Writing in the wake of the furor over her account of the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt reflects on why truth and politics are, in her words, “on rather bad terms.”1 Her analysis rests on dividing truth into two different types. The first type, rational truth, is the subject of mathematics and philosophy. It has a long history of tension with politics, going back at least to Plato, who worried about the displacement of rational truth by mere opinion. In the modern age, Arendt says, opinion has generally won the day, rendering rational truth politically irrelevant.2 The second type, factual truth, has to do with the record of events and history. Factual truth remains politically relevant in the modern age, primarily in its capacity to threaten power with its assertion that certain things are true despite what those in power wish. But, Arendt points out, factual truth is terribly fragile and is contingent on our collective witness, and so is always at risk of manipulation and destruction. Under totalitarianism, manipulation occurs through organized lying on a massive scale, including the rewriting of history. In mass democracy, Arendt insightfully notes, it occurs through the reduction of factual truth to partisan belief, mere ideology, or an expression of interest.
If truth and politics were on bad terms in 1967 when Arendt wrote her essay, surely the situation is worse today. Increasingly, it seems, events are treated not as if there are facts of the matter, but simply as differing ideological viewpoints: Do carbon emissions affect the climate? What led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008? Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction? Does the state of Hawaii have a birth certificate on file for Barack Obama? Answers to these questions are viewed as correct or incorrect only as a measure of which side one is on. There are now entire cable news networks that seem to be devoted to constructing and perpetuating falsehoods, and a growing body of political science research unfortunately shows that citizens in the United States not only are woefully ignorant of accurate facts, but also do not change their beliefs when presented with them.3 The prospects for truth in politics indeed look bleak.
Perhaps, however, Arendt’s categories miss something. Is there another kind of truth than factual and rational truth that may fare better in modern democracies? I take up this question by turning to a different student of Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and ask whether his hermeneutical approach to truth holds promise for politics.
Gadamer famously argues that our “being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic.”4 Language is not a third thing alongside the world and our thoughts about the world. Instead, he says, “in all our knowledge of ourselves and in all knowledge of the world, we are always already encompassed” by language.5 Thus, language is how we become acquainted with the world, and learning to speak a language “means acquiring a familiarity and acquaintance with the world itself and how it confronts us.”6 This is certainly true of our first languages, when as children we come to know the world as we learn to understand what is said to us and to speak ourselves. But it is also true when we learn another language later in life. Learning a new language does not simply give us an additional set of tools to express what we already know. Instead, it opens another world to us. The new language becomes a means of knowing by making it possible for us to become acquainted with new things. In this way, language is not a possession, but is there from the beginning. As Gadamer’s writes, “we are always already at home in language, just as much as we are in the world.”7
Gadamer argues that the “real being [of language] consists in what is said in it,” which he theorizes by recalling the Greek concept of logos.8 He appropriates this concept, even as he recognizes that it has fallen out of favour in contemporary philosophy. Gadamer laments that the correspondence between logos and being was “destroyed” with the demise of Hegelian philosophy and the subsequent dominance of epistemology. Hegel was the “last and most universal representative of ancient logos philosophy” because he taught that reason was in everything, including history.9 Gadamer wants to return to logos philosophy, though not in a Hegelian sense. Although Gadamer does at times equate logos with reason, he generally casts logos in terms of the truth that resides in discourse or speech.10 Logos, in other words, has to do with “the actual content of what languages hand down to us.” If we ignore this and treat language only in terms of form, “we have too little left” to say anything meaningful about truth.11 The distinction between the form and content of language potentially leads us astray. Gadamer wants to reconnect them by means of the concept of logos, the truth that a language bears in its particular form.
To say that truth resides in logos, or that logos bears truth, is to suggest that language acts as a depository of things that we know. Gadamer describes logos at one point as the “communicative sedimentation of our experiential world that encompasses everything that we can exchange with one another.”12 He regards logos as an accumulation of our collective and historical experiences – experiences that we also partake in, in some sense, when we learn a language. In becoming proficient in a language, we do not acquire a set of tools for expressing the truth so much as we become familiar with truth as expressed in language. As language transforms over time with changing experiences and practices, it also accrues truth, almost behind our backs. Truth is sedimented in language; logos is sedimented truth.
