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Plato's
came under fire from a new wave of criticism against systematization at the
beginning of the 20th century.
This can be verified quite well by looking at the problem of intersubjectivity.
Consider its beginnings. Most importantly we have the reception of
Kierkegaard at the turn of the century, which threatened the ascendant transcendental
philosophy, just as Kierkegaard in his own time had threatened
Hegel and his school. Kierkegaards influence began first in Spain where
Unamuno inspired an entire generation of youths. With the development of
the Schrempfschen Diedrichs edition, Kierkegaard also had a strong impact
in Germany, even on Catholic writers like Theodor Hcker and Ferdinand
Ebner, but also on Martin Buber, Viktor of Weizscker and others. Last but
not least was the role played by the Kierkegaard Project, presented by Karl
Japers in his Psychologie der Weltanshauungen (1919). Of course, no one
grasped this yet as falling under the concept of intersubjectivity. But the concept
of a system of philosophy came to an end with the ascendance of the
philosophy of existence.
Now, I have long followed the methodological rule that one should undertake
nothing without giving an account of the history of a concept. One must
bear in mind the way that our language can presage our philosophizing, insofar
as one seeks to make clear the implication of the words used by philosophy.
Now, of course, behind the concept of intersubjectivity stands the concept
of subjectivity. One might even say that the concept of intersubjectivity is
only comprehensible once we have expressed the concept of subjectivity and
of the subject, and its role in phenomenological philosophy. The impression
given by the word subiectum and the concept of subjectivity, has been that
subject means something like self-reference, reflexivity, I-ness. This has
seemed self-evident to us, but one gets no such impression from the Greek
word hypokeimenon. This word means that which underlies. One finds the
word in Aristotelian physics and metaphysics, and in such contexts it has a
long history in Latin, as substantia or as subiectum. Both of these are Latin
translations of hypokeimenon, which is, and means, that which remains unchanged
as it underlies the process of all change. Aristotle introduces this
concept in his treatment of nature. Regarding what occurs in nature, he distinguishes
between what may sometimes happen to a thing, and the thing to
which this happens. This Aristotelian distinction is anticipated already in Plato,
who distinguished between the what, the ti, and the how, the poion. The
Aristotelian turn towards physics brings this concept of the subject, which is
also grammatical or logical, very close to that of hyle, as the concept of
matter, and to the conceptual apparatus of Aristotles metaphysics of sub SUBJECTIVITY
AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY , SUBJECT AND PERSON 277
stance. One may well ask how, from this original orientation, there could
develop the modem concept of subject and subjectivity, with its particular
connotation.
The answer is obvious. It came through the Cartesian cogito me cogitare,
which gained world renown through John Locke. It was given an epistemic
primacy as the unshakable foundation which endures in the face of all doubts
quamdiu cogito, as long as I think, no matter what I think. It is, so to speak,
the substance of all our ideas. The concept of subjectivity developed out of
this. Kant gave the word and the concept further primacy when he recognized
the function of subjectivity in the transcendental synthesis of apperception,
which must be able to accompany all our ideas, and which gives
This explains the fact that the ancient notion of system first returns to
philosophy in the modern era. In the older usage of the Greeks, the word
system plays a role only in astronomy and music, that is, where the task
was (as regarding the heavens) to make the irregular motions of the planets
compatible with the circular motion of the stars, or to designate the tones
in music. The transfer of the concept of system to philosophy assigns to philosophy
the same task: to mediate ever-progressing scientific research with
the truth-claims of philosophy. With Leibniz, the word system even finds
its way into the titles of works.
But the final synthesis, which was most strongly influenced by systemconstruction
in philosophy, was without doubt that of German Idealism. Thus
the successors of Kant grounded all knowledge on the first, highest principle
of self-consciousness. This represents precisely, as Kant called it, a Copernican
turn. It fell to Kants successors to give content to the formal notion of
self-consciousness. Schelling outlined his philosophy of nature, which was
supposed to give the physical proof of Idealisin, in so far as when the advancement
of the potencies of nature reached their highest potency,
self-consciousness would be brought about in a flash from the Absolute. Going
beyond Schelling, Hegel integrates the entirety of historical consciousness
SUBJECTIVITY AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY, SUBJECT AND PERSON 279
into Idealism, and linked the dialectic of life to the concept of self-consciousness.
