Dennis J. Schmidt
It is customary—and nonetheless a serious misrepresentation—to speak of hermeneutic theory as laying out a theory of method or a methodological practice. Such a view fundamentally distorts the basic concerns and insights of hermeneutics. My intention in what follows is not to debunk this view directly, but to argue that if we do risk speaking of the basic concerns and insights of hermeneutics, then we would do well to see them as essentially wedded to the questions of ethical life. This means that, as the tradition of hermeneutic reflection develops, it should, if it is to fully unfold its most original sources, come to show more clearly this very real and original concern with ethical life. Of course, such a claim is still a provocation at this point in the contemporary hermeneutic tradition, and yet I would suggest that grasping the deep kinship between hermeneutic thought and ethical life is the best way to come to the heart of hermeneutics.1 It is also, I would argue, the most promising way of thinking the questions of ethics in our times. In the following, I will restrict my remarks on this topic to Gadamer’s work. I do this because I believe that while others—most notably Ricoeur—have recognized and contributed to this ethical sensibility of hermeneutics, Gadamer’s work has done this most extensively and with a deep sense of the need for what Heidegger called an “original ethics” if ethical thought is to be responsive to the needs of our times.
There are four rather obvious links between hermeneutic theory and ethics that can help illuminate this claim. First, hermeneutics is formulated with reference to the question of ethical judgment as it is developed by Kant in his Third Critique; second, it is modeled on Aristotle’s notion of φρóνησíς in his Nicomachean Ethics; third, it is concerned with conversation and listening, and with the need to engage others genuinely; and fourth, it is animated by a deep respect for alterity and a sensitivity to the complexities of historical realities. Those cornerstones of the way Gadamer formulates the idea of hermeneutics are very good reasons to assume that an ethical sense and ethical concerns belong to the foundations of hermeneutics. Furthermore, Gadamer explicitly affirms such a view in Truth and Method when he writes that “Aristotle’s description of the ethical phenomenon … offers a kind of model for the problems of hermeneutics.”2 That is the sort of claim one finds often made by Gadamer; one sees it, for instance, in the essay entitled “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy” where he says that “theoretical knowledge about the experience of understanding and the praxis of understanding—that is, philosophical hermeneutics and one’s own self-understanding—cannot be separated.”3 In short, the bond between hermeneutics and practical philosophy is a frequent theme for Gadamer. For all of these reasons—and more—one can see that hermeneutics is deeply rooted in the concerns of ethical life. But it must be added that hermeneutics does not simply take over a traditional conception of the problems of ethics; it recognizes that the deepest concerns of ethical life have long remained untouched by philosophical reflections on ethics, and so there is a need for ethical reflection to become different; more precisely, hermeneutics—especially as Gadamer has formulated it—recognizes the need for ethics to become more “original.” In order to flesh out this claim, I need to say more precisely just what this notion of an “original” ethics means.
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Heidegger is the one who introduces this notion, and yet he is not terribly helpful in unfolding what it means to call for ethics to become more “original.” Nonetheless, one can glean something of such an ethics from scattered comments. For instance, it is clear that calling for an “original” ethics does not simply mean that it should be a novel form of what has long passed for ethics; rather, it means that it should be fundamentally different from ethics as it is currently understood. It should be different insofar as it draws closer to the sources of what lets something like an ethical life be, and it should be free from the prejudices of metaphysics that have long governed ethical reflection. In particular, it is the metaphysical partition of ontology from ethics, the separation of theory and praxis that Heidegger finds most in need of being overcome. This is what Heidegger means when he writes that “if it is the case that the word “ἦθος,” in accord with its basic meaning, entails a reflection upon the dwelling of human being, then a thinking that thinks the truth of being as the originary element of human being is already implicitly an original ethics.”4 Such an ethics should be understood as neither theory nor practice; it is rather founded in how we make sense of our world, how we understand, and this cannot be fully accounted for as a theoretical matter, nor does such sense emerge as a matter of practice alone. Properly understood, such an ethics undercuts or deconstructs the very notion of a theoretical/practical divide since it concerns the formation of that character out of which both theoretical and practical relations to the world emerge. Understood in this way, ethics is much more a matter of an enacting of an understanding that defines the “basis” of our being-in-the-world. It is that for which one bears absolute responsibility since it returns one to that which is most of all one’s own.
