A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Development

A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Development

Michael L. Fitzgerald The first part of this chapter examines two predominant conceptions of development, the mainstream or ‘positivist’ and the anti-development or ‘historicist’, to show how neither gives an adequate account of the rela-tionship between development and freedom, because neither properly accounts for how understanding development both constitutes, and is constituted by, development. That is, neither properly accounts for how such understanding is immanent in its historical context, yet also tran-scends it. Positivist development negates the historical context, in which, and as which, development happens, in favour of the notion of a linear, universal series of stages of history or social change, and thus holds that knowledge about development transcends every historical context. His-toricist development, on the other hand, regards development as deter-mined by the historically singular and hence incommensurable contexts in which it occurs, and thus regards understanding of development as immanent in such contexts. In both, development is theoretically objecti-fied in a way that forestalls the possibility of transformation in the con-cept of development itself. Thus, both conceptions preclude the possibil-ity of the unprecedented in development. Yet, arguably, it is unprecedent-edness, rather than predetermined standards or given historical traditions, that constitutes development.

The second part of the chapter argues that a phenomenological herme-neutic approach to development is a way to grasp how the possibility of the unprecedented is constitutive of historical singularity, and thus to grasp how ‘the history we ourselves “are”’1 is both constituted by histori-cal context and involves understanding it. Such understanding is an enactment of possibilities, and thus transforms the historical context. It is the possibility of transformation in how development is understood that constitutes the freedom of development. But, as such transformation in thinking, it cannot be known in advance, and thus cannot be grasped as a (theoretical) object. Instead, it needs to be approached as a phenomenon in the phenomenological sense, which includes how it appears or how we

98 Michael L. Fitzgerald

have access to it. Phenomenological inquiry does not presuppose the ‘content’ of what is to be elucidated in the inquiry, nor does it presuppose that the inquiry is separate from the phenomenon into which it inquires. Rather, inquiry is understood to belong constitutively to the phenomenon and thus to disclose it in the inquiry, as a concrete enactment or actualisa-tion of the phenomenon. Such an approach, I suggest, is a way to under-stand how development always involves the transformation of the con-cept of development itself, and thus to approach the meaning of devel-opment in a way that neither determines it in advance, nor binds it to the past.

1. Positivist and Historicist Conceptions of Development 1.1 Positivist Development My use of the term ‘positivist’ to refer to the mainstream conception of development draws on M. P. Cowen and R. W. Shenton’s Doctrines of Development, in which they ‘take the modern idea of development back to where it was invented, amidst the throes of early industrial capitalism in Europe’.2 In its various incarnations, this conception involves the notion that social change requires management or direction—an ‘inten-tion to develop’3—for human improvement to result, whether this is attributed to development experts, the developmental state, institutions, or grassroots movements. And, because such change is considered to be governed by universally applicable laws, the development of each state or society is considered to be an instantiation of this process. Development is seen as a process to be brought about by the application of knowledge of the regularities of social change, because progress in itself is neither inevitable nor necessarily conducive to social well-being. Although potentially orderly in an empirically determinable way, the actual disor-der of progress can and does lead to social immiseration. The human improvement, both intellectual (or ‘moral’) and material, that develop-ment aims at is considered essential to the realisation of freedom. How-ever, this conception of development itself is not considered to be one it is possible to freely transform. This conception of development is evi-dent, for example, in the World Bank’s World Development Report 1980:

The Report draws on years of World Bank experience—in the analysis of projects, sectors and national economies, and in research—to exam-

A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Development 99

ine the causes and effects of progress in human development and what it takes to implement successful programs in this area.4

The specific conjunction in the 19th century that occasioned the positivist conception of development was the social disorder attendant on capitalist industrialisation, ‘which, it was believed, embodied no developmental purpose and whose destructive dimension was poverty and the unem-ployment of the potential of productive power’.5 Capitalist industrialisa-tion was regarded as a process of social change that, although it gave rise to a dramatic increase in material production, did not result in human improvement, as was evident in the effect it had on the labouring popula-tion. The potential this process had for improvement, positivists such as the Saint-Simonians and Comte argued, could only be realised if it were given guidance in each instance where the process was operative. Such guidance or intention to develop depended on knowledge of the process, and thus required a positive or empirical science of history (or ‘social dynamics’) to determine the causal regularities of social change, allow for prediction, and thus indicate the intervention necessary for future social improvement. This is the fundamental conceptual basis of positivism: ‘a presumed rejection of metaphysics, claims for empirical method and protocols for prediction’.6

This conception can be found in the mainstream UN-era development focus on poverty as the problem that development is to solve.7 What is addressed is the same conjunction of capitalist industrialisation and social disorder in those states or societies that are considered to have yet to solve this problem. Not only does mainstream development, therefore, claim that more knowledge about poverty is required, it also commonly attributes failures of development intervention to lack of comprehension and thus political will on the part of those who are to be developed. Far less often is it attributed to the ‘developers’; but even then the cause is held to be lack of sufficient knowledge of how to bring about develop-ment. This, too, is characteristic of the positivist conception of develop-ment. Development is considered to be an objective process that has the same course in all societies, and which requires guidance in terms of the application of knowledge about development to instances where the process of social change has not resulted in human improvement. Essen-tially, this has meant guidance from the rich countries, despite the various forms of the ‘new orthodoxy’8 that renounce or reject trusteeship ‘by


people who are neither of the state nor the Third World’,9 because these countries are considered to have solved the problem of capitalism and social disorder, and thus not only are ‘developed’, but also have the resources both to fund research and to institute development agencies.

