Gadamer and Hermeneutics

Science, Culture, Literature

Hugh J. Silverman, Hugh J. Silverman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134866342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This title, first published in 1991, opens with an account by Gadamer of his own life and work and their relation to the achievements of hermeneutics. Building upon the key theme of dialogue, Gadamer and Hermeneutics provides a series of essays, either linked Gadamer to other major contemporary philosophers or focusing on a given Gadamerian theme. This book will be of interest to students of literary theory.

PART I
GADAMER/GADAMER

Chapter 1

GADAMER ON GADAMER

 

Hans-Georg Gadamer

 

 

Translated by Birgit Schaaf and Gary E. Aylesworth

In my view my studies in Greek philosophy are the most independent part of my philosophical work. Although the dissertation of the twenty-two year-old student was based upon an independent study of Plato’s complete works, it still followed the path of my teacher at that time, Paul Natorp, whose ideas on the theme of hedone (pleasure) I wanted to work out. Later I began to see the significance of Greek philosophy, especially in light of Aristotelian ethics. I had come to be familiar with it through Nicolai Hartmann, who at that time found in Aristotle a kind of phenomenological help-mate in his break with Neokantianism (inspired by Max Scheler). But my real introduction to the understanding of Aristotle, and his significance for our understanding of the world, I owe to my encounter with Martin Heidegger in the summer of 1923.

At that time, it dawned upon me that one has to conceive of Aristotelian ethics as a true fulfillment of the Socratic challenge, which Plato had placed at the center of his dialogues as the Socratic question of the good. When, in 1927, I finished my philological studies with the “Staatsexamen,” I took up once again the larger project concerning the Socratic question of the good in Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy. But circumstances compelled me to great haste, for Heidegger let me know that he would probably leave Marburg and return to Freiburg. So it happened that only the first part of the project was carried out. It was published in 1931 under the title Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations of the Philebus (Plato’s dialektische Ethik: Phaenomenologische Interpretationen zum Philebos).¹ This book, therefore, was my first contribution to Plato scholarship, and it was to take me fifty years until I published, as a kind of provisional conclusion, a treatise in the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften called The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (English trans. 1986).

Today perhaps a brief explanation is necessary as to what the subtitle Phenomenological Interpretations was supposed to mean at the time. One must imagine the philosophical situation in Germany after World War I. This was the end of an age: the age of liberalism, the unlimited belief in progress, and the unquestioned leadership of science within cultural life. All of this perished in the War’s battles of materiel. The young generation returning to the universities after the war could no longer be convinced of these values. This also became apparent in philosophy. The Neokantian philosophy, which was oriented upon the fact of science and dominated the German rostrum, had lost its credibility for us youth.

The Marburg school of Neokantian philosophy, in which I had been brought up, was also in the process of dissolving. My teacher, Paul Natorp, was trying to catch the primordial-concrete with the development of his General Logic. Another of my teachers, Nicolai Hartmann, was on the verge of a complete break with transcendental idealism. But more important were the effects produced by Dostoevsky and the German Diederichs-edition of Soren Kierkegaard’s writings. To a critical youth, Kierkegaard imparted the concept of existence in the emphatic sense as a clarion call. In his critique of Hegel’s ideal of absolute knowledge, Kierkegaard asserts that “the absolute professor in Berlin has forgotten about existing.” This critique began to be levelled against Neokantianism and was combined with the general mood of cultural criticism that prevailed throughout an impoverished Germany. It was thus that the phenomenology founded by Husserl and effectively represented by Max Scheler became a critical and revolutionary rallying cry.

If today one wants to describe from a distance what the catchphrase “to the things themselves,” formulated by Husserl, meant, it was a program against the subtle argumentation of epistemology which sought to justify science in terms of transcendental philosophy. Against this sort of epistemology, Husserl set the description of phenomena, rejecting all psychological constructions and argumentations that were not intuitively demonstrable. He used to say in his seminar: “No large bills, gentlemen, small change.” That was new, indeed, but not exactly a battle-cry. In contrast, the appearance in Marburg of the young Privatdozent and young professor Heidegger was something like a revolution. Here, Husserl’s phenomenology, which understood itself as transcendental philosophy, was taken with enormous energy back to its basic questions—questions that moved us. This was what Heidegger had in mind when once, in the margin of a book by Husserl in which the catchphrase “to the things themselves” was repeatedly used, he wrote “We want to take Husserl at his word.”

