The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer

156 Pages·2017·1.558 MB·English

by  Darren Walhof (auth.)

The Democratic Theory of
H A N S - G E O R G
G A D A M E R
Darren
Walhof
The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer
Darren Walhof
The Democratic
Theory of Hans-
Georg Gadamer
Darren Walhof
Political Science
Grand Valley State University
Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-46863-1 ISBN 978-3-319-46864-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-46864-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955252
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover image © Gary Waters / Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Dedicated to the memory of
Bernard Walhof, 1944–2012
P a
reface and cknowledgements
“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” Orwell famously wrote in 1946,
“needs a constant struggle” (Orwell 1968, 125). This is particularly true
when it comes to the practices of democracy, and the central argument of
this book is that the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer
helps us envision aspects of democracy that are right in front of our noses
but difficult to see. His work helps us do this, I argue, by shifting our view
away from the citizen-subject that underlies much of democratic theory
and to that which exists between citizens.
Broadly speaking, hermeneutics has to do with the theory or practice
of interpretation. Originally the term referred to methods of interpret-
ing sacred texts and legal documents, but the Romantic period saw its
extension to the interpretation of a broader range of literary texts. The
Historical School of the late nineteenth century further expanded the
scope of hermeneutics to include history itself, detailing methods for dis-
cerning the intentions of historical actors and the meaning of historical
events. As I explain more fully in Chap. 4, Gadamer develops his philo-
sophical hermeneutics partly in response to the Historical School and by
building on the work of Martin Heidegger, who regarded interpretation
as constitutive of all human understanding. Heidegger understood inter-
pretation as a mode of human existence rather than a set of methods rel-
evant only to the study of texts and history.1
1 As Jean Grondin points out, the history of hermeneutics is of course far more complicated
than this (1994, 3). His book provides an excellent overview of that history, as does Richard
Palmer’s book Hermeneutics (1969). Dallmayr’s work is also helpful (2010, 103–10).
vii
viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In Truth and Method, Gadamer developed hermeneutical philosophy by
focusing on the ways in which we are necessarily historically and linguisti-
cally situated beings. His analysis takes the form of a defense of tradition,
authority, and prejudice against what he called the Enlightenment’s “preju-
dice against prejudice.” In Gadamer’s view, Enlightenment thinking had
led to an unfortunate and erroneous dichotomy between reason and tradi-
tion, in which only those things that could be proven through objective and
detached methods warranted the designation of truth. Against this view,
Gadamer argues that we cannot escape our historical embeddedness in this
way since the prejudices we have received from tradition always already
shape our view and, indeed, are the condition for understanding itself.
Gadamer characterizes the nature of understanding through his well-
known metaphor of a fusion of horizons. The horizon always forms the
context for our range of vision, and it is always against the backdrop of
the horizon that something is brought to focal awareness. The horizon
moves with us as we change position and focus, and without it we would
be disoriented and lost. A text or a historical artifact is also situated within
a horizon, and so part of the task of the interpreter is to reconstruct this
historical horizon. Gadamer argues that when one understands the truth
that speaks from tradition, the result is a fusion of the horizon of the text
and the horizon of the interpreter. On this account, understanding some-
thing, whether a text, a historical artifact, a work of art, or a subject of
conversation, is not the result of method but rather has the character of an
event that happens to us.
The publication of Truth and Method in 1960 solidified Gadamer’s
standing as a significant figure in German philosophy and brought him
to the attention of philosophers in Europe and North America. This
was particularly true after Jürgen Habermas criticized the book, initiat-
ing an exchange that became known as the Gadamer-Habermas debate.
By 1970, a festschrift for Gadamer on his 70th birthday contained essays
by Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Ernst Tugendhat, Karl Löwith, and Paul
Ricoeur, in addition to several by Gadamer’s students (Grondin 2003a,
310). The translation of Truth and Method into English in 1975 helped
bring Gadamer’s work to a wider international audience, and his inquiry
into the nature and significance of understanding in human life eventually
proved influential across a range of disciplines, including literary theory,
rhetoric, continental philosophy, and theology.
In political theory, Gadamer’s work has been important in debates over
interpretive methods in the social sciences and methods of textual interpre-
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
tation in the history of political thought. However, with a few important
exceptions, his writings have generally been neglected by democratic theo-
rists. This is partly due to the fact that both critical theorists and decon-
structionists branded Truth and Method as conservative because of its
emphasis on tradition, authority, and continuity. According to Habermas,
in emphasizing the linguistic character of our existence, Gadamer failed
to recognize that language itself can be ideological, something that could
be transcended, in Habermas’ view, only through critical reflection.
According to Jacques Derrida, Gadamer’s portrayal of understanding as a
fusion of horizons masked a will to power that treats the other as a mere
instrument for one’s own understanding, thereby denying the otherness
of the other. For both Habermas and Derrida, then, Gadamer’s herme-
neutics cannot offer grounds for critique of existing linguistic, ideological,
and political practices. This reading has tended to direct democratic theo-
rists away from Gadamer’s writings.
The exceptions include, most prominently, Fred Dallmayr and Georgia
Warnke. In both Beyond Orientalism (1996) and Integral Pluralism
(2010), Dallmayr analyzes cross-cultural encounters using Gadamer’s
account of understanding as a fusion of horizons. Likewise, in Alternative
Visions (1998), he employs Gadamer’s concept of Bildung (formation or
education) to shed light on the relationship between culture and eco-
nomic development. Warnke has used insights from Gadamer to shed
light on domestic policy issues. In Legitimate Differences (1999), she uses
