Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years After Gadamer's Truth and Method

Introduction: Consequences of Hermeneutics

xi Introduction: Consequences of Hermeneutics Jeff Malpas and Santiago Zabala In a future Gadamerian culture, human beings would wish only to live up to one another, in the sense in which Galileo lived up to Aristotle, Blake to Milton, Dalton to Lucretius and Nietzsche to Socrates. The relationship between predecessor and successor would be conceived, as Gianni Vattimo has emphasized, not as the power-laden relation of “overcoming” (Überwindung ) but as the gentler relation of turning to new “purposes” (Verwindung). In such a culture, Gadamer would be seen as one of the figures who helped give a new, more literal, sense to Hölderlin’s line, “Ever since we are a conversation” (“Seit wir ein Gespräch sind”). —Richard Rorty The two key figures in the development of modern hermeneutics are undoubtedly Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Yet while Heidegger ’s Being and Time is certainly a key text in the history of hermeneutics in the twentieth century, it was the publication of Gadamer’s Truth and Method in 1960 that was the watershed event in the development of philosophical hermeneutics, and that established the hermeneutical as a distinctive mode of philosophical inquiry and engagement. While hermeneutics did not begin with Gadamer, it was Gadamer who first articulated a conception of hermeneutics in its universality, and who enabled the expansion of hermeneutics into the wider framework of contemporary philosophical debate. The implications and significance of the hermeneutical approach—its consequences for philosophy—can thus be viewed as largely deriving from the ideas laid out in Truth and Method xii I N T R O D U C T I O N and their elaboration, including the responses to them, over the last half-century. The essays that are included in this volume can all be viewed as explorations of the philosophical consequences of hermeneutics as these play out across a range of different areas and topics—some of them highly specific, as with Christoph Jamme’s examination of the Gadamerian approach to the poetry of Rilke, and some much more general, for instance, Hans-Herbert Kögler’s investigation of the ethical implications of the hermeneutical idea of dialogue. Even those essays that deal with philosophers or approaches that go back beyond the last half-century, such as Michael Marder’s contribution on the political hermeneutics of Carl Schmitt, or William McNeill’s essay on Heidegger’s phenomenology , can nevertheless be seen as operating from within a framework that is to a greater or lesser extent conditioned by a contemporary hermeneutic sensibility (that this should be so is, of course, a conclusion that can itself be derived as a consequence of the hermeneutic approach). Moreover, the way in which hermeneutics provides a frame for the engagement between Gadamer and thinkers such as Richard Rorty, as well as the development of the “weak thought” famously associated with the work of Gianni Vattimo, or the interpretive explorations of Paul Ricoeur, is indicative of the breadth of thought that hermeneutics encompasses. By no means restricted to any one of the German, Italian, French, or English-speaking philosophical traditions alone, hermeneutics is one of the few developments in twentieth-century philosophy (the other is surely phenomenology, with which hermeneutics is itself intertwined) that has gone beyond any sense of particularly “national” association, and has also extended across a range of disciplines, perspectives, and styles. If we look just at the topics covered in this volume, then we can see how hermeneutics connects up, in Rorty’s work, with the tradition of North American pragmatism, in Vattimo’s with Italian critical-political thought, with an Australasian-inflected mode of Davidsonian interpretation in the work of Malpas, and, in Babich, with a range of currents in French, as well as contemporary English-language, philosophy. Hermeneutics appears in engagement with feminist theory, with ethics, with art and literature (including, especially, poetry), and with the history of philosophy (both ancient and modern). Moreover, beyond the topics covered here, hermeneutic approaches can be found at work in a wide range of fields from architecture1 to contemporary philosophy of science,2 while hermeneutic thinking has also played a significant role in the increasing interaction between European and non-European traditions , especially the East Asian, but also those of Africa, the Middle East, and India.3 xiii I N T R O D U C T I O N Significantly, hermeneutics occupies something of a mediative position within...