Roberto Alejandro
Hermeneutics as a philosophy of language, interpretation, and interpersonal communication belongs to the fractured and conflicting landscape that defines Western culture. In this landscape, philosophy stands as a diversity of Archimedean points from which the philosopher weaves the conceptual apparatus that will allow him to apprehend a totality. This apparatus, formed by the different concepts that conform the philosopher’s linguistic universe, seeks universality.
I use the term “web” to refer to the philosopher’s conceptual apparatus, which tends to have an inner hierarchy revolving around a core concept. Examples of such a core concept are the good (Plato), eudaemonia (Aristotle), desire for power (Hobbes), the rational faculty (Kant), Spirit (Hegel) will to life (Schopenhauer), will to power (Nietzsche), class struggles (Marx), Being (Heidegger), and hermeneutics (Gadamer). In all these cases, we have a concept that is also a lens to grasp reality, slice it, and organize it in particular ways.
Giles Deleuze’s description of philosophy runs along the previous lines: “Philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.”1 Hans-Georg Gadamer takes a similar stance: “In talking about the language of philosophy, one can only have in mind the concepts that play a role in it.”2
The philosopher molds universal concepts and then expects and demands that all reality should conform to it. Most important, the philosopher endows his conceptual categories with a redemptive nature. Redemption is here defined as follows: the whole of human culture is redeemed when the Archimedean points are acknowledged to be central, and their implications are translated into institutions, political practices, and modes of personal behavior.
“Would you, Euthyphro, accept that there is an idea that will be present in all pious actions? And would you acknowledge that if we know this idea we will always be able to identify all pious actions? Don’t you know that this is the most important subject for our life?”
Always, all, never, only: these are the adverbs of a universalistic philosophy.
The pole of redemption wears many masks but follows a predictable pattern in which something that can be recaptured was lost, but philosophy is needed to identify the crime scene: the moment when we lost Being or when the solid underpinnings of tradition collapsed or when history went through different movements until it finally reached its self-awareness in one philosophical system.
Once this scene is recreated, the philosopher offers his service to guide those attuned to his peculiar sensibility to the tasks required to overcome the original loss. This is philosophy as nostos.
Let me present four important examples of this arc. Plato sees philosophy as a preparation for the journey back to an original womb. Dialectics and the need to provide an account for everything are the indispensable aspects of this preparation.
Heidegger believes that it is still possible to recover, in some ancient Greeks, the loss of Being that he discerns after Heraclitus and Parmenides. Philosophy went through a succession of progressions and fallbacks until it found its self-awareness in Hegel’s system.
Nietzsche believes that the history of the West has been a succession of missed opportunities in which, despite all the potentialities available at some moment, the wrong side prevailed: Socrates against Athens, Christianity against the Roman Empire; Luther and the Reformation against the Renaissance; the British against Napoleon. In the Genealogy, he clamors for “the redeeming man.”
Gadamer’s hermeneutics also partake in this pattern of universality and redemption. In language and its possibility for agreements, we obtain our redemption to carry on in a world where technology threatens humankind with spiritual desolation.
The pattern of universality and redemption capsizes in the realm of politics. In this chapter, I propose to discuss the relationship of hermeneutics and politics in light of several moments in Western culture and philosophy. I will base this inquiry on Gadamer’s ideas of hermeneutics and will begin with a discussion of what I consider his ontological commitments in order to assess their bearing on the question of politics.
It is worth noting the historical moment in which Gadamer chooses to locate the emergence of hermeneutics: the French Revolution. For Gadamer, this is the upheaval that announced the death knell of the Christian worldview, the juncture where “the common tradition of the Christian states of Europe” (Gadamer 2007, 235) lost its validity. Neither in the Renaissance nor in the Reformation and the wars of religion does Gadamer see the urgent need to erect hermeneutics as the new lodestar.
The French Revolution “was the hour of a universal hermeneutics through which the universe of the historical world was to be deciphered. The past as such had become alien” (Gadamer 2007, 235). We can add a reasonable implication of this position: since the past became alien, the present that found support in such a past also became alien.
