2005-11-10T10:11:00.000-05:00

The Theory of Epistemological Transmutation of English Language as the Global Reversal of Flow of Knowledge[1]

Introduction

Historical Initiation
Postmetaphysics means the initial distancing of knowledge from metaphysics, which has been the dominant ground of knowledge for centuries. It is the conclusion of metaphysics as a correction done to the understanding of understanding itself and the explication of language as a non-substantial phenomenon. Historically, it is the development and dissemination of Continental thought, and theoretically the result of Martin Heidegger’s elaborations on Continental thought as well as Ferdinand de Saussure’s ontological approach to language. Postmetaphysics started its development in English language mainly by the theoretical endeavours of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller. These theoretical developments transmuted the metaphysical ground of knowledge to the linguistic ground. Hence the term postmetaphysics is applied to a historical initiation on an academic basis. This occurred in a situation in which English language never produced leading thinkers as phenomenologists or structuralists to prepare the ground of knowledge for the transmutation. This is to say that English language never prevailingly experienced ‘the epistemological slides’ of phenomenology and structuralism on a wide intellectual scale. Instead of a gradual historical change, English and on a grand scale the world, especially on an intellectual and academic level, is experiencing an unfamiliarity and a state of thrownness caused by the transmutation phenomenon in a relatively short period of time.

The Epistemological Phenomenon
There has not been written a lot on postmetaphysical epistemology[2], and it seems those who have written on this topic are still not very sure of what exactly has changed or is being changed. For example, Jürgen Habermas in ‘Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking’ writes: ‘the situation of present-day philosophizing, too, has become obscure’.[3] Or for explaining the role of language in postmetaphysical thinking, he writes about it only too generally: ‘the shift in paradigms from philosophy of consciousness to philosophy of language’.[4]

Some theoreticians such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty and Fredric Jameson have written about this topic although the issue of transmutation itself has not been explicated and developed by a systematic study. Barthes in ‘From Work to Text’ writes that the new understanding of language (an epistemological issue) had made changes and produced a common ground for the fields of linguistics, anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis, and adds that this is not due to the ‘internal recasting of each of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter’ with language.[5] The term interdisciplinarity, which has become ‘a prime value in research’, is practically an ‘unease in classification’ which indicates a ‘mutation’ or ‘an epistemological slide’ rather than a ‘break’. Barthes believed that the real break had happened in the nineteenth century with Marxism and Freudianism.[6] Similarly, Foucault also writes that ‘this epistemological mutation of history is not yet complete. But it is not of recent origin either, since its first phase can no doubt be traced back to Marx’.[7] Jameson also wrote about the ‘exchange’ of historical ‘model’ to ‘rethink everything through once again in terms of linguistics’ and he decides that ‘it is certain, indeed, that such a replacement marks an absolute end and the beginning of something hitherto unprecedented’.[8] It should also be noted that pragmatist philosophers such as Rorty have somehow unwillingly confirmed the change: ‘like Heidegger and Derrida, de Man treats the end of essentialism and logocentrism as event of world-historical significance. We pragmatists treat it as merely the latest stage in a gradual and continuous shift in human beings’ sense of their relation to the rest of the universe – a change which led from worshipping gods to worshipping sages to worshiping empirical scientific inquiries. With luck, this process will end by leaving us unable to worship anything’.[9]

Cultural Preparation:
I herewith refer to some significant cultural issues in English which has prepared the grounds for an understanding of language that contributed to the epistemological transmutation in the second half of the twentieth century.

a. Theatre of the Absurd: after developments of Surrealism, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud in avant-garde theatre, and following the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, there appeared a series of plays which were classified under the title Theatre of the Absurd. These plays shared some characteristics such as evading dramatic conventions of pseudo-scientific realism in characterization or episodic plot. These in general violated the sense of time as a reified and language-independent reality.

Martin Esslin in the mid 20th century, when the emphasis had not theoretically shifted from consciousness to language and language was still identified with speech, wrote that the philosophers and dramatists of that period were showing reaction to ‘the same cultural and spiritual situation’. He also writes about the question of language in these plays. There was ‘a sense of loss of meaning’ which questioned ‘the recognized instrument for communication of meaning, language’ or the ‘fossilized forms of language’.[10] The significant issue for any epistemological approach is the estrangement which is artistically presented in unconventional monologues/dialogues of these plays. This estrangement allegedly and intelligently and critically tried to fully separate speech from its non-phenomenal source, language, which projects meaning to it. Although these plays were initially appeared in France, English language produced its exponents and culturally received this movement, and produced some major playwrights such as Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and Samuel Beckett(?).

