Toward a comprehensive method of phenomenological understanding: Foucault’s early critique of Jaspers’s “hermeneutic limit”

Abstract

In this article, I highlight the significant influence that Karl Jaspers had on the early Foucault. In particular, I focus on what I refer to as the “hermeneutic limit” of Jaspers's phenomenologically inspired method of intuitive understanding. According to Jaspers, certain borderline cases of psychopathological phenomena, such as schizophrenia, are beyond all understandability because no meaning can be derived from them. Due to this limit, these cases cannot be approached using a method of phenomenological understanding. As will become clear from my analysis of two important writings from the 1950s, namely Maladie mentale et personnalité and Binswanger et l'analyse existentielle , Foucault repeatedly addresses this hermeneutic limit. As I demonstrate, in Maladie mentale et personnalité Foucault still follows Jaspers's core argument that certain psychopathological borderline cases can never be understood, whereas in the Binswanger manuscript Foucault already develops a much more critical stance toward this position. However, as I argue, Foucault does not abandon the concept of understanding as such. Rather, he seeks a comprehensive account that can understand those pathological cases, which, in Jaspers's view, must appear totally meaningless, but become understandable within their own frame of reference when the appropriate method, that is, Binswangerian existential analysis, is applied.