Positivism depends on the notion that history and social existence can be investigated and explained in the same way the natural sciences inves-tigate nature. For example, Comte’s ‘sociology’ was aimed at ‘the dis-covery of the ‘laws of human social evolution”’10 or ‘the natural laws of social phenomena’,11 so as to enable society to use the ‘laws of human reason ... to organise itself anew on principles which will then have been ascertained and estimated’.12 These laws of social change, it was argued, could only be known through empirical scientific investigation, not by metaphysical or philosophical speculation. And this had been made possible by the course of history itself, particularly the ‘critical epoch’ of the 18th century that served to free such inquiry from metaphysical domination.13

By ‘development’, then, the positivists meant the reconciliation of progress and order. ‘Progress,’ Comte argued, ‘may be regarded simply as the development of Order; for the Order of nature necessarily contains within itself the germ of all possible Progress.…’14 The order of the complexity of the social is thus based on ‘the invariability of the laws of nature’. This reconciliation was ‘an instance of that necessary correlation of existence and movement’ found in the inorganic and the biological, which led Comte to argue that ‘Order is the condition of all Progress; Progress is always the object of Order’. The aim of Comte’s sociology was to give this correlation ‘a more definite shape’,15 such that the recon-ciliation of order and progress could be achieved through knowledge. As Cowen and Shenton put it:

Human capacity was singular in that it had the potential to understand and know the possibility of order. Knowing was the active pursuit of improvement. To reconcile social order with human progress social laws had to be comprehended by humanity in such a way as to ensure their applicability.16

What is central to the positivist conception of development, then, is the application of the positive science of social change. For development to happen, it is not sufficient just to comprehend the laws of social change; they must be applied or acted on, too. Only in this way would society or


humanity come to manifest the comprehension required. If such social laws are not comprehended, development cannot occur;

yet development is deemed necessary in order to comprehend them. On the other hand, the positivist science of social change had appeared without such knowledge. Therefore, why was this knowledge deemed a necessary condition for development? That is, positivism itself, as the comprehension of the order of progress, was a consequence of the non-positive, metaphysical stage. But how was this supposed to be possible on the positivist account itself? And why then was it presupposed that no further transformation of the understanding of social change would arise? This turns on the difference between the unprecedented possibility of positivism (or the ‘positive stage’) and the causal inevitability positivism ascribed, ex post facto, to its appearance.

The problem is how that which is scientifically ascertained is to be ap-plied. How is the scientific explanation of history to be operationalised, or brought to bear on history? Human improvement or ‘moral progress’ was held to require ordering through the intentional application of posi-tive knowledge. Yet society as a whole did not embody this knowledge and thus did not manifest the self-ordering of the positive ‘organic’ stage.17 The notion of trusteeship was the positivist solution to this con-ceptual problem: ‘Without trustees as the active agents of development, and a system of constructive order behind it, development remained only a latent possibility.’18 The intention to develop was to be embodied in, or entrusted to, some agency deemed capable of bringing it to bear upon the immanent process of social change:

The trusteeship of the few who possessed the knowledge to under-stand why development could be constructive, and were accepted as trustees because they were understood to be already developed, be-came integral to the intention to develop those who remained unde-veloped.19

The problem in the positivist conception of development is with the purported relationship between history and the intention to develop. The intention deemed necessary to order progress originates historically, where history is taken as a process of social change. As such, how is the intention supposed to transcend the process from which it originates? If the source of the intention lies elsewhere, whether with an intellectual elite or in what is actual in another society or state, as found in both


colonial and postcolonial—‘international’—development, then it is difficult to understand why this intention should be thought to correspond to a process that has not given rise to it. At issue here is the relation of history to the historical knowledge upon which the intention to develop is to be based. The intention to develop, or to order history, is taken to stand outside the history it is to order. As such, it is held to be unaffected by the intentional action undertaken, i.e. whatever historically occurs as a result of intentional action. Neither the intention, nor the knowledge upon which it is based, is considered to belong to or to be constitutive of the history that it studies and aims to affect. Thus, even though particular intentions to develop may be put in question in response to failures of development, the idea that development can be intended is not. Hence the repeated demand for new ‘paradigms’ or ‘models’ whereby to intend development once again. The possibility that development might involve the transformation of the conception of development itself is constantly precluded.20 What it means to be developed is already determined, for this capacity is what distinguishes the developed from the underdevel-oped; inquiry concerns only how it is to be brought about.

The positivist solution of this conceptual dilemma is to posit latency in society of the comprehension of social laws. As a latent possibility for all members of society, it was held to implicitly constitute their self-understanding, but this needed to be made explicit through intentional action (for instance, by eliminating religious superstitions and metaphysi-cal prejudices). However, such latency then becomes a presupposition, rather than being empirically observed, hence contradicting the tenets of positivism. And the way this plays out in practice and policy is repeated time and again with each formulation of the intent to develop: previous development (whether explicitly associated with intention or not) has failed to make the latent patent, or the implicit explicit, which failure is blamed on the body politic rather than on the problem of such intent.