When Heidegger speaks of the “basic meaning” of the word “ἦθος”—of that which points to the truly “original” site of ethical reflection—he refers to the way it means something like a native place or the place where something belongs and flourishes. The word “ἦθος” is used this way in Homer’s Iliad when Paris, running through Troy in order to find Hektor, is likened to a horse breaking free and running to find the haunts [ἦθεα] and pastures [νομὸν] of other horses: ἦθος is the place where the animal belongs with other animals—it the place where they gather and flourish. There is a passage in Plato where one finds this more archaic sense of the word ἦθος that is an even more appropriate way of understanding the “basic meaning” of ἦθος. It appears in the Phaedrus (276d) when, in the course of discussing gardens, Socrates introduces the idea that written words constitute a sort of “garden of letters” [γρáμμασι κἠπους] that are the seeds to be planted in the soil that is the soul. In that passage, Socrates speaks of the place where those seeds were planted as an “ἦθεσι,” and that place is also the word for the character of the soul in which that garden of letters is planted. In this case, ἦθος refers to a gathering place, but also something like a soil upon which something grows and that which grows in this place is one’s character. It is the place where the soul is forged and formed. An ethics that is original—the sort of ethical understanding that I want to argue defines hermeneutics—cultivates this place, forms a character, and nourishes that out of which anything like conduct, decision, action, right, or wrong is to be thought and understood.
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Unlike Heidegger, Gadamer did address the question of ethical life directly and frequently; this is no accident, nor a quirk of personal interests. It is rather a consequence of the fact that a commitment to hermeneutics entails a commitment to ethical concerns. One can see this in Gadamer’s earliest works such as “Praktisches Wissen” (1930) and Platons dialektische Ethik” (1931) up through the period of Truth and Method, where we find texts such as “Über die Möglichkeit einer philosophischen Ethik” (1963), and even into later works such as “Freundschaft und Selbsterkenntnis” (1985). It is no accident that his final significant work was a translation and commentary of Book VI of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, the text he studied with Heidegger and that so profoundly ignited his philosophical imagination, forever cementing that imagination to the question of ethics. Even one of Gadamer’s final publications, the text of a lecture he gave to students at a gymnasium entitled “Erziehung ist sich erziehen” (2000), takes up the theme of this sense of understanding that cultivates character rather than simply cognizes abstract ideas. Although he never systematically treated the largest questions of the relation of hermeneutics and ethical life, those concerns were enduring and never far from Gadamer’s work. The reason for this is simple: the character of understanding that is the aim of hermeneutics is always a form of self-understanding. Such self-understanding is never remote from the realm that Plato characterized as the soil that is the soul.
If one pulls together those texts in which Gadamer discusses ethical concerns as a hermeneutical problem, one finds that a set of rather tightly related themes and arguments emerges and that these outline key features of Gadamer’s understanding of the character of a philosophical ethics. One sees above all that he does not take for granted that philosophical discourse has any special authority over ethical concerns. In fact, one sees that Gadamer considers it a real question whether there can even be a philosophical knowledge of moral life. This is because the conditional and contingent character of human life must forever disrupt any effort to forge a doctrine of ethics and, consequently, any ethics that is sensitive to this conditionality will not be able to deny its own conditional nature—in other words, it must recognize its own questionableness. This modesty of any possible ethics, this humility of its claims and authority, is the most necessary feature of any ethical stance for Gadamer. It manifests itself as a sort of openness to the other and as a form of criticism that is always reflexive rather than aggressive. But within the horizon of this humility that will limit and temper any ethical claim, one does find some clear hallmarks of what Gadamer understands by ethical understanding. Three tightly interrelated themes deserve to be mentioned, in particular: the role of conceptual language in ethical understanding, the transition of ethical understanding into practice, and the distinction between ethical understanding and τἐκνη.