Mysteriously, Gadamer’s philosophy bypasses the immediate memory of both world wars that preceded the formulation of his hermeneutic philosophy, and instead journeys to the ante bellum world on its quest for anchors. For Gadamer, the French Revolution demonstrated that tradition was an obstacle to better ethical and political forms of human relationships. Yet, rather than ask why tradition proved to be so deficient at sustaining a world, Gadamer’s inquiries are guided by another question: How should we reconstruct into a source of ethical guidance what is still there among the smoldering fragments? Regardless of the fractured reality that the French Revolution and the wars of the twentieth century ushered in, there are still ways to reclaim solid grounds by which to make sense of our world.
For Gadamer, hermeneutics thus appears at a moment of disorientation when the material and spiritual worlds of an old regime confronted the guillotine. Both the past and the present that it made possible were in disarray, and the revolutionary moment was the efflorescence of doubts.
If we are attuned to the abyss that the Socratic elenchus may open for its participants, we may also know the abyss that a disjointed culture faces. The hermeneutic task is (1) to decipher a past that (2) has become alien, in order (3) to restore the intelligibility of both the past and the present. This decipherment defines hermeneutics as restoration. The abyss of doubts must be avoided.
Only when our entire culture for the first time saw itself threatened by radical doubt and critique did hermeneutics become a matter of universal significance.
(Gadamer 2007, 237)
… when the historical tradition in its entirety up to the present moment moved into the position of having a similar remoteness, the problem of hermeneutics entered intrinsically into the philosophic awareness of its problems.
(Gadamer 2007, 235)
Against a cultural horizon of shattered foundations, and as an explicit attempt to build new ones in response, Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy constructs what I would call a linguistic ontology. It sees the world as constituted linguistically: “Language is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world.”3
But this description is presented as the surface portrayal of our being-in-the world. Going deeper, Gadamer’s ontology rests on a “primordial assumption” about “the meaningful of the given.” Two consequences follow from this assumption. First, this meaning is manifested through language, which is a mid-world between man and world, and second, this world is found through interpretation. The universality of this totality should not escape our notice. The given, the what is, or, in other words, Being, has meaning that can only be expressed in language. Language is the medium through which the meaning of the given will be expressed.
Thus understood, it seems that language is sequentially posterior to the given as in the Heideggerian formula: Language is the house of Being. But Gadamer’s view is different. Language is constitutive of the given, which has no existence before its creation through language. “Only in the light of interpretation does something become a fact, and only within processes of interpretation is an observation expressible.”4
The given may be there, but will not be noticed until language seizes it and molds it into an “expressible” meaning. Though the meaningfulness of the given is prior, it is still inert and invisible. Through language, meaning receives its life. Language is resurrection. It is also an ethical landscape that projects both backward and forward in the life of humankind.
Words in conversation or writing refer to something that “was originally announced or pronounced and that should be maintained as constituting a meaningful identity.” This “meaningful identity” means that “this thing being announced should be understood.”5
Interpretation emerges as the process through which understanding appears. Hence, the universality of hermeneutics: we all need to engage in interpretation in order to arrive at understanding. The text is “a mere intermediate product [Zwischenprodukt], a phase in the event of understanding.”6
The primordial meaningfulness of the given, realized in language, carries important consequences for Gadamer’s view of tradition. Tradition is a collective construct of all the meaningful texts that have gone through and prevailed in a long process of sedimentation until reaching not only the status of invisible background that establishes validity, but also the evaluative criteria that make a culture meaningful. As a collective construct that has prevailed, it is also a site of authority.
In Truth and Method, Gadamer’s interpretive universe concentrated on legal and canonical texts, a fact that E. D. Hirsch, Jr., registers early in his critique of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The authoritative texts that enter tradition and constitutes a “meaningful identity” are the grounds that shape our understanding of the world (Hirsh 1967, 245–264).7 In “Hermeneutics as a Practical Philosophy,” tradition is understood with reference to “sacred books, legal texts, or exemplary masterworks” (Gadamer 2007, 235). Hermeneutics seeks “to give an account of the exemplary character of that which it understands” (Gadamer 2007, 235).