Cowen and Shenton’s critique of the positivist conception of devel-opment shares with other recent critiques of mainstream development the renunciation of trusteeship.21 The ‘recent orthodoxy’, because of ‘the immediate historical experience of formal imperialism and its end’,22 not only renounces, but seeks to denounce, trusteeship ‘as the source of the domination of the Third World’23 enacted ‘by people who are neither of the state nor of the Third World’.24 Yet, Cowen and Shenton argue:


What implicitly appears is the original mid-nineteenth-century version of trusteeship untainted by imperialism. This was the positivist version which married a conception of science with that of state direction to secure the basis of social harmony through national development.25

The basis for Cowen and Shenton’s renunciation of trusteeship, in con-trast, is the way that it restricts the domain of development to the eco-nomic by subordinating ‘the intent to develop ... to an immanent process of development’.26 Drawing on Marx, they hold that ‘free development’ is only possible in an ‘expanded domain ... in which the intent to develop prevails over an immanent process’.27 But, arguably, the positivist con-ception restricts the domain of development in the way it separates social change from inquiry into social change, and thus precludes the possibility that development might include its own conceptual transformation. Although positivism sought to extend the domain of scientific inquiry to society and social change as a whole, the methodology of inquiry was held to transcend that domain itself. The inquiry into social change, or the knowledge of history, was not regarded as belonging to a historical context. In other words, positivism theoretically objectified society, thereby making the inquiry independent of its object.

1.2 Historicist Development In recent years, mainstream development has been criticised for its uni-versalism and conceptual hegemony, and the way ‘it converted history into a programme: a necessary and inevitable destiny’, in which the ‘industrial mode of production ... became the definition of the terminal stage of a unilinear way of social evolution’, thus ‘robbing peoples of different cultures of the opportunity to define their forms of social life’.28 For these ‘post-development’ critics, the hegemony of mainstream devel-opment arises in the conjunction of ‘capital, bureaucracy and science—the venerable trinity of Western modernization’29 or of ‘science, state and market’, which ‘are based on a system of knowledge about man, society and nature that claims validity everywhere and for everybody’.30 The target of such criticism is plainly the positivist conception of develop-ment, although this is not clearly recognised by these critics themselves. They call for ‘cultural evolution’ rather than ‘development’, to be made possible by ‘tearing apart the conceptual foundations’ of development so as ‘to open a window on to other, and different, ways of looking at the


world and to get a glimpse of the riches and blessings which survive in non-Western cultures in spite of development’.31 Change, they argue, should be seen as ‘a process rooted in the interpretation of each society’s history and cultural tradition’,32 rather than as the attempt to impose a purportedly universal set of values and institutions on diverse societies.

Despite their strictures against development, which it is claimed ‘stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape’,33 these critics do, in fact, have a concept of development, which reiterates the historicist conception that arose in the late-18th and 19th centuries, particularly in opposition to positivism and the positivist view of historical science. Their arguments against mainstream development, too, reiterate the historicist critique of Enlightenment and positivist universalism.

Historicism, for a number of reasons, can be regarded as a predomi-nantly German intellectual current. Such reasons include the political situation of German-speaking peoples in the 18th and 19th centuries, and their attitude towards history. Despite its opposition to positivism, his-toricism shared its anti-metaphysical attitude (although it was more sympathetic to idealism). In addition, the notion of historical science as objectively valid was fundamental to the rise of historicism, a notion that developed out of the positivist tendencies of Ranke and the Historical School. However, historicism shared the Historical School’s rejection of positivist methodology, with its insistence on causal explanation, arguing that history is a domain of meaning and thus must be understood rather than (causally) explained. Historical events are singular and meaningful, these thinkers argued, not instances that causally occur.

The term ‘historicism’ has been used in a number of different and, in-deed, contradictory ways. But, arguably, it refers to the notion that all knowledge and understanding is ultimately historical, for it always arises in a historically singular context and is a form of expression of that singularity. Historicists such as Herder, Ranke and Droysen argued that the concepts of both Enlightenment and positivist universalism were themselves historically contextual and, therefore, could not have the universal applicability claimed for them. Historical or cultural singularity, instead, had to be understood in terms of how an era or culture expresses itself in realising its inherent possibilities, and this is what constitutes development, in the historicist conception. As such, cultures or eras cannot be understood as instantiating ‘culture’ or ‘historical era’, but rather have to be understood in their singularity, and as a plurality. Fur-


thermore, the inheritance of traditions involves ongoing appropriation. Thus, for historicism, development is not an intentional activity, in the sense of aiming to bring about some desired state of affairs deemed to be objective improvement. Nor is it simply a process of social change that can be objectively determined. Rather, it consists in the way that histori-cal or cultural self-understanding deepens and broadens itself in the appropriation of the traditions that give rise to it, i.e. in the active inheri-tance and transmission of the historical context that constitutes such self-understanding. The study of history, thus, is of central importance, since in this discipline the observer is also the observed.34 As Dilthey put it:

Life, knowledge of life and the human studies are, thus, internally re-lated and constantly interact. The basis of the human studies is not conceptualization but total awareness of a mental state and its recon-struction based on empathy. Here life grasps life.35

And, as Heidegger would add in discussing Dilthey’s search for ‘how to see historical reality in its own reality’,36

When the history of the historical sciences is investigated, life itself is investigated with respect to its knowledge. As knowing, life investi-gates itself in its history. The knower is the known.37

Herder was one of the earliest proponents of this conception of develop-ment, and thus can be used to illustrate its main aspects. Dilthey traces back to Herder (along with Winkelmann and Möser) one of the ‘two great principles’ of the ‘new stage of historiography’ reached in the 18th cen-tury,

that of development. This attributes a new fundamental characteristic to the historical system of interactions, namely that it traverses, ac-cording to its inner nature, a series of changes each of which is only possible on the basis of the previous one.38

