In Search of a Phenomenology
of Guilt and Shame
(MA Thesis Philosophy)
by Harnold van der Vegte
(11850817)
Supervisor:
Prof. Dr. Josef Früchtl
Second Reader:
Dr. Stefan Niklas
Foreword
It takes always more than one person to write a master thesis. Allow me, therefore, to thanks those who have contributed, directly or indirectly, in writing this thesis. To begin with, I would like to thanks prof. dr. Gertrudis van de Vijver (uGent) for introducing me to the intriguing field of phenomenology. Her lively discussion groups have sparked in me a great interest in philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger, a spark that has remained in me ever since. I also want to thanks prof. dr. Maarten van Duyk (uGent) for teaching me the ‘craft’ of philosophical thinking. His ability to explain the most profound ideas with the utmost clarity through his precise manner of speech and his elaborate and insightful lecture notes has been a great example for me. Thanks, also, to prof. dr. Josef Früchtl (UVA) for his helpful comments on my writings and his patience and understanding during the process of writing this thesis. I am also very grateful for those friends who found the time to review the pieces of text I continuously sent to them. Their comments have greatly benefited the clarity and cohe- rency of this thesis. I also want to thank everyone who listened to my never-ending pon- derings while I was racking my brain around the issues that I faced in the arduous jour- ney of writing this thesis. And lastly, I cannot say how much I have appreciated the relent- less moral support of my parents who, even though they were not always able to compre-hend what preoccupied my mind during these months of writing, kept believing in my ability to bring this thesis to a successful end. ,
Table of Content
1
Introduction
p.
9
1.1
What Is (Not) Phenomenology?
p.
9
1.2
Lived Experiences
p.
13
1.3
Limitations
p.
15
1.4
Structure
p.
17
2
The Phenomenological-Hermeneutical
Approach
p.
19
2.1
Hit the Phenomenological Road
p.
20
2.2
Limitations to Husserl’s Idealistic Conception
of Phenomenology
p.
24
2.3
What Hermeneutics Brings to the Table
p.
29
2.3.1 Heidegger’s Ontological Turn
p.
30
2.3.2 The Existential Analytics of Dasein
p.
33
2.3.3 The Disclosedness of Dasein
p.
35
2.3.4 Gadamer’s Linguistic Turn
p.
39
3.
Where Guilt and Shame Cross Paths
p.
45
3.1
Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Guilt
p.
45
3.1.1 Authenticity and Inauthenticity
p.
46
3.1.2 The Call of Conscience
p.
48
3.1.3 Being-Guilty
p.
52
Table of Content
3.2
Beyond Heidegger
p.
55
3.2.1 The Unlikely Marriage Between Finitude and Guilt p.
55
3.2.3 The Foreclosure of the Other
p.
62
3.2.4 The Exclusionary Linkage Between Conscience
and Guilt
p.
66
3.3
Sartre’s Phenomenology of Shame
p.
69
3.3.1 In-itself and For-itself
p.
69
3.3.2 The Look of the Other
p.
72
3.3.3 Pure Shame
p.
76
3.4
Beyond Sartre
p.
78
3.4.1 The Unspecified Status of the Other
p.
79
3.4.2 The Linguistic Mining-field of Shame-Related
Experiences
p.
84
3.4.3 Where Ontology Slips into Ethics
p.
87
4.
Where Guilt and Shame Drift Apart
p.
92
4.1
The Implied Other-as-subject
p.
92
4.2
Conscience and Self-attestation
p.
95
Appendix I
p.
99
Appendix II
p. 100
Bibliography
p. 101
Chap
Abbreviations
BN Sartre, J-P. (1956[1943]) Being and Nothingness: An Essay on
Pheno-
menological Ontology (H. Barnes, Trans.). New York, USA: Philosophi- cal Library.
BT Heidegger, M. (2001[1927]) Being and Time. (J. Macquarrie & E. Robin- son, Trans.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
CES Husserl. E. (1970[1936]) The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcen- dental Phenomenology. Evanston, USA: Northwestern University
Press.
CM Husserl, E. (1960[1931])
Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phe-
nomenology (D. Cairns, Trans.) The Hague, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Pub- lishers
FM Ricoeur, P. (1986[1960]) Fallible Man (C.A. Kelbley, Trans.) New York, USA, Fordham University Press. HF Heidegger, M. (1999[1923]) Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity. (J. van Buren, Trans.). Bloomington, USA: Indiana University Press. HI Husserl, E. (2012[1913] Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomeno- logy. (W.R. Boyce Gibson, Trans.). New York, USA: Routledge Classics. OA Ricoeur, P. (1994[1990]) Oneself as Another (K. Blamey, Trans.). Chicago, USA: The University of Chicago Press.
SE Ricoeur, P. (1986[1960]) The Symbolism of Evil (E. Buchanan, Trans.). Boston, USA: Beacon Press.
TE Sartre, J-P. (1991[1936]) The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist
Theory of Consciousness (F. Williams & R. Kirkpatrick, Trans.). New
York, USA: Hill and Wang.
TI Levinas, L. (2007[1961]) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.) Pittsburgh, USA: Duquesne University Press.
TM Gadamer, H-G. (2013[1975]) Truth and Method (J. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall, Trans.). London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
Chapter 1
Introduction
Many of us are familiar with those deeply unsettling experiences of guilt and shame that occasionally rise up and disruptively confront us with how we perceive ourselves. Maybe you have felt deeply guilty after you once injured someone by mistake or you may have felt ashamed after you said something hurtful to a friend somewhere in the past. What our experiences of guilt and shame have in common is that they give us awareness of our
own attachment to ourselves, be it to the person that one is or the acts that one has done.
These experiences are profoundly discomforting and unpleasant as they involve a nega-tive appraisal of one’s Self in relation to a certain set of values or norms that one has
failed to uphold. In that sense, guilt and shame differentiate from other experiences such as anxiety, fear, and pride, which also make us aware of our attachment to ourselves but do not involve a negative normative assessment of one’s Self. Since guilt and shame are so closely related and often ‘fused’ together in a specific situation, it has proven to be dif-ficult to differentiate these experiences in a precise manner. Neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists and others have made several attempts to resolve this issue. This thesis should be seen as a contribution to this debate, yet it follows a different approach for dealing with this question, namely: phenomenology.
§1.1
What is (not) phenomenology?