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Just as the first sentence of Truth and Method makes a distinction between the character of truth in the humanities and that found in the natural sciences, so too does the concern with ethicality begin with a parallel distinction: conceptual language is insufficient and inappropriate for the language of ethical life, that is, for the character of its articulation and expression. The problem with the concept is that it is defined by its impulse, its drive, to universality and generality. Ethical life, on the other hand, is lived out in the life of the idiom—in the realities of history, the sufferings of individuals, and in the singularities that define life as an idiom, as a singular being who is absolutely responsible for how one understands one’s world and how one enacts that understanding. The language of literature in which we find the play of singular situations and the various idioms of art that do not abide by the ideal of the concept are better adept at opening up the questions of ethics than the conceptual language of philosophy. This is why Heidegger could say that “in the tragedies of Sophocles we find ἦθος thought more originally than in Aristotle’s lectures on ‘Ethics’.”5 Conceptual language tends to express its moral significance in terms of laws, which, by virtue of the way language plays into their formation, are held to be universalizable. Consequently, philosophical approaches to ethics get expressed in terms of universal laws and imperatives, and the frameworks of ethical life are articulated according to juridical terms such as right and wrong, guilt and innocence, good and evil. This means that ethical life gets conceptualized as a matter of rule-governed behavior, as a matter of ideals that are to be applied to the realities, the idioms, of factical life. In the end, by thinking ethical life in terms of such conceptual categories, we end up with the imperatives of such categories—or even more fundamentally, with the imperative of the category itself. Kant, at least the Kant of the Second Critique, marks the summit of this liability of the language of philosophy brought to bear upon the realm of ethical life.
Gadamer does not reject the task of philosophy in the formation of an ethical life, but, insofar as the mother tongue of philosophy will always be the concept, he reminds us that, while concepts arise out of the lived word, the words of factical life, in order to bear any real force in that life, cannot only remain concepts, but must be brought back to the word. One might say this: for Gadamer the ethical task of philosophy is not to lay down the law, but to listen to what is said. The final words of his essay (1995) “Vom Wort zum Begriff” address this point: the movement of philosophy is “from the word to the concept, but we must move from the concept to the word if we are to reach the other … this belongs to the great achievement of art … and, in the end, touches upon the basic conditions of our lives together as human beings.”6 In other words, the legitimate claim of philosophy in the realm of ethical understanding is neither complete nor final. Philosophical hermeneutics understands that its final gesture must be to enact a return to factical life and the realities of ethical life as realities borne and suffered in the singular. This return is essential, and it is at the heart of what constitutes hermeneutics as a practice. In order to grasp its nature, one must come to see how different this return to the word, to the singularities of life, is from what has long been considered to be the problem of application of concepts, of theory and ideas, to praxis.
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Gadamer calls the problem of application “the overarching and central problem of hermeneutics.”7 One might put the point more directly: the basic task of hermeneutics is to overcome the notion that understanding needs to be applied. If, however, it is the case that philosophy operates in the realm of the concept and according to the ideal of the universal, then it is indeed the case that the universal that is disclosed and in which truth lies does need to be brought to bear on, to be applied to, the particular realities of life. In such a notion of understanding, the application of truth becomes a post facto supplement to truth. As a result of such an approach, the questions of factical life become secondary to knowing what is true. Against this metaphysical conception of truth as that which needs to be deliberately applied so that a gap, a distance, and a tension between the universal and particular instance is crossed, Gadamer argues that real understanding is always already application. Application is not a supplement to truth, but is rather the real condition of something like truth in the form of an articulated theory. Recognizing this, seeing what it means and what measure it sets for the character of understanding is the key to grasping the nature of hermeneutics.
The traditional framework for speaking of the problem of application is in terms of the relation of theory to praxis. There are, however, several other ways of framing this problem: universal and particular, ontology and ethics, law and the case, the objective and the subjective, and the abstract and the concrete. Typically, there is a hierarchy assumed in this relation and, typically, theory (or universality, ontology, law, objectivity, and abstraction) stands above the realities of history and practice. But from the hermeneutic point of view, these are false dichotomies that cannot be resolved even by means of their own dialectic. These terms and the framework for conceiving the task of thinking that they articulate have misunderstood the real task of thinking. That task is what Gadamer discusses in terms of “understanding.”
The full development of the notion of understanding in hermeneutics needs to begin with Being and Time, where Heidegger develops the notion of understanding as an existential of Dasein.8 In this analysis, Heidegger exposes the key difference between the hermeneutic of understanding and the cognitive interpretation that such an understanding makes possible. I will not repeat Heidegger’s discussion of understanding here; rather, the point that I want to make, the point that Gadamer will develop most clearly, is that understanding is never found apart from factical life. Understanding does not stand above factical life as a theory, but neither is it to be defined as a matter of praxis; it is rather a continuous act that is renewed at every instant; it is a way of life that is informed by history, language, and habits—all of the realities of the situation of factical life. This means that understanding is not to be understood as a theory—even though a theory may eventually result from understanding—nor is it to be understood as an action—whether that action be taken as blind or illuminated by theory—through which we muddle until we achieve the clarity of a theory, of cognition. Rather, understanding forges the center, the “who,” that we become; it becomes the basis for how it is that we come to know and conceptually articulate our world and ourselves.
