7 The Enigma of Socrates: Philosophical Hermeneutics and Greek Philosophy
But of course Plato was at the center of my studies. (RPJ 12/GW2 487)
1. We Are the Greeks—They Are the Moderns
It is impossible to imagine philosophical hermeneutics without Greek philosophy. Nonetheless, hermeneutics is not a retreat from the questions of contemporary philosophy to the historical-philological study of Greek texts, nor should Gadamer’s project be reduced to a mere “application” of Greek ideas. Greek philosophy plays a decisive role for hermeneutics, which has not yet been sufficiently recognized.
There is already an effective history of hermeneutics that must be deconstructed if one wants to avoid leaving Truth and Method as its magnum opus, which supposedly contains all of hermeneutics and casts its shadow over all other works, beginning with the studies of Greek philosophy. In this context Pöggeler writes:
When we read Truth and Method we can very well assume (until we reach the third part on being as language) that Gadamer is an Aristotelian, one who takes rhetoric, poetry, and the legal structuring of life as his main themes. The works of volume 7 of the Collected Works, however, which certainly form a second highpoint next to Truth and Method, prove that Gadamer was a Platonist.1
Thus we should ask ourselves: what relation exists between philosophical hermeneutics and Greek philosophy? At the same time we can ask the still relevant question: do we really need the Greeks for philosophy? Gadamer’s answer is, decisively, yes. Greek philosophy is the constellation for philosophical hermeneutics. Both are bound up with each other through the circularity of understanding. Reading the Greek texts involves a philosophical-hermeneutic reading, whereby Greek philosophy represents a challenge, since it calls into question modern customs and prejudices. Hermeneutics accepts this challenge and lets itself be led by the Greeks in the circular openness of an infinite dialogue. The actuality of Greek philosophy becomes hermeneutics itself, understood as the philosophical reappraisal of the dialogue with the Greeks because, despite the breaks and interruptions, continuity persists.2 Hermeneutics approaches the Greeks “not from the perspective of the assumed superiority of modernity, which believes itself beyond the ancient philosophers because it possesses an infinitely refined logic, but instead with the conviction that philosophy is a human experience that remains the same and that characterizes the human being as such, and that there is no progress in it, but only participation” (IG 6/GW7 130). When he speaks of “participation,” Gadamer means the Platonic methéxis. In this regard he wrote, in the 1972 essay on “The Contemporary Importance of Greek Philosophy,” that for us the encounter with the Greeks is ultimately an “encounter with ourselves.”3 Here Greek philosophy, together with hermeneutics, becomes a new paradigm for philosophy, indeed the very one that today is called “continental philosophy.” In this regard the relation between “the Greeks and us” takes on a completely different significance: We are the Greeks—they are the moderns.
Gadamer stands in the wake of Kant, Hegel, and even Schleiermacher; he follows in other words all those German philosophers who, gripped by “Graecomania,” have linked philosophy inextricably to its history.4 His interest can be seen as part of the rebirth of ancient philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century, in which philology and philosophy cross over and into each other.5 But Gadamer was driven to the Greeks by his philosophical questions, and hence the huge impression that Heidegger’s reading made on Gadamer should not be surprising. It was not only the radicality with which Heidegger questioned Greek philosophy. In addition, his interpretation responded to the necessity demanded by Husserl to free philosophy from the history of philosophy.6 This phenomenological turn in textual hermeneutics cannot be emphasized enough. Philosophical hermeneutics is a phenomenological revival of Greek philosophy. The productivity of this new hermeneutics was soon to deliver important results. Although Heidegger famously concentrated on Aristotle, most of his students preferred Plato: Hannah Arendt, Jacob Klein, Gerhard Krüger, Georg Picht, Leo Strauss, Wilhelm Szilasi. Gadamer’s case, in this context, is particularly significant. How would philosophical hermeneutics have been possible without Greek philosophy, in other words without the Socratic dialogue, without the Platonic dialectic of the one and the many, without Aristotelian phrónesis?
2. On The Language of Metaphysics
For his phenomenological interpretation of the Greeks, Heidegger is guided by a new watchword: “destructuring.” Although he takes up Husserl’s demand to show the experiences of the lifeworld directly, Heidegger notes that such immediacy is not possible, since all showing is mediated by language. Thus it becomes essential to destructure, that is, to dismantle, the sedimented layers with which the tradition has domesticated philosophy and covered over the original experiences of thought. It is essential to reveal the origin of concepts, and thereby to bring the language of philosophy back to the life context from which it emerges. Philosophy will be possible again only through the dismantling of the language that has been rigidified by centuries of Western metaphysics. In this way, on the one hand, the confrontation with Greek philosophy is reopened by recognizing the Seinsfrage, that is the “question of Being,” which has fallen into forgetfulness, and on the other hand, we begin to think again on the basis of our own life experiences. For Gadamer these are one and the same, since philosophy is always a “continuous dialogue with itself” (LL 39/GW8 430).
The question of Being deepens and intensifies in the question of the language of metaphysics. Here Gadamer cannot hide what distances him from his teacher. In both his 1968 essay “The Language of Metaphysics” and his 1990 “Heidegger and Language,” Gadamer asks himself what the “language of metaphysics” could actually be.7 His thesis is that a language of metaphysics does not exist at all. “Language is always only the one that we speak with others and to others” (DD 48/GW8 144.) This does not rule out the existence of a “metaphysical” tradition, which has consolidated itself through linguistic and conceptual rigidity.8 Metaphysics is this rigidity. But philosophical language takes root in everyday language—and not even metaphysics can sever these roots. It is not language that is metaphysical but its hardening into concepts, which, however, as soon as they return to the flow of philosophical dialogue—as Wittgenstein suggested9—already prefigure the lines of their own overcoming.
In this way hermeneutics limits not only the question of the language of metaphysics, but also the question of metaphysics itself.10 Gadamer does not at all share the catastrophic view of a history of philosophy condemned to decline. For him there is also no worry about “twisting out” of metaphysics, which he interprets as “a conscious achievement of the suffering” of a past in which we simultaneously “remain,” even if we have overcome it (HD 81/GW3 87).11 What would be “beyond” metaphysics? Gadamer shares even less Heidegger’s project of returning to the history of Western metaphysics in order to prepare a new “beginning” of thought. For hermeneutics nothing is more “metaphysical” than a totally new beginning, since we are always already in the middle of a dialogue.
But Gadamer also dismantles the philosophical tradition and excavates its effective history—which proves moreover that historically effected consciousness is not a parasitical consciousness—in the search for that Socrates who is hidden in pre-Socratic and post-Socratic philosophy. Along a path that goes through Parmenides and Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle, from the first essays of the twenties to the seventh volume of his Work published in 1991, Gadamer engages in a destructuring of the history of Greek philosophy, in order to lead it back to its forgotten, Socratic inspiration.
3. Parmenides and Heraclitus: The Logos of Mortals
Heidegger’s return to the pre-Socratics, mediated through Aristotle, is determined by the need to open a nonmetaphysical access to phýsis, which is thought in its coming into presence. For Gadamer, by contrast, phýsis is an Aristotelian and not a pre-Socratic thought, which the “meta-physical” Aristotle had projected back onto the pre-Socratics (GW7 43–82, 52). It is a matter, for Gadamer, of freeing ourselves from the Aristotelian construction that reads and forces us to read the entirety of Greek philosophy as a philosophy of nature, in its teleological progress from Thales to Aristotle. What is the picture of Parmenides and Heraclitus that emerges from this reading of the tradition?