b. The Stream of Consciousness Technique: another technical issue which similarly influenced the understanding of language was the mode of narration, stream of consciousness. It took the attention from the phenomenal writing to the system of language in one’s mind. Virginia Wolf in ‘The Tunnel’ writes that it ought to ‘make us feel ourselves seated at the centre of another mind’. In, for example, The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner removes the element of time in the first chapter and presents the whole being in a spatial manner in such a way that the thirty three years of Benjamin’s life becomes available in an eternal present time. In fact, what changes is the unconventional permutation of written marks which forces the reader to search for meaning in the system of language which is present in one’s mind and not on the page.

c. Mysticism and De-institutionalized Readings of Onto-theological Texts: by this expression, I refer to the type of knowledge recorded after a non-perceptual yet conscious experience in which the flow of language stops and one realizes the pure consciousness. It is not perceptual and can be a common ‘experience’. For example, Alfred, Lord Tennyson had this realization by repeating his name. William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) gives it different qualities; however, the one which is related to my discussion is the ‘noetic’ characteristics of which he writes: ‘they are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect’.[11] This knowledge was also spread in the twentieth century by the works of different authors such as Evelyn Underhill, Rufus Jones, William Inge, and Thomas Merton. Similarly it was introduced in different literary works as early as Metaphysical Poetry and Transcendental Literature and as modern as Aldous Huxley or J. D. Salinger. There are also a number of twentieth-century mystics and mystical movements that spread the knowledge by reference to Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Srimad Bhagavatam Purana or The Jewel-Crest of Wisdom as well as translations of Zen Buddhist and Sufi works which all became available in low-priced paperback editions since the 1950s.

I should also name two streams of thinking which covered epistemological issues in a historical sense, namely Western Marxism, and the Linguistic Turn especially the discourse rooted in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

Contributions to the Postmetaphysical Epistemology
I will try to outline the academic introduction of the epistemological transmutation phenomenon into English (the discovery of the actualization of the transmutation), and explain its specification and formulation, which includes the relevant theoretical developments of the ontological[12] relation of the non-substantial language with the substantial sound/writing in postmetaphysical epistemology.

The advent of epistemological knowledge to English

As mentioned above, there are a number of discourses in English in the second half of the twentieth century, which can be mentioned as factors that indirectly signalled the epistemological transmutation. What practically happened by the experience of these presentations was that the readers/audience were forced to go back to themselves and search for meaning in their minds, and hence experience the pure language as separate from phenomenal speech/writing. This process involved one movement; instead of searching for ‘meaning’ out in the phenomenal world, the attention withdrew to language as distinct from the sensual perception. This phenomenon can be viewed as the experience of the withdrawal of knowledge from the phenomenal world and senses back to the living non-substantial language (I shall explain this epistemologically in some detail.). But the issue I bring into attention is the fact that when some critics such as Paul de Man started criticising New Criticism, they were making theoretical explications and conclusions which at that time were somehow there through cultural developments.

Besides the supplementary cultural issues, the primary factor which imported the knowledge which led to the transmutation of the ground of knowledge was the gate that de Man, J. Hillis Miller and E. D. Hirsch opened to the latest developments of Continental philosophy.[13] This was a movement from metaphysical assumptions of New Criticism toward further attention to the epistemological issue of language and meaning in the context of Saussure’s, Edmund Husserl’s and Martin Heidegger’s advances in epistemology. Historically, this occurred in the 1960s. In fact, it was in a symposium at Johns Hopkins in 1966 that Jacques Derrida presented his ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’. This article started some epistemological debates that were known later as poststructuralism. In it, Derrida elaborates on the illusory certainties of metaphysics by dismantling the function of centre in structuralism and pre-Heideggerian phenomenology, and writes about the most influential ‘moment’ in the twentieth-century thought: ‘this was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when in the absence of origin[14], everything became discourse’.[15] It then becomes a methodological principle which declares the primary reduction of everything including the real (or more practically or objectively the concept of the ‘real’) to language. This epistemological recognition defies the metaphysical epistemology, which explains that language is a tool for representing things, truths or intentions which pre-exist language.

But how can the postmetaphysical epistemology, already active for the undercurrent of knowledge on a primordial level, be explained and formulated?

The linguistic ground of knowledge and its formulation

The ontology of language

Saussure’s initiation in describing language in Course in General Linguistics spread a type of knowledge which practically transformed the basis of knowledge itself. Saussure pays attention to the fact that language is not phenomenal: ‘language is form and not a substance […] For all our mistakes of terminology, all our incorrect ways of designating things belonging to the language originate in our unwittingly supposing that we are dealing with a substance when we deal with linguistic phenomena.’[16] He goes on to emphasize that the sign is not a phenomenal entity (corporeality) but a ‘psychological’ [psychical] imprint: ‘the sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical’.[17] He confirms this fact by saying that if we observe our silent conversations with ourselves, the nature of language is understood more vividly. He subsequently clarifies that ‘a linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern’. [18] This accurate clarification of language makes any study of language a subtle issue as it should be noticed that the principal object of a scientific study is not in essence a phenomenal entity.

