![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper addresses the question of the function of genre in Gadamer’s hermeneutics by examining his treatment of Plato’s political writings in the context of the “utopian genre.” I argue that Gadamer’s reading of Plato informs us on the hermeneutics of genre, which is otherwise undiscussed in Truth and Method. First, I reconstruct the utopian genre as Gadamer treats it in a 1983 lecture hitherto neglected. Second, I expand Gadamer’s “logic of question and answer” by drawing on the notion of genre as articulated by E.D. Hirsch and show that attention to genre is not only compatible with Gadamerian hermeneutics, but also productive. Finally, I demonstrate that an application of this concept of genre to the case of Plato’s political philosophy reveals a problem in Gadamer’s interpretation, namely a certain confusion between dialogue and utopia, and propose two ways of explaining this confusion and thus of resolving the aporia.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank David E. Wellbery, Francisco J. Gonzalez and François Renaud for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 The full title is “Platos Denken in Utopien. Ein Vortrag von Philologen” in GW 7, 270-289. Translations of this text are my own.
2 Recall the importance of the notion of application (Anwendung) in Gadamer’s hermeneutics – cf. GW 1, 312-316.
3 Among the very few scholarly comments on “Platos Denken in Utopien,” Orozco (2004a, 226n20) claims in a footnote to her analysis of “Plato und die Dichter” that Gadamer’s polemic against Popper in 1983 is guilty of a hermeneutic “immanence” which pretends to offer a reading of Plato from an “atemporal standpoint.” This strikes me as wrong for two reasons. First, Gadamer replaces the political context of Popper’s interpretation by a literal context which is not and cannot be atemporal. Situating Plato in the context of the literary production of Aristophanes and Euripides is no less temporal than situating the Republic in the political context of, say, Plato’s journeys to Syracuse. Second, Gadamer’s own hermeneutic theory of Horizontverschmelzung precludes the very idea of an atemporal standpoint (cf. section II.2 below). More broadly, Orozco’s interpretation of Gadamer’s early Platonic hermeneutics as an opportunistic compromise with the Nazi regime appears misguided to me. Several scholars have rather argued that Gadamer criticized National Socialism indirectly or implicitly through his early interpretations of Plato’s political philosophy – e.g. Sullivan (1989), Zuckert (1996, 83–84 and 2004), Grondin (2011, 209-10). This is clear in his 1935 review of Kurt Hildebrandt’s Platon. Der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht (GW 5, 331-338) and was later corroborated by Gadamer himself in his Selbstdarstellung (GW 2, 489). Not only does Orozco silence the 1935 critique, but in response to Zuckert (2004), she dismisses hastily the point that Gadamer does not take Plato’s Republic as a political proposition. A significant example of this hasty dismissal is her tendentious reading of Gadamer’s attention to the Platonic “care for the internal state” as meaning that the “state itself” occupies the “interior of the civil subject,” something which Gadamer does not claim – see Orozco (2004b, 248-249). It seems that Orozco cannot accept that Kallipolis is no political blueprint in Gadamer’s early Plato because she cannot conceive of Kallipolis otherwise.
4 With this notion of “literary legislation,” Gadamer refers to: 1) Aristotle’s use of the substantivized infinitive form (cf. e.g. Pol.1268b24: τὸ νομοθϵτϵῖν), which allegedly emphasizes the performative aspect of legislating; 2) the fact that his analysis in Book II of the Politics treats Plato’s Republic and Laws like the existing constitutions of Sparta, Crete and Carthage, as if Plato’s literary productions were just as much acts of legislation as actual political constitutions.
5 Here too, Gadamer follows the guidance of Dümmler (1891, 218-219). Dümmler’s main source for Schythian Romanticism and the Anacharsisroman is, apart from a fragment of Ephoros (fg. 78), Herodotus IV.76-82. Gadamer’s point is not that the stories of the Scythians and Anacharsis are utopias, but that they serve as sources for the development of utopias (for instance, the Scythians are mentioned in Plato at Rep. 435b). Herodotus’ story emphasizes Anacharsis’ capacity to distance himself from Scythian customs and to theorize from that distance. This could be the reason why Gadamer sees an Anzüglichkeit aus der Ferne in this “prehistory” of utopian thinking.
6 Classicists have recently argued that Aristophanes’ comedies participate into the utopian genre. See for instance Bertelli (2012), Sissa (2021) and Kidd (2021, 47-49) On the utopian character of Euripides’ tragedies, see Wohl (2015). On Herodotus (especially the stories of Anacharsis the Schythian and Amasis the Egyptian) as a rich source of inspiration for utopias, see Lockwood (2021, esp. 71-73).
7 Goldhill (2008, 191).
8 Cf. this allusiveness from afar with what Wohl (2015, 112) says about how utopia functions in Euripides’ Electra: “Electra’s utopianism lies not in its ‘realist’ depiction of an egalitarian scenario, but in its staging of egalitarianism as an emergent possibility, not yet realized in the present time of the play’s production.”
