Hans-Georg Gadamer
Truth and Method
Area: History of Rhetoric and Memory Studies
xi-9
• Bildung: “the properly human way of developing one’s natural talents and capacities
• Erlebuisse: “experiences”: enduring residue of moments lived in their full immediacy
o Universal significance which goes beyond history
• Two words for “experience”: erfahrund and erlebnis (used most by Gadamer)
• Erlebnis: overturns exisiting perspective
o Have ≠ erfahrung: undergo
• Re-presenting: ‘total mediation’ made fully available again
• Consciousness open to the effects of history: Ricoeur
• Tradition is not automatic
o Task, required to make even though no one compels us’ precludes complacency and passivity
• Sache: Subject matter
• Language becomes an event, something historical
• Experience of truth that transcends scientific method
o Can’t be verified by methodological means
• The incorporation of experience within
• Understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood
• Legal historian v. practicing lawyer
• Mediation between past and present: application
• Play is more than the consciousness of the player
o More than a subjective act
• Language is more than the consciousness of the speaker (Also subjective act)
• Development of human sciences is modeled after the natural sciences
• Experiential universals are not concerned with how things evolve, but how it got to this point (how it happened that it is so)
• Helmholtz: humans arrive at conclusions by an unconscious process—not logical, but psychological
• Human sciences: true representations of humanism? Contra natural sciences?
9-60
• Bildung (via Herder): raising up to humanity through culture
o Developing one’s natural talents
• Kant: cultivating a capacity
• Bildung represents result of process of becoming
o Not process itself
• Man is characterized by break with the immediate/natural that the intellectual/rational side of his nature demands
• Working consciousness = independent consciousness
o Restrained desire
• By forming the thing it forms itself
• Theoretical Bildung is not immediate, but alien
o Beyond what is immediately known
o Different from oneself
• Returning to oneself from what is other
• Memory as talent/faculty is misunderstood
o Must be formed
• Vico: Rhetoric is based on true and right/evident
• Aristotle: phronesis = intellectual venture
• Probability operates on historical fact
• Le bon sens avoids mistakes of scientific dogmatism and is the law of the metaphysical utopianists (Bergson)
• Detinger: rational truths ≠ common/sensible truths
• Judgment requires a principle to guide its application
• Kant: appeal to common sense when science fails
o Sensus communis: public sense: judgment with collective reason
• Good taste = good society
o Not through birth/rank, but shared judgments
• Taste isn’t demonstrated
• Beauty: an objective idea with subjective pleasure: Socrates
• Taste is the supreme consummation of moral judgment
• Taste ≠ knowledge
o Pleasure, instead
• Beauty is fixed by the concept of purposiveness (an end)
• Taste must be guided by beauty
• Perfection of taste (possibility of its being cultivated and perfected) assumes a definite unchangeable form
o But taste is mutable
60-110
• Experience can be traced back to consciousness
• Dilthey: life is productivity
• Husserl: experience = consciousness = intentionality
• Experience is constituted in a memory
• Every experience is taken out of the continuity of life and related to the whole of one’s life
• Allegory and symbol: not the same but both refers to something whose meaning doesn’t consist in its external appearance, but to something beyond it
• Symbol creates link between visible and invisible
• Symbol: inward unity
• Allegory: points to something else
• Schlegel: all beauty is allegory
• Art: supplement and fill in gaps left by nature
o Fine arts perfect reality, not veil or mask it
• Aesthetic differentation: are existing in its own right
o Selects on the basis of aesthetic quality
• Seeing means articulating => articulating
• Is there a knowledge in art?