What constitutes development in the historicist sense, then, is the series of changes that arises in and from the internal cohesion of a culture or historical era, where each change is made possible by the enactment of the possibilities arising from the previous change. Such ‘sequentiality’ differs from the positivist sense, because the changes involved are neither causal, nor general. That is, they are changes that express the individual-ity of the culture or historical era in which they occur. As Herder put it,


‘Each man, each nation, each period, has its center of happiness within itself’,39 a ‘center’ whose unity was constituted by both the material and non-material aspects.40 What constituted cultures, he argued, was the context of inter-relationships, which had to be understood both structur-ally and historically. But cultural pluralism and historical individuality does not mean the separateness of cultures. As Barnard points out, one of Herder’s ‘major principles ... is that no single thing can be known or understood outside the context of its inter-relationships’.41 A culture’s individuality is thus constituted in relation to others. Nevertheless, such relationships themselves can only be understood and expressed in cultur-ally individual terms.

By ‘historical system of interactions’, Dilthey was referring to the other principle, that history was to be understood not in terms of specific occurrences, particularly political, but as a unified structure: ‘The con-crete pattern of interactions ... was divided up into individual systems ... embraced by the unity of an Age’, with the result that ‘the historian looks beyond political history to that of culture’.42 Together, these contributed to the appearance of what Heidegger calls a ‘historical worldview’ or ‘historical consciousness’, ‘in which knowledge of history determines one’s understanding of the world and the human situation’.43 In contrast to positivism, however, such historical consciousness is only found ‘when history is so viewed that one’s own reality also is seen within a historical context’.44

For Herder, cultures are inherently dynamic or developmental, such dynamism being internally generated by the inter-relationships of the parts that constitute a culture. Yet they are constituted by the ‘essential oneness of persistence and change’,45 in terms of the active inheritance of traditions. Cultural development, then, consisted in the ongoing tendency towards unity or coherence in ‘relations that arise from, but at the same time govern, the degree of reciprocal interaction between the parts’.46 Unlike the opposition between modernisation and tradition found in positivist development, however, for Herder tradition meant active inheri-tance. The twin notions of Bildung and Tradition express the sense of ‘continuous genesis’ of a culture and the ‘continuous merger of the old and the new’.47 Cultures continually refashion themselves, making what is latent in them patent through Bildung and Tradition. However, this could also lead to loss of cohesion, due to imbalance in the development of different parts of a culture.48 Like the positivists, Herder was con-


cerned with ‘the various forms of social disintegration associated with industrialization and urbanization’.49 However, this could not mean that development could be intended so as to preserve cultural cohesion, for the very terms of such intent would be expressive of the disintegration as which that culture was constituted.

Herder’s conception of development is one of the genesis and becom-ing of cultural cohesion, with the event of culture understood as the oneness of persistence and change, and of unity in diversity, where such cohesion is determined in each culture’s own terms, incommensurable with those of others, through the enactment of its possibilities. Under-standing a culture or historical era involves neither the determination of how it instantiates (or fails to instantiate) universal or general characteris-tics, nor the explanation of the causes that gave rise to it, but rather how it constitutes itself through its own self-understanding, which both origi-nates in the various cultural components and transforms them.50 Devel-opment thus does not mean traversing a predetermined series of stages, but rather the dynamics of the transmission and assimilation of tradition. As such, Herder considered a cultural whole to be ‘not a “thing” at all, but a relational event’,51 which ‘lays claim to its separate existence in terms of criteria of its own making’.52 In both aspects, then, the historicist conception of development points towards a non-objectifying understand-ing of cultures, societies or historical eras. Yet the very articulation of this seems inevitably to involve such objectification, because the con-cepts and language involved are themselves general.53

1.3 Conclusion Positivism erred, historicists argued, in thinking that the positive science of social change transcended its own historical context, and thus that development could have only one meaning, regardless of concrete his-torical context. The positivist classification and comparison of cultures, eras or societies in terms of how ‘advanced’ they were gave no considera-tion to the different ways they understood themselves. Positivism simply regarded the failure to grasp and articulate the positivist conception of development as itself an indication of ‘backwardness’ or underdevel-opedness. Historicism argued, instead, that this attested to the historical singularity of different eras or societies.

However, the historicist conception of development is problematic in a way complementary to the positivist conception. Historicism addresses


the historical contextuality of historical understanding but cannot make clear how this can be understanding. That is, it does not allow for the way such understanding, as an expression of historical context, can be ‘about’ anything. The difficulty for historicism is this: if all understanding is determined by historical context (in belonging to its context), then how is such understanding supposed to be about history? What exactly is it supposed to be directed towards that is in any way different from the understanding itself? How can the contextuality of the historical be understood, if there is no standpoint outside of the particular historical context whereby to grasp this? In other words, what possible meaning could ‘context’ and ‘contextuality’ have, on the historicist account? And how can there be any sense of development as transformation, whether from latent to patent cultural expression, or from implicit to explicit self-understanding? The problem in historicism is one of transcendence: how is historical understanding supposed to transcend its own historical con-text, such that it can be grasped and articulated as historical understand-ing?

With historicism, the difficulty is the reverse of that found in positiv-ism. The historicist conception of development does not consist in the intention to bring about understanding (of historical context), as does positivist development, but rather as the occurrence of it, which is only possible for those belonging to that historical context. The sense of his-toricist development is that it is singular, and that its singularity is consti-tuted by and expressed in the way an age (or culture) understands itself.

