Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Time for a @threadapalooza on Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), philosopher, classicist, and leading thinker of hermeneutics, AKA "the understanding of understanding." Gadamer was a moderate postmodernist who thought life was an unfinished conversation with ourselves and others.

Gadamer's main work, Truth and Method, is devoted to showing that our experience of art is not one experience amongst others, but paradigmatic of all acts of interpretation. 2

Scientific enquiry can never be totally objective, because at its core, science is mediated by language, conversation between people. 3

Gadamer is close to Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend in his belief that science is made possible by culture, which itself is made possible by shared "prejudice". 4

Gadamer was not "anti-science," nor was he a nihilist, but he believed the humanities went astray in trying to be objective; STEM-envy misses what the humanities are supposed to do. 5

What are they supposed to do? The answer is contained in the title of Gadamer's magnum opus. Truth is not the same as method. Where scientists have method, overly rigid and static, modular, humanists should seek "truth," understood as an event. 6

An event means something that is neither subjective nor objective, but is overwhelming and all encompassing, the clarification and elucidation of a situation in which I already exist. 7

Right now, I'm telling you about what Gadamer believes and thinks, but Gadamer himself says this is impossible; I'll never be able to get into Gadamer's head; and even if I could, it'd be a mistake to equate his thought with his mental contents. 8

Gadamer belongs to a world, as do I do. Understanding Gadamer means understanding where my world and his world overlap, where our horizons fuse; interpretation is not purely constructive, but nor is it purely "originalist," a recreation of the author's intent. 9

Freud would say we can't take people at their word because their true motives are unconscious.

Marx would say we need to uncover ideology at the root of a thinker's thought.

Strauss would say that thinker's hide their intent to avoid persecution, encoding it for initiates. 10

Sartre would apply the same logic of "bad faith" to certain thinkers and modes of thought, which it is our job to see through.
11

Gadamer rejects the concept of uncovering a true meaning hiding under the surface. He proposes that no one is transparent to himself, that we remain fundamentally open, conflicted, ambiguous, unfinished. So, interpretation is a continuation of paths opened up before us. 12

What matters is not what Gadamer thought, but what we can think with Gadamer now. It is mostly a vain endeavor to try to reduce Gadamer to a set of propositions. 13

Doing so has the appeal of being methodical, by following some scientific or pseudo scientific veneer, but it would be more honest and ennobling and beautiful simply to be a co-creative with Gadamer. 14

Are there limits to this endeavor? Yes. In the same way that in conversation there are unspoken rules or norms that govern a conversation as ethical or polite in contrast to hostile, rude, or solipsistic 15

But we can't help conversing about what kinds of readings are legitimate; because nobody has a monopoly on understanding, we must constantly re negotiate the terms of our understanding. 16

For Gadamer, as for Buber, and Socrates, and Ricoeur, we are never alone, for even when we are, our thought takes the form of a dialogue with ourselves and the voices of others in our head. Dialogue is not something we do, it's who we are. 17

Great works are those which stimulate dialogue: dialogue between reader and work, but also between readers. They are also works which respond to other works, thus continuing the conversation. 18

Like with Heidegger, there is no real distinction between secondary and primary literature; commentary can be original if it elevates the conversation. Stepping into history and our particularity is how we do this. Owning our specificity. 19

But the sciences tend to the abstract and impersonal, the universal, thus putting an end to the conversation. 20

Hermeneutics has two functions: 1) to say that science is fundamentally interpretive, poetic, not objective and 2) to say that human sciences e.g., psychology and sociology, history, literary studies, should not try to be like the hard sciences. 21

Gadamer is under-read in the U.S. despite his ground breaking importance as a domesticated version of Heidegger, a German who made palatable radical and oracular ideas for a more Anglo audience. 22

For example, he influenced legal theorists like Ronald Dworkin and Robert Cover, and "analytic" philosophers like Robert Brandom and John McDowell. Gadamer has also been a major influence in theology and modern religion. 23

The reason for both lines of influence is that Gadamer gives philosophical language for a defense of what in Judaism is called Midrash, the reading of texts that combines what's "in the words" with what's in the hearts of the reading community. 24

Gadamer shows that intuition is not one way that we encounter things, but the most fundamental way; he also shows that intuition is at once mediated by language and ineffable, making what we can say always incomplete. 25

Lots of thinkers note the fundamentality of language to understanding; for example, Wittgenstein. But Gadamer specifically highlights speech as the essence of language. 26

He would say that pragmatics, the relationship between speaker and listener(s), are more fundamental than grammar and syntax. Language is not first rules, but first relationship. 27

In Heidegger, codified rules emerge only when something is broken and needs fixing. So, the rules of language are secondary to language, where rules are shared intuitively. Once you are litigating language you know understanding has broken down. 28

Whether you're a new critic or a Straussian or a philologist or a Marxist, you follow rules for how to read a text. Gadamer rejects these rules as conventions having no ultimate truth; they can be useful as tools and valid as traditions, but they are missing the heart of it. 29

Gadamer can be caricatured as a high falutin version of "I know it when I see it," appealing to the charismatic authority of a text or a brilliant interpreter. 30