A simple example of this can be found in the exchange between Socrates and Meno’s slave. Before interviewing the boy, Socrates asks Meno, “He is Greek, and speaks Greek, does he not?” Meno responds in the affirmative, and says the boy “was born in the house.”13 Presumably this means he grew up speaking Greek, and so it is for him a native language. In asking about this, Socrates may simply want to know whether the boy will understand him if he speaks in Greek, but Gadamer makes more of the matter. He explains that the boy’s recognition of the area of the bigger square “implies that he already knows what ‘double’ means – he must know Greek.”14 The boy knows the concept of “double” because he grew up speaking Greek, just like he knows what a line and a square are, even though he has never formally studied geometry. In asking his questions, Socrates draws on the boy’s implicit knowledge of these things, acquired by learning Greek, and makes them and their connections to each other conscious objects of thought. The truth about lines, squares, areas, doubling, and so forth has accumulated and resides in the Greek language, as it were. One who speaks this language already necessarily “knows” these things.
It important to note, however, that truth resides not in the words or concepts themselves, but in their relation to other words and concepts. This is why Gadamer focuses on logos rather than on words and concepts when he talks about the truth that is sedimented in language. Logos is a kind of “relational ordering” among words,15 and “the truth of things resides in discourse . . . and not in individual words, not even in a language’s entire stock of words.”16 What we say is always instantiated in and connected to much more that we do not say. “Nothing that is said,” Gadamer notes, “has its truth simply in itself, but refers instead backward and forward to what is unsaid.”17 When we speak, we draw on this truth, but in a different way than a subjectivist or instrumentalist account suggests: “Logos (discourse and speech) and the manifestation of things that takes place in it, is something different from the act of intending the meanings contained in words, and it is here, in speaking, that the actual capacity of language to communicate what is correct and true has its locus.”18 We cannot simply compile a list of truths that constitute logos and choose from among them when we speak or wish to know something. We do not have the distance on truth that would be required to do this, since the truth of logos is not an object for us in the way that the truth of method is. As Gadamer says, this “articulation of the experiential world in logos . . . forms a kind of knowledge that . . . still presents the other half of the truth” alongside modern science.19 The truth sedimented in language is the truth that escapes method. We inhabit this truth, rather than stand over against it. When using language, and when communicating with others, we do not draw on it as much as we participate in it.
Socrates understood this, according to Gadamer. His questioning was a way to bring the truth sedimented in language to light in order to illuminate social and political affairs, and also to examine prevailing public opinions that had not been fully evaluated in light of this truth. This is how to make sense of the perplexity in which most of his dialogues end and which Plato theorizes in the Meno. Not only virtue but also hermeneutic truth is not teachable in a dogmatic sense. It cannot be objectified, memorized, and then applied. It is, instead, called forth in dialogue, as the participants in the dialogue participate in the truth that is sedimented in language – in other words, as they encounter and participate in the logos by being again reminded of that which they know. But the ability to recognize this truth depends on being open to being wrong. We can only see the truth in its new (yet familiar) form when we are able to acknowledge the ways in which our current understandings are flawed.20 Seeing the truth and having it emerge anew requires an acknowledgement that one does not know. But this acknowledgment makes one vulnerable. It places oneself in question.
In The Idea of the Good, Gadamer contrasts Meno and the slave in terms of their capacity to recognize what is true. Placing himself in question is precisely what Meno cannot (or will not) do.21 He “wants to acquire the new wisdom as cheaply as possible, and he bolts when he is about to be forced to place himself in question.”22 He has too much invested in the views he already holds about virtue and in his view of himself as one who knows something about it. As a result, Gadamer says, Meno can only follow the dialogue so far before getting frustrated. In contrast, the boy’s recognition that his answers are on occasion false is “not anything that might cripple him.”23 His willingness to acknowledge his errors makes it possible for him, eventually, to recognize the truth. The slave has the wisdom of Socrates: he knows that he does not know. This is the starting point for dialogue that results in truth. Recognition of the new yet familiar truth that resides in logos depends on being open to being wrong and willing to put oneself into question and at risk.