The ontological attention to language leads to four conclusions. Firstly, the sign or the signifier and its signified/s (meaning/s) are located within the non-substantial language, not outside in the phenomenal world. Signification and meaning process (not the production of meaning as something unchanging and stable), therefore, occurs within language and is a linguistic issue.

Secondly, when the question of the non-substantial phenomenon arises, the discussion by itself develops on the assumption of a primordial[19] dichotomy between the non-substantial language and the phenomenal world. This dichotomy is one of the indispensable issues, which is mentioned by some linguists. For example, Roman Jakobson in ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, while explaining the poetic function of the message (sound or black marks – the contact), writes that poetic function is highlighted when the message is oriented toward itself. He considers the poetic function as an overruling one which is present for all types of message although he considers this function as supplementary and gives the precedence to the referential function of language (when the message is oriented toward the ‘context’). Then he writes that the poetic function ‘deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects’.[20] Hence, The elements of the non-substantial phenomenon only work and interact with each other within it, and there is no substantial connection between the signifier and the phenomenal object (the thing-in-itself).

Thirdly, what should not be ignored is the status of the method employed for studying this non-substantial phenomenon. The systematic study that is mentioned as the condition of any scientific method is primarily the application of language itself; thus, what factually occurs is the application of non-substantiality for the explication of non-substantial phenomenon of language. In addition, the methodological precedence should be given to the non-phenomenality of language.

Fourthly, in non-substantiality it is not methodologically sound to present a subject for language because the concept of subjectivity is concerned with corporeal acts (ontic-ontological issues).

However, the counterargument or the apparent contradiction that arises is related to the contact (speech as sound and writing as marks, both substantial entities and therefore phenomenal) and relevantly the issue of subjectivity for speech and writing which comprises our social experience. Saussure deals with this issue as remarked here:

A language might also be compared to a sheet of paper. Thought is one side of the sheet and sound the reverse side. Just as it is impossible to take a pair of scissors and cut one side of paper without at the same time cutting the other, so it is impossible in a language to isolate sound from thought, or thought from sound. To separate the two for theoretical purposes takes us into either pure psychology or pure phonetics, not linguistics. / Linguistics, then, operates along this margin, where sound and thought meet. The contact between them gives rise to a form, not a substance.[21]

Saussure begins the science of linguistics on the pragmatic assumption that the substantial sound is inseparable form non-substantial ‘thought’. This is to say that the availability of the ‘object’ of study is through a gap between the non-substance and substance, which is not yet explained.

The theoretical problem of relation between non-substantial sign and the substantial speech/writing

To develop the issue further I refer to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘Preface’ to Jakobson’s Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Lévi-Strauss asks: ‘if sound and meaning are inseparable what then is the mechanism of their union?’, and he adds that ‘in the second lecture Jakobson shows that the idea of the phoneme enables us to resolve this apparent mystery’.[22]

However, Jakobson does not solve the ‘mystery’ and deals with the problem pragmatically by separating sounds of language from other sounds. This separation is only functional to bridge the gap somehow:

language is the only system which is composed of elements which are signifiers and yet at the same time signify nothing. Thus the phoneme is the element which is specific to language […] It would perhaps be possible to identify it more accurately by calling it phoneme language. This phoneme language is the most important of the various sign systems […] and one might ask whether this special status of phoneme language is not due precisely to the specific character of its components, to the paradoxical character of elements which simultaneously signify and yet are devoid of all meaning.[23]

On the one hand, Jakobson faces the dichotomy of sign and objects in which sign is fundamentally non-substantial, and on the other, he must deal with substantial phonemes of which he is sure that signification is not their function. He invents the concept of ‘phoneme language’, but he writes that ‘phonetic research can provide us with valuable data on phonic matter but it is not able to tell us how this is put to use by language, how language adapts these raw materials to its own ends. Phonetics falls outside linguistics’.[24]

Jakobson also believes that a signifier is a sound but a signified is meaning whereas it is not explicitly mentioned whether meaning is supposed to be a sound or a non-substantial entity.[25] Nevertheless, later he concludes that signification is a function of acoustic differences: ‘Saussure taught that the important thing about a word is not the sound in itself, but those phonic differences which allow this word to be distinguished from all other words, for it is these which are the bearers of meaning’.[26] The problem here is in the attitude, which Saussure put forward: a sign has two sides, non-substantial and substantial.