Phenomenology started as a discernible movement with German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who suggested that philosophy should make it as its primary task the study of how our lived experiences present themselves to our consciousness. This was meant as a wake-up call for scientists and philosophers to not get lost in all sorts of
technical jargon and abstract theory building, but to keep an eye on the ‘matters them-selves’ [Sachen selbst] (HI, 35) as Husserl famously said—that is, we should not retreat within a ‘labyrinth of words’ while losing sight of the lived experiences that these words are meant to express. So, when Husserl suggested we turn our attention to how our lived experiences present themselves to our consciousness, he does not mean that we should describe the way we experience something in their ‘full glory’ by listing all those random thoughts that emerge while experiencing something—like a free association exercise as practiced in psychoanalysis—but rather to explicate the underlying structure that consti-tutes a lived experience as experienced from a first-person perspective. Phenomenology, as the term already indicated, is thus both concerned with the ‘phainómenon’ (the Greek word for ‘that which shows itself’) and ‘lógos’ (which can be best translated in this con-text as ‘reason’ or ‘ground’). When we search for a phenomenology of shame and guilt, we are inquiring in the very nature of how we have these lived experiences, as that what makes these experiences what they are and without which they could not be what they are.
Although Husserl’s phenomenology is further discussed (and criticized) in the coming chapter, it is worthwhile for the present moment to contrast the phenomenological ap- proach with other ways of studying our lived experiences—more specifically, the natural-scientific, the empirical-psychological, and the psychoanalytic approach—in order to tackle already some prevailing misunderstandings about what phenomenology amounts to1. To start with, we can say that what is characteristic of the natural-scientific approach is that it always studies experiences from a third-person perspective. But no matter how deeply scientists probe into the underlying neural circuitry of our experiences2 or how much
1 The boundaries between phenomenology and these three other approaches are, of course, not
always as clear-cut as presented here. Many studies have been conducted in which at least two of these approaches partly overlap. Besides that, there have been all sorts of proposals to explicitly combine two approaches as listed here, such as Daniel Dennett’s proposal of what he calls ‘hete- rophenomenology’, a combination of the natural-scientific and phenomenological approach (Den- nett, 2018, 351). For the present moment, however, this four-fold division would suffice as an ini-tial overview of what phenomenology is and what it is not. 2 Despite the fact that much is still unknown about the underlying neural circuitry of guilt and sha-me, a recent meta-analysis (Bastina, C. et al, 2016) showed that the neural underpinnings of these experiences were similar, yet distinct. Shame, on the one hand, is associated with activity in the
information they gather with regards to the evolutionary origin3 of them, they will fail to capture what it is to have an experience of shame and guilt from a first-person perspec-tive. What scientists try to do is to trace why we have certain experiences, yet such an explanatory description captures little, if anything, of one’s actual experiences of feeling ashamed or guilty4. In that regard, the empirical-psychological approach seems much closer to phenomenology as it equally proceeds from the first-person perspective of how individuals have their experiences. But what distinguishes it from phenomenology is its attempt to produce empirical generalizations that apply to a particular (segment of a) population based on how a certain group of individuals (the sample) make sense of their own experiences (Van Manen, 1990, 22). While phenomenology is also empirical—as its point of departure is lived experience—it does not allow for such empirical generaliza-tions since there is no reason to assume that the majority of individuals, when asked to make sense of their experiences, remain close in their verbal account to what essentially constitutes the lived experience under consideration, while keeping a critical eye towards
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and sensorimotor cortex, while guilt, on the other hand, is associated with activity in the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, posterior tem-poral regions, and the precuneus. Shame and guilt share ‘common ground’ in they both appear to share an association with the anterior insular cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. The insular cortex is known the play a role in representing emotional states, in particular in relation to processing subjective feelings, empathy and uncertainty. It is also shown that the anterior insu-lar cortex specifically is involved in the experience of interoceptive awareness—that is, the ability to detect internally generated bodily signals involved in maintaining homeostasis, such as physio- logical reflexes (i.e., pain) and particular motivational states (i.e., hunger and fullness). The ante- rior cingulate cortex, in turn, is involved in a range of functions including the experience of nega-tive affect, the experience of social pain and, again, interoceptive awareness. For more details, see Bastina, C. et al (2016) Feelings of shame, embarrassment and guilt and their neural correlates: a systematic review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Review, Vol. 71, 455-471. 3 There are many theories concerning the biological evaluation of guilt and shame. An example is
the theory of negative legacy emotions by Breggin (2015). He argues that natural selection fa-voured individuals with built-in emotional restraints that reduced conflicts within their family and tribal unit, optimizing their capacity to survive and reproduce within the protection of their small, intimate societies, while maintaining their capacity for violence against outsiders. Unfor-tunately, Breggin argues, these negative legacy emotions are rudimentary and often ineffective in their psychosocial and developmental function. Consequently, they produce many unintended untoward effects, including the frequent breakdown of restraints in the family and the unin-hibited unleashing of violence against outsiders. For more details, see Breggin, P.R. (2015) The Biological Evolution of Guilt, Shame and Anxiety: A New Theory of Negative Legacy Emotions.
Medical Hypothesis, Vol. 85(1), 17-24.
4
Recently, more cognitive scientists and philosophers of science begin to realize that a mere phy-sical account of brain activity is insufficient to explain what it is like to undergo a particular experience. C.I. Lewis coined the term ‘qualia’ to refer to those subjective qualities of our exper-iences (see i.e., Dennett, 2017, 360). It is important to realize that phenomenology is not primarily or exclusively concerned with these qualia but rather deals with the essential structure of our experience, which goes way beyond pure sensation (Smith, 2007, 189)
the way these experiences are ‘commonly’ interpreted (i.e., accepted categorizations or taxonomies)5.
Phenomenology thus requires a sense of reflective self-exploration or introspection from the one who conducts the study, which is not necessarily demanded by the natural-scien-tific and empirical-psychological approach. But what, then, sets phenomenology apart from psychoanalysis? What both approaches have in common is their concern with what it means to have certain lived experiences from the first-person perspective. But while phenomenology confines its field of inquiry to what appears to our consciousness, psy-choanalysis attempts to articulate how our lived experiences are somehow rooted in the ‘unconscious’, by which it takes recourse to various meta-psychological premises and ideas such as ‘drives’ (Freud) and ‘archetypes’ (Jung) (Karlsson, 2010, 12-15). Not that the phenomenological approach is only concerned with what is given explicitly to our consciousness, since it also strives, by means of reflection, to uncover those aspects of our lived experiences that are still non-thematized, yet given to us implicitly. But in doing so, the phenomenologist refrains from using the assumption that there exists something like an inaccessible unconscious realm that has a bearing on our consciousness6. Why phe- nomenology does not result in a mere subjective or arbitrary account of our lived expe-riences is discussed and shown in the following chapters.
