Self-Understanding and Lifeworld , livre ebook

SELF- UNDERSTANDING AND LIFEWORLD
STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT
John Sallis, editor
Consulting Editors
Robert Bernasconi
John D. Caputo
David Carr
Edward S. Casey
David Farrell Krell
Lenore Langsdorf
James Risser
Dennis J. Schmidt
Calvin O. Schrag
Charles E. Scott
Daniela Vallega-Neu
David Wood
SELF- UNDERSTANDING AND LIFEWORLD
BASIC TRAITS OF A PHENOMENOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS
HANS-HELMUTH GANDER
TRANSLATED BY
RYAN DRAKE AND JOSHUA RAYMAN
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Published in German as Hans-Helmuth Gander, Selbstverst ndnis und Lebenswelt
2001 by Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
English translation 2017 by Indiana University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gander, Hans-Helmuth, 1954- author.
Title: Self-understanding and lifeworld : basic traits of a phenomenological hermeneutics / Hans-Helmuth Gander ; translated by Ryan Drake and Joshua Rayman.
Other titles: Selbstverst?andnis und Lebenswelt. English
Description: 1st [edition]. | Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Series: Studies in Continental thought | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017013831 (print) | LCCN 2017030883 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253026071 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253025555 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Husserl, Edmund, 1859-1938. | Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. | Hermeneutics-History. | Phenomenology-History. | Life-History.
Classification: LCC B3279.H94 (ebook) | LCC B3279.H94 G3613 2017 (print) | DDC 193-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013831
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It is a rule of life that we can and must learn from all people. There are serious things in life that we can pick up from charlatans and bandits; there are philosophical insights that make fools of us; there are lessons in consistency and adherence to law that surface by chance and originate from chance. Everything lies resolved in all things .
Fernando Pessoa
Work in philosophy-in many ways like work in architecture-is actually more like work on oneself. On one s own perception. On how one sees things. (And what one demands from them) .
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Only he who understands this art of existing, treating in his acting the particular thing apprehended as the utterly unique and being just as clear about the finitude of his acting, only he understands finite existence and can hope to complete something in it .
Martin Heidegger
In Memory of J rgen von Kempski Rakoszyn
CONTENTS
Translators Introduction
Preface
INTRODUCTION
1. Exposition of the Connection between Selfhood, Lifeworld, and History
2. Conception and Outline of the Treatise with an Excursus on the Paratextual Functions of Remarks
PART ONE IN THE NETWORK OF TEXTS: TOWARD THE PERSPECTIVE CHARACTER OF UNDERSTANDING
3. Inception and Beginning: Toward a Forestructure of Understanding
4. Approaching the Question of Interpretation: On the Relation of Author-Text-Reader
5. On the Relation of Writing and Reading to Self-Formation
6. The Text as a Connection of Sense in the Horizon of the Occurrence of Tradition as Effective History
7. In the Governing Network of Discourse
8. The Sense-Creating Potential of Texts: The Modification of the World
9. Excursus on the Metaphor of the Book of the World
10. In the Network of Tradition: On Understanding as an Incursion into the Current of Texts
11. On the Interpretive Character of Knowledge in the Wake of the Historicity of Understanding
12. Parenthesis on the Discourse of Metaphysics As Such as a Problem of an Epochal Revaluation in View of a Signature of the Present
13. Critical Remarks on the Concept of an Absolute Reason
PART TWO I AND WORLD: THE QUESTION CONCERNING THE GROUND OF PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER ONE
On the Search for the Certainty of the I
14. Toward the Task of a Hermeneutical Interpretation of the Concept and Its Relation to Everyday Experience: An Approximation
15. Wonder and Doubt: On the Entry Point of Philosophical Reflection
16. Under the Spell of Certainty: Descartes s Self-Certainty of the I am as a Hermeneutical Problem
17. The Ontological Positioning of the Cartesian Ego between Acquisition of the Self and Loss of the World
CHAPTER TWO
On Life in Lifeworlds: Critical Considerations of Husserl s Phenomenology of the Lifeworld
18. The Concept of Lifeworld as an Indication of the Problem