This prepares the way for the role played by the concept of life in 19th and
20th century philosophy. The crucial link is found in Hegels Phenomenology,
in the well-known, but equally misunderstood, chapter on the slave and
master, which shows the meaning of work.3 True self-consciousness is founded
in work. By stamping the worked form on the other, through work, appropriation
of the other is achieved. This is the first higher selfconsciousness,
from which leads the path to the highest self-consciousness of Spirit.
This is on the way to the critique of self-consciousness as undertaken by
Marx and, today, by the critique of ideology. From Nietzsche to the present,
this critique dominates philosophical thought. In a well-known phrase,
Nietzsche directly challenged the idealist principle of self-consciousness, when
he said, with a nod to Descartes, it must thoroughly be doubted. Ever since,
statements that take self-consciousness as simply given seem to us naive. For
instance, Nietzsche already refers to the function of dreams, which Freud
would later put in the forefront, giving the example of someone fast asleep
who re-interprets the sound of an alarm clock as a cannon, and dreams an
entire battle merely in order to wake himself up. What Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud have in common is certainly this, that one cannot just take the givenness
of self-consciousness as a given. Here arises a new role for the concept of
interpretation. One thinks of Nietzsches well-known words, I know of no
moral phenomenon. I know only moral interpretations of the phenomenon.
Nietzsches use of the word interpretation is, in itself, only the borrowing
of a word from the language of philology. But it certainly says volumes that
this use of interpretation has gone well beyond all philological use to become
a basic category of modem philosophy. Heideggers taking up of the
concept also marks, with that very taking up, the critical development of
Husserlian phenomenologys concept of the phenomenon.
Now, how does the problematic of subjectivity look in the light of Heldegger
and his proficient critique of Husserl? As is well-known, already in Being
and Time Heidegger transformed Husserls use of phenomenon, for he saw
the basic task of phenomenology as laying bare the phenomenon, and found
insufficiently careful Husserls mere phrase: to the thing itself. For something
to show itself requires an unconcealing of the concealed, so that it can
come to showing itself. The word phenomenology does not only mean,
then, the description of that which is given, but rather includes the
unconcealing of a concealment, which need not consist only in some false
theoretical construct. To a certain extent, in the beginning the art of
phenomenological description seemed to begin with the unconcealing of dogmatic
concealment, for example mechanical theories in the theory of percep280
HANS-GEORG GADAMER
tion, or in the unconcealing of a hedonistic theory of drives. One might see
this as a major impetus for the tum towards phenomenology, for instance in
the works of Pfnder, the school of Theodor Lipps, and also the young Max
Scheler. Husserl himself speaks of sensual elements in the phenomenon of
perception, and calls them hyletic data. Yet this occurred in order to work
out the particular form-characters active in perception and in order to bring
about the givenness of the object of perception in the flesh. Heideggers critique
was more radical. It aimed at the very concept of the phenomenon and
the givenness of the object of perception in the flesh, because for Husserl in
the end these are related back to the apodictic certainty of self-consciousness.
Heidegger, through his introduction of the concept of presence-at-hand
(Vorhandenheit) and its analysis in the direction of readiness-to-hand
(Zuhandenheit) and Dasein, passed beyond the temporal horizon and the consciousness
of time, as masterfully described by Husserl. He showed that this
supposed givenness remains under the spell of the Greek experience of Being.
That goes for all that lies in the concept of the transcendental Ego and its
apodictic evidence, in which phenomena constitute themselves.
Augustine already worked through the aporia of the consciousness of time
in which the now in fact is not at all, since it has already disappeared into
the past by the time it is identified. Husserl saw also the essence of
self-consciousness in this, that it entangles itself in the aporia of the temporality
as it tries to bring its own being before itself. The reflective self falls
into an endless process of iteration, since the reflection can always reflect
again on the reflecting self. Thus it follows from the structure of reflection
itself that it is trapped in an empty iteration. This is Husserls concept of a
transcendental subjectivity: that it involve this unending, empty iteration.
