Gadamer and the Transmission of History

Jerome Veith

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253016041
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Observing that humans often deal with the past in problematic ways, Jerome Veith looks to philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and his hermeneutics to clarify these conceptions of history and to present ways to come to terms with them. Veith fully engages Truth and Method as well as Gadamer's entire work and relationships with other German philosophers, especially Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger in this endeavor. Veith considers questions about language, ethics, cosmopolitanism, patriotism, self-identity, and the status of the humanities in the academy in this very readable application of Gadamer's philosophical practice.

ONE

From Structure to Task

HISTORICAL EFFECT

Until the early twentieth century, hermeneutics, the study of understanding and interpretation, had tended to identify itself as a practice in search of the right methods, by means of which it hoped to become something akin to a science. Taking issue with this alignment toward modern scientific methodology, and critiquing the subjectivistic limitations it entails for any nonmethodical truth, Gadamer formulates his philosophical hermeneutics as a description not of the proper technique of understanding – how it should proceed – but of the general ways in which it does proceed. Briefly put, he intends to go “beyond modern science’s concept of method and to think, in fundamental universality, what always occurs.”¹ This goal, which Gadamer expands beyond mere textual situations and explicitly associates with Kant’s transcendental project, amounts to an account of the a priori conditions of all understanding.²

Gadamer ultimately concludes that these conditions are limited by the finitude inherent in our historicity and linguisticality. Situated within these conditions, we are subject to their constraining structures as if by “suprasubjective powers,”³ and cannot reach a position in isolation from them. Understanding, considered hermeneutically, is thus always situated. Yet this situation does not amount to a privation of possibility; instead, it is paradoxically precisely within these limitations that all of our potential insights and developments are located. As historical beings, we may not be able to raise ourselves above history to ascertain its course, necessity, or overall purpose, but we have the capacity to understand our history from within, and to always do so differently. In this way, we are also generative of the very history that conditions us. This process takes place in the “speculative” medium of language, named so because it mirrors reality in a way that first makes the latter accessible to us, such that we can never reach an initial basis or a final formulation that would exist eternally apart from experience. Our thrownness into language actually frees us from the constraining illusion of univocal meanings and permanent formulations, and frees us up for a discourse that is infinitely iterable.

This discursive-linguistic aspect of Gadamer’s hermeneutics has drawn much attention, not least for its significance in the philosophy of language, but also in its relation to poststructural/deconstructive philosophy, social philosophy, poetics, and the philosophy of art. Gadamer’s own emphasis tends to fall on this aspect of his philosophy, as it represents an intuitive point of access for anyone engaged in communication.⁴ Yet while language may be construed as the basis of Gadamer’s hermeneutic ontology, it is at most a condition equiprimordial with historicity, one structural moment of the same phenomenon without primacy over the other. This equiprimordiality makes it just as difficult to shift in the other direction and view historicity as the more fundamental layer of understanding; one might instead describe historicity as the motor at the core of our experience that always finds “its enactment in the realm of language.”⁵ Gadamer conceives of this historicity under the heading of historical effect (Wirkungsgeschichte), and while the latter could be said to serve as the main principle of his hermeneutics from which all others can be derived,⁶ it does not stand apart from, nor logically prior to, our involvement in language. Taking over an insight from Heidegger, Gadamer deems it more appropriate to speak of “historicity” or “historicality” (Geschichtlichkeit) than “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit), since human experience bears the character of occurrence (Geschehen), and this is a codeterminant of, rather than simply a temporal container or condition for, linguistic expression.⁷

However, even this core principle of historicity contains ambiguities that are not immediately resolvable and that render opaque not only the nature of language, but also the role of the subject situated in history. In fact, it is due to this lack of clarity that historical effect, and thus Gadamer’s position as a whole, has frequently been misconstrued. One of these misreadings is that, since he stresses our historical boundedness, Gadamer has been taken to espouse either a form of traditionalism or perspectival relativism. However, this conforms neither to Gadamer’s self-understanding nor to the conceptual foundation of his philosophy. His formulation of an “interplay”⁸ (Ineinanderspiel) in historicity is intended to eschew several inimical conceptions of history and human historicality, as they all make pernicious assumptions concerning our relation to history, selfhood, and alterity.

The present chapter will begin with a brief outline of these positions. The subsequent analysis of historicity will show how Gadamer responds to and supersedes these stances. The aim is to elucidate the ambiguities at the heart of historical effect, revealing its structure as a situated, intertwined relation and performative enactment, its disclosure of finitude as the “fundamental insight”⁹ of philosophical hermeneutics, and, by virtue of this insight, its consequences for the broader philosophical issues of social life and ethics. After all, although Gadamer viewed his project as a largely descriptive endeavor, his concepts are not without their intended philosophical repercussions.¹⁰ Though these are not normative in a strict sense, telling us the steps by which we are supposed to understand, they nevertheless act as a corrective to improper ways of conceiving human historicality, and thus the universal conditions of our understanding. Hermeneutic concepts correct and refine “the way in which constantly exercised understanding understands itself,”¹¹ and thus play a role in cultivating something like social reason. In line with this role, the oneness of horizons that Gadamer takes to underlie historicity turns out to be neither a relativist indifference to strangeness nor an essentialist demand for complete familiarity. Based on its finite and dialogical character, the oneness can instead be considered a form of freedom, operative throughout the present enactment of our inherently historical situation. Yet for the same dialogical reasons, oneness remains an interpretive task, a social and ethical achievement that requires attention and cultivation.