Both are far apart from the Ionian philosophy of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Parmenides and Heraclitus are not concerned with phýsis, or nature understood as the ground or substance of all things; they concern themselves rather with human errancy and human finitude. Their thought has a political, ethical, and ultimately religious inspiration—modern terms that can be used only with caution when talking about philosophers whose lógos remains indissolubly bound up with mýthos (GW7 3–31, 14–15).12 This first becomes visible in the fragments from the didactic poem by Parmenides. It is quite naive to believe that an ontological doctrine could be found in this poem. According to Gadamer, we should not ignore the literary fiction. After all, the logos that claims that Being is, is proclaimed by a goddess.13 Why is this the case? Because the logos that leads to truth, to alétheia, which therefore does not mix being and not-being, can only be divine.14 When mortals speak, by contrast, they cannot avoid saying “is” and “is not” in one breath, that is, contradicting themselves without deciding “between the yes and the no.”15 The divine truth stands opposed to the many “opinions” of mortals, who are “deaf and blind, dumbfounded,” unable to avoid the “not” and thus destined to endless error.16 The goddess describes their world darkened by contradiction; but in doing so she remains “on the way to truth,” which is reserved for only the divine dimension (GW7 9). Mortal like the others, Parmenides does not speak in the first person but, making use of myth, lets the goddess speak. The logos of being is thus a logos from the beyond; as such it does not affect mortals, who are plagued by death, by their end, and by their finitude (GW7 24). The point that the logos of being is from the beyond can be interpreted as a critical rejoinder to Heidegger and his question of Being. In any case the human logos remains on “this side of Being”—as the title of the essay “Parmenides or This Side of Being,” suggests. According to the traditional reading, Parmenides introduced the separation between the sensual and intelligible worlds. For Gadamer, by contrast, Parmenides is the philosopher of finitude, of the world that exists on this side, which is at the same time Being and Not-Being, whereas Being is only of the gods.
It is no different with Heraclitus. If we follow—as Gadamer does—the historiographical paradigm that Reinhard suggests, then Heraclitus lived at the same time as or even later than Parmenides.17 Heraclitus was no opponent of the Ionian school, and he never sought to erect a cosmology. Even his doctrine of fire, which also confounds Aristotle, is a Stoic reinterpretation (GW7 51–52). Heraclitus was able to think the speculative unity of opposites in a “contentious harmony,” which is the logos of the world.18 “To attend to the one in all the differences”—that is his contribution (GW7 57). Gadamer mentions in this context Hegel’s famous words: “there is no sentence by Heraclitus that I have not taken up in my logic.”19 From the oppositions of which Heraclitus speaks, the mystery of the unity is not the passage from the identical to the different, but the sudden change (GW7 48). The words often bear witness to this: for example, the word bios points both to “life” and to the deadly “bow.”20 The inseparability of life and death begins to emerge in this “as a final, unsolvable, self-solving riddle” (GW7 41). Is there a return from death to life, as from sleep to awakening? This question is taken up again later by Plato’s Socrates in the Phaedo.
Heraclitus looks past multiplicity and discovers unity in the sudden flare-up and extinguishing of life, as if like fire. This is precisely the meaning of the sentence carved over the entrance to Heidegger’s hut in Todtnauberg: “Lightning directs everything.”21 But Heraclitus also wants to awaken from the sleep of nonunderstanding. It is thus not difficult to read his famous fragment hermeneutically: “The waking ones have one and a shared world, but in sleep everyone turns from it into their own.”22 The way to emerge from the night of isolation, and to return to oneself, is the way that leads to the other, to “sharing in the days and world we have in common” (GW7 78).23 Gadamer wrote of Heraclitus:
This philosopher weeps a bit too obviously over humans and their non-understanding and, forgetting himself, reflects on human life, which, stretched out between sleep and waking, death and life, dream and the reason of daytime that everyone shares, is also deeply non-understandable to itself—as truly as it is exposed to the abruptness of change and the riddle of non-being. (GW7 38)
In this call to alertness, to wakefulness, to philosophy, his closeness to Socrates becomes visible, and even more so when Heraclitus says: “I have sought myself.”24
4. Socrates, Philosophy, and Immortality
Yet in the path Gadamer outlines it is Socrates who represents the true turning point. Socrates is the philosopher par excellence, because the love of sophia for him accomplishes the transition from sleeping to waking, becoming wakeful, and raises itself to that wisdom which knows of its not-knowing from the outset. Even though Gadamer dedicated no more than three essays to him, the figure of Socrates dominates philosophical hermeneutics and forms the model that cannot be imitated, but nevertheless should be imitated. Gadamer’s Socrates is above all the one portrayed by Plato in the Apology, the Euthyphro, and the Phaedo—for it is the Platonic Socrates who has effected our historical consciousness (GW7 83). Following the way opened by Parmenides and Heraclitus, he disappointedly gives up the inquiry into natural phenomena, the position of the earth, the orbits of the heavens. Socrates fears that if he were to proceed like the natural philosophers, who turn immediately to things and demand to grasp them with their five senses, he would end up blinding his soul altogether. So he prepares himself for a “second journey,” a metaphor the Greeks use to designate the extreme case when the wind stops and the ship can be moved forward only by the rowers. The second journey by Socrates is his escape into the logoi, which is depicted in the Phaedo. For Gadamer this is the epochal turn made by Greek philosophy, which is at the same time a decisive transition for hermeneutics.25
We should not overlook the ironic tone with which Plato speaks of this “second” voyage, which is by far superior to immediate experience. It represents the passage from the sensual to the intelligible, which, however, is the intelligible not of the ideas, but rather of the logoi (PDE 70/GW5 53). Gadamer translates as follows the words of Socrates in the Phaedo: “So I thought I must take refuge in discussions and investigate the truth of things by means of words.”26 The flight into the logoi is the anamnesis of language, the anamnetic recognition of the other and the word of the other that articulate shared experience. With Socrates, philosophy no longer boldly presumes to see things in their immediacy. And as philosophy turns its gaze away from things, it listens to the word of the other. It becomes dialogue. Here lies above all the Socratic inspiration of hermeneutics. “I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me—only the people in the city can do that”—so Socrates says in the Phaedrus (Plato, 510; 230d). More than a flight, this is the entry of philosophy into the world of the polis, into the community of citizens. With Socrates, philosophy discovers its political and ethical vocation. Philosophy concerns itself with the why of human actions and for the first time asks the question of the “good,” which will draw all of classical philosophy, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, under its influence.27
But to live with others is no easy matter—at least for a philosopher. In Athens Socrates lives with others, but he does not live like others. Thus his trial and his death sentence for asebeîa, “impiety,” become unavoidable. Socrates listens only to his own daemon. Precisely this is his eusebeîa, his “piety” (Frömmigkeit), namely the devout respect with which he “shows his humility in not-knowing” (GW7 109). The religious character of Socrates’s not-knowing discloses the vanity of the technical-scientific knowledge that spread in the Greek Enlightenment.28 With his constant questioning Socrates challenges the assumptions of the Athenians, who claimed to know what the good is. The service he accomplished is a divine one. According to the oracle at Delphi, Socrates is the wisest of all humans. Socrates, by contrast, says that he does not know—and with that answer he at once confirms and refutes the oracle (GW7 111). The provocation proves to be the divine vocation of philosophy. Thus Socrates does not flee, but accepts his sentence and drinks the hemlock. But even as parts of his body begin to grow cold and stiff, he continues to speak and to question. He reminds his friends that “we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him”: an offering to the god of medicine, in order to say that he is healed and for him a new and true life is beginning (Plato 100/ Phaedo118a).
