have us think about how our thinking includes commitments we inherit from a tradition. It is logically impossible to get a complete vision of these commitments because every time we examine some of them, we must rely on others – and if we adopt a fresh vantage point, then this too becomes part of the situation, part of the ‘past’ now affecting our thinking. We must examine what is beneath a carpet while standing upon it. We move about, lifting the edges and piecing together a picture of the floor below. But there is no magic carpet to give us an overview of the intellectual ground on which we stand. Gadamer now introduces a name for this effort. Our relation to historical items is circular in structure, and Gadamer has been examining its moments with increasing specificity. Gadamer named the whole history of the reception of an item ‘temporal distance’. At first, this notion included the effect of temporal distance on our thought. Gadamer then specified the portion of ‘temporal distance’ that influences our own consciousness as ‘effective history’ – ignoring any history which does not affect us. Gadamer then distinguished between the history that affects us and our condition of being thusly affected, naming the latter ‘historically effected consciousness’. At first, this last notion included both our state of being affected, and our awareness of this state, our consciousness of how history effected our consciousness. Gadamer’s new addition to his lexicon specifies the effort by which we become conscious of the history affecting our consciousness: a ‘reflection on effective history’. The illumination of this situation – reflection on effective history – can never be completely achieved; yet the fact that it cannot be completed is due not to a deficiency in reflection but to the essence of the historical being that we are. To be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete.16

14. TM 301. 15. GW 1, 307 [285/6]. 16. TM 301.

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Auch die Erhellung dieser Situation, d.h. die wirkungsgeschichtliche Reflexion, ist nicht vollendbar, aber diese Unvollendbarkeit ist nicht ein Mangel an Reflexion, sondern liegt im Wesen des geschichtlichen Seins, das wir sind. Geschichtlichsein heißt, nie im Sichwissen Aufgehen.17

Our thinking about the history shaping our thought is important to undertake even if its completion is impossible. We should always pursue the ‘whole truth’, but we can never achieve it. Not only must our enquiry ignore those commitments upon which it relies during the examination of other commitments, but we are always acquiring new commitments and revising the old ones. This is the inescapable structure of thought, which can only proceed on the basis of what has been given to it from the past. The circular structure of thought produces a peculiar ambiguity in Gadamer’s discussion of ‘tradition’. Many readers will have noticed it. Gadamer’s circular idea is reproduced in a circular term. Gadamer often refers both to the historical books we want to understand, and to the history ingredient to our understanding, by using the same term, Überlieferung. This is no mere slip of language. Tradition names the chain of commitments that we presently rely upon to classify an item, to make it what it is. Tradition also names the item we classify, the item given to us by tradition. Both are traditio, handed down, inherited. As we have already seen him claim, there is an essential ‘unity of the one and the other’, the tradition that makes us and we who make the tradition.18 This unity is permitted by the ambiguity of the term. If one considers it for a moment, this ambiguity is preserved in the English word, in so far as ‘tradition’ names both the thing that one does and the reason that one does it. One performs a traditional act because it is traditional to do so. This ambiguity is only clarified by a description of the hermeneutical circle, which we know is never for Gadamer the circle between individual words and an entire language, or between the parts and the whole of a text like the Bible – it is never the circle between anticipations and discovery, between subject and object, between present and past, between inside and outside, or between mind and world. Rather each of these is only a way of describing how tradition produces us and we produce tradition. Knowledge of tradition is thus both knowledge of ourselves and knowledge of the item we seek to understand; knowledge of the item we seek to understand is thus knowledge of tradition and of ourselves. Gadamer turns to Hegel to help him account for this unity.

2. Gadamer’s Use of Hegel Gadamer uses Hegel’s concept of ‘absolute knowing’ to develop his regulative ideal of the ‘whole truth’. The whole truth is necessarily impossible to obtain, but the 17. GW 1, 307 [285/6]. 18. TM 299; GW 1, 305 [283/4].



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therapeutic effect of its pursuit counts for much in Gadamer’s account. As one approaches the whole truth, the tradition which constitutes one’s situation is more fully exposed and the item of tradition which one seeks to understand is more fully revealed – the inherited commitments on which one relies to classify the item as ‘what it is’ are excavated and displayed in their determining character, and the possibility of some alternative commitments allows the item to appear with greater alterity. It is no deficiency in our reflection on the history that affects us (wirkungsgeschichtliche Reflexion) that prevents a full excavation of this tradition. Rather the basic unity between the effective history and ourselves – the historical character of our consciousness – makes the process impossible to complete, however beneficial its partial fulfilment. Gadamer turns to the resources of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to account for the unity of the tradition that creates us and we who create the tradition. All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pregiven, what with Hegel we call ‘Substance’, because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility of understanding any tradition whatsoever in its historical alterity. This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it.19 Alle Sichwissen erhebt sich aus geschichtlicher Vorgegebenheit, die wir mit Hegel ‘Substanz’ nennen, weil sie alles subjektive Meinen und Verhalten trägt und damit auch alle Möglichkeit, eine Überlieferung in ihrer geschichtlichen Andersheit zu verstehen, vorzeichnet und begrenzt. Die Aufgabe der philosophischen Hermeneutik läßt sich von hier aus geradezu so charakterisieren: sie habe den Weg der Hegelschen Phänomenologie des Geistes insoweit zurückzugehen, als man in aller Subjektivität die sie bestimmende Substanzialität aufweist.20

In Being and Time, Heidegger tried to show how the phenomena of everyday life presuppose the grandest, most superordinate, world-defining commitments. He displayed the unity, in first-order experience, between ‘my hammer’ and ‘being’. Gadamer tries to overcome the descriptive gap between parts and wholes in Heidegger’s account. Gadamer relies on Hegel to fill in the important space between individuality and universal necessity. The gap between universals like ‘being’ and particulars like ‘my Bible’ is bridged by ‘temporal distance’, a term denoting that region of our taxonomy composed of midsized, community-based, historically produced commitments. (This remains, of course, a superficial way of classifying our own unitary habit of fundamental classification.) Gadamer’s use of Hegel thus pursues what Heidegger always suggested, namely that our 19. TM 301. I have amended ‘phenomenology of mind’ to read ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’, simply to make clear the allusion. 20. GW 1, 307 [285/6].

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understanding of what exists is largely informed by our own tradition, by the particular history that affects us. The link between universal categories and our particularity is formed by a history that gives us scripture, tradition, and reason. Gadamer gets from Hegel the idea of a whole truth, which, if achieved, would entirely fill the gap between universals and particulars by including every intermediary commitment ever brought to bear on some item. Gadamer uses Hegel’s ‘substance’ to name our taxonomy. The ideal of the ‘whole truth’ should provoke us to excavate our taxonomy, retracing the accumulated commitments that orient and determine us, and thus the items which appear in our world. Of course, he already told us that this is impossible to complete. The effort itself is oriented. It is both made possible and limited by the very taxonomy which philosophical hermeneutics aims to expose. Knowledge of our own substance can never be absolute because that same substance limits our efforts to know it, directing our ‘subjective intentions’. One connection in his chain of reasoning, a part of the quote above that we might miss, is the relation between the effort to clarify our own substance and the effort to understand a historical object (eine Überlieferung). These two efforts describe two arcs of the same circle, substance and subject. The link here is not yet entirely clear, but we can see that ‘substance’ names that arc of the hermeneutic circle in which temporal distance shapes us, while ‘subjective’ describes that arc of the circle which both tries to understand the historical object and discovers or modifies the content of substance, namely temporal distance. Whenever the subjective arc understands the substance arc (perhaps by investigating an important old book), it changes the character of that substance and thus has equally revised the character of the subjective. The relation between substance and subjective is descriptively circular, but a change in one is a change in the other. The unity of the tradition which makes us and we who make the tradition poses descriptive difficulties. In Gadamer’s version of Hegel’s pursuit of the whole truth, a circular description aims to account for this unity. But the unity of the circle is such that there is no sequential chain of cause and effect between parts. A change effected in what gets described as one part or arc of the circle (substance) simply is a change of what gets described as another part (subjective). Revising our reception of tradition is to revise our understanding of a traditional object and our way of understanding it. If we are mesmerized by the temporal and spatial metaphors of Gadamer’s account, by terms like ‘temporal distance’, we will imagine ‘substance’ as something coming from the past into the present, and ‘subject’ as something leaping from the present back into the past. We will be compelled to describe an impossible chain of circular causality. Thankfully, the logical relations under examination are wholly mundane. Any change of one term simply is a change of the other. And these wholesale changes can be arranged sequentially in linear time, for there is nothing temporally circular about them. A circularity will appear if the labels of ‘past’ and ‘present’ governing the ‘temporal distance’ between a ‘substance’ arc and a ‘subject’ arc mislead us into producing an overly literal picture of the hermeneutical circle. Descriptions of relation tend to set out their items sequentially, which



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poses obstacles for the unity between ourselves and the historical object if that item is ‘located’ in the ‘past’; instead these labels merely organize present features of our taxonomy. Heidegger, we can recall, had his own strategy for depicting this unity, namely ‘being-in-the-world’, a concept in which the world, and everything appearing there, is an essential feature of ourselves and we of it. Yet Gadamer, at times, seems to lose his way and forget what is metaphor and what is literal. We get a better idea of the link between knowledge of ourselves and knowledge of historical objects if we consider the unity between our taxonomy and the items that appear in our world. Doing so erodes certain aspects of the ‘otherness’ of historical entities and undermines the contrast between self-knowledge and knowledge of an item of tradition. To understand our ‘substance’ is simply to understand our ‘subjective intention’ and the item of tradition that it presents. That is because things exist for us as they are classified, and because we too are constituted within our classificatory taxonomy. Our investigation of Being and Time placed our taxonomy ‘out there’ in the world. Rather theatrically, we could say Heidegger takes the walls of our head and extends them to include our whole world. But he refuses any simple idealism or subjectivism, for it is a world that makes us, an empirically real world that we inherit and share with others – the world is not trapped inside our heads, rather our mind is out there in the world, open to the public and for all to see. More precisely, our taxonomy is available for everyone in our community to see. It is to the extent that our mind is outside ourselves in this way that we have anything like a community, anything like social coordination and friendship – anything like communication through the material tools of language, or an understanding of the scriptural language we inherit. Gadamer retains this Heideggerian picture. Such a unitary account of the relations between our selves, our tradition, and the world has broad consequences for the notion of alterity. What shows up in our world is already a part of us, but we are already other than ourselves. The condition for the possibility of seeing any item as an ‘other’ is to make it a part of ourselves, to have it within the scope of our taxonomy. And to discover ourselves is to know something other than ourselves (which is to say that the contrast is a false one). Gadamer will, for the remainder of the subsection we are reading, struggle to formulate both a description of alterity and an ethics appropriate to this description. The ‘possibility of understanding any tradition (Überlieferung) whatsoever in its historical alterity’ has a scope we know to extend to all historical items, and for Gadamer that includes everything, including ourselves. An examination of our own substance is an examination of tradition, ‘tradition’ both in the sense of our inherited categories and in the sense of the categorized items of our world. A ‘reflection on effective history’ has a reflexive structure, and this will become clearer before the end of Gadamer’s argument. Our taxonomy defines our ‘situation’ (Jaspers) and our ‘substance’ (Hegel). We stand in the ‘world’ (Heidegger) made by the scope of our ability to classify things. Gadamer introduces another metaphor for the scope of our world, ‘horizon’ (he adopts it from Heidegger, who gets it from Husserl, who gets it from Nietzsche).

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The image of a horizon neatly captures the unity of knowledge and being: the scope of what exists is what is classified by our fundamental commitments. The new metaphor provides Gadamer the opportunity to reformulate many now familiar arguments.21 The rest of his discussion will rely on this metaphor and wrestle with the possibility of alterity.

3. Alterity in the Metaphor of Horizons Gadamer approaches again the question of how we might use the right commitments, how we might acquire categories that are fit to classify the object of our enquiry. He now reframes this topic in terms of horizons. It is, if anything, only a slight departure from the concept of prejudices, from that of situation, and from that of substance. Perhaps it is his ideal of the ‘whole truth’ that compels him to accumulate an array of descriptive categories. Whatever the case, ‘horizon’ is used to describe our vantage point and its range of sight. He draws a contrast between a person possessing ‘no’ horizon (which is, strictly speaking, impossible) and one who has a horizon. The one ‘without’ a horizon cannot properly judge the relative value of what is immediately in front of her; we recall the case of contemporary art in which the lack of temporal distance prevented proper evaluations. The thing to do is to get a good horizon: A person who has a horizon knows the relative significance of everything within that horizon, whether it is near or far, great or small. Similarly, working out the hermeneutical situation means acquiring the right horizon of inquiry for the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition.22 Wer Horizont hat, weiß die Bedeutung aller Dinge innerhalb dieses Horizontes richtig einzuschätzen nach Nähe und Ferne, Größe und Kleinheit. Entsprechend bedeutet die Ausarbeitung der hermeneutischen Situation die Gewinnung des rechten Fragehorizontes für die Fragen, die sich uns angesicht der Überlieferung stellen.23

The relative significance of an item within one’s horizon is not descriptively attached to any specific part of his metaphor. As a metaphor, ‘horizon’ gives us the outer edge of our world, what we might describe as the most superordinate commitment of our taxonomy, or the taxonomy as a collective set. That outer edge provides the orienting scope in which relative significance is possible, but as a metaphor, it is hard to become more specific – for that task, ‘horizon’ is not as descriptively capable as a hierarchical taxonomy of commitments. We might account for ‘relative significance’ in terms of the accumulation of ‘temporal 21. GW 1, 307–9 [285–8]; TM 301–3. 22. TM 301–2. 23. GW 1, 307–8 [285–6].



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distance’, which is to say, the acquisition of perspectives that allow us to approach the ‘whole truth’, but these features of Gadamer’s account do not yet have a place in the metaphor. What does it mean to acquire the right horizon of enquiry? Gadamer is claiming that we must frame our questions with commitments that are appropriate to the item of tradition. Here one might suppose that our horizon needs to match the original horizon of an item – Gadamer will eschew that supposition. In the subsection of Truth and Method entitled ‘The Hermeneutical Meaning of Temporal Distance’, we saw Gadamer criticize the idea that one could leap over the distance that intervenes between the past and the present. Rather than gaining an ‘objective’ perspective by acquiring all the commitments operative at the moment of an item’s production, we always see that item through the chain of commitments since produced. Gadamer now reframes that argument in terms of horizons and wonders aloud whether we must transpose ourselves into the past horizon, dispensing with our own. We already know he rejects the idea, but he considers it again, before rejecting it again for the same reasons – and some new ones. He states the purported merits of exchanging of horizons: If we fail to transpose ourselves into the historical horizon from which the traditionary text speaks, we will misunderstand the significance of what it has to say to us … We must place ourselves in the other situation in order to understand it.24 Wer es unterläßt, derart sich in den historischen Horizont zu versetzen, aus dem die Überlieferung spricht, wird die Bedeutung der Überlieferungsinhalte mißverstehen … Daß man sich in den andern versetzen muß, um ihn zu verstehen.25

Gadamer introduces a new critique of this effort. (He will restate the old ones soon.) He accuses the effort of confusing means and ends. Those who try switching horizons typically have no further goal. These historians of past horizons wrongly think that reconstructing the past horizon is an end in itself. The proper end, however, is to understand whether the past claims are true. Acquiring a past horizon, transposing ourselves into a past world, is supposed to help us understand a text’s claims (means), so that we can evaluate whether they are true (end). If a text, or even a person, is treated as primary evidence of some other horizon, rather than as pointing to a truth, we do it violence. Yes, Gadamer tells us, there are special cases where the purpose of a conversation is to discover where someone is ‘coming from’, but those are exceptions. Gadamer wants us to read all texts as secondary literature, as descriptions of primary truths. We know he thinks that works of art present us with truths, and it is clear that he thinks works of philosophy attempt to persuade us of truths – the 24. TM 302. 25. GW 1, 308 [286/7].

