Key Contemporary Thinkers

Published
Christopher Hookway, Quine

Forthcoming
Peter Burke, The Annales School
Jocelyn Dunphy, Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics, Philosophy and Social Theory
David Frisby, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Social Theory
John Hall, Raymond Aron: A Study in French Intellectual Culture
Philip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: History, Politics and Citizenship
Adrian Hayes, Talcott Parsons and the Theory of Action
Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post-modernism and Beyond
Eileen Manion, Mary Daly: Philosophy, Theology and Radical Feminism
Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes
William Outhwaite, Habermas
Philip Pettit, Rawls
Simon Schaffer, Kuhn
Geoff Stokes, Popper

Preface and acknowledgements

Introduction

1 HERMENEUTICS AND HISTORY

Critique of romantic hermeneutics

Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics

The hermeneutic account of history

Hermeneutics and the Geisteswissenschaften

The phenomenological turn

2 HERMENEUTICS AND AUTHORIAL INTENTION

Hirsch’s intentionalism

The structure of game-playing

Mimesis

Understanding as participation

3 HERMENEUTICS AND THE PROBLEM OF SUBJECTIVISM

The rehabilitation of prejudice and tradition

The anticipation of completeness

Understanding and application

The dialogic structure of understanding

4 HERMENEUTICS AND THE CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY

Habermas’s review of Truth and Method

Apel’s critique of hermeneutics

Habermas’s second response to Gadamer

Unconstrained communication

Gadamer’s conservatism

5 HERMENEUTICS AND THE “NEW PRAGMATISM”

Rorty’s new unity of science

Rorty’s critique of epistemology

Rorty’s irrationalism

Bildung and practical reason

6 CONCLUSION

The dialogic character of understanding

Hermeneutic experience

Bildung

Notes

Index

Since the publication in 1960 of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, his hermeneutics has been the focus of a great deal of philosophical attention. His ideas on understanding and interpretation have been applied to a wide-ranging series of discussions: to questions of interpretation in the study of art and literature,¹ to issues of knowledge and objectivity in the social sciences;² to related debates in such disciplines as theology and jurisprudence;³ and even to re-evaluations of the project of philosophy itself.⁴ None the less, Gadamer’s work has less often been itself the subject of systematic interpretation or assessment and it is this omission that the present book tries to redress.⁵ My concern is first to reconstruct the thread of argument that ties together Gadamer’s disparate discussions of art, history and philosophy, and second to identify both its virtues and its difficulties. By doing so I hope to provide a reliable guide for the continued appropriation and discussion of his work.

Throughout the book my strategy has been to elucidate Gadamer’s position by reconstructing a set of debates in which his work has participated – either actually or virtually. In the first chapter I consider his critique of the romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, the Historical School and Dilthey. He argues that this tradition erred in restricting the problem of understanding to methods for ascertaining an agent’s or author’s intentions; rather, understanding remains primarily a historically situated understanding of the possible validity of texts or such “text-analogues” as actions, practices and social norms. In this critique of the hermeneutic tradition, Gadamer already introduces two of the important tenets of his own “philosophical hermeneutics”: the possible “truth” of texts or text-analogues and the historically conditioned or prejudiced character of understanding. In chapter 2, I expand on Gadamer’s position by setting it against the intentionalist view Hirsch takes from Schleiermacher. Hirsch argues that in emphasizing the variability of textual understanding according to historical circumstances, Gadamer’s position reduces to a subjectivistic glorification of an interpretive community’s or tradition’s prejudices. The notion of a tradition of interpretation is as central to Gadamer’s view as are the ideas of truth and prejudice. The question is whether these need to be given the subjectivistic twist that Hirsch gives to them.

I take up this question in chapter 3, contrasting Gadamer’s position here to a series of actual and possible criticisms. I argue that there are in fact two general objections with which Gadamer’s hermeneutics must contend: not only that it is subjectivistic but that, in its attempt to avoid subjectivism, it becomes conservative. In order to provide a basis for deciding between different plausible interpretations, it takes as its standard the tradition to which it belongs and favors that interpretation which can illuminate its truth. This latter objection is similar to that which Habermas and Apel have raised and chapter 4 therefore examines their debate with Gadamer. As we shall see, Habermas and Apel stress the significance of his analysis as a critique of objectivistic positions such as Hirsch’s; none the less they argue that in taking the tradition as the standard of correct interpretation, Gadamer destroys any basis upon which to assess its own rationality and that he therefore ignores the fact that traditional interpretations can be ideologically distorted. In chapter 5 I consider Richard Rorty’s very different appropriation of Gadamer’s work. Here the value of Gadamer’s work is seen to lie in the scepticism it directs at the possibility of providing a proof for the rationality of our tradition and Rorty thus applauds Gadamer for precisely his disregard for Habermas’s and Apel’s “foundationalist” concerns.

