gjesdal k. aesthetic and political humanism. gadamer on herder, schleiermacher, and the origins of...

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLYVolume 24, Number 3, July 2007

275

AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISMGADAMER ON HERDER, SCHLEIERMACHER, AND

THE ORIGINS OF MODERN HERMENEUTICS

Kristin Gjesdal

Over the past decade, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960) has enjoyed a renaissance. The so-called Gadamer-Habermas

debate, with its concern for the question of validity in interpretation, has faded into the background. So has the discussion between Gadamer and Derrida over the usefulness of hermeneutics versus deconstruction. When philosophers such as Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom turn to Gadamer, it is in order to fi nd support for the notions of Bildung and the linguistic nature of reason.

These notions are also an integral part of the philosophical vocabulary developed by Johann Gottfried Herder in the 1760s and 1770s.1 This is what made him a recurring interest of liberal historians and philoso-phers such as Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor.2 Gadamer, however, has surprisingly little to say about this eighteenth-century philosopher. In his work, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century herme-neutics remains identifi ed with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s romantic theory of interpretation. And to Gadamer, Schleiermacher’s theory of interpretation, developed about twenty to thirty years after Herder’s fi rst hermeneutic refl ections in the 1760s, offers little but an unwanted aesthetic humanism, a position that ought to be overcome by a more viable political humanism—i.e., by Gadamer’s own hermeneutics.

I.

Gadamer does not pay much attention to Herder in Truth and Method. Yet the only book that Gadamer published over the almost 30 years between Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, his habilitation-work from 1931,3 and Truth and Method is a short and somewhat superfi cial study of Herder. Based on a paper he presented at the German Institute in Paris in 1941, this text is among the more embarrassing chapters of

276 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

Gadamer’s activities during the Second World War.4 So embarrassing is it that the text, even though it was published as a separate volume in 1942,5 is not included in his Gesammelte Werke. Or, more precisely, it is included, but the nationalistic rhetoric is weeded out and Volk und Geschichte im Denken Herders now appears under the more neutral title “Herder und die geschichtliche Welt.” This revamped version of the essay fi rst appeared as a postscript to Klostermann’s 1967 edition of Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie.6

In the original 1941 lecture, Herder emerges as one of the greatest European voices brought forth by Germany (VG, 5). His critique of French culture is placed in the foreground from the very start. Strangely, though, this critique is not explained in light of Herder’s increasing doubts about the classicists’ appeal to timeless, aesthetic norms.7 What matters for Gadamer in 1941–1942 is simply that Herder could only develop an adequate notion of the German folk and state through break-ing with the historical and cultural standards of the French (VG, 5). Prescribing a way beyond the twin fallacies of abstract enlightenment and subjectivist romanticism, Herder turns to historical meaning (VG, 10). However, as Gadamer retrieves this notion of Herder’s, historical reality is but the work of powers (Kräften) (VG, 15). Refl ecting on how these powers get branched into different cultures and folks, Herder came to provide the nascent East-European nations with a notion of national self-understanding. Yet, Gadamer goes on, these countries did not realize the full potential of Herder’s thinking. Instead of sticking, as it were, to the Herderian script, they looked to the rest of Europe. Hence they missed the way in which the German notion of Volk offers a promising alternative to the democratic paroles of the West (VG, 23).8 According to Gadamer of the early 1940s, the political-philosophical legacy of Herder consists in making us see the contrast between the democratic paroles of the West and the true politics of power, Volk, and nation-building.

The 1967 postscript is little but a fi xed-up version of this early encounter with Herder.9 That is, in spite of Gadamer later describing the Herder text as “a purely scholarly study,”10 he must have felt like offering a more palatable interpretation of Herder’s hermeneutics. The discomforting political rhetoric is toned down, and it is possible to extract from this text something like a systematic, if still sketchy, picture of Herder’s notion of historical meaning. While retrieving Herder’s notion of historicity, Gadamer highlights three particularly relevant points.

(a) In contradiction to his own celebration of German culture in the 1940s, Gadamer now acknowledges that Herder warns against judging history in light of our own cultural ideals. Against what Gadamer takes to be the usual habit of eighteenth-century historiology, Herder proposes

AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 277

that each culture entertains its own notion of happiness, so that different cultures cannot be compared in light of one universal criterion.

(b) In contradiction to his previous emphasis on the Germanic tenors of Herder’s philosophy, Gadamer recognizes how Herder himself had criticized Winckelmann’s tendency to hypostatize, as an ideal of all art, the aesthetic proportions of ancient Greek sculpture (HgW, 325–326). Herder’s rejection of normative comparison between cultures allows for no celebration of one culture as superior to others, or as the source of universal standards, be they artistic, epistemic, or ethical-political. On Gadamer’s reading, Herder warns against an ahistorical cultivation of ancient Greek culture. Furthermore, he questions the very idea of progress in history. As Gadamer retrieves this point of Herder’s, any progress is at the same time a loss.11

(c) Finally, Gadamer fi nds that even though Herder emphasizes the individuality of each historical culture or period, he does not fail to ad-dress the basic metaphysical problem of the philosophy of history: the question as to whether there is an overall meaning in history. Gadamer proposes that the young Herder sees in history the realization of a divine plan or purpose. Later on, in Ideen, Herder stages humanity as the telos of history, even if this notion of humanity is, on Gadamer’s reading, not abstract and ideal but intrinsically related to the notion of power.

This is as much of a systematic treatment of Herder as we will ever fi nd in Gadamer’s work. At stake in the 1967 version of the Volk und Geschichte essay is a recognition of Herder’s importance for the histori-cal sciences, yet with no genuine effort to engage with his contribution to the development of modern hermeneutics.

Schleiermacher, by contrast, appears in almost every text that Ga-damer has ever written about hermeneutics.12 However, in Gadamer’s retrieval of the history of modern hermeneutics, Schleiermacher’s ro-mantic theory of interpretation represents the point where it all goes wrong. The period from the late 1790s, and all the way through Droysen, Ranke, and Dilthey, appears by and large as a historical cul-de-sac. Only when Heidegger enters the scene in Freiburg in the mid 1910s is there again hope for hermeneutics.

