Gadamer s Repercussions

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2 Gadamer s Repercussions

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4 Gadamer s Repercussions Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics EDITED BY Bruce Krajewski UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

5 University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England 2004 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gadamer s repercussions : reconsidering philosophical hermeneutics/edited by Bruce Krajewski. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Gadamer, Hans Georg, I. Krajewski, Bruce, 1959 II. Title. b3248.g34g dc Manufactured in the United States of America The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally chlorine-free (tcf). It meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso Z (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

6 contents acknowledgments / vii preface / ix list of abbreviations / xiii Introduction. From Word to Concept: The Task of Hermeneutics as Philosophy / 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated by Richard E. Palmer i. gadamer s influence 1. After Historicism, Is Metaphysics Still Possible? On Hans-Georg Gadamer s 100th Birthday / 15 Jürgen Habermas, translated by Paul Malone 2. Being That Can Be Understood Is Language / 21 Richard Rorty 3. On the Coherence of Hermeneutics and Ethics: An Essay on Gadamer and Levinas / 30 Gerald L. Bruns 4. Gadamer and Romanticism / 55 Andrew Bowie 5. Literature, Law, and Morality / 82 Georgia Warnke 6. A Critique of Gadamer s Aesthetics / 103 Michael Kelly v

7 vi contents ii.gadamer and dialogue 17. On Dialogue: To Its Cultured Despisers / 123 Donald G. Marshall 18. Gadamer s Philosophy of Dialogue and Its Relation to the Postmodernism of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Strauss / 145 Ronald Beiner 19. Meaningless Hermeneutics? / 158 Joel Weinsheimer iii. gadamer in question 10. Radio Nietzsche, or, How to Fall Short of Philosophy / 169 Geoff Waite 11. The Art of Allusion: Hans-Georg Gadamer s Philosophical Interventions under National Socialism / 212 Teresa Orozco, translated by Jason Gaiger 12. On the Politics of Gadamerian Hermeneutics: A Response to Orozco and Waite / 229 Catherine H. Zuckert 13. The Protection of the Philosophical Form: A Response to Zuckert / 244 Teresa Orozco, translated by Paul Malone 14. Salutations: A Response to Zuckert / 256 Geoff Waite contributors / 307 index / 311

8 acknowledgments I am indebted to the committee responsible for the Laurentian University Research Fund for its financial assistance in the production of this book and to the contributors for their edifying work. Gaby Miller kept finding ways to support my work. I am grateful to Diane Tessier, Interlibrary Loan Department, Laurentian University; to the Interlibrary Loan Department at Georgia Southern University; to Ed Dimendberg, who shepherded the book through its early stages at the University of California Press; to his successor, Laura Pasquale; to Kelly Smith, Pat Seguin, Doug Parker, Jesse Brady, Laura Duhan Kaplan, Mark Hochstrasser, David Darby, Tommy Armstrong; and to Don Marshall, who provided sagacious advice. Monika Beer helped to provide clues for making my way to publishers in Germany. Geoff Waite guided me toward understanding the larger picture. The translators who helped with this volume Jason Gaiger, Paul Malone, Richard Palmer deserve special mention for their scholarly labors. At a crucial point, Howard Kaplan in the Office for Research Services and Sponsored Programs at Georgia Southern contributed a significant sum to pay the permissions fee for the photograph on the cover. Eric Smoodin, Kate Toll, Cindy Fulton, Hillary Hansen, Randy Heyman, Sharron Wood, and the staff at University of California Press deserve thanks as well for their invaluable assistance. This book is dedicated to my parents, George and Cathryn Krajewski, who encourage my efforts. B. K. vii

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10 preface This volume brings together some of the leading scholars in philosophical hermeneutics, as well as a few outsiders. Many of the contributors agreed to participate in this collection on the basis of their admiration for the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, certainly one of the key German philosophers of the twentieth century, whose work has influenced not only philosophy but also the study of literature, art, music, sacred and legal texts, and medicine. The occasion for this collection was Gadamer s centenary in However, from the beginning, this collection was not intended as a festschrift, despite natural associations some have made when hearing about the catalyst for its production, nor did I set out to be disrespectful of Gadamer. Some anticipated a celebratory volume, with the accompanying festive atmosphere. Others feared something like a replay of what has taken place with Ezra Pound, E. M. Cioran, Paul de Man, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, 1 and others regarding those individuals activities during the National Socialist period. This anxiety surfaced prior to Richard Wolin s Untruth and Method: Nazism and the Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 2 a triumphant piece of oddness (as noted by, among others, Richard Palmer) that, in part, tries to translate Gadamer s own statements about his political life into shocking discoveries. This is not to say that res ipsa loquitur, or that Gadamer revealed all that might seem relevant about that matter. As a former student of Heidegger, Gadamer might have anticipated that the interrogation lamp on Heidegger would be directed eventually at Heidegger s family, friends, acquaintances, and students as well. We cannot distance ourselves in our study of Heidegger from the judgment that condemns Heidegger for his political action and inaction. Substitute Gadamer for every instance of Heidegger in that last sentence, and one begins to sense a problem with Wolin s position, one that wants to come to grips with an inix

