Hans-Herbert Kögler's Critical Hermeneutics

Kurt C. M. Mertel, L'ubomír Dunaj, Kurt C. M. Mertel, L'ubomír Dunaj

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350228658
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Critical Theory

Providing a comprehensive engagement with the work of Hans-Herbert Kögler, this is the first volume to expand upon and critique his distinctive approach to critical theory: critical hermeneutics. In the current climate of crisis, the relevance and fruitfulness of Kögler's work has never been greater, as he fuses the philosophies of Michel Foucault, Hans­ Georg Gadamer, and his mentor, Jürgen Habermas, to respond to critical international issues surrounding politics, agency, and society. Working towards a truly non-ethno-centric and global conception of intercultural dialogue, an essential aspect of Kögler's critical hermeneutics is his account of selfhood as reflexive: socially situated, embodied, and linguistically articulated, permeated by power, but yet critical and creative. Leading international scholars, representing a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, build upon Kögler's approach in this volume and explore the methodological, theoretical, and applicative scope of critical hermeneutics beyond the Frankfurt School. In doing so, they address some of the most pressing issues facing global society today, from multilingual education to the urgent need for interreligious and intercultural understanding. Closing with a response from Kögler himself, Hans-Herbert Kögler's Critical Hermeneutics also offers an exclusive account of the philosopher's contemporary re-appraisal of the core tenets of critical hermeneutics.

Part One

Critical Hermeneutics as Social Theory

1

The Case for a Critical Hermeneutics

From the Understanding of Power to the Power of Understanding

Simon Susen

Introduction

The main purpose of this chapter is to examine the case for a critical hermeneutics. To this end, the analysis draws on the work of the contemporary social philosopher Hans-Herbert Kögler¹—arguably, one of the most influential representatives of critical hermeneutics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The chapter is divided into four parts:

The first part focuses on Kögler’s engagement with Pierre Bourdieu’s plea for an epistemological break, suggesting that it obliges us not only to rethink the role of the paradigms of understanding and explanation in the humanities and social sciences, but also to re-examine the concept of power, especially if determinist and fatalist accounts of social life are to be rejected. The second part centers on Kögler’s hermeneutics of power. It maintains that the exercise of power involves varying degrees of relationality, agency, mediacy, efficacy, and experientiality. Building on this assumption, it will become clear why the critical study of power cannot be dissociated from a sustained concern with domination and resistance. This insight, which lies at the core of Kögler’s critical hermeneutics, paves the way for a shift in perspective from “the understanding of power” to “the power of understanding.” The third part explores the idea of critical theory as critical hermeneutics, positing that every hermeneutically constituted background comprises three key spheres: a symbolic sphere, a practical sphere, and a subjective sphere. Their socio-ontological significance can be elucidated by reference to three—hermeneutically inspired—themes: theory and agency, hermeneutic reflexivity and dialogic subjectivity, and the “me” and the “I.” The fourth part offers some critical reflections on important issues arising from Kögler’s project, notably with regard to its limitations and shortcomings.

The chapter concludes by asserting that Kögler’s critical hermeneutics raises valuable epistemological and methodological questions, whose relevance is illustrated in the far-reaching challenges that the humanities and social sciences face in the twenty-first century.

I. The Epistemological Break: Between Understanding and Explanation

Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, Kögler analyzes the idea of an epistemological break. An epistemic rupture of the sort endorsed by Bourdieu obliges us to examine the relationship between the paradigm of understanding [Verstehen] and the paradigm of explanation [Erklären].² Both paradigms have had a significant impact on the development of the humanities and social sciences since the “methodological dispute” [Methodenstreit].³ As Kögler emphasizes, however, Bourdieu’s plea for an epistemological break also requires us to grapple with “the methodological question concerning power.”⁴ The issue with which we are confronted, then, involves the relationship between “the self-understanding of social actors”⁵ and “the explanatory claims of social-scientific theory,”⁶ including the degree to which any kind of knowledge-seeking engagement with the world is permeated by power dynamics. From a Bourdieusian perspective, critical social scientists—insofar as they are committed to adopting “a skeptical posture towards the operative self-understanding of social agents”⁷—need to undertake a “double epistemological break.”⁸ Let us consider the main assumptions underlying this two-step venture.

i. The First Break

The first break consists in a decisive rupture with what may be described as phenomenological subjectivism. The problem with this approach is that, as a sociological method, it is confined to “an explication of the familiar and unthematized knowledge of the social world.”⁹ Epistemic accounts based on this strategy are “phenomenological” in that they intend not to rise above the “pregiven meaning phenomena”¹⁰ but, in a rather modest fashion, “to make this level accessible in its internal coherence.”¹¹ The principal reason this methodological framework is firmly embedded in the paradigm of understanding is that, far from pursuing the goal of “a theoretical transcendence of the self-understanding”¹² obtained by those immersed in quotidian interactions, it is aimed at “an internal disclosure of the (largely unthematically familiar) semantic implications.”¹³ On this view, major insights can be acquired from studying everyday constructions of meaning and identifying them as the key source of world disclosure enjoyed by human beings.

Critical sociology à la Bourdieu, however, has a strong objectivist component in that it questions the validity of “the original self-understanding[s]”¹⁴ in which ordinary agents tend to remain trapped. This radical break with common-sense perceptions, assumptions, and representations generated in people’s lifeworlds reflects a shift from the paradigm of understanding to the paradigm of explanation and, correspondingly, a change in focus from the phenomenological level of an interpretive sociology to the ontological level of an explanatory sociology.

In short, we are faced with two different types of knowledge: phenomenological knowledge and objectivist knowledge.¹⁵ The former endeavors “to make explicit the truth of primary experience of the social w...