This problematic heterogeneous attitude toward language remains the same afterwards, and the scientific fact of non-substantiality that Saussure established for the ontology of language becomes secondary and sometimes forgotten. Consequently, this flawed assumption became dominant that a signifier is primarily a phenomenal entity even when ‘the Saussurean model’ explained. For example, the ‘Introduction’ to The Linguistics Encyclopedia, writes that ‘Saussure goes on to characterize langue as a “social fact”, that is a socially sanctioned system of signs each of which represents a conventionalized (“arbitrary”) fusion of sound (the signifier) and meaning (the signified).[27] Or for the explanation of ‘moneme’ it is written that ‘the minimal linguistic form that is meaningful, or the minimal significant unit, is known as a moneme, which consists of the association between a signifier (vocal expression) and a signified (semantic content)’.[28] Thus, the signified becomes the ‘content’ of the reified signifier (supposed to be a substantial entity), and language is viewed as a heterogeneous combination of phenomenal sounds and their meanings, and not as a whole. In this way, the relationship of a signifier and its signifieds can never be explained rationally within language, and the use of the word ‘content’ can only spatially (figuratively) connect the absent signified/s to a sound.

Against Saussure’s emphasis on non-substantiality, the methodological precedence, especially for signification, is given to sounds or substance. Instead of analyzing and developing an understanding of sign and signification based upon signifier being a psychical impression which can be articulated or equally written, the reverse order became dominant. I would like to add another endorsing quotation by Saussure: ‘in any case, it is impossible that sound, as a material element, should in itself be part of the language. Sound is merely something ancillary, a material the language uses. […] Linguistic signals are not in essence phonetic. They are not physical in any way. They are constituted solely by differences which distinguish one such sound pattern from another’.[29]

The mystery of the mechanism of the relationship of ‘sound and meaning’ or rather the relationship of language and sound/marks is in need of further investigation. I relate this problem to another ontologically neglected issue. The more inclusive topic for investigation is the question of the relationship between a non-substantial sign and a thing-in-itself (as some part of the phenomenal world, which includes writing/speech and their constituents). There seems to be some sort of connection between a sign and the thing-in-itself in an immediate physical context, but does this mean that language or even the sign is essentially referential? Or can the question of reference finds its relevance in the context of speech and writing as functional issues on a social level?

The question of reference

Jean Aitchison, by referring to W. V. Quine’s ‘The Inscrutability of Reference’ (1968) also published under the title ‘Ontological Relativity’, writes about the problem in 2003: ‘we shall not be particularly concerned with what has been called ‘the inscrutability of reference’, the complex relationship between a word and the real-world thing it labels. Most people assume that words are linked to things via ‘concepts’, though exactly how is unclear’.[30] This means that the ‘relationship between a word and the real-world thing it labels’ is somehow accepted as an unquestionable fact; only its ‘complex’ process has remained unexplained.

It is worthwhile to have a brief examination of Quine’s article to find out about his conceptualization of ‘reference’, and conclusions he makes. Primarily, he understands a word as being composed of two ‘parts’, namely semantic and phonetic. Through some examples especially in the case of translation, he differentiates between meaning and reference and adds that ‘indeterminacy’ as a general condition is not in ‘just meaning, but extension; reference’. [31] To clarify the issue, he asserts that a word such as ‘rabbit’ has several meanings, but it is ‘meaningless’ to say ‘rabbit’ or ‘rabbit part’ refers to rabbit or rabbit parts. Quine clarifies this situation pragmatically by a situational question in which it seems that some words refer to corporeal things; however, he immediately interrupts this misunderstanding: ‘when we ask, Does “rabbit” really refer to rabbits?, some one can counter with the question: Refer to “rabbits” in what sense of “rabbits”? thus launching a regress; and we need the background language to regress into. The background language gives the query sense, if only relative sense; sense relative in turn to it, this background language’.[32] He develops this issue in his article and poses the possibility of ‘infinite regress’ into language.

As Quine understands language as a heterogeneous combination of sound and meaning, he presents his theorization in the triangle of meaning, sound and reference, and thus the question of reference is left for further ontological developments and conclusion. However, even in this context, two issues in Quine’s pragmatic approach become clear: that even in the context of the question of reference (which presupposes that there is already an established reference there, which only needs explanation), language refers to only language, which Quine interprets as regression to background language. And emphatically what creates sense or meaning of a word is other words within language: ‘we need the background language to regress into. The background language gives the query sense’. In fact, this infinite regression is an unavoidable condition of understanding and knowledge, but Quine presents no prevailing formulation or generalizations beyond the border of exemplifications.

On the basis of Quine’s background language and infinite regression, we can add another quality to the non-substantiality. This is to say that language is also non-referential. This proposition is reinforced if we further think that non-substance and substance can have no corporeal connection or continuity in each other since connection is only another signifier which is functional when a phenomenal issue is explained. Even when we talk about the connection or reference of a signifier to other signifiers (signifieds), it should be remembered that we are rationalizing and expounding a realm which is not phenomenal. Therefore, when Quine, in the context of his heterogeneous understanding of language, writes about the complexities and obscurities in learning the ‘semantic part’ of a word which is ‘not directly ascribing observable traits to things’[33], he is in practice confirming the fact that at least the semantic part has no connection to corporeality.

Although Quine’s explication is revealing, the ontological study of the relationship between the non-substantial sign and the substantial object still needs more general explicit and ontological clarification.