5 For instance, a distinction between guilt and shame that is very influential nowadays is derived
from empirical-psychological research conducted by Helen B. Lewis. In 1971, she wrote: “The experience of shame is directly about the self, which is the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not a central object of negative evaluation but rather the thing done or undone is the focus. In guilt, the self is negatively evaluated in connection with something but it is not itself the focus of the experience” (Lewis, 1971, 30) (emphasis in original). For Lewis, the fact that our sense of self serves a different role in our feelings of guilt and shame leads to a distinctive phenomenological experience. On the one hand, she argues that shame is an acute painful emotion that is usually ac-companied with a sense of worthlessness and an urge to escape from the situation that instigated this discomfort. On the other hand, guilt is a less painful emotion because it is con-cerned with a particular act for which one bears responsibility but still stands somewhat apart from the self. It commonly involves a sense of remorse and regret about the act that has been done (or left undone) and is often joined with a wish to somehow repair for the wrongdoing.
6 Despite the difference between the phenomenological and psychoanalytic approach towards lived
experiences, some striking similarities between the two may occur. For instance, Robert Brooke showed that the way Heidegger and Jung understand the relation of the Self to guilt is “virtually indistinguishable”, although they have used different concepts (see Brooke, R. (1985) Jung and
§1.2
Lived Experiences
Until now, I have used the term ‘lived experience’ in referring to shame and guilt without much consideration. Fair to say, the term may sound somewhat tautological at first be-cause it seems unclear what an experience would be if it were not ‘lived’. The reason for this ambiguity lies in the fact that ‘lived experience’ is a translation of the German word ‘Erlebnis’, a word that emerged in the late 19th century as a response to the ‘appropria- tion’ of the term ‘Erfahrung’—the common German word for ‘experience’—by philosop-hers such as Kant who assigned it with a more transcendental meaning (TM, 51-5). To restore terminologically some of the everyday sense of experience as something one ‘personally lives through’, philosophers coined the term Erlebnis—derived from the verb ‘erleben’ (‘to live through’)7. While it was Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) who first brought this term into common academic usage, Husserl followed soon after, first in his Logical
Investigation (1900) and later in his Ideas (1931). In these works, he made several com-ments on what it means to study our lived experiences, of which two of these shall be briefly discussed below, as they already touch upon the difficulties of our search for a phenomenology of guilt and shame.
The first observation is related to taking a reflective stance towards one’s lived exper-iences. For Husserl, our lived experiences, in their most basic form, are not reflected upon; they are ‘being lived’ in an immediately given way (HI, 149). When we start
7
Gadamer points out in Truth and Method (2010[1975]) that the word ‘erleben’—from which Er-lebnis was derived—has a double meaning. First of all, erleben means primarily “to be still alive
when something happens”. Gadamer explains that the word “suggests the immediacy with which something real is grasped—unlike something which one presumes to know but which is un-attested by one’s own experience, whether because it is taken over from others or comes from hearsay, or whether it is inferred, surmised, or imagined. What is experienced is always what one has experienced oneself” (TM, 56). Secondly, the word ‘das Erlebte’ is used to mean the “per-manent content of what is experienced”. This content, so Gadamer explains, is “like a yield or result that achieved permanence, weight, and significance from out of the transience of experiencing (TM, 56). Gadamer argues that both meanings lie behind the coinage of Erlebnis: “both the immediacy, which precedes all interpretation, reworking, and communication, and merely offers a starting point for interpretation—material to be shaped—and its discovered yield, its lasting result” (TM, 56).
reflecting upon them, they present themselves for the first time ‘as really lived’ but also ‘as just having been’ and ‘not having been reflected on’ (HI, 150). What this means, on the one hand, is that Husserl does not posit something like a ‘un- or pre-reflective’ lived expe-rience that is given prior to our reflection of them. A lived experience of guilt that is not reflected upon is incapable of appearing as an experience of guilt independently of its reflective thematization. On the other hand, Husserl points to the fact that by reflecting upon one’s lived experience, the experience itself undergoes a certain modification (HI, 150-2). For instance, if one tries to reflect upon one’s shame, one finds that the expe-rience of feeling ashamed already changes—most directly by considering it ‘shame’—or even slowly dissipates. Consequently, he concludes that phenomenological reflection is always upon lived experiences that are not immediately experienced but that are always passed or ‘lived through’, meaning that we are basically unable to directly apprehend our lived experiences in their ‘unreflective mode’ (HI, 159).
Husserl’s second observation is related to the fact that when something is considered a lived experience, it means that it is ‘rounded into’ a temporal unity (TM, 60-1). These lived experiences are not like singular moments in time that flow past quickly in our consciousness but are more like ‘unitary streams of experiences’ that include a present moment of experience (the ‘now’) surrounded by a fringe of experiences (the ‘before’ and ‘after’) that together, somehow, form a temporal unity (HI, 168-9)8. However, Husserl argues that we do not apprehend this unitary stream as a single experience, as something that is individuated by its very own temporal stream with a clear-cut moment of ‘begin-ning’ and ‘ending’. Our lived experiences do not ‘make their entry’ one at the time and
there is also considerable overlap between the temporal streams of successive lived expe-
8 To be more specific, Husserl argues that consciousness does not occur in isolation but is always a
‘stream of consciousness’ with a temporal structure that consists of—what he calls—a primal impression united with retentions of past impressions (the ‘before’) and protentions of future impression (the ‘after’) (HI, p. 150). For instance, when we listen to a familiar song, we hear a particular tone at a given point, which is our primal impression. In that present moment, we also retain a sense of those tones that just came before the tone that we experience right now. In Husserl’s words, our present ‘stream of consciousness’ thus includes a series of retentions of previous tones. When the song is familiar to us, we also anticipate parts of the song that follow the tone we experience at the present moment. What we hear at present also includes a series of protentions of future tones.
riences (HI, 84; 167). Such successive experiences, in a way, are more like ‘waves belong-ing to the same stream’ rather than ‘wagons of the same train’: they simply ‘flow’9. But if this is the case, how are we, as phenomenologists, able to distinguish a lived experience from other experiences and apprehend it solely and exclusively on its own terms? Husserl concludes that no lived experience can pass as independent in the full sense of the term (HI, 169). Each lived experience is experienced by oneself and, thus, part of its meaning is that it belongs to the unity of this Self and, consequently, to the whole of one’s life. What these two comments uncover is the original ambiguity that underlies any search for a phenomenology of particular lived experiences. On the one hand, we are unable to ref- lect upon our lived experiences while living through them and, on the other hand, we can-not fully isolate our lived experiences like one can isolate a molecule from a cell. Given these limitations, why should we still bother to strive for a phenomenological account of our lived experiences of shame and guilt? While I acknowledge that phenomenological reflection involves a ‘loss’ with regards to ‘what is lived through prior to any reflection’, I also conceive this type of reflection a ‘gain’ since it enables us to deepen our understan-ding of what it means to have these experiences in a way that would be inconceivable when living through them unreflectively.
