Jean Grondin
Hans-Georg Gadamer founded philosophical hermeneutics with his masterpiece Truth and Method. Outlines of a Philosophical Hermeneutics (1960), an influential book he published at a rather late stage of his career, when he was 60, but not of his life since he went on to live 102 years.
Gadamer was born in 1900 in Marburg and died in 2002 in Heidelberg. He studied in Breslau (1918–19), Freiburg (1923), and Marburg (1919–28), with famous teachers such as Paul Natorp, Nicolai Hartmann, Paul Friedländer, and especially Martin Heidegger, who directed his habilitation thesis on Plato’s Philebus, published under the title Plato’s Dialectical Ethics in 1931. With his habilitation, he became a Privatdozent at the University of Marburg until he was named professor in Leipzig in 1939. Unlike his mentor Heidegger, Gadamer steered away from politics during the Nazi era and concentrated his work on Greek philosophy and Hegel. The fact that he never became a member of the Nazi party helped him to be named rector of the University of Leipzig in 1946, which was then in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. He left Leipzig in 1947 for Frankfurt and became Karl Jaspers’ successor at the University of Heidelberg in 1949, where he lived for the rest of his life. Truth and Method brought him world fame and was at the center of philosophical debates in Germany and beyond, most notably with the critique of ideologies of Habermas and the deconstruction of Derrida. In 1985, he started the publication of his standard works edition in 10 volumes and supervised it to its end in 1995. As its main sections indicate, Gadamer’s philosophical work was devoted to hermeneutics (volumes 1–2, 10), modern philosophy (3–4), Greek philosophy (5–7), and aesthetics (8–9). Here the emphasis will be on his hermeneutics.
One of the achievements of Gadamer has been to make “hermeneutics” a household word in philosophical and intellectual debates. The term is often associated with his philosophical outlook. Before him, it was at best familiar to scholars working in the fields of theological exegesis and ancient philology. The traditional task of hermeneutics had been to provide guidelines, methods, and rules for the correct interpretation in fields dealing with text interpretation, like scriptural exegesis, philology, and jurisprudence. The German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) envisioned a broader task for hermeneutics when he suggested it could help solve the methodological challenge of the humanities and social sciences: a hermeneutics could be called for to spell out the methods that enable them to provide valid knowledge, just as the methods of science would account for the success of the physical and mathematical sciences. Gadamer takes up Dilthey’s inquiry into the truth of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), but calls into question his premise, namely, that a methodological reflection alone can do justice to this truth claim. According to him, the guiding idea of method is borrowed in an uncritical manner from the model of exact science where knowledge has to be independent from the observer. Gadamer’s basic conviction is that this idea misses the point and specificity of the humanities, where the implication and the involvement of the interpreter is always essential to what one understands.
Gadamer’s objective in Truth and Method (1960) is to offer a philosophical justification of this type of knowledge, which does not depend on methodology alone, yet without opening the door to the accusation of relativism (which will later often be leveled against him). For this, he refers first to the forgotten heritage of the humanist tradition for which the task of knowledge consists in acquiring an education and culture (Bildung) that can help us broaden our horizon “beyond the narrow scope of our interests and preferences” (Gadamer 1960, 41; Gadamer 1990, 36). Through culture and education, we come to develop judgment, moral taste, and common sense, gaining a general perspective which is not the generality of the universal law of science since it remains rooted in history and shared custom. What is central to humanist knowledge is the formation, indeed the transformation, of the individual, who acquires a larger grasp of the world. Second, Gadamer draws inspiration from the art experience, where the transformation of the spectator also plays a decisive role. He describes the art experience as a play (Spiel, which also means game in German) or an event (Geschehen) in which the participant is taken up into a higher reality, that of the artwork itself, which makes us see the world in a renewed light. A work of art lets a reality appear with an “increase in Being” (Seinszuwachs), in the sense that it presents it (indeed, represents it) in a way that allows us to (re)discover it as it is for the first time. It thus transforms the reality it presents, but also the spectator at the same time. This intensified experience of Being and reality is also a cognitive experience in that it opens our eyes and minds. Gadamer thus heralds in it a truth experience that goes beyond the realm of methodical science. In what does this truth consist, Gadamer asks, and can its features be extended to the issues of understanding as they pertain to the historical sciences but also, more broadly, to our world experience as a whole?
