Philosophical Hermeneutics: A Metatheory
to Transcend Dualism and Individualism in
Western Psychology
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John Chambers
Christopher Health & Human Development
Herrick Hall Montana State
University Bozeman, MT 59715 jcc@montana.edu |
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Suzanne E. Christopher Health & Human
Development Hoseaus PEC Complex Montana State
University Bozeman, MT 59715 |
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An earlier version of the paper
was presented as:
Christopher, J. C., & Richardson, F. C. (2000,
July). Philosophical hermeneutics: A metatheory to transcend dualism and
individualism in Western psychology. In K. D. Smith (Chair), Metatheories in
the natural sciences and in cross-cultural psychology. Symposium conducted
at the International Congress of the International Association for
Cross-Cultural Psychologists, Warsaw, Poland.
Abstract
One impediment for psychology in grappling with the
significance of culture and the challenges of intercultural contact continues
to be its underlying metatheoretical framework. Philosophical hermeneutics
deconstructs Western psychology’s emphasis upon objectivity and neutrality, and
its aspiration to be culture-free, ahistorical, and universal by demonstrating
how these rely upon a particular socially constructed vision of life. This
vision obscures a more fundamental level of agency in which humans are embedded within cultural practices
and traditions prior to the development and emergence of the Cartesian “I” and
its dichotomized world of self/other, subject/object, fact/value, and
mind/body. We argue that philosophical hermeneutics provides conceptual tools
for (a) critiquing the existing Newtonian-Cartesian metatheory, (b) discerning
the ways this metatheory impedes recognition of the cultural values and
assumptions underlying the social sciences, (c) identifying the resulting
impact these values and assumptions have upon psychology in terms of a
"disguised ideology," and (d) developing an alternative metatheory
that is non-dualistic and non-individualistic.
Keywords: hermeneutics, metatheory, ontology, ethics,
individualism, relativism
to Transcend Dualism and Individualism in
Western Psychology
Hermeneutics is most well known in social science circles
as a qualitative method for interpreting meaning. Less well known, hermeneutics
evolved during the 1900’s into a full-blown metatheory that provides a viable
alternative not only for cross-cultural psychology but for psychology as a
whole. As a metatheory, philosophical hermeneutics, beginning with the work of
Martin Heidegger, provides an account of human agency that transcends many of
the dualisms that permeate Western psychology such as the mind/body,
subject/object, self/other, and fact/value dichotomies. Moreover, philosophical
hermeneutics provides tools for situating existing psychological theory, research,
and practice in their cultural and historical context as a means of discerning
and critiquing their underlying ontological and moral commitments (which up to
this point have been largely individualistic in nature). Unlike many of the
attempts to apply post-Newtonian physics to psychology, philosophical
hermeneutics is not just a heuristic metaphor or analogy; it is a successful
metatheory that has already been used to critique existing theory, research,
and practice, as well as to develop alternative models and methods. In this
article we consider how mainstream social science and psychology is based on
what has been called naturalism and objectivism—products of the
Newtonian-Cartesian world view. We indicate some of the problems this generates
and then provide a brief overview of philosophical hermeneutics and how it can
facilitate intercultural relations.
Most Anglo-American psychology in the 20th
century has sought to emulate the outlook and methods of the natural sciences
in order to achieve a similar kind of success. To this end, they have adopted
an outlook, worldview, or metatheory which is perhaps best termed naturalism (Taylor, 1989), the view that
human life is fundamentally a part of nature and nothing other than nature, to
be studied and explained by disciplined, objective sciences that rely mainly on
controlled experimentation and seek, so far as possible, strictly objective,
“value-free,” “value-neutral,” or “culture free” accounts of human phenomena.
Naturalism
is a key element of the modern Western outlook or consciousness which involves,
in Max Weber’s famous phrase, a “disenchantment of the world.” This
disenchantment or desacralizing of the world stems, in part, from the influence
of objectifying. This process, employed by much of natural science, ignores or
abstracts away from the rich appearance of things, including the values and
meaningful relationships of our ordinary experience, so that it can regard the
world objectively, as made up of
inherently meaningless objects in causal interaction with one another. Too
often, the world so regarded is taken to be the real world, or the only
world. But the common human life-world, the sphere of intertwined lives, shared
purposes, moral struggles, and the search for meaning is still there, even if
it is temporarily ignored in the pursuit of one narrow, albeit valuable, kind
of knowledge.
The corollary of this new kind of objectified outlook on
the world is an unprecedented kind of subjectivity
in which values and meanings are thought to reside in the individual and are
projected onto the world. It is, in Taylor’s (1975) words, a new kind of
“self-defining identity,” one “accompanied by a “sense of exhilaration and
power” because the individual no longer needs to define him or herself in
relation to an external order (pp. 8-9). A crucial consequence of this shift is
that the horizon of human identity is now to a great extent found within, which gives birth to the uniquely
modern emphasis on inwardness and inward depths. This inward turn is
accompanied by a sense of a fundamental gulf between individuals and their
world, both natural and social. Thus, it appears to be a mainstay of modern individualism, whereby we tend to view
human beings atomistically as discrete centers of experience and action,
concatenated in various ways into social groups, struggling to reduce
inevitable conflicts with others through negotiations and temporary alliances.
Critics of excessive individualism, beginning with de Toqueville (1969), have
been concerned with how it may purchase valuable new freedoms at the price of
alienation and emotional isolation, in part because it largely eliminates the
possibility of profoundly shared values and long-lasting social ties from our
picture of human life (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985;
Cushman, 1990, 1995b; Etzioni, 1996; Sandel, 1996).
