29Ibid. 30Ibid, p.315. 31 Ibid, p.318.
Hans Georg Gadamer to a Critical Social Theory approach concerned to overcome the modemist way o f framing.
Gadamer and a Critical Hermeneutics o f Praxis.
Gadamer's hermeneutic approach differs from those that preceded it in a number of important ways. It shares a legacy with Schleiermacher and Von Humboldt, but it draws its influence also from figures such as Heidegger, and from classical Greek scholarship (e.g. via the Aristotelian notion of phronesis).32 Gadamer, in Truth and Method, for example, defined his critical hermeneutics as a universal approach to understanding which com es to know the world through the interpretation o f texts in history, as they express their "Dasein" - their "basic being in m otion...[a] being that can be understood is language".33 This marked Gadamer's attempt to redefine the Western philosophical story in terms which saw it as an ongoing conversation, and which recognised no distinction in understanding between the scientific and the social world.34
32See Gadamer. Truth and Method trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Sea bury Press, 1975). Importantly also Gadamer's hermeneutics takes an unequivocal stand on the question of the subjective objectivism of scientific hermeneutics. It rejects the very notion that all social thinking is "subjective" on the basis that such a position merely continues the modernist dichotomy of subject/object and the quest that sees a search for the latter in the pure methods and principles of science. In Truth and Method, first published (in German) in 1960, Gadamer indicated his alternative position by proposing that:
I [do] not remotely intend to deny the necessity of methodological work within the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Nor [do I] propose to revive the ancient dispute on method between the natural and the human sciences...[instead] the question I have asked seeks to discover and bring into consciousness something that methodological dispute serves only to conceal and neglect, something that does not so much confine or limit modem science as precede it and make it possible.
Ibid, p.xvii. Gadamer in this passage points to a notion of hermeneutics with ambitions far beyond those of its earlier advocates which seeks to understand the "truth" of the human sciences beyond questions of method. Indeed in prescribing this task for his study Gadamer proposed that hermeneutics was concerned with questions beyond those of (conventionally understood) epistemology - it was he suggested concerned with questions of (ontological) "being" that are intrinsic to human life per se.
33Ibid, pp.xxii-xxiii.
34This made his hermeneutics distinctly different of course. In acknowledging no special status to scientific knowledge Gadamer intersects with scholars such as Hesse and Bhaskar, but unlike those who also perceive of a unity of hermeneutic knowledge Gadamer's position contains no privileged place either for a "structural" foundation.
From this perspective, Gadamer pronounced the m odem ist story a particular image of the world derived from the "unbroken tradition of [Western] rhetorical and humanist culture" which had been metamorphosed into a universalised and "objectivist" framework of understanding via positivist scientism, in particular.35 In this way, he suggested, a latent Cartesianism had transfixed earlier hermeneutic thought, trapping it within a dichotomised metatheory. Similarly the notion of reason and rationality in "scientific" (e.g. Dilthey's) hermeneutics, for all its commitment to historico-cultural inquiry, was still set in terms which posited a distinction between (universal) reason and (cultural) tradition, between (foundational) rationality and (socio-historical) prejudice. Importantly, however, Gadamer considered it possible to reclaim this story for those written out of it, by serious interpretative regard for the humanist anti-modernism in, for example, art and literature.
Consequently, and in terms which link him to Habermas, post-Wittgensteinian thought and (with qualifications) to post-modernism, Gadamer insisted on a historically and culturally situated "reason" which, in its various language traditions, exhibited its essentially human quality. It was in this context too that Gadamer sought to overcome the legacy of foundationalism. This, strange as it might seem, is where Gadamer returned to the Greek Classical texts in order to reconvene a practical philosophical perspective set in terms of "praxis" rather than "techne". This "praxis" for Gadamer was closely identified with the Aristotelian notion of phronesis. For Aristotle and for Gadamer (and in modified form for Habermas) the importance of phronesis is that it represents an alternative knowledge form and way of understanding from both episteme (scientific knowledge) and techne (technical knowledge). In contrast phronesis is concerned with practical- ethical knowledge, with understanding the human world and learning how to live in it.36
35Ibid, p.23.
Phronesis too is about difference rather than unity, about diversity rather than homogeneity. Whereas scientific and technical knowledge forms deal with foundations, with independent "things" and formulas of given means and ends, phronesis knowledge is about concrete, particular, knowledge o f social situations. By pursuing phronesis knowledge, therefore, the "scientific mystification" of modernity might be broken down and the "false idolatry of the expert" reassessed in favour of a critical hermeneutics of praxis concerned with a knowledge of human society, which is:
not of a general kind of knowledge, but of its specification at a particular moment. This knowledge also is not in any sense technical knowledge...The person with understanding does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unaffected; but rather, as one united by a specific bond with the other, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with him.37
This, for Gadamer, is a more profound process of understanding than any derived from an "objective" knowledge, or even that which seeks "empathy" between individual minds in history. It is the basis of all genuine understanding which sees a "fusing" of horizons between the interpreter and that which is interpreted. And it is not a foundationalist position, for while the text and its language contain "universal" human themes, texts are not given - to be understood "as such and only afterwards used...for particular purposes". Rather the interpreter seeks to understand "what this piece of tradition says, what constitutes the meaning and importance of the text". In so doing the interpreter must not seek detachment from the concrete hermeneutical situation, for it is in the "fusion" of time and mind that we become conscious of the "I" as the "thou".38
There is in Gadamer's concept o f "Dasein", obvious influences of Hegelianism and the historical m ovem ent o f "consciousness". There is also a sense o f holism, rem iniscent o f Hegel and suggestive o f a universal process o f understanding in Gadam er’s "fusion" notion. But Gadam er has stressed the distinction between the dialectic of the "Geist" and the dialectic o f historical "fusion". In the former, he
37Ibid, p.288.