Theodore George
The question of a philosopher’s relation to the legacy of predecessors is, of course, brought into relief by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. One, if not the, central concern of his project is that not only research in the humanities (Geisteswissenshaften) but all of our efforts to interpret and to understand are conditioned by meaning inherited from the past. It is therefore no surprise that Gadamer develops his project in explicit and, indeed, often intimate and intricate, connection with several figures from the history of Western philosophy, not to mention a host of further scholars, poets, and artists. Although Gadamer’s deepest ties are to Heidegger, his thought also remains shaped greatly by the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle, as well as figures and themes in the classical age of German philosophy from Kant to Hegel. Gadamer’s interests in this latter period of German intellectual life are diverse; in addition to the celebrated philosophers of the age, he devotes considerable attention, for example, to the theoretical and artistic achievements of Goethe, Hölderlin, and others. Yet, Gadamer’s relation to the period can be understood to orbit around the figures often taken to be responsible for the inauguration and conclusion of the movement of German Idealism: respectively, Kant, especially Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which many see as an initial impetus for the movement, and Hegel, whose absolute idealism, if he himself is to be believed, comprises the culmination of the movement.
If it is impracticable in a short essay to examine Gadamer’s relation to all of the figures and themes of interest to him from the classical age of German philosophy, we may nevertheless discern the profile of Gadamer’s concerns, then, through his considerations of Kant’s third Critique and motifs from Hegel’s absolute idealism. This, to be sure, still leaves more to do than can be done here.1 In what follows I shall limit myself to two crucial points of Gadamer’s approach, namely, first, the debt he owes to Kant’s third Critique for his own elucidation of the hermeneutical experience of truth, and, second, the debt that he owes to aspects of Hegel’s absolute idealism for his own notion of hermeneutical self-knowledge. While the principal purpose of the present essay is expository, we shall see that Gadamer, in his approach to both Kant’s third Critique and Hegel’s absolute idealism, focuses on themes that allow him to emphasize the forms of finitude he believes guide hermeneutical experience.
Gadamer turns to Kant’s third Critique to help him establish his own view of the hermeneutical experience of truth. His relation to Kant’s aesthetics, though, is nuanced and layered, involving a side that reads with, and another that reads against, the grain of Kant’s thought. Gadamer is no Buchstabphilosoph, philosopher of the letter—not in his relation to Kant, nor, for that matter, in his relation to Hegel. His concern is not to address Kant’s third Critique in the abstract in order simply to clarify and assess Kant’s purported intention or position. To judge Gadamer’s interpretation of Kant by such a standard is to ignore the basic tenets of his philosophical hermeneutics no less than it is to miss the point of his approach to Kant.2 Gadamer’s concern, rather, is to pursue his recovery of the hermeneutical experience of truth through an interpretation that appropriates some aspects of Kant’s aesthetics at the same time as it takes critical distance from others.
Gadamer’s interpretation of Kant addresses a number of matters, not only Kant’s analysis of the aesthetic experience of beauty and the creation of art through genius, but also the significance of Kant’s consideration of matters that were of central importance to the humanist tradition, such as formative education (Bildung), the sensus communis, judgment, and taste (Gadamer 2003, 9–42). Gadamer’s approach to Kant, however, can be understood to coalesce around Kant’s assertion of what is commonly referred to by Gadamer and other contemporaries as the autonomy of the aesthetic. This turn of phrase is often used to signify Kant’s idea that the validity of not only theoretical and practical reason but also reflective judgment—the form of cognition that governs aesthetic experience and the experience of natural purposes—all have independent a priori justification.3 The two sides of Gadamer’s interpretation can be understood each to follow from a divergent implication of Kant’s assertion. Gadamer, on the one hand, appropriates the implication of Kant’s assertion that the validity of aesthetic experience is distinctive from that of theoretical and practical reason in order to elucidate the character and, especially, the finitude of the hermeneutical experience of truth that guides our experience of art. Gadamer, on the other hand, however, criticizes the implication of Kant’s assertion that the validity of aesthetic experience is exclusive of that of theoretical and practical reason; in this, Gadamer recognizes that the history of effects of Kant’s third Critique includes what Gadamer calls the “subjectivization of aesthetics.”
