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PHIL554 - Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Professor: Stephen Steinberg

The liberating circle

With the continental philosophical tradition we come to accept the hermeneutic circle as
constitutive of all our experience. Anything that we learn, perceive, or think is mediated by our
previous knowledge and previous meanings. All of our experience is interpretative. With this
acceptance, the possibility of eternal and absolute truths dissipates. How can we live in a world
where no truth is absolute? What is the task of thinking after the acceptance of the hermeneutic
circle? Instead of plunging us into an unbearable world of nihilism and non-sense, I will argue
that the discovery and acceptance of this inescapable reality liberates us as individuals. Without
the weight of absolute and undebatable truths to follow blindly, the individual is invited by
continental philosophy to the continuous possibility of thinking by himself.
We could trace the beginning of the development of thinking about the interpretative
structure of experience and the centrality of meaning to it to Husserls phenomenology. The fact
that several of the posterior continental philosophers will begin their philosophy as a reaction or
response to his phenomenology makes it seem reasonable to have him as a start point. Husserl
brackets the assumptions that we make in our natural disposition, such as the existence of objects
or a subject, to center his investigation on experience itself. His quest is one to discover how is it
possible to have experience of other objects, how is it possible for our mental acts to always be
about something (he denominates this, following Brentano, intentionality); whether the things

exist in a material world or not is not important. He calls our attention to the things themselves
(which must be understood as the things as we experience them), in order to be able to describe
our experience so that then we can identify the universal structures they share.
This empirical investigation (neither logical nor theoretical) into the structures that make
our experience possible reveals that every act has an associated meaning. Husserl calls it noema,
and identifies four different parts of its structure: the sinne (which refers to the descriptive
features), the thetic character (which determines the type of act in which the object is
experienced), the determinable x (which labels objects), and a horizon (which consists of
protentions, or anticipations, and retentions, or recollections). Even though penetrating into these
specificities of Husserls phenomenology is not our concern here, it is important to highlight how
his work puts meaning at the center of every possible experience. There is no experience without
meaning.
Even though several of Husserls discoveries point to the necessary interpretative
dimension of experience, making explicit references to it in several of his works, as both Ricoeur
and Derrida have mentioned, his striving for a complete reduction that rendered a pure
experience probably kept him from exploring such road (an acceptance of the fact that a
reference to things that the reduction tried to bracket was necessary in any phenomenon, such as
the signaling to protentions and retentions, would be an acceptance of the impossibility of having
a pure experience or a complete reduction).
It would be Heidegger who would push this interpretative feature of experience further,
making it a constant problem in his search for the meaning of the Being of beings. In a way he
continues Husserls phenomenology by centering his interest on the most universal structure of
experience (the meaning of Being). He begins by an analysis of that being from which the

question can arise, that being for which Being is an issue, that being which has a preontological
understanding of Being: Dasein. This analytic of Dasein reveals its interpretative and temporal
nature. Dasein is constantly projecting itself into the future based on its own understanding of its
possibilities (which are determined by its understanding of the world and its past). In this way,
Dasein is constantly interpreting itself and the world in order to exist.
By discovering the hermeneutical situation of Dasein, Heidegger expands notions that
had been previously explored in the tradition of hermeneutics (which began as a set of rules for
interpreting correctly biblical texts and then expanded to study other kinds of texts) to the totality
of human experience, the most significant of these notions being what has been denominated the
hermeneutic circle. In his words:
In every understanding of the world, existence is understood with it, and vice versa. All
interpretation, moreover, operates in the fore-structure [] Any interpretation which is to
contribute understanding, must have understood what is to be interpreted. This is a fact that has
always been remarked, even if only in the area of derivative ways of understanding and
interpretation, such as philological Interpretation. [] The circle in understanding belongs to
the structure of meaning, and the latter phenomenon is rooted in the existential constitution of
Dasein that is, in the understanding which interprets.

