Robert J. Dostal
Hannah Arendt (1968) begins her essay, “What is Authority?” with the strong claim that “authority has vanished from the modern world.” Richard Sennett (1980) begins his book on authority with the claim that there is a “modern fear” of authority, for it is understood to be “a threat to our liberties.” The philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur accepts the claim that modern thought has often rejected, resisted, or ignored authority, but they attempt to show that the rejection of authority is misplaced. On their account, our everyday experience, political and otherwise, often appropriately relies on authority. So too our experience of texts. Accordingly, a proper hermeneutics requires an account of authority.
It has been commonly and appropriately said that the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur attempts to rehabilitate authority. Authority is a concept of particular importance for their hermeneutics. It does not play such a role in the work of other theories of interpretation. Gadamer and Ricoeur would argue that Arendt's claim that authority has vanished is too strong, since authority is indispensable and constitutive of human experience. But they would agree with Arendt and Sennett that the Enlightenment project has been deeply hostile to authority. In contrast, they attempt to show how our human lives together call for authority both with regard to our actions, political and personal, and with regard to our understanding of ourselves and our world. Our understanding of something often requires that we accede to an authority on the matter.
But what is it—authority? The term in its origin is a political concept, and it has largely maintained its political character in its most common and prominent usage. Etymologically “authority” is Latin: auctoritas.1 The concept developed in the context of the Roman republic and was connected importantly with the legacy of the founding of Rome. Auctoritas (authority) is to be distinguished from potestas (power). Authority and power are here not the same. For example, in the Roman republic power was invested in the consuls, that is, they could give commands, while authority was invested in the Senate, which gave counsel.2 Furthermore, the authority of the Senate rested on its ties to the founding of Rome, that is, their maintenance of the traditions of Rome. Arendt argues that for ancient Rome authority was part of a trinity with religion and tradition. Together this trinity had what she calls “binding force” (Arendt 1968, 123).
The origin of the term in Latin and in Rome is particularly relevant to its history, especially in the German context. The German for authority (auctoritas) is Autorität, a transliteration of the Latin term. It has not had widespread use in German, either in everyday speech or in literary and philosophical contexts. Perhaps the single most influential and important analysis of authority in the modern context has been provided by Max Weber who identifies Autorität with Herrschaft, domination (or, more traditionally and literally, lordship) and Herrschaft with Macht (power).3 This effectively identifies authority with power and abandons the distinction between auctoritas and potestas that Arendt and Gadamer deem important. And this is what Arendt means when she writes that authority has vanished in the modern age. We moderns usually fail to distinguish it from power. All we see is power.4 Weber's account of Herrschaft provides for three kinds: 1) traditional, 2) legal-rational, and 3) charismatic. Weber's account has been taken up and sometimes slightly modified in sociology, political theory, philosophy, and literature in almost every language. Importantly for the English-speaking world, Talcott Parsons defines authority as “legitimate power” (Cohen, Hazelrigg, and Pope 1975). This is not exactly how Weber treated authority, since according to Weber authority may be illegitimate. Yet this definition, too, identifies authority with power by similarly subsuming authority under power. Authority, according to Parsons, is a kind of power—the legitimate kind.
As pointed out earlier, authority in its origin is tied to tradition. This close tie of authority to tradition and the distinction of authority and power are carried forward in Gadamer's hermeneutics in which he attempts to recover and rehabilitate authority. His primary account is to be found in Truth and Method, where he provides a brief description, that is, a phenomenology, of the role of authority in human life and a brief historical account of its rejection by the Enlightenment (Gadamer 1999a). This account is part of a larger argument on behalf of prejudice and tradition. He argues that prejudice and tradition are necessary conditions of human understanding. This necessity follows from human finitude and the situated historical character of human experience and understanding. Of course, there are legitimate and illegitimate prejudices, just as there is legitimate and illegitimate authority.