Art offers Gadamer an attractive model for the way one should think of interpretation in general. To interpret in art means that one has to skillfully “play out” or execute a piece, as it is required by the art work itself in the performing arts, like music and theater. Here, there is no artwork without such an execution, which Gadamer will liken to the process of reading in the literary arts and the act of seeing in the figurative arts. In all art forms, he concludes, a presentation of the meaning of the work by the interpreter is required by the work of art itself. This meaning is dictated, to be sure, by the art work itself, yet it only comes out through the active involvement or participation of the interpreter, who can be an actor, a reader, or a spectator. This productive input on the part of the interpreter does not imply arbitrariness, since it has to be done with skill and respect for the work one is “playing.” In this, Gadamer constantly insists, we are, however, less the players who are in control of the execution, than those who “are played” since it is the work that commands its presentation. Yet without this presentation or interpretation, the work of art would remain mum, and its truth would not emerge.
It is this type of experience Gadamer will also find in the human sciences. Gadamer never disputes that these sciences have their methods and that these are essential to their scientific status—this has to be stressed because Gadamer was often unjustly characterized as being “against method”—but he believes methods do not suffice if one wants to describe the truth experience of the humanities. As in the humanistic idea of knowledge geared toward Bildung and in the art experience, the scholar, historian, and art critic play an important part in the type of cognition that is achieved in the historical disciplines. Gadamer follows Heidegger’s famous ideas on the hermeneutical circle that emphasize the productive role played by our anticipations of meaning in the process of understanding, and applies them in an original way to the humanities. For them, the hermeneutical circle means that there is no understanding without prejudices. We are not, however, captives of our given prejudices since they undergo a constant revision in the unfolding or “playing out” of interpretation. In the long run, he argues, the unproductive projections of understanding are eliminated and replaced by better ones. This sorting out is facilitated by temporal distance. This insight leads Gadamer to highlight the importance of tradition and history in understanding. In this, he wishes to counter the tendency to view history as an obstacle of sorts when one asks, for instance, how there could be a form of knowledge in the humanities that would not be dependent on its time and its prejudices. For Gadamer, this is nonsensical because we are all the children of our time. He views prejudices positively as conditions of knowledge: we understand texts and the events of history because we are propelled and challenged by the expectations of our time. Gadamer thus elevates the inescapable and productive historicity of the interpreter to the level of a hermeneutical principle: 1. We strive to understand (in the humanities, but also in life more generally) because we are historical beings who seek answers to our questions in history and the texts we are reading. 2. The objects of understanding are for their part also molded, mediated, and handed over by history. Gadamer speaks here of the Wirkungsgeschichte, or “effective history,” which is at work in those who understand as well as in their objects. When we understand, there is a historical heritage at work, which comes from the past and the present as it has itself been crafted by tradition. This is why understanding has to be understood “less as an activity of the subject than as participating in an event of tradition in which past and present are constantly mediated” (Gadamer 1960, 295; Gadamer 1990, 290). The subjectivity of the interpreter is taken out of the center of the cognitive process in favor of the effective history which is at work in it, whether we are conscious of it or not. According to Gadamer, we can become aware of the fact that effective history is a work in us, but not always of its how and when: “In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it” (Gadamer 1960, 281; Gadamer 1990, 276).