The positivist conception, in keeping with the positivist view of knowledge and inquiry, maintains that conceptualising and the conceptu-alised are distinct, i.e. that the former arises from empirical inquiry into the latter, which does not affect the latter. Thus, for positivism, develop-ment can be studied and known, but such study itself in no way consti-tutes development. The historicist conception challenges the positivist view, arguing that the conceptualised determines the conceptualising. For historicism, the way development is studied and known is an expression of it. The phenomenological hermeneutic critique of these approaches works in the interstices of both. Thus this approach to development seeks to show how, in being expressive of development, it understands it, and vice versa. The questions then are, how does this approach allow for the articulation of understanding that is directed towards what shapes it, and how does it enable the articulation of the unprecedented in doing so?


2. A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Development I have argued above that neither the positivist nor the historicist concep-tions of development properly or adequately accounts for how the con-ception of development belongs to the phenomenon of development itself. A phenomenological hermeneutical approach is a way to grasp and express this, and thus how understanding development is itself trans-formed. Phenomenological hermeneutics, as Heidegger articulates it, is an approach to understanding and expressing the human situation that does not theoretically objectify it but allows it to appear as a phenome-non, i.e. as ‘that which shows itself from itself’,54 in the inquiry itself. Phenomenological inquiry brings a phenomenon to light, or elucidates it, rather than determining it in advance. Methodologically (and for Heideg-ger phenomenology is ‘primarily a concept of method’55), the inquiry attests to the phenomenon as a phenomenon by demonstrating it in the inquiry. Therefore, such inquiry is not about an object that it stands outside of, but belongs to the phenomenon, and is thus hermeneutic in a double sense, because it both constitutes what it inquires about and inter-prets it in the inquiry.

Central to grasping phenomenological analysis or elucidation is the notion of ‘phenomenon’ and how this differs from an ‘object’. As a phenomenon, a being ‘can show itself from itself in diverse manners, in each case according to the kind of access to it’.56 In a purely formal, undetermined (rather than phenomenological) sense, a phenomenon is ‘an eminent way of encounter of something’.57 An object is, of course, some-thing encountered in a certain way. Therefore, the concept of an ‘object’ is encompassed by that of ‘phenomenon’. However, not all phenomena are objects. What characterises an object is that it is determined in ad-vance of any particular encounter of it in terms of what defines it as (an instance of) the object it is. This implies that there is an invariance to an object, such that it can be encountered as it is by different subjects. The way an object is encountered is thus in terms of the instantiation of defin-ing characteristics for a potential multiplicity of subjects.

Inquiry into objects is theoretical, because it ‘stands outside’ them. But there cannot be such inquiry into that which constitutes both the inquirer and the way it is encountered, or equivalently, into that which the inquirer belongs to. Thus, the kind of inquiry suitable for objects (e.g. the natural sciences) is not suitable for other phenomena. A different


approach has to be taken, in particular one that wards off theoretical objectification. The phenomenological approach aims at ‘“letting see” … from out of itself that which [it] is about’.58 Phenomenology, as a concept of method, ‘does not characterise the materially-filled what of the objects of philosophical research, but rather the how of this’,59 i.e. how objects appear as objects, and how we have access to them. Because it does not define in advance—i.e., theoretically objectify—the phenomena it inves-tigates, phenomenological inquiry ‘allows that which shows itself to be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself’, which for Heidegger is what the phenomenological maxim ‘to the things themselves!’ means.60 Phenomenological inquiry thus transforms the phenomenon into which it inquires. In theoretical inquiry, in contrast, the object is not transformed, which is the very meaning of ‘object’ in its modern sense.

The phenomenological method involves exhibition or demonstration of the phenomenon in the inquiry. Such demonstration belongs to the phenomenon: it is the approach through which the phenomenon shows itself. Thus, there is a dual hermeneutical sense to phenomenological inquiry: as descriptive, it is always interpretative; and because it belongs to the phenomenon it seeks to elucidate, its attestation of the phenomenon is constitutive of it: ‘The methodical sense of phenomenological descrip-tion is explication.... Phenomenology of the human situation is hermeneu-tics in the originary meaning of the word, whereupon it denotes the business of explication.’61

Because phenomenological inquiry is hermeneutical in the sense of including the inquirer and the inquiry in what it inquires about, it there-fore requires a certain ‘transparency’ about the situation of interpreta-tion62 or about the initial sense and direction in which the phenomenon is encountered. Although the phenomenon is not defined in advance, this does not mean that the inquiry is without presuppositions or ‘foreconcep-tions’.63 The phenomenon, as a phenomenon, is always encountered pre-phenomenologically in some way or other: ‘What is characteristic of all intuition’ is ‘that it actualizes itself in the context of a definite orientation and an anticipatory foreconception of the respective region of experi-ence.’64

In enacting phenomenological elucidation, it is essential to make this clear, because the elucidation is guided by the pre-phenomenological encounter and, thus, ‘is relative to [the particular] hermeneutical situa-tion’.65 Such situatedness means that the phenomenon is both that to-


wards which the inquiry is directed and that upon which it is based.66 Yet, phenomenological inquiry is itself a phenomenon. Since the phe-nomenon of phenomenological inquiry is to be demonstrated in the enactment of it, neither can this phenomenon be defined in advance. However, because the phenomenon is prepossessed at the start, i.e. is part of the motivation for phenomenological inquiry, what needs to be made clear is how this prepossession or forehaving belongs to or co-constitutes the situation of interpretation. That is, the situation needs to be made transparent: ‘A hermeneutics of the situation has to work out the trans-parency of its situation at the particular time and bring this hermeneutical transparency right into the starting point of interpretation’.67 The point of phenomenological inquiry is that in belonging to the phenomenon, it ‘repeats’ or ‘echoes’ it, and thus the transformation in inquiry is trans-formation of the 68 phenomenon.

