gadamer's century - essays in honor of hans-georg gadamer

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ofArts andLetters

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2002.06.01

Author

Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, Jens Kertscher (eds.)

Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg GadamerPublished: June 01, 2002

Malpas, Jeff, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (eds.), Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor

of Hans-Georg Gadamer, The MIT Press, 2002, xiv + 363 pp., $25.00 (pbk), ISBN 0-262-63247-0.

Reviewed by Richard E. Palmer, MacMurray College (Illinois)

Gadamers Century is an impressive set of seventeen essays honoring the hundredth anniversary of Hans-Georg

Gadamer, who died on March 13, 2002. Assembling the collection was a project of the European Institute for

International Affairs in Heidelberg. It presents a worthy international tribute to a philosopher whose life

spanned the twentieth century. Contributors to the volume, in addition to its three editors listed below, are Hans

Albert, Gerald Bruns, John M. Connolly, Jay Garfield, Robert Holub, Alasdair MacIntyre, John McDowell,

Robert Pippin, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Rosen, Lawrence Schmidt, Charles Taylor, Gianni Vattimo, and Georgia

Warnke. The three editors are not principally Gadamer students and thus bring international and philosophical

balance to the volume.

Appropriately, the volume begins with a 12-page biography, Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biographical Sketch, by

Lawrence Schmidt. Schmidt deftly sketches the life of Gadamer from his birth in Marburg in 1900 to the

centennial celebration of his hundredth birthday in Heidelberg on February 11, 2000. High points were his bout

with crippling polio at age 22, the five years of study with Heidegger in Marburg from 1923-1928, his experiences

during the Hitler years and his struggle to survive as a professor in Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg, during

and after the Second World War. In the 1950s he put together his masterwork, Truth and Method, published in

1960. International fame came with the publication of the volume, although it was not translated until 1975. After

his retirement in 1969, he accepted invitations to speak and teach from all over the world and became an

international traveling scholar. Manybooks followed, most of them collecting his many lectures. Two dozen of

these are listed in the twelve-page bibliography ofGadamers Century.

Schmidt acknowledges his debt to the 437-page magisterial biography by Jean Grondin,Hans-Georg Gadamer:

Eine Biographie, (Mohr, 1997). A shorter biographical source is Gadamers sixty-page autobiographical sketch in

the Library ofLiving Philosophers volume, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer edited by Lewis Hahn

(Open Court Press, 1997), 3-63. This volume contains in its 619 pages some twenty-nine essays on Gadamers

philosophy along with Gadamers reply to each. Interestingly enough, this volume and Gadamers Century

supplement rather than overlap each other! The only commenter to appear in both volumes is Stanley Rosen,

and essays by such well-known authors as Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor and Gianni Vattimo

particularly enhance the more recent volume.

Following the biographical sketch, the commentary essays in Gadamers Century appear in alphabetical order,

beginning with Hans Alberts Critical Rationalism and Universal Hermeneutics (pp. 15-24). Albert

acknowledges his early and sometimes harsh attacks on Gadamer in defense of his own critical

rationalism (15). His Treatise on Critical Reason (1968) gives a clear statement of his position and has been

translated into English (1985). A follower of Karl Popper, Albert is referred to in Grondins biography as

Gadamers Antipode (cited above, 331). Alberts conciliatory remarks here are a pleasant surprise and illustratean important aspect of Gadamers personality. He remarks, Gadamer has always shown a kind disposition

toward me that cannot be taken for granted and that I am bound to respect (15). It was not Gadamers style to

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attack or counterattack, although his masterwork was taken by many as an attack on traditional scholarlyvalues

and method. He answered criticisms carefully and replied to objections by Emilio Betti, Jrgen Habermas, and

other detractors.

Ulrich Arnswalds On the Certainty of Uncertainty: Language Games and Forms of Life in Gadamer and

Wittgenstein (pp. 25-44) presents a lengthy account of Wittgenstein before turning to Gadamer and argues that

there are many similarities between Wittgensteins language games and forms of life and parallel conceptsfound in Gadamer. He concludes that Gadamerian hermeneutics have to be used as an extension to the

discussion of forms of life and language games (40).

Gerald Bruns offers The Hermeneutical Anarchist:Phronesis, Rhetoric, and the Experience of Art (pp. 45-76).

Referring to Christopher Smiths The Hermeneutics of Original Argument: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric

(Northwestern, 1998), Bruns argues thatphronesis and the rhetoric of original argument show the possibility

of a more modest form of rational argument within the limits of human finitude, which he provocatively calls

an anarchic rationality (55). For Bruns, this discussion leads directly into Gadamers account of the experience

of works of art, including modernist art, whose meaning we must construct in each encounter. In Gadamers

aesthetics the event of encountering the work of art is not a museum event in which we simply gape at the thing;

it is an event in which the work claims a place in the world we inhabitindeed, it is right to say that the work

claims a piece of us and insists on belonging to our lives (65). It is an event of witness, testimony, and

appropriation. (65) Bruns well-argued essay demonstrates the significance of Gadamers hermeneutics for

rethinking the history of rhetoric and for understanding art.