So it is out of understanding as an existential that something like a theory or a praxis that is defined in relation to theory emerges. But—and this is the real contribution of hermeneutics—such understanding requires a return to itself, and this return to factical life is not to be understood as a matter of application. This is what Heidegger means when he says that “philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, beginning with a hermeneutic of Dasein which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guideline for all philosophical questioning at the point where it arises and into which it is folded back.”9 If there is a circle that defines hermeneutic understanding, then it is found in this return, the fold in which the real meaning and measure of understanding is found. This too is where hermeneutics shows its deep and essential kinship with an original ethics as the formation of character, as sowing seeds in the soil that is the soul. According to Gadamer, this return that is not a matter of application is the central problem of hermeneutics. It is also exceedingly difficult to address.
In this return to factical life, it becomes clear that hermeneutics, properly understood and practiced, is not an abstract theory, but is rather profoundly rooted in ethical life. But this return cannot be understood as somehow legislating life from the perspective of theory; in other words, it cannot be understood insofar as thinking submits itself to the language and logic of the concept. A different relation to language is one of the keys to understanding how understanding belongs to, returns to, factical life. In particular, the need to bring language back to its roots, to keep it from slipping irrevocably into abstraction and an ideality that effaces the deep resonances of language, is paramount. The practice of hermeneutics is always attuned to the workings of language since the path back to factical life, the way a return that is not an application takes place, will always be in large measure a matter of listening carefully to what language is saying. There is no rule that can be laid out for how one is to carry out such listening. One can say, however, that its goal is the intensification of the sense of life; it is to enact a return to factical life that enriches understanding and that knows itself to be a moment in this circle, the continuous act that is always renewed, that we call understanding.
But there is another way of speaking of this return, this transition that belongs to the nature of real understanding, back to factical life. This brings me to the third of the three themes that I believe help illustrate the ethical character of understanding for Gadamer. This theme concerns the way in which one can say that the excellence of understanding, its real aim, is a ἥζις τοῦ ἀληθεúειν [the habit of being in truth]. 10
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In order to unpack the way in which understanding belongs to practical life as this return, Gadamer refers to Aristotle’s notion of φρóνησíς. Like φρóνησíς, understanding is a unique form of knowing, one that cannot be measured by the standards of cognition, nor is it able to be fully formulated as a matter for theory.
Gadamer’s discussions of how φρóνησí is like understanding invariably begin by highlighting its difference from τέχνη; in particular, that we can learn a τέχνη, it can be taught to us by another, but, by the same token, this means that it can be forgotten. Furthermore, τέχνη is a form of knowing that is able to be enlisted to govern action. For instance, I can choose to use my knowledge of how to make shoes or I can simply set such knowledge aside. 003A4έχνη is a knowledge that I can turn to and draw upon, or simply ignore. It can be separated from action; it need not be a part of any and every action. It can even be separated from who I am. As a result of this separation of τέχνη and factical life, τέχνη inevitably confronts the problem of its own application: if it is to be actualized and brought into being, then there must be a means to the realization of the end of that τέχνη—if I am going to make shoes, then I must be able to apply that knowledge to the materials and possibilities that present themselves to me; I must be able to find the means to realize my end.
This is not the case with φρóνησíς, which is a form of knowing that has already understood its own situatedness so that there is no need even to pose the question of the application of such knowledge. The reason for this is that we do not stand over against φρóνησíς as something that we could adopt or not, learn or forget; it is rather a knowing that makes one who one is. Or better: it is that knowing which is defined as the orientation, comportment, and character which leads us in our factical lives. It is at the center of what defines us as ethical beings at all. Πρóνησíς is a knowing that defines—to the extent that any such definition is even possible—who one is. It is, from this point of view, rather easy to understand how φρóνησíς is another way of unfolding the significance of Heraclitus’ remark ἦθοσ ἀνθρώπω δαíμων: the knowing that is φρóνησíς includes a sort of self-understanding, or, at least, a sort of self-situatedness of the knower.