In this brave new world of individual subjects, often
seen as having inward depths, set over and against a universe of objects
governed by causal laws, knowledge or understanding comes to be viewed as the correspondence of our inner beliefs to
an external reality. This epistemological view often termed representationalism assumes the
existence of an external reality that has determinate properties independent of
our beliefs and practices. The focus of epistemology and the core of scientific
inquiry then becomes the development of reliable methods that allow us to be sure that our knowledge of reality is
entirely “objective,” that is, uncontaminated by our wishes, fears, or
evaluations. Methods such as random assignment and the double blind study
anchor knowledge in objective fact so that knowledge can serve as the basis for
accurate predictions that enable us to re-engineer reality in some desired way.
Correlated with this modern representational
view of knowledge is an unprecedented view of the human person as essentially a
knowing subject. This knowing subject was firmly planted in Western
cultural history by Descartes through his method of radical doubt which
resulted in the conviction that the one thing that can be known with certainty
is the self that can potentially know. The self, in this view, appears as a
kind of isolated point of consciousness and will standing entirely apart from
or over and against the world of brute objects. Taylor (1995) describes this
aptly as the modern “punctual self.” In his words, this self is “ideally
disengaged, that is, as free and rational to the extent that he has fully
distinguished himself from the natural and social worlds, so that his identity
is no longer to be defined in terms of what lies outside him in these worlds”
(p. 7).
Some form of this new subject-object ontology and
representational epistemology has served as the cornerstone of most 20th
century social science. This approach to understanding human action and social
life reflects what Bernstein (1983) defines as the “objectivism” that has
underpinned so much modern thought and culture. Objectivism is the “basic conviction that there is or must be some
permanent, ahistorical matrix or framework to which we can ultimately appeal in
determining the nature of rationality, knowledge, truth, reality, goodness, or
rightness” (p. 8). Bernstein further believes that the defining feature of
mainstream social science is the ideal of the social scientist as a
“disinterested observer” who can uncover universal, ahistorical, atemporal
social and psychological laws.
A
number of different problems exist with objectivism. First, naturalism,
representationalism, and objectivism have not delivered anything like what they
promised for the social sciences. In the opinion of many, in spite of
tremendous effort, little or nothing has been achieved resembling the main goal
of the naturalistic approach, namely the kind of well-developed explanatory
theory that counts as hard representational truth concerning its subject
matter, thereby permitting precise prediction and technical control. Just
describing interesting patterns of variables—which always have many exceptions—does
not yield the sort of instrumental control over events we associate with modern
physics, biology, or engineering. This striking failure has led many to
conclude that human science inquiry may be saddled with an epistemological
ideal that is inappropriate for its subject matter. For example, Gergen (1982)
concludes that a “fundamental difference exists between the bulk of the
phenomena of concern to the natural as opposed to the sociobehavioral
scientist.” Thus, “there appears to be little justification for the immense
effort devoted to the empirical substantiation of fundamental laws of human
conduct. There would seem to be few patterns of human action, regardless of
their durability to date, that are not subject to significant alteration” (p. 12).
Second,
there is evidence to suggest that attempts by the social sciences to emulate
the natural sciences are based on a distorted and unrealistic understanding of
the natural sciences. Post-positivistic philosophers of science beginning with
Feyerabend (1978) and Kuhn (Kuhn, 1970) and including Laudan (1977; 1984),
Shapere (1984), Kitcher (1993) and Suppe (1977) convincingly show that
positivistic philosophies of science with their underlying faith in objectivism
fail to represent or capture what actually occurs in the process of the natural
sciences. Revisionist thinkers now stress the profoundly interpretive or
hermeneutical dimension of science, according to which observation is
considered to be dependent on theory and the confirmation or rejection of
theories is to some degree conventional and influenced by certain values, such
as parsimony or fruitfulness. These changes in the philosophy of the natural
sciences suggest that the social sciences have modeled themselves on a false
ideal.
Third, functioning as the official faith of the social
sciences, objectivism has led to a paradoxical and harmful apotheosis of
method, which has been dubbed “methodolatry.” Slife and Williams (1995) point
out that objectivist social science generally treats theorizing as distinct
from, and subordinate to, the use of scientific methods to uncover knowledge.
Wherever our theories or conjectures come from, they are valid or acceptable
only to the extent that they are tested and confirmed by methods which have
been determined in advance quite apart from any particular theoretical beliefs.
The problem with such a view, however, is that methods are adopted on the basis of some theoretical or
philosophical beliefs about the nature of things and how we might best come to
know them. We would have no idea about what sorts of methods might be useful—or
even that we needed methods in the first place—except on the basis of
preconceived beliefs about the human realm, which usually reflect social and
moral ideals as well as metaphysical commitments. Thus, “method itself is a
theory—a philosophy…it makes assumptions about the world, and important
implications arise from those assumptions.” As a result, these biases or
assumptions rule out some kinds of explanations and evaluations and support
others in a very unscientific manner—“by philosophical fiat in the guise of
'scientific method” (Slife & Williams, 1997, p. 120).
Fourth, the unrealistic and distorted view that
objectivism advances sets the stage for a type of either/or thinking in which
the only other alternative to objectivism is relativism. Loss of the
objectivist faith can plunge a thinker into a despairing or giddy relativism.
Witness the efforts of contemporary postmodern or social constructionist
theorists to abandon altogether a representationalist view of knowledge and
subvert all claims to anchor our understanding in a secure way (Gergen, 1985,
1994; Rorty, 1979, 1982). For example, Gergen (1985, p. 270 ff.), argues that
social constructionism help us get past the traditional subject-object dualism
because in this view psychological inquiry is deprived of any notion of
experience as a “touchstone of objectivity.”
