Tony O’ Connor
Gadamer’s discussion of play occurs as part of his effort to develop a philosophical hermeneutics, or a theory of interpretation, that attempts to reconcile two apparently opposed concepts, namely, universality and historicity.
The word “universal” has various meanings, including the “general in the sense of a concept that applies to all individuals, or as a term that affirms or denies something about every member of a class. It is also commonly interpreted to mean something “necessary,” or “true in all possible worlds,” and in this sense it is taken to be applicable without exception within its proper predicative realm. The word “historicity,” on the other hand, is taken to refer to historical actuality, or to indicate the quality of being part of history.
When the term “universal” is interpreted in the sense just indicated, it tends to be used to explain general concepts that embody unchanging truths. It is commonly held that the Western philosophical tradition uses the term in this sense as part of its search for foundations and norms to serve as unchanging grounds on which to base valid explanations of beliefs, actions, and values, as well as the cultural, social, and political institutions that surround them.
Since the nineteenth century, the view has emerged that the search for permanent philosophical explanations is problematic. Philosophers such as Nietzsche, for example, hold that philosophy should be sensitive to complex historical data, and to social, political, and economic hybridity and flexibility. Hence, they hold that no valid appeals may be made to neutral, unchanging criteria, which supposedly determine the “facts” of any particular case, or to unchanging norms for the correct interpretation of such “facts.” On the contrary, philosophy must be sensitive to what follows from recognition of the historicity of the world.
Gadamer’s attempted reconciliation of universality and historicity is not meant to reduce one term to the other, but to preserve both, and to acknowledge a “depth” and complexity rooted in human life itself. Habermas is one of a number of critics who have objected that Gadamerian hermeneutics has failed to address the real issues of our time and consequently to establish a critical justification of concepts, actions, values, and institutions. Habermas thinks that hermeneutics has failed to free itself from outlived traditions and conventions, and so its central appeal to Aristotle’s account of practical knowledge (phronesis) fails to see that this concept could have a critical future only if it became science.
Gadamer thinks that here Habermas misses the philosophical point and is tainted by unjustified appeals to, and uses of, Enlightenment philosophical concepts, notably, the appeal to science and to the concept of method as it determines natural science and its growing influence on the humanities. Gadamer holds, rather, that sociality and its historical manifestations in play (Spiel) are primary, as are language and art. This is bound up with his view that hermeneutics must grow from the practical activities of understanding and interpretation in life, literature, art, the history of philosophy, and the human and natural sciences.
Heidegger’s “hermeneutic of facticity,” or the existential structure of understanding, as developed in Being and Time, has an important influence on Gadamer’s efforts to develop an historical and universal account of interpretation. It leads Gadamer to criticize traditional views of “aesthetic” and “historical” consciousness because of their failure to adequately account for the “unique, originary experiences” of human beings, such as play, which are basic both to our inherence in the world and our self-experience (Gadamer 1997, 26–27).
In his central work Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer asks about the necessity conditions of understanding. Like Heidegger, he thinks that human life is fundamentally historical in character and that our understanding and knowledge are themselves utterly historical. Thus, he thinks that play, art, language, etc., are bound up with the historicity of interpretation. This is at odds with the view of traditional philosophy that historicity and universality are opposed to each other, which has led to the presumption of autonomous disciplines or regions where critical analysis is undertaken. For example, it was assumed that a universalist approach to aesthetics must depend on a self-sufficient ground other than, and opposed to, the changing historical realms of sociocultural institutions and practices. This clear division between the necessary and the contingent was taken to be a precondition of explanation and critical justification in regard to human activity such as play, and in the realms of art and the aesthetic, etc. Gadamer challenges this traditional view because it neglects the historical conditions of human action, art practices, etc., and so cannot provide a possible critique of them.
This leads him to undertake a critique of German Idealism and its Romantic tradition, where he thinks that the notions of “aesthetic consciousness” and “historical consciousness” offer only alienated forms of our “true historical being.” The intentions of the artist highlighted in Romanticism are not “[t]he unique, originary experiences that are mediated through art and history [and] cannot be grasped within these alienated forms. The tranquil distance from which a consciousness conditioned by the usual middle-class education enjoyed its cultural privileges does not take into account how much of ourselves must come into play and is at stake when we encounter works of art and studies of history” (Gadamer 1997, 27). Against the Romantic view, Gadamer contends that if the human condition is essentially historical, then appeal to the artist’s motivations cannot be fundamental, as Romanticism thinks, because such motivations themselves must be subject to historical conditions and to a historical kind of interpretation. This means that aesthetics must be assimilated by hermeneutics, which leaves open the hermeneutical question—the question of the relationship between interpretation and what it interprets in and about human behavior, artworks, etc. Hence, the question of the historicity of interpretation must be viewed as directly bound up with the historicity of both human life itself and of art, science, etc.
