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Reviewed by:
  • Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer
  • Joel Weinsheimer (bio)
Lorraine Code, editor. Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer Penn State University Press. xii, 408. US $85.00

Lorraine Code titles her introduction to the fifteen essays collected in this volume 'Why Feminists Do Not Read Gadamer.' The reasons for this neglect, she concludes, are many and formidable: Gadamer's conservatism and traditionalism, his insistence on the ineluctable power of prejudice, his suspicion of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and his silence on the 'woman question.' Gadamer formulates no basis for social critique, and in so far as that can be justly described as a fundamental aim of philosophical feminism, Gadamer has little to offer. 'My real concern,' he writes in Truth and Method, 'is not what we do, or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.' Such a focus offers little incentive for a feminist to read Gadamer's hermeneutics in search of a way not just to interpret the world but change it.

Even the most charitable contributors to this collection therefore remain at best ambivalent in their responses to Gadamer. A few are merely rabid - so angry that they cannot speak without spitting. A few think they offer irrefutable evidence of Gadamer's deeply engrained chauvinism and strike a blow for social justice by inserting an indignant '[sic!]' after his masculine pronouns. Most, however, respond in an open and thoughtful way, even while remaining profoundly sceptical. Voicing one of the collection's most frequent charges, for instance, Marie Fleming concludes that Gadamer's view of otherness is 'deeply hostile to feminist values' because his 'hermeneutics is scrupulously oriented to the containment of difference in the name of unity and continuity.' Such charges are understandable. Gadamer's description of understanding as a 'fusion of horizons' seems to prove that homogeneity in his view constitutes both the condition and consequence of understanding. Yet a more careful reading would show that such is not the case. [End Page 566]

If we begin in the feminist way by positing difference and discontinuity as a given, we might say understanding cannot respect difference if interpreting consists in subjugating the Other to our own prejudices. No one, least of all Gadamer, embraces such hermeneutic imperialism, however. Thus instead of reading the Other from our point of view, it would seem that genuine understanding must consist in understanding Others from their own point of view. That implies, however, that instead of subjugating Others to my interpretive framework, I must subjugate myself to theirs. But such martyrdom is merely imperialism in reverse, of course, and equally unacceptable, even if it were possible.

And it is not possible: the injunction to view the Other from the Other's point of view is merely a different way of saying that in order to understand we need to set aside our prejudices - a possibility denied by feminism and hermeneutics alike because of their insistence on what Susan-Judith Hoffman calls 'the historical and cultural situatedness of knowledge seekers.' Thus, if all understanding amounts to colonization, either of me or of the Other, the only way to respect difference, apparently, is to admit that the Other is inscrutable, unintelligible, opaque - that is, to deny that understanding is possible at all. Which eviscerates the whole notion of Otherness, leaving it abstract and hollow.

Among the feminist essays gathered here, there is insufficient recognition that neither unity and continuity nor difference and discontinuity can explain how understanding the Other is necessary and possible. In a condition of insuperable plurality and difference, understanding the Other is impossible; in a condition of absolute unity, it is unnecessary. A more attentive, more charitable reading of Gadamer than is here exemplified would have showed that it is just this premise with which his hermeneutics begins, and the end which it proposes: to reconcile the one and the many while respecting both.

Joel Weinsheimer

Joel Weinsheimer, Department of English, University of Minnesota

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