Does Gadamer’s insistence on history and the productivity of our prejudices in understanding lead to relativism? Gadamer dismisses this accusation as a phantom without an object. To begin with, there is no such thing, he contends, as a knowledge that would be independent of history, if one leaves aside the mathematical sciences. This essential dependence upon history does not entail relativism because history itself provides guideposts and orientation when it produces and distinguishes as such milestones and realizations that survive their own time. There are works, in the humanities, the arts, and history that stand out by transcending their epoch and delivering binding truths. These works are worthy of the term “classical.” Classics are authorities and references that can be found in all the humanities, in all sciences and walks of life. They do not, however, fall from the sky: it is history itself, more precisely, “effective” history, and its reception that patiently bring about works, and issues, which are called classic. Plato, Rembrandt, Mozart, and Beckett are classics because their work extends beyond their time, but this achievement is itself the work of time and history. The classical canon is not set in stone for all eternity since it must be confirmed and appropriated anew by every new present. Every work, Gadamer constantly insists, addresses a present in a new way, in light of its interests and expectations, to which the work offers its answers. Following Gadamer, these creative new understandings emanate from the work itself and its Wirkungsgeschichte.
In this effective history, it is difficult to pinpoint precisely what belongs to the past, its reception through Wirkungsgeschichte and to the present. To understand the past does not mean that one needs to ignore the horizon of the present (which is impossible for Gadamer) in order to transpose oneself (sich versetzen) in the horizon of the past. Rather, one understands the past when one is able to translate it in the language of the present, where the horizons of the past and the present are always fused into one another (sich verschmelzen). Gadamer speaks here of a “fusion of horizons” which takes place thanks to the work of effective history. This does not mean, however, that all the prejudices of the present are justified. A hermeneutically schooled consciousness has to strive to carefully separate the legitimate from the illegitimate prejudices in its understanding. Gadamer calls this task or awareness a “consciousness of effective history” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, one of his main concepts). It means that one has to develop (1) a consciousness of the history that is at work in our understanding and that we can seek to elucidate, and at the same time (2) a consciousness of the limits of such an awareness in light of the historicity of our being which excludes a self-mastery of all our determinations. A consciousness that is aware of its own historicity will not culminate in the total transparency of self-knowledge. This is why Gadamer states that this wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein is less a form of consciousness than of Being (mehr Sein als Bewusstsein), that is, more a determination of our way of Being and consciousness by history than a complete knowledge of this determination. This limit of our capacity of self-reflection has an upside: it leads to a fundamental and Socratic acknowledgment of our finitude, which promises a new openness. A hermeneutical consciousness aware of its own historicity and thus its limits will be all the more open to new experiences, perspectives, and the points of views of others.
Translation provides a useful illustration of what is meant by a successful fusion of horizons in the process of interpretation: a foreign language, say, from the past, must be rendered in our own, yet that is only possible if the full range of possibilities of our tongue are brought to bear to convey what is said in the foreign language. As was the case in the performing arts, one has to do full justice to the work that is to be “executed,”, in this case translated, but that only occurs if one renders it skillfully and successfully into the present. It goes without saying that such a translation, realizing a fusion of horizons, must be creative, without being arbitrary.
This model of translation alludes to the important fact for Gadamer that our understanding is essentially structured through language. Understanding and language are always fused and woven into one another, but in such an intimate way that this linguistic character of our understanding more often than not remains unnoticed, so that understanding appears as an act of pure thinking. This has led to an overlooking, indeed a forgetfulness of language in our Western tradition. To be sure, this forgetfulness is well grounded in the things themselves since language tends to disappear when it lets a world become present for our understanding. But this could create the false impression that our thinking is independent of language. This conception of thinking has dominated our tradition, in which language was thought of as an instrument of secondary status our mind would use or invent to convey its thoughts. Against this instrumental and nominalist understanding of language, Gadamer claims that there is no thinking nor understanding without language. To refute Gadamer’s thesis, one would have to provide an example of a thinking or understanding that would be independent of language. This might be possible, but it is difficult not to use language in doing so.
