Royce and Gadamer on Interpretation as the Constitution of Community

Although Josiah Royce never employed the term "hermeneutics," the centrality of "interpretation" in both his and Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophies invites bringing these two thinkers into dialogue. Beyond this commonality, though, such dialogue is fruitful, I will suggest, because Royce calls into question at least three central features of Gadamer's hermeneutics: (1) the givenness of "tradition," and with it "community," (2) the givenness of "self," and (3) the primacy of texts, taken broadly as any object of interpretation. That is, first, while Gadamer assumes the givenness of tradition and community within the fore-structure of understanding, such are highly problematic for Royce and, instead, are seen as continuously constituted and renewed through the processes of interpretation. Second, and similarly, Gadamer assumes the givenness of "self," while for Royce "self," too, is highly problematic. Third, while for Gadamer the central task of hermeneutics remains getting at the meaning of texts, the disclosure of Being in and through texts, interpretation for Royce is first and foremost the artistic constitution of community, and always, simultaneously, the constitution of selves.

Let me clarify at the beginning that although Gadamer speaks little about "community," and Royce, little about "tradition," I take these terms to be connected, at least insofar as "tradition" means always the traditions of some specifiable community, and "communities" are identifiable at least in terms of their traditions, and they function in comparable ways in each one's theory of interpretation. Hence, I will use the terms together to identify a significant region for comparison of the two thinkers.

John D. Caputo has already well identified the normative, regulative function of "tradition" in Gadamer's hermeneutics, how it serves to constrain the disclosure of a text, by contrast to what Caputo takes to be the more radical sort of disclosure found in Martin Heidegger's later notion of Ereignis and Jacques Derrida's "dissemination": Gadamer, he claims,

backs off from the deeper and more radical side of Heidegger's thought. In the end . . . Gadamer remains attached to the tradition as the bearer of eternal truths, which in a way does nothing more than modify Plato and Hegel from a Heideggerian standpoint. Gadamer's hermeneutics is traditionalism and the philosophy of eternal truth pushed to its historical limits. . . . For Gadamer, the only real question is how meaning and truth get passed along and handed down (trans-dare). . . .

Gadamer wants to hold the flux in check, to ease the difficulty in history, to keep the tradition under the rule of an unchanging base content (Gehalt) which is constantly being transmitted, to see to it that the transformations of the tradition are contained by its essential content. The truth of the tradition is never put in question, only the dynamics of its communication, extension, renewal, and constant revivification. . . . Here is a "play" made safe by recollection. It is not the ominous world-play of Heidegger or the uncontrollable play of dissemination in Derrida. . . . In this play the ball always remains in bounds. (111-13)

Caputo goes too far in his criticisms of Gadamer. James Risser has admirably demonstrated how Gadamer's notion of tradition is dynamic, living, and pluralistic, and he has valiantly defended Gadamer's talk about "preserving tradition," not as a conservatism, but as a "holding open" to the voice of the other (71-73), although Risser's textual support for this defense is wanting. Furthermore, interpretation clearly does not just "preserve tradition": it confronts tradition with the alterity of the text in a dialectical play of continuity and disruption (e.g., Gadamer 1999, 267-70), "familiarity and strangeness" (295). Nonetheless, Caputo's central point holds: "tradition" in Gadamer's hermeneutics remains as something, in some sense, already there. That is, tradition, along with prejudice, is taken for granted, as already present, already constituted and given in some more or less unitary ways, within the fore-structure of understanding...