Gadamer: A Guide for the Perplexed

172 Pages·2006·9.976 MB·English

by  Chris Lawn

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H'II'W COlltillllWlIbooks, COlli
(g Chris Lawn 2006
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Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.
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ISBN: 0-8264-8461-1 (hardback) 0-8264-8462-X (paperback)
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Abbreviation Vll
Prelace Vlll
Introduction 1
Gadamer in a nutshell 1
Gadamer and analytic philosophy 4
The structure of the chapters 11
Who is Gadamer? 17
Hans-Georg Gadamer: a long life in brief 17
Gadamer and Heidegger 19
Gadamer and the Nazis 20
After the war 22
Retirement and international acclaim 23
Gadamer: the man and his work 24
2 The problem of method 30
Method and modernity 30
Descartes and the search for method 31
Gadamer and method 34
The revival of tradition, authority and prejudice 36
3 From hermeneutics to philosophical hermeneutics 44
What is hermeneutics? 44
Romantic hermeneutics 45
Dilthey's hermeneutics 51
Heidegger's 'hermeneutics of facticity' 53
4 Truth without method 59
Gadamer and truth 59
Truth as experience 61
v
CONTENTS
Truth is historical 64
The 'fusion of horizons' and the problems of
understanding the past from the site of the present 66
Effective historical consciousness 68
Dialogue 70
The logic of question and answer 72
5 Gadamer on language and linguisticality 76
Philosophy and language 76
Gadamer's account of the nature of language 80
The hermeneutics of the spoken word 81
'Being that can be understood is language' 82
6 Gadamer's aesthetics 87
Art and truth 87
Art as play 90
Art as symbol and festival 92
Gadamer's poetic turn 95
Gadamer on ordinary, everyday language 97
The poem as 'eminent text' 99
7 The later Gadamer 105
After Truth and fIIfethod 105
Gadamer and Rorty on solidarity 106
Applied hermeneutics III
8 Fellow travellers and critics 120
Gadamer now 120
Gadamer and postmodernism 121
Fellow travellers: Wittgenstein and Rorty 123
Gadamer's critics 127
Deconstructive criticism 135
Conclusion 139
Suggestiollsforfirrther reading 144
Glossary 147
Bibliography 154
Index 158
vi
TM Truth and Method (1989). Second revised edition, revised
translation by 1. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall, London:
Sheed & Ward.
vii
The proposal for this work came from Hywel Evans, former com
missioning editor in philosophy for Continuum, and I wish to thank
him for inviting me to contribute to the series. The idea for the Guides
for the Perplexed, as I understand it, is to elucidate the complex and
difficult philosophical ideas of important thinkers. I hope I have been
faithful to this brief. Most studies on Gadamer tend to focus exclu
sively upon his major work Truth and jVIethod (TM, 1989). This
present study has sought to go further by tracing the developments
in Gadamer's thought over the 40 years or so after the first publica
tion of Truth and l11ethod. I am aware that Gadamer is responsible
for a large body of studies on classical thought. His innovative
hermeneutical studies, particularly of Plato and Aristotle, are not
given the treatment they deserve here, being at best mentioned in
passing.
I have sought to present the key ideas and themes in Hans-Georg
Gadamer's work and explain them in non-technical terms. Although
Gadamer often assumes a detailed knowledge of the history of phil
osophy he is wilfully non-technical, steering clear of the kind of phi
losophy that revels in the logic of fine distinctions. This is for a
variety of reasons. Firstly, he stands within in an academic tradition
that is not always familiar to those working in the Anglo-American
analytic philosophical mainstream. I have been conscious of this
and sought to provide the necessary background and, further, make
Gadamer relevant to ideas and movements beyond his own terms of
reference, that is, the German intellectual tradition.
Secondly, Gadamer is initially difficult to place because his work
is not easily classifiable and his intellectual project seems so wide
ranging and general.
viii
PREFACE
In conventional philosophical terms he is not doing metaphysics
or ethics or political philosophy and yet he manages to work in such
a way as to make his philosophical hermeneutics relevant to all of
these activities and much more besides. Certainly his project is philo
sophical but it extends well beyond the often-narrow range of many
contemporary philosophers. Gadamer seeks to make sense of human
understanding as a philosophical, historical and cultural phenome
non. He also, especially in his later works, brings out the hermeneu
tical dimension to all human activities and is able to offer a measure
of critique.
One might see Gadamer as one of the last of those polymath
European intellectuals, gifted with living and dead languages, and as
conversant with developments in abstract art as he was knowledge
able about anthropology, linguistics and philosophy. Like Richard
Rorty's 'post-philosophical' intellectuals, Gadamer's field of vision
for intellectual curiosity was extensive and his central idea that all
understanding is essentially dialogue is best achieved when the
confines of narrow specialism are no longer appropriate and philo
sophical, literary, scientific, ideas rub shoulders with relative ease.
Finally, Gadamer is difficult because his terminology whilst not
technical is tricky, being frequently suggestive, elusive and without
precision. This, I suggest, is no accident as his work is anxious to keep
open the interpretive space upon which his hermeneutics resolutely
concen trates.
Many colleagues, students and friends have stimulated my interest
in Gadamer over the years. A special debt of gratitude is owed to my
colleague and friend Louise Campbell who obligingly read and com
mented upon the chapter on aesthetics, although any infelicities and
misinterpretations are entirely my own. Mary Fox, Jeff Lambert, Joby
Hennessy, Angus Mitchell and Treasa Campbell, without realizing it,
did me a favour by forcing me to explain Truth and Nletlzod and the
importance of Gadamer: I am not sure that I succeeded but the
attempt was productive as the result is this book. In conclusion I want
to thank Margaret for her forbearance and Omar and Polly for con
stant companionship.
Chris Lmt'll
Desert Cross. Enniskeane. Co. Corle Ireland
September 2005
c/m t'[email protected]
ix