How should one understand language? Our tradition basically conceived it through the notion of sign (Zeichen): signs or “names” (nomina) are the instruments our spirit uses to refer to things. According to Gadamer, this idea of sign induces the impression of a sovereignty of thinking with regard to language. Is there really a thinking that is independent of language, he asks? This leads him to suggest a different understanding of language which sees it less as a sign than an “image” (Bild) or picture. In doing so, he refers back to his reflections on the ontological significance of the picture in the first part of Truth and Method, devoted to the truth revealed and experienced through the work of art. He argued in this section that the true picture is not a secondary reproduction or an imitation of a reality that precedes it, but an emanation of what is presented and which reveals its real essence. It is in and through the picture that reality appears for the first time as such because it is endowed with an increase of Being (Seinszuwachs). An analogous phenomenon appears in language understood as an image or picture: it is not a secondary manifestation of the things themselves, but the presentation that makes them real and enables us to understand them. It is only thanks to language that we have access to the world. Whereas other living beings have an environment (Umwelt) to which they relate, but from which they cannot maintain a real distance, we have a “world,” that is, an access to the things from which we can gain distance and upon which we can reflect. Without language, we would be deprived of a world and would remain captives of our environment.
With this view of language, Gadamer opposes the many conceptions that tend to see in language a limitation of sorts for our thinking, because it would constrain it to some linguistic structures or framework. Far from limiting understanding, language makes it possible, Gadamer forcibly argues. Language is by no means a limitation since it is capable of absorbing and expressing everything that can be understood, and then some. Everything we understand, we can express through language, and we only understand to the extent we seek to express something linguistically. This does not mean that we can understand everything. We remain finite beings whose capacities of understanding are not endless, but the limits of language are also those of understanding. Language “always forestalls any objection to its jurisdiction” (Gadamer 1960, 405; Gadamer 1990, 401). since any such objection would have to be formulated in language. In this lies the universality of the linguistic element for Gadamer which keeps pace with the universality of reason itself (Gadamer 1960, 405; Gadamer 1990, 401). Reason has itself a linguistic character: it can only express itself in a language we can follow, and it aims itself at understanding. This decisive universality of language means that every act of understanding unfolds in the medium of language and that the object of understanding is itself of linguistic nature. In Gadamer’s well-chosen terms, language determines the hermeneutical act (Vollzug) of understanding as well as its object (Gegenstand), the Being that is understood in this process. Gadamer expresses this in a famous dictum: “Being that can be understood is language” (Gadamer 1960, 478; Gadamer 1990, 474). This saying captures the two sides of his far-reaching thesis on language and understanding: (1) our understanding unfolds in language and (2) the Being that we understand is itself of linguistic quality. This is a thesis on understanding, to be sure, but at the same time a thesis on Being in that it claims that Being itself has the character of a self-presentation (“Being is language, i.e., self-presentation,” he simply writes (Gadamer 1960, 488–490; Gadamer 1990, 484–487)), which takes place in language. Gadamer is well aware that this wide-ranging idea leads him back into the dimension of classical metaphysics (Gadamer 1960, 464; Gadamer 1990, 460). For this metaphysics, Being and understanding do not face one another, say, as object and subject; rather, they belong to each other since the notions one uses to understand Being (the “transcendentals” of classical metaphysics) are already coextensive with Being. In this manner, language is already part of Being and the light of Being itself. Gadamer’s thinking thus reaches its pinnacle in an ontology that enables his own philosophical hermeneutics to lay claim to universality. Envisioned are both a hermeneutical turn of ontology (every reflection on Being is indebted to language and only possible thanks to it) and an ontological turn of hermeneutics: our interpretations do not only deal with signs and cultural constructs, they reach Being, which can very well be understood.