In Applicatio andExplicatio in Gadamer and Eckhart (pp. 77-96), John M. Connolly examines Gadamers

hermeneutical concepts ofapplicatio and explicatio and shows them to be clearly at work in the highly allegorical

sermons of Meister Eckhart.

Jay L. Garfield reflects in Philosophy, Religion, and the Hermeneutic Imperative (pp. 97-110) on the academic

categories of religion and philosophy as misleading in relation to non-Western philosophies. He notes that

Western philosophy has sided with science and explicitly defined itself in contrast with religion (103), yet at the

same time even Western philosophy (Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche) never fully repudiates its Semitic origins

(103). Gadamers hermeneutical philosophy enters the picture in that it repudiates many traditional dualities in

philosophy, especially the duality of truth and method (107). Garfield also demonstrates the usefulness of

Gadamers hermeneutical philosophy in helping to bridge the gap between Western and non-Western thought.

Robert C. Holubs Understanding Perspectivism: Nietzsches Dialogue with his Contemporaries (pp. 111-133)

focuses, as the title indicates, on Nietzsche, with a link to the Gadamer-Derrida encounter, where Derrida

criticized Heideggers interpretation of Nietzsche. His remarks on Nietzsche are intended as background for the

well-known encounter between Gadamer and Derrida.

In his essay, We Understand Differently, If We Understand At All: Gadamers Ontology of Language

Reconsidered, Jens Kertscher, one of the editors of the volume, objects to Gadamers reliance on tradition in

developing an antiobjectivist view of language. He finds contradictions in Gadamers ontology of language that

can only be remedied, he argues, by a Wittgensteinian emphasis on language games and praxis. It would seem

that Kertscher begins with Wittgensteinian presuppositions and on this basis evaluates Gadamers hermeneutics

and the Heideggerian concept of a truth disclosed in art.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his essay, On Not Having the Last Word: Thoughts on Our Debts to Gadamer (pp. 157-

172), takes a quite different approach to Gadamer from Kertscher. He does not offer critique, primarily, but

rather he enters into dialogue with Gadamer as an equal who differs on fundamental points. For his essay he

poses the question: What have I learned and perhaps only could have learned from Gadamer? He

acknowledges his unhappiness with Gadamers dismissive attitude to Neo-Thomism and the fact that Gadamer

has never entered into dialogue with a distinctively Thomistic Aristotelianism (157).




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He does make an interesting point by showing that Gadamer offers a clearly better interpretation of Plato than

Natorp; this suggests that there is such a thing as progress in philosophy, contrary to a famous assertion of

Gadamer to the contrary. Were he still alive, I think Gadamer would reply that what he meant was that

philosophy will not ever reach a point where it does not need to read Plato or Aristotle. He finds the scientific

view of progress, which dismisses the past, to be unfair, and I think MacIntyre would agree. Indeed, one could

note that the argument in Truth and Methodalso states that certain conceptions, such as the metaphysical form

of idealism since Kant (cited p. 174), are outmoded. At the end of his essay, MacIntyre thanks Gadamer forprovoking him to articulate his own thoughts in dialogue with Gadamer. And he praises Gadamer as the

exemplary practitioner of the hermeneutic virtues, both intellectual and moral (171).

By alphabetical accident, two essays on Gadamer and Davidson occur together: John McDowells Gadamer and

Davidson on Understanding and Relativism (pp. 173-193) and Jeff Malpas Gadamer, Davidson, and the

Ground of Understanding (pp. 195-215). In the first essay, John McDowell continues the admiration for

Gadamers work he showed in hisMind and World(Harvard University Press, 1994) and defends himself and

Gadamer against an attack of relativism leveled by Michael Friedman in a (1996) review of that book. There

Friedman argued that by turning to Gadamer McDowell opened himself to the charge of relativism (179). Earlier,

Davidson himself had defended himself against the imputation of relativism in his article On the Very Idea of a

Conceptual Scheme in hisInquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1984), 125-140.

While both McDowell and Malpas indicate the basic compatibility between the thinking of Gadamer and

Davidson, Malpas goes more deeply into the key issue of commonality, the ground of understanding. In his book,

Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth and Interpretation (Cambridge University Press,

1992), Malpas had gone into the affinities of Davidson with Heidegger, so he is well prepare to go deeper and

more systematically into the compatibilities between Gadamer and Davidson with regard to the ground of

understanding.

