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Part Four: two kinds of 'why' questions

For at first this presence presents to us a contradiction; nothing of the past exists in and of itself, and so how are we able to acknowledge with a mere nod the idea that what is present is, oddly and perhaps also even mysteriously, nothing but the past? At once, we are confronted with our own human situatedness regarding what we ourselves are: we are compelled to agree with Gadamer in understanding that the vast majority of this ‘whatness’ is not of our own creation. We are beings of history before we are beings in history. Living in history opens up the condition of life within it. My indwelling is that of my authentic Dasein, a being in the world, but as well, an historical being. History does, at first, nothing more than provide me with a what and a how. To discover why I exist the way I do – and note that this is not the same question, nor yet even the same kind of question, as the one which simply asks ‘why am I here’ with a view to providing meaningful purpose to my existence – I must interpret the history with which I have been both gifted and tasked. The first promotes my agency, the second calls me to action. The ‘why’ of existence is at first impersonal. This is so due to its purely historical condition. Yet even here, I find that the manner in which I begin the interrogation of the character of my thrownness is kindred with the answers readily available and thus at hand. My ‘whatness’ and my ‘howness’ are generally known to me by the time I matriculate from schooling. The first includes the ‘life-chance’ variables which were formerly known as ‘structural’; my gender, credo, ethnicity and what-have-you. Alongside these, and in some kind of symbiotic relationship with them, the ‘hows’ of my existence align themselves to the whats; mannerisms, behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and the expectations of the generalized other which take hold on sight, as it were. I first must ask why all of this is so, before I can embark on the more penetrating quest that emanates from querying why I personally exist; what is my purpose alone?

Like the medieval ‘world as text’ sensibility, the template for my life as one of many is to be read off, and in no truly active way. I do not read anything into it, but rather must accept it more or less as whole cloth. Even here, interpretation of the most basic sort is present, and its function is to clarify and comprehend. When I ask the first kind of why question, I then begin to more fully and authentically understand my condition, along with gaining some insight into that human. The difference between comprehending and understanding is of the utmost. The first may be had through a patient study – as a child, almost all of this comes to me from experiencing the world constructed by others, and through formal memorization, such as is to be employed in institutional learning – bereft of analysis. It is no accident that phrases such as ‘reading comprehension’ are present early on in this process. What I am to understand is that understanding itself not necessary to this form of learning. There is assuredly some irony to this, but the demand pushes past this moment. Comprehending the world through history means ‘taking it all in’; a process which in turn precludes a more vigorous questioning and a more intimate dialogue.

Yet I am in error if, when I do gain some understanding of my condition, which would include knowing the fuller character of my parents and their families, the history of the culture into which I was born, as well as the drivers behind the politics of the present-day, that this is no more than a beginning. I do not know myself through this level of understanding, only some of the reasons why my selfhood exists in the way that it does. This is the ‘must’ of my life, and not its needful potential. This first why question gives the demands of the world shape and form; it tells me that at once, interpretation may be assigned the challenge of ferreting out how others like me have had to live, and thence perhaps gives me some sense of limit but as well, avenues of liberation, and that the same hermeneutic impetus can open up this constructed selfhood by risking the ‘confrontation with tradition’. We should not imagine that this loaded word, ‘tradition’, only consists of that which the ‘fiddler on the roof’ type expounds about and exhorts to follow. By definition rather, the tradition contains both everything it needs to maintain itself, but equally so, all that is needed to sabotage and overturn it. This is why Gadamer can say that we are blinded by the present-day sense that we must become revolutionaries over against the tradition entire, failing to acknowledge that the very conception of revolution is itself an historical one; one that is fostered by the very thing that supposedly is in its way. This error is far-reaching and also hamstrings our ability to take that which is gifted to us by our own past in order to vouchsafe a future.

Consider some of the popular the riffs on this crucial mistake. Were Marx and Engels Chinese? In spite of the former’s portrayal on a number of Chinese postage stamps looking a little Asiatic and olive-skinned – perhaps Marx’s own Jewish background allowed the engraver this artistic license – how China does itself run is entirely Western. Though we might not label it a ‘Western nation’, nevertheless, its odd mélange of capitalism and socialism is nothing Eastern. But because China is a rival, we succumb to the error that its entire thingness flies in the face of our most cherished druthers. This is nonsense, but worse, it is dangerous nonsense, for it also suggests that we have not a clue about our own political structures and their recent history. The very reason China is in the ascendant and has been able to remarkably pull itself into the vanguard of human achievement lies in its taking control of the ideas and forces which used to be used only to subjugate it. Japan similarly had begun this same process, sometimes even called ‘Westernization’, decades before China followed suit. Indeed, one could suggest in turn that all the forces of regression so fashionable in Western countries are akin to ‘Easternization’, a term which is hardly heard of, but may be more apt that we would like to imagine.

