The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy

A Study of Ernst Tugendhat

Santiago Zabala, Michael Haskell

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231512978
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Contemporary philosopher—analytic as well as continental?tend to feel uneasy about Ernst Tugendhat, who, though he positions himself in the analytic field, poses questions in the Heideggerian style. Tugendhat was one of Martin Heidegger's last pupils and his least obedient, pursuing a new and controversial critical technique. Tugendhat took Heidegger's destruction of Being as presence and developed it in analytic philosophy, more specifically in semantics. Only formal semantics, according to Tugendhat, could answer the questions left open by Heidegger.

Yet in doing this, Tugendhat discovered the latent "hermeneutic nature of analytic philosophy"?its post-metaphysical dimension—in which "there are no facts, but only true propositions." What Tugendhat seeks to answer is this: What is the meaning of thought following the linguistic turn? Because of the rift between analytic and continental philosophers, very few studies have been written on Tugendhat, and he has been omitted altogether from several histories of philosophy. Now that these two schools have begun to reconcile, Tugendhat has become an example of a philosopher who, in the words of Richard Rorty, "built bridges between continents and between centuries."

Tugendhat is known more for his philosophical turn than for his phenomenological studies or for his position within analytic philosophy, and this creates some confusion regarding his philosophical propensities. Is Tugendhat analytic or continental? Is he a follower of Wittgenstein or Heidegger? Does he belong in the culture of analysis or in that of tradition? Santiago Zabala presents Tugendhat as an example of merged horizons, promoting a philosophical historiography that is concerned more with dialogue and less with classification. In doing so, he places us squarely within a dialogic culture of the future and proves that any such labels impoverish philosophical research.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Rorty alluded to the “future Gadamerian culture” for the first time at the conference he gave to celebrate Gadamer’s hundredth birthday on February 12, 2000, at the University of Heidelberg. This conference can now be found in a marvelous book edited by Bruce Krajewski, Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics, 21–29.

2. Bubner goes on to specify that Tugendhat “has taken seriously Heidegger’s emphasis on the concept of truth, and for that very reason has found fault with the obscurity of Heidegger’s analysis of truth as the locus of an original ‘disclosure’ of Being. That has brought him back, in opposition to the common opinion of the school, to the position prior to Heidegger’s advance beyond Husserl. The transformation of the exact method of phenomenological analysis of conscious experiences into a comprehensive hermeneutic of Da-sein in the historical context is not simply reaffirmed, but painstakingly scrutinized to see what has been gained and what lost.” Bubner, Modern German Philosophy, 91.

3. D’Agostini, Analitici e continentali, 273. Hans-Johann Glock reminds us that some German philosophers after the war “approached analytical philosophy from their own indigenous perspective (many of them taught for some time at Heidelberg, the University of Gadamer). One important example of this approach is the critical hermeneutics of Apel and Habermas. But their use of analytical philosophy is eclectic: they invoke certain points in support of their own position, without altering their preconceptions or style of thought.… Ernst Tugendhat is a German Jew who, in 1949, returned from exile to study with Heidegger, and later immersed himself in analytical philosophy. Throughout he has used analytical tools to pursue his own questions, derived mainly from Aristotle and Heidegger. Moreover, he has done so in a way which transforms both the traditional questions and the analytic methods. His discussion of analytical and traditional philosophy is not based on pointing out interesting but ultimately inconsequential analogies, e.g. between Frege and Husserl, or Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein.” Glock, “The Object of Philosophy,” 234. Barry Smith and Kevin Mulligan have critically noticed how “Tugendhat turns out to resemble Martin Heidegger: Heidegger, too, was happy to emphasize the importance of something called ‘ontological analytic’ without ever saying what the ‘analytic’ means.” Smith and Mulligan, “Traditional Versus Analytical Philosophy,” 202.

4. Tugendhat has accepted the term “semantization” to characterize his own position toward Heidegger. See the epilogue to this volume. Barthes also talks about an “universal semantization” to characterize the linguistic turn. See Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 42.

5. Rorty, “Being That Can Be Understood Is Language,” 28.

6. This fusion is well explained by Jean Grondin when he states that “with Continental hermeneutic philosophy, analytic philosophy remains dominant, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, though it has endured fundamental changes affecting its self-understanding. Following the steps of the late Wittgenstein and under the auspices of the older pragmatic tradition (Peirce, James, Dewey), Quine, Goodman, Rorty, and Davidson have gradually detached analytic philosophy from its early program of logical critique of language. In doing so, they reoriented it toward general questions such as the possibility—given perspectivism and cultural relativity—of binding truth, as well as of responsible behaviour and knowledge, a task that had been entrusted to Continental philosophy since the advent of historicism. Today, quite unlike formerly, it seems that analytical philosophy stands for no precisely formulated program. In the very pursuit of its own tradition, analytical philosophy came to the recognition that it is faced with the same challenges as is transcendental hermeneutics on the Continent. Both are impelled toward a pragmatic philosophy of finitude that must take its chances and weigh its risks. That is one way of describing the dissolution of philosophical analysis, or at least its convergences with hermeneutic philosophy.” Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 9–10. D’Agostini also observes that the “dichotomy ‘analytical and continental’ … does not have an effective empirical collateral reality. More so, for some time, tight connections between the inheritors of neo-positivism (analytical) and those of the phenomenological-existential (continentals) can be found and young researchers study without any discrimination authors of one or the other side.” D’Agostini, Breve storia della filosofia nel Novecento, 193. For a historical reconstruction of contemporary philosophy, see Prado, ed., A House Divided; Niznik and Sanders, eds. Debating the State of Philosophy; Brogan and Risser, eds., American Continental Philosophy; Cavell, Philosophical Passages; Rorty, The Linguistic Turn; D’Amico, Contemporary Continental Philosophy; and Grondin, “Continental or Hermeneutical Philosophy.”