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scope of truth here will be wide. He does not want us to consider artworks or old books as true in themselves but as pointing to something true. Gadamer does not want historical items to be treated as primary sources, as direct examples of their historical context, but rather as revealing a truth for the present. We can better see why I am posing the distinction in this way if we think about two ways of approaching a newspaper. Consider a respectable financial journal, or perhaps a scurrilous tabloid. We might read its pages and consider whether its claims are true. Did the new tax plan really affect their profit margins in that way? Did the prime minister really have a mistress? If we treat these texts as directed towards a truth, we will place ourselves alongside the text and look at that subject matter. The text, and we ourselves, are in a secondary position, facing some primary truth. Or we might treat the newspapers themselves as primary texts. We might bracket whatever it is that they are talking about, whatever truth lies outside the text, and ask about the text itself. What are its assumptions? What is its world? We might use it as first-order evidence of its readership. To what social groups are its advertisements directed? What professions and education levels are assumed in its prose? What is its historical location? When we ask these questions, Gadamer says we must ignore whether the text is true. Even if our two newspapers make false claims, they can be true as primary sources of historical information, as first-order examples of some culture in the past. He says, i.e., it makes an end of what is only a means. The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claims to be saying something true. We think we understand when we see the past from a historical standpoint – i.e., transpose ourselves into the historical situation and try to reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find in the past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves.26 D.h. das, was nur Mittel ist, zum Zweck macht. Der Text, der historisch verstanden wird, wird aus dem Anspruch, Wahres zu sagen, förmlich herausgedrängt. Indem man die Überlieferung vom historischen Standpunkt aus sieht, d.h. sich in die historische Situation versetzt und den historischen Horizont zu rekonstruieren sucht, meint man zu verstehen. In Wahrheit hat man den Anspruch grundsätzlich aufgegeben, in der Überlieferung für einen selber gültige und verständliche Wahrheit zu finden.27

This confusion of means and ends is possible throughout the human sciences. The distinction between our treatment of an item as a secondary source (good), or a primary source (bad), includes works of art and historical artefacts. An artwork is not simply evidence of how people saw things, during the Renaissance, for example, but rather points us to something true. Gadamer would have us see 26. TM 302–3. 27. GW 1, 308–9 [286–8].



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the artwork as presently showing something true. We must bring the item into the present; we must treat it as on a par with ourselves, even as, in some sense, united with ourselves. We are not to get distracted by the historical condition of the painter’s technique (the use of perspective); we are not to be distracted by Raphael’s imagination of Greek architecture in La Scuola di Atene. The painter and the limits of his world are not what we seek to understand – but the truth to which the painting refers. One can imagine Gadamer arguing that we should approach ancient artefacts, like prehistoric jewellery, by asking whether they are worth adopting in the present, whether they are valuable to us as jewellery, even whether ancient styles of pottery in the museum are now worth using. If I am overstating his case I am hopefully making clear the important difference between ends and means. His claims extend to people. Gadamer sees an attribution of sameness as the condition for the possibility of equality. We glimpsed this in the case of the newspapers – we are to stand beside the authors as equals and face the truths which they claim, rather than examine those authors. If we do not treat people as in some respect ‘the same’, then we deny their humanity and undo the legitimacy of their perspective. This denial is what historians do, for example, when they ignore an ancient claim to truth by treating the claim as primary evidence of the historical period. This denial is what the social sciences demand of an anthropologist who, for example, studies the religious practices of an isolated tribe – what the community believes is not to be treated seriously as a claim to truth, but rather as true evidence of their beliefs. In a less extreme case, one might accept the other’s claims as true for the other, or as true in the past horizon, while denying that they might be true in the present – true always and true for us. Acknowledging the otherness of the other in this way, making him the object of objective knowledge, involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth.28 Solche Anerkennung der Andersheit des anderen, die dieselbe zum Gegenstande objektiver Erkenntnis macht, ist insofern eine grundsätzliche Suspension seines Anspruchs.29

Gadamer has a subtle ethics of alterity. If we see the other as totally other, then we destroy something essential to that otherness, namely their claim to a truth which we do not possess. Gadamer makes a virtue of necessity, but a compelling one. After all, we can never see the other as totally other (that would be to place them outside our horizon), and we can never entirely reconstruct the horizon in which the other stands (because our efforts are already shaped by temporal distance, by our own present commitments) – but that does not stop us from trying. And the effort itself can be enough to arrest the other’s claim to truth, the effort may 28. TM 303. 29. GW 1, 309 [287/8].

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make an end out of a means by treating the other’s speech as a primary rather than secondary source of truth. Our vision comes to rest on the other, rather than continuing to the truth which they claim; we thereby set the other at a distance which prevents their claim on the present. Gadamer, we know, is out to mediate these sorts of contrasts: self and other, past and present, subject and object, wholes and parts, universals and particulars. If he can accomplish this, we will have the resources to provide a unitary account of scripture, tradition, and reason, and we will see why philosophical hermeneutics cannot be separated form textual hermeneutics. Gadamer has set up a scenario in which we inhabit one horizon, and the text given to us by a tradition inhabits another horizon. This simply poses his previous contrast between past and present prejudices in the language of his new metaphor. It comes as no surprise then when he denies that we can transpose ourselves into the other horizon. Our horizon always shapes our efforts to understand the historical other, just as that other has already shaped our horizon. However, Gadamer does much more than deny that we can switch horizons. He denies that there are two horizons. This denial is obscured when Gadamer talks about a fusion of horizons, the image of which has mesmerized many interpreters of Truth and Method. It is probably his most famous claim. In what remains I will try to show that Gadamer denies the possibility of a fusion of horizons, and that he rejects the very plurality of horizons on which the image depends. Gadamer is on a mission to fill the gaps between contrasts, and he has already offered us ‘temporal distance’ as the bridge between the ‘past’ and the ‘present’ – a past which supplies the shape of the present and a present which creatively imagines the past. Yet just as ‘temporal distance’ involves neither time nor distance, but only the accumulation of commitments in our present taxonomy, so too the ‘fusion’ between past and present horizons will involve not separate horizons but only something within our own present taxonomy. Gadamer has been wondering aloud whether we should try switching horizons with the past. We have previously seen him reject this idea (in the language of ‘temporal distance’), and now he rejects it again. His new rejection is even more decisive than before because the horizon metaphor is simpler. The new rejection entrenches his earlier position by denying even more strongly the disparity between past and present. Are there really two different horizons here – the horizon in which the person seeking to understand lives and the historical horizon within which he places himself? Is it a correct description of the art of historical understanding to say that we learn to transpose ourselves into alien horizons? Are there such things as closed horizons, in this sense? … Is the horizon of one’s present time ever closed in this way, and can a historical situation be imagined that has this kind of closed horizon?30 30. TM 303.



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Gibt es denn hier zwei voneinander verschiedene Horizonte, den Horizont, in dem der Verstehende lebt, und den jeweiligen historischen Horizont, in den er sich versetzt? Ist die Kunst des historischen Verstehens dadurch richtig und zureichend beschrieben, daß man lerne, sich in fremd Horizonte zu versetzen? Gibt es überhaupt in diesem Sinne geschlossene Horizonte? … Ist der Horizont der eigenen Gegenwart jemals ein derart geschlossener, und läßt sich eine historische Situation denke, die einen solchen geschlossen Horizont hätte?31

Unsurprisingly, the answer is ‘No’. As we saw earlier, the past never ends. Not only do our present commitments proceed out of tradition, but tradition proceeds out of us. ‘Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves.’32 Gadamer provides us a cultured analogy from English literature, before stating: So too the closed horizon that is supposed to enclose a culture is an abstraction.33 So ist auch der geschlossene Horizont, der eine Kultur einschließen soll, eine Abstraktion.34

It is an ‘abstraction’ because the past never finished, it never ended, but continues into the present, shaping our whole world, including our understanding of the past. It is an ‘abstraction’ because a closed past is only a feature of our imagination, a feature of our present horizon, what we have been calling superficial classification. It is our own horizon which contains our idea of the past horizon. The only location of any relation between ‘horizons’ will be here and now, subordinately and superficially positioned in the field of our taxonomy. Only within our horizon could a ‘fusion’ of horizons take place. This might end his investigation of plural horizons, of switching horizons or of fusing them together. There are no independent horizons which can be exchanged or fused. But Gadamer’s arguments are conversational rather than progressive, and he will continue to toy with the idea of a plurality of horizons.35 When our historical consciousness transposes itself into historical horizons, this does not entail passing into alien worlds unconnected in any way from our own; instead, they together constitute the one great horizon that moves from within and that, beyond the frontiers of the present, embraces the historical depths of our self-consciousness. Everything contained in historical consciousness is in fact embraced by a single historical horizon. 31. GW 1, 309 [287/8]. 32. TM 293–4. 33. TM 303. 34. GW 1, 309 [287/8]. 35. TM 303.

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Wenn sich unser historisches Bewußtsein in historische Horizonte versetzt, so bedeutet das nicht eine Entrückung in fremde Welten, die nicht mit unserer eigenen verbindet, sondern sie insgesamt bilden den einen großen, von innen her beweglichen Horizont, der über die Grenzen des Gegenwärtigen hinaus die Geschichtstiefe unseres Selbstbewußtseins umfaßt. In Wahrheit ist es also ein einziger Horizont, der all das umschließt, was das geschichtliche Bewußtsein in sich enthält.36

The ‘past’ horizon originates within ourselves, but what is at the source of ourselves? ‘Historical depths.’ Just as the ‘present’ is open-ended, including the ‘past’ in its understanding, so too the ‘past’ had an open-ended horizon, extending into the ‘present’. Gadamer is erasing the boundary between past and present in such a way that the descriptive contrast supporting the two arcs of the hermeneutic circle has begun to disappear – there are no arcs, only a circle. Thus he also begins to rule out any fusion of separate horizons between ourselves and the historical other. Gadamer introduces another temporal and spatial metaphor that refers to neither time nor space. Like ‘temporal distance’, which we examined in Chapter 6, ‘historical depths’ names only the accumulated commitments we presently use to classify all that appears in our horizon. Their origins are indeed historical, but their use is contemporary, constituting the world that we inhabit (and we must not confuse origins and use). Of course, if we become mesmerized by their origins and by their spatial distances, then we will picture a circular relation between the distant past, which flows into our imagination, and our imagination, which projects that distant past. Rather awkwardly, we should then add to this image one giant horizon, which embraces both the deep past flowing into ourselves, and our present selves, which creatively flows out to that distant past. If, however, we are not mesmerized by Gadamer’s visual language, then we will remember that horizons are things which only people have. Horizons are possessed neither by books nor by the past. If we are not mesmerized, then we will be able to parse origin from use, and we will see that this ‘one great horizon’ is strictly a feature of the taxonomy on which we presently rely. ‘Historical depths’ describes only the inherited commitments which presently determine everything that appears in our world. The origin of these commitments is historical – they were formed by communities in the past – but their use is contemporary – they form a significant portion of our taxonomy now, determining what shows up in our horizon. They are the intermediary categories forming the midsized commitments of our world. They are not universally necessary commitments distributed among all humans, but neither are they simply the product of our own intellectual work. They are an inheritance especially relevant to ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’. The relations that might obtain between a plurality of horizons return us to the ethics of alterity. We have already seen that Gadamer’s account denies the 36. GW 1, 309 [287/8].



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possibility of an encounter with the other at any radical ‘distance’. If the historical other stands outside our horizon, then by definition they do not exist for us. And we recently saw that to make the other too strange within our own horizon would be to deny their claim over us, to reject their claim to a truth we ought to possess. We have a problem of proximity (but not spatial proximity). For the other to speak, there must be some kind of unity, but for the other to be heard, there must be some kind of difference. How do we account for an appropriate engagement with the historical other if their appearance is only possible on the basis our own commitments? The metaphor of a horizon is not as descriptively specific as the taxonomy of commitments we have been discussing. But it is visually appealing, and in his description of an ethically appropriate encounter with the other, Gadamer strenuously works to make use of it. He returns, again, to the image of two horizons, and to the possibility of jumping into the other’s perspective. After his rejection of the possibility of any real plurality of horizons we can either treat such a discussion as simple backtracking, which is not unprecedented, or interpret it as built upon a refinement of the metaphor – one in which a plurality of horizons is a possibility within our own all-embracing horizon. I recommend the latter as the best interpretive strategy, and it allows for a coherent and clear reading of the remainder of our subsection. Any discussion assuming a plurality of horizons must either be rejected by Gadamer himself (which we have seen), or taken to entail plural horizons within our own single contemporary horizon (which we will now see). This latter development brings the image of horizons closer to my account of a hierarchical taxonomy of inherited commitments correlating to the world we inhabit. It is part of Gadamer’s conversational style to adopt the terms of his interlocutor but to redefine those terms in such a way that they cohere with his own position. Gadamer has repeatedly rejected the possibility of transposing ourselves into another horizon. He has rejected both the cleanliness of the switch (we cannot rid ourselves of all our commitments) and the plurality assumed by the very notion of such an exchange (the other is already a part of us and we a part of it). Now he accepts the exchange of horizons. Now he adopts the language of transposing ourselves into the position of the other, but he redefines it in the process. His redefinition entails an enrichment of his metaphor of horizon by permitting horizons within horizons. Transposing ourselves consists neither in the empathy of one individual for another nor in subordinating another person to our own standards; rather, it always involves rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other.37 Solches Sichversetzen ist weder Einfühlung einer Individualität in eine andere, noch auch Unterwerfung des anderen unter die eigenen Maßstäbe, sondern 37. TM 304.

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bedeutet immer die Erhebung zu einer höheren Allgemeinheit, die nicht nur die eigene Partikularität, sondern auch die des anderen überwindet.38

A single embracing horizon is always the condition for the possibility of an encounter with the other. Only persons possess horizons. And only what is within our own horizon shows up in the field of our own experience. We cannot leap into the other horizon using empathy (an idea Gadamer always attributes to Schleiermacher), but we must not subordinate the other to our own horizon. Gadamer’s key contrast will be between possessing an embracing horizon (1) in a way that ‘subordinates’ the other to ourselves, and (2) in a way that preserves the particularity of both the other and ourselves through a ‘higher universality’. Of course, in both scenarios it is only our own horizon which is the basis for the appearance of the other. The difference is that in one case we attempt to situate a representation of ourselves within that horizon as well. The difference between subordination within our horizon, and encounter with our horizon is the addition of a representation of our self. In Gadamer’s language, we rise to a ‘higher universality’ by including a knowledge of ourselves, defined by what he previously called our Hegelian ‘substance’. Thus, the horizon of a ‘higher universality’ needs to encompass a ‘consciousness of how our consciousness has been affected by history’ (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein), which is achieved by performing a ‘reflection on the effects of history’ (wirkungsgeschichtliche Reflexion). This moves us closer to Gadamer’s regulative ideal of the ‘whole truth’ (Hegel) and displays how we stand in our ‘situation’ (Jaspers). In short, our ability to depict ourselves within our circumstances allows us to situate the other in proximity to ourselves, rightly imagining their differences, and thus grasping more accurately their claim to truth. Visually, this is easily depicted in terms of horizons. In the first case (‘subordination’), our horizon includes a single subordinate horizon, representing the other. In the second case (‘higher universality’), our horizon includes two subordinate horizons, representing the other and our own self. In both cases a single horizon embraces all that appears within our world, and that horizon is our own. A failure to include an understanding of ourselves within our own horizon makes it impossible to form an appropriate contrast between ourselves and the other. Our embracing horizon is the condition for the possibility of the other’s appearance, the condition for the ‘sameness’ which allows them to speak at all; but it is the additional inclusion of a knowledge of our own self that creates the contrast necessary for the other to be properly other. Again, our own horizon must embrace the other, for that other to appear; and our own horizon must embrace a representation of ourselves, for the other to appear in a relation of informed contrast. Without the inclusion of a representation of ourselves as a point of contrast, we have no sense of the ‘temporal distance’ which defines our relation to the other and which grants the other their particularity. Gadamer says: 38. GW 1, 310 [288/9].



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If we disregard ourselves in this way, we have no historical horizon … It requires a special effort to acquire a historical horizon … Thus it is constantly necessary to guard against over hastily assimilating the past to our own expectations of meaning. Only then can we listen to tradition in a way that permits it to make its meaning heard.39 Wer derart von sich selber wegsieht, hat gerade keinen historischen Horizont … Es bedarf gewiß einer eigenen Anstrengung, sich historischen Horizont zu erwerben … Daher ist es eine beständige Aufgabe, die voreilige Angleichung der Vergangenheit an die eigenen Sinnerwartungen zu hemmen. Nur dann wird man die Überlieferung so hören, wie sie sich in ihrem eigenen anderen Sinne hörbar zu machen vermag.40

‘Historical horizon’ appears to be Gadamer’s special term for a horizon that embraces both our own particularity and the particularity of the other horizon in a relation of contrast. Or perhaps more loosely, it is the name for the horizon of the other, when that other is included in this special relation of contrast. In either case, the image entails three horizons: a superordinate horizon, and two subordinate horizons standing in relation. And in either case, all three horizons are our own, all three are features of our own taxonomy. The logic guiding this account is familiar from our examination of Heidegger’s 1916 work on Duns Scotus (Thomas of Erfurt), wherein heterogeneous items could only be brought into relation in a homogeneous field. Gadamer has given us a scenario in which one has both the other and a representation of oneself in a common field (a ‘higher universality’). A superordinate horizon contains both the appearance of the other and the representation of oneself. We must not forget that this common ground is always one’s own horizon, which is the condition for the possibility of the appearance of the other. Whether this common ground has anything in common with the other’s own horizon is a question Gadamer does not ask. At this point in Gadamer’s argument, the only available alternative to this ‘good’ scenario is the ‘bad’ one, namely when one’s own horizon embraces the other but does not include an additional representation of oneself as an explicit point of contrast: the other appears in our world, but there is a danger of assimilation or ‘subordination’. In the bad scenario there is no reflection on the possible tension between our own horizon and our representation of the other’s horizon, there is no Hegelian Phenomenology of Spirit, no reflection on effective history, no discovery of temporal distance. A naïve assumption about the continuity of past and present, or a presumption of too much difference, will make the other to appear like ourselves or will fail to recognize the appropriate points of sameness. (Consider, for instance, Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary as a Tuscan donna. Or to reverse the question, consider whether our own assumptions about 39. TM 304. 40. GW 1, 310 [288/9].