19. Husserl s Recourse to as an Irruption into the Theoretical Attitude
20. The Problem of Objectivism in the Tension between and
21. Toward a Philosophical Thematization of Natural Life-in-the-World
22. On Husserl s Transcendental Self-Grounding of Philosophy with a View to the Question of the World
23. Husserl s Application of the Task of a Lifeworldly Ontology
24. The Function of History in Husserl s Transcendental-Phenomenological Conception
PART THREE SELF-UNDERSTANDING AND THE HISTORICAL WORLD: BASIC TRAITS OF A HERMENEUTICAL ONTOLOGY OF FACTICITY
CHAPTER ONE
The Hermeneutical Turn: Heidegger s Critical Dialogue with Husserlian Phenomenology
25. Husserl versus Heidegger: On Situating their Disagreement
26. The Hermeneutical Stance on a Second View
27. The Blind Spot in the Phenomenological Eye: Heidegger s Critique of Husserl with a View to the Structure of Care
a. Phenomenological Maxims of Research and Cognitive Intention
b. The Proper Things of Philosophy : The Being of the Human
28. The Metamorphosis of Phenomenology into the Hermeneutical
a. In Connection with the Tendencies of Lebensphilosophie
b. The Hermeneutical Approach in Pretheoretical Life
c. The New Hermeneutical Accentuation of Phenomenology
29. The Function and Relation of the Hermeneutical Ontology of Facticity, Fundamental Ontology, and Metontology
30. Aspects of a Contemporary Philosophical Situating of the Discourse on Facticity
CHAPTER TWO
The Experiental Structure of the Self: Toward a Hermeneutics of Factical Historical Life
31. The Leap into the World: On Outlining the Factical-Hermeneutical Concept of Experience
32. Analysis of Environmental Experience
33. Remarks on the Problematic of the Alien
34. The Self-World as the Center of Life-Relations
35. The Having-of-Oneself within the Field of Tension between Winning and Losing Oneself
36. The Structure of the Self as a Function of Life-Experience
37. On the Status of a Hermeneutics of Facticity as Ontological Hermeneutics
CHAPTER THREE
Application -Destruktion- History: Hermeneutical Sketches of a Philosophy of the Situation
38. Hermeneutical Application
39. The Critical Sense: On the Task of Phenomenological Destruktion
40. History as the Organon of Understanding Life
OPEN END
41. Retrospective Reflections on the World-Conceptual Relevance of a Hermeneutics of Facticity
Bibliography
Index
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
In Self-Understanding and Lifeworld: Basic Traits of a Phenomenological Hermeneutics , Hans-Helmuth Gander s Gadamerian orientation leads him to think seriously about what is typically ignored or neglected in the current state of phenomenology, namely, our hermeneutic experience of reading. Phenomenological inquiry is most often directed to our experience of the world, to sense experiences, to questions of reality and knowledge, and to a lesser extent to thinking and understanding. But when we, as philosophers trained in or engaged with the continental tradition, are steeped so heavily in the reading of texts, this experience of reading demands its own proper explication as an interpretive mode of letting the phenomena show themselves in themselves as they are, in Heidegger s terminology. Gander s text is an attempt to develop a phenomenological hermeneutics out of an examination of reading. He locates Heidegger s turn from Husserl, which he dates back almost a decade prior to Being and Time , in precisely this turn to hermeneutics. In Gander s hands, the pursuit of a phenomenological hermeneutics constitutes an attempt to uncover the prior or fore- structure of the interpretation of sense or meaning in every act of reading. From this complex forestructure (for which Gander identifies three constitutive parts) that enables human experience, he goes on to uncover the hermeneutical problems hitherto foreclosed by the dominant model of the Cartesian subject, whereby the nature of the I cannot be distinguished rigorously from the world. World, for Gander, is lifeworld. But this position differs from that of Husserl, since the self cannot be abstracted from this lifeworld and it involves the hermeneutical exposition of the prior relations of the self within the lifeworld. The concepts that Gander articulates from this mode of analysis involve experience, particularly the experience of wonder, seen through the lens of the hermeneutics of facticity. The task of setting forth self and world is never to be separated from a lifeworldly self-understanding that is historical and that involves the significance of the self-world. For this reason, while drawing so much from Heidegger, Gander nonetheless faults his work for failing to engage as critically with its ow