At this preliminary point, then, we can see that, based on Gadamer’s account, the possibility of hermeneutic truth in politics will be tied to democratic deliberation. If, as the example of Socrates suggests, the truth sedimented in language emerges only through the back and forth and the questioning and answering that constitute dialogue, then the emergence of truth in politics will depend on healthy deliberation within our political institutions and in the public sphere.24 Such deliberation would require that the participants, like Meno’s slave, acknowledge that they do not already have all of the answers. At least to some extent, they would need to acknowledge that they do not know or that they might be wrong about what they think they know. As I will discuss at greater length below, this appears to be an uncommon trait among political actors today, as citizens and political leaders seem far more likely to assert their views on all kinds of political issues as if it were impossible that they could be wrong. This is a challenge to the possibility of hermeneutic truth in politics.
Another problem arises here as well. Given this picture of truth, it is not clear how Gadamer’s hero Socrates can call dominant opinions into question through his dialogical approach. If truth is sedimented in language, how does this work? Do not the dominant opinions and Socrates’ own questioning draw on the same language and, thus, participate in the same logos? Are these opinions and his questions not drawn from the same set of social and political practices and thus necessarily drawn from the same truths and conceptions of the good sedimented in language? Even if citizens would engage in deliberation with some awareness that they do not know or may be wrong, would this not just result in compromise, consensus, or understanding, rather than something that we can call truth? Even more worrisome, would not these shared understandings also potentially just reflect dominant ideologies, as Habermas alleged in his review of Truth and Method?25 At this point, Gadamer’s approach seems to resemble merely a brand of relativism, with dominant ideologies (and, thus, power) determining what is taken to be true and false, good and bad.
My account of Gadamer’s approach to truth so far is partial. He does argue that truth is sedimented in language, but he also suggests that truth is more than this. Truth is not merely the product of language and culture but also has to do with a world or a reality as such. This dimension of Gadamer’s conception of truth becomes clear in his discussion of propositional truth in a 1957 essay. Here Gadamer argues that because history affects both a proposition and its interpreter, understanding the truth of a proposition brings about “a constant synthesis between the horizon of the past and the horizon of the present.”26 The resulting interpretation is actually a merging of the situational horizon of the proposition and that of the interpreter. Thus, although a proposition has meaning in a particular context, it does not contain truth in and of itself. But rather than claim that all interpretations are subjective and that there is, therefore, no such thing as truth per se, Gadamer goes in a different direction. He insists that the nature of propositions reveals that truth is “unconcealedness,” an idea he takes from Heidegger, who developed it through a recovery of the Greek concept of aletheia.27 Heidegger argues that correspondence theories of truth, which treat true propositions as accurate descriptions of the world as it exists independent of thought and language, actually conceal a more primary truth that involves the disclosedness or unconcealedness of being.28 In saying this, Heidegger is, above all, trying to shift the locus of truth away from consciousness and subjectivity and toward truth as a mode of existence. Truth, in other words, does not first and foremost relate to the correspondence between assertions and reality. While assertions can be true and false in terms of being correct or incorrect descriptions of a state of affairs, they are already abstractions from, and therefore derivative of, a holistic context of truth in which they are situated.29 In other words, the truth of assertions “presupposes a prelinguistic, pre-conventional, precognitive disclosure of beings.”30 Assertions testify to a truth, but they do not contain truth in the way that correspondence theories claim. Instead, they represent occasions for the disclosedness of being. Heidegger thus calls truth unconcealment. Similarly, Gadamer wants to treat truth not as a function of consciousness but more as an event that happens to us. For him, this event takes place because of and in language, particularly speech. In the 1957 essay, he states this starkly: “the meaning of speech [die Rede] is to put forward the unconcealed, to make manifest.”31 Language is the means by which truth is disclosed, but not in the sense of propositions that accurately describe an external reality. Truth is not “in” the proposition but arises out of the interaction between interpreter and text and makes a claim on the interpreter.