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appropriate forms of historical representation are relevant to those paintings, which may, after all, have consciously sought to present her as a local woman.) The effort to form a contrast between our own assumptions and those guiding the argument of an old book, or the speech of another, is effort that Gadamer has addressed before. He reminds his readers of that previous discussion, in which he proposed a ‘foregrounding’ of our own ‘prejudices’ in order to hear the other in their alterity. This, we can recall from Chapter 6, required not the ‘extinction of one’s self, but the foregrounding and appropriation of one’s own fore-meanings and prejudices’.41 The awareness of one’s own bias made it possible for the other to be presented in their alterity. This is now much easier to imagine with the metaphor of three horizons, and Gadamer states that the ‘prejudices’ of the previous discussion are simply equivalent to the ‘horizon’ of the present discussion, ‘for they represent that beyond which it is impossible to see.’42 We are finally presented with a hierarchy of horizons which are actually prejudices, and this brings us close to my own descriptive strategy of a taxonomy of commitments which we inhabit.

4. The Logic of Unity We have a homogeneous whole, and we have two heterogeneous parts subordinate to that whole. Gadamer sees this as a better scenario than having a whole and only one part, because then the whole would risk determining that part in a naïve manner. If Gadamer’s argument were of a lesser quality, it would now be finished. Were that the case, we would not be reading his work. Gadamer’s task in the remainder of the subsection is to undermine the logic of wholes and parts ingredient to the better of his two scenarios. Hegel is his aid in that endeavour. On the basis of what we have already seen, it is not hard to predict the direction his argument will take. As it stands, the account displays serious difficulties in maintaining the boundaries between the distinct superficial entities, and the relations between entities function to undermine the plurality of entities upon which those relations are founded. In his account, the embracing ‘whole’ of our own horizon is supposed to be generated by the past, but now the past is encountered as a subordinate part, namely the historical ‘other’. We have already seen that our effort to imagine our present self within that whole is shaped by the whole. And we know that the representation of the self which is shaped by the whole functions to determine the appearance of the other in a particular relation of contrast to that self. The relations of influence between entities might proliferate, but Gadamer has been concerned to pick out one chain of sequential effects as his hermeneutical circle. Stated briefly, the historical other shapes our horizon, which shapes our understanding of the self, which shapes the other’s appearance in our horizon. 41. TM 271; GW 1, 273–4 [253/4]. 42. TM 305; GW 1, 311 [289/90].



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In the remaining paragraphs of the subsection of Truth and Method that we are reading, the key issue can be stated concisely: the grammar of this description is sequential, but the effects are simultaneous – any alteration of one simply is an alteration of the others. This simultaneity is the consequence of the fundamental unity of the superficially identified parts. The set of superficial relations is complex but now largely familiar. Their descriptive task is to describe the unitary relation between past and present, self and other, subject and object, reader and text. I have previously argued that only if we are mesmerized by the temporal and spatial categories used to organize these relations will the image of a circle appear, relating items across ‘time’ and ‘space’. What is actually described are contemporaneous features of a single person’s horizon, wherein any change to one term simply is a change to the others. Whether Gadamer himself occasionally falls victim to the imagery of his own metaphors is an open question, but the logic he displays consistently undermines the possibility of any relation between parts and wholes, or any sequence of effects that might obtain between them. Such relations are a descriptive strategy.43 We must be clear. Gadamer is concerned with our consciousness, our ‘understanding’ – what I have described as our condition of inhabiting a taxonomy. We must be alert to the way in which his depictions of ‘past’ and ‘present’ address themselves to contemporaneous features of one’s taxonomy, superficially classified according to temporal origins, but temporally indistinguishable in terms of use. Gadamer’s logic will treat these entities not as a plurality but as a single homogeneous condition, demanding that any change to one is a change to the others. The reader of Truth and Method faces the difficult task of keeping clear the difference between references to an entity’s origin and its use. Talk of the past, for instance, most often refers to present features of our taxonomy which originated in the past. Indeed, this problem is particularly acute in Gadamer’s language of the relation between ‘past’ and ‘present’ commitments – for when these terms describe features of our taxonomy, Gadamer’s logic will aim to overcome both their sequential relations and their individual existence. But when these terms name genuine temporal sequences, there is the constant risk that we will misapply Gadamer’s logic of unity, which would have us changing the past, or lead us to suggest that the past is not genuinely distinguishable from the present. Forearmed and forewarned we can return the text. In closing the paragraph we have been reading, Gadamer begins his turn against the logic of parts and wholes and signals why we must adopt a logic of unity. But now it is important to avoid the error of thinking that the horizon of the present consists of a determining and limiting set of fixed opinions and valuations, and that the otherness of the past can be foregrounded from it as from a fixed ground.44 43. Cf. GW 3, 6–10. 44. TM 305. I have added the phrase which seemed to have been lost in translation.

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Nun gilt es aber, den Irrtum fernzuhalten, als wäre es ein fester Bestand von Meinungen und Wertungen, die den Horizont der Gegenwart bestimmen und begrenzen, und als höbe sich die Andersheit der Vergangenheit dagegen wie gegen einen festen Grund ab.45

Fixing the positions of our three horizons, or even merely of the two subordinate horizons, would constitute an error. In the remainder of the subsection, Gadamer will show why that is so. Gadamer is going to give us an account in which these relations are in constant motion. It is a dynamic account that permits descriptions of the sequential effects of each horizon upon the next, but it is also an account in which these superficial descriptions must always presuppose a more fundamental unity of the phenomenon itself, a unity in which any change to ‘one’ is simultaneously a change to the ‘others’. Gadamer’s descriptive strategy rejects a linear logic, wherein the effects of earlier moments are stable in relation to later ones – it is clear enough that Gadamer adopts a circular description in which ‘earlier’ moments can always be revised by ‘later’ moments. The burden of my interpretation is to show that Gadamer’s account also requires us to adopt a unitary logic in which a revision of any moment already constitutes a revision of all the other moments – and this firmly places his account back into the realm of linear time, for the circularity was only ever a descriptive feature of our revisions within a present taxonomy. Although these wholesale changes of the taxonomy can be sequentially mapped in description, including a ‘circular’ description in which items labelled ‘present’ change items labelled ‘past’ – it remains that there are only wholesale changes in linear time. Three paragraphs remain in the section we are reading. We have arrived at the point where Gadamer’s originality is displayed in its most mature form. It is unsurprising that Gadamer’s contribution is built upon the work of others (principally Heidegger and Hegel), and he concedes this very openly. After all, if he were to deny the importance of his inheritance, then he would undermine the credibility of his argument about that importance. Gadamer’s conversational style prevents the dramatic introduction of new arguments. As in the present case, he has usually introduced his ideas long before he defends them, and it is often the case that a complete picture of an idea can only be formed by combining its appearance in several locations. This is why our examination of his work could not be limited to the remaining three paragraphs. Gadamer is about to depict sequential relations between horizons, but he will depict these relations in such a way that he further undermines the contrast between parts and wholes, between self and other, and between past and present. In the preceding pages of Truth and Method we saw Gadamer reformulate Hegel’s relation between the ‘substance’ arc and the ‘subjective’ arc of a hermeneutical circle, reproducing that account in the metaphor of horizons. In the preceding paragraph of Truth and Method we saw Gadamer make two claims which are now relevant. First, he claimed that horizons and prejudices are 45. GW 1, 311 [289/90].



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equivalent concepts, reminding us of a much earlier conversation in which he tried to rehabilitate the language of prejudice in order to describe the importance of our inherited commitments. Second, he argued that neither the present horizon nor the past horizon is an independent entity. He thus began to undermine the distinction between horizons in such a way that an account of ‘sequential relations’, even circular ones, is reduced to a descriptive strategy, but one that fails to capture the unity of the single phenomenon it describes. The unity suggested in this latter point about horizons is increasingly familiar. Gadamer made similar claims when his discussion was formulated in the language of prejudices, and when it was described in terminology from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. He now says: In fact the horizon of the present is continually in the process of being formed because we are continually having to test all our prejudices. An important part of this testing occurs in encountering the past and in understanding the tradition from which we come. Hence the horizon of the present cannot be formed without the past.46 In Wahrheit ist der Horizont der Gegenwart in steter Bildung begriffen, sofern wir alle unsere Vorurteile ständig erproben müssen. Zu solcher Erprobung gehört nicht zuletzt die Begegnung mit der Vergangenheit und das Verstehen der Überlieferung, aus dir wir kommen. Der Horizont der Gegenwart bildet sich also gar nicht ohne die Vergangenheit.47

The first thing we should notice about this statement is the introduction of prejudices into the metaphor of a horizon. A general equivalence has already been claimed for the two concepts, and here they are mixed. To describe our horizon as composed of prejudices, like saying that there are two horizons subordinately positioned within our wider horizon, permits a descriptive plurality within the metaphor. This brings it very close indeed to a taxonomy of hierarchically ordered commitments which we inhabit. Introducing prejudices in this way is simply to recognize that we can describe our habit of being-in-the-world with a diversity of categories. Such descriptions are a parasitic activity of superficial classification. I will be arguing that this descriptive plurality refers itself to a fundamentally unitary condition of inhabiting the world. Gadamer previously told us that acquiring a ‘historical horizon’ entails a relation of contrast in which both the historical other and a representation of oneself are included within one’s present horizon. This establishes an informed contrast between the ‘past’ and the ‘present’ which allows us to hear more accurately the past’s claim to truth. Gadamer returns us to that theme. Considered according to use rather than origin, all three horizons are our own and within the present. 46. TM 305. 47. GW 1, 311 [289/90].

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In the passage above, Gadamer is loosely tracing the familiar circle of effects: in understanding the ‘past’ horizon, the present horizon is itself altered. When he describes us as coming out of a past and a tradition, he assumes we also remember the rest of the circle (that our way of looking at the past is inherited). Gadamer adds that this circular process of revision is continuous. Alert to the difference between a prejudice’s origin and its use, we must ask, ‘What is the site of this continuous circularity?’ The plurality of items which supports the circularity of relations is not a plurality between something ‘inside’ one’s head and something ‘outside’ in the world, or between something ‘here and now’ and something ‘located’ in the past. Gadamer quickly rules out the independence of such separate entities and positions his description firmly in the territory of a single person’s horizon. There no more is an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical horizons which have to be acquired. Rather, understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves.48 Es gibt so wenig einen Gegenwartshorizont für sich, wie es historische Horizonte gibt, die man zu gewinnen hätte. Vielmehr ist Verstehen immer der Vorgang der Verschmelzung solcher vermeintlich für sich seiender Horizonte.49

Any fusion or merger, however continuous, between the past and the present can only be described with relational language if these entities are abstracted from the homogeneity of a single phenomenon. Above, we saw Gadamer claim that the closure of temporal periods or cultures into units circumscribed by horizons was simply an ‘abstraction’; soon he will use the language of ‘superimposing’ and ‘projecting’ to describe how we imagine the superficial plurality of these entities, before addressing their superficial relations and superficially fusing them together. Here, he appears simply to deny that there is a plurality of horizons composing the alleged ‘past’ and the supposed ‘present’. These entities fail to materialize because his description is aimed at one’s present consciousness of the past and the present, and the changes this consciousness undergoes, rather than anything genuinely ‘in the past’. Paradoxically, we are still told of a ‘fusion’ or ‘merger’ between horizons, entities which themselves lack an independent status. Gadamer does not dispense with the language of relation that seems to presuppose the horizons that he denies. Nor does Gadamer present us with any special logic by which he can have his cake and eat it too. Instead his argument works therapeutically, helping us to overcome dearly cherished habits of imagining ourselves in relation to the ‘past’ and in relation to the world we inhabit. The effect will be contradictory if we lose sight of this overall purpose. On the one hand, the logic of Gadamer’s argument denies and works against the plurality of horizons, and on the other, his descriptive 48. TM 305. 49. GW 1, 311 [289/90].



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strategy maintains the language of relation and a lexicon enthralled by temporal and spatial origins. A continuous ‘merger’ or ‘fusion’ between the ‘supposed’ past and present is a descriptive halfway house between the plurality Gadamer denies and the unity which he claims for our horizon. In the next sentence, our familiarity with this phenomenon is elicited by way of an example, but Gadamer is adamant that his description is not limited to such examples. Understanding, he has just claimed, is always describable in terms of this continuous fusion between a ‘past’ and a ‘present’ which are only ‘supposedly existing by themselves’, but which are actually mere superficial ‘abstractions’. We have already seen him deny that the horizon of either the past or the present ever close – and such closing is a condition for the possibility of their fusion. Instead, we are able to individuate these horizons through an act of abstraction, and then describe their genuine underlying continuity in terms of an equally abstracted fusion. Gadamer presses ahead with the descriptive ‘abstractions’. We are familiar with the power of this kind of fusion chiefly from earlier times and their naïveté about themselves and their heritage. In a tradition this process of fusion is continually going on, for there the old and the new are always combining into something of living value, without either being explicitly foregrounded from the other.50 Wir kennen die Kraft solcher Verschmelzung vor allem aus älteren Zeiten und ihrem naiven Verhalten zu sich selbst und zu ihrer Herkunft. Im Walten der Tradition findet ständig solche Verschmelzung statt. Denn dort wächst Altes und Neues immer wieder zu lebendiger Geltung zusammen, ohne daß sich überhaupt das eine oder andere ausdrücklich voneinander abheben.51

That neither is foregrounded from the other means that the imposition of a plurality never breaks the homogeneity of past and present, self and other, mind and world. In the example, this is achieved through naïveté: a complete lack of self-consciousness (due to a failure to reflect on effective history) means that the singularity of one’s horizon contains no subordinate representations of the self, and the historical other does not appear therein as an item of explicit contrast. The one is not foregrounded from the other. We can see this in my example of those Renaissance paintings that apparently presume the mother of Jesus dressed in contemporary Tuscan style. (And I suggested that this could be an example of our naïveté about their alleged naïveté.) To say that there is a continuous and naïve merger of past and present is to say that new commitments are allowed to reconfigure old commitments without a process of self-reflection in which these alterations are managed according to the sequence of their origin. If the use of commitments to classify the world does not 50. TM 305. 51. GW 1, 311 [289/90].

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respect temporal origins, then old and new will be combined according to some other logic, presenting Levantine Madonnas in Tuscan style. Again, whilst the homogeneity of the past and the present is conveniently displayed in the example of naïveté, Gadamer’s claim is that this continuity, this continuous ‘merger’ or ‘fusion’, underlies every act of understanding. This includes scenarios in which one has acquired a ‘historical horizon’, i.e. overcome one’s historical naïveté by positioning within one’s own horizon a representation of oneself and the other in a relation of informed contrast. Yet, for Gadamer, even this scenario entails, as we have seen, an underlying homogeneity which makes impossible any true fusion of independent horizons. A fusion of horizons is impossible because the kind of alterity which is possessed by the historical other is first dependent on one’s own horizon, which is the condition for the possibility of the other’s appearance, and second, the otherness of the other is dependent upon one’s ability to represent oneself within that horizon in order to create the self-conscious relation of contrast. And risking repetition, we can recall that the appearance of the other and the ability to represent ourselves within our horizon are given to us by the ‘past’, in so far as our present horizon is inherited from that past. As Gadamer puts it, ‘There no more is an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical horizons which have to be acquired.’52 Gadamer’s chain of reasoning could be articulated as follows: the subordinate items are dependent upon the superordinate horizon, and that horizon contains no distinction between past and present, in so far as it is inherited from the past and is used to construe the present in a manner which reflects that past. It is always already fused. Underlying every apparent fusion of horizons, that apex achievement of ‘historical consciousness’ and its understanding, is a fundamental homogeneity. This can be better understood if we consider the subordinate fusion in terms of ‘superficial classification’, and Gadamer uses the language of ‘abstraction’, ‘projection’, and will soon add ‘superimposition’. The relation between the historical other that appears in one’s horizon, and the representation of one’s self within one’s horizon, is produced through superficial classification. What is classified? One’s own fundamental taxonomy and the inhabited world with which it is identified. It is as if one were examining one’s own seamless taxonomy and superficially naming that which belongs to the ‘past’ and that which belongs to the ‘present’ before managing their relations. Just as our inherited commitments may once have been superficial but are now sedimented as fundamental commitments of our taxonomy, so too the effort to achieve historical consciousness entails a superficial classification with fundamental consequences. To change one’s understanding of the other simply is to change the condition for the possibility of the other’s appearance within one’s horizon. There is no circle, no temporal sequence, no gap between the fusion or merger which describes the understanding of a historical object and the alteration 52. TM 305.