This becomes a major problem for Heideggers enterprise. Dasein, with its interpretative
nature, offers both the possibility of asking the question about the meaning of Being and the
impossibility of answering the question without an ontic preunderstanding of Being determining
the answer. Asking for the meaning of Being with the necessary preunderstanding that the
question carries calls for both a disclosure of what is already understood about Being and a
concealment of what is not. The nature of the circle seems to prevent absolute total
1 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, section 32, p. 194.

unconcealment. Heidegger encounters the problem over and over again throughout different
texts, not only when asking for the meaning of Being but also when asking about art, technology,
science, or truth. The circle presents itself as an unsurpassable barrier to Heideggers thought, a
dead end to his questioning about the meaning of Being in general.
However, this inescapability from the hermeneutic circle doesnt seem to be a dead end to
him. For him,
To deny the circle, to make a secret of it, or even want to overcome it, means finally to reinforce
this failure. We must rather endeavor to leap into the circle, primordially and wholly, so that we
have a full view of Daseins circular Being.

We must enter the circle with a full consciousness of its existence, because, as he states in
another fragment, In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of
knowing.3 He continued throughout his life looking for that way of thinking that would not fall
into the mistake of western metaphysics of studying beings while having a presupposed ontic
meaning of Being, that way of thinking that could unconceal the most primordial kind of
knowing. In his later work, he refers to it as meditative thinking, releasement toward things,
or waiting for the unconcealed, and describes it as a kind of thinking similar to the early Greek
experience, to the thought of the presocratics, as a way of thinking in which active interrogation
would be replaced by a passive listening.
This faith in the positive nature of the acceptance of the hermeneutic circle was shared by
Gadamer and Ricoeur. In a way, their philosophy comes very close to what Heidegger states in
this fragment:

2 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, section 63, p. 363.

3 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, section 32, p. 195.

To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have
understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and
fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the
scientific in them secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.

We will find in Gadamer precisely this intention of being conscious of the fore-havings that we
bring to a reading, distinguishing the good prejudices from the bad ones. The task of
hermeneutics will be to distinguish popular fancy from positive fore-havings. Note the calling to
phenomenology in the last sentence of Heideggers fragment. It will be Ricoeurs task to show
that the hermeneutic circle only rules out an ideal interpretation of phenomenology, not
phenomenology itself, and that hermeneutics is only possible as phenomenology and vice-versa.
Through close phenomenological observation we must make visible our own fore-havings,
transforming our naivet into an informed naivet.
Nevertheless, Heideggers faith in the possibility of reaching the meaning of Being in
general didnt leave any convincing and stable results, and instead his discovery of the
interpretative nature of all our experience left any possibility of eternal and absolute truths
standing in a very weak position. When we get to Derrida there is nothing left of Heideggers
faith, and what the latter started with his destruction of western metaphysics is taken to the most
extreme possibilities by the former with his deconstruction. If Heidegger described the different
stages of western thought, exposing the different fore-havings that each posed without
accounting for them, in the hope that by doing so a new way of thinking that could recover the
question of the meaning of Being in general of the early Greek thought could be achieved,
Derrida extrapolated the procedure by proving the possibility of applying the same procedure to

4 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, section 32, p. 195.

any text (and in this tradition text must be understood as everything experienced). By proving,
through his deconstruction of Husserls phenomenology, the impossibility of a pure nonmediated presence, even Heideggers search for the unconcealed presence of Being stands as one
more myth.
Instead of careful reading to inform our naivet and distinguish positive prejudices from
mistaken ones, such as Hermeneutics proposes, with Derrida any possibility of reaching a stable
truth is ruled out. The circle has proved that meaning always mediates our experience, and if
there is no such thing as pure presence, if the pure unmediated world is not within our reach, then
meaning has to be constituted by an arbitrary network of interconnected signs (arbitrary in the
sense that it cannot posibly take its structure from an objective reality). Meanings are arbitrary,
and as such they rest on unaccounted fore-havings, prejudices and contradictions that can be
exposed through deconstruction. For Derrida, the acceptance of the circle is equal to the
complete instability of meaning. Even though Hermeneutics as a science that supplies the rules
of the constraints of interpretation could be a position to resist Derridas claims, Gadamers
acceptance of the impossibility of a complete consciousness of all of our own fore-havings
doesnt help much to this end.
How can we live in a world where absolute truth is not reachable? Isnt an existence
where no truth stands firmly unbearable? After all, in order to have experience we must have
meaning. It seems like after the acceptance of the hermeneutic circle we feel the need to embrace
our naivet in order to continue with our everyday lives. This acceptance of the impossibility of a
continuously suspicious and close looking way of life is a constant among several of these
philosophers. For Husserl, a going back to a natural disposition whenever we were not
performing the reduction was necessary to be able to live our lives. Heideggers analysis of