In his essay “On the Truth of the Word,” the authority of what is established through some form of crystallization is formulated in detail. Gadamer’s concern is with the word that stands. “What is the ‘authentic’ word?” It is “a word that speaks, a telling [sagend, saying] word.” The “distinguishing characteristics that make a word truly ‘a word’: that it stands and that one stands by it.”8 A word that stands is one that conveys a message (saying forth). In the case of a court decision, it is a word that is applicable to all.9 In the juridical realm, “codifiability,” which is fixing in writing, shows that the legal directive “stands.”10
We are on reasonable grounds if we envision tradition as the aggregate of all those words, expressed in texts, which stood and still stand.
Aussage is an important concept in Gadamer’s hermeneutics and one that is apropos here. Why is it important? “Because treating the text as Aussage makes it possible to deal purely with what is said there as such without recourse to the occasionality of the author, and to have nothing but the explication of the text itself as a whole to make its meaning clear.”11
The example that Gadamer uses for an Aussage is a witness’ declaration. The three kinds of texts that are Aussage (declaration) are religious, juridical, and literary texts. This demarcation needs further specification. It turns out that hermeneutics stumbles in the presence of utterances that are still too fluid or boundless; namely, utterances that have not been integrated yet into an established web and its sedimentation.
This is the reason why myths and legends are “problems” for Gadamer’s hermeneutics. They are still too free. In comparison to the canonical texts of religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam), myths and legends “do not yet have the structure of a text, that is, of the word that stands.” Accordingly, the world of myth “will open up a completely different hermeneutical problematic.”12 Similarly, a legend “appears not yet to have entered into the firm stability of poetical-linguistic coherence, but rather drifts back and forth on a stream of wisdom, primeval in origin, which feeds on cultic thinking.”13
Notice the areas that Gadamer privileges: religion, jurisprudence, literature. Notice further the terms that are present in his language when writing about myths and legends: “structure,” “firm stability,” “poetical-linguistic coherence,” “drifting back and forth on a stream.” I propose that this is, precisely, what his view of tradition provides: structure, stability, and coherence. Seemingly, these elements are indispensable in the construction of the encompassing web within which things realize their primordial meaningfulness.
Gadamer solves the “hermeneutical problem” that myth and legend represent by bringing them into the realm of tradition and seeing them as belonging to the literary form of poetry. That is, they should be seen as part of a literary tradition. It is in this way that hermeneutical interpretation of myths “finds its legitimate place.”
What they [myths and legends] say to you resides in the declaration [Aussage] which they are, and which necessarily presses forward toward determinate form, perhaps even crystallizing into myth-interpreting poetry. In this way the hermeneutical problem of myth-exegesis finds its legitimate place among the forms of explicating the literary word.14
Granted: this seems to be the only pattern available to philosophy and all systems that manufacture or “find” meaning. What is alien or too free in its movements (“drifting back and forth”) is forcefully integrated into a linguistic apparatus that clothes it with new concepts and endows it with meaning. The danger is that when something is too foreign, too removed from the bounded landscape of tradition, it is no longer a “word that stands.” Expressed differently, it is a word without authority.
In our finitude, “the infinite dialogue is opened in the direction of the truth that we are.” (GR; 88) Just as myths and legends reside in the declaration that “necessarily presses forward toward determinate form” until it allows hermeneutics to locate “its legitimate place”—that is, until they serve themselves up to hermeneutic scrutiny—so also in dialogue we move toward “the truth that we are,” and which dialogue makes possible.
In dialogue, we go to what we already are. This is philosophy as nostos and redemption: the truth that we are, discovered in a dialogue guided by hermeneutic presuppositions, redeems us by leading us into our truth and genuine meaning.
In literature, the highest expression of truth is found in the poetic word. “The forming of poetic language presupposes the dissolution of all conventionally accepted rules … This means that in fact language is in the process of becoming and is not a rule-governed application of words, not a co-constructing of something in accordance with convention. No, the poetic word establishes [stiftet] meaning.”15
Gadamer’s tapestry about the truth of the word then proceeds to look for the ideality of words in all forms of literature. Gadamer finds this universal trait in “tone.” Tone is what “comes into being in the coherence contributed by poetic language …. The tone holds throughout the whole of the linguistic construction, exhibiting its tenacious power of determination above all in instances where discordant tones arise. A discordant tone [Misston] is not only a false tone but a tone that detracts from the whole mood.”
