The Philosophy of Gadamer

Jean Grondin, Kathryn Plant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317489467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The ideas of the German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer have had considerable influence both in their own right as the leading modern exposition of philosophical hermeneutics and interpreting the works of Heidegger, Plato and Hegel. This work covers the trail of Gadamer's thought. Taking 'Truth and Method' (1960, translated 1975) as the axis of the interpretation of Gadamer's thought, Jean Grondin lays out the key themes of the work - method, humanism, aesthetic judgement, truth, the work of history - with exemplary clarity. Gadamer's concerns are situated in the context of traditional philosophical issues, showing, for example, how Gadamer both continues, and significantly modifies, the philosophical problem as it begins with Descartes and advances rather than simply follows Heidegger's treatment of the relationship of thinking and language. In this way Grondin shows how the issues of philosophical hermeneutics are relevant for contemporary concerns in science and history.

Chapter One
The Problem of Method and the Project of a Hermeneutics of the Human Sciences

The problem of the beginning according to Rilke: where does our power to live in a world come from?

Gadamer’s work opens with one of Rilke’s poems, which does not fail to capture the reader’s attention. It is also an issue of capture: “as long as you follow and capture only that which you yourself have initiated, it is nothing but competence and venial gain”. These words also remind us of Descartes and of his ideal of a method of knowledge thanks to which we will become the “masters and possessors of nature”. But who are we, Rilke seems to reply, to hope to master what has always captured us until now? Does true power not come from elsewhere?

Only if you suddenly capture the ball which an eternal playfellow has thrown to you alone, in the core of your being, in a fair throw, in one of the arches of God’s great bridges, then only then will the ability to capture become power, but it will not be your power, it will be that of the world.

But who is this “eternal playfellow”? If only we knew! But to think we know is to become masters of our destiny once more and, eventually, to have as playfellows only ourselves, in a reflexive turning back of the cogito on itself, so that it always considers only its own thoughts. No, says Gadamer: to understand, to be able to live in a world, comes to us from an “elsewhere” over which we do not have total control. The poetic metaphors of throwing, of a game and of the world with which we are familiar evokes the Heideggerian idea of a Geworfenheit, our being which has been “cast” or “projected” into existence, in a kind of dereliction which for Heidegger is a source of Angst.¹ This “projected being” is very well understood in Gadamer and Rilke,² but there is also the Other, the “eternal playfellow”. The projection is never an anonymous outpouring; it comes from the Other who throws the ball, “to me alone, to the core of my being”. There is thus a dialogue, a “being-together”, a game in which we are involved.

And it is in the midst of this game, which Rilke boldly associates with the arch in God’s great bridge, that our own ability to capture and to have power is deployed. It is never just our own, but always that of a world in which we live, which contains us. To speak of God’s bridges is less to give ourselves up to a concrete theology than to set boundaries to our capture. The Greek gods first of all appeared in the position of the predicate.³ Theos is always the quality of something which we do not understand: storms which blow up at sea, wars which break out, love which transports us – none of these events can be explained in terms of human control. This is why the gods were often called the kreittones in Homer: the “superiors”, the “greater”, which are both terms of comparison. The gods were not primarily subjects or substances, but were attributes of everything which is produced without our agency. To speak more positively of the gods would probably be to place ourselves on the same level as them, which would be a contradiction if indeed the gods were kreittones, up there somewhere, but at the same time everywhere. So there are God’s great bridges in Rilke. But it is we who take and catch the ball, it is we who are in the game and are capable of being part of the world. This capacity is a reception, in the sense of pathos, rather than an activity, and is called “understanding”, of which hermeneutics is the philosophical explanation. But it also asks, “what do we really understand?” Because do we not succumb to a share of illusion when we are determined to control the understanding at any price by imposing on it rules and a sure and certain method, which is above all sure of itself? And when we understand, do we really understand ourselves? Do we not reinforce the mystery which passes all understanding? Does the understanding always know where it comes from and what it is? This dimension, this great mystery, which the understanding is to itself, is the issue that Gadamer raises in the crucial preface to the second edition of Truth and Method (unfortunately not translated in the recent complete edition): “Do we need a foundation for what has supported us up to now?”⁴ Is the understanding always a foundation, and can we give foundations to the understanding itself?

Even though Gadamer raises these questions, he is not “antifoundationalist”. Unlike the postmodernists, he does not reject the whole idea of a foundation. It could be that his thought restores to this issue, crucial for philosophy and for existence, what is most central to it: a foundation so fundamental that it escapes the whole search for a foundation. The fundamental is not always what we think it is. We certainly cannot say that Gadamer is hostile to foundations. Rather, he is opposed to an easy fundamentalist solution, to foundations that are too convenient, that can be tamed or explained, because to explain foundations is to cut them off from their essential dimension, or the basis from which everything else flows. Gadamer thus denounces the evasions of foundationalism. The idea of a method of understanding is a good example. There is nothing reprehensible in proposing rules for understanding, but can we then get to the bottom of the understanding? Perhaps even the idea of a methodology, in proposing that it can be technically controlled, deprives the understanding of its fundamental element. The issue of foundations is not a technical matter. In offering, or rather imposing, a hold over phenomena, the technical perhaps does not yield their foundation.