“The things themselves”: This meant more than just farewell to the traditional conceptual language of transcendental philosophy and its fundamental orientation towards the fact of science rather than phenomena. Husserl himself had paved the way for this turn, and had given it to this day an ever more articulate expression in the new word “Lebenswelt.” The rejection of the scientifically limited concept of knowledge and truth sent the young Heidegger, driven by religious doubts and questions of existence, into the broad fields of historical thinking that Wilhelm Dilthey had opposed to transcendental philosophy. What is more, he there encountered Kierkegaard, who, in his vehement critique of the lukewarm Christianity of his native Denmark, demanded a halt to understanding “from a distance.” What had been a Christian thinker’s critical stance against the Church became for Heidegger, and for us, a critical turn against academic philosophy: the history of problems in Neokantianism and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. This explains the title and subtitle of my first book. In reality, it was a thoroughly academic Habilitationschrift that dealt with the Platonic dialectic and its special development in Plato’s Philebus. However, the formula “dialectical ethics” indicates an intention that remains throughout all of my later work.

When one found oneself exposed to the radicality of Heidegger’s energetic questioning, one could not help but remember the ancient task of ethics, the practical philosophy that in theory and practice constitutes a unity that is hardly graspable. This was the first effect of Heidegger in Marburg. And this intention, inspired by Kierkegaard, was later strengthened in Being and Time. In addition, there was the factor of Protestant theology, for whom discourse about God had become a problem. Moreover, the authenticity of Dasein was for the most part understood in a moralistic sense. The question I asked myself was how one could speak of an ethics in Plato’s adoption of the Socratic question and Socratic dialectic. I attempted to clarify this through phenomenological methods. That meant, at first, going back to the original sense of dialectic as Plato used the word. There, dialectic means the art of leading a conversation. The Socratic dialogue and the Socratic question of the good was the life-worldly background from which Plato could call philosophy “dialectic” in the first place. I tried to make this life-worldly background speak anew in the Germany of the 1920s.

In this Germany of the 1920s the Socratic question had to reveal, with an inner necessity, the weakness and powerlessness of our own national consciousness. Thus in those years, in classical studies as well as in philosophy, there developed an interest in the “political” Plato, in his political attitude and the political intentions of his philosophy. This certainly also stands in the background of my own first book. It was meant to be a proper journeyman’s work, seeking to win back the original sense of philosophy, even if in an academic guise, in Plato himself. That allowed me to completely subordinate my philological-historical research to my interests in the subject-matter, and also to set aside the problematic of what was then known as “value-ethics.” It allowed me, where possible, to go back to the subject matter, to the phenomena as they showed themselves undogmatically, in an undisguised way, to the questioning gaze of philosophy. Phenomenological Interpretations thus means a description of the phenomena themselves, which seeks on this basis the conceptual expression that the phenomena have found in Platonic thought.

I then found myself confronted with a problem that would later lead me to a fundamental problem of hermeneutics—the linguisticality of understanding. How is it possible, I asked myself at the time, to make a Greek text like Plato’s Philebus, a text which asks about the good in human life, speak anew from the fundamental experiences of our own life-world? It was necessary to make the concepts used by the Greeks speak again. If we were simply to translate and repeat the Greek concepts, we would not discover ourselves in them. That seemed to me to be the limit for Werner Jaeger’s school of classical philology. If, for example, we say “pleasure” for the Greek word hedonē, we really fail to understand that life must choose whether to take pleasure or knowledge as the highest. To choose pleasure or knowledge—what do we understand here? Everything which is connected with the sweetness of life and which constitutes its joys seems to be included in the Greek hedonē. It is a truly expansive world-field that extends into the incomprehensibility of well-being and non-well-being. Here we already stand in the midst of the problematic of the Socratic dialogue. We see that it is necessary to make distinctions within the manifold of pleasure and happiness.

Furthermore, we must distinguish between the forms of knowledge. In Greek it is called episteme, techne, phronesis, sophia, and nous, which we can render as knowledge, know-how, discretion, sense and understanding, reason and rationality. These words indicate a more or less common feature which has been summarized by the Greeks in the notion of logos and which we might rather call intelligence (Geistigkeit), but certainly not science. In this respect we immediately understand the problematic of the Platonic dialogue as a tension between impulse (Drang) and mind (Geist), and no historicism will succeed in estranging this understanding.

