Hermeneutics without Historicism: Heidegger, MacIntyre, and the Function of the University

Abstract

Martin Heidegger and Alasdair MacIntyre both claim that universities perform important philosophical functions. This essay reconstructs Heidegger’s and MacIntyre’s views of the university and argues that they have a common source, which I call hermeneutics without historicism. Heidegger and MacIntyre are hermeneutical philosophers: philosophers who are sensitive to the ways in which thought is mediated by interpretation and conditioned by history and culture. But both of them reject the relativistic historicism sometimes associated with a hermeneutical approach to philosophy. This desire to have it both ways leads Heidegger and MacIntyre to attach tremendous importance to activities that take place in universities but nowhere else. The essay also asks whether MacIntyre’s defenders should be troubled by the similarities between his account of the function of the university and Heidegger’s. I argue that they should not, because, while Heidegger’s account of the university has obvious moral and political failings, these failings result not from non-historicist hermeneutics as such, but from specific features of Heidegger’s version of it.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for The European Legacy, whose helpful comments and probing questions improved this essay a great deal. I am also grateful to the Western Canadian Philosophical Association for inviting me to present a shortened version of the paper at one of its annual meetings. At this meeting, Tamsin Jones, Kristin Rodier, and Steven Taubeneck made a number of stimulating comments on the paper, and I have benefitted a great deal from discussing the topic with them. Finally, I would like to thank Jason Blakely for sharing his considerable insight into MacIntyre’s work, both in person and over email. Needless to say, I am responsible for any mistakes that remain.

Notes

1. There are many examples in Heidegger’s corpus. An obvious one is his tendency to describe the whole of Western philosophy as a form of Platonism. See, for example, his Nietzsche, Volume One: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1979), 151–61. A concern with the legacy of ancient Greece is also central to MacIntyre’s work. Consider the key roles that Homeric Greece and ancient Athens play in his history of the concepts of justice and practical rationality. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), chaps. 2–8; hereafter cited parenthetically as WJ.

2. This is an oversimplification. Both Heidegger and MacIntyre have complicated attitudes toward modernity. Neither condemns modernity outright, and neither suggests that we should, or could, retrieve a pre-modern way of being. For example, while Heidegger speaks of the need to “repeat” [Wiederholen] the past, he insists that such a repetition “does not bring again something that is ‘past,’ nor does it bind the ‘Present’ back to that which has already been ‘outstripped’.” At best, repetition “makes a reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility of that existence which has-been there.” See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1962), 437–38; hereafter cited parenthetically as BT. That said, Heidegger’s corpus is full of critical (though complex) characterizations of modernity. See, for example, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 115–54. For his part, MacIntyre also grants that a return to the pre-modern is not an option. He dismisses attempts to resurrect pre-modern forms of social life, claiming that “in a modern, large scale nation-state no such collectivity is possible and the pretense that it is is always an ideological disguise for sinister realities.” See Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1999), 132. Nevertheless, one of MacIntyre’s main goals is to document modernity’s moral and intellectual failings. In After Virtue, for example, he criticizes both Marxism and liberalism for sharing “the ethos of the distinctively modern and modernizing world,” claiming that “nothing less than a rejection of a large part of that ethos will provide us with a rationally and morally defensible standpoint.” See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), xviii; hereafter cited parenthetically as AV.

3. Walter Kaufmann directs this criticism at Heidegger in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), 172. Ross Poole makes a similar criticism of MacIntyre in his Morality and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), 150.

4. This phrase, of course, is Charles Taylor’s. See his The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, Canada: Anansi, 1991), 1.

5. Martin Heidegger, “Rectorship Address: The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in The Heidegger Reader, trans. Jerome Veith, ed. Günter Figal (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 114; hereafter cited parenthetically as RA.

6. Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 171; hereafter cited parenthetically as GPU.