Gadamer makes a stronger claim in a 1960 essay in which he argues, perhaps a bit tongue in cheek, that we should dispense with the phrase “the nature of things” and instead talk about “the language of things.” To begin the essay, he laments the turn to subjectivity in modern philosophy and praises classical metaphysics for its emphasis on the pre-existing relationship between subject and object, between idea and being. In Gadamer’s view, however, we can no longer rest a classical approach on its traditional, theological grounding, and so he turns instead to language and its capacity to reveal the world to us. Gadamer draws our attention to the inherent relationship between language and things themselves – that is, to the “interconnection of word and thing [Sache].”32 Talking about “the nature of things” implies that we know what this nature is apart from language and that we simply express it in words. In Gadamer’s view, this returns us to the subject-object problem of modern philosophy and to an instrumental view of language. Talking instead about “the language of things” highlights the fact that it is only in language that “the primordial correspondence of soul and being is so exhibited that finite consciousness too can know of it.”33 In other words, language unconceals being to us. Or, said differently, the world discloses itself in language. Whoever has language, Gadamer claims in Truth and Method, “has” the world. Or, as he famously puts it, “Being that can be understood is language.”34
Being is never disclosed in a complete sense all at once, however, as Gadamer notes: “That language and the world are related in a fundamental way does not mean, then, that the world becomes the object of language.”35 The disclosure of truth in language does not mean that a “world-in-itself” is objectified, nor that a thing-in-itself becomes an object for us. This is the mistaken assumption of modern philosophy of consciousness, as well as of those who equate truth in the human sciences with the results produced by method. The non-instrumental nature of language and our fundamental linguistic existence means that language cannot offer us the distance necessary to gain a view of the world-in-itself. Since we remain “caught,” as it were, in language, only the truth of a thing (Sache), not truth in a comprehensive, objective sense, is disclosed in language. But even here, any disclosure is merely “the experience of an ‘aspect’ of the thing itself.”36 It is only one part of the thing. But notice the scare quotes around “aspect.” Gadamer is not completely comfortable with this locution because he does not want to be understood as saying this disclosure represents an “imperfect understanding” of the thing.37 The thing itself is disclosed, but this truth is always unavoidably partial and historical. Truth is revealed differently in different historical circumstances, or a different aspect of its being is revealed in different moments.
It seems, then, that Gadamer wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, he wants to avoid the relativism that follows from a view of truth as sedimented in language by appealing to something disclosed in language. On the other hand, he criticizes philosophies of consciousness that view truth as something outside of language, and language as a mere instrument. So, he insists both that truth involves the disclosure of the world, the thing or subject, and also that this always and only occurs through language.
If we accept both of these claims, we are left without external criteria to evaluate an event of disclosure and determine whether or not we have encountered something true. Instead, whatever criteria there might be are internal to the experience itself. As Gadamer admits in Truth and Method, “in understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe.”38 We are “too late” because it is only with the disclosing event itself that we encounter truth. Truth has an event quality to it, and so “the revealedness and unconcealedness of things . . . has its own temporality and historicity.”39 Truth discloses itself in speech, but as a result the event of truth is always tied to the horizon of the present.
Gadamer’s discussion of art offers insights into whether and how we can know when truth has been disclosed. One of the characteristics of the beautiful, he says, is that we recognize and value it for its own sake, not as a means to something else. Moreover, this recognition is tied to its character of self-presentation, which takes the form of “radiance” or a shining forth.40 This is the case with truth as well. Like the beautiful, truth shines forth and is recognizable in its shining-forth by making something manifest – by enlightening it.41 Moreover, like the beautiful, the truth that shines forth has a self-evident quality about it. An event of truth thus involves a moment of recognition, of seeing something in a way that is familiar but also new. As James Risser explains, such an event is a moment of something coming to light, “in the sense that something becomes clear.” This above all involves the appearance of something that we recognize as fitting.42 In a conversation, in reading a text, or in some other experience, a fitting response emerges and captures something precisely. When this happens, what emerges may surprise us, but it is not something that was completely unknown to us before its appearance. In fact, we only recognize it because in some sense we already know it, although it was obscured. As Nicholas Davey nicely puts it, an event of truth “is not a bursting forth from a noumenal realm but a sudden shift of perspective that allows us to see that which we had not anticipated even though the elements of what we now know stood before us albeit in a fragmentary way.”43
Another way to think about this is in terms of disentanglement. As Gadamer claims: “To be this and not that constitutes the determinacy of all beings.”44 An event of truth comes not in seeing (or hearing) everything at once but in distinguishing something from that in which it is enmeshed. Such an event is a moment of clarification in which something comes into focus by presenting itself as distinct from other things. These moments are familiar to us from the performing arts. A play or a movie “rings true” when it brings something to light in a way that distinguishes it from the messiness of everything else. Perhaps an exchange, a character, a relationship, or a moment in the performance brought to the foreground of our attention a truth that we previously could not see because it was caught up in everything around it. In such a case, Gadamer claims, “what is emerges. It produces and brings to light what is otherwise constantly hidden and withdrawn.”45 The what is comes into view as it is disentangled from everything else.