This is among the most significant essays in the collection because it does what Gadamer could not dobuild

bridges to analytic philosophy. Malpas argues that Davidson and Heidegger and now Gadamer do not ground

understanding in some element or single source, not Dasein, nor Spirit, not Life, nor even History but ratherin the complex dialogical interplay between speakers and their world, an interplay that is within language and

tradition but never held captive by them (212). With his evident understanding of Heidegger, Malpas is able to

find exciting connections between the philosophy of Donald Davidson and that of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Robert B. Pippin, author ofHegels Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University

Press, 1989) continues with the theme of self-consciousness in his Gadamers Hegel (pp. 217-238). Here it is

self-consciousness in terms of Gadamers interpretation of this theme in Hegel. For Gadamer, influenced by

Heidegger, gave hermeneutics the task of overcoming the primacy of self-consciousness. Pippin poses the

question of whether Heidegger and Gadamer had Hegel or a whole tradition in their sights in this rejection of the

concept of self-consciousness (218). In this careful and detailed essay Pippin goes on to show Gadamers deep

appreciation and debt to Hegel. This is an extremely important essay on Gadamers interpretation of Hegel and is

a real asset to the volume.

Paul Ricoeur, who has done so much from the French side to define the hermeneutic enterprise, honors the

volume with a contribution on Temporal Distance and Death in History (pp. 239-255). In this essay he

proposes to extend the discussion of Gadamers concept ofWirkungsgeschichte by introducing the question of

death as a paradigm of distance (239). He does not have in mind either Heideggers highly personalized

approach to death as ones ownmost possibility nor the objectified approach to death that is exemplified in the

concession that one dies (244). Yet Heidegger, as Ricoeur points out, also employed the concept of

repetition (from Kierkegaard), which is the actualization of the past, thus anticipating Gadamers superb [and

untranslatable] phrase (250) Wirkungsgeschichte, which actualizes the past in a positive way. Ricoeurs essay

offers a direct interaction with both Heidegger and Gadamer that appreciates and extends further the discussion

of temporal distance in interpretation.




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Stanley Rosens essay, Are We Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On? Against Reductionism, takes up the theme

of philosophy and poetry that plays such an important role in Gadamer and concludes through a detailed

discussion of Platos repudiation of poetry. He argues that philosophers must employ poetry not only to explain

life but to praise philosophy and so too dialectic (265). So he suggests that in order to avoid reductionism

philosophers must remember three things: that philosophy originates from ordinary experience, that dialectic,

following Hegel, must continue to be used to overcome dualisms, and that thinking must be freed from

spontaneously produced laws, rules, or categories that infect the bloodstream of necessity (275). Rosen hereoffers a solid, intelligent, and enjoyable brief against reductionism in general but, of course, not all forms of

reductionism.

Space does not allow a fair discussion of the content of the three concluding essays in the volume: Charles

Taylors Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes (pp. 279-297), Gianni

Vattimos Gadamer and the Problem of Ontology (pp. 299-306), and Georgia Warnkes Social Identity as

Interpretation (pp. 307-328). Charles Taylor has been a major interpreter of Gadamers significance for the

social sciences and this essay extends this contribution. Vattimo is an internationally known Italian follower of

Gadamer, whose advocacy of weak philosophy has not always pleased the master. He remarks that as years go

by and the Wirkungsgeschichte ofTruth and Methodmatures, the ontological turn of hermeneutics described

in the third part of that masterwork points in the direction of an identification between transformation and

interpretation of the world (300). Thus, hermeneutics is not just a general theory of understanding that can be

accused of relativism; rather, it is an ontology (303). Georgia Warnkes highly interesting final essay takes up the

question of self identity in the context Gadamers conceptions of tradition and self-definition, but she takes it a

step further to consider in some detail the struggle of women for self-identity. She discusses various current

feminist writers and at the end even Foucaults critique of power structures built into tradition (326).

In sum, this volume is a work of careful scholarship as evidenced by its twelve-page bibliography and seventeen-

page index, but more importantly it is a collection of philosophically important essays by internationally

recognized scholars. Certainly it is a worthy tribute to Gadamer, but it is more than this. It is a valuable and

reliable access to many dimensions of Gadamers thought in their present and continuing significance. It exploresthe parallels in Gadamer to Donald Davidson and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and it lays out the importance of

hermeneutics to interpretation theory in the social sciences and to the understanding of non-Western

philosophy. It also replies to accusations of relativism and reductionism, shows the connections of hermeneutics

to rhetorical theory, and demonstrates the continuing relevance of Gadamers interpretations of Plato and Hegel

and Heidegger. In short, Gadamers Century is a major contribution to Gadamer studies.

Copyright 2013

ISSN: 1538 - 1617

College of Arts and Letters

Notre Dame, IN 46556


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