The first side of Gadamer’s interpretation of Kant, then, concerns the hermeneutical experience of truth. Gadamer (2003), in the “Introduction” to Truth and Method, describes his project as an attempt to develop and justify hermeneutical truth claims, that is, claims made on us in modes of experience “in which a truth is communicated that cannot be verified by the methodological means of science” (p. xxii). He asserts that inquiry into the character of such truth claims begins with “the experience of truth that comes to us in art” (p. xxiii). This, as he believes, is because the character of the truth claim made on us in our experience of art epitomizes the sense of truth at stake in all of the modes of experience that cannot be verified through method. In his later “Reflections on my Philosophical Journey,” he goes so far as to say that inquiry into the hermeneutical experience of truth follows from “the example of art” as “a framework within which a universal hermeneutics could be developed” (Gadamer 1997, 44).
Gadamer’s consideration of this “framework” begins with Kant’s third Critique. It is true that, over the course of his long philosophical life, Gadamer develops his views of the experience of art through considerations of figures as diverse as Plato and Heidegger, Kant, Goethe, and Hegel. A crucial reason Gadamer turns to Kant, however, is that he believes Kant recognizes the distinctive character of the validity of our experience of art. Gadamer, in this, focuses on the analysis of judgments of beauty in Kant’s third Critique. While Gadamer is, of course, aware of the precedence Kant seems to give not only to beauty but also to the experience of natural over artistic beauty, he treats Kant’s as something of a general account of aesthetic experience. Gadamer recalls that Kant believes such experience to be binding, or, as this may also be put, to make a claim on us of universal validity. Gadamer (1986, 18) explains that, for Kant,
When I find something beautiful, I do not simply mean that it pleases me in the same sense that I find a meal to my taste. When I find something beautiful, I think that it ‘is’ beautiful. Or, to adapt a Kantian expression, I ‘demand everyone’s agreement’.
Kant (2000) maintains that our aesthetic judgments, no less than our theoretical or practical judgments, make a claim to universal validity. Kant, we know, maintains that this universal validity is subjective in the sense that it has a basis in the subject. Gadamer believes that decisive in Kant’s analysis, however, is Kant’s insight that the universality of judgments of beauty is without concepts. Whereas the universality of theoretical and practical judgments is understood to follow from a pre-given concept—a category, rule, or principle—that operates to subsume a particular given in sensuous experience, the universality of aesthetic judgments, by contrast, is achieved without prior subsumption of the sensuously given under a concept.
Gadamer believes that Kant’s analysis helps bring into focus the finitude to which we are exposed in the hermeneutical experience of truth. Gadamer, in this, focuses first on a limit exposed by the distinctive character of the validity Kant sees in aesthetic experience. In our experience of the universality of aesthetic judgments, we find ourselves bound by a claim that we can neither explain nor verify by conceptual means—not to others nor even to ourselves. Gadamer (1986), building further on Kant, stresses that because the universal validity of claims made on us in aesthetic experience cannot be communicated conceptually, there can be no instruction in or dissemination of the validity of aesthetic experience absent such experience itself. He writes,
[the] presumption that everyone should agree with me does not, however, imply that I could convince them by argument. That is not the way in which good taste may become universal. On the contrary, each individual has to develop his sense for the beautiful in such a way that he comes to discriminate between what is beautiful to a greater or lesser degree. It does not come about by producing good reasons or conclusive proofs for one’s taste.
(p. 18)
Kant’s analysis suggests that aesthetic experience confronts us with a claim of universal validity made on us that, at the same time, exposes that we can be bound by an experience of truth, which we can neither explain, verify, nor impart.
Gadamer believes that Kant’s very exposure of this limit in our ability to comprehend the claim made on us in aesthetic experience also reveals an excess of possibility that we encounter in such experience. Gadamer (1997), focusing on the experience of the artwork, writes,
The artwork is a challenge for our understanding because over and over again it evades all of our interpretations and puts up an invincible resistance to being transformed into the identity of the concept. This is a point I think one could already have learned from Kant’s Critique of Judgment.