In addition, there is the special hermeneutical problem as to what the written retrieval and repeated awakening of the figure of Socrates means in Plato’s writing, years and decades after Socrates’ death. This is a philosophical way of speaking that operates with manifold shifts of perspective, and which cannot be translated into the later conceptual language of Aristotle without damage. What was imparted to me by Heidegger’s introduction to Aristotle’s thought in ethics, rhetoric, physics, and metaphysics had to be put to a special kind of test in the Platonic dialogue. For here the language of concepts does not predominate. If anything distinguishes the form of Plato’s philosophical expression, it is the obvious and wonderful agreement between logos and ergon, between discourse and being, comprehension and action.

It was thus that I first pursued the inner links between the Socratic dialogue as it occurs in Plato and the dialectic that Plato puts into Socrates’ mouth, with which he at the same time surpasses the persona of Socrates. My first book on Plato therefore dealt with the connection between dialectic and dialogue in Plato’s collected works. It also dealt with the special form in which the Philebus sought to bring to word, in its true expression, the problem of the relation between hedone and episteme, between the urge of life and the life guided by consciousness. My later works have illuminated the extraordinary, many-faceted wealth of this difficult dialogue from Plato’s latest and richest period through many separate contributions. They have developed the historical background just as much as the direct orientation toward the subject-matter.

It is a question of primary importance as to what the Socratic turn meant for the classical philosophy of Athens, and in which sense Socratic questioning dominates this turn. If one naively follows the dominant opinion, the matter looks very curious. According to this opinion, Socrates taught that virtue is knowledge. Also, in the course of his dialectical ascent, Plato described the idea of the good (in mysterious allusions to something lying behind the manifold of moral phenomena) as the ultimate and highest idea, which is supposedly the highest principle of being for the universe, the state, and the human soul. Against this, Aristotle opposed a decisive critique under the famous formula “Plato is my friend, but the truth is my friend even more.” He denied that one could consider the idea of the good as a universal principle of being, which is supposed to hold in the same way for theoretical knowledge as for practical knowledge and human activity. But what is the meaning of this radical critique that Aristotle has levelled in his ethics, and also against the idea of the good and the Platonic doctrine of ideas in general?

To answer that what concerns Aristotle in the fundamental question of human activity is different from what concerns Plato is hardly satisfactory. It is certainly correct that Aristotle grounds the independence of practical philosophy on the fact that human existence, in all its limitations, conditions and finitude, is still guided in all its doings by the question of the good—as indicated in the first sentence of the Ethics. However, Plato himself made the question of the good for human existence explicitly thematic in the Philebus. Ever since Socrates, it has been unavoidable to ask this question, and even more unavoidable to know that all men must ask it. What human life is not obligated to put the question of the Philebus to itself: whether its exalted moments are the fulfillment of human desires and urges, or rather the different enchantment of an open vista upon what is, and is as good as it is beautiful?

Considering the evidence of these similarities, the traditional opposition between Plato and Aristotle could be less and less confirmed. For both are ruled by the enduring urgency of the Socratic question of the good. Thus I would certainly adhere to the guiding thesis, as in my first book, that the Platonic dialogues can be depicted in their content on the conceptual level of Aristotelian teachings. Nevertheless I would admit that the real involvement in a Socratic dialogue, composed for us by Plato, moves us closer to the subject-matter than any conceptual fixation ever could. Today I would see the unique contemporaneity (Aktualität) of the Platonic dialogues precisely in the fact that they transcend all ages almost in the same way as great masterpieces of art. The indissoluble entanglement of theoretical and practical-political orientations of life, of theoretical and practical knowledge, testifies to the continuity of the Socratic question that binds Plato and Aristotle to one another, and both to every human present (Gegenwart). We, too, should not be on the lookout for abstract alternatives when we ask ourselves whether, in the age of science, we can still pursue metaphysics or whether we must overcome it. As practical metaphysics, both of our tasks will remain: to follow the path of knowledge and to think beyond what science has to say. This is what I vaguely had in mind when I gave my first book about Plato’s Philebus the title Plato’s Dialectical Ethics.

If language has its authentic life only in conversation, then the Platonic dialogue will awaken a living discussion now as before, and will achieve the fertile fusion of all horizons in which, questioning and searching, we must find our way in our own world.

PART II
PLATO/HEIDEGGER/GADAMER

Chapter 2

PLATO AS IMPULSE AND OBSTACLE IN GADAMER’S DEVELOPMENT OF A HERMENEUTICAL THEORY

P. Christopher Smith

Kein Ding sei wo das Wort gebricht.

(Where the word breaks off, there is no thing.)

—Stefan George

It would be only consistent to approach Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory, whose key concept is “histori...