So-called reports or descriptions of one's experience' are really just
“linguistic constructions guided and shaped by historically contingent
conventions of discourse.” Therefore, there is no “truth through method,” no
correct procedure that bestows a warrant of objectivity on our findings or
theories. Moreover, social constructionism “offers no alternative truth
criteria.” Instead, “the success of [our] accounts depends primarily on the
analyst's capacity to invite, compel, stimulate, or delight the audience, and
not on criteria of veracity” (p. 270 ff).
Why have we been so dedicated in social science to
holding on to the representational view, trying to make do with or compensate
for its shortcomings rather than seek a fundamentally more adequate
epistemology? Part of the answer seems to be, as Taylor (1995) suggests, that
the modern, disengaged, “punctual” self is as much a moral as a scientific
ideal. The modern self confronting a natural and social world to which it has
no essential or defining ties “connects with ...central moral and spiritual
ideas of the modern age,” such as the
modern ideal of “freedom as self-autonomy...to be self-responsible, to rely on
one’s own judgment, to find one’s purpose in oneself” (p. 7). This self is
well-positioned to freely and rationally treat both itself and the outside
world instrumentally, to alter them in desired ways, or, in later permutations
of the modern self, to resist social pressure to conform and pursue
self-actualization or personal authenticity as it sees fit. Thus, the
representational outlook begins to look like a central strand of our way of
life in modern Western culture, one often thought to purchase valuable freedoms
at the price of much alienation, and to stress mastery and control over nature
and ourselves to the potential detriment of other kinds of social, moral, or
spiritual values in living. The aspiration to an uncontaminated knowledge of
independent realities in science fits very well with the antiauthoritarian, emancipatory
moral outlook of modern times (Richardson, 1989). This outlook is dedicated to
advancing and protecting individual autonomy as its highest priority, but
tending to neglect, as Frank (1973) thoughtfully puts it, other, more
traditional, possibly worthwhile values or virtues such as "the redemptive
power of suffering, acceptance of one's lot in life, adherence to tradition,
self-restraint and moderation" (p. 7).
The quest for certainty via a representational
epistemology and the exaggerated individualism of modern times may be connected
in another important way as well. The transition to a modern way of life that
is urban, pluralistic, and mobile can entail the breakdown of supporting
institutions and the dissolution of human ties of shared purpose and obligation
(Berger, 1977; Berger, 1979). The wrenching nature of this upheaval may be one
important source of our modern romance with both the ethical ideal of an
impregnable individual autonomy and the intellectual goal of invincibly certain
knowledge.
According
to Dunne (1996) the typically modern sense of self—he calls it a
"sovereign" self—presents a strong front of “separateness” and
“mastery” (p. 138) But that front may cover up a great sense of fallibility and
precariousness in our new, modern, uprooted and emotionally isolating
condition. This situation, Dunne suggests, produces an almost compulsive drive
for certainty and security which finds expression in many different sectors of
modern life and thought. Bernstein (1983 p.16ff) finds in Descartes' Meditations, “the ‘locus classicus' in
modern philosophy,” a similar dynamic at work. Descartes' reflections are
partly driven, Bernstein feels, by a deep “Cartesian anxiety” which insists
that either we have an Archimedean
point, an indubitable and certain foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape being enveloped by
forces of darkness, by intellectual and moral chaos, even madness. Perhaps our
insistence on a one-sided autonomy in practical life and the possibility of
certain knowledge, which seems to promise mastery over many of life's threats
and uncertainties, has been, in part, an effort to quell this “Cartesian
anxiety” and give us something solid to hold on to in the flux.
We are drawn to hermeneutic philosophy because it seems
to offer the most powerful means of identifying the problematic assumptions of
the naturalistic outlook and pointing the way toward truly post-Newtonian
perspectives for cross-cultural psychology and social inquiry in general.
Postpositivist views of natural science fit very well with the hermeneutic
viewpoint, which see all knowledge as
fundamentally interpretive and hammered out in traditions of understanding. But
hermeneutics contends that there are still fundamental differences between the kinds of interpretations and
explanations offered by the natural and human sciences.
In the
hermeneutic view, it is quite appropriate (and obviously fruitful for its
worthy, if limited, purposes) for natural science, for the most part, to follow
an approach to its subject matter of abstraction and objectification. First one
abstracts away from the rich appearances, felt meanings, and meaningful
relationships of everyday experience. Then one can regard things, even human
behavior, as neutral events or processes, and to creatively map their
structural make-up and causal dynamics from such a temporarily disengaged and
objectifying perspective. Berger (1977) describes how this remarkable human
capacity for abstraction has burst the bounds of science and pervades a great
deal of modern experience. On the “level of consciousness,” abstraction
establishes particular forms of thought, especially a “quantifying and
atomizing cognitive style, originally at home in the calculations of
entrepreneurs and engineers,” which leads to ignoring and even “repressing”
other kinds of spontaneous, passionate, numinous, or contemplative experiences
and emotions. On the “level of social life,” such abstraction entails the
“progressive weakening, if not destruction, of the concrete and relatively
cohesive communities in which human beings have found solidarity and meaning
throughout most of history” (p. 71).