(p. 44)
Our experience of the artwork confronts us with the challenge to develop always further and novel interpretations because the claim art makes on us, for want of the concept, is never able to be definitively determined. Gadamer suggests that this inexhaustibility of our interpretive relation to art may be understood in connection with the motif from Kant’s aesthetics of free play. For Kant, the aesthetic pleasure of our experience of the beautiful derives from the “free play” of the subject’s faculties of the understanding and imagination (Kant 2000, 102). Gadamer argues, moreover, that the encounter with an artwork leading to our experience of this free play implies an affinity with the genius of the artist who created it. He reminds us that Kant understands the genius as a “favorite of nature” whose inborn ability allows for the creation “of something exemplary which is not simply produced by following rules” (Gadamer 1986, 21). This, in Gadamer’s (1986) estimation, means that Kant may be understood to indicate a “congeniality” of aesthetic experience and the creation of art, in which “a kind of free play is at work in both cases” (Gadamer 1986; trans. mod.). Gadamer, expanding on Kant, suggests not only that the claim of an artwork poses an infinite interpretative task, but, moreover, that we are able to take up this task because such a work is itself brought into being through free play.
If Gadamer indicates that there is insight to be gained from Kant into the excess of possibility we find in art, he argues that our experience of art nevertheless requires us to rectify a distortion found in Kant’s analysis. He argues that Kant’s analysis of the experience of art confuses matters because Kant identifies free play with an operation of the faculties of a transcendental subject. Indeed, as Gadamer suggests, Schiller only distorts matters further when he, moving beyond Kant, associates play with a “play-drive” of the subject.4 Gadamer attempts to rectify this failure of Kant’s, however, not by a rejection of Kant’s insight into the role of play in aesthetic experience, but, on the contrary, by a reinterpretation that wrests the lessons of Kant’s analysis from Kant’s focus on the subject. In this, Gadamer interprets play in light of what he refers to as the “anthropological basis of play” in order to clarify its significance for the being of art.5 The being of art, on this view, is an event or mode of enactment that culminates in the presentation of a truth claim through our interpretive involvement with a work as spectators, listeners, or viewers. Play, from this point of view, is understood to be a clue to the being of art as enactment and not as an operation of the faculties of a transcendental subject (Gadamer 2003, 101). Gadamer at one point goes so far as to characterize play as the finite transcendence that guides our experience of art. He writes that our experience of art “necessarily reveals the human experience of finitude in a unique way and gives spiritual significance to the immanent transcendence of play as an excess that flows over into the realm of freely chosen possibilities” (Gadamer 1986, 46). Gadamer, to be sure, departs from Kant in several decisive respects with this reinterpretation of play. His concern, though, is not to reject Kant’s notion of play so much as it is to liberate the notion from the Kantian prison of transcendental subjectivity.
If Gadamer thus believes there is much to be learned about the hermeneutical experience of truth from Kant’s aesthetics, he nevertheless also sees in Kant an impetus of an errant path that has been taken in Western philosophy, the arts, and humanities. Indeed, Gadamer (2003, 40) suggests that Kant’s impetus “has major consequences and constituted a turning point.” In this other side of his interpretation of Kant’s third Critique, Gadamer (2003, 42) argues that the history of effects that follow from Kant’s aesthetics includes what Gadamer calls the “subjectivization of aesthetics.” Gadamer’s point can be understood in reference to the further implication of Kant’s assertion of the autonomy of the aesthetic, namely, that the validity of aesthetic experience is exclusive of concerns from the theoretical and practical domains. Kant, with his assertion of the autonomy of the aesthetic, not only illuminates the distinctive character of the validity of aesthetic experience but, moreover, also establishes a schism among theoretical, practical, and aesthetic life. We are, of course, aware of Kant’s concern in the third Critique to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical reason through his consideration of reflective judgment. Yet, for Gadamer, the effect of Kant’s belief that theoretical reason, practical reason, and reflective judgment have exclusive a priori grounds is more consequential for the history of philosophy, arts, and humanities that follow. This is because, with Kant, the conviction that aesthetic experience has exclusive grounds comes increasingly to displace the belief of earlier thinkers that aesthetic experience is justified in part by the role it plays in scientific inquiry and especially in legal and moral life (Gadamer 2003, 40–41). As Gadamer (2003) puts it, Kant’s analysis ultimately leads to a “shift” that moves questions about aesthetic experience “out of the center of philosophy.”