And there's a lot of merit to this criticism (equally valid when launched at Heidegger); namely, that who is to say whether a reading is brilliant or just pied pipery? If there are no fundamental rules, how should we decide who gets published, who gets tenure? 31

The Gadamerian retort is that 1) we have already decided how to decide 2) lack of consensus is not an argument against something's truth value 3) it is common sense, intuition, and social agreement that govern how we apply the rules, not the rules themselves. 32

Gadamer says that the movement out of which he comes, phenomenology, is fundamentally at odds with another movement, far more common to this day, namely, epistemology. 33

For Gadamer, epistemology asks how the subject can know the object. But phenomenology starts by assuming that we are already with others in a world and that we already know things. 34

In political philosophy this tracks with Charles Taylor's and Michael Sandel's critique of Rawls. If we stood behind "a veil of ignorance," there'd be nothing there. We need our givens to do anything; judgment is always of the world, never outside of it. 35

Gadamer is perhaps most famous for formulating this idea in his claim that "prejudice is a condition for understanding," not an impediment to it. 36

Prejudice in Gadamer literally means looking forward, but it seems to be another way of saying what in Heidegger is more abstruse, namely what he calls "thrown projections." 37

Theory, then, is not about looking at the world from the outside, but about looking at how we look, at the fact that we can't but look in one way or another. 38

When we look at our looking we ask questions that we had never thought to ask. This is the task of thinking. 39

For Gadamer, the question we should ask is why we in the West have come to privilege the statement and the concept as modes of discourse. Why not poetry? Why not art? 40

Gadamer is not anti statement or anti concept, but he's trying to restore for us the non obviousness of their having come to dominate. 41

One thing about poetry that is less obvious with concepts is that it incites dialogue, because it's meaning is so non self evident. Statements by contrast seem to end conversation, especially propositions. They have the aura of conclusion. 42

Can you derive ethics and politics from art, and what would it look like if these were governed by communal intuition and conversation rather than algorithm? 43

I don't know. I think it sounds pretty awesome in theory, but possibly dystopian in practice. Not that delegating ethics and politics to tech doesn't have it's own dystopian consequences. 44

Gadamer would not be anti tech; but he'd definitely be skeptical of technocracy, as if we could solve our problems simply by figuring out what to optimize and then writing a code for it. That is anti-understanding, anti-speech, anti-conversation, and anti-culture. 45

Gadamer is not traditionalist in the sense of "retvrn" 46

But he's big on the idea that there is no way not to belong to a tradition, to think within a tradition. Philosophy itself is a tradition. I believe he has a reverence for lineage, not as an object of adoration, but as the ocean in which we swim. 47

What is "this is water, this is water" in DFW's parable? For Gadamer, it is language, which is also to say tradition, how we've come to think by virtue of living when we do. 48

This makes Gadamer in certain ways a conservative, rather than a revolutionary. There's no "dismantling the master's house"; we have to make the best of what we've been given, from within. 49

Gadamer thought Celan did this, or at least sought to; that great poets forage at the limits of language for new words, new expressions, new ways of revealing our situation, and in so doing it, altering it. Art saves us from fatalism. 50

It's probably the time to mention that Gadamer's track record on Nazism isn't particularly great. The SS file on him says he was neither strongly supportive nor strongly critical of the regime. 51

He did sign a pledge of allegiance in 1933 to Hitler that all professors were required to take to keep their jobs, but was, by most accounts, politically inactive. 52

I have it on anecdote from a Jewish teacher who met Gadamer that he was at least culturally antisemitic. Wolin and others have gone further in trying to show Gadamer's stronger complicity in Nazism. 53

Unlike Heidegger, who was censured after de-Nazification (Jaspers wrote a letter saying Heidegger is too dangerous to be allowed to teach, but too great to be stopped from writing). Gadamer never met the threshold of a cancellable offense and taught into old age. 54

But there is nothing overtly or reductively "Nazi" in Gadamer's thought. If you want to be ad hominem, though, you might ask if his thought is strong enough to resist Nazism, or if it's relativism weakens it against fascism. 55

For me, that would be a mostly unfair charge, b/c the emphasis on conversation and dialogue so core to Gadamer seems to at odds with the concept of thought and speech control promoted by totalitarianism. 56

Moreover, Gadamer's recognition of individuality as the basis for non-understanding, for difference, and open conversation, strikes me as deeply liberal and somewhat anti collectivist. The group can never alleviate me of the burden of being me. 57

. @AgnesCallard has just written an excellent piece on Bergman and marital loneliness: newyorker.com/culture/cultur… 58

I would argue with Bergman and Callard that loneliness is ineradicable, but not a bad a thing, even if it is sometimes a sad thing. 59

And I think Gadamer helps us see that if loneliness is a byproduct of missed connection or non understanding it is also the condition for connection and understanding. 60

That is, if we had total agreement and total understanding with another, we'd be the same as them. Heck, we don't even have that with ourselves! 61

And it's a good thing we don't have it with ourselves either because then we'd be objects. Our dignity lies in the infinite conversation, which also means the conversation that by design disappoints. 62