In this view, however, it is a mistake to assume that
this approach of abstraction and objectification should be employed in studying
humans. First and foremost, this approach seems to screen or bleach out a great deal of the reality
of human life and experience with which we should be concerned. In addition,
the picture of human being or agency that results from taking an objectifying
stance toward our own existence—that of an isolated, disengaged, knowing
subject that seeks to form correct representations of the world for the
purposes of theorizing and technical control—seems to be a major source of the
exaggerated individualism, alienation, dissolution of lasting social ties,
excessive orientation toward mastery and control, and inability to accept
healthy limits that, in the judgment of many, afflict modern Western life. It
is true that this picture of the disengaged or decontextualized modern
subject—in other words, a subject-object ontology—tends to support cherished
modern values few of us would wish to discard, such as a great deal of personal
autonomy, basic human rights, and a critical stance toward our traditions. But
by itself this approach tends strongly to throw out the baby with the bath, to
dispense with all notions of
tradition, community, and core ethical values beyond human rights and fair
procedures (Sandel, 1996) in order to eliminate any possible distortions of these ideals. Perhaps, in the end, this
is more a way of playing it safe in life than genuinely pursuing the ethical
quest.
Contemporary
hermeneutics makes a modest proposal about how we might avoid many of the
difficulties incurred by both objectivism or representationalism and postmodernism.
The cornerstone of philosophical hermeneutics according to Gadamer (1975) is
the belief that prejudices or
pre-judgments are at the foundation of all knowledge. Knowledge is an
interpretation that is always situated within a living tradition. From this
perspective, any attempt to have objective, value-free, ahistorical knowledge
is both unachievable and misguided. A growing but substantial body of
hermeneutic and postmodern critiques of different aspects of psychological
theory, research, and practice, now exist that demonstrate that despite the
best efforts in psychology to be neutral or objective, cultural values and
assumptions thoroughly permeate the field (Christopher, 1999; Christopher,
Christopher, & Dunnagan, 2000; Cirillo & Wapner, 1986; Cushman, 1995a;
Hogan, 1975; Kirschner, 1996; Richardson, Fowers, & Guignon, 1999; Sampson,
1977, 1988; Spence, 1985; Woolfolk, 1998).
Knowledge
can never be objective because of our inescapable historicity. We are always situated in a particular “horizon”
of understanding that is based on a combination of cultural and personal
presuppositions (prejudices). Consequently, for philosophical hermeneutics,
hermeneutics is no longer just an epistemology, it no longer simply provides a method to guide interpretation; rather,
it is now a social ontology that discusses how the natures of personhood,
selfhood, and agency are inescapably embedded in a social context or
tradition. In short, the social ontology
of philosophical hermeneutics is based on the claim that we are “essentially
beings constituted by and engaged in interpretive understandings” (Bernstein,
1983, p. 137).
In developing these ideas, the
hermeneutic philosopher Martin Heidegger offered an interpretation of the
“being” who is engaged in the activity of interpreting that provides an
alternative ontology to the punctual or disengaged self so central to the
Newtonian-Cartesian metatheory. Heidegger characterizes us as being-in-the-world, a view of the person
that is both non-dualistic and non-individualistic. Being-in-the-world points
to an aspect of human existence that is engaged in social practices and is
prior to the dualism of self and other, subject and object, mind and body, and
fact and value. Instead of thinking of the self as an object of
any sort, Heidegger (1962, p. 426) conceives of human existence as a
“happening” or a “becoming.” Individual lives have a temporal and narrative
structure. They are a kind of unfolding movement that is “stretched along
between birth and death.” In Guignon's (1993) words, just as “events in a novel
gain their meaning from what they seem to be pointing to in the long run...so
our past lives and our present activities gain their meaning from a (perhaps
tacit) sense of where our lives are going as a totality” (p. 14).
Heidegger deconstructs the Cartesian
sense of self, the punctual or disengaged self—the atomistic, skin-encapsulated
“I” that is set over and against the world and other people (see also (Rubin,
1997). He sees this sense of “I” as a cultural construction that distorts and
obscures a more fundamental sense of agency that he terms being-in-the-world.
To convey an understanding of this sense of agency, Heidegger developed the
example of a carpenter working on a construction project. When work is going
smoothly, the carpenter does not construct hammers, nails, and boards as
separate, discrete objects that he or she is “set over and against.” Rather,
hammers, nails, boards, and the carpenter are subsumed under the goal of the
project. When in such a state of flow, being-in-the-world is a “unitary
phenomenon” “in which self and world are reciprocally intertwined in such a way
that there is no way to drive a wedge between a “self” component and a “world”
component (Richardson et al., 1999, p. 209). Heidegger is trying to draw our
attention to a level of experience that precedes the self-other and
subject-object dualisms that shape Western ways of construing reality.
Heidegger believes we only create hammers, nails, and boards as separate
objects when they no longer seamlessly integrate into the project; when, for
instance, we have the wrong type of hammer for the project at hand. It is at
this point we may see the hammer as an object having certain properties,
functions, and uses.
The fact-value dualism is also
problematic from a hermeneutic perspective. In objectivism, values and meanings
are subjective creations that are projected onto the neutral world of objective
facts. In Heidegger’s view of being-in-the-world, facts and values seamlessly
interpenetrate. In his view, our lives are structures of care—the way we live our lives, the way we allocate our time and
energy reveal our most basic values and commitments or what we care about. Such
embodied or lived values may or may not be consciously known—and may even be in
a state of conflict with what we consciously espouse or profess to value.