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of one’s basic understanding of the world. To undertake a superficial ‘fusion’ of horizons simply is to change one’s fundamental horizon. This is the unity of the hermeneutical circle which is the object of Gadamer’s logic. Just as the relation between superficial and fundamental classification constitutes the hermeneutical circle in everyday life – which is subjectively apprehended as a temporal sequence relating inside and outside, assumption and discovery, self and other, textual parts and whole – so too for the fusion of horizons, the hermeneutical circle is consistently rendered in such sequential and plural terms by superficial classification even while provoking changes in a unitary, wholesale fashion. Of course these wholesale changes happen over time, but not the superficially classified time of ‘past’ and ‘present’ that allows us to ‘change the past’ in a ‘circle’ of effects. No, the wholesale changes happen in good old linear time. It is precisely for that scenario in which there is consciously established a discontinuity between past and present, a ‘historical consciousness’, that Gadamer claims a fundamental unity of ‘past’ and ‘present’ and provides us with a logic that subverts the possibility of any real fusion of horizons. The horizons have always already been merged, which is the very condition for the possibility of their superficial identification. Embracing them both in a unity is the prerequisite to their appearance and relation. This is the radical Gadamerian account of the condition of human understanding, and if it is correct, then there is no question of choosing whether or not to adopt it, for it aims to describe what is necessarily the case in every human understanding. If, however, there is no such thing as these distinct horizons, why do we speak of the fusion of horizons and not simply of the formation of the one horizon, whose bounds are set in the depths of tradition? To ask the question means that we are recognizing that understanding becomes a scholarly task only under special circumstances and that it is necessary to work out these circumstances as a hermeneutical situation.53 Wenn es nun diese voneinander abgehobenen Horizonte gar nicht gibt, warum reden wir dann überhaupt von ‘Horizontverschmelzung’ und nicht einfach von der Bildung des einen Horizontes, der seine Grenze in die Tiefe der Überlieferung zurückschiebt? Die Frage stellen heißt, sich die Besonderheit der Situation eingestehen, in der Verstehen zur wissenschaftlichen Aufgabe wird, und daß es gilt, diese Situation als hermeneutische Situation erst einmal auszuarbeiten.54

The question is ambiguous. We should reject both the picture of unity it queries and the idea of fragmentation it denies. The past and present, the parts and the whole, oneself and another, do not represent independent horizons. And we do not have an all-embracing horizon extending to the depths of history. If 53. TM 305. 54. GW 1, 311 [289/90].

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Gadamer’s question about unity returns us to the issue of naïve consciousness, this is not clearly signalled. Whatever the case, the question itself – and we must ask whether this is occasionally true of the wider argument – is mesmerized by the temporal language of its categories. Has Gadamer, here, confused origins and use? What else can it mean to set the bounds of one’s horizon ‘in the depths of tradition’? The fact that a taxonomy is inherited from the past does not make the use of that taxonomy, that horizon, ‘in the past’, for it can only be used as a present phenomenon. We can set aside that part of the comment which depicts a counterfactual scenario of unity. The conversation turns to the particularity of understanding as a scholarly task; it is the opposite of a naïve understanding because it is a task performed with a ‘historical horizon’ and the conscious gap between past and present that this entails. Thus, it is the very scenario that might be suggestive of plurality and fusion, but which Gadamer subverts with a logic of unity. Every encounter with tradition that takes place within historical consciousness involves the experience of a tension between the text and the present. The hermeneutic task consists in not covering up this tension by attempting a naïve assimilation of the two but in consciously bringing it out.55 Jede Begegnung mit der Überlieferung, die mit historischem Bewußtsein vollzogen wird, erfährt an sich das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Text und Gegenwart. Die hermeneutische Aufgabe besteht darin, diese Spannung nicht in naiver Angleichung zuzudecken, sondern bewußt zu entfalten.56

Momentarily, Gadamer appears to bring us to the brink of plurality. Luckily we are now well versed in the logic of ‘historical consciousness’. We know the site of its tension. The ‘temporal distance’ it establishes between the reader and the text is only ever subordinately located within one’s own horizon. There is neither a separation of time nor a space to be overcome in ‘temporal distance’; rather, it is precisely the unity of ‘past’ and ‘present’ which is the condition for their superficial disparity. Gadamer pulls back from the brink of plurality and removes any doubts he might have provoked. This is why it is part of the hermeneutic approach to project a historical horizon that is different from the horizon of the present. Historical consciousness is aware of its own otherness and hence foregrounds the horizon of the past from its own.57 Aus diesem Grunde gehört notwendig zum hermeneutischen Verhalten der Entwurf eines historischen Horizontes, der sich von dem Gegenwartshorizont 55. TM 305. 56. GW 1, 311 [289/90]. 57. TM 305.



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unterschiedet. Das historische Bewußtsein ist sich seiner eigenen Andersheit bewußt und hebt daher den Horizont der Überlieferung von dem eigenen Horizont ab.58

The above description denotes events within our own horizon. ‘Projecting’ describes the abstraction and isolation of existing commitments. It is an act of ‘foregrounding prejudice’, individuating commitments. That the past is different from the present is not a fact which is under scrutiny. And there is no doubt that the taxonomy we inherit bears a configuration of commitments reflecting our own historical moment and cultural location. As Gadamer puts it, there is ‘no absolute reason’. Yet these facts do not establish a consciousness of the disparity between past and present, between self and other, between our world and the world of scripture. Access to this disparity is complicated. Our taxonomy originates in the past, is marked by the changes of temporal distance, and our knowledge of the past depends on our current taxonomy. Yet the past that will be understood by historical consciousness is a present feature of our taxonomy labelled and apprehended as the ‘past’. The fact that some kind of disparity obtains – and the ethical demand to be consciously open to the otherness of the other – leads the scholar to ‘project’ a horizon for the other which is different from one’s own. The otherness of the other will have a specific character that hinges on this projection; the kind of alterity which is established will depend on the kind of projection which establishes it. This alterity is established in the present as a feature of our taxonomy. The projecting side of the equation complicates the otherness of the other, undermining the plurality it aims to establish. But it is no less complicated by the fact that our taxonomies are inherited from the past. Incidentally, Gadamer assumes that our historical enquiries will be directed towards items ‘located’ in our own histories, and thus the effort to project a horizon for a moment in the past turns on the very past which has provided us with our taxonomy of horizons. On such occasions, our ability to project the historical other is shaped by that other. The dynamics of these twin forces return us to Heidegger’s claim that human life is characterized by thrownness (Geworfenheit) and projection (Entworfenheit). However, and this is truly important, the very same process is at work when the projected item does not simply originate in one’s own past – as with the Kimbanguists or in the film The Gods Must be Crazy. There is no break between the past and the present. There are no independent historical moments. Only people possess horizons. For these reasons, to establish the alterity of the historical other, we must project a horizon onto what is in fact a continuous past, presently perceived, thereby superimposing an alterity. Gadamer’s notion of a continuity of tradition occasionally seems to describe an independent reality – the fact that time and even social events do not have natural boundaries – but Gadamer’s claims along these lines can only be properly read as directed towards our own taxonomies, towards our horizon which 58. GW 1, 311 [289/90].

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contains the sedimented layers of tradition. The projection of the historical other within our own horizon is a key step in creating the tension between a representation of oneself and the other, the condition which Gadamer names ‘historical consciousness’. On the other hand, it is itself, as we are trying to show, only something superimposed upon continuing tradition, and hence it immediately recombines with what it has foregrounded itself from in order to become one with itself again in the unity of the historical horizon that it thus acquires.59 Andererseits aber ist es selbst nur, wie wir zu zeigen versuchen, wie eine Überlagerung über einer fortwirkenden Tradition, und daher nimmt es das voneinander Abgehobene sogleich wieder zusammen, um in der Einheit des geschichtlichen Horizontes, den es sich so erwirbt, sich mit sich selbst zu vermitteln.60

If my interpretative strategy is applied to this piece of text, then it can only describe events within one’s own horizon. In that case, we have a depiction of the oscillation between superficial and fundamental classification: distinct horizons are superficially isolated out of the ‘historical depths’ which compose our present fundamental taxonomy, and these superimposed horizons are related to each other in such a way that we alter our fundamental taxonomy. To fuse superficial horizons simply is to change one’s fundamental horizon – hence the awkward grammar, ‘to become one with itself again’. The passage might be read another way: literally. We could imagine that the moment of projection involves an extension beyond one’s own horizon. By definition that is impossible. But perhaps Gadamer takes momentary leave of reason and is carried away by the spatial metaphors of projection and fusion. Perhaps, rather than repairing Gadamer’s thought, we should display such foibles. This would be one of those occasions when Gadamer’s conversational style prevents a close reading of the passage – Gadamer’s prose often becomes desperately vague on inspection, in contrast to Heidegger’s arguments which initially appear obtuse but often reward careful analysis with clear and systematic descriptions. On the literal reading, we could still attend to the broad outlines of the passage so long as we suspend our critical thinking. The site of ‘continuing tradition’ extends beyond one’s horizon, stretching like a line all the way to the ‘distant past’, where the object we hope to understand is ‘located’. We project a horizon beyond our own horizon, isolating a moment of the continuous tradition. Since our present horizon has been created by that very line wherein we isolate the historical other, the act of understanding a part of this line differently immediately changes our present horizon. Our projection affects the basis of our projection, 59. TM 305. 60. GW 1, 311–12 [289–91].



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thereby altering it. Or perhaps our horizon even extends to embrace and incorporate the horizon that we have projected beyond the scope of our horizon. Whatever the case, we have the ‘substance’ arc of the hermeneutical circle, in which understanding is caused by tradition; and we have the ‘subjective’ arc, in which understanding causes the item of tradition – and we imagine this process to involve entities that are ‘outside’ our horizon. Whether we adopt my reading or the literal reading, the conclusion is the same, but only the first reading has the merit of arriving there through defensible means, and it coheres well with the preceding account. In both cases the effort to understand the historical other is somehow not truly a relation between distinct entities, but rather entails projections and superimposed horizons upon what is really a unity. And in either case, the fact that a unity underlies the effort is the means by which its consequences are immediately communicated to us, altering our horizon. One descriptively depicted arc is already the change of the other; the circle is unbroken and unitary; the parts of the whole and their relations are superficial. The language of ‘superimposing’ and ‘projecting’, the lack of independent entities, these should not for one moment lead us to think that nothing is happening. The results may be dramatic. They simply will not follow from sequential relations between independent entities. Wholesale fundamental changes in linear time are the result. Projecting a historical horizon, then, is only one phase in the process of understanding; it does not become solidified into the self-alienation of a past consciousness, but is overtaken by our own present horizon of understanding.61 Der Entwurf des historischen Horizontes ist also nur ein Phasenmoment im Vollzug des Verstehens und verfestigt sich nicht zu der Selbstentfremdung eines vergangenen Bewußtseins, sondern wird von dem eigenen Verstehenshorizont der Gegenwart eingeholt.62

Temporal categories are used superficially to organize this description, but we must not forget that ‘past consciousness’ and ‘present horizon’ name simultaneous phenomena. Otherwise we will imagine that a horizon, which we projected outside the scope of our own consciousness (by definition impossible), is ‘located’ in the past and suffers the risk of being left without its mother. Gadamer’s description fails to overcome such spatial and sequential ordering, and so he pushes on, having risked orphaning a part of our consciousness in the past, he describes its rescue, ‘but is overtaken by our own present horizon of understanding’. The logic of the sequential events which unfold in this passage demands that the orphaned projection has always already been rescued. To project a horizon at the limits of one’s understanding simply is to expand one’s understanding. But the descriptive use of spatial and temporal sequences produces a split which 61. TM 305–6. 62. GW 1, 312 [290/91].

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requires a fusion between distinct horizons, thus expanding one’s initial horizon. Paradoxically, such a fusion has always already taken place. Gadamer’s metaphor relies on a ‘temporal’ sequence of cause and effect between ‘spatially’ differentiated features of our understanding. It first imagines a separated consciousness, risking alienation, and then the metaphor achieves its reunification through a merger that expands one’s initial horizon. The merits of this metaphor reside in its ability to articulate, for instance, how different people will differently rely on tradition to reason differently about the meaning of apparently similar language. The fault of this metaphor is that readers, and even Gadamer himself, may be mesmerized by the spatial and temporal distinctions and conclude that reason, tradition, and scripture name a plurality of phenomena. These merits and faults are perfectly juxtaposed in the final claim Gadamer makes in his argument. (I leave out the subsequent sentence as its purpose is to prepare the reader for a new conversation.) In the process of understanding, a real fusing of horizons occurs – which means that as the historical horizon is projected, it is simultaneously superseded. To bring about this fusion in a regulated way is the task of what we called historically effected consciousness.63 Im Vollzug des Verstehens geschieht eine wirkliche Horizontverschmelzung, die mit dem Entwurf des historischen Horizontes zugleich dessen Aufhebung vollbringt. Wir bezeichnen den kontrollierten Vollzug solcher Verschmelzung als die Wachheit des wirkungsgeschichtlichen Bewußtseins.64

The actuality or genuineness of the merger is immediately undermined, perhaps we should say invalidated, by the claim that the projection entails the merger, that the projection brings with it the overcoming of that projection. What this means is not entirely clear. The descriptive strategy falters when faced with its logic of unity. Perhaps the English translation is too aggressive when it clarifies the relation between projection and merger as temporally simultaneous. Ambiguities remain and must remain because the account suffers from puzzles produced by its reliance on temporal and spatial pluralities. Yet if the account can be faulted for necessitating such puzzles, it has the descriptive merit of articulating how the particular commitments of different traditions orient new understandings. Opinions and perspectives do change. New knowledge is produced. Discoveries are made. Our understanding shifts, however subtly or dramatically. We know that a change with respect to a particular item is no less a change of how we see the world wherein that item appears. Such wholesale alterations are the ramification of any change within the unity of one’s taxonomy. Yet by placing this unitary and simultaneous change into a series of cause and effect, Gadamer’s account hopes to articulate the specific ways in which 63. TM 306. 64. GW 1, 312 [290/91].



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we come to understand and to understand differently from each other. He hopes to articulate how the reception of an idea ramifies throughout the taxonomy by virtue of that taxonomy’s inherited configuration, by the specific manner in which one is committed. He hopes to show how fundamental classification predisposes our efforts at superficial classification, and how this can, in turn, affect fundamental classification. But fundamentally there are no particular commitments. A story about particular commitments, an account of subordinate horizons, has the job of diagnosing how one changes one’s inhabitation of an entire world. It offers a descriptive strategy for the change in commitments undergone when one converts to Kimbanguism or Roman Catholicism or Marxism. And it describes why objects will show up differently in different worlds. The description diagnoses something about the whole and suggests how that whole might be subtly shifted through a practical programme of engaging imagined particulars like the ‘past’. Engaging a superficial particular simply is to engage the whole, but as a therapeutic programme it gives direction to the wholesale changes that are effected. Gadamer is ever aware of the reflexive circularity of such a programme. Becoming alert to the way in which one has been shaped by one’s inheritance can itself change that inheritance – one might adopt, for instance, a programme of radical Enlightenment revision, attempting to reject all tradition, which would itself simply constitute a new tradition. My reading of Gadamer has tried to show two things: (1) that the temporal circularity of the hermeneutical circle is a useful fiction, describing what are wholesale changes in linear time; and (2) that the nature of these changes further undermines our ability to distinguish between ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’. Of course, we do identify these items, but their identity is wholly unstable on close inspection because they are superimposed upon a unitary way of inhabiting the world. If my reading of Gadamer is right, then the diversity posited in selfreflection presupposes the unity it denies. Gadamer’s description of a circle of cause and effect was undermined by the simultaneity of the constituent events. The identity of the distinct commitments was superficially imposed and then sustained by their individual roles in a sequential chain of relations, but the logical unity of the chain always produced antinomies for this kind of description. The fusion of distinct horizons required the claim that the horizons were always already fused. The relations between entities denied the plurality of entities upon which those relations were founded. Gadamer’s attention to what can be described as ‘intermediary’ commitments has provided us the opportunity to see with greater clarity the unity of the changes which take place within this region of the taxonomy, to see the way in which a change of religious tradition, for instance, simply is a change of meaning and reasoning. The descriptive strategy he employs displays both merits and inevitable puzzles. For by arranging unitary changes across a descriptive circle of effects, and by identifying a plurality of phenomena within a unitary experience, he makes possible a detailed account of the small shifts that our whole taxonomy

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undergoes; but he equally spells out the disintegration of his account, for the logic on which it rests always requires one hand to take away what the other gives – consciousness alienated and already rescued. And this shows the essential importance of keeping together philosophical and textual hermeneutics, for the meaning of a text within our horizon cannot be separated from the world we inhabit.