Two difficulties arise for Gadamer at this point. If we grant his claim that focus on the historicity of interpretation may open up more dynamic, pluralistic approaches to human action, art practices, and critique, it seems that he introduces also the possibility of different and incompatible lines of interpretation by interpreters, including artists, critics, and theorists. Furthermore, does critical attention to the contextual character of historical factors mean that hermeneutical truth claims are always affected by contextual conditions or, ultimately, by subjective opinion and choice?
Gadamer holds that the universality of the hermeneutical experience can be approached from any starting point (Gadamer 1997, 40). As observed, his own approach to this issue gives the concept “Spiel” (play, or game) a central role in the determination of the meaning of hermeneutic universality because he holds that “we are guided by the hermeneutical phenomenon; and its ground, which determines everything else, [or] the finitude of our historical experience” (Gadamer 2004, 457). He thinks that when we play—as when we play structured or unstructured games—it is the event of the play, or game, itself that stands revealed. In other words, the game is never a mere object when it is being played; rather, it exists in and for players and spectators as part of their very existence and rationality.
The key insight offered by the notion of play is that we are never at the starting point; we never begin anew. To illustrate this, he takes the example of the child’s first spoken word “which cannot be what it seems,” since a first word cannot exist as such: “It is not language. It is not a word, if there is just this one word. Consequently, the story illustrates why interpretation is the element in which we live, and not something into which we have to make entry” (Gadamer and Ricoeur, 1982, 303).
Gadamer contends that two basic projects are combined in the concept of play: the orientation to “the game we play with art” and “the game of language,” or the grounding of language in conversation (Gadamer 1997, 41). He thinks that this highlights the ontological context of all philosophical problems and is supported by the “universal element of linguisticality” (Gadamer ibid.). Stambaugh (1953) summarizes the core of Gadamer’s position in the context of the playful character of the creation of, and response to, works of art, as follows: “The creation and the response to the work of art dwell in it to the exclusion of everything else.” This is true both of the “static” arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, where the response, what Gadamer calls the “reading,” takes time, and even more so in the “transitory arts of poetry, music, drama, and dance, where the ‘reading’ is the experience of the artwork.”
Gadamer’s elaboration of this position is a rather complex one and involves discussion of the propositional concept of truth inherited from Aristotle; Heidegger’s rethinking of early Greek philosophy; Kant’s conceptless world of the faculty of aesthetic judgment, etc. There is a sense, however, in which it is not altogether dissimilar from Wittgenstein’s discussion of games in Philosophical Investigations, where he links the term to the notion of “family resemblances,” as when members of a family who share a single genetic line may display significant differences between them, such as temperament, eye or hair color, height, gait, gender, etc. Although they manifest significant differences from one another, yet it is often possible to identify them as being related to each other. Wittgenstein thinks that what makes this possible is “a pattern of overlapping and criss-crossing resemblances” (Wittgenstein 1953).
A major implication of Wittgenstein’s position is that “game” cannot be defined, at least not in terms of absolute necessary and sufficient conditions. Hence, it is impossible to define it objectively and neutrally in terms of some essential features or qualities that are present in an unchanging way in all valid uses of the word. This does not imply that the word “game” cannot be defined at all, but only that it cannot be defined in essentialist terms. This highlights Gadamer’s problem of how to reconcile historicity and universality in philosophy. Are the notions incompatible, and must one inevitably give way to the other?
Some light may be cast on this question if, with Gadamer, historicity and universality are bound up with the notion of social intentionality. The concept of intentionality allows that the meanings assignable to things are significant structures that arise from the various kinds of activity that occur as part, and under the influence, of historical and cultural conditions of various kinds. Thus, play, human action in general, speech and writing, language use, etc., are intentional phenomena and have intentional properties. They arise as part of our cultural conditioning, education, life practices, etc., in a world where we develop appropriate skills to act and interpret. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception illustrates something of what is at stake here:
“There is in human existence no unconditioned possession, yet no fortuitous attribute” and “Human existence will force us to revise our usual notion of necessity and contingency, because it is the transformation of contingency into necessity by the act of renewed grasp (of carrying forward).”
(Merleau-Ponty 1962)
The point is that intentional activity and intentional properties emerge as part of an interpreted world where human beings operate interpretively in societies and as members of groups of various kinds.