To further develop and clarify the relation of a signifier and a corporeal object (supposedly the reference), I apply Heidegger’s disclosure of this issue and his description of understanding and interpretation. Initially, a situation should be set in which a person faces an object in front of himself or herself. Heidegger then writes:

When we have to do with anything, the mere seeing of the Things which are closest to us bears in itself the structure of interpretation, and in so primordial a manner that just to grasp something free, as it were, of the “as”, requires a certain readjustment. When we merely stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more. This grasping which is free of the ‘as’, is a privation of the kind of seeing in which one merely understands. It is not more primordial than that kind of seeing, but is derived from it. If the ‘as’ is ontically unexpressed, this must not seduce us into overlooking it as a constitutive state for understanding, existential and a priori.[34]

When a corporeal object becomes the object of the senses, this is only the process of perception and a biological activity. The person at this stage is only focusing his or her senses on the object. The element of understanding is accordingly added when we have ‘as’ in mind within the system of language. In other words, the process in which there is an onject before a person and he chooses the relevant word indicates that the perceiver understands the entity ‘as’ a word. The signifier is not attached to the object of sense perception, but that it is given to the entity by the person, the linguistic perceiver. Understanding begins (essentially simultaneously with perception) when the person chooses the right signifier in his or her mind and hence initiates understanding and consequently interpretation, which is the expansion of understanding. In fact, understanding is a linguistic activity. The signifier chosen is always within language, and therefore it is already connected to its signifieds (other signifiers) and already understood.

Heidegger in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ explains this condition further by explication of the concept of ‘projection’. In the above situation, the signifier and its signifieds are projected to the object or to the things-in-themselves. However, it should be noticed that Heidegger uses a spatial term ‘projection’ to explain a linguistic (non-substantial and temporal) issue. Indeed, if it is remembered that understanding takes place in the non-substantial phenomenon, it becomes clear that no corporeal act ever happens. Understanding, as being purely linguistic, does not even involve speech or writing although it can be articulated or written. Therefore, we should bear in mind that an object never turns out to be a sign to signify, and obviously the object in itself cannot logically be a part of language.[35] In other words, things-in-themselves and phenomenal occurrences have no meaning of their own since meaning or signification is only linguistic. In the meantime, understanding and its expansion, interpretation, should not be assumed the same as perception, especially visual perception. Seeing is not the same as knowing. However, the equilibrium of seeing and knowing is one of the most inviolable prejudiced presuppositions. Derrida, while analysing this issue in some detail, writes: ‘the blind do not want to know, or rather, would like not to know: that is to say, not to see. Idein, eidos, idea: the whole history, the whole semantics of the European idea, in its Greek genealogy, as we know – as we see – relates seeing to knowing’.[36]

This is practically a reduction; the reduction of the thing-in-itself to language in order to become a thing with identity. This reduction is called ‘transcendental reduction’ by Heidegger: ‘the transcendental reduction to absolute subjectivity gives and secures the possibility of grounding the objectivity of all objects […] in their valid structure and consistency, that is, in their constitution, in and through subjectivity’.[37] The ground of being of an object, its being-present and even its consistency and structure in time and space occur on the absolute subjectivity (non-substantiality) of language.[38]

The ontological non-relation of the signifier with speech/writing

Now I return to the question of the relationship of the non-substantial sign with phenomenal sounds and marks on paper or screen. As explained, one projects the linguistic sign on phenomenal objects to make his or her own understanding. It is also the same for the phenomenal sound and writing. When one hears a sound or looks at a mark then a linguistic sign is projected on that phenomenal object. In practice, there is no difference between projecting signs on objects of perception. What a speaker produces as speech and a writer as writing are phenomenal things and therefore not ontologically some part of language. One, including the speaker and the writer, gives or projects signs on them and makes his or her understanding. These phenomenal objects can only potentially be signifiers if they are read and interpreted as signifiers. That is why we sometimes seem to have perceptually read a text, but if we have not projected the linguistic signs on it, we have to read it again. Equally, someone says something but if we miss to project the signs on the sounds, as we hear them, then we should ask for repetition.

Elaborations on the condition of understanding and interpretation

The source of knowledge is then the non-substantial language where a signifier is connected to other signifiers (signifieds) to make signification possible. In other words, what is called meaning belongs to language, and not to the speaker/writer, speech/text or listener/reader. Instead, speeches/texts have social functions, and things are done by them. (The questions of functions upon correct ontological assumptions are left for further re-evaluation.) Moreover, the signifier is already interpreted because it is always located within language and connected to other signs. But this connection is not without pattern. Any sign always occurs in systematic linguistic constructions (discourses). This is what Quine calls regression to background language.

