The Role of Language in Object Transcendence

Abstract

Of all the ways to speak of transcendence, the perception of objects as spatially and temporally transcendent to us would seem to be one of the more mundane. So allow me to make the case right at the start as to why understanding how Hans-Georg Gadamer explains our perceptual awareness of objects is interesting and relevant. First, there is the general point that to fully appreciate Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics we need to take seriously its place within the phenomenological tradition; the nature of perception has been a central theme from the beginnings of phenomenology, and the nature of our awareness of objects as transcendent has been a central theme of the nature of perception. That things are experienced as irreducible to the way they are experienced-experienced as having being beyond their appearance-is our most common encounter with transcendence. When we think of transcendence as moving out from us or as going beyond something-that is, when we think of it as best captured through spatial metaphors-it is because we are drawing on this most familiar sense of transcendence, the transcendence of spatial-temporal objects. Gadamer inherits from classical phenomenology the view that perception is directly of the objects of perception; perception is not mediated through ideas or representations, rather "consciousness is," as he puts it, "according to its own essential structure, already with objects."1 Since there is disagreement among phenomenologists about how object perception should be best characterized, it is worth knowing where Gadamer stands on the issue; however, since he did not write anything extensive or detailed about the nature of perception, knowing where he stands will take some interpretive reconstruction. Second, Hubert Dreyfus has joined a debate around John McDowell's denial of the possibility of a non-conceptual awareness of objects. Two things make this debate relevant to Gadamerians. First, McDowell appeals to Gadamer to help respond to a pressing concern with his view. If we start from McDowell's view that human perception is the actualization of conceptual capacities, how can we explain the continuities between the way mature humans perceive the world and the way beings that lack those conceptual capacities, such as infants or non-human animals, perceive the world?2 McDowell relies on Gadamer's distinction between an environment and a world: animals exist in an environment, driven by solving problems related to their biological imperatives; humans live in a world toward which we are conceptually oriented to allow for reflection and action in ways not simply reducible to biological imperatives. Dreyfus thinks that McDowell under-appreciates the resources the phenomenological tradition provides for a richer understanding of the meaningfulness of embodied, skillfully coping, non-conceptual actions.3 He argues that Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty provide the tools for understanding the origins and the nature of the perceptual transcendence of objects. Separately, Dreyfus has criticized Gadamer for not taking "a stand on Heidegger's claim that there is a level of everyday practice (the Vorhabe) beneath our theoretical presuppositions and assumptions (the Vorsicht),"4 and this objection connects to his objection against McDowell. So Gadamer has been drafted into the debate on the side of the Sellarsian McDowell, while Dreyfus presents his response as phenomenology's response to McDowell. By laying out Gadamer's actual views about the way we are aware of objects as transcendent, we can better position him with respect to the issues at stake between Dreyfus and McDowell on the possibility of non-conceptual perception. The general question I want to address is this: How does Gadamer articulate object transcendence?5 The four key claims that he makes are: (1) that the body is first and foremost an opening to the world and is incapable of being fully objectified; (2) that the way the world is disclosed spatially according to our bodies parallels the way the world is disclosed conceptually through language; (3) that the bodily disclosure of objects is not prior (temporally or logically) to the linguistic disclosure of objects; and (4) that there is in the perception of objects a double transcendence, a spatial-temporal transcendence that reveals the object as surpassing any particular appearance of it, and a linguistic/conceptual transcendence revealing it as not just an individual object, but an object disclosable though language, and, as such, conceptually relatable to other objects. …