The death of the philosopher is the confirmation of his life, and his words are the most convincing proof of the immortality of the soul. In probably one of the most beautiful essays that Gadamer dedicated to Greek philosophy, “The Proofs of Immortality in Plato’s Phaedo,” he has Socrates speak for him (DDP 21–38/GW6 187–200). On the most extreme outer limits of death, without understanding, or wanting to make understandable, what marks the limit of human understanding itself, the word of the dying philosopher is directed to the others who share in his death, in order to receive an answer that takes the dialogue further—even after death. This is the way in which hermeneutics thinks of immortality.29
5. Plato’s Aporetic Dialectics: Between the One and the Dyad
Philosophical hermeneutics is a conscious recovery of Platonic philosophy in the twentieth century.30 Plato shows the way beyond metaphysics toward the openness of philosophical experience: from dialectics to the dialogue.
Who is Gadamer’s Plato? He is not the “metaphysical” philosopher, responsible for the forgetting of Being, as he was depicted by Heidegger and even before that by Nietzsche.31 As Gadamer put it in 1983, “That Plato did more than prepare in advance Aristotelian ‘ontotheology,’ which Heidegger saw in him, was certain to me” (EE 170). But Plato is also not the founder of a theory of principles, as the Tübingen School interpreted him.32 It is of course true that without Plato there would never have been metaphysics, but it is equally true that “Plato was no Platonist” (RPJ 40/GW2 508). This polemical thesis, in which the emancipatory potential of his interpretation begins to emerge, also brings Gadamer close to Schleiermacher, insofar as he rediscovers in Plato the master of dialogue, whose dialectic in its Socratic vocation is a reflection on finitude.33 Hermeneutics proceeds from this dialectic and unfolds itself in an uninterrupted process.
The unitary conception of Platonic philosophy does not prevent Gadamer from privileging certain texts: the Phaedo, the Symposium, the Phaedrus, the Philebus, the Parmenides, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Timaeus, the Republic, and the Seventh Letter. As he had already done in the case of the pre-Socratics, Gadamer aims to deconstruct Aristotle’s reading and to show that his criticism of Plato is unjustified. On the one hand, there is in Plato no chorismós, no ontological separation between the world of ideas and the sensible world, and on the other hand it emerges clearly on the basis of the “Parmenides” that what actually interested Plato was the “web of ideas,” the dialectical interweaving (DDP 119/GW6 113).34
The work by Gadamer that contains in nuce the most important features not only of his Plato interpretation, but also of his entire philosophy, is his 1931 book Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, which focuses specifically on the Philebus. Before the connection between ethics and dialectics is articulated, however, it is important to say what is meant by “dialectics,” the key term of philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer writes:
Platonic philosophy is a dialectic not only because in conceiving and comprehending [im Begreifen] it keeps itself on the way [unterwegs] to the concept [zum Begriff ] but also because, as a philosophy that conceives and comprehends in that way, it knows man as a creature that is thus “on the way” [Unterwegs] and “between” [Zwischen]. (PDE 3–4/GW5 5–6)
Gadamer explains that it is important to keep in mind the Greek prefix día-, which means “through” (IG 98/GW7 182), if we are to grasp the Socratic meaning of Platonic philosophy, which unfolds in the dialectical openness between question and answer, and which recognizes itself as a kind of between that grants the provisionality, indeterminacy, and incompleteness that emerge from it.35 By knowing itself as finite, it accepts infinite openness. It is thus no sophía, since it does not pretend to be wisdom. Instead it is much more philo-sophía, a striving for wisdom (DDP 155/GW6 153).
This dialectic is dialogical: the “between” is the between of the dia-logue. Platonic dialectics arises not only from Socratic dialogue, in which the dialogical character of logos comes to light, but unfolds in an exemplary manner with the guiding thread of language. It develops itself in a dialogical form, in which the logoi are again and again placed “back within the original movement of the conversation” (TM 369/GW1 374).36
Socrates’s “flight” into the logoi, which connects not coincidentally with the “hypothesis” of the ideas, becomes more relevant here (GW7 335). The idea is anchored to the name and to discourse. In the search for a “ground” of truth, Socrates finds it in that characteristic “remaining equal to itself” of the name, even in its self-differentiation, that is, in that “shared substantive understanding” which is articulated here (PDE 52/GW5 52–53).37 Philosophy begins with language as the site of unreflective knowledge that through anamnesis, which is only linguistic, can become reflective and conscious—albeit always incompletely. But Gadamer’s thesis is still more radical: Plato discovers the “dialectical miracle,” the possibility of the one in the many and the many in the one, because he looks at the structure of the logos (GW6 20). How is it possible for the one to be the many and the many the one? How is this contradiction possible, against which the Eleatics cautioned and from which the Sophists profited? Is it not perhaps a question here of a contradiction that makes even speaking impossible? For if it is said that the one is the many, that it is itself insofar as it is one, and is not itself insofar as it is many, then ultimately we are mixing Being and Not-Being with each other.
For Plato the quarrel with the Sophists does not end in “misology,” the hatred of “reasonable discourse” (Phaedo 89c–d).38 On the contrary, the Eleatic Stranger in the Sophist warns: “If we were deprived of that, we’d be deprived of philosophy” (Sophist 260a). If philosophy were a noetic, intellectual intuition of Being, then it would not need to say anything other than Being; it could remain with the identical, that is, say nothing, and give up saying altogether. Philosophy would begin and end—in a divine way—in the intuition of Being. Since philosophy cannot, however, be reduced to this it requires the dianoetic, discursive transition to the other of Being, to what is different: this means it needs saying and needs the logos. In knowing itself to be dependent on the discursivity of logos, philosophy since Plato is aware that it can develop only in that “between” traversed by discourse; it cannot be other than dialectical. In order to save philosophy it is necessary to save or to legitimize the logos. But precisely through this view of the characteristic interweaving of the logos, being also appears different. Nevertheless, dialectics conceives itself as Being bringing itself to language, it “does not think in the logos of being [. . .] it thinks of being itself as logos” (GW6 28).
The wonder of the one and the many lies in their “interweaving,” their symploké. The logos is simultaneously the many woven together with the one, and the one that carries within itself the many. The one and the many are concepts that are correlated and fluid. Gadamer writes: “the one is necessarily many and the many, one” (PDE 96 / GW5 90). This is possible because of the “instability” of discourse.39 Thus there begins to emerge in language a circular movement of ascent and descent that goes from the one to the many and from the many to the one. What counts for the dialectician, in this infinite circularity that articulates itself in the finitude of the légein, the saying, is something that escapes most people, namely what lies “in the middle,” “the intermediates” (Philebus 17a). In this fruitful between, in the dia- of the légein, of discourse that is constantly a dialégesthai, a speaking with each other, the tangled web of Being is woven.