Why, then, does hermeneutics, on Gadamer’s account, derail with Schleiermacher? Before Schleiermacher, Gadamer reckons, fi gures such as Vico, Spinoza, and Gracián cultivated a humanistic interest in culture, Bildung, and tact, and they acknowledged the close relation between taste and morality. Schleiermacher turns his back on this tradition. Instead of drawing on the humanistic legacy, he is infl uenced by Kant’s aesthetics. Indeed, on Gadamer’s understanding, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is but a radical appropriation—or, more correctly, one


colossal misunderstanding—of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Like the other Jena romantics, Schleiermacher was fascinated by Kant’s third Critique, but, again like the other Jena romantics, he misses the point of the Critique of Judgment.13 The romantics read the Critique of Judgment as a philosophical account of the distinction between art and non-art. There may not be anything wrong with that strategy per se, Gadamer concedes, but because the romantics bracketed the dimension of taste, they focused naively on the notion of unmediated genius. The roman-tics ended up celebrating the idea of the original individual, unaffected by schooling and education, through whom nature could express itself within the sphere of culture, and whose creativity would escape any attempt at conceptual determination or post-festum reconstruction of creative guidelines or rules.

On Gadamer’s reading, Schleiermacher’s theory refl ects the general shortcomings of romantic aesthetics in two closely related ways: its focus on individuality and its call for an immediate method of divination.

According to Gadamer, Schleiermacher takes as his point of depar-ture a problematic metaphysics of individuality.14 He postulates a lack of fi t between the shared symbolic resources of a given community and the constitutive uniqueness of each of its members. What matters, when understanding an individual expression, is whatever is behind language or behind the work of art. On Gadamer’s understanding, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is an effort to reach back and reconstruct the individual intentional state of mind in the act of creation. Texts are not approached in terms of their propositional content, but understood as “purely expressive phenomena” (TM, 196; WM, 200).

Facing a state of monadic individualities, hermeneutics, on Gadamer’s reading, cannot respond by referring to the common horizon or culture to which the artist or language-user belongs. What is required, rather, is a grasp of the constitutive originality of the utterance. The inter-preter needs to develop some sort of congeniality, to feel his or her way into the original feeling of the other. Understanding is reduced to an immediate leap—Einfühlung or divination—into the creative mind of another individual. Only an immediate leap of this kind can overcome the difference between interpreter and author. In Schleiermacher’s philosophy, Gadamer argues, hermeneutics is reduced to “an immedi-ate, sympathetic, and congenial understanding” (TM, 191; WM, 194). This, in short, is Gadamer’s reading of Schleiermacher—and it is on this background that he calls for a “move beyond” the framework of romantic theory of understanding (TM, 197; WM, 201).

Since Peter Szondi’s fi rst efforts to rehabilitate Schleiermacher’s theory of interpretation in the early 1970s,15 many attempts have been


made to reclaim the relevance of his hermeneutic philosophy. Gadamer’s student Heinz Kimmerle tried to show that Schleiermacher started out with a theory that is not at all unlike Gadamer’s own, and that he only gradually drifted toward an aesthetic hermeneutics.16 Others, such as Manfred Frank, have kept Szondi’s original focus, suggesting that Schleiermacher’s romantic theory of understanding is indeed an aesthetic hermeneutics, only Gadamer does not understand what an aesthetic hermeneutics amounts to; that is, he does not see how Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics refl ects the proto-modernist sentiments of Jena romanticism and is therefore particularly fi t to illuminate the question of literary style and aesthetic form.17 The problem with both of these lines of criticism is that while accepting Gadamer’s aesthetization thesis, they only call for a reinterpretation of its extension (Kimmerle) or its meaning (Szondi and Frank).18 This is not a suffi ciently radical approach when criticizing Gadamer’s misreading of Schleiermacher in particular and his misconstruction of eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-tury hermeneutics in general.

At this point Herder becomes important. Gadamer makes no con-nection between Herder and Schleiermacher. Herder is pulled in the direction of a theory of Volk, culture, and historicism; Schleiermacher is deemed a hopeless example of aesthetic humanism. However, in order to pay full justice to the origins of nineteenth-century hermeneutics, Herder and Schleiermacher should be read together.19 When doing so, it gets clear that Herder’s hermeneutic relevance does not consist in his more problematic theory of Kraft and Volksgeist, but in his refl ections on the problems of practical historical and philological work. Schlei-ermacher, likewise, defends no hermeneutic subjectivism of the kind that Gadamer ascribes to him, but develops a theory that emphasizes the potential otherness of the text at stake and the need for a critical refl ective procedure in interpretation.

II.

In his reading of Schleiermacher, Gadamer singles out for criticism the notion of individuality and the appeal to divination. Both these notions are traced back to the quasi-Kantian framework of romantic aesthet-ics, and ultimately to its misunderstanding of Kant’s theory of genius. The reason Gadamer has to explain this in light of a misunderstand-ing of Kant’s theory of genius is that Kant himself does not speak of individuality, Einfühlung, or divination, at least not in the sense that Schleiermacher does. In fact, his concern is not with a theory of inter-pretation at all.20 Herder, by contrast, addresses a number of central hermeneutic problems, although he does not, like Schleiermacher, write this up as a systematic study of the conditions of possibility for


understanding. In the works where Herder addresses hermeneutic is-sues, terms such as individuality and Einfühlung (divination) play an important role—at least as important as the more general, historiological points that Gadamer extracts from Herder in his postscript to Auch eine Philosophie. Both the notion of individuality and the idea of Einfühlung need to be discussed in some more detail.

For Herder, the development of a robust notion of individuality is not simply a task of theoretical importance, but one that has the gravest practical consequences for the self-understanding prevailing in German literature and letters. Let us take, as an example, Herder’s engagement with Shakespeare in the three versions of the essay “Shakespear” from the period of 1771–1773.

Herder read Shakespeare eagerly throughout the late 1760s. Both in France (with Voltaire) and in Germany (with Gottsched), Shakespeare had been discredited because he was breaking with the predominantly Aristotelian conventions of classicist theater.21 However, within Herder’s own environment, Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg had pointed out that if we only proceed to read the Poetics in a more generous way than the classicists had done, Shakespeare’s work would indeed prove to fi t in. In the fi rst draft of his essay on Shakespeare (1771), Herder argues that the reference to Aristotle is not itself a valid criterion for the as-sessment of Shakespeare’s drama and, furthermore, he does not fi nd von Gerstenberg’s interpretation of Aristotle convincing in the fi rst place.22 In the next draft, produced less than a year later, he grafts onto his negative point about the Aristotle-Shakespeare connection a more positive claim: Shakespeare needs no Greek Aristotle. What he needs is his own Aristotle, somebody who could do for him what Aristotle did for Sophocles, i.e., conceptually articulate the intrinsic Maßstab of his drama.23 Finally, in the last version of the essay, Herder makes his argument even more poignant. Shakespeare’s work, he now claims, can-not be compared to Sophoclean tragedy. Sophocles’ world is no longer Shakespeare’s. And if the two have anything in common, this is not a set of shared experiences or timeless aesthetic forms, but the capacity to refl ect their own historical world in an individual or original way.24 To critically defi ne “the borders of an author’s past world, own time, and world of posterity—what the fi rst supplied to him, how the second helped or harmed him, how the third developed his work,” was precisely what Herder, only fi ve years earlier, had described as “the foundation for a history of the sciences and of the human understanding.”25

