The Nature of Political Theory

296 The Nature of Political Theory

between what Paul Ricoeur has conveniently referred to as a hermeneutics of recollec-
tion of primal meanings and a hermeneutics of suspicion (see Ricoeur 1970: 26ff.).
The first, more positive, reading of recovering primal (possibly universal) meanings,
sees the world of language positively, as full of meanings, which can be regained and
interpreted. Although this latter view does not precisely map onto Gadamer, I would
associate his work with the more positive rendering of the ontological conception.
In the second, Ricoeur associates the hermeneutics of suspicion perspective with a
mistrust of the surface of language and the need to look underneath the overt state-
ments, or forms of life, to grasp the real ontology. Ricoeur draws his net fairly widely
on the suspicion category. He traces it to figures such as Nietzsche, Freud, and even
Marx. In some ways, many postmodern writings could equally be recategorized as
extreme examples of the hermeneutics of suspicion—although in their case, despite
holding to the idea of genealogically decoding and deconstructing, they have, non-
etheless, given up on any ontology of discoverable meaning. They have, in other
words, given themselves over totally to radical conventionalism.

The Hermeneutic Context

One key background point here is that Gadamer was a student of Heidegger. Although
by the 1930s—and Heidegger’s direct involvement with national socialism—Gadamer
had many deep reservations, he nonetheless derived a deep stimulus for his own
work on hermeneutics from Heidegger’s early interests in the 1920s, particularly
from early lectures and importantly fromBeing and Time.^4 As we saw in Part Four,
Heidegger moves away from epistemology towards ontology. He also takes a rigorous
anti-subjectivist and anti-humanist line. Thus, the rationalist tradition of philosophy,
beginning with Descartes, is largely abandoned. Language is also seen to be the ‘house
of our being’. The world we inhabit is saturated with language. Further, language
is not, for Heidegger, just a technical instrument; rather we are encompassedby
language. It is prior to any subject, and, in one sense, speaks through us and to
us. This gives rise to Heidegger’s idiosyncratic use of hermeneutics. He also discards
Dilthey’s use of hermeneutics as method; hermeneutics is rather about intensifying
our sense of Being (Dasein). Instead of being lost in various conceptual schemes and
interpretations, which alienate us and separate us from Being, Heidegger is concerned,
at this stage, to reawaken the primordial sense ofDaseinthrough hermeneutics. In
avoiding setting up his own new system of concepts as a new scholasticism, he develops
a distinction (which is also crucial for Gadamer), between philosophical propositions,
which are ‘formally indicative’ and ‘language which invites one to self-reflection and
self-interpretation’, namely, something which enables one to pierce through the veil
of misleading concepts to the Being underlying them.^5 Thus, propositional forms are
distinct from the ‘world-disclosing language’ of hermeneutics.
One significant Heideggerian assumption here (which partly remains with
Gadamer) is that there is a primitive, pre-predicative or primordial dimension to
human experience. It is partly equivalent to what Habermas and Dilthey call the