Effective History: On Critical Practice Under Historical Conditions

3. Vattimo: A Closet Kantian

140 3 Vattimo: A Closet Kantian There is an established branch of criticism of Gadamer’s account of effective historical understanding, which joins with Habermas in objecting to the dearth of critical potential available from within one’s tradition and which yet appears far removed from those Enlightenment dreams of reason and progress that we have seen Habermas so faithfully, though unpersuasively, defend. This branch of criticism may be broadly described as reliant upon altogether more postmodern convictions than those held by Habermas, and is amply represented by the hermeneut Vattimo, who opposes the thesis that history is effective in the manner that Gadamer describes, not because it ends our Enlightenment dreams but because it would, implausibly, restore them to life. Gadamer’s “rehabilitation ” of prejudice, his reliance on the authority of tradition as a legitimate ground of our judgment, remains, Vattimo claims, too firmly in thrall to strong notions of coherence and progress to make a convincing critique of Enlightenment conceptions of reason and their implied exclusion of history. Too apologetic, too inherently conservative, effective historical critical practices are, Vattimo would convince us, neither disruptive enough nor constructive enough: blind to the truly interruptive potential implied by the contingency of human existence, effective historical consciousness is, to this extent, unconscious of history; and, concerned always with the potential for self-understanding, with the opportunities for enhancing effective historical consciousness available on particular occasions for understanding, effective historical consciousness tends always only to discover itself, always to learn again that it is partial and prejudiced, at the expense of proceeding to new, more constructive choices and discoveries. Vattimo’s critique of Gadamer, then, has a structure that, in one sense, repeats the structure of Habermas’s critique: just as Habermas invokes both a level of empirical change that is “below” interpretation and a related capacity for transcendental reflection, so Vattimo invokes both a level of historical occurrence that is “beyond interpretation”1 and, as I shall argue, a related mode of reflection with more than historical effect; the old Kantian divide between empirical experience and transcendental critique is raised, in this sense, once again. However, to the extent that Vattimo’s conceptions both of experience and of critique are 141 V A T T I M O fashioned from a much stronger consciousness of historical effect than that displayed by Habermas, from an explicit opposition to the “metaphysical ” illusions of Enlightenment, and actually from a general commitment to hermeneutics as one of the most relevant critical practices of our day, his critique of Gadamer’s account of effective history serves significantly to enhance our appreciation of: important nuances in our problem about history and critique; the continuing influence of Kant’s solution to this problem on the structure, if not the substance, of subsequent solutions; and what are to emerge here as crucial weaknesses in Gadamer’s solution to the problem. Hence, this chapter serves as a gateway to the second phase of this book, in which a detailed juxtaposition of the versions of judgment-in-history proposed by Gadamer and Lyotard would begin both to describe and to demonstrateour solution to the problem of critical practice under historical conditions. Disruptive History In this section, we will examine the detail of Vattimo’s objection that Gadamer’s conception of understanding as inevitably situated in tradition is overly conservative, and therefore uncritically reluctant to countenance the disruptions to expectations of reason and progress available to an unprejudiced experience of historical contingency. It is an objection that arises chiefly in Vattimo’s earlier work, and in particular as part of his famous claim that modernity—and the conservation of the values of reason and progress that defines modernity—is at long last at an end.2 The Empirical We have seen how empirical changes like the proliferation of technologies play a central role in Habermas’s critique of Gadamer, implying that any conviction in the interpretational character of experience must be curtailed to make way for those “brute,” non-interpretational phenomena made available by scientific observation, and the import of which for our human condition is understood by a mode of reflection which is above the effects of particular lifeworld conditions and capable of determining changes in technological capacity as “advances” or “progress” in a manner that is not compelled to regard itself as “merely” contextual and therefore provisional. Vattimo straightaway rejects this move against the primacy of interpretation described by Gadamer; he recognizes that the increasing availability of information, for instance...