In Being and Time, Heidegger makes clear that in interpretation, signification is not projected on ‘some naked thing’, but ‘when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world’.[39] He adds that interpretation cannot occur without presuppositions, and it is based on ‘fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception’. Hence, it is clear that interpretation works within the domain of what is already understood; hence it may mistakenly be considered as a ‘circulus vitiosus’. Then Heidegger asks: ‘how is it to bring any scientific results to maturity without moving in a circle, especially if, moreover, the understanding which is presupposed still operates within our common information about man and the world?’[40] He explains that if we take this circle as a vicious one and try to avoid it then the act of understanding itself is not correctly understood. Instead, as he points out, ‘what is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way. This circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move’.[41]

Hans-Georg Gadamer calls this state of understanding and interpretation the ‘hermeneutical circle’. Gadamer also reminds his readers that Heidegger is not prescribing any method for understanding and interpretation but is describing what is actually taking place in these linguistic acts which occur as if in a circle which ‘possesses an ontologically positive significance’.[42] This is to say that for the reader/observer – the linguistic perceiver – things themselves are like texts on which one initially projects linguistic signs. This initial projection is ‘done’ while the signifier projected cannot be in a vacuum (out of language and far from other signifiers). The signifier away from other signifiers is only a sound perceived, but to become a signifier the sound goes beyond the level of phenomenality and sense perception, and gets connected to other signifiers – while understanding has occurred before the act of projection.

Therefore, as Gadamer says, one approaches the text with certain expectations (fore-projection) which are continually ‘revised’ during the process of reading. The revision of the fore-projection is also a projection of a new meaning to the text; hence, ‘interpretation begins with fore-conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones. This constant process of new projection constitutes the movement of understanding and interpretation’.[43]

It should be added that the circle, into which not any random type of knowledge can enter, practically makes a discourse, a linguistic construction. Foucault explains that a discourse is ‘constituted by a group of sentences of signs, in so far as they are statements [the modality of existence], that is in so far as they can be assigned particular modalities of existence’ or ‘the group of statements that belong to a single system of formation’, e.g., ‘clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse’.[44] One example makes it further clear.

Heidegger in ‘Modern Sciences, Metaphysics and Mathematics’ explains ‘mathēmata’ or the ‘mathematical’ as ‘that about things which we really already know’, giving this example: ‘we can count three things if we already know three.’ Heidegger concludes that ‘The number is something in the proper sense learnable, a mathēma, i.e., something mathematical. Things do not help us to grasp three as such, i.e., threeness’.[45] In other words, the signifier ‘three’ is already understood within the discourse of mathematics, then it was projected on things to form our counting. In fact, threeness is not there as phenomenality but another signifier within a discourse, which can be projected on things themselves.

Formulation of knowledge and its explication

According to the postmetaphysical epistemological developments explained above, the formula of knowledge can be presented thus:

S = [S1, S2, S3 …] where S stands for signifier and brackets indicate the hermeneutical circle which forms any discourse (a linguistic constructions) and acts as the ‘fore-projection’ or ‘background language’.

As an example, on the basis of this formula, I try to define the ‘literary’ and ‘literature’ as follows: the question ‘what is literature?’ has its own presuppositions. It is raised on the grounds of metaphysics and tends to require a metaphysical answer. On the one hand, the question conveys the presupposition of approaching the object of study as an entity since the initiative is about whatness. On the other, there is the writing/text as a phenomenal object or an entity. As a result, there appears the metaphysical tendency to attribute literariness to writing as a phenomenal object. However, it can be realized that the phenomenal entity must be primarily identified as writing; one can identify writings as writing without reading the black marks on the paper (the immediacy of the projection of the word ‘writing’ on the thing perceived). This identification is understanding on a primordial level, on an essential ground, and therefore an ontological issue. In this way writings are all phenomenally the same. They are also read in the same way: linguistic signs are projected on them. But where are the differences? They are in language and more precisely they are produced in discourses. The differentiation of these discourses is not on the basis of what they are since they are only linguistic constructions; language is language. The differences, which are linguistic in nature, should be understood by something other than its primordial being – not by the ontology of non-substantial language. The only possibility that remains is a study in terms of functions of language which reveals itself more clearly in terms of discourses. Thus the level of investigation moves from ontological issues of language to the functions of language, and it is more precise to avoid such combinations as ‘the ontology of literature’ since discussing the functional issues is not the same as discussing ontological issues such as being, time, understanding or interpretation. Now it is possible to move the investigation further into the hermeneutic circle of understanding and interpretation and apply the logic that Heidegger applied to explain arts: ‘what art is should be inferable from the work. What the work of art is we can come to know only from the essence of art. Anyone can easily see that we are moving in a circle’.[46] I can assume that the argument is now logically shifted into a discourse which is called the literary where the identification of writing as a literary work occurs. The discourse identifies writings as literature. It brings writings into its sphere and categorizes them as literature in such a way that it has already defined the presuppositions of the literary. This bringing of writing into the literary discourse occurs on the basis of some social authority present principally in the institutions of a society such as publishers and academies especially literature departments.