Dasein reveals how for most of its time Dasein lives in inauthenticity, lost in being with others in
its everydayness, and that only during the experience of anxiety it became conscious of its
individuality and the possibility of an authentic way of life. Arendt stresses the political and
moral importance of thinking for ourselves without following general rules blindly, especially in
those moments that demand it, but also accepts that in the world of appearances [] I am never
alone and always too busy to be able to think5, and claims that
adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially
recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking
attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to
this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted

Our everyday existence requires our naivet. The question is when to stop and think.
Throughout most of our lives we live an existence mediated by pre-constituted meanings. We are
born into a pre-existent web of signs and meanings. When should we question them? And even
more important, how is it that we are able to question them? If all our experience is mediated by
those meanings, how can we put them in question and create new meanings?
For this to happen there must come a point where the general meaning accepted by
society no longer fits or explains the experience of the individual. But wasnt that experience
constituted through those meanings? It seems like we are enclosed in a paradox. If meaning
determined our experience completely then we would never be able to acquire new knowledge or
new experiences. What meaning gives us are the tools to interpret those experiences. Continental
philosophy does not deny the existence of the world that we experience, all it states is the
impossibility to know it as it is, the impossibility of non-mediated experience or pure presence.
5 H. Arendt, Thinking and moral considerations, p. 446.
6 Ibid., p. 418.

We experience a world while we interpret it, and while we experience it it in turn reconstitutes
our meanings. Without this influence going back and forth the structure would not be a circular
one.
So it is when the world that we experience no longer can be interpreted through the
general habitual structure of meaning without tension that the possibility of the emergence of
new meaning is opened, opening the option of questioning the prejudices and fore-havings of
such structure in order to find its contradictions and wrong prejudices. The key lies in the tension
between the individual and society.
This tension has received extensive treatment by several continental philosophers.
Heidegger, in his analytic of Dasein, exemplified it through the experience of anxiety. To him, it
was through this experience that Dasein got to face its individuality through a consciousness of
its complete freedom and agency of its actions and through an acknowledgement of its own
death as the end of its temporality. Only in this way could Dasein liberate itself from its fallen
state in the theyness (which could be understood as the general habitual structure of meaning),
from its inauthenticity, to be able to project itself in an authentic, resolute, and conscious way
into its temporality.
This ultimate freedom and responsibility of the individual for his own actions would be
stressed by Sartre in his philosophy. He proclaims the absolute responsibility of the individual
for his own choices. For him, this freedom is something the individual cannot escape from.
When living an inauthentic life, thinking that he has no real control over his decisions because
superior forces such as societal norms determine them, the individual lies to himself and acts in
what Sartre denominates bad faith. There is always choice for the individual (even when the
only alternative to an imposed way of living is suicide). His existentialism intends to show

people this uncontestable reality for them to be truly conscious of both their freedom and
responsibility. Following Heidegger, he relates the discovery of this freedom to the experience of
anguish:
It is precisely that the for-itself apprehends itself in anguish; that is, as a being which [] is
compelled to decide the meaning of being [] The one who realizes in anguish his condition as
being thrown into a responsibility which extends to his very abandonment has no longer either
remorse or regret or excuse, he is no longer anything but a freedom which perfectly reveals itself
and whose being resides in this very revelation. But as we pointed out at the beginning of this
work, most of the time we flee anguish in bad faith.

Individuals must make their own choices without following blindly general rules of their society
by fleeing to bad faith. The question that remains is how to achieve that. How can individuals
question the established meanings to be able to produce their own?
Hannah Arendt points to the ethical and political importance of individual thought and
liberation from general habitual meanings and rules. Her study of the trial of Eichmann, an
officer of the Nazi SS responsible for the logistics of transportation of the Holocaust, exposed
her to a kind of evil doing in which the doer had only one characteristic: a quite authentic
inability to think8. She describes how Eichmann functioned in the role of prominent war
criminal as well as he had under the Nazi regime; he had not the slightest difficulty in accepting
an entirely different set of rules9. The individual who does not question the rules and meanings
that society imposes on him can, in doing so, act in terribly unethical and immoral ways, such as
collaborating in a genocide for the sake of following the general rules of his society. Thinking
becomes an ethical commandment, a protection against evil doing when our societys accepted
7 J-P. Sartre, "Freedom and Responsibility," in Phenomenology and Existentialism, Selection #58.
8 H. Arendt, Thinking and Moral Considerations, p.418.
9 Ibid.