This disentanglement is evident not just in the arts but also in the everyday experience of finding exactly the right word to express something. We have all had the experience of not quite being able to retrieve the correct word, of knowing the terms we are using are not quite right and also knowing there is a term that fits, even if we cannot recall it. According to Gadamer, this occurs because “experience of itself seeks and finds words that express it. We seek the right word – i.e., the word that really belongs to the thing – so that in it the right thing comes into language.”46 Finding the right word – and note that we experience it as finding and not choosing the word – has an “aha!” quality to it. The moment it comes to us, we simply know that it fits. In this way, “the truth of speech is determined by the adequation of speech to the thing.”47 The right word disentangles something from whatever else surrounds it. The thing discloses itself in language only through the word that belongs to it.
According to Gadamer, this moment of disentanglement is also characterized by fullness or abundance. The truth we recognize is familiar – this is what makes it possible for us to recognize it – but the moment of recognition is accompanied by “the joy of knowing more than is already familiar.”48 The unconcealing of a subject enriches us by giving us a new understanding of what is familiar. We can see this by way of a negative example. Performances that we describe as flat or hollow do not have this character of fullness and, thus, are not accompanied by the joy of knowing more. We say that such performances do not ring true because they do not present the complexity and fullness of experience. In an event of truth, in contrast, something is distinguished or disentangled, but in a way that also points to something beyond itself. Something true is disclosed, but in a way that maintains a connection to the fullness of the world in which it is situated and from which it is drawn. Our recognition includes a sense of knowing something we had not known before. In this way, the disclosure of the thing is a moment of disentanglement but also enrichment.
To summarize, Gadamer’s notion of truth involves the disclosure of something in such a way that we recognize it as distinct, fitting, and enriching, an experience we are familiar with from the performing arts. Although art and politics are distinct, if intersecting, human endeavors, perhaps it is possible to approach democratic politics with the expectation that truth of this sort may be disclosed here too. Now that we have a fuller account of hermeneutic truth, can we expect to see it in politics and, thus, supplement Arendt’s pessimistic account with a bit of hope?
A couple of observations are in order here. First, as I noted above, the disclosure of truth is primarily a function of dialogue. Gadamer employs the metaphor of a fusion of horizons in order to emphasize that what happens in dialogue does not entail one participant simply taking on the other’s point of view or position. Rather, the result is a new thing – something that was not present before and that belongs to none of the participants. When this occurs in dialogue, Gadamer claims, “it is something that comes to language, not one or the other speaker.”49 Through the back and forth, the question and answer of dialogue, a common thing or subject is disclosed among us. With the event of understanding, the participants “come under the influence of the truth of the object.”50 In this way, dialogue has a disclosive effect. As I noted above, the possibility of hermeneutic truth is directly related to a healthy, deliberative public sphere. The exercise of power to shut down, artificially manufacture, or manipulate public deliberation works against the possibility of the disclosure of truth.
The second observation, related to the first, is that truth of this sort is thus not a possession that one carries into political dialogue and that one has and others do not have. Rather, it is disclosed among us. Recall Gadamer’s concern to shift the locus of truth away from the intended meaning of a particular statement and to its broader linguistic context – to the connection between what is said and what is unsaid. This shift in location means relinquishing the presumption that we already have the truth about political affairs and that the political realm is merely the opportunity to express it, to convince others, or to impose it on them. This approach also means we have to surrender the fantasy, one particularly prevalent among academics, that if others just listened to us, or just understood our point, the scales would fall from their eyes and they would see what is true. In other words, hermeneutic truth requires that we fight against the presumption that those who differ with us on political questions are confused, stubborn, mistaken about their own interests, or have been taken in by propaganda and manipulation.
