Toward a comprehensive method of phenomenological understanding

Foucault’s early critique of Jaspers’s “hermeneutic limit”

Bibliographic Data

ID21395050
AuthorsLeonhard Riep (0000-0001-5754-5501, Faculty 08: Philosophy and History Goethe University Frankfurt Frankfurt am Main Germany, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-06-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Southern Journal of Philosophy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-4283 • E-ISSN: 2041-6962
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/sjp.70048
OpenAlexW7165112887
LanguageEN
References cited36

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

Argument (complex analysis) · Existentialism · Focus (optics) · Frame (networking) · Meaning (existential) · Phenomenology (philosophy) · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Mental Health and Patient Involvement · Mental Health and Psychiatry

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