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is shaped no less by Hegel than by Kant. Gadamer, as we have seen, believes that inquiry into the hermeneutical experience of truth begins with a consideration of the validity of the experience of art and, moreover, pursues this matter in no small part through the two sides of his interpretation of Kant’s third Critique. If Gadamer believes that his philosophical hermeneutics thus takes Kant as a significant point of departure, he may furthermore be understood to develop some main lines of his view of hermeneutical experience in reference to motifs from Hegel’s absolute idealism (Gadamer 2003, 265; trans. mod.). Although Gadamer’s debts to Hegel are many, the Hegelian provenance of his approach comes into focus in his elucidation of the sense of self-knowledge that arises from the finitude of hermeneutical experience. Gadamer’s interpretation of Hegel, like his interpretation of Kant, has more than one side. On the one hand, he develops his conviction that hermeneutical experience is conditioned by historicity and, thus, unfolds in language, on the basis of ideas he draws from Hegel. On the other hand, he clarifies the form of finitude, to which we are exposed in hermeneutical experience, through a rejection of Hegel’s notion of absolute knowing. In this, Gadamer identifies hermeneutical self-knowledge not with an unconditional awareness of oneself that transcends historicity and language, but, on the contrary, with the openness to and readiness for more hermeneutical experience that results from hermeneutical experience itself. He further argues that because such hermeneutical self-knowledge results always from the negation of previous prejudices, this openness and readiness for more hermeneutical experience is nevertheless tempered by Aeschylus’ tragic insight that all learning is suffering.
Gadamer’s consideration of hermeneutical experience may be said to begin not with Hegel, however, but with Heidegger’s formulation of the hermeneutical circle. Gadamer (1986, 57), we recall, tells us that the notion of the hermeneutical circle comes down to us as the “rule” of interpretation that “one must understand the whole from out of the individual and the individual from out of the whole.” Gadamer (2003, 265), however, develops his conception of the hermeneutical circle in ontological terms that follow Heidegger’s existential analysis of the “fore-structure” of understanding. Gadamer maintains that understanding is an event, or, mode of enactment, that is not only constrained but also made possible by what he terms “prejudice” (Vorurteil) (Gadamer 2003, 269). By “prejudice,” he means not first of all an iniquitous judgment, but rather, as the form of the English translation no less than the original German word suggests, something that anticipates our judgments: the preconceptions, presuppositions, predispositions, and other meaning inherited from that past that always initially shape and orient our inquiry and action. Gadamer rejects the belief, for him characteristic of the Enlightenment, that rationality allows us to overcome prejudices passed down to us through tradition. He argues that because reason does not transcend history, the task of understanding is not to overcome our prejudices but, instead, to remain as vigilant of prejudices as possible so that we “remain open to the meaning of the other person or text” (Gadamer 2003, 269). Decisive for Gadamer, however, is that, in our efforts to understand, such vigilance never leads us to leave prejudice behind; rather, such vigilance remains ineluctably bound by the need to clarify, select, and develop our prejudices that first and forever after grant accessibility to the other person or text. For Gadamer, in short, it is “the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments” that “constitute the historical reality of his being” (Gadamer 2003, 276–277).
Gadamer’s conception of hermeneutical self-knowledge, and, with this, his relation to Hegel, comes into focus through his account of what he calls the “principle” of the “effectiveness of history (Wirkungsgeschichte)” (Gadamer 2003, 300; trans. mod.). By this principle, he argues that because understanding does not transcend but rather is both constrained and made possible by prejudices, our awareness of what shapes the questions, concerns, and interests that guide our own experience remain always inadequate. He argues that whenever we attempt to understand from out of our own historical situation something that appears in history, “we succumb to the effects of the effectiveness of history. It determines in advance what appears to us as worthy of questioning and as an object of investigation” (Gadamer 2003, 300; trans. mod.). In hermeneutical experience, as Gadamer indicates, we never find ourselves in complete control of what appears as urgent, relevant, or worthy of being questioned. These matters, rather, befall us in consequence of the weight of history.
