The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer

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1 The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer

2 Darren Walhof The Democratic Theory of Hans- Georg Gadamer

3 Darren Walhof Political Science Grand Valley State University Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / Library of Congress Control Number: 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 publisher 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

4 Dedicated to the memory of Bernard Walhof,

5 Preface and Acknowledgements 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 interpreting 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 discerning the intentions of historical actors and the meaning of historical events. As I explain more fully in Chap. 4, Gadamer develops his philosophical 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 interpretation as a mode of human existence rather than a set of methods relevant 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, ). vii

6 viii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In Truth and Method, Gadamer developed hermeneutical philosophy by focusing on the ways in which we are necessarily historically and linguistically situated beings. His analysis takes the form of a defense of tradition, authority, and prejudice against what he called the Enlightenment s prejudice against prejudice. In Gadamer s view, Enlightenment thinking had led to an unfortunate and erroneous dichotomy between reason and tradition, 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 wellknown 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 something, 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, initiating an exchange that became known as the Gadamer-Habermas debate. By 1970, a festschrift for Gadamer on his 70 th 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-

7 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 theorists. This is partly due to the fact that both critical theorists and deconstructionists 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 hermeneutics cannot offer grounds for critique of existing linguistic, ideological, and political practices. This reading has tended to direct democratic theorists 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 economic 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 fruitfulness 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

8 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 distance themselves from their own commitments and prejudices. Second, it shows how this presumption obscures important dimensions of our democratic 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 concepts in Gadamer s thought: practical philosophy, truth, understanding, tradition, friendship, and solidarity. Chapter 1 situates Gadamer as a political thinker through an analysis of his account of practical philosophy. Rejecting the modern divide between theory and practice, Gadamer instead argues that social and political affairs necessarily involve contextualized 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 awareness things that might otherwise remain obscured. I call this practical philosophy 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 second 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 discourse and reveals the potential for forging common ground even in divisive political contexts. I draw on Gadamer s analysis of conversation to

9 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 optimistic and too pessimistic: they are too optimistic about the epistemic capacities 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 language 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 problems 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 citizens 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 ahistorical 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 religious 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 universal conceptions, on the one hand, and what I call identification conceptions, 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 historically contingent bonds that, first, are not necessarily based on evident similarities and, second, emerge through democratic practices themselves.

10 xii PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Through an analysis of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that emerged in September 2011, I demonstrate how this account of solidarity helps us see the connections that constitute political communities and underlie democratic action. The bonds disclosed by OWS were not necessarily those of shared interests or a shared identity; instead, they are best seen as temporary manifestations of a shared life together that arises from encounters among those who are, and remain, diverse. This framework enables us to assess OWS and similar movements not in terms of policy or electoral outcomes but as cases of solidarity-disclosing civic action. I have for years been a recreational cyclist and a fan of the sport, and I have also raced on occasion. One of the great things about cycling is that it is simultaneously an individual and team endeavor. While it is ultimately your own training, fitness level, and perseverance that will determine how well you ride or high you place, you also depend heavily on your riding mates for companionship, encouragement, safety, and assistance. Sometimes your legs are good and you take long turns pulling at the front; other times all you can do is get behind someone s wheel and draft while you try to find energy reserves for the miles ahead. Writing a book is similar. While the arguments, ideas, and words are ultimately my own, they have come to fruition only with the companionship, encouragement, and assistance of others. During the years I have been working on it, I have greatly benefited from those who read draft versions of chapters, provided comments on conference papers, and helped me clarify my thoughts and arguments in conversation. At the risk of inadvertently omitting someone, I am pleased to thank the following members of the scholarly peloton for their help: Lauren Swayne Barthold, Susan Bickford, David Billings, Jeffrey Bos, Simone Chambers, Maria Cimitile, Fred Dallmayr, Charles Devellennes, Mary Dietz, Doug Dow, Steven Gerencser, Simona Goi, Ruth Groenhout, David Gutterman, Will Katerberg, Ron Kuipers, Alex Livingston, Jill Locke, Rob Martin, Dean Mathiowetz, Brandon Morgan-Olsen, Andy Murphy, Amit Ron, Stavroula Soukara, Jacinda Swanson, David Vessey, Matt Walhout, Georgia Warnke, Karen Zivi, and Lambert Zuidervaart. Two more scholars deserve special thanks. My friend Clarence Joldersma read multiple versions of most of the chapters, and our conversations about them were invaluable. Derek Peterson has been a friend and intellectual companion for over 20 years. Although we inhabit different fields of study, his influence on my thinking has been significant and is evident throughout this book.

11 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii I would like to thank my colleagues in the Political Science Department at Grand Valley State University for their encouragement and collegiality. Thanks especially to Mark Richards, who as Department Chair has helped me carve out time to pursue my scholarly agenda. A sabbatical leave from Grand Valley in 2010 allowed me to do the initial research for Chaps. 2 and 4. I spent that sabbatical at the University of Toronto s Centre for Ethics, and I am grateful to the Centre and its Director at the time, Melissa Williams, for providing a wonderfully hospitable and stimulating environment for thinking and writing. I thank Chris Robinson and the rest of the team at Palgrave Macmillan for shepherding the project into print. An earlier version of Chap. 2 appeared as Exposure and Disclosure: The Risk of Hermeneutical Truth in Democratic Politics, in Truth Matters: Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion, edited by Lambert Zuidervaart, Allyson Carr, Matthew Klassen, and Ronnie Shuker, and published by McGill-Queen s University Press. Portions of Chaps. 3 and 5 appeared respectively in Bringing the Deliberative Back In: Gadamer on Conversation and Understanding (Contemporary Political Theory) and in Friendship, Otherness, and Gadamer s Politics of Solidarity (Political Theory). Thanks to these publishers for permission to use sections of those chapters here. Friends and family members provided personal support and encouragement while I worked on this book. I especially thank my partner, John Slagter, who has always had more confidence in me than I have in myself. I am deeply grateful for his unfailing love and encouragement and for the many daily gestures that sustain a life together. My parents, Bernard and Verla Walhof, always supported my academic and professional pursuits, and I am grateful for my mother s continued support. My father died in 2012 of complications from Multiple System Atrophy, a rare and incurable neurodegenerative disease, and so he did not get to see this book in print. Dad lived all but a few of his 67 years on the farm in southwestern Minnesota that he grew up on and then farmed with my mother for four decades. My life has taken a different path than his, but I could always count on his love and encouragement. This book is dedicated to his memory.

12 Contents 1 Paying Attention to Reality 1 2 Disclosing Truth 13 3 Conversation and Understanding 37 4 Tradition, Religion, and Democratic Citizenship 71 5 Solidarity, Friendship, and Democratic Hope 99 Epilogue: Between Citizens 127 Bibliography 133 Index 143 xv

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