The procedure followed here, which constantly runs through discourse, is that of diaeresis, which represents for Gadamer “the positive turn of the dialectic, [. . .] the ‘euporie’ after the ‘aporie.’”40 The dialectician’s art is described in the Phaedrus (Phaedrus 265d) and it consists of pulling apart an idea that appears in its unity and distinguishing it “according to its parts”; here what matters is to follow the natural weave of nerves, as with the cutting up of a sacred offering.41 Diaeresis is thus a dichotomous process. Through differentiation, the characteristic features of what one is seeking are brought to light; what results from this is the diaeretic logos. It would, however, be a mistake to believe that this logos gives an objective definition of the essence of a thing, since in reality it limits itself to emphasizing new perspectives. The impossibility of reaching a definition—which Aristotle, by contrast, takes to be possible—can be led back to the “irrevocable weakness” of all forms of human knowledge, the names (ónoma), discourse (lógos), the image (eidolon), knowledge (epistéme)—which is fundamentally different from intuition (nous)—that Plato examines in the famous excursus in the Seventh Letter (Seventh Letter 342a–344d). But precisely from this weakness—as Gadamer writes in his study on “Dialectics and Sophism in the Seventh Platonic Letter”—the “productivity” of dialectics will emerge (DDP 111/GW6 106). Every diaeretic logos always permits its own overcoming, because its unity arises from the interweaving of the many, which can always be dissolved anew. What Gadamer will call the “limits” of language, which we repeatedly run up against in our speaking and thinking, on the one hand reveals the unavoidable failure of any systematic exposition of philosophy, and on the other hand destines dialectical inquiry to infinite progress.42
The interweaving of the logos plays a decisive role in Gadamer’s interpretation of Platonic dialectic. Only in the not yet fully clarified interweaving of the one and the many, the many and the one, is the fate of logos and philosophy decided. Another word for interweaving is “mixture”; the one and the many already have history on their side and are derived from two Pythagorean categories: the péras, the limit, and the ápeiron, the unlimited. According to Gadamer, “the great accomplishment of Plato’s thought” was to interpret these two categories anew, as they were developed in the Republic and the Theaetetus (DDP 139/GW6 140). Here it is important to emphasize that “limit” in all of pre-Socratic philosophy had a positive significance, that is, an initial and inaugural significance: the limit does not mark an end but opens up or discloses. Thanks to the limit, what is emerges from the unlimited. The unlimited thus has a negative significance: it is the incomplete, the imperfect—actually the very opposite of what is typically believed today. Plato preserves the positive significance of limit but rehabilitates the unlimited. This rehabilitation, with which he at the same time commits patricide on Parmenides, is important for philosophical hermeneutics, which develops around the concept of the “limit” as a philosophy of infinite finitude and thereby takes up the legacy of Platonic philosophy.43
The interpretation of the Philebus takes on a significance that should not be overlooked.44 According to the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers, the limit is opposed to the unlimited. On the basis of a “naïve ontological identification,” as Jacob Klein explains, the Pythagoreans do not distinguish between the “limit” and the “limited.”45 The innovation that Plato achieved lies precisely in the “limited,” the “mixed” that arises from the “mixture” of the limit and the unlimited. All that is, all that belongs to this world, is “limited,” “mixed,” or exists thanks to a mixture. Gadamer stresses the point: “So the ontological ‘mixture’ of the indefinite and the defining, producing definiteness, is the condition of the possibility of the being and the being unitary, of (ontically) mixed things” (PDE 142/GW5 102). To mix according to proportion, according to logos, mean to bring being into Being.46
In Plato’s philosophy the limit and the unlimited of the Pythagoreans are called the “one” and the “two” or the “dyad” (dýad).47 In his essay on “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectics” Gadamer suggests that the problem of multiplicity is from the very beginning the problem of duality (DDP 135/GW6 137).48 But what is duality, which plays a far more important role in hermeneutics than we typically imagine? The “one” is the limit that unifies by limiting and enclosing. The “indeterminate two” is the way of introducing difference into unity and thus of taking into account the infinite self-differentiation of the many. When Plato prefers, however, to speak of the “dyad” instead of the unlimited, there is a reason for it. As the principle of difference and of differentiation, the dyad also contributes in its unlimitedness to tracing the limits of the order of the world (DDP 151/GW6 150). The dyad is thus the way in which Plato rehabilitates the unlimited. The unlimited no longer represents the boundless infinity of Not-Being; rather it is Not-Being understood as being other; it is the difference of Not-Being in its infinite self-differentiation. The dyad is another name for the “is not,” put forward by the Eleatic Stranger in the Sophist (Sophist 257b). Only in this way can the logos be saved, or the koinonía of the highest kinds of Being be demonstrated, and especially the reciprocal participation of Being and Not-Being, of the identical and the different.
For Gadamer, however, the dyad has a still more precise and effective meaning. This is the case in the first place because it refers not only to difference, but also to infinite differentiation. From this view there arises a new conception of being: differentiation sets in motion the being that is coming into Being, in other words Being that occurs only as the interweaving of the limit and the unlimited, identity and difference, the one and the many, as Plato shows in the Timaeus (Timaeus 37a–b).
Yet the dyad has implications for both philosophy and human life. As the dyad, together with the one, can generate an infinite series of numbers, so it makes possible every logos but also destines it to incompleteness. From this point stems the infinite and indeterminate character of the dialectical discourse, or philosophy (DDP 151/GW6 150).49 On the other hand, the dyad is also decisive for human life, which is condemned every day to “sink into measurelessness” (DDP 155/GW6 153). Although human life must balance itself in the middle, in the mesótes, it remains constantly exposed to the limitlessness of the dyad, which prohibits all completion and prevents the end coinciding with the goal.
In this intermediacy the ethical dimension of the aporetic dialectic can be grasped. For the dyad leaves open the aporía, the difficulty of differentiation, which is also always a decision. The weaving of the logos not only points to a new way of thinking Being in mixture, but refers as well to a life that limits itself through measure. Interweaving, mixture, the limited, and the measure become key concepts for hermeneutics and for its way of understanding life as a drink that must be mixed properly, as described in the Philebus (IG 114/GW7 192). At the same time there will be no lack of pleasure, which can also be described as “unlimited,” because a life that gives itself over to pleasure knows no limit; similarly, suffering will not be lacking, the “disturbance” of the devotion to pleasure, which can lead Dasein back to its own center of gravity (PDE 180/ GW5 130).50 But the human being realizes and understands itself through the process of constantly reestablishing a center, which is possible only with the other.51 There is thus no definition of the good, and there also can be none, since it would be absurd to consider the good in its transcendence as one of the highest ideas (IG 123–124/GW7 198).52 The idea of the good has the furthermost of a beyond, which likens it to a regulative idea. It gives itself in proper measure and proportion, which cannot but appear as beautiful—here is where the good “has taken refuge” (IG 115/GW7 192–193) in the beautiful—and it completes itself in the unification of the many, in other words in the one, which is always open and finite. “Consequently, human life is eo ipso dialectical” (IG 122/GW7 197).