§1.3
Limitations
There are obviously limitations to this thesis, not only as a result of certain conditions that come along with writing a master thesis—such as the total word count or time constraints—but also by virtue of the phenomenological approach itself, as already partially discussed above. One limitation that needs to be mentioned here is the fact that one can never put forward the phenomenology of guilt and shame in a way that is both exhaustive in scope and fully applicable for all human beings around the globe. We can
9 Analogy taken from Zahavi, D. (1999) Self-awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investiga-tion. Northwestern University Press, 77).
only search for a phenomenology of guilt and shame, which is neither something that is set in stone for eternity (as a sheer universality), nor something that is destined to be wholly replaced at the whim of a hat (as a mere particularity). In a way, the phenome-nological approach should be conceived as attending to a dialectic movement between particularity (by starting from the lived experiences as we have them) and universality (by aiming for the essential structure underlying these lived experiences) through which we acquire a deepened understanding of our lived experiences without thereby reaching any ‘final say’ that would settle the matter once and for all. Husserl would surely disagree with this, yet I think—and with me, Heidegger and Gadamer—that this is the best we can aim for as historical and finite beings. But even though I acknowledge that the phenome-nological account as presented in this thesis is necessarily non-exhaustive, it is worth addressing two noteworthy shortcomings that apply to the scope of this study.
First of all, I shall not touch upon the works of the so-called ‘phenomenologists of the lived body’ such as Merleau-Ponty, Plessner, and others who have contributed to the phe-nomenological tradition by drawing renewed attention to the embodiment of our lived experiences. This does not mean that I assume that these experiences can be phenom-enologically investigated as if their embodiment were only a minor ‘supplement’ to the discussion while leaving the essential structure of both guilt and shame undisturbed. I do, in fact, acknowledge that both guilt and shame are bodily experiences, that they are bound up with a certain ‘corporealization’ as the German psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs (2003, 223) once called it, and that they are often accompanied by, for instance, a ‘blush on the cheeks’ when one is ashamed or the feeling of having a ‘weight on one’s shoulders’ when experiencing guilt. But I shall leave it for further research to explore the bodily as-pects of these experiences in more detail. The second shortcoming is related to the fact that phenomenology is a Western tradition and that the phenomenologists discussed are predominantly German and French in origin, which may leave my phenomenological findings prone to Western bias. While I do think that this is an empirical question and therefore outside the scope of this study, I
also believe that it is necessary, first and foremost, to deeply understand phenomeno-logically what it means to have an experience of guilt and shame within the historical, cultural and linguistic world that is our own before we can validate whether these fin-dings correspond with particular experiences of non-Westerns. This is still largely un- charted territory, in particular since phenomenology is hardly practiced outside the tra-ditional Western world10.
§1.4
Structure
All that remains here is to provide a short outline of how this thesis is structured. In the next chapter, I shall start with discussing the works of Edmund Husserl, who is con-sidered the founder of the phenomenological tradition. From this discussion it becomes evident that there are certain theoretical limitations to Husserl’s framework that makes it complicated to come to an understanding of our shame and guilt by staying true to his methodological principles. I shall argue that it is therefore necessary to complement Hus- serl’s idealistic conception of phenomenology with insights from the hermeneutical tradi-
tion. In particular, I will discuss the works of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Hans-
10 There are various cross-cultural studies that compare the Western characterizations of shame
and guilt with other cultures, which has resulted in many interesting findings. For instance, it seems that some cultures (such as the Rarámuri Indians in Mexico and Rural Javanese) do not use different words to distinguish guilt from shame (see Breugelmans, 2006), while other cultures (such as the Mandarin Chinese) use multiple expressions for both experiences. In 2004, Olwen A. Bedford of the National Taiwan University conducted interviews with 34 Taiwanese women from middle-class families, all between 24 and 31 years old, and identified three types of guilt—name-ly, nei jiu (failure to uphold an obligation to another), zui e gan (feeling of moral transgression) and fan zui gan (feeling of breaking a law)—and four types of shame—namely, diu lian (loss of reputation), can kui (failure to obtain ideal), xiu kui (personal failure), xiu chi (social failure). While I do grant the importance of these studies, they do not shed light on what it is like to have these experiences from a first-person perspective using the methodological principles of pheno-menology, but rather how individuals make sense of their own experiences within the language that is their own. However, differences in the number of words individuals use to mark nuances in one’s experiences—i.e., what the reason is for feeling ashamed or guilty—cannot be taken as evidence that the underlying structure of particular experiences are dissimilar from the expe-riences that English-speaking individuals would call guilt and shame. As I shall discuss in the next chapter, there is indeed a close relation between the way one expresses one’s experiences, how one understands one’s experiences and how one have one’s experiences. Whether the underlying structure of particular experiences is the same across different cultures is therefore an empirical question that requires further research.
Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), who provided some crucial insights in how to tackle the limitations of Husserl’s phenomenology while remaining close to the phenomenological standpoint. After this, I shall devote chapter three with a critical reflection upon Heideg-ger’s phenomenology of guilt and Sartre’s phenomenology of shame. Both accounts will function as a starting-point for explicating the relation of our lived experience of guilt and shame, allowing us to see where both experiences ‘cross paths’. Their phenomenological accounts are criticized by taking recourse to various philosophers who are equally in-fluenced by the phenomenological tradition. Finally, in the last chapter, my findings of the previous chapters are used to answer the leading research question of this thesis: “How can we meaningfully differentiate the lived experiences of guilt and shame using the pheno-menological-hermeneutical approach?”