In these final chapters of the book I evaluate both assessments of Gadamer’s work. In my view the contrast between the two accounts suggests that Gadamer’s hermeneutics might best be understood as a middle path. We are situated in history and historically conditioned. This means that our conception of rationality is subject to the limitations of the historical experiences we have inherited. At the same time, the rationality of our response to these experiences remains a constant question for us. No scepticism towards the idea of reason will permit us to avoid it; indeed, it may be that our hermeneutic understanding of others and our past can help us to a provisional answer.

I undertook the preliminary study to which this book is a distant relative while on a fellowship in Germany granted by the Deutscher Akademische Austauschdienst. The book itself was written under the auspices of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. I would like to thank all three institutions for their support. I would also like to thank Thomas McCarthy and my editor, John Thompson, for their intelligent and valuable suggestions, Paul Stern for his criticism and encouragement and Anne Janowitz for both theoretical and practical assistance. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Dalia Fiore who took care of my son with a competence and love that made concentration on this book possible and who is therefore largely responsible for whatever merit it may have.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

In recent years there has been a spate of philosophical books on the limits of various philosophical approaches. In this regard, Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice¹ and Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy² are only two of the more explicit examples. But from deconstructionist studies of the self-deception involved in claims to textual understanding to historicist accounts of scientific research, the emphasis has been on the limits of our knowledge of texts, nature, ourselves and our world. The claim is that we are always involved in interpretations and that we can have no access to anything like “the truth” about justice, the self, reality or the “moral law.” Our notions of these “truths” are rather conditioned by the cultures to which we belong and the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. Hence, we must face the fact of our finitude and the utterly contingent character of our efforts to understand.

Gadamer’s work might be said to serve as the basis for this current focus on limits. For the whole of his philosophical career and culminating in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, his concern has been to overcome the positivistic hubris of assuming that we can develop an “objective” knowledge of the phenomena with which we are concerned. As a distinct discipline hermeneutics has its origins in nineteenth-century attempts to formulate a theory of interpretation. Questions of interpretation had been raised earlier, in particular in the Reformation’s challenge to the Catholic reading of the Bible. Did an understanding of Scripture require a prior acceptance of the precepts of the Catholic faith or could it be understood on its own? If it could, was it to be read as a unified text or as a series of disparate narratives written at different times with different purposes? At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the philologist and theologian F. D. E. Schleiermacher significantly expanded the scope of hermeneutic questions. The problem, as he saw it, was not just how the Bible or even classical texts were to be understood, but how meaning could be comprehended, what the methods were that would permit an objective understanding of texts and utterances of any kind. Following Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey asked even broader questions: what were the methods that would permit an objective reading of symbolic structures of any kind, including actions, social practices, norms and values? How could the understanding of meaning be raised to the same level of methodological clarity that characterized the natural sciences? How could it find as solid a basis for methodical progress?

By 1960, when Gadamer published Truth and Method, the consequences of this kind of question had become apparent. Dilthey had tried to establish the autonomy of the logic of the Geisteswissenschaften or of such studies as history, textual interpretation and the investigation of social norms, practices and institutions. That is, his desire had been to illuminate the difference between the structure of these sciences of meaning and the natural scientific explanation of events based on the formulation of theoretical frameworks and discovery of causal laws. Nevertheless he conceived of both kinds of study as objective sciences; the point of both was to develop a neutral understanding of social or human phenomena, an understanding that would be accessible to all interpreters or observers from whatever historical or cultural vantage point they might inhabit. The positivism of the mid-twentieth century differed only in denying any distinction in the logics of the natural sciences and Geisteswissenschaften. If both were to be objective sciences, this meant that the latter had to emulate the practices and standards of the former; what was required was an ability to explain and predict the occurrence of events by formulating and verifying causal hypotheses. Social scientific findings were to be repeatable in the same way as natural scientific experiments and in both cases objectivity was to mean an elimination of subjective intrusions: explanations were to be based on adherence to rigorous scientific methods so that the effects of differences in imagination, interpretive talent or individual perspective could be minimized. Disciplines in which the influence of talent, imagination and perspective could not be minimized, such as literary studies and art appreciation, were no longer to be viewed as cognitive disciplines at all.³