Though, as we have noted, the term's provenance is primarily political, Gadamer locates his discussion of the concept in the personal realm and, specifically, with regard to our understanding of ourselves and our world. He avoids, for the most part, explicitly addressing the political role of authority. Sorting out the implications of his view for politics has provided the basis for speculation and controversy. The context for his discussion of authority and the large question for Truth and Method is “what is understanding?”—what does it mean to understand something? Anglo-American philosophers might say that such a question makes the work epistemological and, accordingly, the context of Gadamer's treatment of authority would be considered epistemic and not political. Gadamer, however, considers his work to be phenomenological and ontological. An important part of his argument is devoted to “overcoming the epistemological problem through phenomenological research.”5 In short, Gadamer's hermeneutics attempts to provide an account of what the understanding “is” (ontology), and this account is, in the large sense of the term, phenomenological. The question as to what the understanding is leads us to the question as to how we understand Being. A culminating thesis of the work is the claim that “Being that can be understood is language.”6 The epistemological problem that Gadamer wishes to overcome is what he takes to be the central problem for modern epistemology: how do we know that our ideas represent the world as it is? The problem comes from the representationalism of so much of modern thought. Following Heidegger, Gadamer would overcome this phenomenologically. Accordingly, Gadamer's question concerning understanding is not how can we know that our ideas match the things in the world, but rather, given that we understand the world (more or less), what is constitutive of the understanding—what makes understanding possible. Three of these conditions (but not the only three) are authority, prejudice, and tradition.
This is the context for Gadamer's treatment of authority in human experience. He opens his discussion of authority in Truth and Method with the claim that authority is primarily accorded to persons (Gadamer 1999a, 279). In later work, he explicitly recognizes the authoritative role that institutions play in our lives.7 Persons achieve authority through the acknowledgment that they are superior to others in judgment and insight. For this reason, the judgment of the one with authority takes precedence. Our reliance on someone else's judgment bestows authority on her or him. Gadamer further asserts that this bestowal must be earned. The acknowledgment of the superiority of the authority is an act of reason. Three important things follow from this description of authority. First, there is no antithesis between reason and authority. One is not abandoning one's reason when one relies on authority. We must always decide on whose judgment we will rely and give ourselves reasons for this. We need to rely on the judgment of others because of the inevitable limitations of our situation, our perspective, and our knowledge. Gadamer is not identifying authority and reason. He recognizes the difference but argues that they are not necessarily antithetical. Second, authority, he writes, “has to do not with obedience but rather with knowledge” (Gadamer 1999a, 279). In a later essay, Gadamer adds to knowledge “ability” (Können) (Gadamer 1996, 121). She who is capable has authority with regard to that ability. Authority is both theoretical and practical.
Gadamer acknowledges that authority may show itself as command and obedience, but the obedience rests on the rational recognition of the superiority of the knowledge and judgment of the authority. Such a person who demonstrates such superiority is authoritative. The examples that Gadamer likes to give are the teacher, the parent, the doctor, or the expert. Gadamer distinguishes between the authoritative and the authoritarian (Gadamer 1996). The latter has not earned his or her authority and is concerned primarily with power, domination, and obedience. The former has earned his or her authority and receives not so much obedience as trust.8 Gadamer uses the Hegelian term Anerkennung (recognition) to speak to one's acknowledgment of someone's authority, and Ricoeur discusses this relationship as one of mutual recognition (Ricoeur 2005). Third, there is no antithesis between authority and freedom. One is not abandoning one's freedom when one accepts the authority of another or the authority of an institution or a law. Such acceptance is rather an act of freedom. Gadamer claims that “all genuine freedom includes limitation” (Gadamer 1996, 123).9 He is here speaking to the well-known and much discussed paradox of law—that law (restriction and limitation) enables and protects freedom. Without law there is no freedom. So too authority is required by freedom.
