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3. Gadamer's Platonism: His Recovery of Mimesis and Anamnesis
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45 3 Gadamer’s Platonism: His Recovery of Mimesis and Anamnesis Robert J. Dostal It need not be argued that Hans-Georg Gadamer’s most notable contribution to contemporary philosophy is his hermeneutics. Yet three of the ten volumes of his collected works are devoted to studies of ancient Greek philosophy, especially the work of Plato. His attention to Plato was not a side interest unrelated to his hermeneutics. In fact, his concern for Plato is importantly related to his hermeneutics, for his hermeneutical theory is, at its heart, a recovery of Greek philosophy, especially Plato, within a contemporary context. A “recovery” is not a mere repetition or a simple return to the ancients. I will show here how Gadamer’s recovery of the concepts of mimesis and anamnesis is central to his philosophical hermeneutics and to his aesthetics. Though authors are often not the most reliable of commentators on their own work, we should take seriously Hans-Georg Gadamer ’s claims in interviews to be a Platonist.1 We should also be mindful of the fact that Plato himself was no Platonist—as Gadamer reminds us.2 Some find Gadamer’s avowed Platonism puzzling, since he also repeatedly states that his thought is much indebted to the work of Martin Heidegger and thatTruth and Method was intended, in part, as an entryway to the thought of the later Heidegger.3 Heidegger, of course, was a notorious critic of Plato and Platonism. For Heidegger Platonism is equivalent to metaphysics, something we are to overcome or at least to be done with. With Plato, according to Heidegger, the Western tradition retreats from an originary experience of truth, covers it over, and distorts the situation of being-in-the-world. We can readily point to related puzzles about Gadamer’s work. Gadamer champions contemporary poetry, art, and music. Yet against most contemporary literary and art theory, Gadamer insists that these forms of art, often abstract and nonrepresentational, be understood as 46 R O B E R T J . D O S T A L mimetic and as modes of the experience of truth. Gadamer embraces Aristotle’s account of human action and good judgment, phronesis, and puts it to work in his philosophical hermeneutics. Thus he seems, in some important sense, to be an Aristotelian, yet he professes his loyalty to Plato. In addition, Gadamer’s hermeneutics has as first principles situatedness , historicity and human temporality, finitude, and the priority of praxis. Yet he attempts to develop an ontology that relies much on a reading of Plato. These are some of the puzzles that confront a reader of Gadamer’s works. Another question that arises concerns the common thread or threads that tie the large collection of his published writings together— a philosophical hermeneutics, studies in the history of philosophy, and essays in the philosophy of art. I would like to suggest that Gadamer’s collected works are very tightly connected with one another and that a very important thread that ties them together is his recovery of the Platonic concepts of mimesis and anamnesis. A consideration of this recovery will also show us how Gadamer develops a philosophical hermeneutics that is both Heideggerian and Platonic, both Platonic and Aristotelian. These two Greek concepts are crucial for Gadamer’s aesthetics, in which he understands art to be mimetic and truthful. Let us begin this consideration by examining the role that mimesis and anamnesis play in Gadamer’s magnum opus, Truth and Method. Mimesis and Anamnesis in Part 1 of Truth and Method: The Question of Truth as It Emerges in the Experience of Art We should begin by reminding ourselves that Gadamer’s primary concern in his effort to develop a philosophical hermeneutics is truth. More than one commentator has been frustrated by the lack of any extensive treatment of the concept of truth in this book with the title Truth and Method.4 There is a certain irony in the title, but there is no irony in the concluding statement of the work: “Rather, what the tool of method does not achieve must—and really can—be achieved by a discipline of questioning and inquiring, a discipline that guarantees truth.”5 Gadamer proffers his philosophical hermeneutics as the theory of a discipline, not a method, that brings us to the truth. What Gadamer tries to show us in this first part of the work is that art should be understood as mimetic and that our experience of art is one of...