Gadamer brings the finitude of hermeneutical self-knowledge into focus in reference to Hegel. Although Gadamer draws on Hegel’s philosophy of history and of objective spirit, his approach may be said to center on motifs from the Phenomenology of Spirit. Gadamer, in this, treats the Hegelian notion of absolute knowing as a form of absolute self-awareness, in which the knowing subject becomes conscious of itself in substance, that is, in the totality of inherited figures of consciousness that comprise the historically unfolding spirit. On the one hand, he suggests that hermeneutical self-knowledge is comparable to Hegel’s notion of consciousness becoming aware of itself insofar as Hegel sees this form of awareness as conditioned by historicity. Gadamer writes:
All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pre-given, what with Hegel we call “substance,” because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility for understanding any tradition whatsoever in its historical alterity.
(Gadamer 2003, 302)
Gadamer, with Hegel, maintains that self-knowledge arises from our efforts to make ourselves aware of the historical conditions that shape our understanding. Yet, on the other hand, Gadamer rejects the belief he sees in Hegel that self-knowledge of this kind can allow us to become completely transparent to ourselves. Whereas Gadamer takes Hegel to believe that we can become completely cognizant of the totality of conditions that shape our awareness, Gadamer, for his own part, argues that the effectiveness of history—the “substance” that shapes in advance all of our efforts to understand—always exceeds our grasp. “To be historically,” as Gadamer puts the point to rhetorical effect, is “never to arrive at self-knowing” (Gadamer 2003, 302; trans. mod.). In our efforts to understand another person or a text, we are led to reflect on the effectiveness of history that shapes our awareness; yet, this reflection on ourselves results not in the absolute self-knowledge of thoroughgoing self-transparency, but, on the contrary, in the knowledge of our own limits that are exposed to us by our ultimate opacity to ourselves.
Gadamer, within this context, maintains that hermeneutical experience must be understood as a dialectical movement of negation. Gadamer develops his hermeneutical conception of experience by contrast with the picture of experience that guides what he calls the “logic of induction” at work in modern science and, indeed, already discernible in figures from the history of philosophy such as Bacon and Aristotle (Gadamer 2003, 348, 350). Gadamer draws on what he calls Hegel’s “testimony” to observe that experience is dialectical in that it “has the structure of a reversal of consciousness” (Gadamer 2003, 353; trans. mod., 354). In Gadamer’s view of hermeneutical experience, our understanding expands not in the positive process by which we abstract or construe knowledge of universal laws, principles, or concepts from out of the stream of our sensations, but, rather, in a negative process by which we learn to relinquish previous beliefs as they prove to be incongruous with what we actually experience. He writes that experience “cannot be described simply as the unbroken generation of typical universals. Rather, this generation takes place as false generalizations that are continually refuted by experience and what was regarded as typical is shown not to be so” (Gadamer 2003, 353). In hermeneutical experience, our awareness is always already shaped and guided by prejudices that come to us as effects of history. In virtue of this, our prejudices seem initially to be as familiar and obvious to us as they prove to be inadequate to the matter actually at issue in our experience. Experience, in turn, is the movement by which we come to understand both ourselves and the matter better as we confront this inadequacy.
Gadamer’s belief that hermeneutical experience unfolds as a dialectical movement of negation has important consequences for epistemology. Yet, he treats these consequences perhaps above all in the context of their significance for existence and even ethical life. Gadamer develops this significance by means of a contrast with Hegel. Experience, as a dialectical movement of negation, increases our awareness of ourselves through the exposure of the effectiveness that history has over our thought and action. Whereas Hegel believes that experience culminates in certainty of ourselves in virtue of the self-transparency we achieve in absolute knowing, Gadamer argues that experience never leads to certainty, but, on the contrary, always only to more experience. Gadamer, with this divergence from Hegel, maintains that “the perfection we call ‘being experienced,’” that is, the education or betterment of ourselves that results from extensive experience, has nothing to do with the achievement of self-certainty, or, for that matter, of the certitude of any of our knowledge, whether theoretical or technical. Rather, as Gadamer suggests, experience helps us to cultivate ourselves, to develop readiness for and openness to new experience. He writes,
The experienced person proves to be … someone who is radically undogmatic; who, because of the many experiences he has had and the knowledge he has drawn from them, is particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them. The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself.
