L'écoute pragmatique des herméneutes ou la transfiguration esthétique de l'éthique chez Hans-Georg Gadamer

Abstract

Hermeneutics of H.G. Gadamer is taking part in the pragmatic contemporary experimentation of human being by means of dialog. It affirms indeed that we are always understanding each other and ourselves otherwise. It is thereby opposing itself to the diltheyan description of mutual and reflexive understanding which presupposed a kind of hegelian absolute knowledge of the sameness of meaning obtained by sharing mutual understanding and agreement. This theory of hermeneutics is nonetheless affirming its own truth about these internal limits of the phenomenon of comprehension as if this truth were absolutely certain and as if Gadamer himself possessed a kind of absolute knowledge about these internal limits of the possibilities of dialog. His unability to recognize the philosophical logic of every dialog that he is himself using forced him to prescribe an ethical respect of these limits in every dialog. So doing, his hermeneutics is reactivating the goethean image of human being and tries to find the truth of dialogical interaction and the confirmation of ethical reason in the humboldtian aesthetics of mutual understanding. This hermeneutical ethics of dialog justifies itself philosophicaly by means of Plato’s ethics. The reconciliation between the ethics of dialog and the aesthetics of mutual understanding happens in the same terms as in Plato’s mixed life of Philebos, where pleasure and judgment are confirming and reinforcing themselves. Hermeneutics of dialog is legitimizing itself in this way as an ethics of dialog appropriate to limited human beings and is becoming a form of life through its application in mental and social human life. The pragmatic effects of Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutics may therefore be described as an aesthetical transfiguration of his ethics of dialog.