HANS GEORG GADAMER

La fusione degli orizzonti tra il circolo ermeneutico e la positività dei pregiudizi storici
Gadamer è uno dei padri dell'ermeneutica contemporanea. Ermeneutica è una parola di etimo greco, che deriva da hermeneutiké (téchne), termine che allude a una costellazione di significati legati all'attività del tradurre, dell’interpretare, e che a sua volta deriva da hermeneúo, verbo che riecheggia Hermes – il nunzio degli dèi, l’equivalente di Thoth, dio egiziano che Platone cita nel Fedro (274 c7), o di Mercurio latino.
In passato l'ermeneutica era una branca del sapere che si occupava dell'interpretazione dei testi sacri o delle leggi; in età moderna Friedrich Schleiermacher apre la strada a quella che stava per diventare una disciplina filosofica: il problema posto dall'autore era di vedere quali erano le condizioni epistemologiche grazie alle quali noi interpreti avremmo potuto evitare ogni fraintendimento durante la ricostruzione della visione del mondo (hinen-Versetzung, lett: trasferimento interno) nella quale l'oggetto da noi studiato apparteneva. Sí che, il compito del bravo ermeneuta consisteva non solo nel catturare le intenzioni esplicite dell'autore del testo, ma di esplicitare la traccia di un non-detto sotteso a ogni intenzione consapevole. Ma se per Schleirmacher il circolo ermeneutico era concluso grazie a un trasferimento empatico, per Wilhelm Dilthey rimane un compito mai concluso né mai pacificato. Anche secondo Gadamer è impossibile tornare indietro rivivendo il passato in modo oggettivo, poiché l'esistenza presente è influenzata da una serie di conoscenze stratificate che chiama, riprendendo Heidegger, pre-giudizi: quando ciascuno emette un giudizio è influenzato dalla propria visione del mondo (Weltanschauung), che non è un inconveniente, ma una condizione di tutti quanti noi. Per cui Gadamer può dire che: «Di per sé, pregiudizio significa solo un giudizio che viene pronunciato prima di un esame completo e definitivo di tutti gli elementi obiettivamente rilevanti» (Verità e metodo, Bompiani 2000, p. 561) Sí che il pregiudizio non va eliminato, ma abitato con phrónesis (che noi solitamente traduciamo con "saggezza", meglio: "prudenza", che richiama il latino pro-video ovvero la capacità di "guardarsi (se videre) intorno (pro)", concetto greco che Gadamer recupera da Aristotele (Etica a Nicomaco, libro VI): «L'interprete [...] - scrive Gadamer - non può proporsi di prescindere da sé stesso e dalla concreta situazione ermeneutica nella quale si trova» (ivi, p. 699).
Si configura dunque il cosiddetto circolo ermeneutico. L'interpretazione di un testo è influenzata dai pre-giudizi storici, nel senso che le nostre passate (pre-) conoscenze (giudizi) caratterizzano la comprensione del presente, i quali sono determinati da una continua stratificazione di messaggi che si formano grazie al costante dialogo tra l'opera e gli interpreti: è qui che prende vita la fusione degli orizzonti, quel processo che porta il fruitore del testo dentro il circolo ermeneutico nel quale si fondono due orizzonti, quello dello studioso - che si è formato entro la tradizione e la pre-comprensione del presente - e quella del testo, che porta con sé l'insieme di tutte le interpretazioni e tradizioni che ha vissuto.

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Georg_Gadamer

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Good Will to Power
A Response to Hans-Georg Gadamer

The following day, Derrida had this to say:

 

During the lecture and ensuing discussion yesterday evening, I began to ask myself if anything was taking place here other than improbable debates, counter-questioning, and inquiries into unfindable objects of thought -- to recall some of the formulations we heard. I am still asking myself this question.

We are gathered here around Professor Gadamer. It is to him, then, that I wish to address these words, paying him the homage of a few questions.

The first question concerns what he said to us last evening about "good will about an appeal to good will, and to the absolute commitment to the desire for consensus in understanding. How could anyone not be tempted to acknowledge how extremely evident this axiom is? For this is not just one of the axioms of ethics. It is the point where ethics begins for any community of speakers, even regulating the phenomena of disagreement and misunderstanding. It confers "dignity in the Kantian sense on the good will, to know that which in a moral being lies beyond all market value, every negotiable price, and every hypothetical imperative. So this axiom would be unconditional -- and would stand beyond any kind of evaluation whatsoever and beyond all value, if a value implies a scale and a comparison.