Chapter 8 C O N C LU SIO N

1. The Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum displays artefacts donated by several generations of early anthropologists. Today, similar museum exhibits are typically organized by region, and even by a particular island or village. At their best, such museums show an integrated picture of the myths, practices, songs, and physical artefacts of a community. Not so in the Pitt Rivers Museum. Glass cases house collections of similar objects – or at least objects appearing similar to one who uses the right typology to classify them into a set. A single case may contain representations of the human body from widely varying time periods and communities. According to the scheme, all these objects share a common purpose, namely to represent the body. So too, all items deemed to be ‘charms’ or ‘fetishes’ are placed in a continuous display. These associations are partially justifiable on something like brute physical similarity, but just as importantly, they are based on the curator’s scheme of classification. The ‘fetishes’, for instance, vary so widely in appearance that their ‘sameness’ must be founded on a presumed similarity of purpose. But someone attuned to the political, medical, economic, and religious contexts in which these items had their original use might find it surprising that they are all mixed in the same display. Perhaps a few notes of currency, a Christmas ornament, and a child’s teddy bear could be added. The notion that these are all fetishes does not merely flatten out their local peculiarities, but determines a purpose that might seem quite alien to the original users, for whom the medical effects of an object, or the object’s status as a record of political settlement, might be more prominent. One display case, housing pottery, seems more straightforward in its organizational theme, having truly limited itself to obvious physical ‘sameness’. But not only might viewers fail to learn anything of the significance these objects had among the people who possessed them, but obstacles are placed in the path of discovery. We might be led to assume that their meaning and purpose will be similar to the other pots in the display. After all, they are all pots! We already ‘know’ that these are generally the ‘same’, and this is proven by the hard facts of their material origin. Ostensibly, they vary only according to the patterns on their

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surface, the colouring of the local clay, and the technique of their formation – and thus can be ordered by some scheme of technological advancement. Chamber pots, burial urns, and objects of strictly aesthetic appreciation may, in principle, jostle for space. Much of the museum is itself an important artefact of its time. Stripping the local context from objects and showing the hard material facts had the appearance, in its day, of a methodological rigour leading to knowledge. Knowledge of what? Perhaps these cases make available to the viewer the fundamental unity of humanity, or at least some universal banalities, such as the need to store things or overcome sickness. The viewer is presented with objects of apparent similarity from every corner of the planet, and this promises to show a single, unified trajectory along which humanity’s material culture will advance. But what these cases fail to do is show that the ‘same’ objects often have different purposes and meanings within their respective communities – even while ostensibly ‘different’ objects have homologous purposes, serving in a similar capacity within a different economy of meaning, practices, and so forth. The temporal trajectories of the items, their teleologies, were defined differently within the different worlds in which they once had their home. Many cases in the museum display examples of physically similar items found in distant places. Sometimes this is accidental and the original meaning assigned to the items differs significantly; such incidents may be explainable in terms of similar resources used to solve different problems. Occasionally, it is true that the physical similarity of two objects has a historical explanation. A genealogy of an item’s use might reveal that trade routes facilitated the transfer of, say, leather pouches containing fragments of text – an ‘amulet’. What we need to be clear about is that such an origin does not determine the use of an item or its location within any given local scheme of classification. That ‘amulet’ may now be more akin to a ‘fashion accessory’ for foreigners; or perhaps wearing a stack of these pouches might now signal the social prestige and political power of the one who can elicit so many gifts, rather than some desire to ward off evil. I have been treating the physical words of language like cultural artefacts. It would be strange to create a museum of words, taken from all languages, and organized by the similarity of their sound. It even takes some effort for English speakers to list homophones within their own language, like ‘knew’ and ‘new’, ‘nose’ and ‘knows’. Competent speakers of a language rarely notice the similarity between their homophones because there is rarely reason to associate them. The meaningful purpose of these words is continuous with the contexts of their use – they show up in a horizon which orients their meaning in such a way that a more superficial association of sound is difficult to recover. Not only is it difficult, it is normally irrelevant, and if Heidegger’s account of tools is right (Chapter 3), this physical similarity is just the sort of thing we must typically ‘ignore’ while attending to the meaning we produce with language. Like works of pottery, what makes one physical word more sophisticated than another is not simply the number of its syllables but the use to which it is put, its meaning within a larger context of commitments and practices.

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This book has defended the claim that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name a single, continuous phenomenon. I have treated scriptural language like any other physical object. Scripture is what it is, as it is classified within a particular taxonomy, and those taxonomies vary. Its words might be passed about on trade routes, and they might be invented by craftsmen, but they find their purpose within a world of meaning that they help to expose and revise. That world of meaning is already in full swing when scriptural language is finally put to use. The meaning-making job of scripture is defined at a level of fundamental experience that does not admit of a break with the rest of the inhabited world. Physical language is what it is in consonance with the world where it is located, even if it helps to make and unmake that world. Both the classification of scriptural language, as distinguished from other sounds and scribbles, and its use, as a meaning-making tool, might be called an act of reasoning. Either might be called ‘tradition’. But neither ‘tradition’ nor ‘reason’ nor ‘language’ has a distinct life outside the stories we tell ourselves in acts of self-reflection. That, anyway, is the argument I have been testing throughout this book. I have tried to make a case for this line of reasoning through a close reading of both Heidegger and Gadamer. (Of course, this meant repositioning their works within the field of this enquiry, this horizon of meaning.) Broadly, in Chapters 2 to 4, we saw that Heidegger uses the example of tools to alert us to the unity of our immediate, baseline experience. On this reading, our everyday life is experienced with a flowing disposition of ‘know-how’ and neither this experience nor that disposition contain strong distinctions between individual items. Instead, upon on reflection, we see that our experience presupposes the holistic integration of increasingly superordinate regions of the world, descriptively corresponding to increasingly superordinate regions of our taxonomy. In short, we inhabit a unitary world, but in reflection we overlay a taxonomy of entities and relations to describe that experience. Throughout this book, we have seen this handled in terms of ‘fundamental’ and ‘superficial’ classification. On the reading I provided, the point of Heidegger’s argument about hammers was not that the whole world is full of tools, or that the world is constituted only by practices, but that our use of tools alerts us to the wider range of our fundamental experience. Tools are a convenient example because they frustrate us if they fail to integrate with that world of fundamental experience. And like using hammers, our mundane activities of making tea and sitting in chairs and using language contain a basic unity that we tend to obscure in our acts of selfreflection. Examining the use of tools provided an opportunity to expose the fundamental commitments and implicit teleologies that make an inherited world what it is. Looking at practices helps to expose that world, but they are not simply constitutive of it. Whenever we consider what we have been doing in the last several minutes, Heidegger suggests we will discover a whole variety of first-order experiences which did not contain a plurality, unless we jump too quickly to superficial descriptions. According to this reading of his account, if we carefully examine an experience of hammering, we see that the hammer is not differentiated from

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the hand or from the nail or from its environment; on my strong reading, even a description of the hammer’s ‘involvement’ and ‘relation’ with other entities is a concession to plurality for the sake of discursive reflection. The activity of hammering, like reading scripture, is united with a world that orients it to a specific range of meaningful purposes. I showed how we might treat physical words in the same fashion as other tools. Like the difference between hands and hammers and houses, so too the difference between words, sentences, books – and even entire worlds – was depicted as a secondary, reflective, and superficial distinction. For Heidegger, the pseudo-problem of scepticism about the external world failed to recognize that mind and world could only possibly be put in relation if they had already been cut from the same cloth: in fundamental experience there was no such differentiation – the division was only applied superficially in reflection. As a tool that integrates with a world, scriptural language is like litmus paper which can be dipped into any world to help expose its meaning. I briefly rehearsed the example of the Congolese Kimbanguists. That case was useful because it displayed how the Bible could integrate with a new and unfamiliar world; the Kimbanguist world defined the meaning of scripture and scripture defined their world – a world in which Trinitarian relationships described the family relations of Simon Kimbangu in a rural village that became ‘Jerusalem’. I argued that our habits of reflection superficially distinguish between physical language and its environing world and then put them back into a meaningful relation – I contended that an underlying unity founds this very possibility of difference. It is exactly this unity that obtains whenever language has its place in a ‘world’, whenever physical language arrives on the scene, a scene of implicit teleologies, whether in a European cathedral or an American revival tent. Roughly put, the unity of scripture, tradition, and reason in the world means that Europeans rely upon the world to define the telos of their language-tools in just the same way as the Kimbanguists. And like the Kimbanguists, such an already oriented scripture is able to revise their world within the remit of its teleological possibilities. If we want to understand how scripture has the meaning it has, or how the world has its meaning, we have to keep biblical and philosophical hermeneutics together. If we have worlds A, B, and C, we find accounts of scripture A, B, and C. This is a fact so simple and obvious that we risk losing sight of it. So when Christians disagree – when Roman Catholics and Protestants sit together and read the book of Romans – the site of their dispute is misconceived if it is affixed to scripture itself, as if scriptural language were some kind of independent and shared entity, the purpose of which being mutually agreed upon. The question of what scriptural language means is not a question about the material language of scripture, although it appears to be. Rather, the material tools of language have already had their purposes defined by the world in which those tools show up; the linguistic tools have been made into whichever tools they are. Precisely to the extent that they disagree, they disagree over faux-amis like ‘coin’ and ‘coin’, or falsche Freunde like ‘arm’ and ‘arm’. The disagreements are, of course, far more complex. The conflicts are less coordinated than, for example, a legal dispute over the application of a particular

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law. Despite some interesting exceptions, lawyers often agree, in practice, about what law is there to do. But it is not agreed upon between Christian communities what exactly the point of their scriptures amounts to. It is not obvious to everyone which sayings of Christ are moral injunctions to be followed, and which are supposed to be impossible (perhaps cutting off one’s hand). It is not agreed upon how various books of scripture are supposed to be related to each other, perhaps into a unified book-object like the Bible. It is not stated in scripture how or if certain descriptive passages, whether in the Book of Judges or the Book of Acts, are supposed to be changed from narrative into something like doctrine, or what it might mean to be guided by a narrative, or even how such narratives could reveal the character of God in some way. There are firm and sophisticated answers to these questions within communities, but, just as often, those are not shared across the other communities. The effort to alter the other’s reading of a passage has consequences for their whole world, and must either accept that world’s complex rules of meaningmaking or seek to revise them. To oversimplify, a Biblicist Protestant’s rules for making language meaningful might demand a historical recovery of a single past world of meaning, one that is conceived within their present horizon, whereas the Roman Catholic, to put it very roughly, might locate an appropriate meaning in a kind of trajectory formed by a consensus of authoritative sources. Discussions that ignore the world which defines what counts as a believable meaning are likely to encounter stiff resistance, as when a Kimbanguist tries to persuade a Belgian Catholic that the true meaning of scripture is Simon Kimbangu, or vice versa. Of course, it is empirically true that the Bible is about Kimbangu, and the effort to persuade a Kimbanguist otherwise would either entreat them to break their rules of grammar and logic, or induce them to revise those rules. When Christian disagreements appear to be about ‘scripture’, their arguments often cannot be resolved. But when these disagreements are understood as generated by different ‘worlds’, possibilities for ecumenism (rather than accusations that others interpret scripture wrongly) arise more readily. I have been arguing that we need to attend to the fundamentally singular phenomenon named by ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ – if we seek to understand how those entities have meaning once we isolate them from a unitary world. In Chapters 5 to 7, our reading of Gadamer investigated how ‘superficial’ taxonomies change when our ‘fundamental’ use of them is altered – and conversely, how our everyday perceptions and activities are altered under the demands of our reflective practices. We learn new words; we adopt new strategies of reasoning; we revise our own tradition. The unity of these three phenomena – scripture, tradition, and reason – was reinforced by the wholesale and simultaneous nature of the changes provoked in each case of revision, ruining the descriptive boundaries that were supposed to mark their territory. The superficial designation of an entity like ‘language’ or ‘reason’ was shown to have an important therapeutic value. Attending to one superficially defined region of the world helped us track the worldwide consequences of every change it underwent, changes that were never local but always wholesale – whether

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dramatic or trivial. Gadamer was particularly important for introducing (even if not always clearly depicting) the effects of self-conscious revisions – i.e. the kind of reflection that theology undertakes when it considers Christian beliefs and practices, when it delimits a region or aspect of unitary experience, names it ‘scripture’ or ‘tradition’ or ‘reason’, and then attempts to work out revisions within the scope of that entity. Gadamer’s account examined what it means to say that someone inhabits a tradition. On my reading, he argued that the unitary world of our ‘fundamental’ experience oriented and determined the possibilities of ‘superficial’ classification – that is, our habits of reflecting on the world and carving it up into a taxonomy of entities. Revisions worked out at the superficial level produced, at the same time, revisions at the fundamental level. My detailed analysis of his ‘fusion of horizons’ sought to show that Gadamer always presupposed a more basic unity underwriting any such fusion. Time and space were used in a descriptive strategy that distinguished between tradition, reason, and new meaning; but Gadamer’s account of their relations was shown, in its details, either to be confused by metaphors or (better) to demand a unity governing their relationship. Gadamer appropriated Heidegger’s treatment of Cartesian dualism, in which the subject–object dichotomy had to give way to ‘being-in-the-world’. Consequently, Gadamer’s ‘tradition’, for instance, did not simply stand in a relationship with the world, but was in key respects identifiable with it.

2. Cutting the Gordian Knot of Self-Consciousness There are a number of thorny issues raised (1) by the essential difference between fundamental experience and reflective consciousness, (2) by the kind of unity that I have attributed to fundamental experience, and (3) by the putative ground on which fundamental experience itself is possible. Here, I do not intend to resolve any of the puzzles these points suggest. I want merely to note how certain problems take shape, given what has been argued. It is worth sketching one way of viewing these issues in light of the arguments I have offered in the previous chapters. I will first note that the relationship between fundamental and superficial forms of classification determines what counts as self-consciousness, and I will then observe how the basic difference between fundamental and superficial forms of consciousness leaves unresolved the question of what it is that fundamental classification actually classifies. Finally, I will suggest that Heidegger’s account may perpetuate Kantian puzzles about ‘things in themselves’. These points are all ancillary to the account I have been offering in this book, but I raise them because, together, they help make sense of a conclusion that Heidegger draws about what theologians can say. In 1927, Heidegger argues that there is a difference in kind between philosophy and theology, and that in certain respects theology is an inferior and more limited endeavour. Theology must be silent when philosophy

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can speak. I am arguing that philosophical and scriptural hermeneutics need to be treated together. In the next section I will rehearse Heidegger’s argument and contest his conclusion. On the reading of Heidegger and Gadamer advanced in this book, the Gordian knot of self-consciousness is simply cut in two by the claim that fundamental experience admits of no diversity. There are two levels of experience: fundamental, which is unitary, and superficial, which is diverse. Heidegger and Gadamer offer superficial classification as the only possible version of ‘self-consciousness’. After all, given the unity of fundamental experience, the ‘self ’ identified in self-reflection could select any item, whether classifying phenomena ‘of the world’ or phenomena ‘of ourselves’ – the attribution of worldly plurality, and the story of a separate self, are equally parasitic on what is given as unitary. In the effort to achieve self-consciousness, there are no summersaults, disappearing perspectives, or infinite regresses. The picture of what counts as self-consciousness is simple and totalizing – superficial classification counts as self-consciousness either in every case or none. The classification of first-order experience is equally superficial whether classifying entities of the ‘world’ or the ‘self ’. The very distinction would wrongly presuppose the Cartesian picture in which self is ‘not’ world. Cutting the Gordian knot of self-reflection entails denying the basis in fundamental experience for the conceptual contrast between objectivity and subjectivity, or between necessity and freedom, or between universals and particulars. These mark out two ends of a taxonomy which is itself a superficial classification of the fundamentally unitary experience of ‘being there’, of inhabiting some particular world. However important, the contrasts are superficial taxonomic features marking out a spectrum ranging from superordinate to subordinate, but the contrasts have no place in the unity of what exists. I have argued that, in Heidegger’s Being and Time, the difference between fundamental and superficial forms of classification is the difference between receptively creating phenomena (‘uncovering’), and classifying phenomena that have already been given. In self-reflection, whether one identifies ‘world’ or ‘self ’, what gets classified is phenomena, which, to put it bluntly, is to say that what gets classified is not a thing-in-itself. Superficial classification only gets started after something beyond the bounds of sense and our finite way of coping with the world has been brought within the ambit of fundamental experience and been made available for its use. What is classified superficially is always already known fundamentally. In reading Heidegger and Gadamer together, I argued that self-reflection can posit atop a fundamental unity any superficial diversity, to the extent that this plural taxonomy need not conform to external rules of logic; but no less, self-reflection is required to posit that diversity just to the extent that the habit relies on inherited commitments. The diversity posited by superficial classification is always parasitic upon a unitary, fundamental consciousness. Our distinctions between scripture, tradition, and reason occur at this superficial level, and thus I considered at length how their differences become unstable upon close inspection.