Chapter 2
The Phenomenological-Hermeneutical
Approach
Phenomenology is both easy and difficult. It is easy because it starts with the most imme-diate lived experiences of everyday life. You may have had several instances in your life that you felt deeply ashamed or guilty and, most probably, you may also have done a fair amount of reflection on what happened with you at these moments. Shame and guilt are ‘familiar’ kinds of experiences to all of us—except perhaps if you are a psychopath—and thus anyone is potentially able to attend to these experiences phenomenologically. It is difficult, however, because it is precisely the very familiarity of such an experience that makes it hidden from us. Our understanding of what it is to feel guilty or ashamed con- tains within itself series of uninterrogated and overlooked presuppositions that predis-pose us to interpret them one way or another. The difficult task for phenomenologists is to avoid these preconceived interpretations and turn to the lived experience itself, to in-vestigate the experience as we live it rather than how we have interpreted it thus far. Their aim is to press on towards the essential structure that constitutes a particular lived experience and thereby deepening our understanding of it.
But can we truly ward off all our presuppositions and uncover our lived experiences in their ‘true light’? And is our understanding of lived experiences not relative to the lan-guage we speak, since we are only able to reflect upon them through language? These and other questions will be taken up in the coming chapter. The intention of this chapter is not to provide a fixed set of methodological guidelines that would enable us to approach the lived experiences of guilt and shame in the coming chapters, but rather to bring for-ward a history of thinkers that provide a rich framework to discuss the subject matter at hand from various angles.
§2.1
Hit the Phenomenological Road
Most of the time, throughout our daily lives, we perceive the world around us as simply real and straightforwardly extant. We do not actively question its existence; it is ‘just there’ and we experience and discover it immediately and intuitively without theorizing about it. This is what Husserl calls our natural standpoint as that what comes before and after any other standpoint that we may take, such as a scientific or a mythological one (HI, 51). Within this natural standpoint—which is often unrecognized as a standpoint—we assume that there is a world ‘out there’ in which ‘we’ and the acts that we carry out take place. Now, what Husserl suggests is to ‘bracket’ or ‘to put between parentheses’ the as-sumption that there exists such a world ‘out there’—a mental operation that he calls the
phenomenological epochè (HI, 56-60)11 . That does not mean that one should deny the ex-istence of the world; not in the very least, as one can continue to be convinced that the world exists. What Husserl suggests is rather to abstain from using this assumption in describing one’s experiences12
. Instead of paying attention to the seemingly existing ob-
11 The word ‘epochè’ is an ancient Greek term that is typically translated as ‘abstaining of
judg-ments’. This term can be seen as closely linked to another term he frequently uses, namely ‘reduction’. Husserl himself is not always very clear how to differentiate both terms from each other. Helpful in this context is the definition given by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi in their book The Phenomenological Mind (2008): “Whereas the purpose of the epochè is to suspend or bracket a certain natural attitude towards the world thereby allowing us to focus on the modes or ways in which things appear to us, the aim of the phenomenological reduction is to analyse the correlational interdependence between specific structures of subjectivity and specific modes of appearance or giveness. When Husserl speaks of the reduction, he is consequently referring to a reflective move that departs from an unreflective and unexamined immersion in the world and ‘leads back’ (re-ducere) to the way in which the world manifests to us” (2008, 27, italics added) 12 Husserl’s phenomenological epochè has been often unjustly conflated with Berkeley’s idealistic position or Descartes scepticism. But first of all, he does not claim that one can reduce the natural world to ideas in the mind, as Berkeley did. According to Husserl, the ‘world’ and ‘consciousness’ are not identical, yet he concords that the only world we are able to know is strictly and ex- clusively the world as it appear to our consciousness (Smith, 2007, 242). In addition, his pheno-menological epochè is not on par with Descartes’ method of doubt because Husserl is by no means concerned with the question of whether the things that appear to our consciousness truly exist. Whereas Descartes refused to accept anything as existent unless it is secured against every conceivable possibility of becoming doubtful, Husserl’s phenomenological epochè makes the question of existence simply a matter of indifference (CM, 3). That does not mean that Husserl fully disregards Descartes’ methodical doubt because, in fact, he wants to renew Descartes’ radi-calness, the radicalness of philosophical self-responsibility by “aiming at the ultimate conceivable freedom from prejudice, shaping itself with actual autonomy according to ultimate evidences it
jects in the world of which we are conscious, he suggests we shift our attention to how these things appear to our consciousness. In a sense, we are left with our own ‘conscious life’ as the way we experience the world—something that Husserl called the realm of pure or absolute consciousness (HI, 96). Phenomenology is the study of this field of pure consciousness that is acquired after car- rying out the phenomenological epochè, a study that aims to describe and explicate ex-periences as the one who performs the study experience them, meaning that it is a form of self-investigation that rests upon a first-person perspective. However, it would be a mistake to take phenomenology as nothing more than describing one’s inner experience. As Husserl laid out in his works, its task is not to give a detailed account of the “concrete fullness and entirety” (HI, 65) of our conscious experiences in all its particularities, but to capture the essence [Wesen] of what appears to us, to grasp ‘what’ a certain phenomenon is—a mental operation that became known as the eidetic epochè (HI, 11-2). Husserl considered these ‘essences’ as ideal entities: they are not real [real] in the same way as a certain object in the world is real, yet they are nonetheless ‘real’ [reell] by the fact that we can recognize whether certain phenomena in the world belong to particular essences (HI, 43). For example, when we perceive an individual object such as a table, we recognize it as having the requirements for making it a table, thereby belonging to a specific essence. That does not mean that the essence of such an object somehow ‘lurks behind’ the object or is ‘nested within’ it but that it is that what makes the object the very object that it is13.
has itself produced, and therefore absolute self-responsible (…) to renew with greater intensity the radicalness of their [referring to Descartes’ Meditations] spirit (…) [and] to carry out the medi-tations with the utmost critical precaution and a readiness for any – even the most far-reaching – transformation of the old-Cartesian mediations” (CM, 6).