his account of understanding to argue for treating debates over thorny
social issues (abortion, pornography, affirmative action, and surrogacy) as
interpretative disagreements rather than disagreements about principle. In
a subsequent book, After Identity (2008), she uses a set of case studies to
argue that we should take an interpretive approach in theorizing identity.
Dallmayr and Warnke have demonstrated the relevance and fruitful-
ness of Gadamer’s work for thinking about contemporary challenges to
democracy. This book extends their work by arguing that Gadamer offers
an important and unique contribution to democratic theory. It makes
this case by bringing works in democratic theory into conversation with a
broad range of Gadamer’s writings: his early work on Plato and Aristotle;
his development of philosophical hermeneutics in Truth and Method and
subsequent disputes with Habermas and Derrida; and his later essays and
speeches on science, technology, reason, solidarity, and friendship. My
book enacts, in other words, a fusion of horizons between Gadamer’s
thought and important strands in contemporary democratic theory. This
x PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
fusion reveals a number of things. First, it reveals the ways that democratic
theory tends to presume citizen-subjects who through reflection can dis-
tance themselves from their own commitments and prejudices. Second, it
shows how this presumption obscures important dimensions of our dem-
ocratic practices, particularly those not reducible to such self-conscious
citizen-subjects. Third, it demonstrates that Gadamer’s thought offers us a
means of bringing these obscured dimensions to light. In so doing, finally,
this project reveals the ways in which his work provides critical insights on
our democratic practices.
This argument unfolds through an analysis of core, interrelated con-
cepts in Gadamer’s thought: practical philosophy, truth, understand-
ing, tradition, friendship, and solidarity. Chapter 1 situates Gadamer as
a political thinker through an analysis of his account of practical philoso-
phy. Rejecting the modern divide between theory and practice, Gadamer
instead argues that social and political affairs necessarily involve contex-
tualized judgments about both ends and means, an approach he recovers
from the Greeks. Given this, the role of the political theorist is not as
the expert who stands apart from political reality to offer an explanatory
account but as a situated agent who assists others by bringing to aware-
ness things that might otherwise remain obscured. I call this practical phi-
losophy as the discipline of paying attention, and I argue that democratic
theory as practical philosophy ought to draw our attention to political and
social realities that have become hard to see or that are taken for granted.
Chapter 2 focuses on the possibility of truth in democratic politics. I
first outline a conception of truth, gleaned from Gadamer’s major works,
as knowledge of the Good that has become sedimented in our language.
As critics of Gadamer have noted, however, this conception of truth
potentially leaves us with few critical resources, since we would remain
trapped in the dominant ideologies inherent in our language. In response
to these critics, I argue that Gadamer’s conception of truth has a sec-
ond dimension—namely, the disclosure of the thing itself (die Sache)—a
dimension that emerges more clearly in some of his essays. As an event in
which something is recognized as familiar but also new, this disclosure of
truth, I suggest, enables us to evaluate existing democratic practices and
structures, even as we remain inescapably linguistic beings.
Chapter 3 argues that the possibility of understanding in dialogue, the
heart of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, reorients our views of democratic dis-
course and reveals the potential for forging common ground even in divi-
sive political contexts. I draw on Gadamer’s analysis of conversation to
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi
engage in a sympathetic though pointed critique of theories of deliberative
democracy, the dominant approach to democratic theory in the last few
decades. I argue that deliberative theorists are simultaneously too optimis-
tic and too pessimistic: they are too optimistic about the epistemic capaci-
ties of democratic citizens, and they are too pessimistic about the potential
of dialogue for forging common ground, a potential that is revealed when
we move away from a subject-centered account of deliberation that focuses
on reason-giving to one that emphasizes the emergence of a shared lan-
guage about a shared subject. The approach I develop argues for the vital
necessity of a political culture of face-to-face dialogue, in which citizens
and especially political leaders engage with each other about public prob-
lems in ways attuned to the possibility of free responses from others.
Chapter 4 builds on the previous chapters by taking up the question
of religion in democratic politics, a pressing issue among ordinary citi-
zens and democratic theorists alike. Among democratic theorists, I argue,
religion gets cast primarily in epistemological terms, as assent to a set of
theological beliefs. This approach treats religion as apolitical and ahistori-
cal in its essence and, thus, from the outset as an interloper on politics. I
develop an alternative approach built on an interpretation of Gadamer’s
conception of tradition as twofold: (1) tradition as that which forms our
unreflective prejudgments or prejudices and (2) tradition as an ongoing,
reflective, collective re-narration of the past. Whereas treating religion in
epistemological terms leads democratic theorists to focus on the distinction
between secular and religious reasons, highlighting the tradition-structure
of religion clarifies the role democratic politics plays in both reinforcing
unreflective religious prejudices and also re-narrating the identities of reli-
gious communities and individuals. I examine the shifting perspectives of
evangelical Christians in the US on climate change and same-sex marriage
to illustrate this complex relationship between religion and politics.
Chapter 5 argues that Gadamer’s later, post-Truth and Method writings
offer an account of solidarity that helps us conceptualize the bonds that
connect citizens, even in an age marked by hyper-partisanship and social
conflict. Gadamer’s conception of solidarity stands in contrast both to uni-
versal conceptions, on the one hand, and what I call identification concep-
tions, on the other. In different ways, these two approaches cast solidarity
in terms of a pre-political recognition of commonality, thereby subsuming
difference. I argue instead for conceptualizing solidarity in terms of his-
torically contingent bonds that, first, are not necessarily based on evident
similarities and, second, emerge through democratic practices themselves.