The nineteenth-century notion of individuality cannot, as Gadamer does, automatically be traced back to a romantic misunderstanding of Kant’s theory of aesthetic genius—opposed, as it allegedly is, to tradi-


tion as well as critical judging and refl ection. Within Schleiermacher’s intellectual circles, the notion of genius occurs prior to and independent of Kant’s theory—and if there is a chain of infl uence here, it could easily be from Addison, Young, Hutchinson, Home, and Pope to Herder and, later on, Kant and Schleiermacher, rather than simply being a question of romanticizing a Kantian idea.26 The discussion of individuality has been part of modern hermeneutics and philosophy of history from its very beginning. At stake is not, as Gadamer argues, an appeal to the inner, psychological state of mind of a given artist or individual, but an effort to do justice to the uniqueness of a given individual work or a given individual culture, so as to maintain the notion of plurality in historical understanding.

Within this framework—within this budding aesthetic philosophy, articulated, as it later was, in Die Kritischen Wälder27—Herder provides a set of guidelines for a practical interpretative approach to art and historical texts. Where he writes about these issues, he recommends a movement back and forth between the individuality of the work and its context, hence viewing it as a unique expression of the shared cul-tural resources of a given historical community.28 Furthermore Herder suggests that feeling or divination is the best way to grasp the work as individual, whereas a broader genetic approach yields comprehension of the work within its culture.

In his 1768 praise of Thomas Abbt, Herder speaks about the way in which Abbt feels his way into every area of culture, and the way in which he “sensed them as though through a divination.”29 This side of Abbt’s mind is, Herder claims, for him “the holiest.”30 Herder, at this point, does not suggest that Abbt aestheticizes each and every symbolic expression. Nor does he claim that Abbt feels his way into some psychological layer of meaning that is beyond the realm of symbolic mediation. Rather, what Herder has in mind is the way in which Abbt pays justice to works of art in their particularity. Unlike, say, Winckelmann, Abbt does not ap-proach other cultures looking for expressions of the timeless norms and genre defi nitions of classical Greek antiquity. He asks, rather, how a particular expression stands forth as unique: “How can we understand this particular expression or this particular culture in its own right?” This is the subtext of Herder’s engagement with Abbt in particular and the motivation for his appeal to Einfühlung and divination in general. Herder wants to question the hegemony of classicist aesthetics and the normative assumptions it yields with regard to other cultures, periods, and artistic genres.

It is this kind of thinking—attentiveness to the individuality of symbolic expression as it lends voice to a larger cultural context—and


not an inadequate romantic misreading of Critique of Judgment that establishes the intellectual background against which Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics must be understood. The point here is not, as Gadamer claims, to aestheticize the work or to tear it away from its larger, cultural context. At stake, rather, is a willingness to grasp it as a unique mani-festation of the shared symbolic and cultural resources of the time and hence, by implication, to emphasize the limits of a universal poetics. As soon as we situate Schleiermacher within such a framework, it becomes clear that Gadamer misunderstands both his notion of individuality and his appeal to divination.

When Schleiermacher, in his hermeneutics, speaks about the in-dividuality of an expression, he does not have in mind some kind of psychological, inner feeling that is torn loose from the shared symbolic resources of a given community. Schleiermacher claims that the indi-viduality of a given work of art (or of a given symbolic utterance) must be understood as the individual combination or application of the shared symbolic or cultural resources of a given community.31 This is the reason why, according to Schleiermacher, the refl ected interpreter needs to pay attention to both the culture in which the author lives, the linguistic-symbolic resources she has at her disposal, and the individual way in which she applies them—that is, to what Schleiermacher, with a twist on the traditional division of biblical hermeneutics into a grammatical and a spiritual part, rephrases as the grammatical and the technical aspects of interpretation.32

On this interpretation, Schleiermacher’s notion of divination emerges in a new light as well. Divination and comparison—or rather contex-tualization—emerge as equally needed, and one cannot replace the other.33 Schleiermacher’s point, when introducing this notion, is that if the work (the symbolic expression) is seen as individual, one simply cannot understand it by contextualization alone. Contextualization can only lead to an understanding of the features that one work (or symbolic expression) shares with another, or how it differs from any other work (or symbolic expression)—and cannot, as such, provide understanding of the work in its own right. Hence contextualization/comparison must be accompanied by divination, a hypothesis formation that, in turn, begs confi rmation through a comparison of the individual paragraph or text at stake with other paragraphs, texts by the same author, or with other authors of the period. This is Schleiermacher’s version of the hermeneutic circle: a back and forth movement between bold hypothesis formation and the gradual revision of this hypothesis in light of careful philological work. At stake is no headless, romantic process of divin-ing one’s way into the immediate feeling that the work expresses, but attentiveness to the fact that linguistic rules beg application, and that


this opens for a dimension of individuality that, after Schleiermacher, has often been overlooked in hermeneutics.

By reading Herder and Schleiermacher together, it becomes clear, fi rst, that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is not a problematic philosophy of aesthetic individuality and immediacy. Second, and equally impor-tant, Herder’s contribution to hermeneutics is not only, as Gadamer suggested in his revised, 1967 version of “Volk und Geschichte,” a gen-eral philosophy of history and power, but also an ambitious, systematic effort to deal with the concrete problems of historical and philological work—it is indeed one of the very earliest theories, perhaps even the earliest theory, in which hermeneutics turns philosophical, that is, in which it is no longer seen as a tool for classicists or theologians, but as an independent branch of philosophy itself.

III.

There are, to be sure, many ways to illuminate Gadamer’s misreading of Schleiermacher and Herder. Yet if one does not want to get drawn into more biographical speculation, one way to explain this is to bring in the broader intellectual framework of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, as it developed in the early 1930s—a framework that has been surprisingly absent in the discussion of Gadamer’s work both within German and Anglophone contexts.