Understanding and event: being rather than consciousness

Hermeneutics looks to understand what the understanding is, over and above the ease of a purely technical control of it. This is perhaps what hermeneutics wanted to be, as far as the art of understanding goes (Kunst-lehre des Verstehens, ars interpretandi). This art presumes to subject the understanding to rules that are the exclusive guarantors of truth. Does the experience of the truth of understanding truly allow itself to be reduced to rules? In all acts of understanding, is there not the aspect of an event, a happening which is not truly dependent on a methodology? We remember that Gadamer thought of entitling his work Understanding and Event, Verstehen und Geschehen.⁵ We can now see why. What is at issue, again as he says in the Preface to the second edition, “is not so much what we should do, but what happens outside our wishes and our acts”⁶ when we understand and live in a world.

The experience of truth to which Gadamer appeals is found to depend less on epistemology, or the theory of knowledge in the strict sense, than on a “grounding”, or we can also call it a well, which is at one and the same time the soil, source and water of life, but which is not knowledge in the strict sense. Perhaps this aspect of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is the most important, and also the most misunderstood. If it is misunderstood, it is because Gadamer in Truth and Method sometimes has a tendency, as he himself later recognized, to take an epistemological approach to the problem in talking of “knowledge” and of “assumptions” that would be the conditions of understanding. It could be, in fact it is certain, that he was here the victim of too epistemological a connection with the problem of understanding that he wanted to unsettle. Besides, this is why he placed less emphasis in his later works on the roots of his thoughts in the human sciences, still an issue of epistemology, than on his debt with regard to the experience of art, where epistemology has no place at all. We are here reminded of the essay from 1992, “The Word and the Image: So Much Truth, So Much Being”.⁷

If the understanding (and the term is still almost too epistemological) is a matter of event, we do not really know how, nor from where, it comes. It is produced, it rocks and nourishes us, it is the element in which we bathe and which allows us properly to understand ourselves and to share in common experiences. Gadamer draws on the crucial term “experience” in Truth and Method. It is not, of course, the experiment which the scientist undertakes in his laboratory, but experience understood in the way meant by Aeschylus (pathei mathos: we learn through suffering): experience which strikes us and becomes part of us, more deeply than any syllogism or analytic argument. Our understanding, our experience, are dependent on such a “grounding”. The great enticement of modern methodology is to persist in making us forget it. It is like an instumentalist conception of the understanding which hides its essential unavailability. Fundamentally, Gadamer questions this instrumentalism. To understand is not to control, but is a little like breathing or loving: we do not know what sustains us, nor where the wind which gives us life comes from, but we know that everything depends on it and that we do not control anything. We must be there to know what it is, and to know that it is being rather than knowing. To speak of criteria, of norms, of foundations, as happens in contemporary philosophical literature, is to give an instrumentalist conception of the understanding which perhaps misses what is essential. A similar mistake is to think again that Gadamer stands against method and instrumentalism. But this is not the case at all: we must follow a method if we want to build a bridge, solve a mathematical problem or try to find a cure for AIDS. Gadamer has never tried to deny it: instead, he has learnt a lot from the methodologies of understanding, for which he has the highest praise. For him, they are evidence and gain. He never challenges science, but only the fascination which emanates from it⁸ and which threatens to reduce the understanding to an instrumental process. He therefore writes, in an important autobiographical work, that hermeneutics perhaps had “fewer things to learn from modern scientific theory than from ancient traditions which should be remembered”.⁹ Gadamer was thinking here of traditions in rhetoric and practical philosophy that were pushed aside by modern science precisely because they did not subscribe to a strictly instrumentalist conception of the understanding. To say that hemeneutics has “less” to learn from modern science is to recognize that it owes it a lot, but the empire of science is today so obvious, so universally recognized, that perhaps it is more urgent to appeal to traditions which point out the limits of science.

