Hermeneutics, Exteriority, and Transmittability

Research research in phenomenology 47 (2017) 331–350 in Phenomenology brill.com/rp Are We a Conversation? Hermeneutics, Exteriority, and Transmittability Theodore George Texas A&M University [email protected] Abstract Hermeneutics is widely celebrated as a call for “conversation”—that is, a manner of inquiry characterized by humility and openness to the other that eschews the pretenses of calculative rationality and resists all finality of conclusions. In this, conversation takes shape in efforts to understand and interpret that always unfold in the transmission of meaning historically in language. Yet, the celebration of hermeneutics for humility and openness appears, at least, to risk embarrassment in light of claims found in Heidegger and Gadamer that conversation is always contingent on “prior accord.” Critics of hermeneutics have, for some decades, interpreted this claim of prior accord to refer to a common tradition, so that the understanding achieved in conversation is restricted to those who belong to the same heritage. In this essay, the author argues that although Heidegger and Gadamer often suggest this prior accord is a matter of common tradition, crucial threads of Gadamer’s thought, in particular, recommend a different view. Gadamer, in these threads, offers that “prior accord” concerns not a common tradition, but, on the contrary, the call to participate in hermeneutic transmission as such, even—and no doubt especially—when those in conversation are not familiar with the tradition or language of the other. With this, we are called to converse not first by what the other says, but by the fact that we do not yet understand, that we have already misunderstood, and that we perhaps cannot understand. Keywords hermeneutics – conversation – Heidegger – Gadamer – language – exteriority – facticity – transmission © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi �0.��63/�569�640-��34�Downloaded373 from Brill.com10/01/2021 03:05:39PM via free access 332 george 1 Are we a Conversation?1 Not only within professional philosophy but also with emphasis in several dis- ciplines across the academy, the name “hermeneutics” has become all but the motto for the pursuit of a distinctive kind of intelligibility. Discerned first of all in our experience of the arts and humanities and in the intimacy of our rela- tions to one another, this intelligibility takes shape in understanding and, with this, in the further refinement of understanding in interpretation. In the con- text of hermeneutics, understanding is taken not only to differ from but also to encompass and to be more original than the explanatory knowledge purported within the natural sciences and in much of the quantitative research conduct- ed in contemporary social science. Although philosophical hermeneutics has developed in important new directions in the last several decades, the focus on understanding may be said to originate as a critique of pivotal ideals of the European Enlightenment—and also the by now global encroachment of the consequences of these ideals on what early twentieth century philosophers first described as the life-world. Gadamer, for example, disavows as hubris all Enlightenment pretenses to establish eternal verities through method, the implementation of norms of inquiry that are set up in advance and adhere to the demands of calculative rationality. In contrast with such Enlightenment pretenses, Gadamer characterizes understanding as a finite form of intelligibility, one that remains conditioned by the historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) that characterizes factical existence, and, accordingly, the historical transmission of meaningfulness in and through language. To many in philosophy and across the academy today, “hermeneutics” thus stands for an experience of intelligibility that is characterized at once by humility and openness: humility, because every understanding is always conditioned by historicality, remaining always without methodological guarantee, ultimate foundation, completeness, or exactitude; and, in turn, openness, because every effort to understand may again bring into question anything that appears in familiar obviousness as well as any presumed final word. In view of this humility and openness, the experience of understanding resists every closure; we are called always to understand again and anew. In sum, the 1 This article is based on the André Schuwer Lecture at the 55th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Existential Philosophy. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, for the invitation to deliver this André Schuwer Lecture. research in phenomenologyDownloaded from 47 Brill.com10/01/2021(2017) 331–350 03:05:39PM via free access are we a conversation? 333 experience of understanding thus always calls for and takes shape in “conversation” that can itself never be brought to completion or conclusion. How, though, are we to grasp the stakes of the call for such conversation now, in a historical moment that has become suspicious of much more than the ideals of European Enlightenment and their encroachment on the life-world? What do we make of the call for such conversation in a historical moment that has moreover become suspicious of the disastrous effects of the deployment of these ideals—not to mention the deployment of ideals of humanism and other European traditions—by Europeans in the period of European imperial- ism and colonialism? How are we to take the call for unending conversation in a historical moment that now reels from legacies of violence and subjugation that excluded innumerable multitudes from any and all conversation about their own fate, that continues to exclude from conversation too much of the memory of these legacies, and, moreover, that continues to exclude from conversation too many still today? Given the celebrated reputation of hermeneutics for humility and openness, the response to this line of questions found within hermeneutics raises the specter of a philosophical embarrassment. The concern that hermeneutics may be implicated in such an embarrassment may be discerned from two references to conversation made, one each, by two of the figures of the twentieth century most associated with hermeneutics, Heidegger and Gadamer. Together, these references not only indicate that conversation is definitive of our shared lives together; more than this, and more to the issue, these references indicate that conversation is always predicated on and made possible by a certain prior accord. Heidegger. Heidegger’s reference to conversation appears in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” in his treatment of a line from an untitled poem by Hölderlin, which reads, “Since we have been a conversation….” Heidegger writes: We—human beings—are a conversation. Man’s being is grounded in language [Sprache]; but this actually occurs only in conversation [Gespräch]. Conversation, however, is not only a way in which language takes place, but rather language is essential only as conversation. But now what is meant by ‘conversation’? Obviously the act of speaking with someone about something…. We are a conversation, that always also signifies that we are one conversation. The unity of a conversation consists in the fact that in the essential word there is always manifest that one and the same on which we agree, on the basis of which we are united and so are au- thentically ourselves. Conversation and its unity support our existence…. research in phenomenology 47 (2017) 331–350 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 03:05:39PM via free access 334 george Without this relation [to the one and the same on which we agree] even a quarrel would not be possible.2 The sweep of Heidegger’s concerns in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” is, we recall, grand. He takes up the relation of being and the poetic word, the significance of the poetic word for shared life, as well as for the foundation and destiny of a people; he moreover considers the significance of Hölderlin’s poetry for the German people, and for “poetic dwelling.” Heidegger’s elucidation of the phenomenon of conversation is nevertheless distinctive. Heidegger elucidates the phenomenon in a decidedly ontological register. In rejection of the assumptions of Western metaphysics, Heidegger characterizes conversation not in terms of subjects who, in their subjectivity have or engage in a conversation with one another. Rather, Heidegger, with Hölderlin, maintains that we are a conversation. By this, Heidegger means that to be human is to participate in an event that is defined by the enactment of language in conversation. Human beings, as Dasein, are defined by the disclosednsess that is made possible through language and that is always and again enacted only in such conversations. But Heidegger does not stop with this. He not only maintains that to be human is bound up with conversation; he moreover argues that such conversation is possible only if we are part of a single conversation. That is, for Heidegger, our enactment of language in conversation is only possible because language grants us access to a prior common accord—“that one and the same on which we agree”—that “supports” and “grounds” our existence. Indeed, as Heidegger indicates to clarify that this prior common accord is what makes conversation possible as such, this prior common accord is what allows us not only to come into agreement about any specific matter or other but even what allows us to fall into dispute about any matter in the first place. Gadamer. Gadamer’s reference to conversation appears in “The Universality of the Hermeneutic Problem” in a brief but important elucidation of the ev- eryday phenomena of misunderstanding and disagreement.3 Gadamer writes, I am trying to call attention to a common experience. We say, for instance, that understanding takes place [in conversation] between I and thou. But the formulation ‘I and thou’ already betrays an enormous alienation. 2 Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans.

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