Effective History: On Critical Practice Under Historical Conditions

Notes

321 Notes Introduction The epigraph for this chapter is from Joseph Margolis, prologue to Pragmatism Without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), xiii. 1. For introductory purposes, the “human sciences” refers to disciplines traditionally conceived as having a primarily cultural or “human” thrust (philosophy , history, literature, languages, etc.), although to thereby designate the “natural sciences” as non-cultural relies on a distinction that I do not—as we shall see—wish to make. Indeed, the apparent obviousness of this distinction is part of the malaise that I would redress in this book. 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer,Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989). Henceforth TM. 3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen-Doepel (London : Sheed and Ward, 1975). 4. In what follows, there is drawn an important distinction between “scientific ” and “scientistic,” between “science” and “scientism.” I would highlight this distinction briefly now by borrowing from Habermas the definition of “scientism ” as “the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science.” Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. J. Shapiro (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity, 1987), 4. The fact that science itself is often less scientistic than certain, more “cultural,” domains of practice will be significant here. 5. The model of the natural sciences is the model of induction, Gadamer explains, whereby the particular is understood not as a particular but as an instance of a general rule. Thus the Geist (“spirit”) of Geisteswissenschaften (the “humanities ” or “human sciences”) is literally forgotten as the focus of the humanities (“how this man, this people or this state is what it has become”) is reduced to the focus of the natural sciences (“how men, peoples and states evolve”) (TM 5). This failure to recognize the distinctiveness of what counts as understanding within the human sciences Gadamer traces back to J. S. Mill’s Logic, the translator of which first popularized the term Geisteswissenschaften and the author of which prematurely stripped the term of its distinctive meaning by holding out the possibility of applying inductive logic to ethical judgments (TM 3–4). 6. Gadamer maintains that the human sciences have, in the wake of their intellectual heritage of German classicism, been proud of their distinctively 322 N O T E S T O P A G E S 7 – 1 6 “human” contributions, when compared with the instrumentalism of the natural sciences (TM 9). 7. Gadamer thinks of the subsumption of the particular under the universal , which, since Kant, has been generally regarded as the most rational way of proceeding, as a mere skill, akin to the Aristotelian notion of techne. By contrast, the cultivation of one’s sense of what is appropriate within the properly human domains of culture, he regards as a higher mode of reasonableness or phronēsis (TM 314–15). 8. For Hegel, knowledge of the Absolute is gained when the constructions of the intellect become so many and various, and are yet felt to be so inadequate to the expression of ultimate truth, that reason—as a kind of life force—steps outside of our intellectual simulations, and experiences what is true: In [any] culture, the appearance of the Absolute has become isolated from the Absolute and fixated into independence. But at the same time the appearance cannot disown its origin, and must aim to constitute the manifold of its limitations into one whole. The intellect, as the capacity to set limits, erects a building and places it between man and the Absolute, linking everything that man thinks worthy and holy to this building, fortifying it through all the powers of nature and talent and expanding it ad infinitum. The entire totality of limitations is to be found in it, but not the Absolute itself. [The Absolute is] lost in the parts, where it drives the intellect in its ceaseless development of manifoldness. But in its striving to enlarge itself into the Absolute, the intellect only reproduces itself ad infinitum and so mocks itself. Reason reaches the Absolute only in stepping out of this manifold of parts. The more stable and splendid the edifice of the intellect is, the more restless becomes the striving of the life that is caught up in it as a part to get out of it, and raise itself to freedom. When life as Reason steps away into the distance, the totality of limitations is at...