The circularity of the approach is not vicious, however, because the ‘anticipatory foreconception’ is an implicit ‘having’ of the phenomenon. Something is encountered in a certain way, without the constitution of phenomenon and encounter being explicit. The task of phenomenological interpretation is to make the implicit explicit, or the latent patent, in two respects. First, in making the phenomenon explicit, it is necessary to ensure that the interpretation is ‘true’ to the foreconception or the ‘imma-nent intentions’ of the inquiry. This is why hermeneutical transparency is necessary. We need to be sure that the foreconception (which never defines an object) is grasped in its determinate indeterminacy. Second, in making the situation of interpretation explicit, phenomenological inquiry changes it. This means that the enactment of understanding and articulat-ing a phenomenon changes the situation in which that phenomenon is grasped. How we grasp and explicate it changes the situation of enacting it. Thus,

philosophical research is something a ‘time’ … can never borrow from another time. Such research is also something that … will never want to step forward with the claim that it be allowed to and is able to relieve future times of the burden of having to worry about radical questioning.69

This turns on what it means to grasp and express historical singularity, the difficulty of which lies in how the singular can be grasped and ex-pressed in a way that does not make it an instance. How is it possible to


grasp and express the unprecedented in its historical singularity? What sort of concepts allow for analysis of what cannot be determined in advance? A fundamental criticism of phenomenology in its early years was that concepts determine objects, and thus phenomenology, too, must involve objectification. This criticism was linked to another, which concerns the problem of historical singularity, namely, that the (histori-cally) singular cannot be grasped and expressed, because concepts and language are inherently general.

Heidegger argues that this criticism presupposes all concepts and lan-guage to be general, yet there are concepts and expressions that are singular, for example, occasional expressions such as ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, etc. Heidegger follows the analysis in Husserl’s Logical Investigations that such expressions can be understood as encompassing two meanings, the intending meaning and the meaning intended. When a speaker says ‘here’, she has a meaning intended of the place she is referring to. How-ever, for the listener, this meaning is only available in the context, by enacting some form of access to it from the intending meaning, i.e., that this expression is referring to a particular place, the concrete content of which can be discerned by looking at a spot pointed to, or by receiving what is being proffered—‘Here!’ Such expressions direct us to their meaning or concrete content, but do not provide it themselves in advance of some enactment. Heidegger argued that philosophical concepts are like this, and thus differ from the theoretical concepts of the positive sciences. Such concepts, which he called ‘formal indications’ [formale Anzeige], indicate or direct us towards their meaning or fulfilment, but require an enactment in order to grasp their meaning. Just as ‘here’ indicates some spatial reference for fulfilment of its meaning (and not temporal, personal or other reference), a formally indicative concept directs us towards its enactment, and also wards off or ‘prohibits’ the objectifying aspect of theoretical concepts. That is, it directs thinking towards something with-out specifying it in advance. Formally indicative concepts allow for the possibility of thinking the unprecedented, in that they point to or direct us toward unprecedented thinking. Yet, correlatively, this is also how we can understand the meaning of being historically singular.

Possibility, in the phenomenological sense of being our possibilities, or being-possible, is the formally indicative sense that binds together or unifies identity and change in the phenomenon of development. What is essential in this regard is the notion that the concrete situation of devel-


opment in each case is determined by its possibilities, which are them-selves concrete, i.e. arise out of the situation itself, and thus can only be grasped concretely. Thus, how possibilities are grasped and enacted is singular. Development depends on the possibility of grasping develop-ment, as positivism maintains, but understanding this possibility as possibility is itself a way of being that arises in, and as, the concrete situation, as historicism maintains.

From the foregoing outline, it should be clearer how a phenomenol-ogical approach to the phenomenon of development is appropriate, for it neither presupposes a definition of development (e.g. with reference to values, indicators or other supposedly objective standards), nor does it isolate the inquiry from its ‘object’. The situatedness of the inquiry itself suggests how the historically singular context can be articulated in the way it determines the inquiry that arises from it, and how such inquiry, in making that context explicit, allows for the possibility of disclosing the unprecedented.

Elucidating a phenomenon involves elucidating the access to it, which includes the foreconceptions and method by which it is elucidated. The categories in terms of which the phenomenon is understood and ex-pressed originate in the encounter of the phenomenon, rather than pre-existing it. Furthermore, in the elucidation, which makes the implicit understanding of the phenomenon explicit in concrete expression, the concepts undergo transformation. Understanding is transformed in inter-pretation because the realisation of the possibilities it involves transforms the situation from which understanding arises.

