Thomas Schwarz Wentzer
Dialectic is the parting of ways in philosophy. To some it harbors the structural laws of history (Marx) or even nature (Engels), while others altogether deny dialectic any explanatory force that would contribute to our understanding of the social or natural world (Popper). To some it refers to the most developed way of gaining the knowledge that alone is appropriate to true philosophy (Hegel). Others hold dialectic to be an ill-conceived manner of playing with concepts that violates the most elementary laws of logic (Moore). Hence, the analytical movement inaugurated by Moore and Russell took its departure in an attack against Neo-Hegelianism in Britain (notably Bradley and McTaggert), presenting analysis as the cure for the dialectical disease (Moore 1993, 34).
Hermeneutics too can be regarded as a way to overcome the prevalence of idealist thinking that dominated the philosophical scene in Germany at the beginning of the last century. Notably, Heidegger, in his early critique of contemporary Neo-Kantianism and its “burgeoning Hegelese,” dismissed dialectic as being “fundamentally unphilosophical” and misleading (Heidegger 1999, 44), and suggested following the phenomenological slogan to the things themselves instead. Here, it is hermeneutic phenomenology, not logical analysis of language, that is expected to preserve access to the world and its truth, thus freeing philosophy from the straitjacket of Neo-Kantian idealism that according to Heidegger has to be regarded as the recent representative of a philosophy stuck in petrified and derivative traditions. The renewal of philosophy at the beginning of the last century had a common target on both sides of the channel: dialectic.
However, Heidegger’s uneasiness with dialectic is part of his conviction concerning the necessity of retrieving the question of Being in a way that includes a destruction of the basic concepts of logic and ontology. In that sense, dialectic does not just refer to a particular logic that endeavors to unfold implicit conceptual oppositions into their open contradiction that would then necessitate an articulation of the inherent unity of the contradicting determinations. Above all, it denotes the metaphysical stance of such thinking, as it displays the principle of absolute subjectivity that penetrates all there is. Dialectic in this Hegelian sense is the most sophisticated and elaborate way in which metaphysical thinking manifests itself and fulfills its ambition to grasp the world in thought. Hence, the starting point of Heidegger’s questioning that relentlessly tries to probe the origins of Western philosophy is the metaphysical heritage culminating in Hegelian dialectics (Gadamer 1993, 368). The hermeneutic entry relies on a countermovement against the subjugating (and ultimately nihilistic) logic of dialectic, that is, against Western metaphysics. From this perspective, the “fault” of dialectic is not its logical or epistemological incapability, but rather its lack of radical questioning, which prohibits the disclosure of the origins of logic and propositional truth, and uncritically presupposes their paradigmatic validity. The very meaning of “logos” and its capacity to unveil the world and its affairs are the issues that Heidegger wants to have philosophy as phenomenology to question; and it is this project that his version of a “hermeneutics of Dasein” pursues (see the exposition of the project of Being and Time in Heidegger, 2010).
It is in the spirit of these rather brief remarks that Gadamer claims: “Dialectic must retrieve itself in hermeneutics” (Gadamer 1976, 99; see also 2004, 362ff.). In what follows, I will try to sketch some of the implications inherent in this claim; hence, I will by and large present Gadamer’s take on dialectic.
The demand that dialectic has to retrieve itself in hermeneutics is raised as the conclusive sentence in a piece on The Idea of Hegel’s Logic (Gadamer 1976, 75ff.). It programmatically maintains what one could render as one of the most important achievements of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutic, that is, the destruction of dialectic. Gadamer, in fact, executes what Heidegger declares to be necessary if the question of Being is to be raised properly, namely, the destruction of “the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since” (Heidegger 1962, 44). Dialectic no doubt belongs to the heritage of ancient thinking; and hence one has to pave the way from recent derivative understandings of dialectic back to its original givenness to regain a genuine experience that “dialectic” can legitimately conceptualize. Such a destructive revision of dialectic is to be taken as an ontological exercise, as its performance gains the opportunity of revisiting basic concepts that used to guide our understanding of and acting in the world—above all, our concept of language or logos. This procedure is not a maneuver in philosophical historicism that claims to articulate how the Greeks really thought or experienced; it is not an appeal to rebuild modern culture in orientation toward the Greek tragic spirit either (as the young Nietzsche under the influence of Wagner seemed to have suggested in the Birth of Tragedy). “Its criticism is aimed at ‘today’ and at the prevalent way of treating the history of ontology” (ibid.); it seeks to save the experiential character of dialectics inherent in dialectic itself, recalling its enactment in the pro and con of subject-oriented dialogue against the closure of its accomplishment when taken as method. In this sense, Gadamer describes his emergence out of the self-imposed domestication that dialectics had led thinking into: It is “the way back from dialectics to dialogue and conversation. This is the way that I myself have tried to pursue in my philosophical hermeneutics” (Gadamer 1993, 367f.) From this perspective, one has to approach Gadamer’s contributions to Greek philosophy (“the most original part of my philosophical writings,” Gadamer 1991, 121) and, in particular, his readings of Plato, arguably the most significant thinker for Gadamerian hermeneutics.