In Truth and Method, Gadamer thinks of intentionality as the very processes of understanding and interpretation themselves, and it occurs as a continuation, but also as modification or development of an entire tradition. Thus, he contends that “interpretation is not an occasional additional act subsequent to understanding, but rather understanding is always an interpretation, and hence interpretation is the explicit form of understanding” (Gadamer 2004, 274). This is to say not only that understanding always occurs as part of a tradition, but efforts to modify or develop this understanding never entirely escape the influence of that very tradition. The influence of such background social factors includes the common sense of particular communities, the specialized methods and knowledge of advanced disciplines, the sociopolitical presuppositions and institutions of societies and cultures, etc. In other words, as hermeneutical beings we both constitute meanings and are directed toward the future behaviorally and conceptually, but always under the influence of effective understanding and interpretations of background tradition.
Gadamer justifies his position in terms of three core phenomena, namely, language, social interaction, and prejudice. He contends that language is the basic mode of operation of our being in the world and is essential to our constitution and interpretation of meaning therein (Gadamer 1996, 111). This constitution of meaning occurs by using modalities of social interaction, where multiple interpretations occur as part of dynamic traditions, within which they carry pre-formed meanings and values, but may be open also to the revision of these meanings and the constitution of new ones. Hence, prejudice (or operative presuppositions) plays a dynamic and constitutive role in all of this (Gadamer ibid., 115).
Gadamer thinks that this allows him to reconcile historicity and the universal in a valid way. There are two key moves involved here. First, he rejects Romantic hermeneutics, which restricts hermeneutic consciousness to a technique for avoiding misunderstandings (Gadamer ibid., 114). Second, he holds that invariance can be recovered from within history through the identification of a “single horizon.” We inherit this single horizon from the “classical” age of ancient Greece. Its recovery involves “a consciousness of something enduring, of significance that cannot be lost and is independent of all the circumstances of time…. A concept that possesses a normative sense” (Gadamer ibid., 256).
This returns us to the notion of play and its links to Gadamer’s account of the “fore-structures” of perception, understanding, and action in Truth and Method, which, he contends, are interpreted in terms of the “things themselves” (Gadamer ibid., 260). He offers the example of the literary critic who “plays with the text” by making general projections based on her ongoing and open-ended reading of it. These projections are never static or complete, but open to revision as she interacts interpretively with the text and, possibly, with other critical and evaluative views of it (Gadamer ibid., 260).
Thus, for Gadamer, understanding and interpretation involve trial and error, which can lead to various, perhaps multiple, interpretive possibilities which are directed, in turn, toward the constitution of meanings regarded as more appropriate, or valid, than those already extant. These projections and interpretations can be confirmed or disconfirmed by citing further evidence from and about the text. Open-ended interpretation in this sense is on the way to truth and objectivity and involves “the confirmation of a fore-meaning in its being worked out” (Gadamer ibid., 267). Hence, for Gadamer, objectivity does not involve absolute determination of meaning; rather, it arises from interpretations that strive for individual and group coherence and consistency as features of styles, disciplines, and traditions of interpretation (Gadamer ibid., 268–269).
Gadamer’s further justification of his proposed reconciliation of historicity and universality turns on two other notions: the “fusion of horizons” and “historically effected consciousness,” or “effective-historical consciousness.” He thinks that when horizons “fuse,” as when an artwork is understood hermeneutically, all the limitations of its historical origin or cultural context are transcended. This, he thinks, allows him to avoid historicism and relativism, although here the world of the artwork still belongs to our world, yet, because we understand it, we recognize that “both worlds” belong to the hermeneutic universe. He illustrates this in respect of philosophy as historical enterprise: “… when going back into the history of philosophy … one certainly should not do this as a mere historian. When we are thinking on our own, we always move in a constant dialogue with the history of philosophical thought (Gadamer 1953, 219). The notion of effective-historical consciousness indicates that humans as historical beings are both open to the effects of history and carry forward interpretively this history in self-conscious and deliberate ways. As hermeneutical beings, we transcend our own relativity in a way that makes rigor and objectivity possible in life, in art, and in the human and natural sciences.
Here, our previously mentioned problem returns. How can Gadamer’s claim be justified without implying a concept of absolute, philosophical knowledge beyond all historical consciousness? Sinead Murphy summarizes this difficulty when she claims that Gadamer both fails to account for how effective-historical understanding can criticize and possibly modify or alter its own presuppositions and appreciate the perspectives of other traditions as irreducible to that of the situated interpreter. More than this, however, she maintains that ultimately Gadamer relies on “neutral,” “pure,” and absolute grounds for hermeneutical activity, and to which he appeals rather than justifies in terms of evidence and argument (Murphy 2010, 211). Problems such as these mean that discussions continue regarding the philosophical viability of Gadamer’s position. However, whatever the outcome of such discussions, he reminds us of the all-pervasiveness of both the cultural world and of human beings as cultural constructs and shapers of cultures through the hermeneutical constitution of meaning and value.