Today the very title Truth and Method is more or less synonymous with philosophical hermeneutics. However, when Gadamer initially started working on Truth and Method in the early 1930s, he did not intend to dedicate the next thirty years of his life to a discussion of the problems of understanding and interpretation. To the young Gadamer, art was a lot more important.34 Humanism, he claims, has become stifl ing and irrelevant.35 It has lost touch with the spirit of the classical tradition and its emphasis on judgment, sensus communis, tact, and the relation between taste and morality. Nowadays, Gadamer complains, we no lon-ger have a relation to the past as a living and integrated dimension of the present. The past is aestheticized. The experience of traditional works of art culminates in mere aesthetic enjoyment. No self-understanding is involved. No truth is at stake in this experience. It is as if the entire tradition is turned into a museum—be it real or imaginary. In the hu-man sciences this is refl ected in a certain kind of scientism: tradition is turned into an object that can have no genuine infl uence on the way we live today. What we face, Gadamer worries, is a situation in which the humanities are ridden with a harmful combination of romanticism and positivism.36 The situation is ripe for change—and Gadamer, in the 1930s, is prepared to take on the challenge.


Wanting to combat the aesthetic attitude of the 1930s,37 Gadamer does not seek to abandon humanism as such. Instead he wants to mus-ter, against the aesthetic humanism of the time, what he, somewhat idiosyncratically, calls a political humanism. Gadamer never offers a clear-cut defi nition of political humanism. Yet he makes it clear that a political humanism would take into account the truth of art and of tradition. It would take into account how our historical being in the world is acted out in our engagement with the works of the past—be that works of art or works of philosophy. Vaguely defi ned as it is, this political humanism, although rarely noted by the commentators, is the driving force of Gadamer’s work in the period when the bulk of Truth and Method was drafted and also in his later work, especially the later essays on art.

Jürgen Habermas is one of the few to have paid attention to Gadamer’s call for a political humanism.38 In his portrait of Gadamer, in Political-Philosophical Profi les, Habermas stages a contrast between the allegedly more rural sensitivities of Gadamer’s teacher Martin Heidegger and Gadamer’s own “urbanizing of the Heideggerian province.”39 Although there are obvious differences between the two philosophers—some of them deriving from Gadamer’s affi nities with the classicist environment in Marburg, some of them stemming from his affi nity with Hegel, it is important to see that they cannot be explained in light of Gadamer’s appeal to a political humanism.40 Gadamer’s political humanism is pre-cisely where he is at his most Heideggerian (even though humanism, as such, is not a term that Heidegger himself would use to describe the project of fundamental ontology).

When addressing Heidegger’s importance for the development of twentieth-century hermeneutics, one often rushes to mention Being and Time, his opus magnum of the early years in Freiburg and Mar-burg. It is in Being and Time that Heidegger speaks of hermeneutics as an “interpretation of Dasein’s Being,”41 and of the methodology of the human sciences as hermeneutics only in a “derivative sense” (BT; SZ, 38). It is here that he acknowledges how hermeneutics, in the primary meaning of the term, always moves in a circle: Only by presupposing Dasein’s average self-understanding can Dasein’s being be ontologically analyzed (BT; SZ, 8), which means that the apparent circle in reality is “a remarkable ‘relatedness backward or forward’ which what we are asking about (Being) bears to the inquiry itself as a mode of Being of an entity” (BT; SZ, 8). Finally, it is in Being and Time that Heidegger delivers his famous critique of Dilthey, claiming that in Dilthey’s critique of historical reason “everything centers in psychology” (BT; SZ, 398), so that he is almost bound to miss “the authentic disclosedness (‘truth’) of historical existence” (BT; SZ, 397).


Gadamer is clearly infl uenced by Heidegger’s ontological herme-neutics. In Truth and Method, he explicitly claims that it is fi rst and foremost by the standards (Maß) of Heideggerian philosophy that he “desires to be measured” (TM, xxv; WM, 5), and he repeatedly stresses that more than anything else it was the encounter with Heidegger, and in particular Heidegger’s teaching of the early 1920s, that came to determine the path of his own thinking. Hence, in order to spell out the hermeneutic import of Heidegger’s thinking, one ought to go back to the period before Being and Time and especially to his famous seminar on Aristotle from the early 1920s—a seminar that Gadamer himself takes to be the single most important intellectual experience of his youth,42 and which he also claims that he was “later to justify in theory and to represent.”43

Heidegger, who had been teaching Aristotle on several occasions, infuses his reading of this philosopher with a more general criticism of our relation to history and tradition at large. In the 1921–1922 lecture course Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger claims that we no longer relate to the tradition as relevant and alive. The tradition is perceived as dead, irrelevant, as an object to be studied at a disinterested distance. Wanting to mend this situation, Heidegger proposes a salvaging destruction of the past: an effort to rescue the works of tradition from the conservative, sometimes even petrifying tendencies of tradition itself—a return to the (truth of the) works in themselves, as it were (BT; SZ, 21). Against philology, which allegedly loses the big questions out of sight, Heidegger calls for a direct engage-ment with historical texts. The historical aspect of philosophy, he claims, “is visible only in the very act of philosophizing. It is graspable only as existence.”44 It is a misunderstanding, he claims (referring to Dilthey), “to maintain that we would come to an understanding if we do justice to history in . . . calmness and Objectivity.”45 Calmness and objectivity are not desirable qualities, but the result of “weakness and indolence.”46 Against this Heidegger advocates “the intention to confront [Ausein-andersetzungstendenz].”47 Only such an intention “has its own radical power of disclosing and illuminating.”48 What matters, when relating to the philosophical works of the past, is not their aesthetic, formal, or stylistic attire, not the historical-philological context in which they were written, but their relevance for us here and now.