Third, the disclosure of truth in politics thus depends on being open to others. Recent democratic theory has focused substantially on the kinds of reasons that are appropriate or inappropriate in a democratic public sphere, but this, I would argue, is to mistake political discourse for an academic debate and citizens for scholars. The openness Gadamer’s account suggests is not primarily an epistemological disposition, a kind of skepticism or suspension of conviction that may seem normal to academics but foreign to citizens generally. Instead, it has to do with a willingness to interact with others, to see them as fellow citizens, and to fall into dialogue with them about common concerns and issues.51 It means not surrendering to our instinct to steel ourselves against others, an instinct that is strongest when the other is unlike us. It means seeking out opportunities to fall in with citizens not normally part of the circles we run in.
Fourth, this openness is risky because opening oneself to others in dialogue means that one is not in control. Given the interactive nature of dialogue, once we are drawn in – once we fall in with another – we may not escape without being changed. By its nature, truth-disclosing dialogue is unpredictable, and the truth that emerges may not be what we sought or expected. Opening ourselves to others unlike us, and thereby to the disclosure of truth about some subject, thus exposes our views and ourselves. The act of engaging in dialogue with those unlike us may transform our views or even transform us. For most of us, taking this risk cuts against our instincts, as we generally seek control of more dimensions of our lives, including politics. It cuts against our quest to be sovereign.
To summarize these observations: when it comes to politics, hermeneutic truth is not a possession or viewpoint brought into the political realm but something disclosed through the risky practice of dialogue, in which we open ourselves to others, especially those unlike us. When stated this starkly, it is not clear we can be more hopeful about hermeneutic truth in politics than Arendt was about factual truth. At least in the United States right now, it is hard to find examples of open dialogue among those who do not already agree with each other. Among political elites, ideological and partisan commitments trump attempts to craft good policy, much less pursue open discussions on difficult public issues. The US Senate, once called the world’s greatest deliberative body, has become starkly polarized, with deliberation pushed aside in favour of speeches to an empty chamber, written for the purpose of having snippets replayed on the cable news networks. Anecdotes of Congress’s broken state abound. The private lunchroom in the Senate, where senators from both parties used to take meals, now sits empty. Senators Lieberman and Alexander tried to start a series of bipartisan breakfasts in 2007, but they died out after the 2008 election.52 Bob Shieffer, host of CBS’S Sunday news program Face the Nation, revealed in May 2010 that a congressional leader requested a separate green room before appearing on the show because he did not want to share space with someone from the other party.53 There are few better ways to steel oneself against risky engagement with another than refusing to be in the same room with them.
Politically engaged citizens mimic the bad behaviour of elites. A recent study of political bloggers, for example, shows that the vast majority of their references, responses, and links are to other blogs with a similar ideological stance. Only about 15 per cent of their references cut across ideological lines, and about half of these were classified by the researchers as “strawman” arguments rather than as serious, substantive engagement with opposing views.54 Likewise, a study found that an overwhelming majority of blog readers – 94 per cent – visit only websites from one side of the ideological spectrum. While blog readers are more partisan and ideological than other citizens, they are also the most politically aware, the most highly educated, and the most politically active.55 In other words, they are the citizens most prepared to thoughtfully engage with other citizens in dialogue, but they instead insulate themselves, rarely risking an open encounter with others they do not already agree with. When citizens do meet face to face with those unlike them, truth-disclosing dialogue is rare, as demonstrated by the series of town hall meetings in 2009, which were scheduled to foster dialogue about health care but were instead hijacked by groups whose primary aim was to stop dialogue.
Given this combination of ideological fragmentation and hyper-partisanship, the prospects for the disclosure of truth in US politics seem grim. In order to remain hopeful about the prospects of hermeneutic truth, one must take the long view. One example, I will suggest, is the disclosure of truth about the nature of civic equality. Though Tocqueville in the 1830s reported on what was to him an astonishing level of equality in the US, the democracy he saw was of course marred by substantial civic inequality. Women’s suffrage activists had already started organizing at the time, but it would be nearly a century before women won the right to vote nationwide. Likewise, abolitionists were also already at work when Tocqueville visited, but it would be nearly forty years before the Civil War amendments promised civic equality for African Americans, and nearly another century after that before many of those promises began to be fulfilled. In each of these cases, the truths that sex and race are not legitimate grounds for inequalities in public life – in voting rights, property rights, rights to education, access to the judicial system, employment protections, rights to marry (and divorce) whom one wants – were disclosed by means of the members of the subjugated groups tirelessly working their way into the public sphere. Their organizing, speaking, marching, and hounding of local and national officials required those officials to recognize and engage with them. This engagement, in turn, eventually rendered it impossible to hold onto the ideal of equality while also defending differential public standing on the basis of race and sex. The disclosed truth about equality, in other words, has become sedimented in the language of democratic politics.
