Remarks on James Risser's "The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics"

Abstract

The opportunity to discuss James Risser's recently published book, The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012) an honor and privilege. Given scope and significance of Risser's contributions to scholarship in hermeneutics in particular and in continental philosophy more widely, it comes perhaps as no surprise The Life of stakes out an original approach to hermeneutics as innovative as it erudite and nuanced. Risser's scholarship has influenced discussion of many definitive themes of hermeneutics: especially, perhaps, experiences of understanding and interpretation, tradition, language, and, too, solidarity, significance of humanities, and bequest of humanism. He treats these themes in connection not only with and Heidegger but also with Plato, Kant, and host of further figures in contemporary continental philosophy. We are,of course,also familiar with Risser's indispensible Hermeneutics and Voice of Other: Re-Reading Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). In this previous book, we recall, Risser expands context of debate about Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics through his recognition of significance of Gadamer's later essays for his overall project. Risser stresses role of Gadamer's concern for finitude, poetic word, and, perhaps above all, experience of otherness in philosophical With this, Risser makes one of definitive arguments within Anglophone reception of Gadamer's approach to experience centers on exposure of alterity. Hermeneutical experience, as he argues, is not really about assimilation of meaning any more than it simply an appropriation of meaning by subject. Rather, experience pertains ... to openness whereby word of other can be understood, or, again, Understanding comes not from subject who thinks, but from other addresses me.1Risser's larger body of work, taking his Hermeneutics and Voice of Other together with his edited volumes, and his many articles, not only helps tell story of scholarly debate in hermeneutics over past decades, but, moreover, poses an abiding challenge for critics. His contributions challenge not only those who would recast Gadamer's hermeneutics in post-modern terms (such as Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo),but also those who have associated Gadamer's hermeneutics with conservatism or Hegelianism (such as John Caputo), not to mention those from analytic quarters who have tried to reduce Gadamer's concerns to 'hermeneutical platitudes'in need of more rigorous analysis (Robert Brandom).Risser, in The Life of Understanding, in any case, proposes to advance philosophical study of hermeneutics even further than in his previous Hermeneutics and Voice of Other. A comparison of two books' subtitles suggests as much. In The Life of Understanding, Risser promises a contemporary hermeneutics, and, indeed, as his Introduction indicates, something like hermeneutics after Gadamer goes beyond stated positions of and Heidegger alike, whereas Risser's Hermeneutics and Voice of Other proposed, by contrast, re-reading of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Risser, in The Life of Understanding, argues 'hermeneutics after Gadamer' not to be sought in anything like clean break from and Heidegger, however, but rather in return to them enlarges what he suggests hermeneutical insight at heart of their concerns: namely, that understanding inseparably tied to life situation.2 In this, Risser argues for no less than for Heidegger, understanding to be grasped as characteristic enactment of human life as it lived. Risser writes understanding thus concerned with factical life, is, the existing historical situation in which an individual always finds oneself and which requires interpretation as way of continually gaining access to it. …