Bruce Krajewski
“Why did Leo Strauss devote so much effort to publicizing the existence of an esoteric teaching in the Western tradition?”—Stanley Rosen
(Rosen 1987, 113)
“Philosophy’s essential uncertainty of its audience is what may appear as its esotericism.”—Stanley Cavell
(Cavell 1994, 5)
“It is concealment that philosophical hermeneutics must overcome.”—Michael Marder
(Marder 2010, 322)
Interpretation and politics merge in one of the famous stories from the Hebrew Bible. Joseph’s power of dream interpretation thrusts him into a place of prominence in Egyptian society. In the ancient world, divination and interpretation go hand in hand. Cicero’s extensive treatise on the topic remains a touchstone for learning about the ways in which the ancients dealt with probability and prediction in relation to political matters. Rome’s College of Augurs reinforces the entwinement of interpretation, power, religion, and folklore that one can also find in the earlier context of the Delphic Oracle. Augury reminds us that understanding happens in the context of an event, a context that presupposes one is missing something, lacking the necessary vision or foresight, and help is called for.
This persistence of augury testifies to the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s point that our relation to the world is not one of knowing. Hans Blumenberg, a lesser-known contributor to the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, also devoted a number of his works to reiterating the point, found in the history of rhetoric, that human beings possess an immanent deficiency “in specific dispositions for reactive behavior vis-à-vis reality” [an spezifischen Dispositionen zu reaktivem Verhalten gegenüber der Wirklichkeit] (Blumenberg 1987, 439). The human condition is one that involves finding oneself continually in situations in which one is compelled to act without complete and certain evidence.
To paraphrase a line by Brice Wachterhauser, our very ability to not understand comes from our participation in contexts that make reality meaningful in the first place. The juxtaposition of the commonplace and its disruption causes something to stand out, to become the catalyst for reflection and questioning. Slavoj Žižek, following Jacques Lacan, makes a similar point that our understanding of what is true is constituted by initial misrecognition. When the event first erupts (or as upscale hermeneutical theorists would have it: irrupts), it is an intrusion of the Real. In Wittgensteinian terms, we might have to participate in a different form of life to know what to do, how to go on, and that might mean giving up, or losing, a previous form of life—the loss of a world. Žižek: “Every historical rupture, every advent of a new master-signifier, changes retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, makes it readable in another, new way” (Žižek 1989, 56)
Blumenberg’s underappreciated Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (1981) treats human experience as a contingent process of interpretation, meaning that our experience with the world is not one that is plain or transparent. From biblical stories to our genetic code, human beings find themselves confronted by issues of legibility, and need to decipher what is in front of them in order to make sense of seeming senselessness, say, a traumatic event. Blumenberg provides ample evidence that one of the primary metaphors for dealing with obscurities has been the book. For instance, one of his chapters explains the ways in which people have read the Book of Nature as a book written by God’s hand. In other words, nature assists us with theology. This view persists with, for example, contemporary preachers interpreting natural disasters as God inflicting punishment on certain communities for sins or misdeeds. Even the most horrific and unsettling experiences can be interpreted as part of “intelligent design.” On this view, random or neutral occurrences do not upset or undermine human experience. Even the oddest encounter is susceptible to explanation.
The ancients valued strange and puzzling texts. As Gerald Bruns claims, the overriding presumption of ancient interpreters is: “That which is easy to understand is not worth understanding” (Bruns 1984, 148). The premium put on abnormal texts, and the Holy Scriptures would be a prime example of an abnormal text, meant that interpreters in the ancient world meditated on lacunae and passages steeped in obscurity. This kind of work ended up making for specialists, people talented in dealing with what is not plain. Think of Philo of Alexandria, Origen, Augustine, Plotinus, and the talented rabbis of the midrashic tradition. People with skills at figuration and interpretation play an important role in the ancient world, a world that did not yet include lawyers as we know them. Still, the skillful ones wielded authority, and thus political power. This kind of power has been garnered in other ways, of course, as Michael Marder points out about sovereignty (Marder 2010, 310).
The segue from interpretive skill to politics that is plain in a text like the Joseph story is not usually so readily understood in other contexts when addressing the general topic of hermeneutics and politics. Sometimes it is difficult to see how, for example, the interpretation of scripture counts as politics, except in instances where scriptural passages deal with legal matters, in issues of adhering to textual claims that might involve prohibitions and punishments, or methods for establishing insiders and outsiders, believers and nonbelievers, and citizens and aliens. The issue of politics in the history of hermeneutics is a vexed one, in part, because scholars of hermeneutics have frequently opted to write about politics in the abstract, or solely in connection with aesthetic experiences.
