Abstract
This paper sets out an account of hermeneutics as essentially ‘topological’ in character (where ‘topology’ is understood as designating the philosophical inquiry into place) at the same time as it also argues that hermeneutics has a key role to play in making clear the nature of the topological. At the centre of the argument is the idea that place and understanding are intimately connected, that this is what determines the interconnection between topology and hermeneutics, and that this also implies an intimate belonging-together of place and thinking, of place and experience, of place and the very possibility of appearance, of presence, of being.
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Notes
Figal 2010
Makkreel 2015.
The spatial and topological turn that appears in Figal and Makkreel is also evident in Janz (2017). Janz’s volume aims explicitly to address the spatial and topological character of hermeneutics across a range of topics and areas.
See Malpas 2015a.
In spite of the tendency among some readers to disown or disregard its connection to any notion of place, Heidegger’s use of Dasein as the central term in his thinking in Being and Time is perhaps the clearest indication of the essentially topological character of that thinking. Dasein names that mode of being whose own being is in question for it, and that questionability is tied to the singularity of Dasein’s being—a singularity that is itself tied to Dasein’s being as essentially placed, hence its being named as Da-sein (literally ‘there/here-being’). It is the idea of singularity that underpins Heidegger’s use of the notion of ‘own-ness’ (Eigentlichkeit—problematically translated into English as ‘authenticity’), since what is most properly Dasein’s ‘own’ (eigene)—what is ‘ownmost’ to Dasein—is precisely that which belongs to it in its singularity. Such singularity, which is neither a matter of particularity nor individuality, is precisely what pertains most properly to place and that which is placed (see Malpas 2015b).
See Figal 2010.
See Malpas 1999. The reciprocity that obtains between place and human being is a key point in the topological account sketched here. The basic idea of reciprocity or mutuality of constitution is fundamental to hermeneutic thinking, and is evident, for instance, in the very idea of hermeneutic circularity (which is an ontological rather than merely methodological or epistemic structure) as well as in the hermeneutic emphasis on the inter-relatedness of self and other.
See Malpas 1997
See Malpas and Zöller (2011)
Heidegger (1971, p.41) talks of the human being as the one who ‘walks the boundary of the boundless’ (echoing Georg Simmel’s characterisation of the human being as ‘the bordering creature who has no border’—Simmel 1997, p.170), and in doing so captures just this idea of the connection between boundedness and a non-metaphysical form of transcendence. Heidegger’s attitude towards the notion of the transcendental, however, changes over the course of his thinking, and the notion is one that he comes to view as problematic (see Malpas 2007, pp.119-134; also Malpas 2012, pp.90-95).
These relations include, but are not restricted to, the relations that make up the ‘pre-judgmental’, and they also include relations that remain unarticulated linguistically or conceptually, but this does not mean that they therefore stand apart from judgment, or apart from language or concept.
Significantly, Gadamer himself argues for the importance of the Kantian critical turn to the hermeneutical turn—particularly in relation to Heidegger, although he also notes the disappearance of Kant in Heidegger’s thinking as tied to Heidegger’s abandonment of the transcendental (see Gadamer (1994)). My approach here adopts a rather different reading of the transcendental form that assumed by both Gadamer and Heidegger, and so also a closer relation between the critical, the transcendental, and also the topological.
‘Heidegger 1971, pp.29–30.
Kant’s Letter ‘To Marcus Herz, 21 February, 1772’ in Kant 1967, p.71.
Aristotle 1983, Bk IV, 4.
See Aristotle 1983, 212a20
The precedence given to the visual here reflects a precedence given to the visual in the thinking of place also—for instance, in the way places are commonly identified with their visual representations as exemplified both by the postcard and the landscape painting.
Levinas often appears to reject the topological (most obviously in essays such as ‘Heidegger, Gagarin and Us’ – Levinas 1990: pp.231–234), but also to embrace it (in the very idea, for instance, of the face-to-face), and could thus be seen to demonstrate the inevitability of place in thinking even when the attempt is made to think apart from place. In fact, much of what goes on in Levinas is actually the mobilization of one form of topology—one mode of the thinking of place—against another.
On this basis, the Kantian transcendental-critical project has to be understood as directed against the scepticism of Descartes more so than that of Pyhrro—even though this is not entirely clear in Kant himself.
See for instance Cavell 1988. Cavell also demonstrates the way in which a certain topological-hermeneutic sensibility can be uncovered in Wittgenstein’s work, as well as in certain strains of romanticism and in American idealist-pragmatist tradition (on the latter, see also Malpas 2016c). Notice that the way we are brought back to place here is not such that we are brought back to some certain and secure shelter—the bringing back to place that is at issue is a bringing back to the uncertainty and questionability that also belongs to place, though it is an uncertainty and questionability that can only arise within it and on the basis of it.
See Malpas 2016d.
As Donald Davidson shows in several key essays—see e.g. Davidson 2001, pp.183-98. Davidson is perhaps the best example of a thinker who arrives at what is essentially a topological-hermeneutical position, one that is close in many respects to that of Heidegger and Gadamer, from within a largely analytic framework (though one that is also strongly influenced by Kantian and Hegelian elements—in the former via Whitehead and in the latter via Mead).
On the relation between phenomenology and topology, see e.g.. Malpas 2012, pp.44–56.
See Dreyfus (2014).
Place, and so too any mode of being in place, always extends beyond anything that might be said of it or in terms by which it may be conceptualized, and place is not constituted by language nor by conceptuality. Being in place also encompasses modes of engagement other than the purely linguistic or conceptual—being in place does indeed include, for instance, the bodily and the sensual. None of this, however, warrants the conclusion that, in regard to place and being in place, language or conceptuality are therefore secondary phenomena.
The ‘life-world’ is an important if also problematic concept. In some ways, the life-world can be construed as a way of taking up aspects of what is at issue in the idea of place (it essentially a development of the topological notion of horizonality). Yet, because it is defined specifically in relation to the ‘lived’, so it also tends to remain within the frame of an essentially subjectivist orientation. Moreover, within this sort of approach, the topological elements that are at work often remain undeveloped or appear only as single elements alongside others within a larger structure—as is so often the case, place itself is effectively overtaken by the idea of situation or lived environment (where the latter are treated as if they were the prior notions). The idea of the life-world is deployed as a key concept in Claude Romano’s account of both hermeneutics and phenomenology (see Romano 2015), and although I would see Romano as one of those who has contributed significantly to the contemporary resurgence of critical engagement with hermeneutics (and elsewhere I find important points of convergence between his work and my own), his deployment of this idea, among others, seems to me to present significant problems. The topic deserves much closer attention than I can give it here, however, and I look forward to a closer and more direct engagement with Romano in the future.
See especially Derrida’s discussion of the Platonic chora in Derrida 1993, pp. 89–130.
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Malpas, J. Placing Understanding/Understanding Place. SOPHIA 56, 379–391 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0546-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-016-0546-9