7. See, for example, the following: Steven Galt Crowell, “Philosophy as a Vocation: Heidegger and University Reform in the Early Interwar Years,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 14.2 (April 1997): 255–76; Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989); William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999); Otto Pöggeler, The Paths of Heidegger’s Life and Thought, trans. John Bailiff (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998); and Iain Thomson, “Heidegger and the Politics of the University,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (October 2003): 515–42. Not all of these authors straightforwardly condemn the ethics and politics of the “Rectorship Address.” Crowell says that his reading resists “both hagiography and idle moralizing” (“Philosophy as a Vocation,” 255), while McNeill even sees the address as a defense of academic freedom—specifically, “a defense of the philosophical essence of the German university... against external pressures from the state” (The Glance of the Eye, 151–52).

8. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 25, 24.

9. An obvious example is Hans-Georg Gadamer, who had a well-known debate with Strauss about whether historicism is by nature relativistic. Gadamer gives his side of the debate in “Hermeneutics and Historicism,” a 1965 supplement to Truth and Method. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans. Joel Wiensheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 505–41. Mark Bevir has recently distinguished relativistic forms of historicism from what he calls the non-relativistic “developmental historicism” that thrived in nineteenth-century Germany. According to Bevir, developmental historicists such as Hegel were able to avoid relativism because they “relied on teleological and substantive principles to postulate the unity of history. The principles of nation, reason, and spirit bound past and present together in an organic whole.” See Mark Bevir, “Why Historical Distance is Not a Problem,” History and Theory 50 (2011): 26. For Bevir, then, it is not historicism as such that is relativistic, but only a fusion of historicism with “modernist historical theories” (24) that leaves no room for the substantive bridging principles invoked by Hegel and his ilk.

10. For example, Meinecke links historicism with a skepticism about general truths regarding culture, describing the essence of historicism as “the substitution of a process of individualizing observation for a generalizing view of human forces in history.” See Friedrich Meinecke, Historicism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), lv. For a helpful discussion of Meinecke’s view, see Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996), 30–31.

11. Frederick Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 207–9. For a fuller presentation of Beiser’s view of historicism, see his The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

12. Though the “Rectorship Address” is the key text on this topic, it is not the only one. As Iain Thomson has documented, Heidegger discusses the university in several other texts as well, including “Toward a Philosophical Orientation for Academics” (1911) and “On the Nature of the University and Academic Study” (1919). See Thomson, “Heidegger and the Politics of the University.”

13. This phrase is Paul Ricoeur’s. See his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 32.

14. MacIntyre again stresses the need for such institutions in his 2010 Dewey Lecture. Recalling his time as a faculty member at Boston University, he concludes that “philosophical conversation of high quality requires some awareness in depth of what is going on in the world outside philosophy, both in other relevant academic disciplines ranging from physics to history, from the neurosciences to Shakespeare studies, and in the everyday life of those social and economic practices and institutions where so many of our concepts find or fail to find application. ... The first of these requirements will only be met if there are quite a number of joint appointments with other departments. The second will only be met if one takes care to appoint some colleagues who are also or have been farmers or soldiers, trade union organizers or beekeepers.” See Alasdair MacIntyre, “On Not Knowing Where You Are Going,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 84.2 (November 2010): 68.

15. In a 1976 review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, MacIntyre makes a similar criticism of contemporary universities. He claims that these universities are so fragmented and so specialized that many questions cannot be intelligently asked within them, let alone answered. In the contemporary academy, he says, “we start with the conventionally demarcated, well-established disciplines; and then only secondarily do we develop comparative work on shared problems. But if Gadamer’s argument, as I understand it, is correct we cannot develop even a minimally adequate view of the particulars... until we have drawn on materials—philosophical, literary, linguistic—which are now allocated to what are now taken to be different disciplines. There is no enquiry which ought not be comparative from the outset.” See Alasdair MacIntyre, “Contexts of Interpretation: Reflections on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” Boston University Journal 24.1 (1976): 46.

16. By “hermeneutical thinker” I mean someone who practices philosophical hermeneutics—that is, someone who does philosophy in a hermeneutical manner. Not everyone who could be said to practice hermeneutics is a hermeneutical thinker in this sense. Someone might practice hermeneutics in the sense of interpreting texts, or in the sense of having a theory of textual interpretation, without having any particular interest in philosophical questions. To engage in philosophical hermeneutics, as I use the term, is not just to be interested in interpretation, but to approach philosophical questions in a way shaped by the study of interpretation.