The tone is a sentinel: it watches over the coherence and harmony of the whole. Literature has “harmony in itself.” It does not need to “search for or find this harmony outside itself.”16 And then Gadamer, without pause, smuggles in his view of society: the same coherence of the whole that the poetic language conjures appears in human relationships. “In literature it is no different from life in human society.”17 Society is also seen as a coherent and harmonious whole where discordant notes have no place.
Here the assumptions merit attention: coherence, harmony, and the whole. Gadamer is aware of the vulnerable flanks this insistence exposes, addressing them head on: “It is therefore also a serious mistake to think that the universality of understanding, which I take as my starting assumption …, includes within it something like a harmonizing attitude or a basic conservatism with regard to our social world.”
He goes on to make room for critique: “[T]o understand ourselves with each other in this world, just as much presupposes critique and struggle with what has grown rigid or outdated as it does the recognition or defense of the existing orders of things.”18
Yet, it is no accident that references to critique or resistance are sparse and fleeting in Gadamer’s works. When ontological grounds posit a meaningfulness that will be realized through “the word that stands,” and it stands because it is integrated into a powerful system of authority, critiques will tend to be destabilizing; namely, the opposite of what stands.
The linguistic ontology presented earlier has ethical and political implications. The most important ethical consequence, I suggest, is the claim that agreement defines us.
Gadamer sees agreement as ontologically inscribed in our linguisticality. Agreement is the ontological outcome of conversations because it is antecedent to the conversation as well as its only goal.
Disagreements are misunderstandings that can be dispelled. The disorienting aspect that a conversation may elicit can and should be seized as an interruption in the quest of the ontological agreement that will be found because it is already woven into language. “We need to recognize that agreement in understanding is more primordial than misunderstanding, so that over and over again understanding leads us back into a reconstruction of agreement in understanding.”19
Gadamer is right that a “genuine conversation” transforms its participants. In such a conversation, “[t]he commonality between the partners is so very strong that the point is no longer the fact that I think this and you think that, but rather it involves the shared interpretation of the world which makes moral and social solidarity possible [emphasis added].”20 The problem rests on this “commonality” and “shared interpretation.”
Gadamer follows Marx and Nietzsche’s emphasis that we always find a world that is already structured in a particular way. But while Marx and Nietzsche see the world as constituting the wrong organization of human relationships and submerged in a linguistic code of values that obfuscates and hinders a truthful understanding of what is underneath, Gadamer’s path goes in a different direction.
Yes, the world we encounter is “already interpreted, already organized in its basic relations, into which experience steps as something new, upsetting what has led our expectations and undergoing reorganization itself in the upheaval.”21 But this world, already “interpreted” and “organized in its basic relations,” contains the keys for meaningful understanding.
Misunderstanding and strangeness are not the first factors; thus, avoiding misunderstanding cannot be regarded as the specific task of hermeneutics. Just the reverse is the case. Only the support of familiar and common understanding makes possible the venture into the alien, the lifting up of something out of the alien, and thus the broadening and enrichment of our own experience of the world.22
We need to recognize that agreement in understanding is more primordial than misunderstanding, so that over and over again understanding leads us back into a reconstruction of agreement in understanding.23
Marx and Nietzsche begin from the standpoint that there is something that makes the world, or our experience of it, questionable. This is also a Socratic presupposition: there must be something not quite clear in the oracular response. Gadamer’s starting point is different: our world, one anchored and defined by tradition, already contains the possibilities of a shared understanding. For we are a conversation, and the end of conversation is agreement, which is seen as a path toward solidarity.