Gadamer’s hermeneutics had a profound and lasting influence on philosophy and all the human sciences, mainly history, literary theory, art history, jurisprudence, and theology. One cannot do justice to them here, but this volume as a whole might fulfill this task since it would not have existed without the debates Gadamer’s opus has sparked. What elicited resistance was, first, his seemingly brazen overcoming of the methodological task of hermeneutics. Well-known critics such as Emilio Betti, E. D. Hirsch, Peter Szondi, Hans Albert, Hans Krämer, and even Paul Ricœur took issue with this overcoming, some even claiming that Gadamer’s new methodology consisted in giving free rein to all our prejudices (“anything goes”), which would be fatal for the humanities. Gadamer patiently replied to his critics that his aim was not to dictate what we ought to do, but to describe “what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing” when we understand.1 Besides this methodological and largely epistemological debate, Gadamer’s hermeneutics was challenged by representatives of ideology critique such as Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. Even though both heralded and took up his linguistic turn and his notion of reason oriented toward mutual understanding, they took issue with Gadamer’s rehabilitation of tradition and the idea that it would always favor the emergence of good prejudices. Gadamer failed, in their view, to account for the ideological factor and the possibly deforming or biased nature of tradition. A critique of the ideologies of society, akin to the healing achieved in psychoanalysis when one uncovers one’s false understanding, would need to supplement Gadamer’s “conservative” hermeneutics. Gadamer responded that he did not see why ideology itself and its critique should escape the universal scope of hermeneutical understanding, where new insight, wherever it may come from, always transforms us. On the political side, he found that what was lacking in ideology critique was perhaps a critique of the ideologies of the critique of ideologies itself. He did not believe that society as a whole was in dire need of psychotherapy, nor that the social scientist enjoyed any specific competence in this regard. Another major debate confronted Gadamer with Derrida’s school of deconstruction: it raised the issue whether the hermeneutical focus on the primacy of understanding was not somewhat one-sided, all the more so if understanding implies that one “appropriates” the other. Can understanding ever do justice to the alterity of the other or are other means of openness required? This incited Gadamer to insist in his later work on the idea, already found in Truth in Method, that hermeneutics culminated in an openness to the other and alterity. Ongoing debates continue to deal with the issues of validity in interpretation. While many fear Gadamer’s thinking has perilous relativistic underpinnings, postmodern authors such as Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo hail Gadamer’s relativism as liberating. For them, the dictum “Being that can be understood is language” means that our understanding can never go beyond language and our ways of expressing things. This would preclude the idea that our linguistic understanding would somehow ever correspond to some reality out there. Since there are, moreover, many linguistic frameworks and perspectives, the hermeneutical ideal would be one of tolerance and pluralistic openness to the various ways of seeing things. Gadamer surely advocated and practiced this virtue of tolerance and openness, but it needs to be recalled that he also preserved the notion of truth (the first word in the title of his work!), spoke of correspondence to the things themselves, and unfolded a universal thesis on Being which echoed the issues of classical metaphysics. In my own modest work, I have sought to develop those metaphysical consequences of hermeneutics (Grondin 2013), which are too often overlooked.
Gadamer’s work and influence are largely identified with the hermeneutics of Truth and Method, one of the classics of the philosophy of the twentieth century. Gadamer certainly drew pride from this, but felt his studies on the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, and on modern authors like Hegel and Heidegger, as well as his work on poetics were too often overlooked. The disposition of his Standard Works edition certainly wished to correct this in that it astutely devoted three volumes to hermeneutics (1–2, 10), two to modern philosophy (3–4; placed before the volumes on the Greeks since we only understand the Greeks out of the present!), three to the Greeks (5–7), and two to aesthetics and poetics (8–9). This Blackwell volume will certainly strive to do them justice.
Especially influential were Gadamer’s ideas on “The Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics” (following the title of a seminal essay of 1963), where he called into question the primacy of Kant’s ethics of duty and universal law to rediscover the essence of morality, with Aristotle and Hegel, in the realm of the customs and traditions which guide us in everyday life. Gadamer’s ethical perspective, already present in Truth and Method, of course, helped to rehabilitate the Aristotelian and Hegelian tradition of practical philosophy. In lectures directed toward a wider public (some of which are collected in the four volumes he published in the Bibliothek Suhrkamp series), Gadamer also discussed more general themes, such as the enigma of health, time, death, Europe’s legacy, and the meaning of reason in the technological age. Even though he published a late essay “On the Political Incompetence of Philosophy,” (1992) the later Gadamer was happy to stress the cultural significance of his philosophy of mutual understanding in the age of globalization, in which the different cultures and religions will have to learn to live and dialogue with one another. “The soul of hermeneutics,” he would insist in this context, “lies in the fact that the other might be right.”