13 Worth mentioning in this context is that Husserl did not consider these essence mere ‘mental
constructs’. If that were the case, we would have to say that numbers are mental constructs too, something Husserl thinks is absurd. As he wrote in Ideas: “One may read in a treatise that the number-series is a series of concepts, and then a little farther on: concepts are mental constructs. Thus the numbers themselves, the essences, were being referred to at the outset as concepts. But, we ask, are not the numbers what they are whether we “construct” them or not?” (HI, 41). It is su- rely questionable how to interpret the ontological status of Husserl’s notion of ‘essences’, espe-cially because he seems better in pointing out what they are not then clarifying what they are (See also Zhok, A. (2012) The Ontological Status of Essences in Husserl’s Thought. New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Vol. XI, 99-130) What is at least clear is that he ‘brackets’ the existence of these essences in a similar vein as he did with the assumption whether the world exist, thereby trying to liberate philosophy from the ‘problem of existence’ and shifting
Part of Husserl’s phenomenology is the assumption that we are able to see and describe the essence of what we experience, free from all those prejudices that we carry with us (CM, 35). He believes that we can establish ourselves as ‘disinterested onlookers’ and purify our experiences of all worldly interpretations, explicating them completely and adequately in their essential structure. To do so, he introduces a third mental operation: the transcendental epochè. This requires us to shift our attention from the object as per-ceived to the essential structure of the conscious act in which the object is perceived (CM, 33). More precisely, we should turn to the realm of pure consciousness and uncover the necessary conditions that allow for a particular experience to be given to us at all. What this means is that we have to ‘split’ ourselves from our empirical ego—as that part of us that is concerned with the world by virtue of being immersed in it—and reduce ourselves to our pure or transcendental ego (CM, 21; 35). This pure ego, however, has a somewhat peculiar status in Husserl’s work, as it is not a ‘piece’ of the world but rather a being that we are but that exists prior in ourselves. It is the ‘I’ that forms the underlying basis in which all our objective knowledge is grounded, or put differently, it is our ‘absolute being’ in and by which the world acquires objective significance (CM, 20-4)14 . Husserl is convin- ced that by attending to our pure ego, we are able to secure a field of indubitable and self-evident claims regarding the essential structure of our conscious experiences15. Later in this paragraph, I will address some issues with regards to Husserl’s notion of our trans-cendental ego.
our attention to the task of abstracting the essence from the phenomena as they appear to us. 14 The fact that Husserl does not consider the pure or transcendental ego as a ‘piece of the world’ marks the difference with Descartes’ ego cogito. Descartes thought that he “rescued a little tag-end of the world” (Smith, 2007, 337) by postulating the ego as that from which one could infer the existence of the rest of the world, yet for Husserl the existence of the world can never be deduced from the transcendental ego, as acquired after the phenomenological epochè (CM, 24). 15 In Ideas, Husserl makes a distinction between a ‘thing’ and an ‘experience’. In principle, he argues, “a thing can be given only ‘in one of its aspects’, and that not only means incompletely, in some sense or other imperfectly, but precisely that which presentation through perspectives prescri-bes. A thing is necessarily given in mere ‘modes of appearing” (HI, 82). Experience, in contrast, does not present itself according to Husserl, meaning that the “perception of experience is plain insight into something which in perception is given (or to be given) as ‘absolute’, and not as an identity uniting modes of appearance through perspective continua” (HI, 83). He writes: “An ex-perience has no perspective” [Ein Erlebnis schattet sich nicht ab] (HI, 79). This leads him to the conclusion that: “whereas it is an essential mark of what is given through appearances that no one of these gives the matter in question in an ‘absolute’ form instead of presenting just one side of it, it is an essential mark of what is immanently given precisely to give an absolute that simply can-not exhibit aspects and vary them prospectively” (HI, 84).
What is important for now is to understand what Husserl’s three mental operations are designed for, namely, that it enables us to bring ourselves in a position in which we can study how things are given to us and distill the essential structure of these experiences accordingly, regardless of whether the things we experience truly exist in the world. But then, how are we able to grasp the essential structure of our experiences? According to Husserl, we are capable of doing so by a form of intuition [Anschauung] that he calls ‘es-sential insight’ [Wesensschau] (HI, 12). In the English language, the word ‘intuition’ may raise all sorts of connotations, such as a ‘magical inner sensing’ or ‘instinctive cognition’, but when Husserl speaks about this peculiar sort of intuition, he is more referring to an immediate and self-evident form of experience (CM, 24). Not that the essence of some- thing is instantly given to us in such an experience, since it may be needed to use the met-hod of eidetic variation (CM, 70). For example, when we perceive a table, we can use this method to get a hold of the essence of this perceptual object by arbitrarily varying it in its shape or color using our imagination while, simultaneously, keeping our perception fixed as a perception of a table. By doing so, we are able to shift from our actual perception into the realm of ‘purely possible’ perceptions, which allows us to apprehend—according to Husserl—that what holds with absolute necessity and universality in all our free varia- tions of it and, consequently, what can be considered the essence of the conscious expe-rience under consideration (CM, 71). But even if we resort to Husserl’s phenomenology of essences, it still seems that most of such essences are way too complex and can only be grasped inadequately (as there is always more to know) or without absolute certainty (as further evidence may require revision), let alone that we can presuppose that there is something like a stable essence of something. That does not mean, however, that the quest of trying to grasp the essence of a particular conscious experience is not an insightful one. On the contrary, it may deepen our understanding of what it really is to have such an experience, even if this may even-tually lead us to conclude that we are unable to fully specify the necessary conditions for having a particular experience. It may also be the case that in our attempt to understand the essential structure of an experience, we run up against its historicity; that we become
aware that we are always caught up in the whirl of traditional conceptions in explicating our experiences, seemingly unable to discard our historical outlook altogether. Husserl rejected this possibility, as he was deeply convinced that we could grasp, by pure intuit-tion, the essential structure of our experiences without having to resort to any form of historical relativism16. He seems to disregard the fact that in any attempt to comprehend the intuition we may have concerning the essential structure of a phenomenon is media-ted by interpretation, which is always historical, linguistic, and ultimately finite by its very nature. This can be considered the first theoretical limitation to Husserl’s account of phenomenology.
§2.2
Limitations to Husserl’s Idealistic
Conception of Phenomenology
We know, thus far, that the domain of phenomenology is the entire realm of pure con-sciousness, while the methodology encompasses the three mental operations mentioned earlier. But before Husserl could even start to discuss the various types of conscious ex- periences that we have, he must begin practicing phenomenology by attending to ‘cons- ciousness’ itself and ask after its essence. His answer is that the key feature of conscious-ness is intentionality, a term he adopted from the German psychologist Franz Brentano.
