-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Grimes
Do you feel like giving me a quick overview of Gadamer--or at least a quick synopsis of Truth and Method? He and Leo Strauss knew each other and took lectures under Heidegger at Freiburg and Marburg around 1922-4 or so. Chuck Grimes
The is a good deal of bibliographical work on Gadamer that has been published in the last couple years. Gadamer died in 2002, still writing and publishing (he was a participant at the Derrida & Religion conference... published as Religion, ed. Derrida and Vatimo). He was 102.
Forgive the formality of the writing here. This is a cut and paste (and re-shuffled and re-edited) of my summary / study notes.
Basic idea: "The ability to understand is a fundamental endowment of humankind, one that sustains communal life with others and, above all, one that takes place byway of language and the partnership of conversation. In this respect, the universal claim of hermeneutics is beyond all doubt." (Truth and Method). Essentially, hermeneutics is the attempt to discover something that is not absolutely unknown but whose meaning has become alien and inaccessible. The practical task of hermeneutics is understanding, the philosophical task of hermeneutics is to outline what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing, an explanation of how understanding happens. The background work of a philosophical hermeneutics demonstrates how knowledge and understanding are made possible. Gadamer does this through an explication of the concept "historically effected consciousness" - the universal phenomenon of contingency and meaning as effectual moments of one's own being and understanding. In Truth and Method Gadamer demonstrates the limits of method by examining the nature of art and aesthetic experience. Art is a unique expression and aesthetics is therefore understood as a history of worldviews. Likewise, understanding a work of art can only come from participating in the mode of being of the work of art and is therefore not open to the sciences, since art, as play, both transcends the conscious player and performs without a goal. For Gadamer, a moral conversation is thus an open interpretive dialogue - which does not beg a teleological end but unfolds in accord with the living presence of embedded and embodied individuals. In this way the process of hermeneutics is a learning process characterised by the dynamics of openness and prejudice. His comments on prejudice enticed Habermas to enter into a debate with him.
Gadamer initially clarifies the idea of prejudice through the Greek conception of taste. Taste is how we approach an object. It is a testimony both to the mutability of all human things and the relativity of all human values, it is a source of pre-judgement. Gadamer is careful to distinguish between the hasty prejudice of human authority and the prejudices which constitute the historical reality of the human condition. Only on the basis of historical experience and prejudice is understanding made possible. Understanding is not possible without experience and experience is not possible outside of history. History, being the immediate context of human beings, is therefore both a source of legitimate knowledge and rational authority. Prejudices are necessary components of human thought in history since they serve as a kind of guarantee against falsely imposing alien standards on distant objects. In other words - we argue, interpret, and live from within our individual historical location - moving dialectically within our traditions, history, and personal identity.
As a practical activity, the aim of interpretation is an inquiry which proceeds to a fusion of horizons. A horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. For Gadamer, historically effected consciousness is an element in the act of understanding itself and is already effectual in finding the right questions to ask. Constituted by experiences, problems are engaged, whether they are ethical, legal, or philological, in order to achieve an effect, with an awareness that the supposed difficulty of application does not consist in relating some pregiven universal to the particular situation. The resolution of a problem is made possible within the fusion of horizons, the effect of coming to an understanding about something. In this way Gadamer's reading of the human situation is pluralistic - but also cognitive - since understanding is a fundamental endowment of all human beings. The entwinement of experience and understanding is achieved through reason and negation. Experiences are negations or contradictions of prior experiences. An experience is characterised by openness, a desire to know, and stands in opposition to expectations. For Gadamer, the experience of understanding, the fusion of horizons, is an achievement of language: "To understand someone else is to see the justice, the truth, of their position. And this is what transforms us." Language is the medium of hermeneutic experience, adopted for both expressive and communicative means. It "holds open the totality in which we live" and is the "quintessence of everything that can encounter us at all." Understanding, which is always an understanding about something particular, is concretised in language, since words are the bearers of our history and past experience. Gadamer characterises language as an event in the process of concept formation. The character of language, as formative, is also incomplete and speculative, just as human prejudices are also incomplete and also rooted in speculation. Nonetheless, language serves the medium of our whole experience - within which dwells art, knowledge, method, reason, truth, and understanding. In sum "being that can be understood is language."
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