11 x preface tellectual stain that spreads across a number of figures, while simultaneously acting as if that gripping leaves Wolin s (or my own) hands unstained. Some of Gadamer s well-intentioned guardians, already on heightened alert after the appearance of Teresa Orozco s book about Gadamer, 3 want to protect him posthumously from an interrogation, as if wanting to avert a trauma, which seems, in my view, to run counter to the consensus among Gadamerian scholars about the importance of openess, of encounters with otherness, of tradition, and of dialogue, all terms requiring more, not less, attention in the context of a philosophy (philosophical hermeneutics) embedded in a tradition prone to concealment (see Gadamer on Plato s Seventh Letter) and explicitly linked to the figure Hermes, hardly a model of Unverborgenheit. Gadamer was well aware of the pertinence of Stanley Rosen s (Platonic) question, To what extent, if any, can philosophy exist in public? 4 The energies that Gadamerian insiders devote to anxieties about the possibility of a more thorough accounting of Gadamer s life during National Socialism are misplaced. 5 As Geoff Waite put it in this volume, neither Gadamer s acts of collaboration and opportunism nor their admission has proven devastating (265). Perhaps those energies can be redirected toward what James Risser claims is Gadamer s (and repeatedly his followers ) interest in putting claims and judgments to the test in shared inquiry so that what is is raised up in partial aspect and placed in the light of unconcealment [ins Licht Unverborgenheit]. 6 Unlike Wolin, Waite addresses Gadamer s life and writings during the National Socialist period as matters that remain pertinent. Waite is not looking back from a superior ethical position but is asking, among other things, how he himself is called into question by the circumstances that Gadamer faced. Waite stresses that he does not really know what he would have done in circumstances the same as faced by Gadamer in the Third Reich (281). No such self-examination is to be found in Wolin s article. At least equally important in considering why we should care 7 about what went on with Gadamer in the Third Reich is linked to the complex relationship that philosophical hermeneutics has with the history of philosophy itself. While the information about Gadamer s acts of collaboration and opportunism has not been devastating, it has also not led to a reconsideration of the tradition that is philosophical hermeneutics, a tradition that ought to trouble those of us who study it. As Gerald Bruns explains, using the story of Oedipus as one of his examples, the hermeneutical experience of what comes down to us from the past is structurally tragic rather than comic. It is an event that exposes us to our own blindness or the limits of our historicality and extracts from us an acknowledgment of our belongingness to something different, reversing what we had thought. It s just the sort of event that might drive us to put out our eyes. 8 Gadamer s eyes, my own, and presumably yours are at stake. Working on

12 preface xi this collection has reversed some things I had thought about philosophical hermeneutics. I see some things differently at this point. I have more work to do, more things for which to answer. Gadamer thought about his own eyes as well. In a telling passage that has relevance to the Radio Nietzsche chapter, Gadamer writes about the significance of the year 1900, the year Nietzsche s eyes closed, and [Gadamer s] opened to or beheld the light of the world [in dem Nietzsche die Augen schloss und ich das Licht der Welt erblickte]. 9 Implicit in this image is a continuation of sorts. One philosopher dies and another is born, one set of eyes closes while another set opens. What does Gadamer s late, disquieting ocular image suggest about his own view of his role as a philosopher immediately after Nietzsche? My aims for the book were numerous. It seemed important to attend to some of Gadamer s writings that have received little or no attention in either English or German. Also, I wanted to invite people to rethink some of Gadamer s work, especially texts like Truth and Method, the book published in 1960 that in at least one sense put Gadamer on the intellectual map. For a work like Truth and Method, a number of people know already what they think about it, or what they are supposed to think, and I wanted contributors to consider whether that work or others might warrant revisiting, an attention to repercussions. In some cases, contributors set out on their own, journeying through territory I had not imagined, resulting in some edifying surprises. From my view, one that not everyone will share of course, the best result of this set of essays is its provocation. This collection will call on readers and scholars of Gadamer to acknowledge that more is at stake with Gadamer s work than might be immediately apparent, stakes and repercussions that bind contributors and readers, and that call for something other than defensiveness and/or dismissal, and something other than celebration. NOTES 1. See, for example, Paul Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul de Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Adam Gopnik, The Get- Ready Man [on Cioran], The New Yorker ( June 19 and 26, 2000), ; Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds., The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple University Press, 1992); and Steven Ungar, Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). North American analytic philosophy has not been immune to similar scrutiny. See John McCumber s Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001). 2. Richard Wolin, Untruth and Method: Nazism and the Complicities of Hans- Georg Gadamer, The New Republic (May 15, 2000): See also the Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 1 (2001), which is entitled Schwerpunktthema: Hermeneutik

