Per Caritatem

A nice passage to contemplate by Hans-Helmuth Gander on Gadamer’s historically-friendly description of a human being as “biography”:

“Reflection on history means as well, therefore, that the one reflecting is himself always already involved in history. No one simply ‘takes up’ history, and no one begins it; for this reason a single reflection on history is never able to conceive it neutrally and ab ovo. The individual is implicated in history through his biography, which takes shape respectively under the influence of historical events and developments. These latter are, in turn, reflected in one’s biography; they are inscribed in it in such a way that they engrave, as it were, one’s life. In this engraving, the forces of history produce a biography in its individual profile, which therefore can never be removed from the experience of reality, since experience is already history for the individual. Seen in this way, history is the medium in which we carry out our lives. Accordingly, human life is nothing like a substance or an essential core to which one simply attaches, in its factical course and in all of its historical details, a biography. By implication, one’s historical life is not placed before one, as the possession of an autonomous subject. It can be said, with Georg Picht, to modify a famous Gadamerian pronouncement: ‘In truth, we do not possess our biography, but rather, it possesses us. [That is to say:] We are produced by our biography; one could even say: we are nothing other than our biography” (Geschichte und Gegenwart [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1993], 6). Along with the familial genealogy that is stored within our biography, there lie at the same time those aspects of historical influences and events that allow each person to become for himself the person who he is. Conversely, the ‘course of world history’ only emerges in the form of a concrete course of lives, such that in this constitutive reciprocity between existence and world history, not only can neither be conceived without the other, but it is only in this reciprocal relation that each receives its respective profile” (p. 122).

Bibliography

Gander, Hans-Helmuth, “Between Strangeness and Familiarity: Towards Gadamer’s Conception of Effective History,” Research in Phenomenology 34 (2004): 121-306.

In Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture (given in the 70’s), he recalls something that Dostoevsky once said—something that he used to consider quite puzzling, viz., “Beauty will save the world.” (“Мир спасет красота”). He goes on to say, “There is […] something special in the essence of beauty, a special quality in art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolute and subdues even a resistant heart. A political speech, hasty newspaper comment, a social program, a philosophical system can, as far as appearances are concerned, be built smoothly and consistently on an error or a lie; and what is concealed and distorted will not be immediately clear. But then to counteract it comes a contradictory speech, commentary, program, or differently constructed philosophy—and again everything seems smooth and graceful, and again hangs together. That is why they inspire trust—and distrust. There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe. (Попусту твердится, что к серцу не ложится). A work of art contains its own verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them. Perhaps then the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the dressed-up, worn-out formula we thought it in our presumptuous, materialistic youth? If the crowns of these three trees meet, as scholars have asserted, and if the too obvious, too straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been knocked down, cut off, not let grow, perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will work their way through, rise up to that very place, and thus complete the work of all three? Then what Dostoyevsky wrote—’Beauty will save the world’—is not a slip of the tongue but a prophecy.”

If anyone is interested, I have just uploaded a new paper on Luther to my website. You can read it by clicking, Luther: Continuities and Discontinuities with His Late Medieval Context.

I hope to post more on Gadamer in the days to come. Until then, Merry Christmas to all!

Cynthia

In stark contrast to a modern aversion to prejudice or bias as a hindrance to “objectivity,” Gadamer presents a positive view of prejudices in his view of hermeneutics. According to Gadamer, all of us come to the text with our own prejudices or “horizons” and these biases are not be understood as solely negative or as necessarily closing off understanding. Though it is the case that our prejudices or presuppositions can and do set limits on our interpretative endeavors, it is not the case that our prejudices are unalterable nor are they always active in a negative limiting way. Rather, they have a positive or productive function as well and actually promote understanding. Addressing this positive aspect of our prejudices, Gadamer writes,

“Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that they inevitably distort the truth. In fact, the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word [pre-judgment], constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices are our biases of our openness to the world. They are simply the conditions whereby we experience something—whereby what we encounter says something to us. This formulation certainly does not mean that we are enclosed within a wall of prejudices and only let through the narrow portals those things that can produce a pass saying, ‘Nothing new will be said here.’” (Truth and Method, p. 9).