@AriLamm and I were recently twitter-dialoguing about loneliness in Rabbi Soloveitchik vs. in Arendt. For Soloveitchik, loneliness can be "redemptive." 63

For Arendt, by contrast, loneliness is the accomplishment of totalitarian rule; we are never so lonely as when we are in a crowd. But maybe Arendt's positive term, "solitude" is the same as what Soloveitchik is after. Only the Rav is with Callard and Bergman that it hurts. 64

Arendt is more rosy on the experience of being alone, following the example of Thoreau. 65

Gadamer is more cerebral, analytical not getting into the emotion of solitude or loneliness, but you could say his view is tragic. He thinks we never fully get others or ourselves. 66

"Longing we say, because the heart is full of endless distances" (Robert Hass).

If total understanding of ourselves and others is a mirage, then any attempt to claim it is tyranny. But this is what we do sometimes when we treat ourselves scientifically. 67

Here is Gadamer: “Might it not be just a prejudice of modern times that the notion of progress that is in fact constitutive for the spirit of scientific research should be transferable to the whole of living culture?” 68

The problem is applying progress as an ideal in the scientific and technological realm to other realms where we can't and don't make progress, where progress is the wrong lens. 69

Is moral progress also then an illusion? Political progress? As a critic of objectifying rationality, my guess is that Gadamer was ambivalent on these questions, seeing areas where modernity got us further than the ancients and areas where it regressed. 70

I see Gadamer as a humanist who would certainly applaud the welcoming into the conversation of more voices through emancipation; but I also see him as a pessimist who criticizes those who think formal emancipation is sufficient. 71

Ie. the Hegelian project of recognition is not going to reach completion because we are opaque. 72

The utilitarian project is doomed because we aren't just pleasure seeking maximalists. We also want to preserve "The beautiful" and "the good" which are ideals that we only know intuitively and conversationally, but which are still real. 73

The lack of accountability and metrics in Gadamer make him at once a romantic but also prevent him from being able to infiltrate technocracy and actually change anything (you could criticize Heidegger, Arendt, Levinas, Adorno, and many others along these lines). 74

So while Gadamer is not or need not be anti political, I think he's most fruitfully read as a virtue ethicist, where the highest virtue is to be a good conversationalist. 75

A good conversationalist finds the middle path between listening and speaking, but more deeply, between thinking she understands and thinking she doesn't. 76

The good conversationalist knows what she says is a guess, but still seeks attunement with the other. 80

The good conversationalist knows that conversation is never free from struggle and antagonism, but neither embraces battle nor pacifism. 81

The good conversationalist seeks to create something new with the other, something that did not pre exist either of them and does not belong exclusively to either. 82

The good conversationalist seeks to hear in discourse, not a set of statements, but the illocutionary dimensions, the relationship between speaker and listener, between speaker and self, between speaker and community, between speaker and language. 83

All language is about something, but it is also about itself. The good conversationalist hears the depths of possibilities contained in the word itself. 84

To what end all of this? Why be a good conversationalist if one can't succeed at understanding? 85
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I think Gadamer would say because the good and the beautiful are ends in themselves and that good conversation, beautiful conversation is self evidently meaningful. 86

The art of conversation and the art of reading are both lost arts, connected arts. This is one unexplored area where Gadamer's academic polemics still have much application. 87

What if we related to each other and ourselves as we did works of art? 88

What if we related to works of art as if they were people standing before us? 89

Of course, a text can't speak back and is thus defenseless against our projections. But a text is also always already "with us." 90

We know how to read poems because we already know something about the kinds of things they are. A poem both fortifies and challenges the prejudice we bring to it, or it should. 91

If we aren't surprised, or even shocked, by people we think we know, we aren't paying attention to them; we're just relating to our concept of them, our heuristic of them. 92

The heroism of Gadamer's tragic view appears when we realize there is nothing greater than being stupefied by the other, realizing once again that their "truth" eludes our "method". 93

Heisenberg says you can't know velocity and position of an electron at the same time. Gadamer would say the same about the realm of human beings: you can't have a method for knowing them and be open to their truth at the same time. 94

Method is downstream of truth, for Gadamer, just as correctness in Heidegger is a diluted form of "unconcealment" (aletheia). The world is much more complex and overwhelming than any model we have of it. 95

Intent and consent matter, but they are not the source. When we get mechanically focused on downstream things that we can measure and lose awareness of the source, we lose more than we gain. 96

We need art and poetic events to restore this awareness. 97

This is, arguably, what religious experience did or does, but which in secular rational society is lost. This is also what classical humanistic reading can do, of the kind championed by @zenahitz in "Lost in Thought. 98

Artistic consciousness need not make us better people, but a lack of it certainly makes us callous and impoverished. 99

The careful reader notes that I skipped a few tweets above, but in keeping with the spirit of truth over method, I will not stick to the form. These tweets are currents in a stream beyond me and beyond us, a stream of history. 99b

Will it reach to heaven where the sages of old imagine it to be nothing but an academy where angels talk endlessly about the meaning of Scripture? No matter. We are here. 100