Ultimately, the fragmentation elicited by different languages and our finitude, far from showing that reason is “fragmented,” shows the opposite. In our finitude, “the infinite dialogue is opened in the direction of the truth that we are.”24 It is no accident that Gadamer’s references to critique are sparse and fleeting. The emphasis is on recapturing the agreement that is potentially in all conversations. This explains Gadamer’s question: “[I]s it not, in fact, the case that every misunderstanding presupposes a ‘deep common accord’?”25
Conversation and agreement are the “truth that we are.” When the emphasis on agreement is moved to the interpretation of texts, we find a revealing statement in the context of Gadamer’s distinction between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis:
… the unconscious in the sense of what is implicit in our direct awareness, is the normal object of our hermeneutic concern. This means, however, that the task of understanding is restricted. It is restricted by the resistance offered by our statements or texts and is brought to an end by the regaining of shared possession of meaning, just as happens in a conversation when we try to shed light upon a difference of opinion of a misunderstanding.
(Gadamer 2007, 243)
We should notice this reference to “regaining” a “shared possession of meaning.” This shared possession is antecedent to the conversation and, when the dialogue is fruitful, this communality will be fulfilled. Further, though hermeneutics operates on two different levels—the level of interpreting texts and cultural artifacts and the level of conversations—both dimensions are guided by a “shared possession of meaning” which antecedes us.
The previous section serves as background to my reflections on tradition and politics. Tradition is both background and guardrails. It is the source of questions, the tribunal that stipulates the criteria that will validate claims. It is thus the sieve that sifts evaluative claims—hence a problem, which is also a major one.
Tradition carries the unmistaken air of authority and its consequences. It feeds on values, institutions, and practices that, through constant use, have acquired the weight of the past. Tradition is about anchors and orientation, which become referential points to assess arguments and actions. But all referential points are conceptual and, in the life of society, ethical demarcations, and there are no demarcations without exclusions. These exclusions could be so obdurate that they may even determine the questions to be formulated and the solutions to be allowed.
Aristotle is dwelling on this dimension of exclusions in traditions, when he argues that the problem with some political proposals is that, by being so novel, they have not occurred to anyone. “In framing an ideal we may assume what we wish, but should avoid impossibilities” (Aristotle 1996, 1265a 15).
This is clearly directed at Plato’s arguments in Republic and Laws. Finding the solid shelter of tradition, he declares: “Let us remember that we should not disregard the experience of ages; in the multitude of years … which they have.” And: “No one else has introduced such novelties as the community of women and children, or public tables for women …” (Aristotle 1996, 1266a 35).
The “experience of ages,” which is another way of referring to tradition, serves as a foundation to exclude some proposals and to dismiss them as too novel or simply unfeasible.
Exclusion has a dark aspect: for it also refers to the silencing of voices. In Politics, Aristotle refers to “Phaleas of Chalcedon, who was the first to affirm that the citizens of a state ought to have equal possessions” (Aristotle 1996, 1266a 40).
But we are in the dark about Phaleas of Chalcedon, and others, as their voices are refracted through the classificatory prism of Aristotelian philosophy in a process where distortions may occur. What happens when these voices do not have refracting lenses? The histories and religious texts of the Incas, for example, were burned by the invaders. How can these voices be reclaimed and made part of a “tradition”?
Fortunately, in the Greek case we have Solon, even if only in fragmented shards of his poetry which can be pieced together to reconstruct something approaching a coherent picture. Yet, neither Solon nor Cleisthenes is a source of political inquiries for Plato or Aristotle. As always, philosophers select and narrow the complexity of inherited events. In the West, this narrowing is what has been infused with the reverence of tradition. Etymologically, tradition, from the Latin verb tradere, means to hand over but also means to betray.
I suggest that we conceive of tradition as a pressing down, a crushing of richness and complex arguments through the conceptual power of classifications, hierarchies, and the association of political modes of organization to other concepts and ways of life. Thus, oligarchy is associated with wealth and the few; timocracy, with courage and warriors; and democracy, with liberty and the many.
In both Plato and Aristotle’s description, democracy is the only regime that requires further specification. It is one where people want to live in whatever way they like. This is another way of saying that democracy lacks controls, is potentially anarchic, and prone to injustices. Plato is more categorical in his analogies: democracy is like a beast.26
The previous traits are part and parcel of tradition, which is in turn a core principle of philosophical hermeneutics, and lead us to consider the type of philosophy that hermeneutics claims to be. Socrates was the first emblem, but the spiritual predicament precedes him: philosophy and alienation go together. It is in dissatisfaction, spiritual anxiety, and suspicion of the superiority of his analytical criteria that Socrates undertook his philosophical mission and saw it as a challenge to the oracular response that he was the wisest among human beings.