Until we engage a text (with an openness to being changed by that text) we are often unaware of our biases. Thus, it is through our dialogic encounter with the text that are prejudices are made evident to us—i.e., we must be open or “made open” to having our presuppositions laid bare. Two analogous examples that spring to mind that might help us to better grasp Gadamer’s idea come from my own experience. The first goes back to my music (jazz) school days when I played in various jazz groups. I had become pretty familiar with a style of jazz called “swing” and in addition to playing in one of the top large ensembles at my school, I also played in a small group on the side. One semester I met a friend who was well versed in Latin jazz and asked me if I would be interested in playing a few Latin jazz gigs. I took him up on the offer and met his group that evening for a rehearsal. To my surprise, I had an extremely difficult time “getting” the nuanced and extremely complex accents of Latin rhythms (which are very different than the accents in swing for which I had a somewhat “natural” feel). Because I assumed that Latin jazz, being a species of jazz, used the same harmonic progressions, scales, and even much of the same standard tunes, I thought that simply adjusting my rhythmic feel to Latin would be no problem. However, once I was actually playing as part of group of well-seasoned Latin jazz players, I immediately sensed the inadequacy of my assumptions and realized that there was much more involved in Latin jazz than I had previously thought. A second example is my experience of living in Moscow, Russia for three years. In preparation for my new cultural experience, I studied Russian and had attained a decent conversational level of speaking, read a few Russian novels and short stories, attempted to read a bit on the Russian Orthodox Church and so on. I thought that surely such efforts on my part would allow for a smoother transition into my new culture. To an extent these things certainly helped, however, I had no idea how my own American culture had so deeply shaped my thinking and behavior. Had I not had this experience of being an “other” in a foreign environment, I would not have been made aware of my own prejudices. My experience of living in Russia among the Russian people—interacting with Russian Orthodox believers, shopping in Russian grocery stores, learning Russian jokes, and traveling on Russian trains—transformed me by making manifest my own prejudices (of which I was unaware—things like a certain American sensitivity to time and getting things done according to a schedule and a certain way that we as Americans tend to view “customer service,” and so on) and provided a way for me to see outside of my own culturally limited perspective by living as an other with a people whose life orientation often clashed with what I had come to think was “normal.” Though these are only analogous examples and are not speaking directly of “texts” per se, I do think that they illumine important aspects of Gadamer’s broad understanding of hermeneutics and the role of prejudices as the conditions that make possible our (on-going) understanding.

Bibliography
1. Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977.

In Kathleen Wright’s article, “On What We Have in Common: The Universality of Philosophical Hermeneutics,” she writes the following regarding Gadamer’s understanding of the universality of hermeneutics:

“the universal aspect of hermeneutics has to do with the community we join and the communion we feel in and through the fusion of horizons.”

What Wright wants to highlight is that according to Gadamer a “successful conversation” involves the interlocutors forming a community and being changed or transformed by the subject matter of the conversation. We can easily see what Wright calls the “I-we sociality” involved in a conversation between two living, breathing individuals, but how are we to understand this sociality when the conversation partner happens to be a text? “With whom or with what does the interpreter actually share an understanding? Gadamer seems to be responding to this kind of question when he states that, ‘It is more than a metaphor; it is a memory of what originally was the case to describe the task of hermeneutics as entering into a conversation with the text (Truth and Method 368). Gadamer maintains, therefore, that the shared understanding, the ‘fusion of horizons,’ that comes about through the interpretation of a text is social in the same I-we sense as the shared understanding, the ‘fusion of horizons,’ that we achieve through a conversation” (p. 237). Here I think that a musical analogy (or two) might help in shedding light on Gadamer’s claim. Consider a solo piano piece written by Beethoven (the score being analogous to a “text”) and its performance (interpretation) by a 21st century pianist. The pianist does not simply approach the score in a monologue fashion, but rather attempts to enter the lifeworld of the piece—a lifeworld that goes beyond Beethoven, as Beethoven himself stood in a tradition of musicians and his composing reflects the various influences of his musical predecessors (Haydn, Mozart, etc.). Likewise, the pianist herself represents a musical tradition—a tradition which perhaps has been shaped by French impressionism and a genealogy of Russian composers. Consequently, when the pianist performs Beethoven’s piano concerto, she, as well as, the piece itself are transformed and a ‘fusion of horizons’ takes place. In a sense, the “conversation,” has been going on for some time (several hundred years); the 21st century pianist (the “I”) is simply joining in (and participating in the “we” and vice versa).