6. Hegel, Dialectics, and Hermeneutics
When attempting to clarify the recovery (Verwindung) from metaphysics, much like the bearing of a sickness with which one must stay, Gadamer elaborates by saying that this is “particularly appropriate for Hegel, for one must ‘stay with’ him in a special way” (HD 100–101/GW3 87).53 Why does Gadamer stay with Hegel and his “inheritance?”
The encounter with Hegel takes place under the sign of Plato—as Gadamer underlines in the lecture on “The Heritage of Hegel” (RAS 44/GW4 467).54 No other modern philosopher understood how to develop Greek dialectics to such an extent as Hegel, the last of the Greeks. Heidegger had already expressed the point in a similar way: “With the name of ‘the Greeks’ we think of the beginning of philosophy, with the name of ‘Hegel’ we think of its completion.”55 Gadamer sees this proximity too, but his distance from Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato, as well as from the entire Western tradition of philosophy, deepens even further in the case of Hegel. Gadamer cannot share the judgment, for example, whereby Hegel would represent the “completion of the metaphysics of subjectivity.” As soon as we take into account what Hegel recognizes as “the speculative” in the Greeks and generally, wherever there is philosophy, it is the opposite picture that begins to emerge (HD 5–34, 30/GW3 3–28, 25).56
In his collection Hegel’s Dialectic, Gadamer explains the complex relationship between Hegel and the Greeks, a relationship marked at the same time by a reciprocal exchange. Precisely this reciprocity does not allow us to speak of a “completion.” If Hegel sees in the Greeks what the Greeks themselves did not see, on the other hand it is possible to see Hegel’s philosophy in a new way only through the Greeks.
The connection between Gadamer, Hegel, and the Greeks is dialectics. The art of the dialectic goes back to those earliest philosophers, who left behind the firm ground of sensible experience and sailed forth for the first time onto the high seas of pure thought (HD 74–99 79/ GW3 65–86, 69). Hegel’s gaze turned toward Eleatic and Platonic dialectics, in particular—as Gadamer elaborates in his essay “Hegel and the Dialectic of the Ancient Philosophers”—to the “speculative” dialogues: the Sophist, the Parmenides, and the Philebus (HD 7/GW3 4). The Parmenides, especially, takes on a decisive role. For here it is shown that truth never clings to an isolated idea, but always lies in the combination of ideas, in the movement that discovers the contradiction and that takes up into itself the antithesis of being and not-being, identity and difference: in a movement that unfolds between the one and the many (HD 79, 86/GW3 69, 75). Although Hegel believes he can trace this movement in the Sophist, it is still especially the Socratic style of the Parmenides that shows the self-development of thought in its “immanent formation” (HD 7/GW3 5).
Where lies, then, the weakness of this dialectics? It occurs at first in that “permanent turbulence” in which the one, even if already implicated, has still not been thought as the highest unity, or in Hegel’s words, as the totality of the whole (HD 86/ GW3 75). Platonic dialectics is therefore only negative and brings forth nothing positive from its aporia. Gadamer states that Platonic dialectics is no method; there is no beginning and even less so a kind of knowledge that would gradually reach absolute completion in the concept (HD 81/GW3 70). If in the first part of this critique he agrees with Hegel, Gadamer distances himself in the second part, by playing Hegel off against Hegel.
The ancient philosophers wanted to raise themselves from the immediacy of the sensible, in order to reach the universality of thought. The modern age, conversely, in which the individual is already surrounded by abstract forms, is characterized by the effort of making the fixed fluid again. It is in such a way that Hegel describes the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. On this view, ancient philosophy lacks self-certainty as subjectivity, it lacks self-consciousness; but precisely for this reason it is closer to the fluidity in which “‘everything that occurs’ is thought of in the natural language of natural consciousness” (HD 9/GW3 6). Here one can see the extent to which the moderns are, as always, dependent on the ancients. Modern dialectics must again take up ancient dialectics, which exhibits the speculative movement of thought (HD 33–34/GW3 27–28).
What remains to be clarified, however, is not only the meaning of the “speculative,” but also its connection with the “logical.” This topic is treated in the most important essay in Gadamer’s collection: “The Idea of Hegel’s Logic” (HD 75–99/GW3 65–86). After he has explained how the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic are the two great books by Hegel, Gadamer debates the actuality of Hegel’s logic (HD 76–77/GW3 65–66). At the same time, however, he develops a rigorous critique of Hegel that culminates in the thesis: “Dialectics must retrieve itself in hermeneutics” (HD 99/GW3 86).
Hegel’s great discovery is that philosophy completes itself in a speculative movement. Thus the traditional form of the proposition, in other words the “rational proposition” or assertion that combines a subject with a predicate, and that Aristotle had characterized as lógos apophantikós, proves to be wholly inadequate. The philosophical proposition, which instead of contenting itself with mere judgment dwells on what is to be thought and forgets itself therein, is a speculative proposition. This proposition has one peculiarity: it does not pass from the subject over to the predicate, but tells the truth about the subject in the form of the predicate. One could offer an example: “God is one.” In this context “one” is not a predicate of “God,” but rather his authentic essence. The subject is not determined by the predicate. Instead, the movement of determination “suffers, as we might put it, a counter-thrust” and is halted.57 It begins precisely from the subject, as if this were its foundation, but then discovers that the predicate is the substance, and the subject, which has become the predicate, is thus sublated in it. The speculative proposition does not, therefore, predicate like a simple assertion, but wavers back and forth—its speculative character is precisely this wavering, in which “the identification of Subject and Predicate is not meant to destroy the difference between them, which the form of the proposition expresses.”58 In short: the speculative proposition does not limit itself to predicating identity, but represents a harmonious unity in which the identity allows difference to exist (HD 18/GW3 14–16). Its relevance lies precisely in the fact that, before any assertion, the speculative proposition enables the speculative or the dialectical movement of language to be recognized clearly. Gadamer describes this accordingly:
The speculative statement maintains the mean between the extremes of tautology on the one hand and self-cancelation in the infinite determination of its meaning on the other. Here lies Hegel’s great relevance for today: the speculative statement is not so much a statement as it is language. (HD 95/GW3 83)
In this respect, Hegel speaks also of the “logical instinct” of language. By this he means above all that logical structures are mirrored in grammatical structures, and that the interweavings and correlations of logic are realized thanks to the “vowels of being” of which Plato speaks in the Sophist (Sophist 253a–b). “Forms of thought are in the first place set out and laid down in the language of humans,” writes Hegel in the Science of Logic, so that for the human, “language has penetrated into everything [. . .] that he makes his own.”59 To be sure, the logical instinct of language means something more for Hegel, namely the tendency of language toward the “logical,” the drive to find its own completion in the idea of logic. The instinctive or natural logic of language would find its goal and end in the elevation to philosophical logic, as the word does in its elevation to the concept. Obviously, Gadamer cannot follow Hegel in this salto mortale of thought beyond language. Language is not, in other words, a “transitional form” that thought can leave behind when it reaches transparency in the concept (HD 94/GW3 82). Hegel does not see that the movement of language, precisely because it is speculative, has a “double direction”: whereas language makes the concept present in the word, it prohibits the concept at the same time, revokes and retracts it, calls it back. For in the word, which is never isolated but instead always points to a whole and to its relations to the whole, the said always reflects the unsaid.60 Hegel is right when he recognizes in the “logical” and the “speculative”—which are synonymous here—the very “dialectical articulation” that lies in language itself. But he is mistaken in his assumption that there could be a movement that runs in only one direction and finds its goal outside and beyond language. The triumphal march of self-consciousness fails in its drive to create a stable place to stay with the “appropriation” of the other, which has undermined the Western tradition. The reflection that lies in the movement of the instinctual logic of language is always “homeless” (unheimisch), and cannot as such be halted anywhere (HD 98/GW3 85). But it such a way, also the epic of absolute spirit, which unfolds in Hegel’s great monologue, ends in failure (HD 7/GW3 5; TM 369/GW1 375).