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If fundamental classification alone counts as first-order consciousness, and if reflective acts cannot achieve the direct apprehension to which they aspire, then we need a special strategy for staging an account of our constitution. This, Chapter 3 argued in some detail, is a task Heidegger’s phenomenological method is suited to accomplish. Beginning with diverse phenomena, he seeks the superordinate unity that functions as the condition for their possibility, and he tries to show how this whole, descriptive, taxonomic structure hangs together in a fundamental experience which does not itself contain the taxonomic distinctions. That, anyway, is what I tried to demonstrate in our close reading. Considerable problems were introduced, we saw, when investigating the terminal, most superordinate category of his taxonomy. I tried to avoid those problems by ignoring the extremes of his system, and by only adopting those features from the middle that could drive the central argument in this book. I thereby tried to avoid the demand to solve certain problems on Heidegger’s behalf. The difference between consciousness and self-consciousness is not a difference between engaging the world and engaging oneself (for that distinction only obtains within self-consciousness), but rather, is marked by the difference between the inherited habits of ‘uncovering’ phenomena in fundamental experience, and their superficial classification in reflection. Fundamental classification ‘makes’ phenomena; superficial classification classifies phenomena. But what does fundamental classification classify? What does Heidegger’s uncovering uncover? A clear answer is not readily available. As discussed in previous chapters, Heidegger used the term ‘uncovering’ to name what transpires in fundamental classification, which is when phenomena are received into experience, prior to any reflective, superficial classification of phenomena that are already in experience. Uncovering is not ostentation; it is the condition for the possibility of ostentation. Interestingly, Heidegger demands that we see every uncovering as equally an act of covering, which gives a particular character to any version of inhabiting a world – of ‘being there’, of Dasein, of standing within the horizon of what exists.1 This ‘mixed’ character of what exists could suggest that there is something beyond being, even if whatever it is cannot have more than a regulative status. Something has been both uncovered and covered up. The issues here are of interest, but would require extensive treatment.2 We can merely note that it is precisely because of the taxonomic shape of his enquiry that Heidegger needs to address the logical problem of whether being is a genus and show that the classic objection does not hold for his own account.3 By locating his taxonomy strictly on the side of our discursive reflections, Heidegger has a strategy for denying that, fundamentally, ‘being’ really is a genus and thus identifiable with the supreme category in his taxonomy. It is because our habits 1. GA 2, 4, 221f.; GA 18, 10f., 369f. 2. E.g. Denis McManus, ‘Ontological Pluralism and the Being and Time Project’, in Journal of the History of Philosophy 51.4 (2013): 651–73. 3. E.g. Aristotle, Metaphysica, 998b14–999a1; Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.3.2–7, Summa contra Gentiles, 1.25.

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of superficial classification are only superficial that the logical contradictions entailed by a terminating category of ‘being’ are relatively insignificant, whereas it is crucial for Heidegger to expose the workings of fundamental classification (‘uncovering’) which any taxonomic description aims to classify. The question of Heidegger’s idealism has received extensive treatment.4 It might be called ‘ontological idealism’, and it can be summarized as the claim that being is coextensive with our inherited habit of uncovering, rather than including what has not been uncovered, what has not been brought into fundamental experience. This is merely to implement Kant’s demand that ‘existence’ is not possible of things in themselves, but is given in understanding, downstream from sensory intuition.5 Heidegger’s descriptive taxonomies are superficial treatments of the manner in which what has been fundamentally uncovered has been just so uncovered. These superficial taxonomies are parasitic on what is already uncovered, and thus never extend beyond that limit. The limit itself, the horizon of what exists, is never apprehended as a thing or an event, but is simply a lack. It is not a known unknown; the horizon lies at the unknown, unknown. What exists in the unity of fundamental experience is not a class or genus because its horizon is not of the right kind, it is not bounded in the requisite sense. It remains that we might ask of Heidegger’s account what Jacobi asked of Kant’s, namely, whether something like a thing in itself is required to enter and to stay within Heidegger’s world. We might ask whether there is an unknowable and technically non-existent thing that we know to be uncovered, an unclassified something that becomes fundamentally classified. Of course, as we saw in Chapter 3, uncovering is not projecting or fantasizing but uncovers something, something which unifies and potentially challenges our various acts of uncovering. What status does such a thing in itself have for Heidegger’s world? The answer, if there is one (and even this may not be particularly satisfying) seems to be that doubts about a thing in itself, like doubts about the external world, have no place in fundamental experience. In previous chapters we observed that, for Heidegger, there is no possible explanation of the relationship between that which gets uncovered and that which enters fundamental experience. Explainable relations are, of course, possible between superficially classified entities, but those are cut from the same cloth of fundamental experience. There is no possible correspondence between something like a thing in itself, and consciousness of it, because they are different in kind. The alterity of what gets uncovered introduces, perhaps at a superordinate level, a Kantian dualism. Kant’s dualism (either located between things in themselves and sensible intuitions, or between the manifold of intuitions and the pure categories of our understanding, or both) could not explain how it was possible for the 4. See William Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and ‘Heidegger’s Kantian Idealism Revisited’ Inquiry 47 (2004): 321–37. Philipse offers an alternative, Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 141–51. 5. Kant, KrV, A80/B106.

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relevant pair to be related.6 This impossible but necessary relationship had itself repeated in a more sophisticated way the dualism of Descartes (between res cogitans and res extensa, which had been ‘explained’ by appeals to God),7 while avoiding the monistic solution of Spinoza. If Heidegger offers an advance on Kant, it is a subtle one. On the one hand, there is no longer a question about where the great divide is located – if we accept that Kant divided the mind–matter relationship into two smaller problems, then it becomes unclear which is to bear the greater weight: is it the gap between things in themselves and intuitions, or that between intuitions and concepts of the understanding? Heidegger’s fundamental experience has nothing ‘beneath’ it other than things in themselves, and this ‘relation’ becomes the only possible site of a gap. In contrast, any reflections performed downstream of this experience are well within the scope of consciousness as he understands it (that is, as being-in-the-world). The subtle advancement suggested by Heidegger’s account results from the way he cuts the Gordian knot of self-consciousness. Heidegger avoids the problem of making being a genus by locating all the categories of such a descriptive taxonomy on the side of superficial reflection. The world hangs together for first-order consciousness, and is well-conceived as a field of attractive and repulsive forces. It is uncovered as unitary and without boundaries, and thus, crucially, even its finite horizon is not apprehended as some kind of wall, beyond which are the ‘things in themselves’. The finitude of first-order experience is ‘bounded’ by the unknown unknown, and is oriented by an inherited habit that mixes covering and uncovering. Thus, only self-reflection can posit a relation between this world and things in themselves, but when it does so, that relationship remains superficial, wholly within the scope of the uncovered world. The ‘impossible relation’ is a story told in self-reflection. On this Heideggerian account, Kantian transcendental idealism already introduces a variety of self-consciousness in so far as, however inadvertently, it always posits a single horizon embracing a conscious relation between a thing-in-itself and the perceiving agent, and thereby grants to the ‘thing-in-itself ’ a status within the taxonomy, however regulative, rather than a status genuinely ‘outside’ the scope of the horizon. An un-experienced ‘thing-in-itself ’ is thus made an important though regulative feature of experience.8 This contrast can also be posed temporally: between presently uncovered and an anticipated but not yet uncovered – and again, this contrast takes the anticipatory moment, which is a present phenomenon, and by placing the temporal label ‘future’ upon it, 6. Kant, KrV, A51/B75, A68/B93, 78/B103, A278/B334; of course, statements along the lines that two things must be related do not explain how it is so; cf. Kant’s footnote to Religion, 6: 65, ‘there is no analogy, but a formidable leap’. 7. René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. 7, eds C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris: J. Vrin, 1973), 52f. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 2, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 37f. 8. Cf. Heidegger’s later comments in GA 25, 98–100 [E 68–9].

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mistakenly differentiates the ‘anticipated’ from something ‘real’, as if the presently ‘anticipated’ were not yet itself a part of what presently is. For Heidegger, these contrasts can only be taxonomic differentiations applied superficially to a unitary experience. In the same way that every Cartesian subject–object relation is imagined in an act of self-reflection that posits a diversity within a single horizon of being – one horizon embracing both res extensa and res cogitans, so too, transcendental idealism posits (or risks positing) a ‘thing-in-itself ’ within such a unitary horizon, now more sophisticated and far less equitable in its epistemic distribution. Thus even if Kant avoids a Cartesian scepticism within the scope of his empirical realism, he repeats the dualism with his transcendental idealism. By raising the order of analysis yet again, now to being itself, Heidegger has by definition – but perhaps only by definition – excluded any territory for non-being.9 There simply is being, whether classified as ‘thinking’ or ‘extended’, ‘internal’ or ‘external’, ‘subject’ or ‘object’, ‘past’ or ‘present’, ‘covered’ or ‘uncovered’. All are within the scope of our ‘being there’, within the horizon of the unified taxonomy we inhabit. Fundamental experience has no scope for the classic problem of being as a genus, and thus fundamental experience has no room for the sorts of reflective considerations that imagine diverse entities, including any putative contrast between being and non-being. A ‘thing-in-itself ’ is always either subordinate to being or incoherently imagined. When there is a failure of fundamental classification, when uncovering bumps up against ‘things in themselves’, this provokes a move to superficial reflection. The sudden confrontation, we might recall, with a gap between a hammer that was working and a newly broken tool, is synonymous with the move to superficial classification. It is reflective consciousness which introduces that gap as a gap, and even the effort to fix the tool quickly reabsorbs the worker in fundamental classification.10 If fundamental experience were to offer consciousness a contrast between being and non-being, then it would suffer from the classic paradox of making being a genus. Heidegger only permits such contrasts at the level of self-reflection. Considering the relation of being to non-being is inadvertently to bring both of these entities within the scope of being – in the same way that the contrast between the res extensa and the res cogitans inadvertently brought both within the same horizon; and in the same way that the thing in itself, on the one hand, and both the subject and object together, on the other hand, were inadvertently brought into the same horizon. We might understand Heidegger’s account in Being and Time as repeating these ‘mistakes’ intentionally. Except, now, he can hope to resolve the puzzles generated by these inherited contrasts (1) by raising the discourse to the order of ‘being’ and thereby positing all the contrasts within the horizon of what exists, and, furthermore, (2) by denying that fundamental experience contains discursive classification of the relevant kind. In demanding that being is 9. The strategy of argument bears a close affinity to Plato’s Phaedo, 102b–106e. 10. GA 2, 73–4.

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constituted in a unitary process of uncovering, Heidegger tries to preserve what exists from every superficial contrast posited by any descriptive taxonomy, and thus preserve it from the logical problems of genus which these descriptions entail. Heidegger must still explain how fundamental classification can produce varied inhabitable worlds ‘before’ they are superficially classified, and so he demands that uncovering is always also an act of covering, which is to say that it is always done in some inherited, particular, hermeneutical way. As we observed in Chapter 4, the biggest category of a descriptive taxonomy operates, however trivially, with the distinctive effects of the smallest because the categories cannot be separated in fundamental experience. These considerations are only roughly sketched. It is not my task here to resolve any puzzles but to draw our attention to the problems that, as I take it, Heidegger is concerned to address, and to characterize them in terms of the readings I have provided. It remains that, for Heidegger and Gadamer, plurality requires precisely the unity which it imagines itself to deny. This is why the security and stability of the taxonomies created in the reflective practices of theology, and the real diversity of ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’, are equally denied if the Gordian knot of self-consciousness is cut in two. This will require us to keep philosophical and textual hermeneutics together if we want to understand how Christians use scripture to make meaning. And it will give us grounds to question Heidegger’s own conclusions about the relation between theology and philosophy.

3. What Can Theologians Say? Throughout the 1920s Heidegger enjoyed warm relations with the faculty of theology and he was invited to deliver lectures on a number of occasions.11 His 1924 lectures on time, given to Marburg’s theologians, summarized the insights he had gained in his previous commentaries on Paul’s epistles and Augustine’s Confessions – and to a significant degree it was these insights that served as the foundation for Being and Time, completed less than two years later.12 In the first half of this book, we examined a fragment of Being and Time in detail. I have since been drawing out consequences for theology in a particular way – arguing that Heidegger’s account demands we see scripture, tradition, and reason as a unity. Theologians, I said, make a mistake if they seek to negotiate a settlement between the resources of scripture, tradition, and reason. Debates about any one of these entities need to be referred to the world that makes that entity what it is. Biblical and philosophical hermeneutics need to be kept together. Heidegger imagined different consequences for his own philosophy. In the spring of 1927, about a week after Being and Time was printed, Heidegger lectured in Tübingen and Marburg on the relation between philosophy and theology. In the lecture, he draws a sharp contrast between these disciplines, at once granting to 11. E.g. ‘Die Marburger Theologie’ in GW 3, 197f. 12. GA 64, 105f.

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theology the status of a genuine science – one that cannot be discredited by the other sciences, nor contrasted with them in terms of ‘faith versus reason’ – but at the same time denying theology the superior terrain of philosophy. Philosophy, on his account, is allowed to say things when theology must remain silent. But if my reading has been correct, and if scripture, tradition, and reason name the same phenomenon, then his 1927 restriction on theology is inconsistent with his own work and cannot be sustained. Heidegger’s claims in the 1927 lecture are as follows: 1. The difference between every positive science is one of degree. 2. The difference between philosophy and every positive science is one of kind. 3. Theology is a positive science. 4. Therefore theology has more in common with history or biology or chemistry than it does with philosophy. Heidegger is adamant that the difference signalled here is both one of method and, correspondingly, one of the object of enquiry – rather than some social fact about the historical practice of these two disciplines or the overlap of their vocabulary. It is irrelevant that the history of philosophy and theology are intertwined. And it is perfectly possible that some theologians-cum-positive-scientists occasionally (or even frequently) stop doing theology and practice philosophy. But if they are to have their disciplinary methods guided by the object of their enquiry, they will clarify what they are aiming at and consolidate their efforts – theologians will stop doing philosophy. I intend to show that Heidegger’s conclusion is misguided and misguided for specifically Heideggerian reasons. If we are to understand Heidegger’s 1927 contrast between positive science and philosophy, then we will need to see the way it has been determined by his earlier work in theology. In what follows, I will narrate the genesis of this split, as it formed during the years preceding Heidegger’s lecture, in a decade when Heidegger intensively engaged with the theological tradition. Some of these brief depictions will be familiar from our investigations in Chapter 3, but here their effect will be to place Being and Time within a wider framework that orients the relation between philosophy and theology. After reviewing several sequential developments in Heidegger’s thought, I will return to his 1927 lecture in order to contest the absolute difference it imagines between theology and philosophy, and thus the corresponding restrictions it places on what theologians should do in their capacity as theologians. Review of Das Heilige, 1918/1913 Among Heidegger’s manuscripts we find the draft of a book review of Rudolph 13. GA 60, 333 [E 251–2]. From his notes for the 1918–19 course ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism’, which was never conducted. On 9 January 1919, Heidegger wrote to the Roman Catholic priest who had officiated at his wedding the year before, Father Engelbert Krebs, confessing that his research for this course was a part

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Otto’s Idea of the Holy (1917).14 Heidegger’s 1918 assessment of that text is telegraphic and incomplete, but it can be roughly summarized by using George Lindbeck’s familiar contrast between ‘experiential-expressivist’ and ‘culturallinguistic’ visions of religious experience.15 Rudolph Otto clearly favours the former. Standing in the tradition of Schleiermacher, Otto finds a phenomenon of the holy that breaks through the various cultural forms when it enters the field of experience. Notably, Otto had spent the last several years translating primary texts from Hindu theology into German.16 Heidegger (like Lindbeck would be much later) expresses his scepticism about the possibility of such a cultureless experience. Over the next several years, he would examine the relationship between religious experience and the life-world where such experiences appear. Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, 1920/1 In the 1920/1 Lecture course ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion’, Heidegger provides verse-by-verse commentary on some of St Paul’s writings, principally Galatians and the letters to the Thessalonians. His commentary depicts how eschatological anticipation forms a specifically Christian world. On Heidegger’s reading of St Paul, the question of who I am as a Christian is answered by the way I take myself to be living in the presence of God’s eschatological judgement right now. This temporal structure appears to be one in which the inheritance of a religious tradition defines a future that constitutes the present.17 For Heidegger, St Paul’s discussion of the Parousia of Christ is above all a story about the constitution of the whole world one inhabits now, a world that is presently defined by standing before the judgement of God.18 The litmus test of a Christian, on Heidegger’s reading of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, is the ability to see an antichrist. The antichrist only shows up on a properly construed background – i.e. a background that has been defined by a specific stance whereby the eschatological judgement of God defines the of his decision to quit Catholicism for a latitudinarian Protestantism, one containing a direct experience of God through scripture. English in brackets follows Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna GosettiFerencei (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004). 14. GA 60, 79 [E 54–5]. 15.  George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (London: SPCK, 1984). 16.  Especially the bhakti philosopher Ramanuja (1017–1137 ce). Rudolf Otto, Siddhānta des Rāmānuja. Ein Texte zur indischen Gottesmystik II, (Jena: E. Diederiche, 1917). 17.  GA 60, 114–15 [E 81]. It is not entirely clear (as it would be in Being and Time) how far the present vision of the future also revises the reception of religious tradition. 18. GA 60, 114–15 [E 81]. ‘To the Christian only his tò nun of the ‘complex-ofenactment’ [Vollzugszusammenhanges] in which he really stands is to be decisive, but not the anticipation of a special event that is futurally situated in temporality.’ The present is not some ‘now’ moment but the whole existential Situation, an inhabited taxonomy.

