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45 An Overview natural sciences. Gadamer is constantly battling against the intrusion of method into hermeneutics and the Geisteswissenschaften. Wolin seeks to show how "methodism" has infected and distorted the discipline of political science. Method is not innocent or neutral. It not only presupposes an understanding of what constitutes social and political life; it has become a powerful factor in shaping (or rather misshaping) human life in the modern world. Wolin makes fully explicit the practical-moral concern that lies at the heart of the writings of Feyerabend and Gadamer when he tells us that the vita methodi "avoids fundamental criticism and fundamental commitment/' and that far from being an innocent, epistemological, neutral ideal it is a "proposal for shaping the mind"-a proposal that all three see as having ominous consequences.Bl Against the vita methodi, Wolin defends the bios theoretikos, and at the heart of his understanding of this form of life is judgment. The following passage by Wolin might have been written by Gadamer, for it approximates Gadamer's own understanding of the quintessence of political judgment . What is political wisdom? Put in this vague form, the question is unanswerable , but it may be reformulated so as to be fruitful. The antithesis between political wisdom and political science basically concerns two different forms of knowledge. The scientific form represents the search for rigorous formulations which are logically consistent and empirically testable. As a form, it has the qualities of compactness, manipulability, and relative independence of context. Political wisdom is an unfortunate phrase, for ... the question is not what it is but in what does it inhere. History, knowledge of institutions, and legal analysis [are relevant] ... knowledge of past political theories might also be added. Taken as a whole, this composite type of knowledge presents a contrast with the scientific type. Its mode of activity is not so much the style of the search as of reflection. It is mindful of logic, but more so of the incoherence and contradictoriness of experience. And for the same reason, it is distrustful of rigor. Political life does not yield its significance to terse hypotheses but is elusive, and hence meaningful statements about it often have to be allusive and intimative. Context becomes supremely important, for actions and events occur in no other setting. Knowledge of this type tends, therefore, to be suggestive and illuminative rather than explicit and determinate. Borrowing from M. Polanyi, we shall call it "tacit political knowledge.1182 SCIENCE, HERMENEUTICS, AND PRAXIS It may seem that I have wandered quite far from the issues involved in the movement beyond objectivism and relativism. One may be 46 Beyond Objectivism and Relativism genuinely perplexed about what political wisdom and the tradition of practical philosophy has to do with the character of rationality in the natural sciences and the type of argumentation required for theorychoice or paradigm switches. There may be legitimate suspicion that the interrelationships of science, hermeneutics, and praxis that I have been adumbrating are more suggestive than substantive. Finally, there may be a proper skepticism about my constant references to a new conversation, a feeling that this expresses more of a pious hope than a living reality. The reader rightly demands a working out or working through of the suggestions that I have been making that will clarify, test, and support my claims. My objective thus far has been to provide an orientation, to convey a sense of the underlying questions, and to suggest how I plan to go about probing and answering them. In turning to the working out of this project, I begin with the self-understanding of the nature of science, its essential character and scope. It is our cultural understanding of science, especially the physical sciences, and the remarkable "success" of the scientific enterprise since its modern origins that has set the context for the intellectual and cultural problems in the modern world. Hermeneutics , as that discipline took shape in the nineteenth century, has been a defensive reaction against the universalistic and reductivistic claims made in the name of the sciences. Every defender of hermeneutics , and more generally the humanistic tradition, has had to confront the persistent claim that it is science and science alone that is the measure of reality, knowledge, and truth. As for praxis and phronesis, these concepts are suspect once we are in the grips of the Cartesian legacy. There are deep cultural reasons and causes-as Gadamer, Arendt, and Habermas have argued-why in the modern world the...

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