Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy

The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Pol Vandevelde, Arun Iyer, Arun Iyer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474275002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy collects together Gadamer's remaining important untranslated writings on the problem of history and the major philosophical traditions of the 20th century from the standpoint of hermeneutics. In these writings, Gadamer examines important thinkers as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Bourdieu and Habermas and their ongoing legacies. This volume also includes a preface by the editors, who are also the translators, presenting the structure of the volume, a substantial introductionsituating Gadamer's particular project and examining the place of hermeneutics vis-a-vis the disciplines of history and philosophy in the 20th century. The translation is followed by a glossary of German terms and Greek and Latin expressions, as well as a bibliography of all the works cited and alluded to by Gadamer.

Part One

History as a Problem: On Being Historically Affected

1

Is There a Causality in History? (1964)¹

[107] The modern concept of causality has its own right to a home in the circle of concepts that were originally coined for the natural sciences. This is because the mode of being of nature as it appears in our experience is constituted in such a way that it can only be conceived as a sequential connection of cause and effect. This is the reason why Kant counted causality among the originary concepts of our understanding, those that in fact make our very experience a priori possible. It is indeed true that experience and the natural sciences founded upon experience carry with them the following assumption about the being of nature: that which is without foundation, the accidental, the miraculous has no place in it. To speak with Kant, nature is nothing other than ‘matter submitted to laws’. It is easy to see that the principle of causality in this sense belongs to the fabric of nature as such. For, a natural connection that would be interrupted by unforeseeable intrusions coming from another order would destroy the unity of experience, making it impossible thereby to anticipate the course of things. It would thus destroy the presupposition that underlies the management of the forces of nature in the service of human purposes, what we call technology.

It can be said, though, that experience teaches us precisely that the unpredictable arbitrariness of human beings constantly intervenes in the course of nature and that, nevertheless, it is possible to some extent to anticipate the course of things. Thus, for example, we make prognoses about economic and social developments, although we are undoubtedly dealing with the effects of free human decisions here. The fact that the social action of human beings – despite their inner consciousness of being free – allows for predictions to be made at least in general, seems to prove that human nature itself remains a member of the complex of nature into which everything fits nicely.

Yet, the experience of history is something completely different. To apply the concept of causality here is in fact to pose a problem. For, history is a course of things, a complex of events that is not primarily experienced in the mode of planning, expecting and anticipating – however uncertain this anticipation may be. Rather, history as a complex of events is always experienced fundamentally as something that has already happened. This is why such a complex of events belongs to a completely different [108] dimension. Here, the free decisions by individuals do not enter into a calculation the result of which is foreseeable. The free decision is rather experienced here as what was not to be predicted and made history precisely because it happened as it happened. These are Ranke’s ‘scenes of liberty’² out of which world history is made. This formulation makes history appear as a staged drama. In it, there are scenes, which initiate the affected spectators into a new direction taken by the course of things. It may be that the course of things is determined in general by the given circumstances in such a way that many possibilities are foreclosed and only a few open. Yet, the complex in which world history fits is anything but knowable or even foreseeable in its necessity. The complex does not have the character of a connection between cause and effect in the way it underlies our knowledge and calculation of the course of nature. If it is an old fundamental principle of the knowledge of nature that the cause must be equal to the effect, the opposite is true when it comes to the experience of history: small causes have huge consequences. It obviously belongs to the experience of those who stand within history that it surprises them. Never do they possess an adequate awareness of what is the case. For any situation in which they find themselves, there are already in fact infinitely many things that have been decided beforehand, of which they know nothing. The behaviour of individuals in an unrepeatable moment of their action is certainly not that of complete cluelessness or total blindness. They try to come to grips with the situation in which they find themselves and find the right course of action, do what is required and handle the situation in the desired sense. Yet, ‘what are hopes, what are plans that human beings, in their transience, build on grounds so fleeting?’³ Human beings have no solid ground. What truly is the case, nobody knows exactly. These are the unfathomable beginnings out of which ensues what will take hold of the future. These beginnings are not known, even to those, and perhaps least of all to those who occupy ‘leading’ positions in political or economic life. These people know what is planned, what is going on, what is expected. What they necessarily forget is what is to be expected, that is to say, what cannot be predicted, what was not planned, what is unforeseen. Naturally, people in political life need a special sense for opportunities and possibilities, a nose for what is coming. Salespeople too, let alone economic leaders and political leaders, must have something similar. Yet, how little is all of this a knowledge, how little is it a certainty, and how much is it an instantaneous adaptation to changing situations or the capacity always to wrestle something positive from any event? The opportunist is always far closer to the reality of history than the dogmatist.