A similar state exists with the
relationship of culture and the self. As Jahoda (2000) and Ratner (2000)
contend, psychologists, even cross-cultural psychologists, have generally
failed to develop a cohesive and comprehensive conception of culture. The
result has been primitive or uncritical models that fail to grapple in a
serious way with the ontology of persons, the nature of culture, and the
relationship between the two. This dominant tendency according to Geertz (1973)
has been the proliferation of what he calls “stratagraphic” views of the self
in Western social science. In these stratagraphic views the self is drawn with
concentric circles, having layers or levels like an onion. Invariably, culture
is the outermost layer—like values it is thought to overlay or be appended to
our more basic realms of biology and personality. In the hermeneutic view,
culture precedes us. We are at the most basic level beings that are brought
into and take over social practices and the meanings implicit in them. For
instance, in the United States, we experience hot showers and baths and thereby
participate in the meanings implicit in them developmentally long before
anything like the Cartesian sense of ourselves as an “I” that can choose or
internalize cultural beliefs and values emerges. Meanings and values, what
Geertz called “webs of significance,” already pre-exist in the dynamic
life-world and social practices that we are thrown
into upon birth and encounter in our day-to-day activities. Or put in another
way, the social practices we learn prior to becoming self-conscious revolve
around a particular interpretation of the self and the good life. By learning
to interact in our families and social world we take over these interpretations
of life (and sometimes modify them). But importantly, the meaningfulness of
things does not have to be a mental process that is either internalized nor
projected onto the world. While meanings and values are in one sense
constructed, as revealed by their tremendous variation across cultures, they
are for the most part not constructed by any one of us individually.
Through
his account of being-in-the-world, Heidegger’s “goal is to get us to see that
in our initial, everyday, prereflective encounter with the world, things show
up for us directly as already value-laden and having significance” (Richardson
et al., 1999, p. 209). The meaningfulness of things is not mere projection of
human values. Consequently, from Heidegger’s perspective the ability to be
disengaged, to see meanings and values as subjective construals that is so
central to naturalism or what he calls the “theoretical attitude” is not
neutral or objective—it is a cultural and developmental accomplishment; it
reflects a breakdown and distortion of our normal condition of
being-in-the-world. Similarly, Heidegger sees Descartes’ cogito, his
belief in the primacy of the “I” that “thinks” as a fundamental and tragic
ontological error that is also a collapse of what is more primordial,
being-in-the-world. In other words, the subject-object
ontology, the Western sense of ourselves as an “I” set over and against society
and nature is a cultural construction; it is not our most primary way of being.
The
ontology of engaged agency is broadened in philosophical
hermeneutics by considering what it is that the self is embedded in. While
hermeneutic thinkers discuss how human beings are immersed in social practices
and traditions, they are particularly interested in the meanings that inform or
underlie these concrete patterns of interaction. Geertz (1973), for instance,
refers to culture as “webs of significance” that underlie social life and give
it coherence and meaning. In Taylor’s (1985a; 1989) view, human beings are
self-interpretive animals that always exist within what he calls inescapable frameworks. These inescapable frameworks are largely
implicit but inextricably both ontological and moral. They form moral visions (Christopher, 1996; 2001)
that inform us as to both what the self is
and what the self should be or become. These interpretations becomes
self-constituting. As Taylor observed,
“A fully competent human agent not only has some understanding (which may be
also more or less misunderstanding) of himself, but is also partly
constituted by this understanding” (1985a, p. 3). For Taylor, actions are
clearly guided by interpretations. Consequently, actions can only be fully
understood or identified by taking into account their aim or purpose. This
frequently requires taking seriously the agent's “vision of things.” Thus,
human beings cannot be fully understood as “brute data” that can be
comprehended without reference to the subject. Rather, human emotions and
actions are partly defined by the agent's own judgments and perceptions, by
his or her own interpretations.
In the hermeneutic view,
individual lives are always “thrown” into a familiar life-world from which they
draw their possibilities of self-interpretation. Our own life-stories only make
sense against the backdrop of possible story-lines opened by our historical
culture (Guignon, 1989, p. 109)
In this way, hermeneutics
claims to take the full measure of our historical and cultural embeddedness and
the inexorable limitations of human understanding, to the extent that Gadamer
(1975, p. 245) can say that the “self-awareness of the individual is only a
flickering in the closed circuits of historical life.” Yet it is just this
embeddedness and these limitations that make possible a sense of identity and a
meaningful or purposeful life. Only they provide the needed context for such a life.
In the hermeneutic view, partly because of this
embeddedness, people care about
whether their lives make sense and what they are amounting to (Heidegger, 1962,
p. 228). Therefore, they have always taken some stand on their lives by seizing
on certain roles, traits, and values. Indeed, they “just are the stands they
take in living out their lives” (Guignon & Pereboom, 1995, p. 189). Taylor
(1985a, p. 3) develops this notion of care with the idea that humans do not simply desire particular outcomes or
satisfactions in living. Rather, they always make “strong evaluations” (Taylor,
1985a, p. 3). Even if only tacitly or unconsciously, they evaluate the quality of their desires and motivations
and the worth of the ends they seek
in terms of how they fit in with their overall sense of a decent or worthwhile
life. Humans never simply prefer or desire certain pleasures or results. They
always, in addition, are building their lives around some notion of what is
decent vs. indecent, noble vs. base, or deep vs. shallow—the terms vary widely
across societies and eras. The claim is that this is not an optional activity,
but something that we do as an inherent feature of human existence. It
certainly does not mean that the ideals that inform our living are necessarily
clear or refined or put into practice in a non-hypocritical or conflicted way.
It only means that, in some form, they cannot be dispensed with or completely
evaded.