Axiomatic to any talk of politics in the tradition of hermeneutics is an absence of party politics. Even one of the latest attempts at dragging scholars of philosophical hermeneutics into practical politics (Vattimo and Zabala 2011) stops short of that goal by reducing politics to “conversation.” Furthermore, the authors, as one critic has pointed out, “make extensive use of [Martin] Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics while making scant reference to the dire political conclusions he drew from it” (Swindal 2012).
Most of the contemporary scholars who write about philosophical hermeneutics, the tradition which includes Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, are allergic to politics in the proletarian sense of that word. Party politics and parliamentarian procedures—the practical political activities of most democratic nations—receive almost no attention in the secondary literature on contemporary hermeneutics. When politics means a contestation for power for the sake of power, for ruling as against being ruled, scholars of hermeneutics would prefer to insist that politics has to do with existentialism, or with a rejection of metaphysics that leads to some sort of amorphous freedom, sometimes linked to a notion of anarchy or weak hermeneutics. This comes as no surprise to many people who possess awareness of the troubled political history of the two key figures of hermeneutics mentioned earlier. Heidegger’s alignment with National Socialism coupled with Gadamer’s accommodations to the National Socialists do not leave proponents of philosophical hermeneutics with much to say that does not end up sounding utterly defensive and reactionary. It has not helped that some of the prominent scholars in philosophical hermeneutics studied with Heidegger or Gadamer, or developed friendships with the two philosophers. Richard Palmer, Jean Grondin, Dennis Schmidt, P. Christopher Smith, Lawrence Schmidt, and others are in this latter group of hermeneutical scholarship. Let us call this group the Protective Circle (PC). When scholars like Teresa Orozco and Geoff Waite have challenged the hermeneutical establishment (PC) about questions of politics and ethics that have arisen owing to the actions and inactions of Heidegger and Gadamer, the consequences have not resembled anything like the openness, receptivity, and understanding that is championed in many essays that attempt to characterize the hermeneutical ethos that the PC attributes to the work of Heidegger and Gadamer (e.g., Jean Grondin accuses Orozco of “a witch hunt”). Frequently, those who insist that Heidegger and Gadamer’s works ought to be viewed as starting points for ethical behavior are the same people with little or no patience for anyone presenting a contrary view. Furthermore, while preaching about ethics, politics, and morality from a hermeneutical perspective, PC scholars ignore Gadamer’s famous line about “the political incompetence of philosophy” (Gadamer 1989).
One ready-to-hand example of this can be found in the collection entitled Consequences of Hermeneutics (2010). The table of contents of that collection includes a section that is supposed to be about politics and hermeneutics, but in there one will find no mention of Richard Wolin, Robert Sullivan, Orozco, or Waite—scholars whose research challenges the view that readers should look to Heidegger and Gadamer for wisdom about ethical behavior or progressive political modeling. Wolin, Sullivan, Orozco, and Waite are not part of the “conversation.” Meanwhile, the centrality of conversation is trumpeted by the circle of people endorsing philosophical hermeneutics. Dennis Schmidt goes so far as to claim that Gadamer’s work is fundamentally about an “original ethics” (Schmidt 2008, 36). Schmidt turns to Gadamer’s writings rather than to what might be thought of as the application of Gadamer’s ethics via Gadamer’s own life. The centrality of application to philosophical hermeneutics seems to have been lost in this case, but Schmidt is aware of the problematic nature of looking at Gadamer’s choices (his practice), and chooses the cleaner path of pointing to the writings (Gadamer’s theory). Schmidt knows Grondin’s biography of Gadamer, careful as it is to protect the father of philosophical hermeneutics, resorts to painful statements, such as that Gadamer had Jewish friends, as cover for Gadamer’s lack of resistance to National Socialism (see Grondin 2003, 153; Krajewski 2011). Grondin describes it as “getting along” with National Socialism (177).
Gadamer’s assertion about the political incompetence of philosophy opens the door to an esoteric tradition in philosophy that includes Plato’s “secret doctrine,” and stretches back to Pythagoras and Heraclitus. The esoteric tradition became more well known via Plato’s Seventh Letter, in which the famous philosopher admits that the common folk cannot be trusted with the truth (Plato had witnessed what had happened when the public turned on Socrates). Gadamer wrote about the Seventh Letter several times, starting in the early 1930s. The esoteric tradition from which Gadamer’s incompetence springs becomes most toxic with the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose influence played a substantial role in Martin Heidegger’s own esotericism and political troubles. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger equated philosophy and war. In 1935, Heidegger declared that “polemos and logos are the same” (Fried 2000, 216—though Fried too seems to have fallen victim to esotericism). Gadamer, Heidegger’s student, confirms that Nietzsche was the “point of critical orientation” for Heidegger. Heidegger says in regard to Plato and Nietzsche that all great thinking is not merely unwritten but unsaid. From Heidegger the troubles spread to Gadamer, to the PC, and to Stanley Cavell, among others. Gerald Bruns describes the political troubles as a “stain” on the hands of anyone who takes up the study of Heidegger (Bruns 1989). One could throw Leo Strauss into the parade of shame as well, given Strauss’s famous contribution to the discussion—that esotericism was necessary due to the persecution of philosophers and intellectuals, a re-inscription of the lesson of Plato’s Seventh Letter (Strauss 1952).