This is the context in which Gadamer’s philosophy—and his recon-struction of nineteenth-century hermeneutics—must be seen. Gadamer, too, wants to rescue the past from the twin specter of aestheticizing and objectivizing attitudes; he, too, wants us directly to confront the words of the great poets and philosophers. Indeed his fi rst work on Plato is driven by such an ambition. In this work he tried, in his own


words, “to lay aside all scholarly knowledge for once and take as [his] point of departure the phenomena [i.e., Plato’s Philebus] as they show themselves to us.”49 For should it not, he asks rhetorically, “be possible . . . to see Greek philosophy, Aristotle and Plato, with new eyes—just as Heidegger was able in his lectures on Aristotle to present a completely uncustomary Aristotle, one in whom one rediscovered one’s own pres-ent-day question in startlingly concrete form?”50

This type of hermeneutic rationale not only characterizes Gadamer’s own hermeneutic practice in the 1920s and 1930s, but also his general hermeneutic position—his so-called political humanism—in Truth and Method and later works. The greatness of the works of the past, their truth, cannot be acknowledged if we turn them into objects of human studies in the narrow meaning of the term. Instead we ought to expose ourselves to their sublime, existential bidding. This existentialist drive of Gadamer’s hermeneutics surfaces in his discussion of the classical. In modernity, Gadamer claims, the term ‘classical’ is “reduced to a mere stylistic concept” (TM, 285; WM, 290). Partly due to Hegel, who saw the classical as a period rather than as a way of “being historical” (TM, 287; WM, 292), the idea of the classical has lost its normative force. Against this, Gadamer proposes a return to the early modern notion of humanistic education, which, he claims, embodies the idea of the classi-cal as “more than a concept of a period or of a historical style, and yet it nevertheless does not try to be a supra-historical value” (ibid.). As part of a liberal education, the classical refers to the capacity perpetually to allow “something true to come into being” (ibid.). The classical represents a historical authority that is preserved and handed down prior to all refl ection (ibid). It does not need to prove its authority; its authority is always already proved because the meaning of the work extends into and forms the beliefs and practices in terms of which we understand ourselves. As such, the classical discloses a historical reality to which consciousness belongs (zugehört) and is subordinate (untersteht) (TM, 288; WM, 292–293).

Understood as classical, the works of the past, Gadamer claims, ought to address us with an imperative like the one extruding from the Apollo sculpture in Rilke’s poem “Archaïscher Torso Apollos”: “Thou must al-ter thy life.”51 These works do not beg criticism. On the contrary, every “genuine artistic creation stands within a particular community, and such a community is always distinguishable from the cultured society that is informed and terrorized by art criticism.”52 Nor do classical works beg historical or philological scholarship. What they ask of us, rather, is self-examination—self-examination because we live in a culture that is no longer able to respond adequately to the call of the past, i.e., to our own historicity. Hence the challenge we face, living under the twin


shadow of aesthetic humanism and a quasi-scientifi c objectifi cation of the past, is to be able, again, to take on authentically our historical being-in-the-world. This is what is ultimately at stake in Gadamer’s hermeneutics: it is not, as it is often claimed, an effort to carve out an epistemology that allows for a position beyond relativism and objectiv-ism,53 but to take hermeneutics from a discussion about the validity of the historical sciences to a phenomenological analysis of our historical being in the world.

This detour through the phenomenological-existentialist roots of Gadamer’s hermeneutics should put us in a better position to see, fi rst, why Gadamer (for systematic, philosophical reasons and not just for personal reasons having to do with his disgraceful Paris talk) leaves Herder almost entirely out of his discussion of past hermeneutics, and, second, why he misreads both Schleiermacher and Herder. What Ga-damer wants is not so much to get the history of modern hermeneutics right. What he sets out to do, rather, is to explain philosophically how it was that aesthetic humanism—the general aesthetization of the past—came about, so that he, having analyzed its historical roots and contemporary symptoms, can prescribe the right cure. If Herder does not fi t into this picture, he may as well be ignored. At stake is not an effort to systematically explore the possible alternatives to Heideggerian hermeneutics, but to show that given the unproductiveness of subjec-tivist-psychologist hermeneutics, which he ascribes to Schleiermacher, there are simply no alternatives to Heidegger’s and his own ontological turn in hermeneutics.

There is nothing contingent about Gadamer’s misreading of Schlei-ermacher and Herder—the misreading, by the main advocate of hermeneutics in the twentieth-century, of two of the main advocates of hermeneutics in the nineteenth. It is not as if Gadamer’s misunderstand-ing of Schleiermacher and his overlooking of Herder’s hermeneutics are simply accidents, and that he, in this particular case, happens to be a bad advocate for a theory that is in itself in good shape. Rather, in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, the whole question of validity, philological justifi cation, and objectivity is sublated into the understanding of truth in terms of authenticity and self-understanding. It does not really mat-ter whether he gets Herder and Schleiermacher right. What matters is to make us understand the alienation from history and tradition that marks our modern predicament. This, I think, is the point at which we need to return to nineteenth-century hermeneutics and ask what kind of resources Herder and Schleiermacher offer, given that their hermeneutic theories do not aspire to a full-fl edged critique of modernity but respond to, somewhat more modestly, the question as to how we can understand


and interpret the expressions from cultures that are geographically, temporally, or culturally distant from that of the interpreter.

IV.

A return to the Herder-Schleiermacher line in hermeneutics need not undermine the basic worries that initially motivated Gadamer’s political humanism—the worries about the impacts of a problematic aesthetic humanism. However, having argued that neither Schleiermacher nor Herder can be placed within the category of naïve, aesthetic human-ism, but that they nonetheless do not follow Gadamer in conducting an ontological turn in hermeneutics, I cannot see why the call for a critique of an aesthetic humanism necessarily leads to a position of the kind that Gadamer is defending. On the contrary, from the point of view of Herder and Schleiermacher’s theories of interpretation, it would be reasonable to worry that Gadamer’s own existential-ontological turn in hermeneutics does not itself succeed in overcoming the fallacies of aesthetic humanism. Instead of appearing as the hermeneutician to get beyond the aesthetic paradigm, Gadamer emerges as the representative of a reinforced, ontologized version of aesthetic humanism—one that is at least as problematic as the one he initially wanted to question.

When criticizing aesthetic humanism, Gadamer’s main concern is that it tends to reduce the experience of art to a question of subjective feeling and immediacy. Truth and knowledge are not given any role to play within the sphere of art and artistic experience. Against this, Ga-damer emphasizes the artwork’s capacity for world-disclosure, its ability to present us with the truth about our own way of being (as historical Daseins) and hence trigger a potentially more authentic and fulfi lling existence. The truth of art is a momentary fl ash of self-understanding, an epiphany in which we all of a sudden see the power of the tradition in which we are situated, hence recollecting in a quasi-Platonic sense what we already knew but did not, as it were, refl ectively contemplate.54 This is what Gadamer has in mind when describing understanding as an “event of being [Seinsvorgang]” or an event (ein Gescheen) (TM, 144; WM, 148, see also TM, 309; WM, 314), and it is this event (of being) that makes up the fabric of his so-called political humanism. It is an account of the humanities that, wanting to move beyond the call for a method that is on par with the ones applied in the natural sciences, returns to art’s capacity to stage a kind of world-disclosive awakening in which not just the given, historical work, but the entire relationship between the interpreter and the tradition in which he or she is situated, is expe-rienced in a new and more truthful way. When authentically perceived, the interpreter does not stand toward tradition as a subject toward an object. On the contrary, this way of perceiving the hermeneutic situation