As well, Russia is seen through this mistaken lens. Russia is, contrary to the Kremlin’s daily rhetoric, a Western nation. We can state this because all of its politics, arts, and even clothing and foodstuffs and the like are kindred not with Asia, but rather with Europe. The novel, the symphony, the theater, the much-vaunted Russian ballet, are all art forms which are nothing Russian at all, but have been imported and given great efflorescence into that country and by its people. Like Marx and Engels themselves, Pushkin, Gogol, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsikoff, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, among many others, are figures of European merit and order. Even a lesser-known light like Afrikan Spir participates fully in part of the tradition of Western philosophy, itself rather a redundant phrase. At the further end of all of this supposedly ’Russian’ culture, we may find the means to defend it against all comers, but especially the West. The tank was invented in England, the aircraft in the United States, the missile in Germany, and so on. No, the error is upon both sides. Beijing more than downplays the fact that it controls a Western economy of production and consumption and does so by way of a Western political ideology, and Moscow rejects all comparisons with the ‘decadent West’. On that side of things, the errors are both contrived and deliberate, and so at least have the excuse of propaganda about them. But the deeper error on our side, we ‘truer’ Westerners’, is much less forgivable, for it emanates from unerring ignorance alone.

I take this brief detour into our current political situation only to demonstrate how errors can both develop and take hold of us if we only ask the first version of the why question. And even if we gain the knowledge necessary to debunk such errors – for it too is contained in the tradition and is, in the two cases noted just now, glaringly obvious even at a second glance at things – it still remains for us to act upon it. And this follow-through kind of action can only present itself through enabling the second why question; the one that begins to interrogate my own selfhood’s sense of purpose, moving my understanding from meaning to meaningfulness in the hermeneutic manner we have already had occasion to outline. If I listen to a Beethoven symphony I hear all of the emotional elements that occur in one by Shostakovich; the sense of purpose, of urgency, of anxiousness, of heroism, for example. I encounter the rondo structure, counterpoint, harmony, melody, and theme. If Beethoven’s ‘programs’ are more abstract than are Shostakovich’s – consider the ‘pastoral’ sensibility in Beethoven Six, the ‘heroic’ in Three, or the ‘joyful’ in Nine, as contrasted with the more specifically historical illustrations of many of these abstractions in for example Shostakovich Nine (mockery against Stalinism), or Eleven (entitled The Year 1905, referring to the aborted revolution which ultimately led to that of 1917, also a title of another one his symphonies) – then they are nonetheless intimately linked with the forces associated with each ideal appearing either more generally or more specifically. In a word, both have used the symphonic form as a platform to express the very best qualities of the human character, often over against the very worst. We can call such creations ‘romantic’ if we so choose, but there is much more ‘going on’ in these works than a simple conflict between art and politics, important as this theme continues to be.

We utilize a musical example ahead of time, as it were, to remind ourselves that in such interpretation, we are reading the music and not listening to it. Just as the world as text metaphor informs us of the situatedness of our thrown beings, so too do the arts, rendered again as textuality, help us to understand our common lot. When we ask ourselves, ‘what is this work of art about?’, we are embarking upon a specific kind of hermeneutic endeavor. We might at first equally respond by claiming that it is about nothing at all, and tell ourselves to simply listen to it, look at it, be with it, and so on. A like example comes from the world of popular music. When Robert Plant was asked about what the lyrics for the signature song Stairway to Heaven meant, he replied quite without guile that ‘well, they don’t mean anything’. He claimed to have simply written them down as they came to him, without agenda either prior or post. Once again, the world, and specifically the human world, presents to us its norms and forms alike. It falls wholly upon us to discern first their meaning, and thence make those meanings ‘our own’ through the hermeneutic tending toward meaningfulness. The author is simply another interpreter in this vein. Plant could have provided what he opined his own lyrics may have meant, but to do so would be to set up a canonical interpretation, which most artists eschew, given that it tends to act against a more perduring interest in their work. Indeed, even to say ‘his own’ or ‘their’ is tantamount to doing something of the same sort. I have myself met only one artist who was willing, or perhaps even able, to interpret their own works, but Sarah Knowlton did so with an express intent to enter into an authentic dialogue with me, the professor of human sciences at the time, about art in general, and her own art was a catalyst and exemplar for this wider question.

Reading works of art promotes meaning, to be sure, but the goal of the second why question involved in a more active and risky interpretation would have to include other ways of encountering the aesthetic object, which avoid the question of ‘aboutness’ and only obliquely suggest feelings and resonances, some bordering upon the uncanny, and which can only be made sensible not through a wholly textual morphology but rather through calling up in one’s own being that which is most often wordless and thus unspoken. Not that text itself is denuded of these other presences, but we find that when engaged in actual reading, we must depart the text to some extent, in order to note how we have reacted to it. Poetry is easier to distance ourselves from in this manner than is prose, and within prose itself, fiction easier than non-fiction. We have already had occasion to provide a précis regarding the Saussurean sense of how words actually work, in terms of the problem of where their meaning ‘comes from’. Let us regain this tack for a moment, before investigating how a more patently hermeneutic manner of examining meaning leads us away from that structural and towards meaningfulness both personal and cultural at once.