The stain’s outcomes in esoteric philosophy take several forms, from a valorization of hierarchy to endorsements of slavery and misogyny, to exercises in sigetics, to a manipulative exotericism that ends up perpetuating the poisonous esotericism, and serving the interests of global capitalism rather than the interests of the people (Waite 1996).
The esotericism, “getting along,” collaborations, and accommodations of the main characters in the narrative of philosophical hermeneutics raise the question: How do contemporary scholars who have followed Heidegger and Gadamer account for their continued allegiance to this esoteric, poisonous tradition? In addition to some typical defensive rhetorical tactics, found in abundance in Catherine Zuckert’s essay on Gadamer (see Waite 2004), some participants in the esoteric tradition resort to the standard protections afforded to esotericists, that is, the esotericists almost never do the dirty work directly, and then claim their hands are clean. In a recent brief and elliptical discussion with the poet Charles Bernstein, Stanley Cavell is at pains to suggest that he would think differently about Heidegger, had Heidegger “actually laid hands on people.” This misses the point of esoteric politics bent on war, and more particularly on outsourced war. One has others put hands on people, while one’s own hands remain legally unstained. It is a version of drone wars at which philosophers excel. No one’s hands are ever laid on the victims of the drones. No philosopher ever strangled a sophist or rhetorician, yet philosophers since Plato have managed to smear both groups. Cavell makes the point for the prosecution in his autobiography Little Did I Know: “The obligation to combat charlatanry, false philosophy, is born with philosophy in Plato, in Socrates’ combating of the Sophists” (Cavell 2010, 500).
Cavell also admits in his autobiography Little Did I Know that he thinks Heidegger’s dalliance with National Socialism was “impermanent.” Cavell seems clueless about the impact of Nietzsche on Heidegger’s esotericism, and about the consequences of Heidegger’s propagation of Nietzsche’s work. As early as 1921, Heidegger had written to Karl Jaspers about forming an “invisible community” of those interested in the philosophical topics occupying Heidegger. In Being and Time (Section 44), Heidegger writes that “the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep it from common understanding.” Cavell—who has been rewarded for his attunement to the quotidian, the common, and the low in studies of Thoreau, Emerson, and Hollywood films—gives the impression of deliberate silence about Heidegger’s distaste for the common (people).
We must not forget that Heidegger is a master of prolepsis, of words and works that, like spells, cast consequences into the future. The kind of philosophy he practices is deliberately secretive and arcane. Heidegger admits as such, but not in the exoteric philosophy. He lets it slip in a letter from 1951, in which he remarks, “Only once or twice in my thirty to thirty-five years of teaching have I ever spoken what really matters to me [meine Sache]” (Heidegger 1986, 426).
Heidegger was always preparing for a particular kind of future, not one that anyone reading this entry would likely want. Again, in a letter, this one from 1922, Heidegger conveys to Karl Jaspers the pressing “need” not only for their own “consciousness of a rare and independent battle action group” [einer seltenen und eigenständigen Kampfgemeinschaft] but also, Heidegger stressed, “for an invisible society” [einer unsichtbaren Gesellschaft] (Biemel 1990, 29 and 42). This future need is still at work among Heideggerians, Gadamerians, Straussians, and others, but that is a story that has been told in different ways for years now to various audiences with little or no effect.
In his book on Nietzsche, Geoff Waite captures the conundrum for hermeneutics: a philosophy devoted allegedly to understanding in an exoteric sense does not offer its audience methods for understanding that very philosophy of understanding, which is engaged in esoteric politics, in a campaign to hide its own political agenda. Radical theoretical alternatives to global capitalism exist. Philosophical hermeneutics is not one of them, despite the likely well-intentioned but contorted efforts of Vattimo, Marder, and Zabala (Vattimo and Zabala are unprepared to repudiate a “theological communism,” since they seem unwilling to put aside the Roman Catholic Church!). One would do better on this score (the intersection of hermeneutics and politics) to detach oneself fully from the contemporary scholarship on hermeneutics and take up the work of Kojin Karatani (Karatani 2003).