The reversal of the flow of knowledge

Gadamer, while explaining hermeneutics adds that he is not presenting a methodology but is offering an understanding of understanding as it is: ‘if we make understanding the object of our reflection, the aim is not an art or technique of understanding, such as traditional literary and theological hermeneutics sought to be’.[47]

However, in this context, I argue that when the truth about understanding and interpretation is known, and when the immediacy of any experience is explained as above, it produces a temporal frame of reference, which becomes the linguistic foundation of any piece of knowledge with the formula that I presented. This will regulate the production of ‘new’ knowledge and, if need be, shall rectify knowledge produced in the past at any present moment when knowledge is being formed in one’s mind. This regulation and rectification as a whole is practically and therefore historically the reversal of knowledge. This is to say that it was the epistemology of metaphysics (in conformity with commonsensical and ideological understanding) that made it acceptable that knowledge flows from phenomenal things to man, or that the word represents the thing, the reified truth or an intention existing independent of the language. In a sharp contrast, the postmetaphysical understanding reverses this order (hence the withdrawal of knowledge): it is the word which is projected to the world and things-in-themselves. This issue is also reflected in linguistics: ‘whether we take the signification or the signal, the language includes neither ideas nor sounds existing prior to the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonetic differences arising out of that system.’[48]

In other words, the epistemological knowledge which is now spread all over the world practically reverses the order of metaphysics – no matter it is conscious or not. The methodological precedence is, therefore, given to language (not to perception or anything else), and the direction of understanding is entirely reversed. As a result, if in a discourse perception becomes a relevant issue, it should also follow the direction of the word; perception also observes the direction from a person to corporeality. An object can never intrude perceptual consciousness of a person, and it cannot be considered as a cause for one’s consciousness.

Significance and consequences

The significance of the epistemological reversal, as a correction made to the ground of knowledge and as an unprecedented phenomenon in the history, can be multi-faceted. I would like to add a few lines for further theoretical developments within the academic discourse.

The epistemological correction is dealing with the historically located problem of the human sciences that Gadamer reveals: ‘the logical self-reflection that accompanied the development of the human sciences in the nineteenth century is wholly governed by the model of natural sciences’.[49] In other words, the human sciences have been developed on a theoretical basis which presupposes that the methodology and the object of study is similar to natural sciences. Gadamer further explains that John Stuart Mill’s inductive methodology which establishes ‘similarities, regularities, and conformities to law’ was applied to the human sciences with the presupposition that this method was similarly ‘valid’. Gadamer adds that the use of inductive method has little to do with ‘metaphysical assumptions’, and therefore it is not important how the phenomena which is studied is understood in itself.

The transmutation is largely focused on the human sciences which are in need of radical revisions. This is practically confirmed by the developments of interdisciplinarity and primary signals of the ‘unease in classification’. Habermas properly asks: ‘is it not an illusion to believe that texts by Freud and texts by Joyce can be sorted according to characteristics that definitively identify them as theory on the one hand and as fiction on the other?’.[50] This in general modifies giving priority to the inductive method of analysis; methodologically a deductive logic becomes applicable since, for any scientific research, language (a whole and not only categorical manifestations within discourses) and then teleology become initially fundamental.

This situation which began with an unease in classification, even without any field research, indicates an intensification of the conflict between the established academic categories upon the basis of incorrect epistemological assumptions which are inherited from the past, and the development of epistemological knowledge which negates those assumptions from which knowledge departed. The synthesis, which is to change the categories, is reasonably calculable; however, the ‘resistance’ to this historical development might have led to an academic corruption which threatens the raison d’etre of academic knowledge in general.

Finally, what I cannot neglect is the question of the impact of transmutation on what is called social. How is it going to change the world? How has it already changed the world? Aren’t we located on a transitional point? Is this transitional point a renaissance: ‘to the extent that philosophical thinking is still attempted, it manages only to attain an epigonal renaissance’[51]? Isn’t it the birth of neo-humanism? I would like to end this article by a quotation from Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’: ‘the descent, particularly where man has strayed into subjectivity, is more arduous and more dangerous than the ascent’.[52]

Bibliography

Aitchison, Jean, Words in the Mind: an Introduction to Mental Lexicon (Third ed) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)

Derrida, Jacques, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. by P. Brault and M. Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking’, in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. by W. M. Hohengarten (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 28-53

Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Philosophy and Sciences as Literature?’, in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. by W. M. Hohengarten (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 205-227

Hashemi, Mansour, 'The Metaphysical Problem of the Concept of Intentionality in English Literary Theory: an Epistemological Analysis' (unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Birmingham, UK, 2004)

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)

Heidegger, Martin, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, in Basic Writings (Revised and Expanded Edition), ed. by David Farrell Krell, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 431-49

Heidegger, Martin, ‘Modern Sciences, Metaphysics and Mathematics’, in Basic Writings (Revised and Expanded Edition), ed. by D. F. Krell, trans. by W. B. Barton and V. Deutsch (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 271-305

