Husserl and Gadamer on the historicity of understanding: Can historicism be avoided?

摘要

This comparative study of Husserl and Gadamer asks the question: Can we give an account of human understanding that, although sensitive to the historicity of understanding, does not fall into historicism? This question raises three themes: historicism, historicity, and the nature of philosophy.; What bothers Gadamer about historicism is not the challenge it poses as a philosophical claim, but the effect it has on our engagement with the tradition. When we regard a text as valid only for a past time, we never take up its questions as our own; our own horizon is never placed at risk. The hermeneutic practitioner avoids historicism by engaging in genuine dialogue.; Because our linguisticality is, for Gadamer, what ultimately accounts for the historicity of our understanding, I examine what he calls the speculative structure of language. His notion of effective historical consciousness entails the inevitable corrigibility of every interpretation. But this universal claim concerning the contingency of all interpretations cannot be asserted without self-contradiction. Further, when Gadamer claims that he is articulating what "always happens," whatever we may be understanding, this is a performative inconsistency. But aside from these rare admissions, his account does not avoid historicism. To thematize the contingency of understanding, but to deny it of the thematization, highlights the discontinuity between the theory of the practice and the practice itself.; Husserl shatters the premise of historicism by pointing out that all historical facts are posed against a non-objectifable horizon of questionability. This is a transhistorical apriori structure, as are the other structures of historical understanding: internal time consciousness, the noema, sense, and linguistic meaning. Although Husserl recognizes a discontinuity between the natural and the philosophical attitudes, there is no disjunction between how these formal structures function. We are always identifying identities within manifolds. The difference is that in philosophy we can recognize certain identities as invariant ideal structures. These ideal apriori structures are reiterated throughout history. This is how Husserl's account successfully avoids historicism.