[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

cannot be challenged and is not susceptible of being displaced by subsequent, moredeveloped and sophisticated interpretations. Any given interpretation, no matter how satisfying,is only, as James said, a provisional resting-place. “The very idea of a definitiveinterpretation,” Gadamer insists, “seems to be intrinsically contradictory. Interpretation,”as he goes on to say, “is always on the way” -- such that “the word interpretation pointsto the finitude of human being and the finitude of human knowing.” (RAS, 105) It is, inshort, the nature of experience and interpretation that there can be no such thing as “thelast word.” (Cf. GOC, 60). As the phenomenological psychologist Eugene Gendlin hasshown in a revealing study of the relation between experience and expression (based on hisown clinical experience as a practicing psychologist), it is the very nature of experiencethat the “felt meaning” of any experience can always be articulated in ever more refinedways; one “vital characteristic of experiencing,” as Gendlin points out, is that “any datumof experiencing—any aspect of it, no matter how finely specified—can be symbolized andinterpreted further and further.” 155 Adding to Gendlin’s observations on this matter,David Michael Levin points out that “the relation between experience and the languageof its articulation is an ongoing process of hermeneutic disclosure, whereby (1) languageforms the experience it is articulating in the process of articulating it and (2) experiencecontinues to talk back to the words that have been used to render it articulate.” 156The unavoidable incompleteness, of any attempt at bringing our lived experience to theproper expression of its own meaning, that Gendlin has highlighted, is itself, as it were,empirical confirmation of Ricoeur’s basic conviction that in human existence there is asuper-abundance of meaning to the abundance of non-sense (there is no experience thatcannot be interpreted and reinterpreted productively, “further and further”). In any event,what the phenomenology of perception -- that of both Merleau-Ponty and William James --has shown is that, at its most basic level, the “stream of consciousness” is not the chaoticjumble of discrete “sense data” that British empiricism took it to be (or as James said ofKant’s metaphysical epistemology, “There is no originally chaotic manifold to be reducedto order” 157 ) but is, rather, from the very beginning, the lived experience of an ordered,meaningful world. And as Merleau-Ponty said, “Because we are in the world, we arecondemned to meaning.” (PP, xix) “The sensible,” as he also said, “is, like life, a treasuryever full of things to say.” (VI, 252) This is, of course, something that poets and greatnovelists like Marcel Proust have always known. 158In an arresting image, Merleau-Ponty once provided this description of the humansituation: “Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expansesof darkness.” (SNS, 4) And thus, as he also said: “The highest form of reason borders on(est voisine avec) unreason.” (SNS, 4) Hermeneutics’s postulate of meaningfulness does notpreclude it from recognizing the existence of a kind of radical ignorance and uncertaintyin human existence; there is, as Jean Grondin rightly observes, “no triumphalism ofreason” to be found here. 159 Hermeneutics’s presumption of meaning, though rational,155Eugene T. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and PsychologicalApproach to the Subjective (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), 16; see also idem,“Experiential Phenomenology,” in Maurice Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).156Levin, “Liberating Experience from the Vice of Structuralism,” 96-7.157James, The Principles of Psychology, 1:363.158In his Recherche, Proust describes many experiences of this sort, such as the one occasioned bythe church towers of Martinville which he glimpsed in the course of an automobile ride, or the three treesnear Balbec that he once sighted; see Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols. (Paris:Éditions Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954), 1:180 and 1:717-19.159See Jean Grondin, “Gadamer on Humanism,” in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-GeorgGadamer, 167.47