This is not to argue that full civic equality for women and African Americans has been achieved. Actual social, economic, and political conditions may not live up to the truths disclosed in language. Nor is it to claim that racism and sexism have been eliminated. Rather, it is to point out that our language of civic equality is no longer natural to those who wish to subjugate these groups. In a way that was not the case, say, half a century ago, their arguments have become strained and forced as if they are working against that language.
I argue that we are witnessing further disclosure of the truth about civic equality, this time with respect to sexual orientation. We have seen some of the same patterns here, though in a more compressed time period, of gaining access to the public dialogue through organizing, speaking, parades, and so forth. The movement began with local efforts to end discrimination in housing, employment, and criminal law, and then set its sights on equal marriage rights and the attendant privileges and responsibilities that go with them. The law has already changed in a handful of Western democracies, but the US remains in the midst of a rapidly evolving public debate, one recently energized by a Federal District Court ruling that California’s Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriages, violates provisions in the US constitution.56 Whatever the eventual outcome of the appeals process, the trial itself and Judge Vaughn Walker’s opinion suggest that when fear mongering and demagoguery are held at bay by the constraints of legal reasoning, it becomes difficult to defend the restriction of civil marriage to heterosexual couples in terms that simultaneously hold onto the ideal of civic equality.57 As the conservative columnist and same-sex marriage opponent Ross Douthat acknowledges, long-standing arguments against same-sex marriage are no longer effective, including that marriage has always been defined as the union of one man and one woman, that heterosexual monogamy is natural, and that the nuclear family is the “universal, time-tested path to forming families and raising children.”58 These are now, Douthat says, not just “losing arguments,” but also wrong. He argues that heterosexual marriage should instead be defended on less universalist grounds, as “a particular vision of marriage, rooted in a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal” involving two sexually different human beings.59 In other words, in order to defend the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, Douthat must explicitly abandon the notion of equality. The only ground left, in his view, is an ideal of marriage that is particularistic and unequal. When this ideal of marriage is no longer dominant, Douthat concedes, same-sex marriage will be not just permitted but “morally necessary.”60 As in the earlier cases of race and gender, the arguments against marriage rights for same-sex couples have become increasingly strained and forced, and seem to work against the truth about civic equality disclosed and sedimented in our public language.
Arendt actually concludes her reflections on truth on a somewhat hopeful note at odds with the rest of her essay. While fragile, truth is also resilient, she alleges. Though it will be defeated in a head-on clash with power, truth is nonetheless also less transitory than power, and whatever those in power may contrive, they are unable to discover or invent a viable substitution for it.61 Likewise, hermeneutic truth as sedimented and disclosed in language is fragile. It always stands at risk of being concealed by partisan and ideological echo chambers and by our refusal to fall into dialogue with those unlike us. Over time, however, it too demonstrates a reassuring resilience. As the example of civic equality suggests, taking the long view can help us see the possibility of the emergence of hermeneutic truth in democratic politics, at least so long as we and others are willing to expose ourselves to the risk of its disclosure.
1 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 227.
2 Ibid., 235.
3 B. Nyhan and J. Reifler, “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” Political Behavior 32 (2010): 303–30.
4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, ed. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1995), 443.
5 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David Edward Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 63.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 64–5.
9 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 220.
10 “The tradition of the West . . . rendered the Greek word logos as reason or thought. In truth, however, the primary meaning of this word is language.” Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 59.
11 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 404.
12 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Beginning of Knowledge, trans. Rodney R. Coltman (New York: Continuum, 2001), 125.
13 Plato, Meno, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 82b.
14 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 55.