110-159
• Play and disguise: holds on to continuity for self along
• The players no longer exist, only what they’re playing
• Ontological difference between the likeness and its resemblance
• Contemporaneity: bringing the two moments together that aren’t concurrent
o Kirkegaard
• How is the picture different from the copy?
o Problem of the original
• The picture has an autonomy that affects the original
159-212
• Hermeneutics: classical discipline of understanding
o Rise of historical consciousness
• Reading with understanding is always a kind of reproduction
o Speaks to us in the present
• Writing can mean something unintentional
• Schlermacher: hermeneutics => avoiding misunderstandings
• Trojan War exists within Homer’s poem
• The artist doesn’t set the standard for his own work
212-264
• Something interior is immediately present
• Historical experience and idealistic heritage
• Dilthey: how historical experience can become science
• Experience: fusion of memory and expectation
o ≠ a living historical process
• Dilthey: triumph of hermeneutics—objectifications of art
• Everything in history is intelligible because everything is a text
• Life-world ≠ objectivism
• What being is was determined by time
265-307
• How can hermeneutics do justice to historicity of understanding?
• Make the fore-structures work in terms of the things themselves—in the present => expectation only goes so far
• Reading with expectation = reevaluating what’s there
• What happens when understanding goes unnoticed?
• Hermeneutics: becomes a question of things
• “Unfounded judgment” => The whole debate!!
• Have the courage to make use of your own understanding
• Tendency of reconstruction = reclaiming the past
• Poets have only an aesthetic effect: stimulate the imagination
• Overcoming prejudices in itself prejudicial
• Not knowing historical fate is very different from the way nature is alien to man: nature is knowable—not an in the future;
o But historical fate is only a “guess: based on past experiences
• What an authority says supposedly can be verified
• Relation to the past isn’t characterized by distance
o Always part of us: non-distance
• One ‘does’ traditions without really understanding the experience
o “I have always done this…but why…because that’s how it is… ‘makes’ me feel connected
• The historical process must constantly re-prove itself
• The classical is timeless
• “Hermeneutic Rule”: whole in terms of detail, detail in terms of whole
• Temporal distance is not something to overcome
• Understanding = historically effected event
307-346
• Hermeneutics divided in three ways: understanding, interpretation, and application
• Understanding: applying something universal to particular
• Man is not at his own disposal
• Always already in the situation of having to act
• Laws of agreement v. natural law
• The work of interpretation is to concretize
346-389
• Historically effected consciousness has the structure of experience
• Husserl: uses scientific experience as the basis for all other experiences
• Experience isn’t science itself, but a necessary condition of it
• Hegel: experience is the experience that consciousness has of itself
• A person called experienced has become so through experiences and also is open to new experiences
• Return is an illusion
• Knowledge always means considering opposites
389-428
• Interpretation makes understanding explicit
• Greek philosophy: a work is only a name
474-491
• Being that can be understood as language
• Beauty has the most important ontological function mediating between idea and appearance
Class notes
• Historical overview of perspectives of hermeneutics
• What’s the nature of the enterprise of rhetorical theory today?
• Leading up to the present
• Referring back to the classics without any consciousness of what they’re doing
• Product of human activity
• Question of human activity
o Truth?
• What’s the nature of any human construct?
• How to we account for things and what is it that the accounting does?
• How is it that a scientific rationality determines human (rationality)?
• Kuhn—reversal: hermeneutics can help us understand humanness of scientific rationality
• Things we do we aren’t aware of
• Awareness of activities that are definitely human activities
• Science: Reduce particulars to the universal
o Example: laws of gravity
o Subsumes all the particulars
o Makes any event uneventful
• Explains stuff away: Nietzsche
• Human Sciences: Success of human science was extremely profound
• Interconnected:
o Not dissociated with being a person in the world
o No account of my experience of falling
• Experience and understanding not so divergent of each other
• Manipulation of language was an intervention of ‘cosmic order’
o Persuading to extra-sensory appeals
• Ex: Gorgias
• Seduction with words like drugs
• Tap directly into will
• Explain pretty well with accounts of experiences
• What’s rhetoric in Enlightenment?