In this situation, what can ‘the causality in history’ mean? [109] Obviously it is the question of something unknown that handicaps the consciousness of human freedom and responsibility in a specific way. We must only look for it in our own concrete attitudes [Gestalten], for example in the oppressive weight of guilt. The question of who and what was at fault for things turning out badly is not only a question that unavoidably imposes itself upon us. It is also and primarily a question that leaves us at a loss, even awakening in us an internal resistance. As if we can be at fault for something that we did not want and certainly did not intend in that way. What does historical responsibility mean? Is it not the dark unintelligibility of destiny that lets the wretched feel guilt?⁴ What is historical experience if not a mixture of belated comprehension and regret?

What about the life of the individual? Indeed, historical experience is always also an experience of the individual. Anyone will be affected by what happens on a large scale even if this experience is, for the individual, that of a guiltless suffering – what we call destiny. Does this not mean that it is not just ‘evil’ deeds – what were meant and intended in an evil manner – that recoil upon us having their undeniable existence in comprehension and regret, guilt and punishment? Is it also the same in the life of individuals, namely that they also regret what they did not foresee, precisely because they did not foresee what resulted from their deeds? Even the moral problematic is not so simple as if it were just a matter of good or evil intent, the unforeseen consequences being of no weight. It is the merit of the great sociologist Max Weber to have pointed out the opposition between an ethics of intention [Gesinnung] and an ethics of responsibility and, through this distinction, to have elaborated the problem we are dealing with here in clear terms. He has shown that not having knowledge when one can know is itself blameworthy. This is an uncontestable truth, but it receives its full acuteness only in this: the limits of what one can know or could have known weigh heavily on the mind of someone with a sensitive conscience.

Thus, the question of causality in history is affected by a schism. On the one hand, causality appears as what limits and threatens human freedom and responsibility, leading to the experience of an impotence in the face of history and an attitude of a socio-political fatalism that drives headlong into the ‘unpolitical’. On the other hand, causality in history is dictated by the wish and the will to penetrate with the light of understanding and the conscientiousness of knowledge even the enigmatic happening that produces history and to determine its course. This wish and this will even lead to the audacious hope of political utopianism that humanity having attained its emancipation will one day take its destiny into its own hands and make its way into the future with scientific exactitude. These are the two extremes that make visible to us the question of the causality in history. [110] Is there a true middle way here, which is neither the one nor the other, or is the whole alternative skewed? Perhaps the whole question starts from presuppositions that are not suited to the condition humaine, the fundamental human constitution in its greatness and misery.

One must ask these questions. For, it could very well be that the modern concept of causality, which finds its classical expression in seventeenth-century mechanics and receives its philosophical legitimacy in the eighteenth century through Hume and Kant, is a genuine constitutive category when it comes to natural events. However, it may affect what happens in human affairs, what we call history, in fact only at the margins and not in its essence. If one ventures to ask these questions, one has, first, to examine the very concept of causality itself.

Concepts are not arbitrary tools of human understanding by which it organizes or controls experiences. Rather, concepts have always already grown out of experience; they articulate our understanding of the world and predelineate thereby the course of experience. Thus, with any concept through which we think, a pre-decision has already been made, whose legitimacy we no longer verify. To become aware of this pre-decision is to acquire a new intellectual freedom; it means seeing new questions and opening new paths for solving old problems. When we question in this sense the provenance of the concept of causality and seek out the original conceptual context to which it belongs and out of which it acquires its precise determination, it means that we uncover pre-judgements, under which the question of causality in history already stands. It is indeed always so and it turns the business of philosophy into a genuine contribution toward bringing human beings to understand themselves. This is the case even in this age of unconditional faith in science, which no longer concedes to philosophy any real knowledge of its own. Were it the case that the answers to the questions that we raised lie under the jurisdiction of scientific methodology alone, then philosophy may not be able at all to compete with the sciences. In fact, philosophy starts earlier, there where no questions have been raised yet, with the concepts through which we think and which are in general unquestionably obvious.

What philosophical reflection discovers is that there ar...