Just as there is no completion in Hegelian dialectics, so Hegel also shows there is no completion in ancient dialectics. “Were Hegel’s idea of logic to include full acknowledgement of its relationship to natural logic [. . .], he would have to draw close again to the classical origin of his idea in Plato’s dialectic” (HD 99/GW3 86). If at first it was necessary to read Greek dialectics through Hegel, in order to discover its still lacking unity, now it is necessary to read Hegelian dialectics through the Greek, in order to realize that no totality can be closed—if it will neither be totalizing nor totalitarian. It holds open the very negativity, the aporia, that remains both in the indeterminate dyad of Plato and in the “bad infinity” of Hegel.61 In the way in which objective spirit articulates itself in language, it limits the subjective spirit on the one hand, and disputes from within the absolute spirit on the other; that is, it makes absolute spirit impossible. Even more: it is language that offers the new model of a whole that is always infinitely open. That dialectics must “retrieve” itself in hermeneutics means that it must retract itself, just as the concept retracts and revokes itself each time in the word. It means that the dual direction must be recognized: from the word to the concept and from the concept to the word (GR 108–121/GL 100–111).62 This also means, however, that Hegel’s metaphysical dialectics must rely on the contemporary form of the dialogical dialectics of Plato, namely on philosophical hermeneutics.
Hegel himself, though, was of course fully aware of the speculative significance of Platonic dialectics, insofar as he was conscious of all that had been lost in the separation of the dialectic from the analytic, through the closure that the Aristotelian apodictic had established (HD 27/GW3 22).
7. Apodictics and the Exclusion of the Other: On Aristotle
Although Gadamer is taken for an Aristotelian, if not a Neo-Aristotelian, on the basis of his rehabilitation of phrónesis, if we consider his work more closely we will see that the opposite is the case. In order to correct the former impression, we could even describe him as an “Anti-Aristotelian.” Gadamer’s proximity to Aristotle is ultimately limited to the chapter in which philosophical hermeneutics encounters the practical knowledge of Aristotle, where Aristotle himself returns to Platonic and even Socratic motifs. Gadamer emphasizes this in the 1990 study “The Socratic Question and Aristotle.”63 Otherwise, we should speak rather of the distance between them.
In the first place, Gadamer reads the history of Greek philosophy by demolishing its Aristotelian reconstruction. But this distance from Aristotle also has a considerable philosophical significance. Gadamer is far from the apodictic philosophizing of the Stagirite, and he in no way shares his critique of Plato. In his eyes, Aristotle represents the apodictic closure of Platonic dialectics.
Should Platonic dialectics really be conceived as an intermediate phase on the way to epistéme, the apodictic science that Aristotle supposedly achieved? For Gadamer it is important to revise this judgment. It condemns Plato’s philosophy for lacking conceptual fixity, which on the basis of its dialectical vocation this philosophy precisely sought to avoid. According to Aristotle, Plato’s diaeretic method is unsatisfactory because of this indeterminacy; this is proven for Aristotle by the difficulty of ever choosing the right point in the dichotomous division. Diaeresis could not, therefore, claim a scientific method.64 The Aristotelian apodictic—and the transition from the literary form of the dialogue to the treatise bears witness to this—tends to overcome Platonic dialectics in the attempt to secure a scientific foundation in the concept, which is the universal and necessary definition of the essence of the object. But “conceptual formation,” even if at first glance it seems to bring a gain in clarity, actually reveals itself to be a double loss.
With conceptual formation, in fact, the “inexhaustible ambiguity” of everyday language is lost, whereas philosophical language gets reduced to rigid terminology. Above and beyond that, apodictic discourse extrapolates and isolates its concepts: téchne, epistéme, sophía, phrónesis, and noûs may perhaps gain clearer contours, but the connection that links them to each other and with the context from which they arise is no longer visible. The greatest loss that the Aristotelian apodictic brings, however, since its task consists of separating what is unified, is the hypostatization of the sensible and the intelligible world. The doctrine of two worlds is a consequence of the Aristotelian critique of Plato. For Gadamer it was, paradoxically, precisely Aristotle who, by his renunciation of the Socratic dialogue, initiated Platonism.
In its intention to establish a necessary procedure for evidence, the Aristotelian apodictic must also renounce another moment particular to the dialectic: the consent of the other. The objectivity that is the aim of the definition implies a conclusive understanding. But the other as such is excluded from this understanding. The only role that remains for the other is to confirm the reasonableness of the definitional logos: “Thus the other with whom one seeks to reach agreement is in no way different from any other person, or better, he is needed only in the ways he is precisely not different from others” (PDE 41/GW5 31). The understanding (Verständigung) that leads to the definition marks a finis, a goal, which is at the same time the end of speaking and the end of dialogue. Through this process, hermeneutic openness is put into play.
In dialogical dialectics, by contrast, the process unfolds in exactly the opposite way, since its provisional nature leads not to an irrevocable definition but to a conversation that in its open indeterminacy, as a question, always demands a response. The interpretation that the dialectician suggests makes further interpretations possible, on the basis of the openness that it preserves. Thus dialectics achieves a speaking that is endlessly prepared to find its motivation, its justification, and its foundation in the response of the other. In the way in which Gadamer takes it up, Platonic dialectics lives from the participation of the other and is supported at each step by the possibility of assuring the other’s agreement.
Notes
1. Otto Pöggeler, Schritte zu einer hermeneutischen Philosophie (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1994), 497. See also the judgment by Werner Beierwaltes, “Rezension zu Gesammelte Werke 5 und 6,” Philosophy and History 20 (1987): 120–122.
2. Strauss, by contrast, thinks of the relation between the Greeks and the moderns as an opposition. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Philosophizing in Opposition: Strauss and Voegelin on Communication and Science,” in Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper, eds., Faith and Political Philosophy. The Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 249–259.