13 xii preface und Politik in Deutschland vor und nach For some helpful corrections to Wolin s article, see Richard E. Palmer, A Response to Richard Wolin on Gadamer and the Nazis, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10.4 (2002): See also The real Nazis had no interest at all in us..., an interview with Doerte von Westernhagen in Gadamer in Conversation, ed. and trans. Richard E. Palmer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), Teresa Orozco, Platonische Gewalt: Gadamers politische Hermeneutik der NS-Zeit (Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1995). 4. Stanley Rosen, Man s Hope, The Public Realm: Essays on Discursive Types in Political Philosophy, ed. Reiner Schürmann (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), An unfortunately typical but concise example of the ways in which scholars of philosphical hermeneutics treat the issue can be found on the dust jacket of the English translation of Jean Grondin s Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003): [Gadamer] chose to remain in his native Germany in the 1930s, neither supporting Hitler nor actively opposing him, but negotiating instead an unpolitical position that allowed him to continue his philosophical work. The section of this collection called Gadamer in Question asks of such scholars of philosophical hermeneutics how they continue to negotiate an unpolitical position that allows them to continue their philosophical work. 6. James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-Reading Gadamer s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), Georgie Warnke, Pace Wolin, International Zeitschrift für Philosophie 1 (2001): Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsäfe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 134.

14 abbreviations GADAMER AP Ästhetik und Poetik I: Kunst als Aussage. Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, DD Destruktion and Deconstruction, in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, EH The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, GW Gesammelte Werke. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) IG The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, PA Philosophical Apprenticeships. Trans. Robert R. Sullivan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, PH Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, PL Philosophische Lehrjahre: Eine Rückschau. Frankfurt: Klostermann, RAS Reason in the Age of Science. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, RB The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Ed. Robert Bernasconi. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, TM Truth and Method. 2d revised ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad, VG Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, xiii

15 xiv WM contributors Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. 4th ed. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), LEVINAS AE Autrement qu être ou au-delá l essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, BPW Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan T. Pepezak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, CPP Collected Philosophical Papers. Transl. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, DEHH En déouvrant l existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. 3d ed. Paris: Vrin, EN Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l autre. Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, HAH Humanisme de l autre homme. Montpellier: Fata Morgana, LR The Levinas Reader. Ed. Sean Hand. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, NTR Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, OTB Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, QL Quatre lectures talmudiques. Paris: Editions de Minuit, SS Du sacré au saint. Paris: Editions de Minuit, TeI Totalité et infini. Essai sur l extériorité. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, TI Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, TTO The Trace of the Other, in Deconstruction in Context. Ed. Mark Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, BT Dde EPH OTHER Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. Ed. and trans. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer. Albany, NY: State Univeristy of New York Press, Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics. Ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson. Trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992.

16 contributors xv PHGG SR SZ The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn. Chicago: Open Court, The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics. Ed. Lawrence K. Schmidt. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Neimeyer, 1984.

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18 Introduction From Word to Concept The Task of Hermeneutics as Philosophy hans-georg gadamer, translated by Richard E. Palmer I would first like briefly to justify the theme I have chosen, namely: from word to concept. The subject matter is a topic belonging both to philosophy and to hermeneutics. In truth, concepts are really one of the distinguishing marks of philosophy. Indeed, philosophy first entered Western culture in this form. For this reason the concept is the first thing I would like to discuss. Of one thing I am sure: the concept, which very often presents itself as something strange and demanding, must begin to speak if it is to be really grasped. For this reason I would first like to revise my topic a little to read: Not only from word to concept but likewise from concept to word. Let s think back to the beginning for a moment. The point we must start out from is the fact that conceptual thinking is a basic characteristic of the Occident. But even the word Occident [Abendland, land of the evening] is no longer so current as it was in my youth, when Oswald Spengler announced its decline. 1 Today, we would prefer to speak of Europe, but again nobody really knows what Europe will be; at most we know what we would like it to be one day. For this reason I believe my topic is not so very far removed from the most pressing questions of today. Nor do I think I have simply chosen to speak again about one of my favorite topics to express my thanks for this festive occasion. Rather, because these are questions I am continuously at work on, I want to confront them here once again. How did it really come about in human history, that in the very dire historical situation in which the Greek city-state culture found itself (i.e., under pressure from the Persian, the Asiatic, and later the Punic African spirit) at exactly this time conceptual thinking, the enduring intellectual creation whose bright rays have streamed out over the globe right down to the present day, arose in Greek culture? You all know, of course, what I am referring to. I am speaking about science obviously about that science we all learn in 1