structures of meaning (such as the calculative instrumental way of thinking the Nazis applied to
their treatment of the Jewish people) allow for evil to be done.
For Arendt, the acceptance of the impossibility of reaching solid axioms and eternal
truths translate to the fact that when it comes to morality we have the obligation of thinking for
ourselves instead of accepting final codes of conducts. Careful thinking will reveal the
contradictions and wrong assumptions that make evil possible. She returns to the figure of
Socrates as that person who did that constantly, thinking deeply about commonly held beliefs
and unexamined opinions and proving their errors. She remarks precisely the necessary
individual character of his thinking, as a constant dialogue between the individual and his own
conscience, by returning to one of his quotes: It would be better for me that [] multitudes of
men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself
and contradict me.10
For Arendt, it is in those moments of political importance, when the multitudes seem to
be swept away by unexamined ideologies, when we must be vigilant. The individual under the
totalitarian government must listen to himself and question the general rules. It is in those
moments of tension between the generally accepted meanings by society and the individuals
experience in which a window opens to question the habitual structures of meaning, to let the
wind of thought (as Arendt talks about it when referring to Socrates) shake the structures. It is in
those moments of tension, of anxiety, of anguish, in which the individual gets to look at himself
and stop floating passively and comfortably among the general meaning that has been constituted
for him by society.

10 H. Arendt, Thinking and Moral Considerations, p.439.

Both Hermeneutics and Deconstruction are available as tools for the individual to be able
to shake the habitual structures of meaning. By using Hermeneutics he gets to examine closely
the prejudices that make the system stand, getting to decide between the positive ones and the
ones that are wrong (which are nothing more than popular fancy). In deconstruction the
individual finds the valuable tool of being able to challenge any habitual structure of meaning,
being able to find, through it, the unaccounted prejudices in which an ideology or theory stands
and even the contradictions that allow the system to be deconstructed from within.
It seems clear that these tools can function as that wind of thought that shakes the
structures. It is also evident how it can perform a restrictive and negative procedure on certain
ideologies and mistaken fore-havings. The question is how can they have a positive outcome,
how can they produce new meaning, new structures, after shaking the old ones. The term
deconstruction claims this positive end. It is not a destruction of a system; it is a deconstruction,
a procedure by which the structure is dismounted to then be rearranged in a different way.
Derrida, when defining deconstruction in a letter, states that the undoing, decomposing, and
desedimenting of structures [] was not a negative operation. Rather than destroying, it was also
necessary to understand how an ensemble was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end.11 A
similar positive end is intended with hermeneutics, which claims not the negation of all forehavings but the identification between the good ones and the wrong ones to be able to restrain
the possible interpretations in a correct way, correcting by eliminating the previous wrong
interpretations and creating new ones that are correct.
The individual that has experienced the tension between his personal experience and that
habitual structure can rearrange the different elements of the system in a way that fits his
11 J. Derrida, Letter to a Japanese Friend, p. 272.

personal, perspectival, and positioned situation. The acceptance of the circle makes all this
possible, as we have shown. It liberates the individual from having to accept habitual meanings
that cannot fit his own experience without tension. It is the beginning of the revolutions, the
liberation of the individual from habitual structures of meaning.
However, it is only the beginning. This first liberation only liberates the individuals
mind by allowing him to reconfigure the structures that have been set for him, but it is not a
complete liberation because the individual, as a social being, must continue to exist in a world
with others in which his newly configured meanings are in tension with the habitual ones. How
can this habitual societal meaning structures change? How do revolutions happen? When dealing
with these problems we quickly face the close relation between power and the habitual structures
of meaning. The convergence of the influence of Marx and Nietzsche with structuralism has
produced a vast investigation of this relation by philosophers such and Althusser or Foucault. As
we have constantly repeated, with the acceptance of the hermeneutic circle we no longer believe
in absolute truths. Therefore, we must find an explanation for the consolidation of these several
absolute truths that have dominated western thought during various epochs. The Marxist
tradition has shown how the different economic systems throughout history benefitted different
social sectors and produced different structures of meaning which would be enforced both by
force and by the active creation of subjectivities in which these structures would be assimilated.
Deconstruction offers the possibility to think differently from those hegemonic structures, but for
the complete liberation from these structures to occur, for a change of paradigm to happen,
political action is necessary.
Before revolutions, intellectually liberated individuals have constituted new meanings by
a rejection of wrong fore-havings and a reconstitution of the elements of the structure that suited