SITUATING HISTORICAL EFFECT

Gadamer’s concept of historical effect did not arise in a vacuum, nor can it be considered independently of the positions to which it responds. As philosophical hermeneutics in general develops out of a long tradition of dealing with interpretive and epistemological issues, Gadamer’s own core concepts are part of the development of historical consciousness from the eighteenth century to the present, and his entire thought bears the mark of intense dialogue with this evolution. One might even say that Gadamer’s elaboration of historical effect is performative and reflexive, precipitated by the very conditions it describes. Philosophical hermeneutics thus stands deeply indebted to a discourse that it nevertheless intends to correct and supplant. To present this discourse in its entirety is obviously beyond the scope of this work.¹² However, the theme of Gadamer’s philosophical origins remains a fertile ground for debating the place and importance of his thought, and the present work as a whole aspires to contribute to this debate, however slightly.¹³ While I will return below to the social dimension of this discourse, and while subsequent chapters will elaborate this theme, I will here merely identify four prevalent conceptions of historicality that Gadamer takes to be problematic on the basis of two general presuppositions: (1) the elevation to a perspective beyond human historicity and (2) the pretension to immediacy in historical experience. While one pair of historical conceptions is guilty of only the latter assumption, another pair, which Gadamer identifies as historicist, makes both. I will turn to this latter group first.

Detached Historicism

What Gadamer calls historical consciousness or historicism had arisen as a philosophical view of history during the nineteenth century, through respective pushing and pulling factors.¹⁴ It can be described as a response to the collapse of teleological-metaphysical explanations of history, be they eschatological or speculative. Thinkers no longer accepted accounts of the goal-directedness of history, but struggled with great difficulty to elaborate an alternative theory. This lack of foundations impelled philosophy to seek its stability elsewhere, to find more plausible descriptions of historical development and knowledge, and thus to account somehow for philosophy’s continued relevance. A great attractor in this pursuit was the burgeoning dominance of natural scientific method, which, with its mechanical-positivist aspirations toward general laws, promised philosophy a similarly grounded study of the past, no less than a vindication of its own scientific status. In adopting the naturalist viewpoint that sees time, in spatial terms, as the uniform and infinite container for historical events, historicism was able to treat all points in history as essentially equal, and to survey these points as if from above. Two distinct approaches took shape at this suprahistorical level.

One, a historically objective approach or “theoretical historicism,” took history to be largely immobile and continuous.¹⁵ In the terms of the dominant Neo-Kantian school within this approach, one desired to discover and justify the knowledge-claims contained in history. One thus engaged in a Kantian critique of history, separating contingent facts from historical truths by tracing law-like patterns of meaning. This focus on formal-logical patterns gave rise to a history of problematics (Problemgeschichte), which treated the past as the arena of recurring problems (and which Gadamer labels “a bastard of historicism”¹⁶).

In a programmatic 1910 essay, Nicolai Hartmann proposed a historiography of philosophy founded on Problemgeschichte, a conception of the history of philosophy that is centered around the self-unfolding of perennial philosophical problems over time.¹⁷ This approach allows one to treat philosophy as an historical process, yet to also join various insights together across time into a broader corpus possessing scientific objectivity. This presupposes, of course, some access to the perennial problems. Hartmann himself acknowledges this: “we must already possess the problems in order to conduct a history of problems.”¹⁸ To explain this possession and the conditions making this approach possible, Hartmann cites the capacity – indeed the necessity – of abstracting both from the concrete factual basis of philosophical insights and from the specific lives of individual thinkers. What remains are “problem-lines” of which particular people and eras are merely intersections.¹⁹ The problems that Problemgeschichte treats thus function as formal-transcendental categories that allow one to establish “historical continuity,” and any variability in the philosophical content thus attaches not to the problem, but merely to its historical instantiation.²⁰ From this angle, then, the history of philosophy is a gathering process that collects knowledge from across history in a precise and cumulative procedure.

The philosophical import of history, then, was that humans sought to answer perennial questions, and past attempts to address these could be aligned with, and serve as material for, present research. One had to admit, of course, that questions undergo variations in their formulation, and even that present concerns were not always in direct correlation to those of the past. Yet the thinker of problematic history, so the Neo-Kantians imagined, could surmount these obstacles by normalizing the terms and conceptual structure under which past questions were raised – in short, by producing a transcendental logic of history. In this way, one could identify the transhistorical topics (or “values,” to use Rickert’s term²¹) of historical reason, fusing them into one discourse. As a detached surveyor of this whole, the historical objectivist could take his or her own position as a sign of the scientific nature and scope of historical reflection.

A divergent, discontinuous approach arose as a reaction to this unifying stance. This approach, while maintaining a quasi-scientific overview of history, stressed the limitations of comparing various times to each other. Rather than emphasizing the continuity between philosophical questions and concerns across time, one relativized the views of each age to its historical environment. This plurality and discontinuity demanded that historical research be mobile: that it place itself within the age under consideration and assess the latter’s concerns on their own terms.

Gadamer’s critique of these two approaches hinges on what unites them as historicist stances. First, both try to rise above history in such a way as to ignore the researcher’s embeddedness within it, and render his or her own standpoint insignificant. This naive leap constitutes a neglect of what Gadamer describes under the term of histor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 From Structure to Task
• 2 Historical Belonging as Finite Freedom
• 3 The Infinity of the Dialogue
• 4 New Critical Consciousness
• 5 The Bildung of Community
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index