Hermeneutics: Hans-Georg Gadamer
In the last chapter we looked at different forms of the interpretive approach to the social sciences sharing in common a concern with instrumental rationality. In this chapter we have looked at different forms of rationality, concerned less with doing than with being: how do we find meaning in our life, how do we endow it with meaning? The answers have all involved reference to communities, forms of life, traditions, the collective; to rules; and lastly to narratives.
They have taken us from questions of epistemology through a first encounter with the problem of relativism to questions of moral philosophy and the relationship of morality and the social world. They have also taken us from the individual emphasis of instrumental rationality through to the collective emphasis of culture and tradition.‘Hermeneutics' was a term given originally to interpreting the spiritual truth of the Bible, but it was imported into the human sciences by Dilthey to refer to the investigation of intentional human behaviour and human institutions, and by thinkers after Dilthey to refer to processes of understanding within and between traditions and cultures. In its widest sense everybody we have looked at in this chapter and the previous one can be listed under this heading, but there are important distinctions. Max Weber can be seen as closer to the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment as well as tracing its triumph, whereas Peter Winch and Alasdair MacIntyre have recourse to different traditions - Wittgenstein and Thomism. Conventionally now hermeneutics refers to the ideas of a number of continental European philosophers one of the most central of whom is Hans-Georg Gadamer (Gadamer 1989). What marks this particular group is their hostility to what they see as the instrumental and manipulative spirit of the natural sciences.
Gadamer is a critic of all conventional notions of objectivity, insisting that knowledge is not a product of coming to understand the action of the individual (a la Weber) but of achieving an understanding of the movement of history, and history is the development of a common aim; we can only understand a text when we make ourselves part of that common aim out of which it emerged.
The same can be said for understanding an argument with somebody from a different tradition - what is necessary is a gradual merging of horizons as each comes to understand the other, and this happens through the attempt to understand, independently of our will. If you have struggled to understand a difficult text with which you don't agree and you discover at some later point that your view of the world has somewhat changed, you should be able to understand what Gadamer is getting at.Understanding is inevitably historical; the nature of a human being is itself historical and open to historical change. The process of understanding is paradoxical, involving the ‘hermeneutic circle': we cannot know the part without understanding the whole of which it is a part, and at the same time we cannot understand the whole without understanding the parts that make it up. We cannot understand the meaning of, say, a Shakespeare play without understanding the meaning of the individual scenes and acts within it; at the same time we cannot understand the meaning of the individual scenes and acts unless we understand how they relate to the whole play. Understanding involves a constant movement from the part to the whole and back again, and for Gadamer this is a description of our very existence as thinking beings. This is what we do when we think.
The individual is secondary for Gadamer; history (the culture, the tradition) is primary. We first come to understand ourselves through and as part of the social units in which we live, long before we understand ourselves as individuals - individual selfawareness is merely ‘a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life’. We understand, primarily through our prejudices, the prejudgements of the historical moment of which we are a part. The introduction of a word such as ‘prejudice’ in a favourable light, as what roots us in history and our life, indicates how far Gadamer is from conventional notions of science. Alan How describes well the way this works.
We are understanding and interpreting beings, caught up in the circular process of moving from part to whole and back again:It is something we undergo, something that cannot be finally controlled by us because our prejudgements are not our possessions. They are not things that, as it were, we could get round the front of us in full view. They are what we are before we know it, and in being so are also the positive pre-requisites for all our actual understandings and interpretations. We don’t really know our own prejudgements till we bring them into view in the process of furthering our tradition.
(How 1995: 47)
We cannot, then, know anything at all without prejudices, but they may change as we become aware of them in the ongoing historical project. The historical is a source of authority as well as necessary prejudice, and the process of understanding involves the recognition of the authority of tradition.
For the purposes of this book, these are the most important ideas we can take from Gadamer. Perhaps it might be useful to look briefly at some current debates in sociology to show the import of his ideas. It is not uncommon now to hear arguments that we no longer need the classical texts of the founders of sociological thought - Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel. There are different versions of this: either modern sociology is a sophisticated empirical discipline, or modern thinkers have shown the restrictive or repressive character of ‘grand narratives’, or modern theorists are more relevant to the beginning of the twenty-first century than those who wrote in the late nineteenth.
Gadamer’s position would be that the conditions of the possibility of sociological thinking are provided by the classic texts; they, if you like, provide the prejudices of sociology, and it is arguable that if we don’t read them then we have no discipline - no authority for what we say about the world. It would be as if every generation had to build the discipline anew, from scratch.
As How points out, new theories and apparently radical critiques of the classics appear, but over time they become absorbed into the tradition. And of course if we leave the classics behind, we end up reinventing the wheel (How 1998).At the same time, there are problems with Gadamer’s notions of tradition and authority. As we will see in the following chapter, there is a strong argument that if he is right then we cannot undertake the systematic investigation of our mistaken ideas about the world, the critique of ideologies. The arguments about relativism are relevant here as well - if the tradition from which I came is systematically racist (as it almost certainly is) and it frames my perceptions of the world and of other people, then how is it possible for me to learn, or if I do learn, to show others, that racism might be wrong. Of course, reality is more complicated than that, and a tradition is made of all sorts of contradictory streams of thought in a continuous process of argument and merging, but there is a perhaps unnecessary conservatism to Gadamers hermeneutics, an overemphasis on the authority of tradition. Yet his picture of human beings as beings who by nature understand and interpret through a circular process that defines their being adds to Winch's view of humans as rule-following and MacIntyre's view of humans as storytelling animals.