The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics

By James Risser

In Gadamer's hermeneutics, interpretation is inseparable from the broader concern of making one's way in life. In this book, James Risser builds on this insight about the juxtaposition of human living and the act of understanding by tracing hermeneutics back to the basic experience of philosophy as defined by Plato. For Risser, Plato provides resources for new directions in hermeneutics and new possibilities for "the life of understanding" and "the understanding of life." Risser places Gadamer in dialogue with Plato, with the issue of memory as a conceptual focus. He develops themes pertaining to hermeneutics such as retrieval as a matter of convalescence, exile as a venture into the foreign, formation with respect to oneself and to life with others, the experience of language in hermeneutics, and the relationship between speaking and writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780253002198

Book preview

THE LIFE OF UNDERSTANDING

STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT

John Sallis, editor

The Life of Understanding

A Contemporary Hermeneutics

JAMES RISSER

Indiana University Press

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© 2012 by James Risser

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Risser, James, [date]

The life of understanding : a contemporary hermeneutics / James Risser.

p. cm. — (Studies in Continental thought)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-00214-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-253-00219-8 (electronic) 1. Hermeneutics. 2. Plato. 3. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1900–2002. I. Title.

BD241.R498 2012

121’.686—dc23

2012007746

1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: Platonic Gestures

ONE Memory and Life: Hermeneutics as Convalescence

TWO Distressed Memory: Hermeneutics and the Venture of the Foreign

THREE Beyond Distress: Toward a Community of Memory

FOUR The Fabric of Life: Dialectics, Discourse, and the Art of Weaving

FIVE Severed Threads: The Incapacity of Language

SIX Reading beyond the Letter: On Memory and Writing

SEVEN The Flash of Beauty

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book first took shape when I gave the André Schuwer Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (spep) in 2003. That lecture eventually became the first chapter of this book. With that and with other occasions in subsequent years at various places to present many of the ideas brought forward in this book, I was greatly aided by colleagues and friends who heard this work and in their responses have contributed to its development. I want to especially thank Walter Brogan, Pat Burke, Marylou Sena, Günter Figal, and Nicholas Davey. I also want to thank John Sallis, Burt Hopkins, Charles Scott, Dennis Schmidt, and Donatella DiCesare, whose own work has been an inspiration to me. Once again, I am deeply indebted to my wife Jean who continues to abide the slowness of my work.

Earlier versions of several chapters have appeared elsewhere. The Memory of Life: Hermeneutics as Convalescence was originally published under the title On the Continuation of Philosophy: Hermeneutics as Convalescence in Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vatimo, ed. Santiago Zabala (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), 184–202. The Fabric of Life: Dialectics, Discourse, and the Art of Weaving was originally published under the title Discourse, Dialectic, and the Art of Weaving in Epoche: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 291–98. Severed Threads: The Incapacity of Language was originally published under the title The Incapacity of Language in The Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology, 40 (2009): 300–11. Reading Beyond the Letter: On Memory and Writing was originally published under the title Ideality, Memory and the Written Word in Internationale Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik 2009, ed. Günter Figal (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 2009), 27–40.

THE LIFE OF UNDERSTANDING

Introduction: Platonic Gestures

My aim in this book is to develop and enlarge the hermeneutic insight that understanding is inseparably tied to the life situation. This is the insight that characterizes the scope of hermeneutics drawn from the principal sources for this book, namely, the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and, more particularly, Hans-Georg Gadamer. This is the hermeneutics that begins with Heidegger’s early formulation of hermeneutics under the heading of a hermeneutics of facticity, in which philosophical research has as its basic concern the interpretive movement occurring within factical life. Factical life, as the original evidence situation of philosophy, is simply the existing historical situation in which an individual always finds oneself and which requires interpretation as a way of continually gaining access to it. This hermeneutics, which effectively recasts the character of the theoretical as it was conceived in the early project of phenomenology and neo-Kantian philosophy, is furthered by Gadamer, who broadens it into a more overt cultural and social context where the perspective of interpretation is indeed inseparable from its basic relation not just to the historical aspect of historical life but to human living in general. While it is true that Gadamer’s hermeneutics devotes considerable attention to the character of textual interpretation, it is not, at bottom, a theory of textual interpretation in its classical sense. In his philosophical hermeneutics the interpretation of texts is to be woven into the broader concern of making one’s way in life such that the interpretation of texts is part of the communicative experience in which the world in which we live opens up.