Gadamer highlights two aspects of this difference between φρóνησíς and τέχνη as especially significant for formulating the character of hermeneutical understanding. The first is that whereas τέχνη confronts the problem of application and of the question of the means to an end, φρóνησíς does not face this question of its own application. Instead of needing to confront the problem of its own application to life, φρóνησíς requires a different sort of reflection in order to realize itself or to actualize itself in the world. More precisely, φρóνησíς needs a self-deliberation that opens up something like the self-understanding that emerges from grasping the situatedness of what is to be known. Such self-deliberation is not a matter of a self-inspection in which one observes oneself as if from a distance. It is rather the effort to understand what one does understand, and this means that it is just as much a matter of seeing a situation, seeing the problem of praxis, as it is a sort of dialogue with oneself that is aimed at greater understanding. This deliberation is a unique form of reflexivity; it is the way in which we seek out that understanding that already belongs to the realities of factical life so that there is no need of anything like an “application” of what one learns. The understanding is the application. The second aspect of the difference between φρóνησíς and τέχνη that Gadamer finds worth highlighting is that φρóνησíς is a form of knowing that cannot be forgotten. Gadamer frequently refers to the peculiar character of a knowing that is so profoundly integrated into who one is that it cannot be forgotten. His fascination with this goes back to his 1924 course with Heidegger in which Heidegger said, “Was bedeutet das, dass es von der Phronesis keine ‘λεθη’ gibt? Meine Herren, das is das Gewissen.”11 The point that Gadamer wants to emphasize here is that I cannot hide from the knowing defining both conscience and φρóνησíς since it has already constituted that which I am. It is profoundly intimate. It defines that sense of ἦθος that defines me.
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But what does this have to do with my contention that hermeneutics offers both a theory that responds to Heidegger’s call for an original ethics and that the practice of hermeneutics is itself a cultivation or performance of such an ethical posture? Clearly, I want to suggest that the kinship between hermeneutics and ethical understanding is essential and that to fully understand what is at stake in interpretation, in understanding, as Gadamer unfolds those notions, we need to acknowledge and think through the ethical significances of those practices. One way of expressing this point is to note that the real aim of hermeneutics is akin to earliest aim of philosophy, an aim that was expressed by words now generally considered rather outmoded: wisdom, Bildung, and character. The aim of hermeneutics to arrive at an understanding that ultimately concerns how one is and lives in the world. This sense of understanding is, at bottom, a matter of self-understanding and in this sense one can say that understanding, this high task of hermeneutics, forges ἦθος in its most original sense. One might put the point this way: when I take a text into my hands, when I enter a conversation, or engage the idioms of life and others in whatever way I do, the stakes are high and, in the end, what is most at stake is who I am and will become, how I will be with others.
This is very much at the heart of what it is that defines the idea and practice of hermeneutics. One might object and say, “But isn’t this simply what philosophy has always wanted to be even according to its own name?” This is no objection, and it is quite true. My claim simply means that hermeneutics, properly understood, returns us to the real roots and task of philosophy in general. It does this in a distinctive way, one that does not—as has become de rigueur in the philosophical tradition—submit the concerns of ethical life and the cultivation of a self to the rule of the concept and the laws that tumble down from its authority. Rather, it remembers that ethical life and its questions always appear in singular lives that unfold themselves according to their own idioms. It does not yield any primacy to theory in the conduct of a life. It knows rather that philosophy is above all a way of life and that it requires a peculiar practice which is not at all a technique, but much more a matter of struggling to understand.
The point is this: that in matters of ethical life, we cannot accomplish much. In the end, such a life always remains, as Schelling reminds us, a matter of the abyss that is freedom, an abyss that we can neither calculate, nor control. No philosophical ethics should ever forget this profound limitation upon the possibility of any contribution in advance to the riddles that one confronts as the riddles of ethical life. However, what we can do is recognize that the real goal of our efforts in all understanding is, in the end, nothing abstract but that if it is to fulfill its aims, it must enact a return to life. This means that we need to remember that which I believe is at the center of the very idea of hermeneutics; namely, that understanding in its deepest sense serves this ethical aim. It must touch upon that absolute responsibility that I bear, it must contribute to the real shape and character of that idiom that I am. If we are to carry forward the tradition of hermeneutics as Gadamer has unfolded it, then we should be careful not to sever its roots in these aims of ethical life.