16 Early on in 1911, Husserl wrote an essay called Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft in which he
insisted that philosophy should aspire to be a ‘rigorous science’—an ideal that he thought was never fully attained—and his intention was to develop phenomenology as a proper science too (Husserl, 1965, 71). It may seem rather odd, especially from today’s perspective, to suggest that philosophy should strive to meet the same methodological standards as the natural science, yet it should be noted that the German word Wissenschaft has a much wider meaning than the English word ‘science’, especially in Husserl’s days. Back then, the word applied to any method of re-search that is capable of generating a body of true and false propositions regarding a given domain of objects, which implied that also more abstract disciplines such as logics, mathematics and epistemology were considered a science (Smith, 2006, 191; 339). Therefore, when Husserl sought to establish philosophy as a rigorous science—in particular phenomenology, which he considered the first philosophy because, for him, all other sciences were initially grounded on how phenomena appear to us (CM, 30)—his intention was to define a sharply delineated domain of study for philosophy, while also formulating a strict methodology that would enable him to make true and false propositions with regards to this domain (HI, 129).
He does not use intentionality here in the usual sense like when we say that ‘I intend to go to the supermarket’ but he rather refers here to the fact that whenever we are conscious, we are always conscious of something; there is always an object of consciousness, whet-her it is a table, another person, or an idea (HI, 63). Besides that, he remarks that each time we are conscious of something, the intended object is presented and determined in a particular way. When we perceive a table, for instance, it always appears to us ‘such-and-such’, not merely because we look at it from a certain angle or because it is presented to us in a particular light, but more significantly, because what we perceive is always media-ted by a ‘sense’ [Sinn] that we attribute to the table as ‘object-as-intended’, a sense that is always there but which does not enter our awareness prior to our phenomenological ref-lection (HI, 184-5). Husserl calls this the noematic side of consciousness, or in short:
noema. Its counterpart, the noetic side of consciousness or noesis, refers to the way we are conscious of something (CM, 36). For example, we can be conscious of a table by just perceiving it, but it is also possible that we are conscious of the table by an act of remem-bering or that the table occurs to us in a dream, all of which are different noetic moments of a conscious experience.
In what follows, I shall not venture into a detailed account of Husserl’s analysis of the structure of consciousness, partly because throughout his work he is primarily concerned with the conscious experience of perceiving an intentional object in a manner that invol-ves a sensorial dimension. However, a phenomenology of the lived experiences of shame and guilt requires a different approach since, as a kind of inner feeling experienced by a subject, it does not seem to be primarily directed to anything in the world but rather to oneself. But even this claim may not be entirely correct, as there is undeniably a form of directedness towards the world, in part because it implies that one becomes conscious of the way one is or the way one acted in the world. Only briefly did Husserl touched upon the question whether the feature of intentionality also belongs to feelings in general or whether they are merely loosely attached to it, thereby coming to the conclusion that the-re awhether they are merely loosely attached to it, thereby coming to the conclusion that the-re indeed non-intentional feelings (Husserl, 2001, 224-9). While I do not think that shame and guilt belong to the latter category, it would also be unconvincing to classify
either shame or guilt as merely feelings in the first place, as they appear to be a peculiar mixture of both feeling(s) and cognition. But if this is the case, how can we submit these lived experiences to Husserl’s phenomenological approach, in particular because this would assume that we could apprehend these experiences by ‘affectively distancing’ one-self from the world (including one’s own body), something that seems to be implied by the transcendental epochè?
In my view, the transcendental epochè is untenable for understanding the lived exper-iences of guilt and shame because these experiences are tightly related, in their essence, to the situations that give rise to them and the feelings that accompany them. In Husserl’s terminology, they appear too bound up with our empirical ego—that is, with our ‘con-cern’ with ourselves and Others—that we will ‘lose’ these experiences, and therefore the means to understand them, when we reduce ourselves to our pure ego. This can be mar-ked as the second theoretical limitation of Husserl’s phenomenology. The third limitation is related to Husserl’s immanent solipsism in his phenomenological account of the cons-cious experience of someone else, of another ego that is recognized as Other. Although he admits that it seems quite impossible to foresee how, after the three mental operations, other egos can be recognized as Others, he is determined to tackle this issue in the fifth section of his Cartesian Meditations (CM, 30). His claim basically boils down to the asser-tion that the Other is given to us derivatively by a form of analogy—he also calls this an original ‘pairing’ [Paarung] (CM, 112)—between one’s own ego and the ego of the Other (the latter called the ‘alter ego’), given that we notice similarities between the bodily ap-pearance of the Other and how we experience our own body17. The theoretical limitation
17 Husserl’s ‘solution’ to the phenomenological problem of how we can recognize the Other as Other starts from the visual experience of perceiving the bodily appearance of the Other as it stands in front of us. He argues that in such a situation, the Other is not just ‘presented’ to our conscious-ness but conjointly ‘appresented’, meaning that the body we perceive is somehow indicative of exhibiting psychic life (CM , 91; 117). The reason for this is that this bodily appearance is noticed as not a mere physical body [Körper] but rather as an animate organism [Leib] (CM, 110). Hus-serl’s uncompromising idealism comes clearly to the surface in his further attempt to explain why we perceive the body of the Other as an animate organism rather than a physical body, using the concepts of ‘analogizing apprehension’ and ‘apperceptive transfer’ (CM, 110-1). To put matters simply, he argues that it is by virtue of our own experience of having an animate organism—or a ‘lived body’, a term more common nowadays—that we are able to notice similarities when we perceive a body in our perceptual field that is similar to ours, which leads us to ‘apprehend’ this body as ‘analogue’ to an animate organism. Moreover, he argues that the body that is
appre-to Husserl’s phenomenology is, however, that he can only conceive of the Other by taking recourse to the transcendental route of attending to the pure ego—as an isolated subject detached from the world—thereby taking issue with the problem of how the ego can apprehend the Other as a conscious being. Heidegger, in contrast, would argue that he reverses the problem here. For him, the problem is not how to conceive Others as being similar to us, but rather how we, as beings that always already dwell among other beings, can reclaim our relationship with ourselves.