17. Paul Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” in From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 53.

18. Ricoeur, “Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” in From Text to Action, 30; hereafter cited parenthetically as PH.

19. My discussion of Heidegger’s hermeneutics is restricted to Being and Time and a handful of other texts from the late 1920s and early 1930s—for example, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. It does not consider the role of hermeneutics in Heidegger’s earliest work, or in his work after the turn. While important, questions about these periods are outside the scope of this essay.

20. For example, in his reading of Nietzsche, Heidegger claims that “we shall never experience who Nietzsche is through a historical report about his life history, nor through a presentation of the contents of his writings.” More important than the contents of Nietzsche’s writings are the possibilities for thinking that he opened up. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume Three: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1987), 3.

21. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 8.

22. A great deal has been written about Heidegger’s relationship with historicism. Some helpful discussions include: Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 5; Jack Bonsor, “An Orthodox Historicism?” Philosophy and Theology: Marquette University Quarterly 4.4 (1990): 335–50; Emil Fackenheim, Metaphysics and Historicity (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1961); Charles Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), esp. chap. 5; Charles Guignon, “The Twofold Task: Heidegger’s Foundational Historicism in Being and Time,” Tulane Studies in Philosophy 32 (1984): 53–59; Laurence Lampert, “On Heidegger and Historicism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34.4 (1974): 586–90; and David White, “On Historicism and Heidegger’s Notion of Ontological Difference,” Monist 64 (1981): 518–33. It should be noted that several of these authors use the term “historicism” differently than I do, sometimes taking it to name a position that is not relativistic by default. Guignon, for example, calls Heidegger’s position “transcendental historicism,” and takes it to be an anti-relativistic position. According to Guignon, Heidegger’s goal “is to overcome the superficial understanding of Being that arises in common sense and the tradition in order to ‘retrieve’ the deeper, more primordial meanings of our heritage. The essential structures uncovered by this approach are ‘transcendental’ in the attenuated sense of capturing the conditional necessity of the content of Western thought. It is, on this view, a contingent fact that there is historical Dasein. But once this fact is given, then what counts as Being will have a certain necessity within the context of Dasein’s cultural and historical understanding.” See Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge, 217. Similarly, Lampert argues that Heidegger should be classified as some sort of historicist, but not the “self-refuting” sort associated with relativism. Lampert argues that “Heidegger is saved from a self-refuting historicism by a simple and perhaps profound device. Heidegger maintains that all fundamental historical changes in man’s understanding are products of the disclosure of Being itself... [G]enuine truth (the truth about what is) is different in different historical periods because what is disclosed to thought is different.” So while different historical epochs recognize different truths, “they are not equally false or fictitious, nor is one true and the rest more or less adequate. They are all equally true because they give expression to the way Being disclosed itself to thought.” See Lampert, “On Heidegger and Historicism,” 587–88.

23. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 24.

24. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 22.

25. Heidegger, Basic Problems, 221.

26. Heidegger, Basic Problems, 222. In Basic Problems, Heidegger discusses relativism in a wholly general way. He does not specifically discuss the version of relativism that I have been calling historicism. But it is not hard to discern a link between historicism and relativism in Heidegger’s work. Indeed, Heidegger himself links these notions in section 76 of Being and Time. There, Heidegger not only repeats his claim that relativists and absolutists share a questionable assumption about what truth is; he says that “‘historicism’” [‘Historismus’—the scare quotes are Heidegger’s] arises from assumptions about historical truth made by academic history [Historie]. He writes: “the emergence of a problem of ‘historicism’ is the clearest symptom that historiology [Historie] endeavors to alienate Dasein from its authentic historicality [Geschichtlichkeit]” (BT, 448).

27. Jeffrey Barash goes quite a bit further, claiming that one of Heidegger’s goals is to identify “truth that genuinely transcends the temporal horizons of specific epochs and the barriers of given cultures.” See Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning, 179.

28. Some critics argue that it does not. Ernst Tugendhat, for example, argues that by equating truth with disclosure, Heidegger deprives himself of a way of distinguishing successful disclosures from unsuccessful ones. See Ernst Tugendhat, “Heidegger’s Idea of Truth,” trans. Christopher Mcann, in Critical Heidegger, ed. Christopher Mcann (London: Routledge, 1996), 227–40.