GADAMER IN A NUTSHELL
How would one describe a philosopher's achievement in a few brief
sentences? In Great Thinkers A-Z I rose to this challenge and wrote
the entry on Gadamer. The only instruction from the editors was
that the piece could not be more than 800 words so it had to be short
and concise. This is what I wrote:
Since Descartes, modern philosophy regarded correct method as a
route to absolute certainty. Armed with a rational procedure,
human thought becomes equal to natural science in replacing the
dark forces of tradition with objective truth. The work of Hans
Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) contests this optimistic account of
modernity, especially in the major work Truth and Method (1960).
Gadamer starts by re-valuing the idea of tradition - from which
Enlightenment thought distanced itself claiming that 'tradition'
and 'reason' cannot be so easily teased apart. For Gadamer, trad
ition cannot be an object of 'pure' rational enquiry. The idea that
we can step outside our own cultural reference points to embrace
timeless truth is a demonstrable fiction of modernist thought.
Gadamer relates his idea of 'tradition' to a reworked notion of
'prejudice', which he understands as pre-judice or pre-judgement,
in other words as that which makes any kind of discrimination pos
sible. A prejudice is not a distorting form of thought that must be
shaken off before we see the world aright. For Gadamer prejudices
are present in all understanding. Against Enlightenment claims
that reason, detached from historical and cultural perspective,
gives a test for truth, Gadamer claims that we are irredeemably
GUIDE FOR PERPLEXED
embedded in language and culture and that the escape to
unclouded certainty via rational method is a chimera.
How does Gadamer substantiate the assertion that forms of
understanding are always prejudicial and that we cannot make
strictly objective claims about the world? Here is where we find his
singular contribution to contemporary thought. Understanding
is invariably 'hermeneutical', he claims. The term derives from
hermeneutics, 'the branch of knowledge dealing with interpret
ation' (Oxford English Dictionary). Historically, hermeneutics was
the art of correctly reading and interpreting ancient texts, notably
the Bible. In Gadamer's hands hermeneutics becomes a more
general procedure for understanding itself, which he terms philo
sophical hermeneutics and characterizes in terms of a 'hermeneuti
cal circle'. The idea of the circle refers to the constantly turning
movement between one part of a text and its total meaning. In
making sense of a fragment of the text one is always simultane
ously interpreting the whole. Gadamer justifies extending the role
of hermeneutics, making it a necessary characteristic of any
attempt to understand the world, by referring back to the history
of hermeneutics and early attempts to codify interpretative prac
tice. Hermeneutics is also a submerged strand running through the
history of philosophy. Aristotle's account of phronesis or 'practi
cal wisdom' is a case in point. In becoming moral we are habitu
ated into a moral tradition, Aristotle asserts, but the moral agent
is always confronted with situations that go beyond the regularities
of habit. This oscillation between habit and novelty is similar to the
dynamic of the hermeneutical circle.
Gadamer's principal authority for his claims is his teacher
Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time Heidegger shows how inter
pretation of the world is impossible without pre-understanding.
Against Descartes he shows that understanding is not worked out
in the privacy of consciousness but through our being in the
world. But if all understanding is interpretation, it is still guided
by what Gadamer calls a 'fusion of horizons'. A text, or any thing
or event within the world we interpret, has its own hori:::on of
meaning. Interpretation is sited within the mutual horizon of the
interpreter and the thing to be interpreted.
The modernist thought that understanding depends on a
detachment from tradition effected by rational method is under
mined when viewed from the hermeneutical perspective. For
2