How we should make sense of the Other phenomenologically is a matter of dispute I will leave unresolved for the present moment. Meanwhile, it is important to recognize that within the Husserlian framework, we are unable to account for an essential dimension in our relationship with the Other, namely that the presence of the Other is somehow co-implied in our sense of being a subject, making the transcendental epochè, once again, questionable. Note here that this limitation gets right to the heart of the subject matter at hand, as our lived experiences of shame and guilt seem to presuppose the presence of the Other in a more primordial sense than Husserl could allow for—at least, according to Hei-degger and Sartre, as we shall see in the coming chapter. This leaves us with the fourth, and equally the last, theoretical limitation to Husserl’s phenomenology, one that is re-lated to his notion of the ‘life-world’ [Lebenswelt] that gained prominence in his later work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936). The ap-parently contradictory features of Husserl’s notion of the life-world have puzzled many scholars (see Carr, 1970, 331-9). Hence, without claiming to do full justice to his rich and multi-leveled account of this notion, it is at least clear that he regarded the life-world as the ‘pre-given world of experience’ prior to any theoretical reflection, yet a world that is nonetheless deeply imbued with the meanings and values that are part of the cultural, historical and linguistic tradition to which one belongs (CES, 139-4; 209). We acquire this life-world, so Husserl argues, through a process of ‘sedimentation’ [Sedimentierung] by which the prejudices of our time become passively ‘enfolded’ in each experience that we
hended as such must have derived this sense by us ‘transferring’ this sense upon this body that we ‘apperceive’ as belonging to another ego (CM, 122).
have, thereby influencing the manner in which we experience things (CES, 189; 362).
By positing the life-world as that what serves as the perpetual background through which our experiences are given to us, one may get the impression that Husserl eventually pul-led away from his central tenet that, by practicing phenomenology, one could arrive at claims about our conscious experiences that can be held with absolute certainty. Nothing is further from the truth. Though he admits that the life-world itself is essentially subject-tive and intersubjective in character, he is convinced that we can inquire back from our pre-given world to the most formal and general structures that constitute the life-world as such (CES, 139-42)18. In fact, he argues that it is our task, as phenomenologists, to thematize the life-world—he even talks about an ‘ontology of the life-world’ (CES, 173)—by stripping away all those prejudices and idealizations that cling to the life-world from the perspective of our natural standpoint, and reveal the unquestionable ground that provides the ultimate foundation for the life-world throughout all possible altera-tions (CES, 112; 172). What this ontology amounts to and how it is to be performed shall not be discussed here. The main point here is that Husserl remained loyal, throughout his work, to the assumption that we can ‘peer through’ the (inter)subjective layer of our life-world and explicate our conscious experiences in a way that holds true independently of the life-world that one has. I consider this a theoretical limitation to Husserl’s phenome-nology because it is unlikely that he would consider shame and guilt ‘valid starting- points’ for a phenomenology, particularly because it is doubtful whether these terms de-note clearly discernible primordial experiences that can be understood entirely apart from the particular life-worlds in which they have emerged as two distinct experiences.
All four theoretical limitations of Husserl’s framework equally demonstrate the compli- cations of coming to an understanding of shame and guilt phenomenologically. I shall de-
monstrate in the next paragraph that by incorporating some crucial insights from the her-
18 See also Luft, S. (2004) Husserl’s Theory of the Phenomenological Reduction: Between Life-World and Cartesianism. Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 43, 98-234. In my interpretation of Husserl, I join Luft in his claim that Husserl’s focus on the life-world in the Crisis should not be interpreted as a ‘departure from Cartesianism’ but that his proposal to thematize the life-world phenomeno-logically is based on the transcendental question with regards to the origin of (inter)subjectivity.meneutical tradition, that we can still use Husserl’s valuable groundwork for approaching our lived experiences while overcoming the evident theoretical limitations to his work.
§2.3
What Hermeneutics Brings to the Table
Throughout his entire career, Husserl stood his ground and kept proclaiming that we could get to the sense the world has for us all prior to any ‘philosophizing’, a sense that philosophy can uncover but never alter (CM, 151). Hence, he was shocked that Heidegger, his former student, rejected this central premise in his major work Being and Time (1927) by arguing that we will never find some pure ahistorical essence with regards to the experiences that we have (BT, 75). The reason for this is that the being that we want to
understand is itself a being that understands, a being who is constantly interpreting itself
and, consequently, also interprets Others to whom it is bound as well as the world in which it is embedded. Each time we start inquiring into what it is to have certain lived experiences —such as shame and guilt—we can never simply start from scratch. We are always already up our ears in an inherited culture and a native language according to which everything that might appear to us is already understood and interpreted one way or another. We have to begin with how the world presents itself to us in our everyday life and then try to get to the roots of our presuppositions. This is not a matter of freeing our-selves from these presuppositions in an attempt to reach some ‘naked fact’ of the matter, but to continuously rethink and renew the presuppositions with which we originally began. Due to this, Heidegger concludes that we have to resort to hermeneutics—that is, the study of interpretation—as a more appropriate method for giving an account of our lived experiences (BT, 60-2).
Hermeneutics, as a systematic activity, has its roots in Ancient Greece where theories were formulated for the interpretation of the Homeric epics. This project was again taken up during the Reformation, where people became interested in how to interpret the Bible
without having to rely on the unquestioned authority of the Catholic Church. Only in the 18th century, most notably by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and Friedrich Ast (1778-1841), were these historical developments theoretically unified by systematizing and generalizing the methods of interpretation that had already been in use (Bleicher, 1980, 15). While hermeneutics was still ancillary to theology and philology back then, this changed in the run up to the 19th century where hermeneutics was gradually developed as the methodology of the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften]. In an attempt to chal-lenge the prevailing positivistic idea that all acquisition of knowledge, in order to be scientifically valid, must be modeled along the lines of the natural sciences, Wilhelm Dil-they (1833-1911) provided the human sciences with its own epistemological foundation. He argued that whereas the natural sciences is concerned with explaining [Erklären] phe-nomena by subsuming observed regularities under causal laws, the human sciences uses the method of understanding [Verstehen], more specifically of the coherence and struc-ture that is given directly within lived experiences itself (Smith, 2007, 33-5). This led him to the assertion that hermeneutics could serve as the model for understanding in the hu-man sciences. Heidegger again radicalized this notion of hermeneutics. For him, understanding and in- terpretation are not mere auxiliary disciplines of the human sciences but rather ontologi-cal characteristics of Dasein, which is the mode of Being that applies to human beings. This move became known as the ontological turn in hermeneutics19.
§2.3.1
Heidegger’s Ontological Turn
In the summer of 1923, Heidegger gave a lecture at the University of Freiburg titled Onto-logy: Hermeneutics of Facticity in which he clearly sets out the role hermeneutics would
19 I have consulted various articles and books for my interpretation of Heidegger’s ontological turn
as well as his phenomenology of guilt. In particular, I used the works of Caputo (2018), Mulhall (2005), and Polt (1999). My own interpretation does not follow either one of these interpreta-tions in particular but is—of course—based on my own close reading of Heidegger’s work.