What this means is that we are always “insiders” with
respect to some deep, defining set of commitments and identifications, even
though their content varies greatly across cultures. Both positivists and postmodernists
seem to feel it is appropriate to try to step outside or distance ourselves as
much as possible from historical entanglements. Hermeneutic thinkers argue that
“the language of science, when applied to the study of human beings, is a
relatively impoverished language. Using traditional scientific investigations,
we force ourselves to study human beings at a distance” (Slife & Williams,
1995, p. 195). In the hermeneutic view, this is not only impossible, but
probably somewhat inauthentic. The only sort of human agency we can imagine
takes place according to a "logic of question and answer" (Gadamer,
1975, p. 333) within a "space of questions" (Taylor, 1989, p. 26)
taken for granted by our culture or elaborated by us in some way. Failing to
recognize this we can easily allow our own cultural frameworks to become a form
of disguised ideology (Prilleltensky, 1989) in our scientific endeavors.
Yet even if it were possible to be outside this dialectic
or disengaged from it, we would not gain a better grip on who we are—we would
simply not know what meanings things have for us and potentially incur a
frightening kind of dissociation. We can and often should profoundly criticize
our norms and practices. But we always critique not from some privileged objective
and neutral vantage point but on the basis of other commitments or moral
insights from our traditions which for the moment we take for granted (Warnke,
1987). Our various cultural and moral traditions are rich resources for such
critique. The common view of these traditions as stable, monolithic authorities
is actually a narrow, prejudiced outgrowth of the Enlightenment. In fact, our
traditions of meaning and practice seem essentially to be multivocal,
interminably noisy debates rather than static sets of rules (Fowers &
Richardson, 1996). That insight applies to scientific traditions, religious
traditions, and even to what is now the weighty tradition of the Enlightenment
itself, the meaning and shortcomings of which are today everywhere in dispute.
Hermeneutics
puts the living process of dialogue in place of both the modern quest for
certainty through method and the postmodern stance of detached irony and
relativistic play in all our doings. In doing so it proposes not only a metatheory
for psychology but also a means of approaching intercultural relations.
What is
this dialogue? Hermeneutic dialogue is a process or method of attempting
to understand or make sense of the meanings, interpretations, and commitments
of others, especially when they differ from our own. The fundamental premise of
hermeneutic dialogue is that genuine understanding relies on a “fusion of
horizons.” As a first step, this means that we need to understand the horizon
or background of meanings underlying the perspectives of different parties.
Dialogic
understanding can be portrayed as a kind of interplay between openness and application. The beginning phase of openness (Gadamer, 1975) rests on the assumption that we do
not have any corner on truth and that others might have important things to say
to us. Genuine
openness to any meaning or claim actually involves granting it provisional
authority (Warnke, 1987, p. 167ff.) to challenge our beliefs and prejudices. While any effort will always be
partial and incomplete, the goal is to try to get at how it is that others
could take themselves seriously and live as if their approach to or outlook on
life is true and meaningful. The “fusion” occurs when we can adopt such a
stance of respectful openness to the Other; when we grant others the
provisional authority to challenge our own mostly deeply held values and
assumptions. For Gadamer (1975), this is the most authentic way of relating to
others, a form of I-Thou relationship, and it offers us the best way of avoiding
an imposed etic.
The second phase
of hermeneutic dialogue, application, involves ascertaining or testing out in
a fully critical way whether an insight or point of view gained through openness really offers
us a better way to make sense of our current situation as well as new
circumstances and unforeseen challenges. The rigorous application of our new-found understandings to
our own concrete situation helps us to decide which of these insights to retain
and which to set aside. The application of what we learn from the other will
always be modified by our own concrete circumstances and historical background
rather than being ingested whole. Yet continued openness can help us to
counteract the tendency to be too narrow in our application.
The
danger with openness, Warnke (1987) points out, is conservatism in which we slavishly bow to authority or rationalize
the status quo out of fear or timidity. The only cure for such inauthentic
rationalization is further rigorous application of these claims to our unique historical
situation. The danger with application is subjectivism
or the clever, opportunistic interpretation of events or principles in a
self-serving manner. However, the only cure for such arbitrariness is further,
sometimes painful openness to challenge from others. Richard Williams describes
this process as a kind of "artful, meaningful participation"
(Williams & Faulconer, 1997, p. 28) in which it appears that "agency
and knowledge...are intimately associated" (Williams, 1994, p. 36).
In
Gadamer’s (1981) view the ongoing to-and-fro of question and answer
characterizes not just attempts to understand texts and other form of
discourse; it characterizes the unfolding “play” of tradition as well.
According to Richardson et al. (1999),
In
Gadamer's view, we are always engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the
meaningful, historically shaped pre-understanding we find around us, and in
this dialogue we are constantly testing our assumptions in the light of what
texts and other speakers have to say. In
fact, for Gadamer, as for Hölderlin and Heidegger before him, a human being
just is an ongoing dialogue or
conversation in which the voices of the past are critically appropriated in the
attempt to find a truth applicable to the present. [Therefore] our horizon and the questions we
ask are constantly transformed through this ongoing dialogue” (p. 232).
We can always defensively or dishonestly distort the
process of dialogic understanding. No sure-fire method or social arrangement of
checks and balance can prevent this from happening. Still, this approach
suggests a way to blend qualities that we often admire but find hard to
reconcile. For example, dialogic understanding helps reconcile commitment and criticism. At their best, serious moral and political commitments
encourage us to be as open as possible to challenges from the outside. Because
of the importance of the subject matter, we have a strong motivation to get
things right. Also, such commitments contribute to the sense of self needed to
withstand the uncertainty and trepidation of the questioning process.
