08/24/2022 – Gadamer and Dialogue: Hermeneutics Part 2

What does this famous painting have to do with hermeneutics? We’re going to talk today about dialogue, historicism, horizons, and maybe even…sinking ships? To find out the answers, hang out here for a minute, or ten. This is TenOnReligion.

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This is the second part of our five-part series on hermeneutics, the art of interpretation and understanding. The first part was on the death of the biblical author and later we’re going to get into Habermas, Ricoeur, and Levinas, but today…Gadamer and dialogue. Let’s get into it.

Hans-Georg Gadamer is considered one of the most important founders of philosophical hermeneutics. Most importantly, he argued that the humanities and natural sciences are both subcategories of a larger, universal practice of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation and understanding. Gadamer was a huge fan of Plato’s writings, called dialogues, because most of them are conversations between his teacher Socrates and one or more other characters. In these dialogues, Socrates asks questions which slowly get the conversation partners further towards the truth of some particular issue. Plato’s conversations with these folks end up being kind of like a game. Sort of like when athletes play sports and get on a roll, they say they’re “in the zone” and everyone knows what they mean by that. In these dialogues of Plato, the conversations are back-and-forth question and answer scenarios similar to a to-and-fro movement of a game. When we are “in the zone” we don’t play the game. The game plays us. It’s like we’re no longer in control.

There are essentially four shared characteristics of modern Western hermeneutics which chiefly come from Gadamer. One, there is a strong acknowledgment of the finitude and historicality of all human understanding. Two, the focus of hermeneutical philosophy must be on the other as an alterity, meaning something completely different from us and our expectations of normal. What’s normal? Of course, it’s what you are and other people are not. Three, the hermeneutical “self” experiences an excess to its ordinary self-understanding that it cannot control. One must “let go” to the dialogue and get into that “dialogical zone.” And four, the dialogue only works as a dialogue if the other is allowed to become in the dialogue a genuine other, not a projected other. They must be allowed to be themselves, not what we want them to be.

This gets us to one of Gadamer’s key concepts – a horizon. Gadamer developed his concept of horizon from the German philosopher Husserl and his research on intersubjective experiences. Husserl was Heidegger’s teacher, and Heidegger was Gadamer’s teacher. Kind of like an academic grandfather. Get the connection? I actually have no idea what that means. Husserl’s lifeworld became Gadamer’s horizon which eventually sort of morphed into what we now call a worldview. Gadamer’s “horizon” is a preunderstanding, or in Heidegger’s terminology, a fore-structure, that makes all beliefs, ideas, and concepts possible. It’s a limited view of all other possible views, kind of like the Chinese expression of trying to see the sky from the bottom of a well. In that situation one only sees the part of the sky that is possible to see from that vantage point. Our sense of belonging to a history, culture, tradition, and language always effects, or generates, our horizon of meaning, including the possible ways in how we think and the possible types of questions we might ask.

This leads us to Gadamer’s elaborate argument against historicism, the claim to reconstruct the past as it really was. In place of historicism Gadamer proposes a historically conscious hermeneutic. The English translation from German renders this as historically-effected consciousness. For every piece of historical data – be it an event, person, document, work of art, and so on – there also exists everything that everyone has ever said or written about those historical things. That then adds to how all later generations understand them. Our “consciousness” is “effected” or molded and shaped as a result of this historical process of understanding without us really realizing it. Our interpretation of the past is made possible by our historically-effected consciousness because we are always already part of the history that we set out to interpret.

According to Gadamer, historicism’s delusion consists in trying to displace this with methods in order to make something like certainty and objectivity possible in the human sciences. Historicism hopes to escape historical conditionedness by distancing itself from the determining effects of history. But since we cannot escape historically-effected consciousness, we are more subject to history than history can be subjected to consciousness without these historical effects. History interpenetrates our viewing of reality in such a way that we cannot ultimately clarify it or distance ourselves from it. Present-day consciousness is itself shaped – or more strongly, constituted – by history. Our consciousness is thus “effected” by history.

So much is understanding co-determined by the individual effective-historical situation that it seems inappropriate to speak of progress in interpretation or of understanding better over the course of history. Take the example of the Titanic sinking and its two main representations in film. The 1958 production A Night to Remember, focused on the historical recreation of the tragedy itself. To this end, many individuals who either saw the Titanic in person, or were on the Titanic during the sinking, were involved with the film, including the film’s producer, William MacQuitty. In contrast, the 1997 film Titanic, by writer and director James Cameron, focused on two lovers aboard the ship, Jack and Rose, each trying to find their own identity during the crisis itself. Though the impressive set itself was intended to recreate the ship perfectly (even to the point of replicating the original carpets, china dishes, and paint colors), much of the dialogue and mannerisms of the characters would have been quite inappropriate in 1912, the year the ship sank. Such social details were much closer in appropriation to late 20th century society when the film was produced. The entire story was comprised of a young woman portrayed as being in a horribly constraining engagement relationship with a wealthy tycoon. While sailing on the Titanic, she was in some sort of an existential quest to find herself out of this predicament. Then the redemptive figure arrives, a young vagabond, who not only “saves” her from forever being a rich wife in high culture society, but also dies in the end after the ship sinks. Jack…Jack…Rose…

Which is the real story? According to Gadamer, the answer is both. He wrote in his most famous work Truth and Method:

Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text belongs to the whole tradition whose content interests the age and in which it seeks to understand itself. The real meaning of the text does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history. [Truth and Method, p. 296]

Does the James Cameron film show that the history surrounding the Titanic was understood better in 1997 than in the 1950’s? There is no way to differentiate between them since one interprets and understands only through the categories of one’s own time. Understanding is not reproductive, but productive, or in a word, creative. So, in the case of James Cameron’s Titanic, his existential views (centering on the idea that humans are what they create themselves to be) infiltrate the historical recreation so that the end result is far from the original event.

To understand a text, a person, an event, or a work of art from the past means to translate it into our situation. It means to hear in it as an answer to the questions of our time. Since our understanding is always finite and historical, we necessarily understand differently than any original author or original audience of a text.

So, what in the world does a painting have to do with all of this? This gets really interesting. Diego Velázquez was a Spanish artist in the Baroque period of the 1600’s. His most work was Las Meninas, painted during the reign of King Philip IV. There’s a lot going on here and we don’t have time to unpack it all, but let me briefly mention a few things. First, the focal point of the painting, the king’s daughter Margarida Theresa, is different from the focal point of the painter, which is King Philip IV and his wife Mariana. We know this through their reflected image in the background mirror. Second, this leads any viewer of this work of art to ask who is the subject and who is the object? Is the painter Diego Velázquez the subject painting an object? In this case, the king and his wife. But their location is the same location as the viewer. So, is the viewer both a subject (viewing the painted image) and an object (of Diego Velázquez looking at us)? That’s deep. The viewer seems to be both the one viewing the painting as well as being in the location of the painted image that Velázquez is creating. This is a great example of showing how we create. We participate in the act of bringing the present significance of historical data into life. Gadamer referred to this as the fusion of horizons.

We can dialogue with both the past and the present. In dialogue, one must learn to risk one’s current understanding by exposing oneself to the other as other (be it person or historical data). If one learns how to play well, one reaches the point of being played by the dialogue itself – “in the dialogical zone.” But because we are finite, we live in and from a dialogue that can never end.

Okay, I hope you’ve enjoyed this investigation into Gadamer and dialogue. Leave a comment below and let me know if you ever feel like you’re in the dialogical zone. Coming up is part three in our hermeneutics series: Habermas and critique. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.