My first question, then, would be the following: Doesn't this unconditional axiom nevertheless presuppose that the will is the form of that unconditionality, its last resort, its ultimate determination? What is the will if, as Kant says, nothing is absolutely good except the good will? Would not this determination belong to what Heidegger has rightly called "the determination of the being of beings as will, or willing subjectivity?" Does not this way of speaking, in its very necessity, belong to a particular epoch, namely, that of a metaphysics of the will?

A second question -- still in relation to last evening's lecture: What to do about good will -- the condition for consensus even in disagreement -- if one wants to integrate a psychoanalytic hermeneutics into a general hermeneutics? This is just what Professor Gadamer was proposing to do last evening. But what would good will mean in psychoanalysis? Or even just in discourse that follows the lines of psychoanalysis? Would it be enough, as Professor Gadamer seems to think, simply to enlarge the context of interpretation? Or, on the contrary -- as I am inclined to look at it -- would this not involve a breach, an overall re-structuring of the context, even of the very concept of context? Here I am not referring to any specific psychoanalytic doctrine but only to a question traversed by the possibility of psychoanalysis, to an interpretation worked on by psychoanalysis. Such interpretation would perhaps be closer to the interpretive style of Nietzsche than to the other hermeneutical tradition extending from Schleiermacher to Gadamer with all the internal differences that one may wish to distinguish (such as were singled out last night).

Professor Gadamer describes this context of interpretation to us as the context of what he terms "un ve'cu a "lived experienced" [Lebenszusammenhang] in living dialogue; that is, in the living experience of living dialogue. This was one of the most important and decisive points in all that he said to us about context-related coherence -- systematic or not, for not every coherence necessarily takes systematic form. For me, it was equally one of the most problematical. And this applies also to everything he told us concerning the definition of a text, be it literary, poetic, or ironic. Here I am also reminded of the final question posed by one of the participants in the discussion. It had to do with the closure of a corpus [la cloture d'un corpus]. What is the relevant context in this regard? And what, strictly speaking, would be an "enlargement of a context?" Would it be a continual expansion, or a discontinuous re-structuring?

A third question also has to do with the underlying structure of good will. Whether or not psychoanalytic afterthoughts are brought into the picture, one can still raise questions about that axiomatic precondition of interpretive discourse which Professor Gadamer calls "Verstehen "understanding the other and "understanding one another." Whether one speaks of consensus or of misunderstanding (as in Schleiermacher), one needs to ask whether the precondition for Verstehen, far from being the continuity of rapport (as it was described yesterday evening), is not rather the interruption of rapport, a certain rapport of interruption, the suspending of all mediation?

Finally, Professor Gadamer has insistently referred to "that experience [Erfahrung] that we all recognize to a description of experience that is not in itself to be taken metaphysically. But usually -- and maybe even always -- metaphysics presents itself as the description of experience as such, of presentation as such. Furthermore, I am not convinced that we ever really do have this experience that Professor Gadamer describes, of knowing in a dialogue that one has been perfectly understood or experiencing the success of confirmation.

In the tangle of this web of questions and remarks, which I abandon here in their elliptical and improvised form, can one not glimpse a quite different way of thinking about texts?

 

 

To which Gadamer replied:

Reply to Jacques Derrida

Mr. Derrida's questions prove irrefutably that my remarks on text and interpretation, to the extent they had Derrida's well-known position in mind, did not accomplish their objective. I am finding it difficult to understand these questions that have been addressed to me. But I will make an effort, as anyone would do who wants to understand another person or to be understood by the other. I absolutely cannot see that this effort would have anything to do with "the epoch of metaphysics" -- or, for that matter, with the Kantian concept of good will. I stated quite clearly what I mean by good will: for me, it signifies what Plato called (find out how to render this phrase in HTML). That is to say, one does not go about identifying the weaknesses of what another person says in order to prove that one is always right, but one seeks instead as far as possible to strengthen the other's viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating. Such an attitude seems essential to me for any understanding at all to come about. This is nothing more than an observation. It has nothing to do with an "appeal and nothing at all to do with ethics. Even immoral beings try to understand one another. I cannot believe that Derrida would actually disagree with me about this. Whoever opens his mouth wants to be understood; otherwise, one would neither speak nor write. And finally, I have an exceptionally good piece of evidence for this: Derrida directs questions to me and therefore he must assume that I am willing to understand them. Certainly this is completely unrelated to Kant's "good will but it does have a good deal to do with the difference between dialectic and sophistics.