Heidegger, Martin, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings (Revised and Expanded Edition), ed. by David Farrel Krell, trans. by Frank A. Capuzzi & J. Glen Gray (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 213-65

Heidegger, Martin, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. by P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999)

Heidegger, Martin, The Principle of Reason, trans. by R. Lilly (Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 1996)

Jakobson, Roman, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning with a Preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. by J. Mepham (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1978)

Jameson, Fredric, The Prison-House of Language: a Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1972)

Malmkjær, Kirsten (ed), The Linguistics Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 2004)

Norris, Christopher, ‘Philosophy of Science as History of the Present: Quantum Theory, Anti-Realism, and Paradigm Change’, New Formations: A Journal of Cultural/Theory/Politics (Complex Figures), 49 (Spring 2003), 14-31

Quine, W. V., ‘The Inscrutability of Reference’ in Semantics: an Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, ed. by D. D. Steinberg and L. A. Jakobovits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 142-154

Rorty, Richard, ‘De Man and the American Cultural Left’ in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers (Vol 2) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 129-139

Last edited: 07/10/2005
[1] I presented a synopsis of this theory to the subscribers of Adabiyat listserv, Emory University, on my webpage on 10/08/2003. The relevant correspondence should still be available on the following URL: http://www.listserv.emory.edu/archives/adabiyat.html
[2] epistemology ‘has to do with issues of knowledge, with the scope and limits of human understanding, and hence with questions of scientific truth and method’.

[3] Jürgen Habermas, ‘Themes in Postmetaphysical Thinking’, in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. by W. M. Hohengarten (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 28.
[4] Ibid., p. 34.
[5] Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Collins, 1977), p. 155.
[6] Ibid., 156.
[7] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 12-13.
[8] Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: a Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. vi-vii.
[9] Richard Rorty, ‘De Man and the American Cultural Left’ in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers (Vol 2) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 132.
[10] Martin Esslin, 'Introduction', in Absurd Drama (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 13-15.
[11] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Random House, 1936.
[12] Ontology is the discourse which deals with the truth of Being (ta onta) and beings and the primordial issues of human existence.
[13] For a detailed account see: Mansour Hashemi, ‘The Metaphysical Problem of the Concept of Intentionality in English Literary Theory: an Epistemological Analysis’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, The University of Birmingham, 2004), pp. 21-32.
[14] ‘origin’ here should be understood in metaphysical terms.
[15] Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 278-80.
[16] F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. by Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 120.
[17] Ibid., 66.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Primordial in the sense that it occurs at a primary level of human beings’ existence
[20] Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ in Language in Literature, ed. by Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 66-69.
[21] Saussure, General Linguistics, p. 111.
[22] Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning with a Preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. by J. Mepham (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1978), p. xv.
[23] Ibid., 66-67.
[24] Ibid., 45.
[25] Ibid., 23.
[26] Ibid., 41.
[27] Kirsten Malmkjær, The Linguistics Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 2004), p. xxxiv.
[28] Ibid., 160.
[29] Saussure, General Linguistics, pp. 116-17.
[30] Jean Aitchison, Words in the Mind: an Introduction to Mental Lexicon (Third ed) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 43.
[31] W. V. Quine, ‘The Inscrutability of Reference’ in Semantics: an Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, ed. by D. D. Steinberg and L. A. Jakobovits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 146.
[32] Ibid., 153.
[33] Ibid., 143.
[34] Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 190.
[35] See also Paul de Man’s ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’ in Aesthetic Ideology for a detailed analysis of the epistemology which believes that ‘the fountains of knowledge […] are in things themselves’.
[36] Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, trans. by P. Brault and M. Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 12.
[37] Martin Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’, in Basic Writings (Revised and Expanded Edition), ed. by David Farrell Krell, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 439-40.
[38] Heidegger posits the origins of this reduction in its process of historical development from Descartes’s ‘ego cogito’ to Husserl’s call ‘to the matter itself’.
[39] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 190-91.
[40] Ibid., 194.
[41] Ibid., 195.
[42] Gadamer, Truth and Method, p.266.
[43] Ibid., 267.
[44] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 120-21.
[45] Martin Heidegger, ‘Modern Sciences, Metaphysics and Mathematics’, in Basic Writings (Revised and Expanded Edition), ed. by D. F. Krell, trans. by W. B. Barton and V. Deutsch (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 276.
[46] Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Basic Writings (Revised and Expanded Edition), ed. by David Farrell Krell, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 144.
[47] Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. xxiii.
[48] Saussure, General Linguistics, p.118.
[49] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), p. 3.
[50] Jürgen Habermas, 'Philosophy and Sciences as Literature?', in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. by W. M. Hohengarten (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 206.
[51] Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy’, p. 433.
[52] Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings (Revised and Expanded Edition), ed. by David Farrel Krell, trans. by Frank A. Capuzzi & J. Glen Gray (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 254.