is the very root of the problem. At stake, rather, is a situation where the interpreter encounters a totality that is more authoritative than him or herself, a totality that one cannot refl ectively master or objectify but only deal with to the extent that one participates and subjects to it. Ga-damer expounds on this experience by exploring the metaphor of games and game playing, which he deliberately wants to take back from the Kantian-Schillerian tradition. The play involved in our encounters with tradition is not about exercising critical refl ection.55 It is, rather, about belonging. And it is important to see that the attraction of this experience is not, as such, linked up with subjective pleasure (be it disinterested or not) but rests with the relationship between the self and its tradition to such an extent that Gadamer, even in texts that are written well after the Second World War, is comfortable calling for a rehabilitation of the aesthetic-philosophical relevance of the notion of Volk.56

By ontologizing the process of understanding, Gadamer gets beyond what he takes to be the subjectivist implication of nineteenth-century hermeneutics. However, given his insistence on the “event of under-standing,” he does not get beyond the aestheticizing of the hermeneutic process as such. If, on Gadamer’s model, our relation to tradition is not about subjective aesthetic feeling, it is nonetheless about a kind of ex-perience that is paradigmatically expressed in the encounter with the work of art.57 In Gadamer’s model, it is tradition itself that has taken over the sublime authority of romantic genius. And whereas Gadamer accuses the romantics of taking over a Kantian theory of genius (but without seeing how genius, for Kant, is closely related with taste), he himself, at least when judged from a perspective like that of Herder and Schleiermacher, falls prey to a similar fallacy, except that genius is no longer linked up with the individual’s capacity for transcending aesthetic rules and conventions but with tradition itself. The experience of tradition is all about being played (TM, 104, 109; WM, 110, 115); it is all about being “carried away [hingerissen]” (TM, 125; WM, 130), and it is all about “ecstatic self-forgetfulness [ekstatischen Selbstverges-senheit]” (TM, 128; WM, 133). A critical-refl ective attitude would here miss the point of the political humanism that Gadamer takes himself to be representing.

Against this, Herder and Schleiermacher call for hermeneutic re-fl exivity. This is not because they bracket our situatedness in history. Quite to the contrary, according to their way of thinking, it is precisely because we are historically situated beings that we need to try to work out some hermeneutic standards, some refl ective procedures, in light of which we can critically assess our engagement with the past. Nor do Herder and Schleiermacher represent an appeal to a naïve methodology, culminating in an immediate congeniality or divination. Both Herder


and Schleiermacher deny that a fi nal, complete understanding is within the reach of the individual interpreter.58 However, the very point that Schleiermacher and Herder keep reiterating is this: The fact that we are historical creatures, the fact that we cannot as individual scholars reach the one and sole truth about the meaning of a given historical text or event, does not mean that we should let go of the aspiration to question the validity of our prejudices and grasp the text in its histori-cal uniqueness. The prejudices of tradition are not simply true because they express the truth about our world. That is, understanding our own world is something Herder and Schleiermacher would surely encourage. Moreover, they would underline that more often than not, self-understanding takes place through the encounter with other. What they would deny, though—and this is the main difference between their positions and Gadamer’s—is that understanding, on a most fundament level, is about authentic self-understanding or authentically taking over our own tradition. Understanding, from their point of view, is all about understanding another—be it another person, another text, or a culture that is geographically, temporally, or culturally distant from our own. In fact, given the emphasis that understanding the meaning of the text is to understand it as an individual expression of a shared historical culture, understanding would include all of the above.

At this point, the term political humanism acquires a new meaning. For Gadamer, this concept is related to notions of authenticity and a truthful appropriation of the eminent texts of our own tradition.59 If Herder and Schleiermacher were ever to use such a concept, it would have to be about understanding the other as other, of not reducing that which is other to that which is mine. This does not mean that we necessarily have to accept as true or right whatever another person is saying or doing. What it implies, however, is that we must be prepared to search for the rationality of the acts, claims, or expressions we face, asking how they could plausibly make sense within a context that is no longer ours.

This, it seems to me, is a much healthier form of political humanism than the one we fi nd within post-Heideggerian hermeneutics. Empha-sizing that understanding others, be they geographically or culturally distant from ourselves, is not simply an event into which we are drawn. It is a process that requires hard work, critical skills, and a mixture of philological knowledge and sympathetic imagination. A rigid method to guarantee the successful outcome of this process does not exist. Neither Herder nor Schleiermacher would claim that. What they would claim, however, is that without philological, historical, and critical-refl ective standards, our understanding of others potentially lapses into a projec-tion of our own idea of the other—be it in the form, so aptly described in the work of Edward Said, of a naïve endorsement of the “exotic,” or in the


shape of an equally naïve rejection of other cultures because they do not seem to meet a particular Western, post-enlightened notion of rational-ity and knowledge. This is the legacy of the Herder-Schleiermacher line in interpretation theory. And this is why their line in hermeneutics, as opposed to the Heidegger-Gadamer paradigm, is deserving of a renais-sance within contemporary philosophy and social thought.

Temple University

NOTES

I would like to thank Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Michael Forster, Paul Guyer, John Zammito, and the other participants of the “Herder and Anthropology” workshop at the University of Oslo, May 2006, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

1. In particular the 1764 Von der Ode and the 1768 essay on Thomas Abbt. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Von der Ode, Werke in zehn Bänden, hrsg. Martin Bollacher et al., Bd. I, Frühe Schriften, 1764–1772, ed. Ulrich Gaier (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), pp. 57–99; and “Über Thomas Abbts Schriften. Der Torso von einem Denkmal, an seinem Grabe er-richtet,” Werke im zehn Bänden, Bd. 2, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur, 1767–1781, ed. Gunter E. Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), pp. 565–608. English translation of the Abbt text (selections) in Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Michael Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 167–177.

2. See Isaiah Berlin, “Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pim-lico, 2003), 70–90 and Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 168–248. See also Charles Taylor, “The Importance of Herder,” and “The Politics of Recogni-tion,” in Philosophical Arguments (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79–100 and 225–257.

3. Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, trans. Robert M. Wallace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); Platos Dialektische Ethik, Gesam-melte Werke, Bd. 5, Griechische Philosophie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1999), pp. 3–163.