From Gadamer’s point of view, this constellation of norms and premises is a disaster since it overlooks important differences between understanding meaning and explaining the occurrences of events, differences that Dilthey was right to emphasize. Gadamer thus reverses the positivist response to Dilthey, criticizing him not for maintaining a distinction between natural and social science but for not realizing that this distinction runs right through to the standards’ of objectivity appropriate to each. In so far as positivism assumes that the natural sciences provide the model of an objective inquiry impervious to changes in historical vantage point and scientific perspective, it does not describe even them correctly. Gadamer maintains that the natural sciences are the product of a tradition of interpretation and that their norms and standards are simply the “prejudices” of this tradition. To hold them up as the muster of knowledge in general is thus to overlook the extent to which they are historically conditioned and, moreover, to refuse to recognize the existence of other historically constituted norms and standards. We shall examine the details of this argument in the substance of the book itself. The point here is that, for Gadamer, the question that Schleiermacher and Dilthey ask and positivism takes up is the wrong question. We cannot ask how the sciences of meaning are to attain the objectivity characteristic of the natural sciences because this standard of objectivity is one constituted within a certain tradition, appropriate, perhaps, for certain purposes, but not at all one that can be absolutized as a general demand.

Hermeneutics, as Gadamer conceives of it, then, is no longer to be seen as a discourse on methods of “objective” understanding as it was for the hermeneutic tradition of Schleiermacher and Dilthey. It no longer seeks to formulate a set of interpretive rules; rather, in referring to his analysis as “philosophical hermeneutics,” Gadamer turns to an account of the conditions of the possiblity of understanding in general, conditions that in his view undermine faith in the ideas of both method and objectivity. Methodological approaches to both natural and human phenomena are rooted in history; they accept certain historical assumptions as to both what is to be studied and how it is to be approached. Understanding is therefore rooted in prejudice and the way in which we understand is thoroughly conditioned by the past or by what Gadamer calls “effective history.” This influence of the past obtains in our aesthetic understanding, in our social and psychological self-understanding and in all forms of scientific understanding. The objectivity of our knowledge is therefore significantly curtailed by its dependence on tradition and this dependence is not one that method can in any way transcend. Anticipating the trend I noted earlier Gadamer might therefore have titled his book Objectivity and the Limits of Method.

By now, this analysis may seem old-hat. The positivism that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s no longer has the force it once had and few still deny the reliance of scientific approaches on a series of historically advanced assumptions or conventions. Such theorists as Richard Rorty, whose views I shall be discussing in chapter 5, go so far as first to reject the positivistic distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive disciplines, and second to argue that natural science is itself hermeneutic. The development of hermeneutics which began with Schleiermacher and Dilthey’s attempt to erect a science of meaning on a par with the natural sciences thus culminates in the claim that the natural sciences are themselves sciences of meaning; in other words, that they are themselves historically conditioned, fallible interpretations. But if Truth and Method thus sets itself against a positivism that is no longer generally accepted, the question arises as to whether it has anything left to say to us, post-positivists as many of us are.

In my view it has a great deal to say to us. For, if the attention Truth and Method pays to prejudice and the influence of the past is important, no less important is its attempt to resuscitate a dialogic conception of knowledge. Understanding (Verstehen) for Gadamer is primarily coming to an understanding (Verständigung) with others. In confronting texts, different views and perspectives, alternative life forms and world-views, we can put our own prejudices in play and learn to enrich our own point of view. Against positivism, then, Gadamer argues that an objectivity attained through scientific method is no more adequate than the prejudices it presupposes; but he also suggests that our prejudices are as much thresholds as limits, that they form perspectives from which a gradual development of our knowledge becomes possible. To this extent, Gadamer’s account of understanding retains a connection to the Enlightenment. To be sure, we can no longer hope to eradicate prejudice through method. Nor can we search for an objectivity that would lift us above historical variations and subjective interpretations. None the less, in coming to an understanding with others we can learn how to amend some of our assumptions and, indeed, how to move to a richer, more developed understanding of the issues in question.

It is significant, then, that Gadamer does not refer to limits in his title. In stressing the way in which our understanding is embedded in history, his point is not simply the degree to which our history limits our knowledge and not simply the extent to which notions of truth are historically various. His point is also that history can itself aid our development and help us to cultivate what we may still call “reason.”