Nietzsche claims that there must be several centuries between the philosopher and his age. Alain Badiou is right in his assertion that “there is no philosophy without the discontent of thinking in its confrontation with the world as it is” (Badiou 2005, 29). Contrary to this predicament, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is explicitly articulated as both a reaction to alienation and an effort to overcome it.
My argument so far is that tradition, which exercises a tremendous power over the way that political affairs are carried out, is a construct of sedimentation, exclusions, and the silencing of voices. Its authority tends to depend on the force of time and the habits that enclose a person’s spiritual horizon.
But there is an angle that puts in sharp relief an unaddressed question in Gadamer’s hermeneutics and in any inquiry that gets its criteria from the established linguistic and ethical settlements of tradition. Socrates is emblematic of this question as the first living conflict between hermeneutics and politics. He is the first hermeneuticist and his examinations did not end well even in a setting that was rather exemplary for its tolerance. This is the question: Contra Gadamer, how should the interpreter proceed when tradition lacks the resources to entertain some legitimate questions and even less to answer them?
Politics is also a quest for anchors, but these operate on a different plane. In this section, I will offer my view of politics and its possible connection to hermeneutics.
I see politics as (1) the organization of conflicts and power through concepts, practices, and institutions; and (2) as a landscape of resistance. Politics as a field of forces that include power and resistance should be seen as a text, in the original meaning of the word “text” that Gadamer, in another context, identifies “an inter-wovenness of threads that does not ever again allow the individual threads to emerge” (Gadamer 1980, 6).
Power includes but does not enclose resistance, which contains the possibility of rupturing the confining boundaries of power. In the arena of power, politics is both a physical and ethical demarcation. Physically, it demarcates some material areas (the assembly, for example) as the places where deliberation will take place. Ethically, it demarcates the rules that will guide deliberations and establishes the norms and goals that should be binding on the community.
In the domain of resistance, politics is the apprehension of visibility. It is the process by which an individual (a dissident) or a group transforms its invisibility into visibility by addressing public institutions. It is an eruption that shatters existing and sedimented views as well as an enactment: protests, signing petitions, etc.
If we accept that power and the concepts it uses possess both the weight of a dominant reasoning and its criteria to validate claims, my characterization of politics carries with it the question of tradition and all its potentialities and concomitant problems. As the organization of power, politics suggests an effort to remove chaos from social relationships and keep it at bay. As a landscape of resistance, politics is fated to instability. Politics could well be the institutionalization of the chaos of oppression under a repressive establishment. In some cases, politics follows a certain pattern in which a fractured landscape imposes either the need for new concepts or the imposition of concepts that are present but neglected. I will use the Solonian experience to illustrate some aspects of these definitions.
Solon dwelt in an arena of contention where the materiality of power was expressed in serfdom and slavery, and where resistance took the form of stasis—civil war. Against this materiality, Solon develops an ethical sensibility: there is a sinister disposition in wealth, which has no satiety. And this disposition will necessarily look for entities—people, lands, loans—which will be integrated into wealth and its essential trait: it is never satisfied with whatever property it may have. It demands more. Wealth, without satiety, is excess (koros), which leads to hubris, and then to strife.
Lawlessness brings the city countless ills, but Lawfulness (eunomia) reveals all that is orderly and fitting, and often places fetters round the unjust. She … puts a stop to excess, weakens insolence…Under her all things among men are fitting and rational.27
That is to say, Solon analyzes the contentious situation, integrates it into the conceptual web of eunomia, koros, hubris, strife, etc., and sees the concept of eunomia as a transcendent principle of justice. It is the standard by which social relations must abide.
It is possible to argue that the invocation of eunomia, as a concept already present in the Attic cultural context but reshaped by Solon, is also a confirmation of the potentialities of the existing tradition, but we should be careful. The concept of eunomia is definitely one that is pregnant with many future trajectories, but these are conflicting possibilities.
The rich could certainly claim that eunomia is perfectly at home with serfdom and slavery. The slave owners of the American South believed in such an order, and they even marshaled the Bible to their cause.