3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Gegenwartsbedeutung der griechischen Philosophie” (1972), in Gadamer, Hermeneutische Entwürfe. Vorträge und Aufsätze (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 97–111, 99. Gadamer’s reading of the Greeks is problematized, though, by Yvon Lafrance, “Notre rapport à la pensée grecque: ‘Gadamer ou Schleiermacher?’” in Catherine Collobert, ed., L’avenir de la philosophie est-il grec? (Montréal: Fides, 2001), 44–54; see in the same volume, Francois Renaud, “L’appropriation de la philosophie grecque chez Hans-Georg Gadamer,” 79–96; see also Renaud, “Gadamers Rückgang auf die Griechen,” in Andrzej Przylebski, ed., Das Erbe Gadamers (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2006), 95–118. On this topic see also Günter Figal, “Platonforschung und hermeneutische Philosophie,” in Thomas A. Szlezák and Karl-Heinz Stanzel, eds., Platonisches Philosophieren. Zehn Vorträge zu Ehren von Hans Joachim Krämer (Hildesheim: Olms, 2001), 19–29, 26.
4. Gadamer, “Die griechische Philosophie und das moderne Denken” (1978), in Griechische Philosophie II, GW6, 3–8, 3. For an overview of his interest in the Greeks see the interview with Glenn Most, “‘Die Griechen, unsere Lehrer.’ Ein Interview mit Glenn Most,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 1 (1994): 139–149.
5. It is sufficient to mention the philosophers and philologists of ancient languages with whom Gadamer was connected: next to Paul Friedländer there were especially Werner Jaeger, Julius Stenzel, Karl Reinhardt, Kurt Riezler, Bruno Snell, and Kurt von Fritz. After 1960, Gadamer followed closely the studies published in the United States on Greek philosophy.
6. See in this volume chapter 4, part 4.
7. Gadamer, “Die Sprache der Metaphysik” (1968), GW3 229–237; “Heidegger und die Sprache” (1990), GW10 14–30. See Ingrid Scheibler, “Gadamer’s Appropriation of Heidegger: Language and the Achievement of Continuity,” Études phénoménologiques 26 (1997): 59–89, 66–67.
8. For Gadamer it is always important to reconstruct or destructure the history of a concept, since only from that point can we begin to philosophize once more. See on this topic TM 428–429/ GW1 432–433; “Begriffsgeschichte als Philosophie” (1970), GW2 77–91; “Die Begriffsgeschichte und die Sprache der Philosophie” (1971), GW4 78–94. See on this Reiner Wiehl, “Begriffsbestimmung und Begriffsgeschichte: Zum Verhältnis von Phänomenologie, Dialektik und Hermeneutik,” in Rüdiger Bubner, Konrad Cramer, and Reiner Wiehl, Hermeneutik und Dialektik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1970), 1:167–213; see also Wiehl, “Die philosophische Hermeneutik Hans-Georg Gadamers jenseits von Erkenntnistheorie und Existenzphilosophie,” in Das Erbe Gadamers, 33–63, 44ff.
9. See in this volume chapter 8, part 9.
10. See in this volume chapter 9, part 2.
11. See also Heidegger’s positive commentary on Gadamer’s discussion of “twisting out” in a letter to Gadamer from December 2, 1971 (published incomplete in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, Das Erbe Hegels (Frankfurt/M.: Suhkramp, 1979), Nachwort, 89–94; Gadamer, Das Erbe Hegels, GW4 476–483.
12. On this topic, see also André Laks, “Gadamer et les présocratiques,” in Jean-Claude Gens, Pavlos Kontos, and Pierre Rodrigo, Gadamer et les Grecs (Paris: Vrin, 2004), 13–29.
13. Parmenides, VS Fr B 6, 1–3. The pre-Socratic fragments are cited according to the version by Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 7th ed., vols. 1–3 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1954).
14. Parmenides, VS Fr B 8, 50–65.
15. Parmenides, VS Fr B 6, 1–2.
16. Parmenides, VS Fr B 6, 4–7.
17. See Karl Reinhardt, “Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1977). The essays by Gadamer on Heraclitus follow those on Parmenides in the volume Plato im Dialog (GW7). I should also draw attention to the two reviews that Gadamer devoted to Reinhardt: Gadamer, “Schein und Sein. Zum Tode von Karl Reinhardt” (1958), GW6 278–288; “Die Krise des Helden. Zum Gedenken an Karl Reinhardt nach zehn Jahren” (1966), GW6 285–291; see also his portrait in PA 127–134 and PL 151–160.
18. Heraclitus, VS Fr B 10, 1–2.
19. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I, vol. 18 of Werke (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1986), 320. See Gadamer, “Vom Anfang bei Heraklit” (1974), GW6 232–241, 232 (reprinted with the title “Zur Überlieferung Heraklits,” in Gadamer, Der Anfang des Wissens [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999], 17–34, 17); “Hegel und Heraklit,” (1990), GW7 32–42, 32.
20. Heraklit, VS Fr B 48.
21. Heraklit, VS Fr B 64. See also Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus in Martin Heidegger, “Logos (Heraklit Fragment 50),” in Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, GA 7, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 2000), 211–234. For a comparison between Heidegger and Gadamer in this regard, see Hans Ruin, “Einheit in der Differenz—Differenz in der Einheit. Heraklit und die Wahrheit der Hermeneutik,” in Günter Figal, Jean Grondin, and Dennis J. Schmidt, eds., Hermeneutische Wege (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 87–106.
22. Heraklit, VS Fr B 89.
23. On the proximity of sleep and death, see also Gadamer, “Goethe und Heraklit” (1999), in Hermeneutische Entwürfe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), 234–237.
24. Heraklit, VS Fr B 101; Gadamer, “Hegel und Heraklit,” GW7 40; “Heraklit-Studien,” GW7 83.
25. See Plato, Phaedo 96a–99b, Plato, 83–85. See Mark Painter, “Phaedo 99d–101d: Socrates and Gadamer’s ‘Second Way,’” Southwestern Philosophical Review 14 (1998): 179–186.
26. Phaedo, 99e; Plato, 86. Gadamer himself translated this text in Platon, Texte zur Ideenlehre, ed. and trans. Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1978), 21.
27. For a portrait of Socrates, see Günter Figal, Sokrates (Munich: Beck, 1995). See also Francis J. Ambrosio, “The Figure of Socrates in Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1997), 259–273. See Gadamer, “Sokrates und das Göttliche,” in Sokrates. Gestalt und Idee, ed. Herbert Kessler (Heiterheim: Graue Edition, 1993), 97–108.
28. See in this volume chapter 9, part 4.
29. Reale is right in this sense to identify Gadamer as the “Platonist” of the last century. See Giovanni Reale, “Gadamer, ein grosser Platoniker des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Günter Figal, ed., Begegnungen mit Hans-Georg Gadamer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 92–104, 92.
30. The limits of Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato are shown, for example, by Alain Boutot, in Heidegger et Platon. Le problème du nihilisme (Paris: PUF, 1987); one should also think of Heidegger’s negative conception of dialectics as “appearance.” See Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit, GA 29/30, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1992), 306.
31. The Tübingen School, whose most significant representatives are Konrad Gaiser, Hans Joachim Krämer, Heinz Happ, and more recently Thomas Alexander Szlezák, whose interpretations concur with those of Giovanni Reale and Maurizio Migliori, see Plato’s actual doctrines in the “unwritten” teachings that were passed down in the Academy and that can be reconstructed on the basis of a few witnesses, including Aristotle. The result is a systematic and heavily mathematical philosophy. Gadamer turns his focus, by contrast, to the Socratic Plato, although he was also interested in the indirect tradition, not least because of its implications for the relation of orality to writing (see in this volume chapter 8, part 2). From this starting point he saw the “royal way” for interpretations of Plato to pursue. See Gadamer, “Platos ungeschriebene Dialektik” (1968), GW6 129–153, 133. For Gadamer’s final position on the Tübingen School see his introduction to the volume: Giuseppe Girgenti, ed., La nuova interpretazione di Platone (Milan: Rusconi, 1998), 19–23.
