Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

Unquiet Understanding; Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics, by Nicholas Davey

Blair M. Ogden

To cite this article: Blair M. Ogden (2009) Unquiet Understanding; Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics, by Nicholas Davey, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 40:3, 337-338, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2009.11006693

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2009.11006693

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

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Date: 08 June 2016, At: 18:44

UNQUIET UNDERSTANDING; GADAMER’S PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS

, by Nicholas Davey, New York, State University of New York Press, 2006, 291 pp., ISBN 978 0 7914 68425, (pbk.).

The Platonic dialogue provides a paradigmatic example of the nature of hermeneutical thought. The productive space between self and other, familiarity and strangeness, remembrance and forgetting is the locus of all hermeneutic engagement. The reception of Gadamer’s thought within the analytic and continental traditions occupies a similarly unsettled position. He is neither fully at home within either. Anglo-American thought has certainly been slower to recognize his significance, yet its reception of Gadamer has been remarkably positive. Davidson and more recently McDowell have championed Gadamer within the philosophy of mind. By contrast, for a large part of the continental tradition hermeneutics has come to represent epistemological and political conservatism. Partly due to the absence of a political dimension within Gadamer’s thought, he has become associated with Heidegger’s political evasions. Both Ricœur and Habermas have helped to rectify this by creating a dialogue between Gadamer and the masters of suspicion: Freud and Marx. Yet, on his own terms Gadamer is still widely misunderstood.

Unquiet Understanding marks a sustained response to Gadamer’s critics by bringing the more radical aspects of his hermeneutics to the fore. Broadly speaking, it sets itself two goals: firstly, it aims to provide a critical introduction to Truth and Method; secondly, it launches a counter offensive against Gadamer’s post-structuralist critics by exposing what Davey identifies as their nihilistic foundations.

From the outset Davey acknowledges that when it comes to the presentation of his ideas Gadamer has not always been his own best advocate. This has much to do with the Janus-face appearance of Truth and Method. It represents an ambitious attempt to marry certain Hegelian concepts – historical-consciousness, tradition, and totality –with the more anti-systematic thought of Heidegger. However objections arise when commentators treat Gadamer as an unreconstructed Hegelian.

Davey’s exposition is commendable. Unquiet Understanding begins with eleven philosophical theses aimed at reversing certain misconceptions surrounding key Gadamerian concepts. The concept of ‘culture’ (Bildung) is an exemplary case. On one level Gadamer’s focus upon cultivation could be read as advocating the normative superiority of the Western cannon. In contradistinction, Davey argues that Gadamer self-consciously uses the term to reclaim what is marginalized within the unfolding of tradition. Bildung is employed as a defence of the subjective side of experience increasingly devalued by the hegemony of science. Becoming-cultured in a Gadamerian sense – like Aristotle’s notion of phronesis – is based upon a sensitivity to situationally affected reasoning. It is not a normative concept with a defined content, but rather the existential ground of understanding.

What will prove of greatest interest to scholars of Truth and Method is Davey’s examination of the phenomenological maxim: ‘towards the things themselves’. Hermeneutic experience is predicated on what appears as a paradox. Gadamer insists

that every act of interpretation is objectively of the thing itself while never fully disclosing what that subject matter is. This tension stems from the notion that language simultaneously reveals and conceals the object of interpretation. One of the core claims of Unquiet Understanding is that the gap between word and world should not be a source of anxiety, but rather, perceived as the driving force behind hermeneutic engagement. Hermeneutics, Davey argues, must continually resist attempts to ‘colonize’ this productive space of interpretation. Here he finds an unlikely ally in Adorno. The comparison is provocative, especially considering Adorno’s antipathy to Heidegger. For this reason a Gadamer-Adorno encounter has been thus far resisted. Yet more so than any other thinkers of the last century Gadamer and Adorno have grappled with the legacy of Hegel. What both thinkers productively take from Hegel is the notion of negative critique. The object of phenomenological enquiry only begins to reveal itself when an individual is dialogically forced to think against himself. Davey convincingly argues that like Adorno’s negative dialectic, hermeneutics is committed to widening the space of interpretation by continually exposing itself to alterity, conflict and difference. It is an achievement of Unquiet Understanding to reopen a dialogue previously shrouded by mutual miscomprehension.

Davey devotes the second half of his work to dealing with two charges laid at Gadamer: epistemological and political conservatism. Hermeneutics is often criticized for failing to acknowledge Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics. Davey presents the case that all of Gadamer’s thought deals with the collapse of metaphysical certainties without resorting to the nihilistic excesses of post-structuralism. There are echoes of Gillian Rose here in Davey’s attempt to navigate a Hegelian third way between modernity and postmodernity. Hermeneutics is presented as unashamedly logo-centric, but, in a non-metaphysical sense of the term – this claim should rouse some Derrideans. For Gadamer the ‘word’ (logos)is the ground of understanding. Linguistic practices – in essence, shared ‘forms of life’ – are a legitimate basis for nonmetaphysical, yet still objective truths.

In response to the absence of the political in Truth and Method, its humanistic content is highlighted. Davey avoids deploying sedimented notions of ‘openness’ and ‘tolerance’ to the other without critically examining these concepts. Behind the liberal fascination with the other often lurks a form of nascent exoticism. If hermeneutics is to remain a paradigm of reflexivity it cannot fail to examine the notion of an ‘individual’. What emerges from Davey’s confrontation with Gadamer is a form of communitarian ethics where the ego is not the centre of the ethical world.

Unquiet Understanding stands as a significant reinterpretation of Gadamer’s thought. By conceding the problematic aspects of the hermeneutic project it stays true to the Socratic imperative: only when we are sitting uncomfortably can genuine dialogue begin.

Blair M. Ogden Balliol College, Oxford