Mohanty’s Account of the Complementarity of Descriptive and Interpretive Phenomenology

Abstract

Toward the end of situating the results of my study within the context of the second variation of the second tendency, noted above, in the literature addressing the Husserl-Heidegger relation, I will consider Mohanty’s careful and insightful attempts to seek a rapprochement between descriptive and hermeneutical phenomenology. He argues that

[b]oth sorts of phenomenology—descriptive as well as interpretive—can be either naive or self-critical. When they are naive, they perceive each other as opposed. When they are self-critical, they recognize each other as complementary, and, in fact, as mutually inseparable.¹

As a result, “phenomenology and hermeneutics stand in a peculiar dialectical relation to each other.”² However, unlike Ricoeur’s formulation of a dialectic between the two in terms of the reciprocal “presupposition” of the intentional uncovering of meaning and Auslegung, in Mohanty’s formulation, this dialectic has its basis in the intentional “dialectic of reflection and reflected upon.”³ Such a dialectic has as its terms, on the one hand, the dimension of transcendental subjectivity whose corporeal, historical and linguistic excess makes reflection and transcendental philosophy possible; and, on the other hand, the impossibility of “a complete coincidence between reflection and the reflected upon,”⁴ which discloses the situatedness of consciousness in sedimented (and hence, in some sense, “opaque”⁵) meanings, and its consequent necessary involvement in the hermeneutical circle.⁶