Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers

Text Matters

Hans-Georg GadaIner TextMatterJ RK: What were the milestones on your own way to hermeneutics? H-GG: My way to hermeneutics describes my initial experiences with the study of language as a young philologist in Marburg. I had already completed a dissertation on Plato for my first philosophical studies with [Richard] Honigswald, [Paul] Natorp, and Nicolai Hartmann , and I had also met Heidegger. Only then did I actually begin my course of studies as a classical philologist with Paul Friedlander. It was at that point I had the opportunity to recognize the vital importance of a literary genre itself, especially when we are trying to correctly understand the produce of such a genre. For example, in a debate I had with Werner Jaeger at that time, I took issue with his use of Aristotle 's Protreptikod as a significant measure of early Aristotelian thought. The genre of the "protreptikos" among the Greeks offered essentially nothing more than an advertisement for competing schools of rhetoric and philosophy seeking patronage. To expect that controversial questions in philosophy could be settled by appealing to such a genre, as Jaeger apparently did, seemed quite erroneous to me. Or to take another example, I realized that the meaning of Plato's RepubLic could only be correctly understood after noting that we are dealing here with the literary genre of "utopia." To write in the utopian genre, especially under the political conditions of a Greek polis that afforded no separation of powers, was the only possible way to criticize 167 the degeneration of a democracy through corruption, nepotism, etc., without suffering political consequences. The comedies of Aristophanes had a similar function. In more recent times, we also know what political censorship can mean for literary production. Goethe actuallyattributed the increase of the linguistic art of expression to this kind of censorship , and, in this respect, paid tribute to it. Leo Strauss pointed to Spinoza as an example of the difficult situation of "thinking" in the era of the European Enlightenment, and he showed how the worry about censorship influenced Spinzoa's Ethicd. Strauss also indicated that similar concerns could be applied to Arabian repression in the case of the medieval Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides. RK: What did you learn from these early observations? H-GG: I learnt to attend more fully to the addressees of philosophical texts ,........,to those for whom the writer writes. I thus encountered the twofold hermeneutic problem: (1) how we make ourselves understood to others through language, and (2) how we have to deal with writing to avoid misunderstanding, misuse, and distortion,........,as Plato had already warned us. In order to appreciate this, we have to acknowledge the central importance of rhetoric} which achieved its highest development in the blossoming of Greek culture in the citystate . At the time of the decline of the Greek polis, rhetoric turned into a literary genre that subsequently dominated the entire academic culture, only losing its leading role as a transmitter of culture in our era of modern science. I therefore constructed my studies with ancient rhetoric in mind, and, above all, on Plato's critique of rhetoric and his qualified recognition of rhetoric. RK: Why did you choose hermeneutics as the best means of developing the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger? H-GG: One doesn't really "choose" things like that. We always find ourselves in a tradition that is speaking to us. Therefore, there is an easy answer to your question. Philosophy only works by means of linguistic formulation, and for this to carry conviction it must include rhetoric. It is an error to think that mathematical formalism,........,whose clarity certainly constitutes its advantage ,........,can be everywhere substituted for the use of natural language. In the mathematical and natural sciences, where it is a question of exact, measurable results, the apparatus of mathematics plays a decisive role. But in those sciences where one is not dealing with quantitatively measurable objects of research, the research is conducted and communicated to others by means of 168 • Hans-Georg Gadamer human language. In the course of time, philosophy has increasingly found that the elaborate conceptual language of Latin scholastics, a language that has penetrated into modern national languages, often introduces unrecognized and invisible prejudices. Even the philosophical reform movement, heralded by phenomenology and philosophical research at the beginning of our century, had to trust more and more in the power of living language to awaken...