4. Gadamer retrieves his visit to Paris in Philosophical Apprenticeships in the following way: “I went abroad twice during the war. I did not fully rec-ognize that thereby one was being used for purposes of foreign propaganda, for which a political innocent was sometimes suitable.” See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 99; Philosophische Lehrjahre. Eine Ruckschau (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), p. 118.


5. Gadamer, Volk und Geschichte im Denken Herders (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1941). Further references to this work will be abbreviated VG.

6. Gadamer, “Herder und die geschichtliche Welt” (1967), Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 4, Neuere Philosophie II (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), pp. 318–335. Further references to this work will be abbreviated HgW.

7. See Herder, “Shakespeare,” trans. Joyce P. Crick, in German Aesthet-ics and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, ed. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 165; Herder, “Shakespear” (1773) in Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur, p. 504.

8. The full quote is: “Dies unpolitische Erahnen und Vorbereiten des Kom-menden war überhaupt das deutsche Schicksal seiner Epoche, und vielleicht ist das Schicksal solcher politischen Verspätung die Voraussetzung dafür, daß der deutsche Begriff des Volkes im Unterschied zu den demokratischen Parolen des Westens in einer veränderten Gegenwart die Kraft zu neuer politischer und sozialer Ordnung erweist” (VG, 23).

9. The essay was originally given as a lecture for French offi cers in a camp for prisoners of war in Paris. Gadamer briefl y refers to this talk in “Selbstdarstel-lung Hans-Georg Gadamer,” WM II, 490 and in Philosophical Apprenticeships, p. 99; Philosophische Lehrjahre, p. 118.

10. Ibid.11. This is a too weak interpretation of Herder’s point. Although Herder, like

Hegel, emphasizes that progress always means leaving something behind, the young Herder, in addition, questions the very idea of a progress in history as such. See for example the 1767/68 Older Critical Forestlet, where Herder criticizes the idea of retrieving history as a “doctrinal structure [Lehrgebäude].” Older Criti-cal Forestlet (excerpts), Philosophical Writings, pp. 257–258; Älteres kritisches Wäldchen, Die kritischen Wälder zur Ästhetik, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Litera-tur, 13. Later on, Herder does indeed characterize Winckelmann’s work, with its teleological retrieval of the Ancient cultures, as such a Lehrgebäude. Ibid., 23.

In later texts, however, Herder offers a more ambiguous account of progress in history. In This Too a Philosophy, i.e., the text which Gadamer’s 1967 essay accompanies, one fi nds, in spite of the subtitle “Beitrag zu vielen Beiträgen des Jahrhunderts,” examples of an almost Hegelian notion of teleology. This Too a Philosophy (1774) (Excerpts), in Philosophical Writings, 299; Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, Werke, Bd. 4, Schriften zu Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774–1787, ed. Jürgen Brummack und Martin Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), pp. 41–42.

12. Along with the discussion of Schleiermacher throughout Truth and Method, two central essays are “The Problem of Language in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics,” trans. David E. Linge, in Schleiermacher as Contemporary: Journal for Theology and the Church 7, ed. Robert Funk (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), pp. 68–84; “Das Problem der Sprache bei Schleiermacher” (1968), Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 4, pp. 361–373; and “Schleiermacher als Platoniker” (1969), Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 4, pp. 374–383.


13. For an alternative interpretation of Schleiermacher’s affi liation with the Jena romantics, see Reinhold Rieger, Interpretation und Wissen. Zur philoso-phischen Begründung der Hermeneutik bei Friedrich Schleiermacher und ihrem geschichtlichen Hintergrund, Schleiermacher-Archiv, Bd. 6 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988).

14. Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 190; Wahrheit und Methode, 2. vols., Gesam-melte Werke, vol. 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1990), p. 193. Further references to Truth and Method/Wahrheit und Methode will be abbreviated TM; WM. Un-less explicitly noted, the WM pagination refers to vol. 1 of this work.

15. Peter Szondi, “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics Today,” in On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 95–113; fi rst published as “L’herméneutique de Schleiermacher,” trans. S. Buguet, Poetique 2 (1970), pp. 141–155.

16. Heinz Kimmerle, “Introduction,” in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Herme-neutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman (Montana: Scholars Press, 1977), p. 27; “Einleitung,” Hermeneutik. Nach den Handschriften, ed. Heinz Kimmerle (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1974), p. 14.

Kimmerle’s approach has later been subject to criticism. See Wolfgang Virmond, “Neue Textgrundlagen zu Schleiermachers früher Hermeneutik. Prolegomena zur kritischen Edition,” Schleiermacher-Archiv, Bd. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), p. 578ff.

17. Manfred Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine (Frankfurt am Main: Surh-kamp Verlag, 1977). See also Frank’s edition of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics: Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993) and the largely overlapping Hermeneutics and Criticism, ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

18. A couple of more recent readings of Schleiermacher’s work deviate from this tendency: Gunter Scholtz, Ethik und Hermeneutik. Schleiermachers Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Ver-lag, 1995); and Christian Berner, La Philosophie de Schleiermacher (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1995).

19. The fact that I want to read Herder and Schleiermacher together does not mean that I would deny that there are also important differences between their positions. For a discussion of these differences, see Michael Forster, “Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2002 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2002/entries/schleiermacher/.

Furthermore, it is the point of this essay to argue that the strength of Herder’s hermeneutics is related to the points at which he goes beyond and challenges the framework of Gadamer’s hermeneutics rather than, as Hans Dietrich Irmscher suggests, Herder representing an early version of Gadame-rian philosophy. See Hans Dietrich Irmscher, “Grundzüge der Hermeneutik Herders,” Schaumburg Studien, Heft 33, Bückeburg, 1973, pp. 17–57.


20. At least not a theory of interpreting the texts of the past. For a read-ing of the broader hermeneutic implications of the third Critique, see Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of the “Critique of Judgment” (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1990).

21. See John Pemble, Shakespeare Goes to Paris (London: Hambledon and London, 2004); Friedrich Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1920), pp. 185–358; and Hertha Isaacsen, Der junge Herder und Shakespeare (Berlin: Verlag von Emil Ebering, 1930), pp. 13–49.

22. Herder, “Shakespeare. Erster Entwurf (1771),” Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur, pp. 522–523.

23. “Shakespear. Zweiter Entwurf (1771),” Schriften zur Ästhetik und Lit-eratur, p. 548.

24. Herder, “Shakespeare,” p. 172; Herder, “Shakespear (1773),” Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur, p. 515.