The result of hermeneutic dialogue is not only an
approach that can be used to understand differences when they occur, but
becomes a way of trying to get at truth. Instead of trying to ground truth and
representation through method as objectivism does or dismiss the whole notion
of truth as much of postmodern thought does, hermeneutics substitutes a
dialogical form of truth. Hermeneutics sees the pursuit of truth as essential
to human existence, but suggests we can never have certainty we have found
truth. For instance, while statistically significant correlational findings are often assumed to
indicate universal, ahistorical truths about the human condition, Bernstein
observes that they could simply reflect “regularities or systematic
interrelationships in the personal or social existence of particular historical
communities...” (1978, p. 31). We can never be certain about our theories, our
research findings, our epistemic principles, our values, or our ontological
commitments. In consequence, hermeneutics substitutes what Taylor (1989) terms
our “best accounts” for the quest for timeless, universal laws of human
behavior. We can only offer our best accounts, our best interpretations, our
best arguments, and our best reasons to the ongoing historically situated
dialogue in which we are necessarily immersed.
Social Theory as
Practice. Finally, in the hermeneutic view, social theory is a form of
practice. Psychology has always struggled to reconcile its insistence on pursuing a
neutral form of inquiry with its mission of advocating human welfare. However,
philosophical hermeneutics and other postmodern critiques have pointed out how
the ideal of the “disinterested observer,” is misguided, self-deceived and ultimately
impoverishes the social sciences. Social science is not a “disembodied
cognitive enterprise,” as Bellah and his colleagues point out, “It is a
tradition, or set of traditions, deeply rooted in the philosophical and
humanistic (and, to more than a small extent, the religious) history of the
West" (Bellah et al., 1985, p. 301). They further note that,
social science makes assumptions
about the nature of persons, the nature of society, and the relation between
persons and society. It also, whether it admits it or not, makes assumptions
about good persons and a good society and considers how far these conceptions
are embodied in our actual society. (p. 301)
The unavoidable presence of these type of
normative commitments leads Bellah and others (Haan, Bellah, Rabinow, &
Sullivan, 1983) to claim that social science would be more accurately portrayed
as a form of moral inquiry.
From
the hermeneutic or interpretive perspective (Hiley, Bohman, & Shusterman,
1991; Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979), social science, which seeks to elucidate
or explain human action in real life cultural contexts, cannot be understood
mainly as formulating hypotheses and comparing them to independent facts. The
“facts” in this case are lived experience and social practices which are not independent
objects but are constituted, in part,
by our changing meanings and self-understandings. Experimental, correlational,
qualitative, and other methods may serve well at times to identify patterns or
bring realities to light in our experience or world. But they cannot stand
entirely on their own as “objective” explanations or descriptions to which we
must conform our thinking. Rather any importance or meaning they have is a
function of larger interpretive efforts to make sense of our situation, tested
in ongoing dialogue. Thus, an interpretative or hermeneutic approach is not a
substitute for rigorous empirical research—rather it complements it by
providing a metatheory that can better situate its application and findings.
Because the conclusions we come to, the interpretations we make are never final
or certain, like everything else in life, a hermeneutic outlook is consistent
with methodological pluralism.
To put
it simply, we might say that the primary point of social and psychological
theory and research is clarification of the meanings we live by, not sheer
predictive accuracy. Sometimes theory and research findings will reiterate and
validate some aspect of our way of life. But they always reinterpret our social
practices to some degree, and so may bring to light errors, inconsistencies, or
deficiencies that push toward transformation of that way of life. It should be
stressed that interpretation and dialogic understanding in everyday life or
social science always have an inescapable evaluative dimension, an indelible
practical point. It is for this reason that Bernstein (1978) believed that
social science should be simultaneously empirical, interpretative, and
critical. Social theory and research are essentially, in part, ethics and
politics by other means, an extension of our search for justice, love, and
wisdom in practical life. If that is true for the kind of social and
psychological inquiry we carry out extensively on ourselves and our way of
life, even in a multicultural society, think how much more it applies to
cross-cultural psychology, which is bound often to shake our foundations, call
us into question, and show us different, sometimes better ways of being human.
Hermeneutics’
biggest contribution to intercultural relations is to help us understand better
what is involved or at stake in intercultural interactions. From the
hermeneutic view, what is at risk in these interactions is a moral vision of what the self is and
what the self should be or become (1996). Recognition of this notion in general
and learning to see these moral visions in particular interactions, can help us
to avoid premature judgments, ethnocentrism, and imposed etics.
For
instance, virtually all aspects of the practice of psychotherapy and counseling
have been noted to be influenced by values and assumptions about human nature
and the good life (Cushman, 1995a; Ellis, 1973; London, 1986; May, 1967;
Tjeltveit, 1989). As Szasz (1961) pointed out the “socioethical orientations” of
the therapist will “influence his [or her] ideas on what is wrong with the
patient, what deserves comment or interpretation, in what possible directions
change might be desirable, and so forth” (p. 116). Wachtel (1977) gets even
closer to the heart of the matter in observing that “the theories that guide
contemporary therapeutic efforts both reflect and shape the culture’s view of
human potential and the good life” (p. 3). Diagnosis, conceptualization,
treatment goals, and interventions are all culturally informed. The challenge
is to translate this general abstract realization into the ability
to discern these cultural influences in our practice.
An
example of dialogical understanding in couples counseling helps set the stage
for how hermeneutic understanding might guide intercultural relations. Often,
couples in conflict struggle to determine who is right, who is wrong, and where
the truth lies. This dynamic is rarely helpful; even if it could be determined
what the truth is or was, it tends to perpetuates a power struggle with one
partner feeling vindicated and the other diminished. An important dimension to
working with couples is assisting them to move from a dynamic of right and
wrong to a dynamic of mutual understanding. In the dynamic of mutual understanding,
couples work to understand the perspective of the other—they attempt to
understand how the other person’s perceptions and inner experience make sense
to them. This process (which is essentially the same thing as the phase of
openness in the hermeneutic dialogue) is often powerfully transformational.
