A Response to My Commentators

Abstract

I want to begin by thanking my commentators for the care they have taken to read my book. Their care is evident from the force of their remarks in which, from my perspective at least, they are deemed to be fitting remarks, and as such they demonstrate a faithful understanding of the text. As we know from contemporary hermeneutics, a fidelity to the text is not marked by an effort of mere repetition but by a seriousness of critical engagement which provides an opportunity for the expansion, if not correction, of the ideas presented in it. One might say that it is an opportunity not simply for contestation which thrives on a relation to difference, but for a certain generation of understanding within the life of understanding. So, I am committed from the outset to test this fittingness with a corresponding thoughtfulness.As I try to make clear in the book, the very idea of the life of understanding is to be an expansion of Gadamer's project, but not simply Gadamer's project, for it is Heidegger's hermeneutics too that is in play in this expansion, and, in a more limited sense, Plato's work as well. In this regard, I appreciate very much Ted George's use of the word to describe the way in which I have tried to think from and along with these central figures named in the book, and I consider such amplification a matter of hermeneutic honesty. One reads and thinks as if in a conversation-whether it be in relation to the question of the text that addresses us or with respect to our own questions that demand a response-and one cannot so easily move beyond one's conversational partners without committing some form of hubris. I think it is because of this approach to reading and thinking-and thus to interpretation-that this book remains essentially Gadamerian, and as such forgoes a more violent approach in which interpretation is set within the unsaid of a work in order to force the concealed inner passion of a work into speech. But the difficulty with this Gadamerian approach is that, in the end, I am not sure exactly whose voice it is that speaks in the text. Certainly the hermeneutics presented in this small book takes the position that Gadamer's hermeneutics is more radical in what it is saying than how Gadamer at times presented it and how some commentators have interpreted it. It is this radicality that I think keeps Gadamer closer to Heidegger and also puts him in proximity to Derrida's work. But here I am not alone in this contention. I think one finds it also in the work of Dennis Schmidt and Donatella Di Cesare, and others.Regarding the specifics of my attempt at a contemporary hermeneutics, what Ted George sees so well is that this amplification is directed at what I call making one's way in life-what he names as human transcendence-which is expressed in relation to the finitude confronting us with the limits of our possibilities to understand. This is not the finitude of the limit of time, but of a resistance that belongs to the very activity of life. As I attempt to make clear in the chapter on convalescence, it is this finitude that keeps hermeneutics from becoming a practice of conservatism as well as a practice of progressivism in the reading of history and in the way-making of life. There has never been much of a question about Heidegger's notion of finitude staying true to itself and thus capable of being interpreted in the way I am proposing; but such is not the case for Gadamer, whose own expression that he sought to save the honor of Hegel's bad infinity is actually insufficient to convey just what hermeneutical finitude entails. Unlike the implication of Gadamer's acceptance of the analogy with Hegel, the hermeneutics of history presented here does not progress and does not make it possible to repeat the past without introducing real differences in meaning. And unlike Hegel's bad infinity, the hermeneutics of language and the questioning commensurate with it in this contemporary hermeneutics take place under the condition of the immanent possibility of failure. …