The situation of interpretation for the phenomenological elucidation of development involves the positivist and historicist conceptions of devel-opment, since these constitute ways that development is understood. Therefore, we need to ask whether the articulation of the positivist and historicist conceptions is adequate to their foreconceptions. The forecon-ception of positivist development is that historical change exhibits some kind of regularity or intelligibility, rather than being purely contingent, and that the possibility of explaining this has arisen through historical change itself. Yet the insistence on the sole legitimacy of empirical method occludes the sense of the appearance of positivism itself. Comte’s attempt to systematise and classify the ‘stages’ of history made it seem as if positivism was a necessary consequence of history (i.e. an inevitable result of the laws of social change), thereby eliminating the very sense of


the unprecedentedness or uniqueness of the historical era in which the positivists found themselves. Comte represented his ‘sociology’ as, on the one hand, simply an extension of scientific understanding, and yet, on the other, as a form of science only made possible by the sequence of stages of historical development itself. The conceptual liberation occasioned by history was thus to be the means whereby history not only could be explained, but could also be ordered or manipulated so as to bring about the kind of development that history had already resulted in. In this way, the positivist conception of development determines in advance how development is to be understood.

The positivist approach, then, does not properly correspond to its foreconception. The positivist notion is that the regularities of social change can be empirically determined so as to be operationalised in directing such change. But this fails to recognise that, as part of the historical context, such knowledge changes it. The process of social change that positivist development is supposed to order has already been transformed by the appearance of positivism itself. In other words, the unprecedentedness of the positivist foreconception of development was eliminated in the approach to and conception of it.

Finally, in the positivist conception, as Cowen and Shenton make clear, development is considered to be a process, despite the lack of conceptual clarity about how the results of positivist science are supposed to relate to this process. Once again, we find that this does not correspond to the positivist foreconception of development, namely, that the regular-ity or order of history is only intelligible as a process when unprece-dented positivist science (or the unprecedented positive stage) appears. The notion of process involves a sequence of changes from defined start- and end-points, but prior to the positive stage, this stage itself could not be known as an endpoint.

The historicist foreconception of development involves the notion that the constitution of coherence or unity of the historically singular cannot be predetermined, and that understanding it as coherence is only made possible by the historically singular context itself. In belonging to the historical context, the way we understand it is determined by that context. But, as so determined, such understanding simply expresses its historical context. It cannot transcend it, which means that it cannot serve as a conception of development.

The theoretical approach to enacting these foreconceptions does not


lead in either case to a conception of development as a transformation of historical context in the comprehension of it. In both cases, albeit in opposite ways, the conception that results is one of determinate proc-esses, which the inquiry itself plays no part in constituting. Because the inquiry does not belong to what is inquired about, there can be no trans-formation of the process in the understanding of it. In the positivist con-ception, there can be no development without first of all being developed, i.e. capable of grasping the immanent process of development and of formulating the intention to develop, in other words, of understanding and expressing the historical situation. In the historicist conception, there can be no development without belonging to the historical context and being determined by it. Yet, it is the possibility of expressing the un-precedented that constitutes the phenomenon of development.

What neither positivism nor historicism are able to articulate is the very happening of development, because neither approach in itself in-volves or enacts such happening. Both conceptions theoretically objectify development as a process, whether universal (positivism) or as one arising from the particular historical context (historicism). But this notion always involves the idea of definite start- and endpoints, and thus cannot grasp development as a happening or event in which conceptualisation itself changes. Phenomenological hermeneutics, in contrast, involves a way of access that allows the phenomenon to show itself from itself in the enactment of the elucidation, which must hence always be contextualised concretely. Nevertheless, this way of access can be formally indicated, i.e. conceptualised in a way that does not prescribe or presuppose the material or concrete content, but points to the enactment itself. Formal indication, then, holds the content in abeyance until it is enacted. In the enactment, formally indicative concepts are ‘deformalised’ into concepts that articulate and grasp the phenomenon concretely. The phenomenon of development involves and is constituted by such concretisation itself, as the way in which the understanding of it arises from the context and yet is directed ‘back’ towards it.

Phenomenologically elucidated, then, ‘development’ does not mean a set of characteristics (of an object or an objective process) specifiable in advance, as the positivist and historicist conceptions entail. Approached phenomenologically, the meaning of development lies in the way the approach to it allows it to show itself, i.e. is constitutive of how it comes about, which cannot be known in advance. Such an approach suggests


that ‘we will know it when we see it’ (or even ‘when we are it’), not because we simply retrospectively deem whatever happens to be devel-opment, but because we have a foreconception or intuition arising from our historical situation of what development could be. We will know it when we see it, because seeing it is part of knowing it, and vice versa. How we can see it cannot be specified in advance, nor prescribed, be-cause this depends on who we are. Yet, correlatively, being who we are depends on how we are able to understand ourselves in grasping our possibilities.

Thus, the phenomenological approach to development involves eluci-dating how the understanding of development belongs to development itself, and equally how development is constituted in and by such under-standing. Because understanding ourselves depends on who we are, it is always historically singular. But such singularity only happens in the expression of that understanding, which transforms the situation because it belongs to it. This is the sense of the unprecedented that positivist and historicist conceptions of development purport to articulate, but always preclude by attempting to determine it. Phenomenological hermeneutics indicates that the possibility of the unprecedented can be grasped and articulated precisely as possibility, not as some actuality either present elsewhere or in the past, because the very approach holds open the possi-ble as the sense that we continually enact in striving to understand who we are and how we have become.

Notes

1 Martin Heidegger, ‘Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews’, trans. J. van Buren, in Heidegger, Supplements, ed. van Buren (New York: SUNY Press, 2002), 74.