19 2 introduction school, Euclidean geometry first and foremost. What wonderful precision it displayed in logically proving things that nobody doubted, yet which nevertheless required the very highest intellectual effort for their proof! This success in proving represents an intellectual heroic deed that moved human thought for the first time beyond all knowledge based on experience [Erfahrungswissen] and founded what is now called science [Wissenschaft]. I can speak only with greatest admiration about what this powerful capacity of reason truly is: the miracle of numbers and geometry that grounds the enormous edifice of mathematics. If I begin with this basic assumption that science had its birth in Greece and it was from the Greeks that we inherited our thinking and reflection about the possibility of knowledge as such, then I would go on to pose the further question: What does knowing [Wissen] signify for us? You know the answer. It appears in the form in which Socrates received his reply from the Delphic oracle: that no human being then living was wiser than he. His great admirer and disciple, Plato, has shown us what this wisdom consists of, namely knowing about not knowing. It is the uncompromising and incorruptible manner by which we humans seek, during the short span of life that ends in death, to comprehend the other person, the unknown, the ignoramus and ignorabimus, the not-knowing of our true place in the world. If I begin to ponder the matter in this way, then the following question presses itself on me: How has this mathematizing capacity of the Greeks, this logical power, this taking shape of the most speakable of all languages as Nietzsche called Greek (but in truth all languages are speakable for those who understand how to think) how did it manage to gain prominence throughout the world? If we pose the question in this way, I think we come somewhat nearer the theme, word and concept, and therewith closer to what I have in mind when I focus on the situation of the world today and on our conception of the world, a conception that must no longer be purely Eurocentric. There can be no uncertainty any more that the effects of our sciencebased civilization, with its unbelievable capacity to alter the givens of nature for our own use, life, and survival, have become a tremendous, worldwide problem. There is no doubt that all this has become an important question that is addressed to us, not least because science itself has taught us more and more about what a very short episode humanity represents within the evolution of the universe. Along with the privilege of our present power to transform the given, have we not received one last great gift? Also along with this power, have we perhaps been presented with a task that completely exceeds the powers of our understanding? When one looks beyond what we regard as the civilized motherland of European and Anglo-Saxon cultural traditions, when

20 introduction 3 one looks around the world today at Japan, China, India, South Africa, or South America one finds that in all these cultures the same mathematized and formalized thinking is gaining the upper hand. How will these two factors go together? Or will one dominate the other? Somehow, a global transformation is emerging. I don t want to argue here that the international adoption of the British bathroom betokens a revolution, or that the adoption of the European business suit in offices from Japan to China to India is deeply significant, but rather that at least in certain realms of life a unitary cultural model is emerging, which, like a revolution, is turning everything upside down. In all this there is a fact worth considering: whole blocks of humanity that are quite different from each other in terms of cult, religion, and honoring their ancestors in short, that have different collective ways of living together in conformity with their social rules these cultures are now confronted by the resplendent methodological mastery represented by science. Indeed, we can measure our fate by how, either harmonizing or clashing, this fusing of cultures takes place, perhaps even shaping our own future. Or better: by how that future will be determined by us. Our fate will be decided by how well the world that bears the stamp of science, and that was philosophically expressed through the world of concepts, will be able to bring itself into harmony with the equally deep insights into the destiny of humanity that have come to expression, for example, in a dialogue of a Chinese master with his disciple, or in other kinds of testimony from religiously founded cultures that are completely strange to us. How have we gotten ourselves into this situation? Not completely without poetry, and this holds true for the Greek world as well. The oldest written evidence of Greek conceptual thinking comes in the form of Homeric poetry testimonies sung in Homeric verse. Not philosophy but the epic stands at the beginning of our written heritage. And we experience this when we see how the concept suddenly began to speak spreading suddenly from Greek city-state cultures to the whole Mediterranean world when, embedded in the lines of a verse text, it uttered the question, ti to on What is being? What is it we call nothingness? I could continue and show how Plato s question actually developed out of this one question and led to the establishing of metaphysics, which through Aristotle finally came to be accepted throughout the world and left its imprint on two thousand years of Western thought, until from out of it in the seventeenth century modern science emerged, as well as the modern sciences of experience and mathematics. But at the moment, it is perhaps more appropriate for us to remember that we are in a room dedicated to Hegel. So we have good reason to recall that it was Hegel who saw himself