25. Herder, “On Thomas Abbt’s Writings,” p. 173; Herder, “Über Thomas Abbts Schriften,” p. 580.

26 See also John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 28ff.

27. Herder, Die Kritischen Wälder zur Ästhetik, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur, pp. 9–443; a selection of this work (the fi rst and the forth grove) is translated in Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Gregory Moore (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 51–291.

28. Or, as Hans Dietrich Irmischer puts it, as “historisch bedingt und zu-gleich ursprünglich.” “Grundzüge der Hermeneutik Herders,” p. 25.

29. Herder, “On Thomas Abbt’s Writing,” p. 174; “Über Thomas Abbts Schriften,” p. 605.

30. Ibid.31. Even though there can, as Schleiermacher claims, be no “concept of style

[Von keinem Stil läßt sich ein B[egriff] geben],” he maintains that “[t]here is nothing in style but the composition and treatment of language [Komp[osition] und Sprachbehandlung].” Hermeneutics and Criticism, pp. 96–97; Hermeneutik und Kritik, pp. 172, 174.

32. Hermeneutics and Criticism, p. 8; Hermeneutik und Kritik, p. 78; Hermeneutics, p. 68; Hermeneutik, p. 56; and Hermeneutics and Criticism, p. 91; Hermeneutik und Kritik, p. 168.

33. Hermeneutics, pp. 68–69; Hermeneutik, p. 56.34 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Writing and the Living Voice,” in Hans-Georg

Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicolson, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (New York: State Uni-versity of New York Press, 1992), p. 63.

35. In Gadamer’s words, “For the philologists, the text, and especially a poetic text, is there . . . like a fi xed given.” Gadamer, “Refl ections on my Philosophi-


cal Journey,” in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis E. Hahn, Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 24 (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), p. 54.

36. The expression, which is Gadamer’s own, is taken from his discussion of Dilthey in “Wilhelm Dilthey nach 150 Jahren (Zwischen Romantik und Posi-tivismus),” in Dilthey und die Philosophie der Gegenwart, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1985), pp. 157–182.

37. Gadamer, “Refl ections on my Philosophical Journey,” p. 27.38. Another exception is Robert Sullivan, who writes in his introduction to

Philosophical Apprenticeships: “Philosophical hermeneutics was fi rst of all a different way of doing politics.” “Translator’s Introduction,” Gadamer, Philo-sophical Apprenticeships, p. xvi.

39. Jürgen Habermas, “Hans-Georg Gadamer: Urbanizing the Heidegge-rian Province,” trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 196–197; “Hans-Georg Gadamer. Urbanisierung der Heideggerschen Provinz,” Philosophisch-politische Profi le (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Ver-lag, 1981), pp. 400–401.

40. Habermas, “Urbanizing the Heideggerian Province,” p. 194; “Urbanisier-ung der Heideggerschen Provinz,” p. 397.

A similar point of view can be found in Robert Sullivan’s introduction to the English translation of Philosophical Apprenticeships, where it is claimed that “Heidegger’s contribution to Gadamer’s thinking was mainly negative: It helped push the young Gadamer away from the dominant Western philosophical tradi-tion” (“Translator’s Introduction,” Philosophical Apprenticeships, p. x), and in Jean Grondin’s proposal that “[t]o put it bluntly, Gadamer is a humanist and Heidegger isn’t.” Jean Grondin, “Gadamer on Humanism,” The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, p. 157.

41. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Ed-ward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962); Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), p. 38. Further references to this work will be abbreviated BT; SZ, with page numbers referring to the German standard pagination.

42. “Selbstdarstellung Hans-Georg Gadamer,” WM II, p. 485.43. Philosophical Apprenticeships, 49; Philosophische Lehrjahre, p. 216.44. Martin Heidegger, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and

Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994); Wahrheit und Methode, 2 vols., Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1990).

45. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initia-tion into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 3; Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 61, hrsg. Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985), p. 1.

46. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, p. 4; Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, p. 2.


47. Ibid.48. Ibid.49. Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, p. xxxii; Platos dialektische Ethik, p. 161.50. Ibid.51. “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics” (1964), Philosophical Hermeneutics,

ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 104; “Ästhetik und Hermeneutik,” Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 8, Ästhetik und Poetik I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), p. 8.

52. Gadamer, “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem” (1966), Philosophical Hermeneutics, vol. 5; “Die Universalität des hermeneutischen Problems,” WM II, p. 221.

53. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (London: Black-well, 1983).

54. Gadamer, “Refl ections on my Philosophical Journey,” p. 24.55. Drawing on the Dutch anthropologist Johan Huizinga and his Homo

Ludens (1938), Gadamer claims that we enter the play with an almost “sacred seriousness [heiliger Ernst]” (TM, 102; WM, 107), that is, with a willingness to be directed by the rules or rhythms of the game itself. Like the religious ceremony, play proper presupposes that “the player loses himself in play [der Spielende in Spielen aufgeht]” (TM, 102; WM, 108). The play takes place without the full control of the players; the “to and fro movement” of the game “follows of itself” (TM, 104; WM, 110). The play “draws him into its domination and fi lls him with its spirit,” as Gadamer puts it (TM, 109; WM, 115). Hence, “the actual subject of the play is . . . the play itself” (TM, 104; WM, 110, emphasis added).

See also Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955), 55ff.

56. As late as 1966, Gadamer claims that “we cannot deny that the idea of art being bound to a people [(die) Rede von der volksverbundenen Kunst] involves a real insight [auf etwas Wirkliches hinweist].” “The Universality of the Hermeneu-tical Problem,” p. 5; “Die Universalität des hermeneutischen Problems,” p. 221.

It is interesting to note in this context that Herder, whose name is frequently associated with this kind of thinking (as he is in Gadamer’s 1941 essay), criticizes what he takes to be a narrow notion of national art. See, for example, “Denkmal Johann Winkelmanns,” Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur, p. 669.

57. Particularly relevant in this context is Gadamer’s account of pre-modern art, which, on his understanding, relies on “a community of meaning which linked the work of art with the existing world” (TM, 134; WM, 138) so that its obligatoriness (Verbindlichkeit) is self-evident.

58. See Hermeneutics and Criticism, p. 96; Hermeneutik und Kritik, p. 172; and “Denkmal Johann Winckelmanns,” p. 655.

59. In the “Afterword” in Truth and Method, Gadamer concedes that “[w]hat has occupied me for years . . . are the special problems of eminent texts” (TM, 576; WM II, 475).

gjesdal k. aesthetic and political humanism. gadamer on herder, schleiermacher, and the origins of...

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