29. William H. Smith, “Why Tugendhat’s Critique of Heidegger’s Concept of Truth Remains a Critical Problem,” Inquiry 50.2 (April 2007): 175–76.

30. For example, in “On Not Knowing Where You Are Going,” MacIntyre claims to have learned a great deal from Gadamer (67). He makes a similar claim in “Contexts of Interpretation” (41).

31. Alasdair MacIntyre, “A Partial Response to my Critics,” in After MacIntyre, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 295.

32. MacIntyre, “On Not Knowing Where You Are Going,” 62.

33. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science,” in The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5–6. Appropriately enough, MacIntyre adds that “our beliefs about what the marks of ‘a best account so far’ are will themselves change in what are at present unpredictable ways” (6).

34. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Ends of Life, The Ends of Philosophical Writing,” in The Tasks of Philosophy, 127.

35. MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises,” 4.

36. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 25.

37. MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises,” 5.

38. Crowell, “Philosophy as a Vocation,” 25.

39. Anthony Smith, Theories of Nationalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 216, 217.

40. Claire Sutherland, Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century: Challenges and Responses (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 55.

41. For a more detailed discussion of these matters, see Sutherland, Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century, 53–57.

42. For a detailed discussion of the ways in which the National Socialist regime used the language of ethnic nationalism to justify its oppression of minorities, see Inis Claude, National Minorities: An International Problem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955).

43. To be sure, not all of Heidegger’s readers think his rejection of academic freedom is as significant as I have suggested. Thomson, for example, argues that Heidegger’s “oft-lamented discarding of academic freedom” is “at best tangentially related to [his] underlying philosophical views” (“Heidegger and the Politics of the University,” 535). Thomson further argues that Heidegger’s rejection of academic freedom “can be much better understood if we remember that historically a great deal of the blame for the fragmentation of the modern university of Fichte and Humboldt was placed on the new academic freedoms this university introduced” (535). Thomson grants that Heidegger’s position on this issue is problematic, largely because in 1933, Heidegger had not yet worked out a detailed way in which the fragmentation partially brought about by academic freedom could be reversed by the unifying influence of philosophy. Thomson suggests that “had Heidegger worked out these views a few years earlier, in 1933 instead of 1937, they would have undermined some of the authoritarian policies of his Rectoral Address” (533). Nevertheless, in Thomson’s view, Heidegger’s opposition to academic freedom was a not-unreasonable response to a genuine problem, and it should be distinguished from the very different opposition to free inquiry within the Nazi regime. The Nazis advocated a “politicization of the university;” Heidegger, by contrast, advocated a “scientization of the polis” (538). I agree with Thomson that Heidegger’s rejection of academic freedom is significantly different from that of the Nazi regime. However, I do not think that this fact avoids the problem with which I am concerned. As I see it, Heidegger’s rejection of academic freedom is a symptom of a larger problem: his explication of rational superiority in terms of authenticity, authenticity in terms of social existence, and social existence in terms of ethnic nationalism. Heidegger’s vision of the university and the German state may well have differed from those of the Nazi regime in many details. But it is the same general sort of vision, a vision ultimately inseparable from a troubling form of ethnic nationalism. For Heidegger’s proposals to avoid the problems I am describing, they would have to be divorced from any kind of ethnic nationalism—not just the particular version of it advocated by the Nazi regime. And I am not convinced they can be.

44. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for The European Legacy for suggesting this striking way of putting the point.

45. Jason Blakely, review of What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century? Philosophical Essays in Honor of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. Fran O’Rourke, Philosophy in Review 34.6 (2014): 329.

46. My reading of Not For Profit, particularly with respect to its anti-hermeneutical character, is heavily indebted to John Arthos. Arthos discusses the book in his “Subtilitas Applicandi: Addressing the Crisis of the Humanities with Hermeneutics,” unpublished conference paper, presented at the annual meeting of the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics in Seattle, Washington, 18 September 2010.

47. Martha Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 45.

48. Nussbaum, Not For Profit, 25.

49. Arthos, “Subtilitas Applicandi,” 12.