This perspective also marks the main difference between Gadamer’s and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. While Gadamer tries to recall the roots of dialectic and understanding in oral dialogue and takes the enactment of this movement—in short: one’s awareness in historically effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein)—to be the task of philosophical hermeneutics, Ricoeur holds hermeneutics to defend a last line of distance between interpreter and text that might grant the possibility of critique in interpretation. To Ricoeur, interpreting texts remains the paradigm where the task of hermeneutics can best be depicted—in what he takes to be the dialectic between explanation and understanding. Ricoeur’s semiotic hermeneutics differs from Gadamer’s dialogical hermeneutics precisely in the latter’s aim to recall the dialogical dimension of understanding in hermeneutics that evades methodological controllability (for an overall evaluation on this, see Gonzales 2006). “Thus the dialectic of question and answer always precedes the dialectic of interpretation. It is what determines understanding as an event” (Gadamer 2004, 467).
Gadamer’s hermeneutic takes dialogue to be the model that manifests the event of understanding and the task of hermeneutics. According to this model, understanding of a certain utterance—a statement in oral discourse, a text in the broadest sense of the word—occurs if one understands the question that the utterance is supposed to give an answer to. The step back behind a statement to a question that lets the statement be understood as its answer contextualizes and motivates what is asserted in the statement. Gadamer convincingly argues that this process actually occurs every time we understand an assertive utterance. Understanding simply means to transpose statements into virtual sequences of a dialogue; it is misleading to claim that we would first understand a statement per se and then, owing to our, say, historical or psychological interests, it would subsequently be put into a certain situational context rendered by dialogical structures. “The path of all knowledge leads through the question. To ask a question means to bring into the open,” Gadamer claims (Gadamer 2004, 357). What is it that we understand when we understand a question? What legitimizes Gadamer’s claim concerning the “priority of the question”?
In ordinary dialogue—of which Plato has given us its idealized model—a question is directed toward another person with the request for an answer. The act of questioning poses a demand that the interrogated person is expected to fulfill. All our speech acts—including assertive statements—are in principle communicative actions that, when performed in the community of other speakers, require certain responses—at the least to be listened to. Wishes or orders articulated as imperatives certainly demand a particular act of fulfillment from its recipients; they do not expect the recipient to wish or to order in return. A question, however—mostly, but not necessarily articulated in interrogative sentences—invites the recipient to join the act of questioning. Only because the respondent executes the question by herself is she in a position to answer. To understand a question in fact requires performing the interrogative act by oneself. Phrased in a Hegelian vocabulary, it implies to acquire the question by and for oneself and hence become involved in the sharing of the question. Entering a dialogue means to get caught by a question.
This peculiar reflexivity is what distinguishes our interrogative acts from assertive acts. When a person A states p to B, she does not necessarily expect B to hold p as well. Understanding a statement of another person does not require the endorsement of the proposition rendered in the statement. One can withhold one’s consent or dissent and abstain from the propositional content and its assertion. But when a person A asks B whether p, she wants B to endorse the questionability of p in order to be joined in searching for an answer. A question requires as its fulfillment the enactment of a corresponding interrogative act that adopts the very same content to be questioned. Hence, the priority of the question to the statement relies on the integrative openness of its enactment. We cannot but let ourselves be asked, if we want to understand. “That is why we cannot understand the questionableness of something without asking real questions, though we can understand a meaning without meaning it. … To understand a question means to ask it. To understand a statement is to understand it as the answer to a question” (Gadamer 2004, 368, trans. mod.).
In a dialogue, a question might pop up and pose itself, sometimes without or even against the interlocutors’ intentions. Insofar as the respondents have to deal with questions that arise independently of their initiative and beyond their control, the art of dialogical discourse is neither a method nor a techné under the command of an interrogating subject, but rather a personal disposition that is not restricted to a certain domain. Gadamer can hook on to humanist traditions that highlight the cultivation of a person’s character (her education or Bildung); a dialectical person is in this sense able to open herself to the course of the dialogue, withholding solely private convictions in favor of the thing itself. Hence, in Plato’s Statesman, the Eleatic Stranger and Socrates the Younger explicitly agree about the dispositive character of dialectic, stating that it is a preferable goal of any conversation apart from gaining insights into the relevant issue “to become more dialectical in any respect” (toú perì pánta dialektikotérois gígnesthai, Pol. 285 d 6).
