Difficulties of Ethical Life

3. Hermeneutics as Original Ethics

3 Hermeneutics as Original Ethics D E N N I S J . S C H M I D T Ethical questioning has always been defined by its essential difficulty: it is that realm of questioning that begins where the uncomplicated and the facile have ceased. One speaks of ethics only when there is difficulty; Immanuel Kant’s notion of ‘‘judgment,’’ especially as Hannah Arendt develops it, nicely captures the problem of ethical life as emerging out of an undecidability and the failure of theoretical knowledge. Nonetheless, even if ethics has always been a matter of the difficult, there seems to be a special and new form of difficulty defining the problematic of ethical thought today: the very idea of the ethical has become questionable. Some of the most cherished assumptions underpinning the dominant traditions of ethical thought—assumptions about subjectivity, agency, and autonomy, among others—have been called into question, and those traditions have largely collapsed, or at least lost all vitality, under this questioning. The most telling form of this decline of ethical thought is found in what now goes by the name of ‘‘applied ethics’’—as if ethics were simply applied theory. Nothing signals the loss of an ethical sensibility more than the emergence of such ‘‘applied ethics.’’ But this decline of ethical thought is not new; Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed it and spoke of the clear need to think ‘‘beyond good and evil’’ if we were ever to be in a position to take up the task of ethical reflection. Martin Heidegger, who was often criticized for not taking up the enigmas of ethical life, was well aware of Nietzsche’s insight into this dif- ficulty of discussing ethical life at the end of the West’s long-standing 35 commitment to metaphysics. When explicitly asked about the possibility of an ethics for our times, Heidegger only alluded cryptically to the need for ethics to become ‘‘original’’ again, that is, to be thought of anew from out of the sources of ethical life. His oblique references to ethical matters, coupled with the blunders of his own political acts, have made it difficult to pursue ethical concerns from the perspectives opened up by Heidegger. And yet I want to argue that those perspectives offer one of the most promising avenues for thinking about ethical life at this time when the very idea of an ethics is questionable. Although Heidegger’s own writings do seem to obscure the possibilities of a new approach to thinking about the difficulties of ethical life, one of the paths that has emerged in the wake of Heidegger’s own work, namely, hermeneutics as we find it formulated by Hans-Georg Gadamer, does indeed develop some of the promises of the new philosophical starting point we find in Heidegger. Consequently , the argument that I want to make in what follows is that the philosophical hermeneutics we find formulated in Gadamer’s work is fundamentally —not accidentally or subsequently, but fundamentally— concerned with the task of thinking about that which Heidegger referred to as an ‘‘original ethics.’’ I am well aware of the provocation of such a claim; nonetheless, I want to defend it and suggest that we would do well to recognize just how it is that Gadamer’s hermeneutics outlines something like an ‘‘original ethics,’’ since such an ethics belongs very much to the heart of hermeneutic theory . I will say more below about what I take the problem of an ‘‘original ethics’’ to be, but first let me make some preliminary comments about the rather outrageous contention that in the heart of hermeneutics we find a concern with ethics—original or otherwise. Hermeneutics has already suffered enough misrepresentation by being portrayed as a ‘‘method’’; might not I be proposing that we misrepresent it yet again, this time as an ‘‘ethics’’? After all, not even a single volume of Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke is devoted to the topic of ethics, so why would one dare suggest that it is not only prominent but fundamental to hermeneutics? There are three obvious ways to begin to defend this view, and although none of them are sufficient to make the case I want to make, I do want to note them for two reasons: first, elements of each are important and do contribute to my argument; and second, taking the three approaches together, one begins to see just how widespread Gadamer’s concern with ethical notions is...