15 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 412.
16 Ibid., 411.
17 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 67.
18 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 411.
19 Gadamer, The Beginning of Knowledge, 125.
20 Gadamer, The Idea of the Good, 59–60.
21 Gadamer presents a rather harsh picture of Meno, which may not be completely warranted by the text of the dialogue. Nonetheless his contrast between Meno and his slave is useful for putting forth his own understanding of the openness required for hermeneutical truth.
22 Gadamer, The Idea of the Good, 52.
23 Ibid., 56.
24 Deliberative accounts of democracy have in recent decades become a dominant strand in democratic theory. For a summary of this literature and an account of the place of Gadamer’s thought within it, see Darren R. Walhof, “Bringing the Deliberative back In: Gadamer on Conversation and Understanding,” Contemporary Political Theory 4, (2, 2005): 154–74. See also Adam Smith’s contribution to this volume, “Truthfulness, Discourse, and the Problem of Pluralism.”
25 Jürgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jerry Stark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 172. Although he recognizes the value of Gadamer’s defence of hermeneutical knowledge against instrumental rationality, Habermas argues that Gadamer fails to recognize that language itself is ideological and, thus, that critical reflection is necessary to transcend and criticize ideology. As Grondin rightly notes, the long-term result of the debate was a shift in the position of each and a recognition that they share more than originally thought; Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 132–3.
26 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “What is Truth?,” in Hermeneutics and Truth, ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 45.
27 Ibid., 36.
28 Heidegger’s conception of truth is complex and problematic. Since it is not the main concern here, I only give enough background to help understand Gadamer. Good sources for understanding Heidegger on truth include Lambert Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Barry Allen, Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
29 Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth, 83.
30 Allen, Truth in Philosophy, 86.
31 Gadamer, “What is Truth?,” 36.
32 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 77.
33 Ibid., 76–7.
34 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 450, 474, emphasis in original. This phrase, which pithily captures the central argument of Truth and Method, conjures Heidegger’s claim that “language is the house of being.” Gadamer’s indebtedness to Heidegger is obvious here, although there are important differences. In particular, Gadamer gives significant weight to everyday language and speech, while Heidegger is dismissive of “everydayness” and ordinary discourse, privileging instead a notion of “authentic” existence that rises above this; see Zuidervaart, Artistic Truth, 78. Moreover, Gadamer increasingly moves away from talking about “being” as that which is disclosed in language, instead preferring to talk about the “thing” (Sache) disclosed. Weinsheimer has a nice discussion of additional differences between Heidegger and Gadamer on this score; Joel Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 213–16.
35 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 450, emphasis original.
36 Ibid., 473.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 490.
39 Ibid., 46.
40 Ibid., 482.
41 See Schmidt’s helpful discussion of Gadamer’s notion of the enlightening (die Einleuchtende) as the self-presentation of the thing in language. Like the power of light to illuminate, language possesses an illuminating quality, which “permits the thing to be seen in its self-presentation in language”; Lawrence K. Schmidt, “Uncovering Hermeneutic Truth,” in The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Lawrence Kennedy Schmidt (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 76.
42 James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 146, 152.
43 Nicholas Davey, Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), 120.
44 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 445.
45 Ibid., 112.
46 Ibid., 417.
47 Ibid., 36.
48 Ibid., 114.
49 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 122.
50 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 378.
51 Walhof, “Bringing the Deliberative back In,” 161–2.
52 George Packer, “The Empty Chamber,” New Yorker, 9 August 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_packer.
53 CBS, “Face the Nation,” 9 May 2010.
54 Eszter Hargittai, Jason Gallo, and Matthew Kane, “Cross-Ideological Discussions among Conservative and Liberal Bloggers,” Public Choice 134 (1, 2008): 67–86.
55 Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell, “Self-segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 8, (1, 2010): 146–50.
56 Perry v. Schwarzenegger et al. (US District Court for Northern California 2010).
57 Debates in state legislative chambers can be also be productively constraining, as I argue in a forthcoming article; see Darren Walhof, “Habermas, Same-Sex Marriage, and the Problem of Religion in Public Life,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (3, 2013): 225–42.
58 Ross Douthat, “The Marriage Ideal,” New York Times, 9 August 2010, A19.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 259.