It is easy to see here that any amplification of the hermeneutic insight of the juxtaposition of life and understanding must involve itself in a thoroughgoing way in the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer, but my intent is not to present a critical exposition of their positions. Both positions have already been extensively treated in the secondary literature. Rather, my intent is to move beyond their stated positions, in effect to present something like a hermeneutics after Gadamer, by an amplification that ties hermeneutics back to the basic experience of philosophy as defined by Plato. The incorporation of Plato into the project of hermeneutics, by way of indications for its thematic development, has the effect of broadening the scope of hermeneutics as philosophy and identifies more properly what is at issue in this book. In moving back to Plato one can find resources for directions in hermeneutics and for opening up new possibilities for the life of understanding.

With the introduction of Plato as a third figure for the further development of hermeneutics, the thematic presentation is effectively entangled in and constantly moving between two sets of relations, with Gadamer as the pivotal figure: Heidegger–Gadamer, and Gadamer– Plato. The first relation, as noted, constitutes the scope of contemporary hermeneutics with respect to the life situation; but more than this, this relation is the relation that is absolutely essential to consider for anyone interpreting Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Gadamer does not just borrow from Heidegger the basic principles of a hermeneutic phenomenology which he then applies in his own way to craft what he calls a philosophical hermeneutics. Rather, his thought is fully informed by his lifelong association with Heidegger’s work, so much so that the key to understanding the extent to which Gadamer extends the range of hermeneutic philosophy in an original way lies in a careful appreciation of this association. While clearly acknowledging in Truth and Method that he is taking over from Heidegger the notion of interpretation and understanding that originates in a hermeneutics of facticity and is famously presented in Being and Time, he also states in his autobiographical writings how important the later Heidegger’s work on language and art was for his own expanded sense of hermeneutics.¹ In a sense, Gadamer’s hermeneutics provides the link between the early and late Heidegger’s work, a link that Heidegger himself acknowledges but fails to fully articulate.

If there is a natural affinity between Gadamer and Heidegger, the same can also be said to exist, for different reasons, between Gadamer and Plato. Certainly the importance of Plato for Gadamer is well known and the subject of many commentaries.² In Gadamer’s writings the reader is constantly directed to Plato, not to provide examples for the point under discussion, but to inform the hermeneutical dimension of this point. Plato, more so than Aristotle or Hegel, is the second principal source for Gadamer’s hermeneutics, shaping its essential character in a very direct way. This is evident by seeing how Gadamer draws on Plato, not just for the framework of dialogue, which fashions his hermeneutics so decisively, but for the character of human reason, the basic comportment of the philosopher to human living, the nature of the beautiful, and as a way of understanding ethical life. Drawing on Plato in this way and with respect to these topics allows his readers not only to see a Plato who has a closer relation to Aristotle than we have been accustomed to see, but also to see Plato as a philosopher of finitude echoing Gadamer’s own work as a hermeneutics of finitude.³ To become entangled in this relation does not mean that I will be retracing Gadamer’s own work on Plato nor even focusing primarily on those dialogues of Plato with which Gadamer is most often occupied. Rather I will be following hermeneutic themes after Gadamer, themes that have opened up for me by placing Gadamer in dialogue with Plato, themes such as convalescence, exile, formation, weaving, and voice. Each of the chapters of this book will develop one of these themes pertaining to hermeneutics that have a corresponding dimension in a dialogue of Plato, which serves as the broader frame for the theme under discussion. Accordingly, it is this second relation that constitutes the immediate context for a hermeneutics after (Heidegger and) Gadamer.

To engage in a reading of hermeneutics that intends to be a hermeneutics amplified by this connection back to Plato, then, means first of all to present a further consideration of themes in hermeneutics that are in accord with Gadamer’s (and inseparably so, Heidegger’s) hermeneutics. It is to consider themes in hermeneutics that can only be discussed primarily on the basis of a reading of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. But this reading of hermeneutics also means to take up what follows upon, comes after, the project of a philosophical hermeneutics that carries his name. The themes considered here intentionally get tangled in this double aspect. While certain chapters can be read as an attempt to expand a fundamental aspect of Gadamer’s thought—the two chapters on language are prominent in this regard—others introduce themes that are an attempt to develop directions after Gadamer within contemporary hermeneutics.