2 M. P. Cowen & R. W. Shenton, Doctrines of Development (London: Routledge, 1995), 5. Cowen and Shenton’s aim is to explore how the positiv-ist conception proves antithetical to freedom in development, in the way that it divorces understanding of development from the process of development. They draw on Marx to articulate a way in which ‘free development’ can be understood. This aspect of their analysis is beyond the scope of this paper.

3 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, viii. 4 World Bank, World Development Report 1980 (New York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1980), iii.


5 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, ix. 6 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 27. 7 As expressed, for example, in the title of the World Bank’s World Develop-

ment Report 2000-2001: Attacking Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). The World Bank’s view is also expressed in its slogan, ‘a world free of poverty’. One noted development theorist, Dudley Seers, points to poverty, unemployment and inequality as the indicators of whether develop-ment can be said to have occurred (Seers, ‘The Meaning of Development’, International Development Review, Vol. 2 [1969], 1977).

8 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, xiv. 9 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 446. 10 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 28. 11 Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Vol. 2, trans. &

ed. H. Martineau (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2000), 162. 12 Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 137. 13 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 28. 14 Comte, System of Positive Polity, Vol. I, 84; in Cowen & Shenton, 28. 15 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 28. 16 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 29, emphasis added. 17 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 29. 18 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 117. 19 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, emphasis added. 20 As Cowen & Shenton point out, Marx criticised Saint-Simon (and positivism)

for precisely this reason: ‘Individuals in society wanted to preserve their in-dividuality “while they demanded of society a transformation which can only proceed from a transformation of themselves”’ (Doctrines of Development, 137).

21 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 4-5, 476. 22 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 445. 23 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 453. 24 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 446. 25 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 446. 26 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 118. 27 Cowen & Shenton, Doctrines of Development, 118. 28 Gustavo Esteva, ‘Development’, in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to

Knowledge as Power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed Books, 1992), 9. 29 Wolfgang Sachs, ‘Environment’, in The Development Dictionary, ed. Sachs,

35. 30 Sachs, ‘One World’, in The Development Dictionary, ed. Sachs, 109. Other

post-development texts include Serge Latouche, In the Wake of the Affluent


Society, trans. M. O’Connor & R. Arnoux (London: Zed Books, 1993), and The Westernization of the World, trans. R. Morris (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); & Majid Rahnema with Victoria Bawtree, The Post-Development Reader (London: Zed Books, 1997).

31 Sachs, ‘Introduction’, in The Development Dictionary, ed. Sachs, 4-5. 32 Arturo Escobar, ‘The Making and Unmaking of the Third World through

Development’, in Rahnema, The Post-Development Reader, 91. 33 Sachs, ‘Introduction’, in The Development Dictionary, ed. Sachs, 1. 34 As Herder recognised. See, for example, F. M. Barnard, ‘Herder’s Treatment

of Causation and Continuity in History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1963), 211.

35 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Studies’, in W. Dilthey: Selected Writings, ed. & trans. H. P. Rickman (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 181, emphasis added.

36 Heidegger, ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Struggle for a Historical Worldview’, trans. C. Bambach, in Heidegger, Supplements, ed. van Buren, 155.

37 Heidegger, ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Struggle for a Historical Worldview’, 155.

38 Dilthey, ‘The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Studies’, 205.

39 Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Yet another Philosophy of History’, in F. M. Barnard, ‘Culture and Political Development: Herder’s Suggestive Insights’, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 63, No. 2 (1969), 382.

40 Barnard, ‘Culture and Political Development’, 381-82. 41 Barnard, ‘Culture and Political Development’, 382-83. 42 Dilthey, ‘The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Studies’,

205. 43 Heidegger, ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Struggle for a Historical

Worldview’, 149, translation altered. 44 Heidegger, ‘Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Struggle for a Historical

Worldview’, 149. 45 Barnard, ‘Culture and Political Development’, 380. 46 Barnard, ‘Culture and Political Development’, 385. 47 Barnard, ‘Culture and Political Development’, 388-89. 48 Barnard, ‘Culture and Political Development’, 387. 49 Barnard, ‘Culture and Political Development’, 380. 50 Barnard, ‘Herder’s Treatment of Causation and Continuity in History’, 205. 51 Barnard, ‘Culture and Political Development’, 386.


52 Barnard, ‘Culture and Political Development’, 384. 53 As Barnard puts it, ‘Surely we need at least some general concepts in order to

see and convey meaning or significance in any complex of relationships’ (‘Culture and Political Development’, 382).

54 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 18th Ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), 31. 55 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 27. 56 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 28. 57 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 31. 58 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 32. 59 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 27. 60 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 34. 61 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 37. 62 Heidegger, ‘Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle’,

in Heidegger, Supplements, ed. van Buren, 111. 63 Heidegger, ‘Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews’, 74, 77-

78; ‘Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle’, 121-22. 64 Heidegger, ‘Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews’, 74. 65 Heidegger, ‘Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle’,

111. 66 Heidegger’s term for this is ‘das Woraufhin’, which can be translated as ‘the

upon-which-toward-which’ (cf. ‘Phenomenological Interpretations in Con-nection with Aristotle’, 112; Sein und Zeit, 151).

67 Heidegger, ‘Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle’, 112.

68 There is considerable difficulty in finding appropriate terms in which to express this hermeneutical belonging. Heidegger adverts to this difficulty in Being and Time: ‘not only are most of the words lacking, but above all the “grammar”’ (Sein und Zeit, 39).

69 Heidegger, ‘Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle’, 113.

A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Development

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