The Question of Hermeneutic Alterity

Abstract

WHO IS THE "OTHER" FOR PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS? This essay seeks to draw attention to an ambiguity concerning the nature of the "other" in Gadamer's thought. In part 2 of Truth and Method, near the end of his discussion of hermeneutic experience, or the experience of tradition, Gadamer suggests that hermeneutic experience resembles moral experience in that tradition "expresses itself like a Thou."1 As Gadamer goes on to explain, this means that one's comportment with regard to tradition should be something like that which is called for in interpersonal relations. One might be tempted on this basis to ask whether it is possible to discern the outlines of something like a hermeneutic ethics. However, Gadamer also asserts repeatedly that hermeneutics is not concerned with other persons as such, whether the author of a text or one's partner in a conversation. One may therefore ask: what is the nature of the other, the Thou, with which hermeneutics is concerned? It is worth noting that the question of the relationship between hermeneutics and ethics is further complicated by Gadamer's frequent indications that hermeneutics should be regarded as an heir to the ancient tradition of practical philosophy, by which he means that understanding belongs to the realm of practice. Here Gadamer obviously has in mind not only Aristotelian politics, ethics, and rhetoric, but also, if less obviously, Platonic dialectic. In both cases what is decisive is an orientation to what might be called "the primacy of practice." This phrase suggests the way in which hermeneutics strives to maintain the standpoint of finitude by conceiving of language as an event, namely, the event or happening in which meaning brings itself to language and in so doing first comes into its own. In Aristotle the primacy of practice shows itself conceptually, for example in the analysis of phronesis, which Gadamer takes up in Truth and Method as a way of elucidating the fundamental hermeneutic significance of application. In Plato, on the other hand, the primacy of practice can be observed not so much conceptually as performatively, as Gadamer suggests when he draws insights concerning the logic of question and answer from the "model of Platonic dialectic." The notion of the question is of particular importance here inasmuch as it belongs to the nature of questioning that a question must always be asked anew, i.e., it must be posed in a way that makes it present, here and now. This implies, as I will indicate below, that whoever really wants to know something cannot remain at a distance from it but must instead participate in the event of its disclosure. However, to return to the main question of this essay, the hermeneutic orientation to the primacy of practice appears to problematize Gadamer's insistence that understanding has to do with meaning-in particular, meaning that is "detached from the person who means it, from an I or a Thou."2 I will not be able to develop further the important connection between hermeneutics and practical philosophy, although I would like for it to remain on the horizon of the following remarks. Here I would simply like to suggest that, in comparing tradition to a Thou, Gadamer is not really proposing a true analogy between hermeneutics and ethics-or, more precisely, that the analogy which he does propose is restricted by an important, indeed essential, ambiguity in the nature of the hermeneutic other. For, despite the comparison, hermeneutic experience and moral experience are ultimately concerned with different forms of alterity. The precise sense of this difference will be the focus of the second part of my paper. In the first part, however, I would like to spend some time looking at how Gadamer's comparison is indeed pertinent. But before any of that, let me make two final prefatory remarks. First, my purpose here is not to identify the ambiguity in the hermeneutic conception of alterity as a point of weakness or a lacuna in Gadamer's thought. …