32. Gadamer, “Schleiermacher als Platoniker” (1969), GW4 374–383, 374–376. See on this P. Christopher Smith, “H.-G. Gadamer’s Interpretation of Plato,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 12 (1981): 211–230; Charles L. Griswold, “Gadamer and the Interpretation of Plato,” Ancient Philosophy 1 (1981): 171–178; White has expressed a critical view, see Nicholas P. White, “Observations and Questions about Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Interpretation of Plato,” in Charles L. Griswold, ed., Platonic Writings—Platonic Readings (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 247–257; Francois Renaud, Die Resokratisierung Platons. Die platonische Hermeneutik Hans-Georg Gadamers (Sankt Augustin: Academia, 1999). See also James Risser, “Gadamer’s Plato and the Task of Philosophy,” in Mirko Wischke and Michael Hofer, eds., Gadamer verstehen—Understanding Gadamer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), 87–100.
33. Renouncing the theory of two worlds in Plato implies a rethinking of the entire Western tradition. Zuckert states this clearly: “Gadamer asks his readers to reconsider and reconceive their understanding of the entire Western tradition.” See Catherine H. Zuckert, “Hermeneutics in Practice: Gadamer on Ancient Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 200–224, 219f; see also Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 70–103.
34. See Gadamer, “Zur Vorgeschichte der Metaphysik” (1950), GW6 9–29.
35. The dialogue Socrates leads, in the ingenious way Plato portrays him—see “Plato als Porträtist” (1988), GW7 228–257—is the model of philosophizing itself, because the reader gets drawn into the process of question and answer and loses their own apparent superiority. For Gadamer this means: “To philosophize with Plato, not just to criticize Plato, that is the task” (RPJ 32/GW2 501). See Stepan Spinka, “‘Plato im Dialog.’ Hans-Georg Gadamer als Interpret der platonischen Dialektik,” in Wischke and Hofer, Gadamer verstehen—Understanding Gadamer, 120–137.
36. See P. Christopher Smith, Hermeneutics and Human Finitude: Toward a Theory of Ethical Understanding (New York: Fordham University Press, 1991), 144–145.
37. Gadamer has a negative image of sophistry that one need not share.
38. Gadamer, “Zur Vorgeschichte der Metaphysik,” GW6 21.
39. Gadamer, “Zur Vorgeschichte der Metaphysik,” GW6, 23.
40. The idea here is nothing other than the question that opens the investigation. Gadamer takes over Natorp’s conception of the idea as the starting point. See Paul Natorp, Platons Ideenlehre. Eine Einführung in den Idealismus (1902) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1994), 150–163. See also Paulette Kidder, “Gadamer and the Platonic Eidos,” Philosophy Today 39 (1995): 83–92.
41. See in this volume chapter 8, part 6.
42. See in this volume chapter 9, parts 3–4.
43. See Plato, Philebus, 23b–27b, Plato, as well as Gadamer, PDE 112–125/GW5 94–107.
44. Gadamer owes Klein a great deal on this point, which is decisive for his philosophy. See Jacob Klein, “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra,” in Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Astronomie und Physik, Abteilung B: Studien, vol. 3, 1st book, (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1934), 18–105, and second book, Berlin 1936, 122–235; reprinted in English: Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of the Algebra, trans. Winfree J. Smith and Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), 68 and 70. See Burt Hopkins, “Klein and Gadamer on the Arithmos-Structure of Platonic Eidetic Numbers,” Philosophy Today 52 (2008): 151–157.
45. The concept of the logos stems from mathematics and is called “relation”: the number, like the logos, too, is a weave, a weaving of relations. See Gadamer, “Mathematik und Dialektik bei Plato” (1982), GW7 290–312.
46. Aristotle uses the term dyas, “dyad” or “twoness,” in order to describe Plato’s philosophy; but the term does not appear at all in his works and is thus counted as a key concept of Plato’s “unwritten teaching.” See Aristotle, Metaphysica, 987b 25.
47. The concept of the “dyad,” which is decisive for Gadamer’s philosophy, has received very little attention until now; the brief essay by Prufer represents an exception. See Thomas Prufer, “A Thought or Two on Gadamer’s Plato,” in Hahn, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 549–551; see also Gadamer, “Reply to Thomas Prufer, 552–554.
48. On this point Plato could be criticized for accepting what Hegel calls “bad infinity.” See in this volume chapter 9, part 4.
49. It is important to note that Gadamer’s first publication deals with pleasure, whereas the last deals with pain: see the small, posthumously published book Schmerz. Einschätzungen aus medizinischer, philosophischer und therapeutischer Sicht (Heidelberg: Winter, 2004).
50. See in this volume chapter 8, part 7.
51. Against this conception, however, see Christopher Gill, “Critical Response to the Hermeneutic Approach from an Analytic Perspective,” in Giovanni Reale and Samuel Scolnicov, eds., New Images of Plato: Dialogues on the Idea of the Good (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2002), 211–222, esp. 213–219.
52. See also Gadamer, “Hegel’s Philosophy and Its Aftereffects Today,” RAS 21–37/VZW 32–53.
53. The lecture was given in Naples under the title “Hegel und die Hermeneutik.” See in this volume chapter 1, part 11. See also Gadamer, “The Heritage of Hegel” (RAS 42/GW4 467).
54. Martin Heidegger, “Hegel and the Greeks,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 323–336; “Hegel und die Griechen,” in Wegmarken, 427–444.
55. For a comparative study see Merold Westphal, “Hegel and Gadamer,” in Brice R. Wachterhauser, ed., Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 65–86; see also Theodore Kiesel, “Hegel and Hermeneutics,” in Frederick G. Weiss, ed., Beyond Epistemology (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 197–220.
56. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 43; Phenomenology of Spirit, 37.
57. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 43–44; Phenomenology of Spirit, 38.
58. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logic. Erster Band, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 21, ed. Friedrich Hogemann and Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1984), 10.
59. On the speculative dialectic of the word for Gadamer, see in this volume chapter 8, part 4.
60. See in this volume chapter 9, part 4. See also James Risser, “In the Shadow of Hegel: Infinite Dialogue in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics,” Research in Phenomenology 32 (2002): 86–102.
61. Gadamer returned to this topic more and more into his later years, and held his last seminar in Naples in 1997 on it.
62. Gadamer, “Die sokratische Frage und Aristoteles, GW7 373–380. See Jean Grondin, “Gadamers sokratische Destruktion der griechischen Philosophie,” in Grondin, Der Sinn für Hermeneutik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), 54–70, 69. See also Jamey Findling, “Gadamer and the Platonic Contribution to Practical Philosophy,” in Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik 4 (2005): 125–139.
63. See Aristotle, Analytica priora, 46a 31–b 19.
64. See Gadamer, “Die sokratische Frage und Aristoteles,” GW7 377; “Aristoteles und die imperativische Ethik,” GW7 388.