These three aspects of authority—that there is no antithesis between reason and authority, that there is no antithesis between freedom and authority, and that authority rests on knowledge and not obedience—are aspects that are ignored or rejected by the Enlightenment that ties freedom and reason closely together and in opposition to authority and power. We need only recall the long tradition in logic of the fallacy of the appeal to authority. Though there have been some moderate voices which have suggested that in some contexts (often legal) the appeal to authority may be justified, a common understanding of this fallacy simply pits reason and logic against authority. We might note Hobbes’ dictum: auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem (“authority, not truth, makes the law”).10 This dictum places authority and truth in opposition. It is this opposition that Gadamer would undo. Francis Bacon similarly places reason in opposition to authority. Kant opens his essay, “What is Enlightenment?” with the motto, “Sapere aude!”—a motto that Kant borrows from Horace (Kant 1996). With this motto, Kant dares the reader to think for him or herself and implicitly suggests that we should take nothing on authority. Gadamer opens his discussion of authority in Truth and Method by pointing to Kant's motto as indicative of the Enlightenment resistance to authority. Yet in a later essay, Gadamer defends Kant's motto on behalf of the idea that we should never cease thinking for ourselves and that we accede to authority appropriately when we have good reasons for doing so.11
As noted earlier, Gadamer's rehabilitation of authority is closely tied to his attempt to similarly rehabilitate prejudice and tradition. These three concepts are closely related. Gadamer declares that there is a defining prejudice of the Enlightenment: the prejudice against prejudice. Gadamer argues that it is in the very nature of the understanding that we bring pre-judgments (Vorurteile) to our experience. We bring an understanding to our experience, and we anticipate what is to come. Our culture, our language, and our own individual experiences provide us with such prejudgments or prejudices. There is no ridding ourselves of this. But what we expect and what happens often do not coincide. Our pre-judgments are often shown to be false. It is important to test our prejudices and to reject those that show themselves to be false. There are legitimate and illegitimate prejudices. There is no possibility, as Descartes seemed to think, that we could rid ourselves of all prejudice at once. The prejudicial character of any understanding is indicative of what Gadamer, following Heidegger, calls the finitude of the understanding. Understanding is partial and perspectival. But, for Gadamer, it is not merely the case that prejudgments are unavoidable. They are, rather, a positive aspect of human experience. They are enabling. Our language, our traditions enable us, more or less, to deal with that with which we are confronted.
This prejudicial character of understanding is also historical. This means for Gadamer that understanding is traditional, that is, that a source of our prejudices is our tradition—that which has been handed down to us. Much of this is carried in our language. Tradition is not to be considered a fixed set of past practices and ways of thinking that get passed down and continually reproduces itself with a kind of self-sameness. Tradition is historical and dynamic. It changes. “It needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated” (Gadamer 1999a, 281). In parallel with his discussion of authority, Gadamer criticizes the abstract opposition that the Enlightenment created between tradition and reason and between tradition and freedom. For Gadamer, they are not necessarily in opposition. The preservation or the rejection of tradition is an act of reason. In one of his few explicitly political comments, Gadamer writes that “what makes classical ethics superior to modern moral philosophy is that it grounds the transition from ethics to ‘politics,’ the art of right legislation, on the indispensability of tradition” (Gadamer 1999a, 281).12
This defense and rehabilitation of tradition has led to a widespread negative critical response to Truth and Method, the most prominent of which is the critique by Jürgen Habermas to which Gadamer responded.13 Unlike some of Gadamer's harsher critics, Habermas praised Gadamer's hermeneutics as appropriate for the humanities, but, he argues, Gadamer's hermeneutical theory does not provide an adequate account of the complete role of reason, especially in its critical capacity. According to Habermas, Gadamer underestimates the critical power of reason. Gadamer's position leaves one within the confines of tradition banging helplessly on its walls with no way out. For Habermas, Gadamer's position is “traditionalist” and insufficiently emancipatory. The tradition bears much injustice, and Gadamer's affirmation of tradition assists the maintenance of tradition and its injustice. Gadamer defends himself by arguing that Habermas and like-minded critics are naïve with regard to tradition and the politics of emancipation. His critics’ Enlightenment views ignore too much human historicity and finitude. He argues that his rehabilitation of tradition does not commit him to ‘traditionalism'—an unthinking acceptance of whatever tradition provides us—just as his rehabilitation of authority does not commit him to authoritarianism. Habermas’ criticism assumes the opposition of reason (critique) and tradition, an opposition that Gadamer denies.14
We find no prominent role for the concept of authority in Habermas’ theory of universal pragmatics and communicative rationality. In the political sphere, Habermas is concerned not so much with authority as with legitimacy. Of Weber's three kinds of Herrschaft (traditional, legal-rational, and charismatic), Habermas under the title of legitimacy is concerned with the legal-rational. On his account, modernity has pushed aside tradition on behalf of the legal-rational. The ways of life in modern society have been “rationalized.” Habermas is concerned to give an adequate account of rationality for modernity and late capitalism that does not succumb to ideology. Gadamer does not reject the Weberian and Habermasian account of the disenchantment and rationalization of modern life, but he would have us see the continued role of tradition in modernity. He finds that Habermas continues to maintain the Enlightenment hostility toward, and naïve rejection of, tradition and authority.