7. In the German term Überwindung we should think of the “overcoming” of metaphysics; Verwindung, instead, is the “turning to new purposes,” as Rorty says, or even “surpassing” or “twisting” metaphysics. R. P. Pippin has explained, commenting on Vattimo’s investigations, that “etymologically, the term suggests a convalescence from an illness, a twisting, or even distorting, as well as a resignation (one can be verwunden to a loss). It suggests both an acceptance of Western humanism and a taking leave from it at the same time, much in the manner of the later Heidegger’s remarks about the always intertwined nature of revealing and concealing truth. Metaphysics is not ‘responsible’ for the obscuring of Being as presencing; Being always must be obscured as presencing.” Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 138.

8. Vattimo, “Pensiamo in compagnia,” 193.

9. Rorty, review of Traditional and Analytical Philosophy, 727.

10. Bubner, Modern German Philosophy, 97.

11. Rorty, “Being That Can Be Understood Is Language,” 26.

12. Ibid., 23.

13. Jürgen Habermas, “After Historicism, Is Metaphysics Still Possible?” 18. Andrew Bowie, commenting on Habermas’s philosophy, noted how in his taking up key ideas from the analytical tradition, “he was influenced by Heidegger’s pupil, Ernst Tugendhat, who had, in turn, come to reject many of his teacher’s ideas in favour of arguments from analytical philosophy.” Bowie, Introduction to German Philosophy, 182.

14. R. Brandom believes that when “we talk of the ‘end of metaphysics,’ whether that be in Nietzsche’s sense, or in that of Dewey and Rorty, the point ought to be that we give up the idea of a vocabulary that is final in the sense of unrevisable and irreplaceable, a set of concepts and categories that can be counted on as fully adequate as we develop and our circumstances change.” Brandom, “Hegelian Pragmatism and Social Emancipation,” 561. Habermas, discussing Rorty, has also noted how Tugendhat fits in this list of postmetaphysical philosophers: “like, for example, Apel and Tugendhat, Rorty regards the history of philosophy as a succession of three paradigms. He speaks of metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language.” Habermas, “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn,” 37.

15. “So the result seems to be: thoughts are neither things in the external world nor ideas. A third realm must be recognized.” Frege, English translation of Der Gedanke, in Beaney, ed., The Frege Reader, 336–337.

16. D’Agostini observes that “reconnecting analytical thought to its Austrian and Bretanian origins helps one to understand the affinities (explained by Tugendhat) with continental ontology. Not only did Husserl start with Bretanian introductions, but even Heidegger’s interest in ontology is due to his early reading of Brentano’s dissertation.” D’Agostini, Analitici e continentali, 228.

17. Tugendhat, Traditional and Analytical Philosophy, x.

18. “Tugendhat is the author of penetrating books on Aristotle and on the concept of truth in Husserl and Heidegger, and the present work deservedly drew attention to itself on its first appearance, not least because in it we find a philosopher steeped in traditional philosophy giving an account of the results of his confrontation with the thought of Frege, Wittgenstein, Searle, Strawson, ‘et fréres.’” Smith and Mulligan, “Traditional Versus Analytical Philosophy,” 194. John. R. Williams has rightly observed that Tugendhat’s main aim is this book was to “demonstrate that linguistic philosophy does indeed answer the questions of traditional philosophy, such as the question of the meaning of ‘Being,’ and does so better than any form of traditional philosophy has been able to do.” Williams, “Traditional and Analytical Philosophy,” 346–347.

19. Tugendhat, preface to the Italian edition of Traditional and Analytical Philosophy: Lectures on the Philosophy of Language (Genova: Marietti, 1989), 4.

20. Tugendhat, Traditional and Analytical Philosophy, 8.

21. Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, 30.

22. Bubner, “Zur Wirkung der analytischen Philosophie in Deutschland,” 448.

23. Although Dummett has also reconstructed the origins of analytical philosophy in his Origins of Analytical Philosophy, I agree with H.-J. Glock when he says that “Tugendhat traces the origin of a cultural theme of analytical philosophy in a way which is more conscientious and less myopic than comparable attempts by Anglophone writers like Dummet. He shows that philosophy’s concern with the concept of an object and the role of singular terms has deeper (and in many respects more important) roots than Frege’s distinction between objects and concepts or the logical atomism of Russel and the Tractatus, notably in Aristotle’s ontology and Kant’s transcendental philosophy.… He shows how analytical philosophy can profit not only from ‘classical’ traditional philosophy, but also from contemporary Continental philosophy. For example, he intimates that the understanding of sentences in turn presupposes a larger context, namely membership of an intellectual tradition, an idea which could be developed by reference both to the historical dimensions of understanding discussed by hermeneutics and to Wittgenstein’s claim that speaking a language is part of a ‘form of life.’ For all those who are interested in a serious debate between analytical and Continental philosophy, Tugendhat’s works the best place to start.” Glock, “The Object of Philosophy,” 240.

24. On this matter, see Pothast, “In assertorischen Sätzen wahrnehmen und in praktischen Sätzen überlegen, wie zu reagieren ist, Ernst Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung,” 26–43.

25. Rorty, review of Traditional and Analytical Philosophy, 726–727.

26. For an ethical-political profile of Tugendhat’s later works, see Wolf, Das Problem des moralischen...