This seems to be the key: a concept may contain opposing options, but the same concept may lack the inner resources to settle the conflict. In a soil where the conflicts are already seared into the concepts, how does one choose?
Solon interprets eunomia as consisting of an order of cooperation where the dignity of people should not be lacerated. Inexorably, this cooperation requires a new institutional setting—the court system. The telos of cooperation based on recognition was the ethical order, already implicit in eunomia, but made possible as an act of arbitration, which was also an imposition.
Solon, in other words, privileges some options found in eunomia and imposes them by creating a new configuration of power. This new configuration is not an agreement elicited by a conversation anchored on a shared fund of values as in Gadamer’s tradition. The new configuration was fashioned by (1) the resistance that the poor, making themselves visible, brought to bear on the value system of the rich and its consequences; (2) a state of contention where no group was able to impose its will; (3) the awareness that a new settlement was needed as a precondition for living under new and just circumstances; and (4) a willingness to abide by this new settlement. The tradition of “good birth” that sustained the rich showed itself to be unsustainable and of little help.
We can extract a lesson here: The triumph of some possibilities enmeshed in tradition represents not only a new articulation inside tradition but, more importantly, the defeat of some options that power has transformed into the dominant ones. Tradition is not a marketplace of values and events, all of them holding an equal status and transparently available to the moral gaze of citizens and thinkers. Tradition also obscures and even buries some values, not to mention events. It is not clear that these values or events will ever be recovered. Without delving for lack of space into my next claim, I assert that dialectics and its belief that things are retained and molded into a new and higher form is a hopeless fiction.
Solon’s example suggests that politics may require the upheaval of previous understandings as well as the creation of new ethical definitions, and that these new definitions must be translated into institutional settlements. Politics tends to institute some form of authority, which is premised on explicit values that bring hierarchies into human relations. Equality privileges the demos; inequality privileges the oligarchs; the Platonic good privileges the philosopher.
Once we have a new context for political activities, politics should not forget its own fragility and constant need for reconstitution. Ideally, politics should also be conceived as awareness that there are junctures in which radical proposals must be considered, even when these proposals shall and must transform the status quo. With this, we have arrived at a central paradox of democratic politics. It is the paradox of the potentially destabilizing relationship of democratic politics and power.
Politics requires stability (some values, institutions, and procedures), and stability tends to crystallize into a power configuration. It is the nature of power to reproduce its own legitimacy, while politics should include its own mechanism to transform itself through new values, institutions, and procedures. Power gravitates toward centers of rest; politics is more fluid. These are conflictive tendencies ontologically inscribed in democratic politics; and it is a paradox not meant to be solved, but only acknowledged in the hope (no certainty here) that democratic politics will be aware of it in order to stall or slow down the tendency toward ossification.
This paradox is compounded by another one: it appears that power has a tendency to make itself invisible through its visibility. This means that power shapes the subjectivities under its thrall in such a way that they no longer see it. Power normalizes its subjects to remove itself from critical scrutiny.
Solon and Socrates challenged the existing configuration of power that conformed their spiritual and material horizon. Solon did it through a new ethical sensibility and institutional order; Socrates, through new terms, questions, and modes of philosophizing. In both cases, tradition was helpless since it was, precisely, in question.
In a world marred by strange secular and religious fundamentalisms, the reality of fragility28 in the view of politics sketched earlier, as well as in philosophical arguments, is no trivial platitude. Rather, it is a standpoint that calls for a new sensibility that makes us suspicious of any philosophical language claiming to speak in the name of Being, history or the downtrodden. It also suggests a further investigation into the politics of axioms as presented by Alain Badiou and into the ramifications of dissensus as defined by Jacques Ranciere. As a preliminary clue, I propose that, while philosophical arguments may offer values for the consideration of democratic politics, they must be regarded as offers and not axioms. Likewise, and taking our cue from Plato, there is no system of political organization, no ideal city, that participates in eternity. Fragility acknowledges that even democratic polities find their source in a sifting of the past consisting of both preservation and willful destruction, a sifting itself informed by values that are no more necessary or eternal than the location from which they emerged.