What is the future of the past? Gadamer and Hegel on truth, art and the ruptures of tradition

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 4-20

  George, Theodore ^a  

^a TEXAS A AND M UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 64249167956     PISSN: 00071773     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2009.11006662     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Charges against Gadamer's conservatism, which are often traced to Habermas' criticisms of Gadamer, are well known. For a good discussion of this debate - and, so, some of the origins of such criticism - see Ingrid Scheiber, Gadamer Between Heidegger and Habermas (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). It should of course also be noted that not all commentators who see strands of conservatism in Gadamer find fault with him for this reason.
2. See, for example, Dieter Misgeld, "Poetry, Dialogue, and Negotiation: Liberal Culture and Conservative Politics in Hans-Georg Gadamer's Thought," in Festivals of Interpretation: Essays on Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Kathleen Wright (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 161-181.
3. Gadamer discusses the concepts of authority, tradition, and prejudice in, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, in Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), Vol. 1, "Zweiter Tell."
4. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, revised trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2003), "Part Two." Translations that appear in this essay are my own, except when I expressly mention that I have used or consulted other English translations. When English translations of cited passages are known to me, I have provided references to both the original and the English translation.
5. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, in Werke in zwanzig Bände, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), Vol. 13, 25.
6. Cf. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston, (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975), Vol. 1, 13.
7. See Günter Figal, "The Doing of the Thing Itself: Gadamer's Hermeneutic Ontology of Language," in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, edited by Robert Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 102-125.
8. See in particular, Figal, "The Doing of the Thing Itself," 122-123.
9. Robert Bernasconi, "You Don't Know What I'm Talking About: Alterity and the Hermeneutical Ideal," in The Specter of Relativism, ed. Lawrence Schmidt (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 178-194.
10. See in particular, Bernasconi, "You Don't Know," 194.
11. See Robert Dostal, "The Development of Gadamer's Thought," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 34, no. 3 (October 2003). See in particular pages 257-259.
12. James Risser, "Our Time: The Time of Modernity as the Time of Tradition," Kinesis 31, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 13-14.
13. Hans-Helmut Gander, "Between Strangeness and Familiarity: Towards Gadamer's Concept of Effective History," trans. Ryan Drake, Research in Phenomenology 34 (2004): 126.
14. See, for example, John D. Caputo, "Firing the Steel of Hermeneutics: Hegelianized versus Radical Hermeneutics," in Hegel, History, and Interpretation, ed. Shaun Gallagher (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 59-70.
15. Robert Pippin writes, for example, "Gadamer is forever returning to examples of art as paradigmatic problems of understanding ..." Robert Pippen, "Gadamer's Hegel," in Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, eds. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 222.
16. For a careful treatment of Gadamer's speculative approach to poetic art, see J. M. Baker, "Lyric as Paradigm: Hegel and the Speculative Instance of Poetry in Gadamer's Hermeneutics" in Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 143-166.
17. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I, p. 52. Cf. Osmaston, Vol. 1, p. 42.
18. Jacques Taminiaux, "Speculation and Judgment," in Poetics, Speculation, and Judgment: The Shadow of the Work of Art from Kant to Phenomenology, trans. Michael Gendre, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 1-2.
19. Gadamer refers to "Archaic Torso of Apollo," the lead poem in the second part of the New Poems, in "Ästhetik und Hermeneutik," in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 8, 8.
20. Cf. Gadamer, "Aesthetics and Hermeneutics," in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans, and ed. David Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 95-104. For my translation of Rilke I have consulted Edward Snow.
21. See Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, the Other Part, A Bilingual Edition, trans. Edward Snow, (New York: New Point Press 1998), 3.
22. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 116 ff. Cf. Weinsheimer and Marshall, 110 ff.
23. Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. Kathryn Plant (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), 44.
24. Gadamer, "Wort und Bild - >so wahr, so seiend<," in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 8, 375.
25. Cf. Gadamer, "The Artwork in Word and Image: So True, So Full of Being!," in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of Later Writings, ed. Richard Palmer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 197.
26. Gadamer's relation to Hegel's notion of the 'bad infinite' has been taken up by a number of commentators. See, for example, Pippin, "Gadamer's Hegel," 222.
27. Baker treats this issue in "Lyric as Paradigm." See, for example, Baker, "Lyric as Paradigm," 150.
28. Gadamer, "Wort und Bild," 388. Cf. Palmer, 212.
29. Jean Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, 28. Indeed, it should really be noted that despite Gadamer's explicit critical relation to Kant, many of Gadamer's deepest insights into art and aesthetic experience may nonetheless be seen to flow from insights into Kant's Critique of Judgment.
30. See Dennis Schmidt, Lyrical and Ethical Subjects: Essays on the Periphery of the Word, Freedom, and History (Albany: State University of New York, 2005), 9.
31. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 46. Cf. Weinsheimer and Marshall, 40.
32. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Die Werke Immanuel Kants in zwölf Bände, Vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 95, B XXXVII/A XXXV.
33. Cf. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 72.
34. Jean Grondin notes that Kant's position cannot be said to assert the complete 'autonomy of the aesthetic,' in Grondin, The Philosophy of Gadamer, 33.
35. Baker, "Lyric as Paradigm," 154.
36. See Robert Wicks, "Hegel's Aesthetics: An Overview," in Cambridge Companion to Hegel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 352.
37. See also Wicks, "Hegel's Aesthetics," 351.
38. Gunter Figal, Sinn des Verstehens, Beiträge zur Hermeneutik (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996), 48.
39. Gadamer, "Ende der Kunst?," 207. Cf. ibid., 217, 219.
40. Heidegger, "Nachwort," to "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003), 68.
41. Cf. Heidegger, "Epilogue" to "The Origin of the Work of Art", trans. Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Haprper & Row, 1975), 80. I use Hofstadter's translation here.
42. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke 3, 515.
43. Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 426 / § 703.
44. See, for example, Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II, in Werke 14, 238 ff.
45. Cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975), Vol. 2, 396 ff.
46. Baker, "Lyric as Paradigm," 158.
47. Cf. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II, 238. Cf. Osmaston, Vol. 2, 396.
48. Andreas Grossmann, "Hegel, Heidegger, and the Question of Art Today," Research in Phenomenology 20 (1990): 199 ff.
49. Gadamer, "Ende der Kunst?," 220.
50. Gadamer, "Die Stellung der Poesie," 229.
51. Cf. Gadamer, "Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as Play, Symbol, and Festival," in Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 10.
52. It may be that notions of political and cultural conservatism are more polyvalent than can be adequately defined and treated within the confines of the current essay. One may think of T. S. Elliot, for example, as a cultural conservative, and, as has insightfully been pointed out to me, there may be important resonances between Gadamer's view of the challenges faced by artists in our time and Elliot's efforts in "The Wasteland", which may be seen to concern the recovery of meaning from the fragments of tradition. While this complication certainly warrants further consideration, it remains the case that critics of Gadamer's conservatism characteristically level criticisms against his purported view of the continuity of the past with the present and the preservation of cultural heritage. Gadamer's focus on the need to embrace the fragmentation he sees at the present historical juncture, I think, does much to call into doubt charges of conservatism in this sense.
53. Eric Nelson, "Schleiermacher on Language, Religious Feeling, and the Ineffable", in Epoché 8, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 299.