Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years After Gadamer's Truth and Method

2. Truth, Method, and Transcendence

25 2 Truth, Method, and Transcendence Nicholas Davey Our thinking is never satisfied with what one means in saying this or that. Thinking constantly points beyond itself. —Hans-Georg Gadamer In one of the most methodologically significant passages of Truth and Method, Gadamer writes, To be historically aware means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete. All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pre-given, what with Hegel we call “substance,” because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility for understanding tradition whatsoever in its historical alterity . This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it.1 It would be tempting to read this passage as a reinvocation of an Identit ätsphilosophie in which the journey of prodigal subjective consciousness culminates in a return to its foundation, that is, objective consciousness. In fact, Gadamer celebrates no such return. The passage is a subtle celebration of dialogism which is made possible by a moment of transcendence . The “discovery in all that is subjective (of) the substantiality that determines it” is not the dissolution of subjectivity. To the contrary, it amounts to the philosophical discovery of subjectivity, for reflexive subjectivity is established in dialogical relation to alterity. Subjectivity comes to itself when it realizes that it is grounded in something both more and 26 N I C H O L A S D A V E Y other to itself, in an alterity or difference that subjective consciousness is able to enter a dialogical relationship with and thus refine its specific sense about the distinctiveness of its own perspective. The ground and justification of philosophical hermeneutics’ reflection on this transcendent moment of understanding is the concern of this essay. As we approach the main burden of our argument, let us note Gadamer ’s statement that knowledge of oneself cannot be complete. Though Cartesian self-reflection can not render the self cognitively transparent, viewing it from the outside can, as it were, afford a completer (though never complete) degree of understanding. Historical reflection on the work of an author can therefore lead to a completer understanding. Gadamer remarks that “it is necessary to understand a poet better than he understood himself.”2 This echoes a major motif of hermeneutics often mistakenly attributed to Schleiermacher: “The task is also to be expressed as follows, to understand the utterance at first just as well and then better than its author.”3 The reasoning is actually Immanuel Kant’s. I shall not engage here in any literary enquiry into the meaning which this illustrious philosopher [Plato] attached to the expression. I need only remark that it is by no means unusual, upon comparing the thoughts which an author has expressed in regard to his subject, whether in ordinary conversation or in writing, to find that we understand him better than he has understood himself. As he has not sufficiently determined his concept, he has some times spoken, or even thought in opposition to his own intention.4 Kant refers to the impossibility of Plato being aware of the full consequences of his conception of ideas or forms. The historian of ideas or the hermeneutician may gain a fuller appreciation of Plato’s position because of the way his ideas have subsequently been determined in the work of other thinkers. For Gadamer, this process is dialogical. It is not a historical filling out of the variations on Plato’s argument, but rather a reflexive refinement of one’s own articulation of the notion of form in critical relation to the positions adopted by other thinkers. Reflexive self-consciousness in philosophical hermeneutics is not a “state” or “condition ” but a continuous process. It is, fundamentally, a journey toward articulated differentiality. The full consequences of Truth and Method are difficult to determine . Gadamer was fond of the mandarin quip that two thousand years was far too soon to judge the historical significance of a text. That aside, 27 T R U T H , M E T H O D , A N D T R A N S C E N D E N C E Gadamer’s reworking of the concept of tradition is now canonical. The approach to language as the ontological foundation of hermeneutical understanding is probably the greatest achievement...