o Logical consistency
• Problem with science (for Gadamer) is that it has no way of accounting for itself
• Gravity (ex.): how can we be confident that what I’m saying account for themselves
• Science has problem of self-awareness and observation of empirical phenomenon
• What happens when we apply this to human activity
• Explaining away not explaining why
• We want consequence in our experience
• My experience tells me that there’s something else going on
• Natural science aims at universal experience
o ≠ human science: experience: understand value of particular
• What is it about human activity that matters?
o Different anticipation
• How do we explain how things matter?
o Memory and expectation
• Something about the recollection and remembering is the event/that makes it meaningful
• Any event fits into a universal
o More of a pointedness to it
• “my memory was something like that, too”
• Particular into an instance of a universal
o Ex.: Hamlet—creates its own world in which it represents own universal
• How do we know our own narrative efforts are right?
• If rhetoric is some kind of manipulation of signs and symbols, then how does that participate in our own
• Created by common viewpoints
• Politically aware
o Understanding world in response to each other
• Ex: it’s right not to steal
o Accepted
• How do you mediate between particular and universal?
• How do I have an understanding of these particular things?
• For Gadamer: the shadows are more than real
o What is only is because we are aware of them
• Rearticulation of universality
• The aesthetic object gets prioritized as human value and significance
• The sublimity of human experience
• What is it that makes certain experiences more?
• Experience isn’t scientific
o 255: structural continuity
• In not comprehending, there’s no self-understanding
• What’s the structure of human experience?
• Reconstructing the construction for someone else
• Experience occurs in the representation
o Re-narritization
• Defamiliarization: greater understanding but self-alienating
o One hand given, on the other taken away
• Using a collective language—the only words to describe belong to a universal
o Make the words belong: altered and distorted
• How something is described has everything to do with what it is
• What to know first: method of obtaining truth? (but end already exists)
o What method can we have for certainty?
• Any indication of what method would be?
• Value as humans?
• Our understanding is contingent upon our historicity
• Something we do with texts that allow us to have a reality within itself
• Does human experience have a predictive value?
• Make a particularly appropriate response
o Satisfying
• Can responsibility be a theory of rhetoric is there’s always an openendedness?
• What’s the stopping point of rhetoric?
• Hermeneutics: a form, an art of rhetoric
• What is it that hermeneutics does?
• It’s not a science of something out there (physics)
• Universality of our experiences
• Study of experiences: cultivation of culture
• If things are only in the doing of them, what’s the truth
• In the anticipation, I contribute to the event
• Spatiality: what the text brings to me along with what I bring to the text
• What does Gadamer mean by understanding?
o More experiential
o Emotional? Visceral response?
• If understanding is an experience, then how do we creat them?
• Projective awareness
• Prejudices
o Can’t change personal values
• Common sense, common good
• Bringing own understanding
• What consequences does the speaker have if no one receives it?
• Supreme faith in dialogue
• That person loses sense of understanding: alter their language
• As long as people continue talking, it will eventually “count” as truth
• Can you have a private experience?
o Relational
o Understanding in particular context
• Context specific understanding
o Common, shared
• Everything begins and ends in projection into an experience
• Common sense: sense of something shared
• Refutation model (Kuhn)
o Affirm certan things about the theory
o Once theory stops being affirmable, that’s when we change things
o Throw it open to its refutation
o Two things occurring at the same time
• Genius robs the possibility for
• One can talk around morals, but one cannot make positive (absolute) statements
• Wittgenstein: Tractatus
o Look at mathematical theories of science
o Guide scientific developments
o Take issue with aphoristic positivism
• Can’t give you a method: need to figure out yourself
• 314-17: Learning by doing; techne
• No one can tell you how to value language
• Conversation leading the people
• What is rhetorical studies/theory?
o Is rhetorical theory a discipline?
• What determines disciplinarity?
• Look at the ways you’re working/being in the world
• If it’s a discipline, what’s it a discipline of?
• What’s the relation between critical and creative activities of rhetorical studies?
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