“Authority” and “authorship” (or the “author”) are obviously terminologically closely related. For the interpretation of any work, some hermeneutical theories suggest that the final authority for the meaning of the text is the author and the author's intention. The concept of the mens auctoris (the mind of the author) as the ultimate principle of interpretation goes back at least to the Renaissance, if not long before. Recent theorists such as Emilio Betti (1955) and E. D. Hirsch (1967) have argued for the primacy of the author's intention for any interpretation. In the 1960s and 1970s, in what is often referred to as post-modernism, there was a widespread rejection of the central role of the author and his or her intention in interpretation. Roland Barthes (1977) writes about the “death of the author,” and Foucault (2003) and Derrida (1969), each in their own way, take up this theme.
Gadamer too rejects the idea that the intention of the author is the goal of every interpretation, but his reasons for the rejection are quite unlike those of the poststructuralists and deconstructionists. Gadamer places two closely related concepts at the heart of his interpretive theory: “truth” and “the matter at hand” (die Sache). What is at issue for Gadamer in any interpretation is a determination of the truth of what is written. There are three sides to any text: the author, the written text, and the reader. The text is about something, and it is that to which Gadamer gives primacy. Accordingly, Gadamer's hermeneutics is concerned with the intentionality of the text (what the text is about) and not the intention of the author. Any understanding of text is an understanding of the claims of the text. These claims are claims about the shared world and ultimately are also claims on the reader that she agree.
It follows that in Truth and Method Gadamer gives little attention to the author. His discussion of “authority” makes no mention of the “author.” Elsewhere in Truth and Method, Gadamer claims that the focus on the author's intention in some hermeneutic theories is an aspect of “romantic hermeneutics,” especially the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, who psychologizes the task of interpretation. On this view, interpretation is a meeting of the minds. Against this view, Gadamer writes that we should not be so much concerned with the author and what he or she thinks “but with the truth of what is said, a text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to truth” (TM 297). Gadamer does not entirely dismiss the author or proclaim the “death” of the author. Rather, the text and its claims have primacy. Often, an author's own comments on her work are vague and unhelpful.
It should not be surprising that a discussion of authority makes no mention of authorship. There is a disconnect between the concepts of the author and authority in English that goes back to the Latin origins of these terms: auctor and auctoritas. In Latin, an “auctor” (author) is one who possesses authority. As noted earlier, the paradigm of authority in ancient Rome was the Senate, which did not give commands but gave counsel. Accordingly, a Senator was an “auctor” who was charged with maintaining the traditions of Rome and respecting the “founding” of Rome. There are various usages of the term in Latin which may mean a performer or doer, a trustworthy speaker, a founder, a progenitor, or a guarantor. Seen from a Greek and Aristotelian perspective, this word group is related to praxis, to human actions and to ethics and politics. Human action, ethical or political, is perfected by the virtue of phronesis, good judgment (or prudence). An “auctor” is to be distinguished from an “artifex”—a maker or producer. This is the word used for the artist—the sculptor and the painter. Our contemporary usage of “author” is closer to artifex than to auctor. Again, seen from the Greek and Aristotelian perspective, the word group around artifex—the producer, the product, artifice, artificial, etc.—comes under the concept of poesis (making), which is perfected with skill (techne). So, for example, someone who takes responsibility for the building of a home or a city and charges architects, artists, and technicians to do the work is the “author” of the home or city. Those who do the work and construct the home or city are the “artificers” of the home or city. Aristotle considers the distinction between praxis and poesis to be of considerable significance. And so too do Gadamer and Arendt and Habermas. This has important ramifications for their respective political theories, though Gadamer's political theory is, at best, implicit. Further, this distinction is also important for Gadamer's hermeneutics.
Though he does not discuss the distinction explicitly in Truth and Method, Gadamer does appeal importantly to Aristotle's treatment of phronesis as a model for hermeneutical understanding, which is not to be seen as either technical or scientific. Interpretation is a matter of judgment not method. It is as much a matter of practice as it is of theory. Interpretation ultimately concerns who we become inasmuch as we take the text and its claims seriously. If we accede to the claims of the text, we are recognizing the authority of the text.