As mentioned earlier, dialogue serves as the universal model for all kinds of understanding. Gadamer frequently highlights that it is not a metaphor to describe the hermeneutical task “as entering into dialogue with the text” (Gadamer 2004, 362). We are literally asked by and also respond to the text that we interpret. We experience ourselves in a dialogical partnership with the text, joined via mutual interest in questioning the subject that the text is about. Hence, Gadamer’s concern in this reconstruction is not restricted to a theory of communication between two speakers or between the author and his reader. The dialectic of question and answer “likewise [arises] from the subject matter that is dealt with. The matter ‘raises questions’; therefore, question and answer occur between text and its interpreter too” (Gadamer 1993, 6). To put it bluntly: According to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, we are not primarily directed to what a speaker or an author meant or had in mind, but to what is actually said or written. It is the subject matter, the thing at issue that is the primary target of our understanding. As Gadamer argues in his critique of Schleiermacher and others (Gadamer 2004, 183ff.), the doctrine of mens auctoris is neither applicable—as any written or oral statement that would render new information itself depends on understanding and hence needs to be interpreted—nor primary—as if we would understand the matter at stake owing to our prior understanding of the speaker’s or author’s intention. It is the other way round; understanding verbal or written statements of other persons is released via our understanding of what these statements are about, and this is acquired when we are able to enact the questions that the statements could be taken to give answers to.
Hence, in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, the dialectic of question and answer does not function as a maxim that one should apply in exegetic business instead of other competing maxims or methods. Its aim is ontological, describing what actually happens when we find ourselves drawn into conversation. As such, it is the cornerstone of a “theory of hermeneutic experience” (Gadamer 2004, 267ff.).
The destruction of dialectic retrieved into dialogue discloses the priority of the question and the event character of questioning. It attacks the predominance of the statement and the assertive act, which used to be the default approach to language in Western philosophy (accompanied by a corresponding theory of propositional truth whose prevalence Truth and Method, following Heidegger, contests). To recall the dialogical origin of dialectic, however, does not mean to curb what one may call the “speculative force” of dialectical thinking. The point of retrieving Hegelian dialectic back into hermeneutics is not to tame its philosophical ambitions but rather to free its potential from the inherent metaphysical limitations. Hegel’s “dialectic remains within the dimension of statements and does not attain the dimension of the linguistic experience of the world” (Gadamer 2004, 464). The true engine, the “spirit,” so to speak, of dialectic is “in the logical instinct of language and the guidance it provides” (Gadamer 1976, 31). According to Gadamer, our ordinary language provides the ultimate horizon that harbors what Hegel’s logical reconstruction tries to manifest, thereby—despite Hegel’s criticism against the fetishism of fixed determinations of scientific understanding (Verstand) and notwithstanding his insights in the doctrine of the “speculative sentence”—subordinating and suppressing the infinite openness of meaning into the ideal of absolute self-knowledge. Gadamerian hermeneutics refrains from such an agenda; but it would be wrong to sense a postmodern lack of philosophical self-confidence in the age of nihilism (Vattimo 1997, 2012) as well as to blame Gadamer for a lack of radicalism in his involvement with Hegel (Caputo 2000). In fact, Gadamer seeks to radicalize Hegel’s dialectical intuition by recalling its origin in linguistically mediated understanding, that is, dialogue.
Hence, Gadamer acknowledges a speculative dimension; but he finds this dimension in our everyday understanding, promoted by the web of ordinary language. “Being that can be understood is language” (Gadamer 2004, 470)—this famous statement exactly locates hermeneutics between Hegelian metaphysics and Heidegger’s thinking of Being. The linguistic experience of the world (the significance of which Hegelian dialectical logic underestimates) is speculative in so far as it unveils the fact that any utterance and every single word are parts of a whole of language. Gadamer’s hermeneutic not only promotes language holism, but claims the possibility of experiencing the inherent dialectic of the whole and its parts that the traditional doctrine of the hermeneutical circle in methodological respect had formulated. Hence, Gadamer’s context principle is not restricted to the context of what is actually said, but to the whole of what could be articulated in language.
To say what one means …—to make oneself understood—means to hold what is said together with an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning …. Someone who speaks in this way may well use only the most ordinary and common words and still be able to express what is unsaid and is to be said. Someone who speaks is behaving speculatively when his words do not reflect beings, but express a relation to the whole of being. … Even in the most everyday speech there appears an element of speculative reflection.
(Gadamer 2004, 464f.)
This passage entails a version of what Heidegger termed the ontological difference between being and beings or entities. It locates meaning in the middle between what is said and what is or remains unsaid. The appeal to express the unsaid seems to imply a contradiction that undermines any chance of rendering a theory of understanding. But “the unsaid” is not to be taken as a collection of fixed entities on the shelves of possible utterances that happen to remain ignored. It acknowledges the experience—canonically captured in the doctrine of St. Augustine concerning the verbum interior, the inner word (Grondin 1994, 126)—that what we want to say might very well exceed what we actually phrase, and that everything we say can in principle be said differently. This is not only true for interpersonal conversations but also holds for the soul’s inner dialogue with itself. In Gadamer, alterity taken as the unsayable is captured as the infinity of meaning that always already exceeds its adequate articulation and that therefore remains the origin of the urge to understand. Hence, “the unsaid” displays in its absence the very possibility of meaning in language. Language as logos provides the ultimate medium of understanding that can never be actualized (or grasped in Hegel’s absolute idea of thought that thinks itself) but that nonetheless is the space of meaning. “Speaking remains tied to the language as a whole, the hermeneutic virtuality of discourse which surpasses at any moment that which has been said” (Gadamer 1976, 115).