(Gadamer 2003, 355)
To be experienced, for Gadamer, is not to attain the self-certainty of absolute knowing, but to have cultivated an ability for more and new experience. This is an ability that is perhaps best understood in terms of practical life as a virtue or excellence of character.
Gadamer argues that the cultivation of readiness and openness nevertheless also leads to what can be described as a tragic sensibility. This is because such cultivation is fostered by the experience of reversals that confront us with the painful reminder of the ultimately intractable inadequacy of our awareness. Instead of expanding on the tragic sensibility that can develop from such reversals with continued reference to Hegel, however, Gadamer turns to the Aeschylean dictum that human beings learn through suffering (pathei mathos) (Gadamer 2003, 356). With this, he asserts that “experience is the experience of human finitude. The truly experienced person is one who has taken this to heart” (Gadamer 2003, 357). To be experienced is not only to be ready and enabled for more and new experience but thereby also to be aware that one does not have, and never can gain, mastery over one’s life, and that one grows only as one suffers the exposure to one’s own inability.
Gadamer maintains that hermeneutical experience, in being conditioned by historicity, thus also always unfolds in language. His examination of the hermeneutical significance of language begins from the insight that we experience language as the address of the other; by virtue of language, we experience not only the other person but even, as Gadamer believes, meaning inherited from tradition as a “thou” (Gadamer 2003, 358). Some of his most important ideas about the hermeneutical experience of language arise, however, from his consideration of what he calls the “speculative” dimension of language (Gadamer 2003, 465). By this, he means that language allows a matter to be presented in a movement which, as the etymology of the word “speculative” indicates, can be compared to a back-and-forth mirroring or reflection. Gadamer examines the speculative dimension of language with reference to Hegel’s celebrated conception of the speculative proposition (Gadamer 2003, 466). Gadamer (2003) suggests that the character of a speculative proposition can be illuminated by contrast with propositions that predicate something of something. Whereas such a predicative proposition may be understood to determine a relation between the subject and predicate, a speculative proposition, by contrast, expresses “the truth of the subject in the form of a predicate.” He clarifies this idea of a speculative proposition through the illustration of the speculative proposition, “God is one.” This proposition does not express that God has the property of being one, but, rather, that it is the being of God to be one. Here, knowledge of God is supposed to be expanded not through the connection of the concept of God to something else, but, rather, in a movement that effaces the operation of predication as the concept of God itself is presented in a reflection of the predicate back onto the subject.
Gadamer’s conception of the hermeneutical experience of language is informed by this Hegelian distinction between predicative and speculative language.6 He argues, in consequence of his engagement with Hegel, that the hermeneutical use of language does not principally take shape by means of predication but rather through the speculative possibility of reflective movement. Gadamer acknowledges that our use of language can, of course, always involve predication, but he believes that we come to understand a matter thanks to the reflective movement of our speech. Although Gadamer’s approach thereby affirms Hegel’s insight into the speculative character of language, he also clarifies an important difference between his own view and Hegel’s. Whereas Hegel believes that the reflective movement of language admits of a conclusion, in which a matter is presented in its complete totality, Gadamer, by contrast, maintains that the speculative movement of language cannot ever be brought to such completion. For Gadamer, in all of our efforts to understand, our words always come up short of the matter. Again here in this context, he argues that our experience of this finitude exposes us both to possibilities and limits. For, when we recognize that what we intend to say exceeds what we have as yet been able to say, we are exposed to the infinity of possibilities that language offers for us to continue to bring out our intention. Gadamer writes, “The infinite possibilities of the word are oriented toward the sense intended as toward the infinite” (Gadamer 2003, 469). With the recognition of this excess of possibility, however, also comes insight into the inability of language ever fully to allow us to express what we intend. In the hermeneutical experience of language, we find that we always mean more than we can say, and, thereby, that we can never fully convey what we mean.
***
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics cannot fully be understood without the contour his project receives from his relation to Kant’s third Critique and Hegel’s absolute idealism. Of course, in Gadamer’s interpretive engagement with Kant and Hegel, he also offers us a remarkable example of hermeneutical practice—an example that allows us not only to learn novel insights from Kant and Hegel, but, with this, suggests the richness that tradition can continue to hold for us.