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present. Any other background, and the antichrist shows up as precisely its opposite: as God. This is an instance of Heidegger’s broader principle that, as he puts it, ‘Understanding the entire situation is necessary for understanding the phenomena.’19 Only a Christian whose whole situation is defined by the apprehension of God’s judgement in the present, rightly experiences God as God. We can already begin to see where this will lead Heidegger. Anyone whose religion or culture gives them a different temporal structure to constitute the present will consequently experience the objects that show up in that world in a different way: antichrists will be saviours, or as we saw in Chapter 4, ritual instruments will be old Coke bottles. Heidegger basically rules out Rudolph Otto’s trans-cultural religious experience of holiness. People with different worlds do not experience the same phenomena. And, on a biographical note, it seems that this was one of the motivating factors in Heidegger’s departure from Roman Catholicism and his embrace of Protestantism. Heidegger adopted a new, and specifically Weberian,20 conviction that the medieval world had routinized and bureaucratized the Christian account in such a way that religious life and experience were no longer properly constituted by that tradition. The background had been badly damaged. Paul’s original temporal structure, in which the present is eschatologically defined, was replaced by a facile account of eschatology as having to do with some future historical events, events which simply had not yet happened.21 That, anyway, was Heidegger’s new conviction. ‘Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity’, 1923 The idea that different communities inhabit contrasting but self-sustaining worlds was treated at length in Heidegger’s 1923 lectures on ontology and hermeneutics. He argues that standard terms for people – like, we might observe, the ancient Greek ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, the Septuagint’s ἄνθρωπος, Augustine’s Latin humanus, the medieval person, or the German Mensch – actually signal some particular cultural-religious taxonomy in which the human subject is constituted by some particular network of relations. To be a Pauline Christian, as we have seen, is to inhabit a specific world. It is to inhabit a situation that is ultimately defined by a relation to time whereby God’s eschatological judgement reigns over the present in a specific way. And to be a Christian in that world is for one’s own self to be defined by the world. Every item in that ‘authentically Christian’ world, including

19. GA 60, 105 [E 73]. Also, GA 60, 109–10 [E 78], ‘The facticity of knowledge is necessary for this. Whether one is a true Christian or not is decided by the fact that one recognizes the Antichrist.’ 20. GA 60, 19–21. 21. GA 60, 111–12 [E 79], which adds, ‘These latter [who misunderstand] set the work aside, stand around and chat, because they expect him every day. But those who have understood him must be despairing, because their anguish increases and each stands before God.’

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one’s own self, is finally defined by its status as a creation of God which stands before him in an eschatological relation – right now.22 But Heidegger, as we know, does not want to investigate the details and facts generated within a Christian world, or a pagan Greek world, or a medieval Latin world. Heidegger wants to investigate what it means to have any world at all. What does it mean for a world to be inhabited as a world? Heidegger does not want to ask what it means to stand in God’s creation, or to stand under the eternal pagan heavens, or to stand at a moment of Darwinian development – he wants to ask what it means to stand there at all, to have a stance. And to ‘be there’ is, of course, his overly literal interpretation of the quotidian German word for existence, Dasein. To exist is to ‘be there’ in a world. Heidegger’s adoption of the word thus signals his turn away from all specific versions of the world, like that of New Testament Christianity, or the medieval church. For Heidegger, it is philosophy’s task to discover what it means for anyone to have any world at all; the task is to discover the conditions for the possibility of a world. In contrast, the task of theology will be to examine a specifically Christian world that is already, so to speak, in full swing. It is a world in which what gets to count as God’s revelation – a saviour rather than an antichrist – has already been decided by the background conditions of a Christian, eschatological, temporality. Heidegger thus conceives of theology as already committed to a range of background conditions, and as committed to working out their consequences within the kind of world that those commitments reveal. (We can simply note that Heidegger’s theologians do not study God, but those revelations of God which are constituted as such within a particular world.) Logic: The Question of Truth, 1925/6 In the months before Heidegger composed Being and Time he delivered a series of lectures entitled Logic: The Question of Truth. We have seen some passages from these lectures in previous chapters, but now we are considering them in a trajectory of development that led Heidegger to split theology from philosophy. In these lectures, he continues the line of thinking we have seen thus far: the world we experience every day is constituted on the basis of the teleologies that we inherit from our community. The world is divided up into its various items (particularly in reflection) according to these many purposes. The objects of everyday life can be individuated qua objects because we have received from the past a habit by which we presently see the objects according to how they will be put to use in the future. Things already matter to us in terms of what they are for. We see a teacup as precisely that, because we inherit commitments from a community that uses such things; the cup stands out from its environment and matters to us now in terms of what we could do with it in the future.23 For Heidegger, it is possible to describe hierarchies of such teleologies: little 22. GA 63, 21f. 23. GA 21, 147f. [E 123f.], 234f. [195f.].

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teleologies for teacups, big teleologies for the whole world. We have seen that, according to Heidegger’s reading of St Paul, one’s whole existence as standing in a Christian world is basically shaped by a return from the eschatological future into the present in such a way that one always lives in the presence of God’s judgement and grace. Now, what is important about all of this for Heidegger’s 1925/6 lectures on Logic is that the world of meaningful teleologies which we inhabit functions as the condition for the possibility of language as a meaningful enterprise. That world, which is only one of many possible worlds, is what gets described by language and what language seeks to revise, but language itself is meaningless. It is a set of brute words sitting in the world like rocks and birds and trees – or rather, language is parasitic upon a taxonomy of implict teleologies disclosing a meaningful world which logically precedes it, and which provides its physical stuff with a meaningful purpose, just as it does other items. To quote Heidegger on a now familiar point, there is first a world of ‘primary meaning to which words can then accrue’.24 And the fact that there is such a world of implicit teleologies is important because Heidegger’s 1927 ‘positive science’ studies the positum of this primary meaning, a world that already is God’s creation, or the eternal pagan playground, or atoms bumping in the void. Each telos is a positum which positive science identifies in its efforts at self-consciousness. A positive science is the parasitic language – and parasitic mode of enquiry – that accrues to a world already in full swing. A positive science only asks about the consequences of taxonomically superordinate commitments that it does not question. And theology is precisely such a positive science, a story told about a particular world and God’s saving acts of grace therein. Now, while it is true that Heidegger limits the activity of theological enquiry to a Christian world that is already meaningful, it is to his credit that in the 1925/6 lectures he refuses to make God an item in that world.25 Heidegger refuses to make God the hierarchically highest item in the inhabited taxonomy, and he offers caustic remarks for anyone who might make that mistake: So that today we can risk saying that religion, too, is a value. And we don’t stop there. The insights presumably get more profound: God is a value, indeed the highest value. This proposition is a blasphemy, and it is not made less blasphemous by the fact that theologians propound it as ultimate wisdom. This would all be very funny if it were not so depressing. It shows that philosophers no longer philosophize from the issues but only from the books of their colleagues.26 Kann man schon riskieren zu sagen, die Religion sei auch ein Wert, ja sogar hierbei bleibt man nicht stehen, sondern – die Einsichten werden vermutlich 24. GA 21, 151 [E 127]. 25. Cf. Aquinas, ST 1.3.2–7; Contra Gentiles, 1.25. 26. GA 21, [E 70].

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noch tiefer – Gott ist ein Wert und selbst der höchste Wert. Dieser Satz ist freilich eine Blasphemie, di dadurch nicht herabgemindert wird, daß sie Theologen als letzte Weisheit vortragen. Das alles wäre komisch, wäre es nicht tief traurig, weil es zeigt, das man nicht mehr aus den Sachen philosophiert, sondern aus den Büchern seiner Kollegen.27

Heidegger’s version of ‘theology’ studies the God revealed through revelation, and revelation is an event in a world, particularly the correct kind of world. After all, on the wrong sort of background, Heidegger’s interpretation of St Paul has it that even the antichrist will show up as God. Christian theology’s enquiries within the Christian world both take that world for granted and stay within its horizon, hence the reason theology does not study God, but God’s self-revelation. To study God’s revelation is necessarily to presuppose the background on which it can be that revelation. The great barrier that Heidegger will raise between theology and philosophy in 1927 will have nothing to do with whether or not theology is able to bring God into its world of reference. Heidegger’s God is beyond our world (though God’s revelation is not). And his barrier between philosophy and theology will have nothing to do with whether philosophy is specially equipped to extend beyond the world we inhabit – a point that should be clear from our previous discussions, for there is no being beyond the world, and there can be no reflective strategy by which one sees beyond the horizon of being. In what then does Heidegger’s great contrast between theology and philosophy consist? We can now turn back to the 1927 lecture and consider how successfully he forms the barrier between theology and philosophy. Phenomenology and Theology, 1927 For every experience that a human has, their inhabited world serves as the background condition for its possibility, and that world delimits, orients, and defines the experience. Indeed, in fundamental experience, there is no contrast at all between ‘world’ and some particular ‘experience’; this distinction is always the creation of superficial reflection. Heidegger’s phenomenology, as we know, is a strategy by which one reflects on the background conditions for any phenomenon that shows up in our field of experience. Phenomenology is a story about those conditions. And Heidegger is convinced that if one discovers the condition for some experience, then the next appropriate step is to query the condition for that condition, and to continue up the chain of conditions until one discovers those big background conditions which are both universal and necessary for all of human life. For Heidegger, if there is a Christian eschatological experience of time, then it follows that there must be some prior background structure that serves as the condition for its possibility. There are Christian eschatologies and pagan eschatologies and, we might add, secular eschatologies. Heidegger infers that there must 27. GA 21, 84.

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be a superordinate temporality that allows all specific teleologies to work, eschatology as such. Heidegger aims to bypass these specific versions of temporality and get to the universal condition for their possibility, eschatology qua eschatology. The enquiry putatively seeks something which is logically pre-Christian, and thus beyond the remit of the theologian. In 1927 Heidegger contrasts theology and philosophy using the terms ontic and ontology. I have argued that Heidegger uses the language of ‘ontology’ and ‘ontic’ to describe a contrast between an investigation of conditions and an investigation of any specifications made possible by conditions. An ontic science is then a positive science; it commits itself to certain background conditions and asks what is permitted within their remit. An ontological enquiry is philosophical; it considers a phenomenon and seeks the background conditions that make it possible. It is a binary distinction in the direction of travel and thus the method of investigation. As a purely methodological distinction, this description of what counts as philosophy does not pick out any special things to enquire about, but names how one does the enquiring. To ask how the law of gravity will apply to a falling object is an ontic enquiry. To ask whether there are laws of gravity is an ontological enquiry. One enquiry moves from the superordinate to the subordinate and the other moves from the subordinate to the superordinate. It is a simple contrast. In the 1920s, Heidegger generally adds, though not consistently, a further condition to his label of ontological enquiry.28 To count as philosophy, an investigation must not only aim at background conditions, but it must also achieve the discovery of universal background conditions. This is precisely what he hoped to accomplish in Being and Time. It should thus come as no surprise when he tells us, in the 1927 lecture on phenomenology and theology, that philosophy deals with the ‘pre-Christian content of basic theological concepts’.29 These two conditions 28. Heidegger had begun to differentiate, in the 1925/6 lectures, a special, hierarchically superior territory for philosophy, ‘In Christianity and its interpretation of existence this particular matrix of being that obtains between existence’s authentic being and fallen concern has undergone a specific [bestimmt] conceptualization. But we should not understand this structure as if it were specific to a Christian awareness of existence. Just the reverse. Only because existence has this structure in itself qua care can there be a specifically Christian conception of existence. And because of that (although we can’t go into it here), these structures can be worked out in complete isolation from any orientation to whatever kind of [theological] dogmatics.’ GA 21, 232 [E 194]. 29. GA 9, 64 [E 52]. Also note how GA 9, 63 [E 51] puts it, ‘… All basic theological concepts, considered in their full regional context, include a content that is … ontically sublated, they are ontologically determined by a content that is pre-Christian and that can thus be grasped purely rationally. All theological concepts necessarily contain that understanding of being that is constitutive of human Dasein as such, insofar as it exists at all.’ As a case in point GA 9, 63–4 [E 51] offers, ‘Sin is manifest only in faith, and only the believer can factically exist as a sinner … the content of the concept itself, and not just any philosophical preference of the theologian, calls for a return to the concept of guilt. But guilt is an original ontological determination of the existence of Dasein.’ English in brackets

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give us a complete picture for Heidegger’s distinction between theology and philosophy. Not only is the direction of travel ontological rather than ontic, but there is a special and specifically philosophical object of enquiry – a taxonomically defined region or process that is the condition for the possibility of every world that could possibly be inhabited. It is a region so superordinate that it supports every possible eschatology, whether secular or pagan or Christian. Every particular eschatology will rely on that universal eschatology which Heidegger’s philosophy hopes to discover. For Heidegger, incidentally, the ‘pre-Christian content’ of eschatology turns out to be something like the universal structure of temporality first indicated by Aristotle. Of course, any universal condition, any condition for the possibility of all possible words, is itself a feature of every actual world and is not in any way ‘outside’ of a world. Both philosophy and theology remain limited to the world for their enquiries. At this point we should have a good idea of how Heidegger, in his 1927 lecture, distinguishes philosophy from theology as a positive science. Earlier I stated Heidegger’s four claims about this difference. These bear repeating. 1. The difference between every positive science is one of degree. 2. The difference between philosophy and every positive science is one of kind. 3. Theology is a positive science. 4. Therefore theology has more in common with history or biology or chemistry than it does with philosophy. Now we can see more precisely what constitutes the difference in kind between a positive, ‘ontic’ science like theology and an ontological enquiry like philosophy. First, it is a difference in the direction of travel: positive science moves from the superordinate to the subordinate, whereas philosophy moves from the subordinate to the superordinate. Second, it is a difference in just how high up the taxonomic chain an enquiry reaches: philosophy engages regions that are so superordinate as to be both universal and necessary. At this point we should contest the relation between theology and philosophy as Heidegger depicts it, and we should contest it for Heideggerian reasons, or at least reasons commensurate with the reading of Heidegger provided in this book. Every enquiry must begin from within a world. Philosophy has to move from within a world to the founding concepts of that world’s operative taxonomy; it therefore depends on the world in important ways. As I have been arguing throughout this book, an enquiry must have commitments, and those commitments are from the world it investigates. This would be a trivial observation except that Heidegger offers a picture of the world as fundamentally unitary; that picture does not end with Being and Time, but persists in the 1927

follows Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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lecture. In fact, he now goes so far as to suggest that this unitary world may be ‘non-conceptual’.30 What that claim might mean has been a matter of ongoing debate,31 but we can say that the world of meaning disclosed through what Heidegger calls ‘uncovering’ and which I have discussed in terms of fundamental classification, the world to which language might later accrue, is not conceptually carved up in just the same way as it is in parasitic reflection. I have contended that, in Heidegger’s picture of fundamental experience, there is finally no difference between the little teleologies of teacups and the biggest teleology of the whole world – they run together in the same world, defining each other. A distinction between different regions of experience, or an analysis of a tool’s progressively more comprehensive involvements with the world, is accomplished in a self-reflection that produces differentiations by its superficial classification of a unitary experience. Heidegger repeatedly insists (as in the example of hammers) that we have an everyday experience of this unity, but not when we consciously reflect upon that experience. To use a hammer or a room or a city is to use a whole world. This matters. On such an account, there can be no special, separate, neutral, philosophical region of founding concepts that disclose being rather than beings of some specific worldly kind. However inconsequentially, the teacups that show up in a Christian world are apiece with that world, and their meaning is part of its meaning. There is no separate, philosophical process like ‘temporality’ that can be disentangled from its cultural variations. There are no neutral categories hiding in the background free from cultural variation. In fundamental experience, ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name a unity without hierarchical order. Teacups matter in a network of commitments to practices of hospitality, or to a Protestant work ethic, or to a stiff upper lip, or to a sense of refinement; being committed to one or more of these is to be committed to yet further, more superordinate commitments – yet in being so committed, these hang together in a fundamental experience that does not make the distinctions. The unity of the inhabited world does not provide a firm ground for distinguishing between either more or less fundamental experiences. In this ‘non-conceptual’ world the teleologies run together; the teacups just are working out one’s Christian salvation or fuelling one’s vocational duty or displaying one’s social sophistication. On this view, Heideggerian experience comes in two kinds: fundamental and superficial. There is no eschatology more fundamental than Christian or pagan or secular eschatology. In fundamental experience, there is no 30. GA 9, 50 [E 42], ‘It is proper to the positive character of a science that this prescientific comportment toward whatever is given (nature, history, economy, space, number) is already illuminated and guided by an understanding of being – even if it be nonconceptual [wenngleich noch unbegrifflichen Seinsverständnis]. The positive character can vary according to the substantive content of the entity, its mode of being, the manner in which it is pre-scientifically disclosed, and the manner in which this disclosedness belongs to it.’ 31. Joseph Schear, ed., Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate (London: Routledge, 2012).