It is thus the easy instrumentalism of epistemology that seems too brief to Gadamer. It is obvious that Truth and Method tends to give too objective and intellectual a slant to the hermeneutic experience of understanding, as it speaks of “assumptions” and of the formulation of a proper historical “consciousness” from their subterranean determination. Gadamer recognized that he was here the son of his time, but the transcendence of the wholly epistemological and instrumental consideration was his main concern. Heidegger disliked Gadamer’s reference to consciousness here.¹⁰ Gadamer only settled on this term because it is also used in ordinary language to refer to an experience, an awakening or a “crisis of consciousness” which is not reducible to scientific objectivity. After Truth and Method Gadamer found a more fortunate turn of phrase, which exploited the sonority of the term in German, as Marx had already done in another context, in saying that the consciousness (Bewusstsein) to which he was referring was “Being rather than consciousness”.¹¹ Perhaps the whole of Gadamer is found in that formulation. Not everything is a matter of consciousness, including consciousness itself. To recognize that thought has limits is not to silence it, but to allow it to better apprehend itself and to open itself more easily to dialogue. Its absolute autonomy and its pride are found to be shaken but, knowing itself to be determined, “grounded”, thought develops a sharper consciousness from its determination and its historical sources.

Heidegger had previously liberated the notion of understanding from its epistemological straitjacket on listening to the German phrase, sich auf etwas verstehen, which refers to a skill more practical than theoretical, an activity rather than reflective knowledge. We say the same in English: “to be skilled at something”, to mean that we are on top of something, that we can get something done, that we are capable of doing it.¹² Understanding is always power, power-to-be, force, as in Rilke’s poem. But is this “power” always to do with knowing and controlling? There is always a lack of control and a lack of understanding in all understanding. All power conceals impotence. The phrase “to be on top of something”, to be capable, already hints at it. It indicates that we are only just on top, that we are scarcely capable, that if need be we can just manage. But what we understand, or are able to do, can at any moment topple into an incapacity, a lack of understanding. To be capable of something is to know that we are never completely capable of it. There is thus an element of mystery in the arising of the understanding. Heidegger also recognized this dimension in his concept of truth, because the Greek term is a-letheia, where the initial alpha denotes a lack, a lifting of the veil, an unveiling. But in the experience of truth, which each time is a discovery, the veiling is present, like that to which all truth is deaf.

This experience of truth is central to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, a truth which is not really “knowledge”, but power and a discovery which does not forget that it cannot discover everything, and that something of the truth essentially remains hidden. The understanding does not always know how it operates, nor from where it comes, but it is nonetheless the source of truth. It is this hermeneutic experience of the truth that interested and intrigued Gadamer. The truth does not only, and perhaps not even primarily, rely on what has an absolutely firm foundation, as scientific methodology insists. The primary role of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is to value experiences of truth, of “knowledge”, which go beyond the infinitely restricting limits of what allows itself to be objectified in a method of knowledge. The great anamnetic effort of his thought is to recall that the truth is not only, nor even initially, what can be guaranteed by a method.

Gadamer discovered this experience of truth in valuable forgotten traditions that were rediscovered mainly through his own philosophy: in the legacy of rhetoric, where the truth is a matter of belief, integrity and probability, but the certainty or ultimate foundation is lacking, or, it could be added, is still missing; then in practical philosophy, where the truth is always what concerns me directly, without being a matter of technique (like applied ethics, which is so widespread nowadays); in legal and theological hermeneutics because understanding is still and always a matter of application to a particular situation. But the privileged witness of the mystery of this understanding which comes to us from a source of equal mystery is found by Gadamer in the experience of art. This is the departure-point of Truth and Method.

The destruction of aesthetics in the name of the humanist tradition

Before the reconquest of this experience of art, this buried truth, we must undo what prevents us from perceiving it. Even if he does so without recognizing it, or by instinct, it is clear that Gadamer follows the method of his master Heidegger in his great confrontations with the history of ideas: to have access to phenomena, we must first of all destroy the “evidence” that hides them. In a word, paradoxically, it is a case of destroying aesthetics. We must destroy the aesthetic consciousness if we want to have access to the truth of art.

What is aesthetic consciousness? As a tautology this time, it is consciousness which considers works of art only as aesthetic objects, in taking away from them their moral or cognitive overtones. It is clear that ignoring the moral and cognitive dimensions has led to the rise of the autonomy of art in modernism, and that contemporary art is unthinkable without them. But this autonomy comes at a price: it cuts off works of art from their aspiration to the truth, from what can be called their “message” (Aussage). The autonomous appreciation of aesthetics has its claims, and the aesthete in Gadamer easily recognizes them, but it forgets that a work of art is above all participation in an experience of truth. King Lear teaches us what ingratitude is,¹³ just as Frans Hals revealed to us who Descartes was. It was imperative for Gadamer to reinstate this experience of truth, for several reasons: first, to free the concept of truth from the web imposed by modern science; next, to counteract the pernicious effects of the contemporary reductionism of the human sciences (and of philosophy) to a simple matter of “aesthetics”, understood as arbitrary an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Translator's Note
• Introduction
• 1 The Problem of Method and the Project of a Hermeneutics of the Human Sciences
• 2 Truth after Art
• 3 The Destruction of Prejudices in Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics and Epistemology
• 4 Vigilance and Horizon in Hermeneutics
• 5 The Dialogue that We Are
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index