Heideggers advance consists in the fact that he himself uncovered the secret
after-effects of Greek ontology in this concept of self-consciousness, and
thus invalidated the concept of self-consciousness and its role as the support
for Transcendental Idealism.
Being is not to be understood only as that which I am conscious of or,
as the later Heidegger would interpret it, is present there [anwesen ist]. With
the concept of self-presence, that is, the appearing of the stream of consciousness
to itself, Husserl meant to grasp the essence of the consciousness
of time. Heideggers critique shows the narrowness of such a conception of
being. He shows that on this conception, the primary, fundamental composition
of human Dasein is misjudged. Dasein is not constituted in the always
retrospective attempt to recognize oneself in the very act of becoming aware
of oneself. It is rather givenness-on-the-way (Weggegebenheit), and not
only because of its imaginings, but above all because of the non-givenness of
SUBJECTIVITY AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY, SUBJECT AND PERSON 281
the future. This is what makes up human Dasein, as Hermann Cohen also
emphasized. Whether one calls this the Principle of Hope, or however much
one emphasizes the future-oriented character of human Dasein, Heidegger
showed that in all this, and in the concept of subjectivity, there is transmitted
an unnoticed ontological prejudice, even if one does not think of subjectivity
as substantiality or as presence-at-hand.
From this critique of the concept of consciousness, which Heidegger would
later radicalize, we can take to be of special significance that Heidegger already
before Being and Time introduced the expression hermeneutic of
facticity, setting it against his own questioning of the idealism of consciousness.
Facticity is obviously that which cannot be clarified, that which resists
any attempt to attain transparency of understanding. Thus it becomes clear
that in every understanding there remains something unexplained, and that
one therefore must ask about what motivates every understanding. This
changes the entire concept of interpretation, and we approach the radicality
we saw above in the citation from Nietzsche. My own works have proceeded
in this direction, asking what interpretation in fact is when one goes so far as
to fundamentally question the ideal of the self-transparency of subjectivity.
This does not mean only that de facto one will always find every understanding
to be limited. It also means that an unlimited understanding would cut
away at indeed, abolish (aufheben) the very meaning of understanding,
just as a perspective that sees everything would abolish the very meaning of
perspective.
This penetrates deeply into the problematic of so-called intersubjectivity
as will be shown. To begin with, it seems obvious in Being and Time that
intersubjectivity depicts only a peripheral appearance in Daseins authentic
mode of being, and falls under the verdict of the inauthentic, of Idle Talk, of
the They (das Man). That is to say, intersubjectivity has its place in Daseins
tendency towards fallenness.
In order to open a new horizon for the problematic of intersubjectivity, I
have chosen a concept-historical consideration of the concept of subjectivity
as my theme. We have already emphasized that transcendental subjectivity
constitutes the constant foundation in the Husserlian construction of phenomenology.
Likewise, the concept of intersubjectivity is a guiding word that
points us back to Husserls own conceptual shortcomings and a whole range
of problems. What we might, with Hegel, call objective Spirit, or with Marx
and the heirs of Hegels philosophy of right, call society, appears in Husserl
under the concept of intersubjectivity. The orientation towards subjectivity
is so central that Husserls position itself can only be formulated in its terms.
This is also expressed quite clearly by other terms Husserl used in his analy282
HANS-GEORG GADAMER
sis of the problem of intersubjectivity. Thus it is significant that Husserl latched
onto the Leibnizian concept of the monad and the monadic aspect which
already in Leibniz carries with it the nearly insoluble problem of the
co-existence of the monads, a problem Leibniz hoped to solve by proving the
existence of God. For his part, Husserl claimed the meaning of intersubjectivity
as constitutive of the world. Only through common possession of the world
(Welthabe) can one think the co-existence and interrelation of the monads,
that is, only on the basis of a consciousness which possesses the world
(welthabenden Bewusstsein).
Even without getting involved in the semantic side of the question, there