The expansion of contemporary hermeneutics as well as the thematic presentations are all discussed with a view to life as the common denominator linking all three philosophers. This is not to suggest that the central figures here are engaged in the effort of making a life-philosophy. Certainly the modern notion of life-philosophy is far removed from the world of ancient Greek philosophy, and it is certainly incongruous with the metaphysical Plato who appears to be concerned only with the problem of knowledge in a universe quite unlike the φ σιζ of Aristotle. But the metaphysical Plato is not Gadamer’s Plato and not even the Plato of those dialogues in which the Socratic prescription of care within the concern of life is present. And while the early Heidegger puts forth the idea of a hermeneutics of factical life, he is quick to distance himself from its casual associations with the notion of life-philosophy and adopts the term existence to convey the phenomenological category at issue. But in this emphasis on existence, which is soon overtly transformed into the question of being, Heidegger remains in agreement with Aristotle when he says: Being, for the living, is life.⁴

As for Gadamer, whose work is being followed most closely here, life and philosophy decidedly go hand in hand. The central concepts of tradition (Überlieferung) and language, which form the basis of his philosophical hermeneutics, are significant only by virtue of their capacity to be living. One could easily make the argument that the entire effort of his philosophical hermeneutics is to describe not simply the conditions for understanding, but the conditions for understanding with respect to our human living, as we see most immediately from his critique of social reason and his emphasis on the living voice. This argument could easily be made because one would expect to find it in a project that for all intents and purposes is an attempt to rethink the experience of the humanities where issues of human life are naturally brought into play. The issue of life and understanding, though, runs deeper than any consideration of the humanities as an area of scholarly research. And this is perhaps Gadamer’s point: the enactment of understanding, which is tied directly to research in the humanities, is also at issue in all our attempts under certain conditions to become familiar with the world, i.e., it is also at issue in all our attempts to add to our world formation. The enactment of understanding, in this sense, correlates with our human experience of the world. As such, the enactment of understanding proves to be something more than a species of knowing that has been described in the past as explication (Auslegung), methodological or otherwise. The notion of understanding as a movement from implicit to explicit fails to capture the real dynamic of hermeneutic experience. And, especially in regard to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, for a similar reason one should not confuse the experience of understanding with a simple coming to agreement.⁵ Gadamer has said on more than one occasion that in the case of a dialogical understanding between two persons, understanding the other does not mean agreeing with the other, but only recognizing that the other person could be right. The task of understanding is to find the word that can reach the other, and in every case, our words cannot be insulated from the world.

The title of this book, the life of understanding, is thus meant in the sense that understanding does indeed have a life. Understanding is not the outcome of a methodological procedure, nor the simple result of the effort of interpretation of texts, but a movement with respect to a way-making and opening that brings the matter at issue into view. And insofar as the life of understanding takes place as our experience of the world, one can reverse the title phrase: what is at issue in the life of understanding is the understanding of life. Of course there can be no grand gesture toward what can be accomplished under such a title. The various thematic presentations are simply philosophical aspects, indeed fundamentally so, of human living—being historical, being at home in the world, the formation of community, the articulation of human living in the life of language.

Still, the life of understanding so understood is unavoidably broad.⁶ What constrains the thematic presentations here is the issue of memory. There is a certain obviousness to the fact that human life and memory are inseparable. Human life, qua human, does not simply pass; it remains in memory, whether in the form of mental representations, the documents of our culture, or institutions that come to shape the character of contemporary life. It is no exaggeration to say that memory happens everywhere in human life. In this context, memory is nothing less than a mode of transmission, carrying out not the sheer passing of life, but the passing on of life. It is a form of retaining in life that is so vital to life that the loss of living memory can be catastrophic. This is, of course, the condition of memory, namely, that it can be lost, it can be forgotten, as if to say the essential quality of memory is to be alive. How it can be so depends on its power of presentation, as a power of re-presentation. When confined to a connection with articulation—and this is its connection with hermeneutics— memory in its power of presentation is more than a simple recalling. The difference here follows the classical distinction that Plato makes in the Phaedrus regarding the benefit of writing. Writing, while appearing to be a remedy for forgetting, actually only serves the soul in its ability to remind ( πoμvήσεωζ) and is thus actually a drug that dampens the use of true memory (μvήμηζ). Both pertain to Mvημoσ vη, but while the former carries out a simple repetition, the latter is caught up in a transformation of the remembered object. The re-membering of Mvημoσ vη is thus a distinctive form of a return from loss.

And so for hermeneutics. For both Heidegger and Gadamer, hermeneutics is configured as a recovery from forgetting and concealment, not in the ordinary psychological sense in which lost and forgotten objects are made present again, but as the retrieval that operates within historical life. Memory in this sense is what Heidegger in Being and Time calls Wiederholung and, in a more general way, what Gadamer identifies with all presentation (Darstellung). This form of memory, which mutatis mutandis extends also to the later Heidegger, is simply the recollection that enables human life to take hold of itself in its manner of living.⁷

The thematic presentations in the first three chapters of this book are explicitly entangled in this issue of memory. The first chapter has a decisive importance in this regard. It attempts to spell out the comprehensive way in which hermeneutics is indeed inseparable from memory, establishing at the same time an essential connection to the experience of philosophy as we find it in Plato. Here memory is translated into the issue of recovery as a matter of convalescence—a recovery that operates not unlike the getting over an