their individual experiences, but only when they unite with other individuals that have
constituted similar meanings or by influencing individuals for which the habitual structure was
also conflicting with their daily experience, they gain the necessary power to transform the
habitual structure and make it match their previously individual structures of meaning. Only
those who gain power get to establish their structures as habitual, as absolute truths, as natural.
This revolution of world experience is necessary for even more configurations of
meaning to be possible. After all, individuals liberate themselves while conserving several forehavings of the habitual meaning structure they are liberating from without noticing. As stated by
Gadamer, the complete discovery of one's prejudices is an impossible task. Only through a
change of the world as experienced can even more configurations be possible. Seen like this, the
process shows itself as a continual dialectical process. This is the problem a lot of Marxists have
faced. It is impossible for them to picture what the system will be after the revolution: without a
radical change of the material conditions, a vast change of the world as experienced, imagining
radical new structures of meaning is simply not possible.
The cycle will continue occurring indefinitely. The new truth, the one consolidated after
the revolution, will be another habitual structure that will constraint the way in which individuals
experience the world, at least until, once again, the weak, those for which the structure is not
beneficial, those for which the structure tenses their experience, liberate themselves from it,
unite, and take action to change it.
However, this continuous cycle of domination through succeeding hegemonic habitual
structures of meaning may be challenged by a world which is fully conscious of the existence of
the circle and the impossibility of any absolute truths. Is a world without any dominant structure
of meaning possible? Is a continuous opening to the possibility of other ways of thinking, other

systems of meaning, something achievable? Derrida seems to talk of deconstruction in similar

terms: Deconstruction is not an enclosure into nothingness, but an openness towards the
other12, deconstruction is, in itself, a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls,
summons or motivates it.13
After all, the exposure between several cultures with different structures of meaning has
been rising exponentially during the last decades of globalization. Postmodernity, with its denial
of big narratives, can also be thought as contributing to this possibility of a world where no
hegemonic structure of meaning dominates over the other. However, this apparent multiplicity of
meaning proclaimed by postmodernity dissipates once we think of the strong consolidation of
calculative thinking and capitalism ideology around the world. The multiplicity of structures of
meaning may only be an illusion that masks the strength and reach of the hegemonic structure of
meaning of our time.
We have traced the discovery of the centrality of meaning in continental philosophy to
human experience to Husserls phenomenology and seen the emergence of the hermeneutic
circle as constitutive of our experience in Heideggers philosophy. The acceptance of the
inescapability from the circle, with the consequence that after it no truth can be seen as absolute,
has presented to us as a necessary first step for the liberation of the individual from the habitual
structure of meaning of its society. In order for this to happen, a tension between such structure
and the experience of the individual must occur, such as during an experience of anxiety or
anguish, or when the vigilant individual interrogates the habitual structure that his society has
dived into fanatically. It is through these experiences of tension between the individual and its
society that he is capable of identifying, through hermeneutics and deconstruction, the

12
13

R. Kearney, Dialogue with Jacques Derrida, p. 124.

Ibid. p. 118.

contradictions and wrong fore-havings of the habitual structure and is able to reconfigure the
elements of the system to make the structure coincide better with his own experience. This first
intellectual liberation can be the beginning of the liberation that a revolution can achieve,
through a union of liberated individuals that are able to gain power, changing the habitual
structure itself and thus changing the world experience substantially. Will this process keep on
going infinitely, challenging habitual structures only to replace them and fall back to a state of
naivit? A world conscious of the continual possibility of deconstruction, of the absence of any
possible absolute truth, would be one of continuous opening towards the other. We have not yet
seen such a world, but these discoveries may enable us to start to imagine it. For now, for a
world constantly open to alterity to come one day, all we can do is affirm repeatedly the ultimate
importance of the acceptance of the hermeneutic circle.

Bibliography
E. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology. [PDF]
H. Arendt, Thinking and moral considerations. [PDF]
J. Derrida, Letter to a Japanese Friend. [PDF]
J-P. Sartre, "Freedom and Responsibility," in Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Robert C.
Solomon.
M. Heidegger, Being and Time. [PDF]
P. Ricoeur, The Task of Hermeneutics. [PDF]
R. Kearney, Dialogue with Jacques Derrida. [PDF]