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separable world per se or temporality per se. Superficial abstractions cannot select already distinct regions of fundamental experience. The story wherein words accumulate to a taxonomy of various and distinct teleologies within a world, a story in which some regions of that taxonomy are universal and thus the rightful territory of philosophy alone, is itself parasitic. It is a descriptive strategy, a superficial story told from the vantage point of reflective language. Reflective reason forms the distinctions between teleologies and identifies the teleologies by the same move. Any positive science must use concepts reflectively to carve up an experiential positum, but according to Heidegger, that positum does not present its own conceptual distinctions and may even warrant the label ‘non-conceptual’. Heidegger draws one consequence from this: he claims that the concepts we apply to this unitary way of existing cannot be treated like individual ‘playing chips’ but must be descriptively situated in a web of meaning.32 Of course one should not lose sight here of something essential: the explication of basic concepts, insofar as it proceeds correctly, is never accomplished by explicating and defining isolated concepts with reference to themselves alone and then operating with them here and there as if they were playing chips. Rather, all such explication must take pains to envision and hold constantly in view in its original totality the primary, self-contained ontological context to which all the basic concepts refer.33 Es darf hier freilich etwas Wesentliches nicht außer acht gelassen werden: die Explikation von Grundbegriffen bewerkstelligt sich nämlich, sofern sie recht angesetzt ist, nie so, daß isolierte Begriffe für sich expliziert und definiert und dann wie Spielmarken hin und her geschoben werden. Alle grundbegriffliche Explikation hat gerade das Bemühen darauf zu richten, den primären geschlossenen Seinszusammenhang, in den alle Grundbegriffe zurückweisen, in seiner ursprünglichen Ganzheit in den Blick zu bekommen und ständig im Blick zu behalten.34

But the concession is not enough. The consequences of the unity of fundamental experience are far more serious. Heidegger wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to claim that the whole experience of inhabiting a meaningful world is able to be in full swing without fundamental conceptual divisions, and he wants to claim a privileged conceptual boundary between the Christian bits of that world and the universal bits, which alone are the special preserve of philosophy. Heidegger wants to claim that there is a discoverable region, or some process, in the non-conceptual world of fundamental experience, something that allows there to be any world at all, something which is taxonomically distinct – something 32. GA 9, 62–3 [E 51]. 33. GA 9, E 51. 34. GA 9, 62–3.

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which is the exclusive interest of philosophical enquiry. And Heidegger wants to claim that there are no fundamental regions in any world. Heidegger relies on more than a distinction in method, in the direction of enquiry; philosophy is made distinct by a different object of enquiry. The difference between theology and philosophy is not merely in the direction of travel, whether up or down a taxonomic hierarchy, but is also established by a superordinate taxonomic region reserved for philosophy alone. This separation of frame and content, of universal and particular, of the necessary and the contingent, of being and beings, amounts to a separation of the secular and the sacred, of nature and grace. This theologians may freely deny. Philosophy, like theology, has axioms or commitments from which it conducts its reflective investigations. Each reflective enquiry is committed to overlaying a superficial taxonomy of concepts upon a fundamentally unitary experience; but there is not, nor can there be, an a priori reason to grant a special status to the axiomatically derived distinctions which are internal to either enquiry. There is no a priori ‘properly philosophical’ reason to grant a special, superior status to an axiomatically asserted conceptual distinction between sacred and secular in the way Heidegger wants. There is no a priori reason for theology and philosophy to be separate enquiries at all. Such distinctions are internal to an enquiry. In one philosophy’s world of enquiry there might very well be a distinction between sacred and secular; but the distinction itself will depend, parasitically, upon the mode of enquiry and its way of construing the world in superficial classification. The contrast it marshals will amount to a display of its own taxonomy, superimposed upon the fundamental experience of inhabiting a particular world. Heidegger’s ‘philosophy’ is distinguished by its direction of travel (from the subordinate to the superordinate), and by its special region of enquiry (the most superordinate). I have tried to show that Heidegger’s distinctive region criterion fails. I would now like to show that Heidegger’s direction of travel criterion also fails. If there is no special region of investigation, where does that leave theology and philosophy? Analytically and arbitrarily we may define these two disciplines simply according to the direction of travel taken in their enquiry, and such a distinction is marvellously useful. On this strictly methodological distinction, it cannot matter whether an enquiry into background conditions achieves a discovery of a special region of the world, perhaps construed in terms of a special universal process or big category like ‘being’; and by definition there cannot be an enquiry that extends beyond the domain of a particular inhabited world of fundamental experience. An enquiry into the condition for the possibility of something will suffice for the label ‘philosophy’. According to this strictly methodological distinction, all that would matter is whether one moves from the subordinate to the superordinate or from the superordinate to the subordinate. Yet if we adopt such a distinction of method, then it might well mean that much of what philosophy does is ‘positive science’ and much of what theology does is ‘philosophy’. True, if theology were to look at the world and identify an instance of providential action, that would be a case of ‘positive science’, but it is more likely that, for the overwhelming majority of the time, theologians will ask questions like

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‘what is providential action?’ – and such an enquiry into the conditions of some instance of identifiable divine action will make their work ‘philosophy’. Furthermore, if we imagined that, in some particular taxonomical arrangement, an enquiry into either ‘action’ or ‘providence’ happened to be superordinate to an enquiry into ‘providential action’ that would not, in this case, provide any grounds for differentiating philosophy and theology: the direction of travel would remain the same. Action as such would still be action in a particular, perhaps Christian, world. This ruins Heidegger’s division of labour. He describes philosophy as a tool for ordering, and thus guiding, all the positive sciences that must, in turn, rely upon background conditions which philosophy alone manages. Philosophy shows theology (imagined as a positive science) that any one of its doctrines, such as guilt, is really a version of a universal structure of ‘guilt’, a universally necessary ‘guilt’ that guides many other positive accounts, whether pagan or secular. In doing so, philosophy has the critical task of putting theology – and all other positive sciences – on a clearer and firmer foundation. As he says, philosophy allows the positive sciences to be properly scientific.35 The Heideggerian division of labour disintegrates once we renounce – as we must – special regions of taxonomical enquiry and are left with a simple methodological difference between the directions of enquiry in a superficial taxonomy. From the perspective of theology, there is no special structure of universal guilt or virtue or grace that is either temporally or logically prior to God’s created order for the universe and his providential plan for its redemption. All versions of guilt, however superordinate, are of theological import. An investigation situated within a Christian world refuses and precludes the idea of a non-Christian region of being. A theological enquiry into the meaning and structure of some ‘guilt’ that is superordinate to, say, Lutheran guilt would remain an enquiry into – to put it simply – God’s way of doing things in God’s world. In this respect, theology’s claims are comprehensive. All of the possible worlds which might be inhabited – by an ancient Greek ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, by a Latin person, or by a Congolese Kimbanguist – might very well be equally guided by a single structure of temporality, but it will remain Christian theology’s claim that such a temporality is only finally understood when seen as part of God’s plan, or perhaps when eschatologically construed in terms of the resurrected Christ, or whatever it may be. It is God’s temporality. There are no universal structures which are not God’s structures.

4. Sacred Language, Sacred World It is a theological task to ask, ‘What superordinate commitments are guiding this reading of scripture, or this particular liturgical rite, or this construal of the trinity?’ An enquiry is committed to a superficial taxonomy, and if it directs itself towards the superordinate rather than the subordinate extremity, then it is a ‘philosophical’ enquiry. Theologians identify an instance of something, but 35. GA 9, 64, [E 52].

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then query the background conditions for that instance. ‘God is in the Mass, how is that?’ Strictly in terms of its direction of travel, this poses a ‘philosophical’ question. But in view of the underlying unity of the world that this question queries, there is no difference between asking it and some other question with the same direction of travel. In other words, descriptive commitments A, B, C cannot pick out a special, more superordinate region because there are no natural regions A, B, C within fundamental experience; the whole thing hangs together. The ‘more superordinate’ regions are not detachable from the world that says all eschatologies are part of God’s created order; the ‘subordinate’ defines the ‘superordinate’. A reflective enquiry begins by cutting off some region of unitary experience, names it (perhaps ‘scripture’ or ‘tradition’ or ‘reason’), and then queries the conditions for the possibility of this region – ‘What makes this text count as scripture and not that one?’ Theology, like all forms of reflective enquiry, takes very seriously the superficial taxonomy which it inscribes on a unitary experience. But a failure to recognize the superficiality of that taxonomy will generate confusions, like the notion that Kimbanguists misread their scriptures rather than experience them in unity with their world. This is not to deny the importance of superficial taxonomies. As we saw in our reading of Gadamer, in marshalling and querying its own taxonomy, theology is able to better regulate how the whole world of fundamental experience will change. If scripture is interpreted differently, or if tradition is revised, or if one adopts an alternative strategy of reasoning, then the whole inhabited world will be altered in a specific way. This book has offered an account of Christian life as more fundamental than certain entities which are distilled out of it, namely: scripture, tradition, and reason. The chief aim has been to defend the single phenomenon thesis – that the ‘threeness’ of these entities is a story we tell ourselves, but one that disintegrates upon careful inspection. I introduced the case of the Kimbanguist to alert us – by way of comparison – to the power of the inhabited world to define the individual items we identify within it. Our reading of Heidegger then began to undermine the identity of specific items qua items. While actively engaged in an experience, the individuation of entities does not take place. Gadamer supplemented this story by showing how the inherited taxonomies of fundamental experience develop in history, so that the divergence between taxonomies (such as between the British Baptists and Kimbanguists, or between the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, or between Roman pagans and barbarian Christians) could be better understood, with changes occurring both at the level of fundamental experience, and in the acts of self-reflection determined by that experience. A comparison between taxonomies is useful for exposing the hidden power of our own background commitments, for exposing the way our world defines what we imagine to be individual entities within it when we reflect upon experience. Yet the dynamics of unity investigated by Heidegger and Gadamer remain operative whether recognized or not. Were there only one inhabited world – were there only one culture, one language, one way of thinking about things – the single phenomenon thesis would still remain crucial for understanding how it is that

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we imagine there to be a panoply of individual items, like bits of language or an independent faculty of reasoning. It would be crucial for assessing the claim that Christians rely on tradition to reason about the meaning of scripture. A diversity of worlds is useful for revealing these dynamics, but the dynamics do not depend on that diversity. Humanity is indeed fragmented, there is not just one taxonomy, and Christianity provides an example of that – in fact, it is one of the finest examples of human fragmentation because that splintering has been documented with unprecedented detail. Further, the twentieth century has witnessed the most rapid expansion of Christianity in history, an expansion that has broadened and compounded Christian diversity. At such a moment, it is worth pausing to consider how an inhabited world is formed and how it generates the meaning of the entities identified within it. What shows up in one world as an icon, appears in another as an idol. Justice and perversion, violence and peace-making, right and transgression – these are the contrasting concepts applied to the ‘same’ act, the ‘same’ item, when it shows up in different worlds. When the ‘same’ passage of scripture is used to produce contrasting meanings by two communities, the theologian has an opportunity to query the world that generates each reading. That requires philosophical and textual hermeneutics to be kept together. Ecumenical possibilities are afforded when attention is concentrated on the world that produces conflict, rather than on the conflict itself. The question is not merely, ‘Should the passage mean A or B?’, but also, ‘How are meanings A and B produced?’ To consider the formation of inhabited worlds is a central task of theology, not merely a preparatory concern handled by philosophy. It is not a form of ground clearing or throat clearing before theology begins. To argue about how a world ought to be formed simply is to argue about the meaning of scripture, the reception and revision of tradition, and the canons of reason. Historical queries into the nature of past worlds are pursuits in historical theology. Systematic accounts of the inhabited Christian world are works of systematic theology. Constructive theology might propose how a world ought to be revised, offering arguments that appeal to the reasons of a current taxonomical arrangement. Pastoral theologians might ask how liturgy and catechesis can best mould and address the world of parishioners. In this book I have tried to show the unity that obtains between world, mind, and the meaning of physical words – between scripture, tradition, and reason. In the first chapter I began to articulate certain key assumptions guiding this account, going so far as to list them. Subsequent chapters added more points to the list, and each point received progressively detailed treatment. They do not form a syllogism, but together they helped to build a world in which my reading of Heidegger and Gadamer could be conducted. They formed the background against which the central claim of this work has been advanced, namely that ‘scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ name a single phenomenon. These theses bear repeating.

Conclusion

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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An enquiry must rely on commitments. These cannot be the object of that enquiry. Such commitments may be the object of a separate enquiry. Commitments have origins. Most commitments originate in the social life of a community. Origins do not determine use. Commitments can be revised. To understand, repurpose, or revise our own commitments are reflective tasks necessarily determined by those commitments. Commitments produce the phenomena of experience in acts of fundamental classification. Commitments classify phenomena in acts of superficial classification. Our taxonomy of fundamental commitments is identifiable with the world that we already inhabit. All that appears in experience as fundamentally classified is unitary. A plurality is an effect of superficial classification. Self-reflection is parasitic; it classifies phenomena. ‘Scripture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘reason’ are a superficial plurality that name a single phenomenon.

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INDEX Aristophanes 138–9, 143, 146, 149, 154 Aristotle 4, 24, 46, 50, 52, 55, 66, 67, 75, 124, 194 n.3, 206 Augustine 67, 198, 201 Coca-Cola 9, 106, 107, 111, 121 Coke see Coca-Cola Collingwood 29 n.13, 124 Dialungana 16–17, 20 Diangienda 16–17 disclosure see uncovering Duns Scotus, John 50, 70, 171 effective history 127, 139–40, 150–1, 153, 156–7, 159, 161, 171, 177 Erfurt, Thomas of see Duns Scotus eschatology 200–7, 210–11 Flaubert 101 God 11, 13, 15, 17, 37, 51, 66–7, 101, 104, 105, 191, 196, 200–4, 210 Hegel 1–2, 4, 122, 123, 126, 128, 142, 151, 154–62, 170–2, 174–5 Holy Spirit 12, 17, 75, 100 incarnation 11–12, 17, 101 Jesus Christ 11, 13, 14, 17, 19–20, 177, 191, 200, 210 Joyce 102 Kiangani 17 Kimbangu, Simon 9–20, 22, 26, 40, 42, 67, 75, 83, 85, 99–102, 105, 106, 111–14, 121, 125, 134, 190–1, 211 Lindbeck, George 200 McTaggart, J. Ellis 89 metaphor horizons 117, 162–72, 174, 175 language 35, 122

spatial and temporal 78, 145, 148, 152, 160–1, 163, 166, 168, 173, 182, 184, 192 taxonomies 80, 169, 175 Nietzsche 102, 161 orientation of Being and Time 37, 70, 199 inherited 2, 184, 196 of superficial classification 192 by taxonomy of classificatory commitments 21–2, 40, 48–50, 66–7, 75, 77–8, 80–1, 84, 96, 104–5, 108, 111, 120, 122, 140, 144, 152, 154–5, 160, 162 theory of 29–34, 132–3 by the world 26, 42, 71–3, 79, 107, 114, 136, 156, 188, 190, 204 origin versus use 2–7, 12, 32–6, 59, 107, 109, 121, 134, 143, 146, 148, 152, 168, 173, 175–81, 187–8, 201, 213 Otto, Rudolph 200–1 phenomenology, definition of 31–5, 37–8, 40, 71, 113, 152, 194, 204 Plato 24, 45, 46, 120 n.3, 138–9, 146, 197 n.9 presence-at-hand see present-at-hand present-at-hand 39–40, 45, 47, 54, 60–1, 65, 67–9, 80, 106 n.7 readiness-to-hand see ready-to-hand ready-to-hand 39–40, 45, 47–9, 53–4, 59–63, 65–72, 74, 76, 79–81, 98, 105–8 reference 30, 46–50, 55–60, 62–4, 79, 107–8, 111–12, 173, 175, 204 rose (flower) 20–1, 97 Schleiermacher 129, 140–1, 170, 200 science 23, 29–30, 48, 50, 67, 124–5, 133, 154, 199, 203, 205–10, 207 n.30 scientist see science Socrates 138–9, 146–7 teleology 23, 92, 105, 188–90, 202–3, 205, 207–8 telos see teleology

222 Index temporality 33, 41, 51, 108, 113, 122, 126, 200 n.18, 204–8, 210 Trinity 17, 18, 190, 101, 210 uncovering 55–61, 65–73, 75–8, 80, 86, 90, 96, 97, 101, 104–10, 117–20, 153–7, 193–8 use versus origin see origin versus use Uys, Jamie 106–7, 106 n.6, 114

Weber, Max 201 Wittgenstein 97 Wirkungsgeschichte see effective history worship 5, 24, 104 Xenophon 146