Now I also do not believe I have been understood if one attributes to me a desire to integrate a pyschoanalytic hermeneutics -- that is, the process by which an analyst helps a patient to understand him or herself and to get over his or her complexes -- into a general hermeneutics, and to extend the classical-naive forms of understanding over into psychoanalysis. My aim was quite the reverse: to show that psychoanalytic interpretation goes in a totally different direction. Psychoanalytic interpretation does not seek to understand what someone wants to say, but instead what that person doesn't want to say or even admit to him or herself.

I, too, see this as a breach, a rupture, and not another method for understanding the same thing. It would never occur to me to deny that one could approach the task of understanding utterances with an intention totally different from that which would lead to mutual understanding. My question was straightforward: When and why does one bring about such a breach? I wanted to point out this breach because I know that Ricoeur, for example, rejects the idea of a radical break when he places the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of intention side by side as two different methods for understanding the same thing.

But I am not under any illusion that Derrida, even though I agree with him on this point about a "breach is really in agreement with me. Surely he would say that this breach must always be made, because a continuous understanding of another person simply does not exist. As far as he is concerned, the concept of truth which is implied in harmonious agreement and which defines the "true" opinion of what something means, is itself a naive notion that ever since Nietzsche, we can no longer accept.

No doubt it is for this reason that Derrida finds my speaking about a lived context [Lebenszusammenhang] and the fundamental place of living dialogue especially problematical. It is in this form of exchange -- of word and word, question and answer -- that a genuine mutual understanding (see about greek phrase) can be produced. This is the way, Plato emphasized constantly, by means of which one is able to eliminate the false agreements, misunderstandings and misinterpretations that cling to words taken by themselves. Indeed, much more than a linguistic system as a system of signs is constituted through (greek phrase) [Syntheke], or agreed-upon conventions. This is especially true of the communicative sharing in which what Derrida himself calls "collocution" takes place.

So it seems to me entirely justifiable to start with the process in which mutual agreement is shaped and reshaped in order to describe the functioning of language and of its possible written forms. Surely this is not at all a kind of metaphysics, but the presupposition that any partner in a dialogue must assume, including Derrida, if he wants to pose questions to me. Is he really disappointed that we cannot understand each other? Indeed not, for in his view this would be a relapse into metaphysics. He will, in fact, be pleased, because he takes this private experience of disillusionment to confirm his own metaphysics. But I cannot see here how he can be right only with respect to himself, be in agreement only with himself. Of course I understand very well why he invokes Nietzsche here. It is precisely because both of them are mistaken about themselves. Actually both speak and write in order to be understood.

Now certainly I would not want to say that the solidarities that bind human beings together and make them partners in a dialogue always are sufficient to enable them to achieve understanding and total mutual agreement. Just between two people this would require a never-ending dialogue. And the same would apply with regard to the inner dialogue the soul has with itself. Of course we encounter limits again and again; we speak past each other and are even at cross-purposes with ourselves. But in my opinion we could not do this at all if we had not traveled a long way together, perhaps without even acknowledging it to ourselves. All human solidarity, all social stability, presupposes this.

But doubtless Derrida thinks -- and I am hoping he will excuse me if I try to understand him -- that matters are different when it comes to texts. To him, any word appearing in written form is always already a breach. This applies especially in the case of a literary text, indeed, with regard to every linguistic work of art, in that it demands of us that we break with the customary course of our experience and its horizons of expectation. To put it as Heidegger does: A work of art thrusts itself upon us, it deals us a blow [Stoss]. In no way does it signify the reassuring confirmation of mutual agreement. All the same, we ought to be able to understand ourselves on the basis of it. The experience of limits that we encounter in our life with others -- is it not this alone that conditions our experience and is presupposed in all the common interests bearing us along? Perhaps the experience of a text always includes such a moment of encountering limits; but precisely for this reason it also includes all that binds us together. In the text I presented yesterday I tried to show that literary text -- a linguistic work of art -- not only strikes us and deals us a blow but also is supposed to be accepted, albeit with an assent that is the beginning of a long and often repeated effort at understanding. Every reading that seeks understanding is only a step on a path that never ends. Whoever takes up this path knows that he or she will never be completely done with the text: one accepts the blow, the thrust, that the text delivers. The fact that poetic text can so touch someone that one ends up "entering" into it and recognizing oneself in it, assumes neither harmonious agreement or self-confirmation.

One must lose oneself in order to find onesel

I believe I am not very far from Derrida when I stress that one never knows in advance what one will find oneself to be.

From Dialogue and Deconstruction: the Gadamer-Derrida Encounter pages 55-57

public.iastate.edu

 

 

 

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