Couples frequently shift from adversaries to partners who are looking together
at a common problem. At its most profound level this can lead to the type of
I-Thou relationship described by Buber (1970) and is often accompanied by a
deeper sense of compassion for the other and a renewed sense of intimacy in the
relationship.
We believe that this type of dialogical mutual
understanding is an essential ingredient in multicultural counseling (and more
broadly in intercultural relations). Hermeneutics is a way of thinking
interpretively about what is ultimately at stake in these intercultural
encounters: moral visions and moral stances made on the basis of them. Having a
sense of what can vary (notions of the self, the good life/person, fundamental
metaphysical, moral and epistemological assumptions, etc.) can guide us in
understanding how these may differ with a specific client (Christopher 1996,
2001). In the climate of managed care and treatment manuals, the therapist is
frequently encouraged to adopt an instrumental approach in which the patient is
objectified as something to change from one point to another. This results in
essentially what is an imposed enculturation of a Western view of the self and
the good life because we are pushed to act before we can fully understand and
appreciate. Consequently, a deep understanding of the client from the inside is
precluded—this often occurs as well when the therapy is conducted within the
same culture. Hermeneutic therapy includes phenomenological understanding of
the client’s experience and hermeneutic analysis of the values and
presuppositions underlying the client’s phenomenology. In such a dialogue we
work to situate the client by trying to make sense of their life, the choices
they make, the emotions they experience, and the types of thoughts they tend to
have—seeing all of these different aspects or dimensions of the person as
expressing a moral vision. Instead of disregarding such information, a dialogic
approach to therapy begins with client’s deepest senses of the self and the
good life, and helps clients identify and express these core values and
commitments in an open environment. This type of dialogue can be also thought
of as ethical position: it treats the other as inherently worthy of respect and
understanding and helps to avoid an unconsciously and uncritically imposed
etic. Hermeneutic dialogue is also important for pragmatic reasons. It provides
an important kind of data: the structure of values and assumptions that
constitute and animate the lives of clients from other cultural viewpoints.
We believe this type of deep
interpretive understanding is also essential for the researcher: it is
incumbent upon the researcher to have a general sense of the historicity of the
concepts, ideas, and theories underlying their work (Cushman, 1990, 1995a). The
need for this is illustrated by considering how we address acculturative
stress, on both theoretical and practical grounds. Berry (1997) details three
levels or “points of view” for considering the level of difficulty individuals
have in psychologically acculturating: behavioral shifts, acculturative stress,
and psychopathology. On one side of the spectrum are those individuals who can
easily adapt by changing their “repertoire” – behavioral shifts. On the other
end is mental illness as Berry and Sam note: “When major difficulties are
experienced, the “psychopathology” or “mental disease” perspective is most
appropriate” (p. 298). While this perspective can certainly capture important
behavioral symptoms, it also potentially obscures the concrete fact that we are
engaged in pathologizing those who struggle the most with such changes. This
pathologizing rests on the presupposition that cultural transitions should be
relatively facile—those who struggle most are most ill. If we step back and ask
why should cultural transitions be easy, we run into our own cultural meanings.
For instance, might we by pathologizing these individuals be reinforcing the
Western notion that the self should be flexible, adaptable, and highly mobile
(Bauman, 2000). If we consider that what is at stake for such individuals is ultimately their world view,
ethos, understanding of what it means to be a person and how life should be
lived, then it seems questionable that cultural transitions should really be so
easy or straightforward. The transition to a modern way of life that is urban,
pluralistic, and mobile involves a wrenching experience of the breakdown of
supporting institutions and the dissolution of human ties of shared purpose and
obligation. Are not the symptoms of “psychopathology” an eminently sane and
comprehendible reaction given the task involved? Moreover, might seeing such
individuals primarily in terms of
psychopathology potentially lead us to miss seeing possible strengths and
virtues? For instance, resistance to shedding identities and indigenous social
practices may in some cases indicate a form of psychological strength or
integrity. The potential risk is that by drawing on or resorting to Western
understandings of mental illness and their associated diagnostic
classifications, we may forget to situate such individuals within their own
frameworks of meaning. We may, as a result, fail to grasp the underlying views
of “human potential and the good life” (Wachtel, 1977, p. 3) that are being
expressed even in the midst of the most severe experessions of psychopathology.
Applying hermeneutic understanding to such situations is a way of attempting to
discern what’s at stake from the “native’s point of view” (Geertz, 1983) and exemplifies that it is “interpretation
all the way down” (Dreyfus cited in Hiley, 1991).
To conclude, hermeneutics begins with
ontology, a developed theory that looks in depth at the concept of the person,
the idea of culture, and the relationship between the two. Western psychology,
in contrast, has largely attempted to avoid theory not based on empirical
research findings. A considerable amount of scholarship suggests that by not
taking ontology seriously, Western psychology has simply taken over the
categories of our individualistic folk psychology. This is not only not
neutral, but it often precludes an awareness of and sensitivity to other
culture’s indigenous psychologies. To gain a deeper appreciation of culture and
cultural influences, Ratner (2000) suggested psychology needs to “overcome the
Western inclination of trying to link psychological functioning with abstract
social variables…” (p. 9). We believe the interpretative thrust of hermeneutics
provides a way of understanding the significance and meaning that such
variables have for those on both sides of the cultural divide. We see this as ultimately the best means to
“culturally re-center” both the “research enterprise” (Easton, 1991) [cited in
(Gudykunst & Bond, 1997, p. 148) as well as intercultural relations
themselves.
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