9 According to Gadamer, a dialogue is authentic if each interlocutor 1) respects the alterity of the other and; 2) is resolutely oriented toward the subject matter (Sache); 3) is open to the possibility that the other is right, and thereby to the possibility of being corrected by and learn from her. On these conditions, see especially PDE, 17–65 and TM, 314-316; 366-369.
10 One may also note that technically, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is not confined to textual interpretation, and the notion of genre is more clearly relevant where texts are at stake. However, Gadamer appropriates Collingwood’s logic of question and answer, which also applies more easily to texts. In other words, it is easier to see why genre does not really belong in Heidegger’s hermeneutics than to see why it would not be appropriate for Gadamer’s.
11 “Die aristotelische >Protreptikos< und die entwicklungsgeschichtliche Betrachtung der aristotelischen Ethik,” originally published in Hermes in 1927, is now printed in GW 5, 164-186.
12 Despite the intensity of Derrida’s critique of Gadamer, well documented in Michelfelder and Palmer (1989), potential agreements should not be so surprising. After all, in the wake of Gadamer’s passing, Derrida wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung an In Memoriam entitled “Wie recht er hatte. Mein Cicerone Hans-Georg Gadamer.” On Derrida’s posthumous convergences with Gadamer, see especially Grondin (2011, 473-78).
13 For his critique of Gadamer, see Hirsch (1967, 245-64). For a defense of Gadamer’s notion Hortizontverschmelzung against Hirsch’s critique, see Vessey (2009). For a broader appreciation of the Gadamer-Hirsch debate on the issue of authorial intention, see Tatar (1998).
14 Hirsch (1967, 89).
15 Hirsch (1967, 86). Italics in the original.
16 Hirsch (1967, 258).
17 Hirsch (1967, 81).
18 Hirsch (1967, 76). My emphasis. Thus Seebohm (1977, 194) argues that Hirsch’s revision of the hermeneutic circle amounts to an overcoming of circularity in favor of a “process of trial and error.”
19 Hirsch (1967, 77). Cf. Hirsch (1967, 83) on genre as a “system of expectations” and Goldhill (2008, 186) on genre as a “frame of expectation.”
20 Hirsch (1967, 93).
21 Derrida (1980).
22 Derrida (1980, 56). Cf. 57: “as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm.”
23 Note that such exceptions are treated by Derrida as transgressions because he determines the norm of genre as law; were the norm looser (as it is with Hirsch), the crime would be less serious.
24 Derrida (1980, 81).
25 Derrida (1980, 63)
26 Derrida’s (1980, 65-66). On the continuity and dynamism of literary genres, see also Goldhill (2008, 188).
27 Hirsch (1967, 76).
28 Note Derrida’s (180, 66) own words: “What will I ask of La Folie du jour? To answer, to testify, to say what it has to say with respect to the law of mode or the law of genre […]” (my emphasis). Were Derrida simply to insert his Vorurteil in Blanchot’s text, he should say that he will ask La Folie du jour to testify to what he has to say.
29 See Derrida’s (1980, 65), taken up verbatim by Stephen Heath and cited in Goldhill (2008, 185).
30 Indeed, Hirsch’s critique of Gadamer’s word choice is somewhat unfair: Gadamer never argues that an interpreter “cannot” change her prejudices or “habitual attitudes” even if she wants to (cf. Hirsch [1967, 260]); in fact, he denies this immutability of prejudices (GW1, 272). Gadamer’s point is not that we cannot change our Vorurteile, but that we cannot get rid of Vorurteile altogether. Hirsch seems to neglect Gadamer’s efforts to broaden our understanding of the word “prejudice,” namely to change our Vor-urteil about Vorurteile. If Gadamer thought that one cannot change one’s interpretive habitual attitudes, we could not see why he would have written these pages on the notion of Vorurteil.
31 Hirsch (1967, 258).
32 Hirsch (1967, 262).
33 On the “socio-politics of genre,” see esp. Goldhill (2008, 186-7): “Genre cannot be fully accounted for in purely formal literary terms: audience, context of performance, circulation of texts, and self-aware critical discussion all play a role.” While Goldhill may be right to complain about the lack of attention paid to this socio-politics of literary genre, and while Hirsch may be found guilty of this charge, I do not see how his theory of genre excludes this important dimension. In fact, his metaphor of genre as a code of social behavior suggests that he was aware of the social and political aspects of the phenomenon.
34 Hirsch (1967, 263).
35 There is no reason to think that Gadamer thinks of the Fragehorizont merely in terms of literary or intellectual context. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is too sensitive to historical mediations to exclude the cultural, social and political dimensions of such interrogative context.
36 See e.g. “Text und Interpretation” in GW 2, 339-340.
37 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 87.
38 Note that this opening-and-closing structure resonates once more with Derrida’s (1980, 65-66) image of genres as floodgates (écluses).
39 It is a mistake to overemphasize openness and to forget the limits that the notion of horizon implies in Gadamer. Decker’s (2000) critique of Gadamer’s interpretation of Plato on that point is unsuccessful since it presupposes the “radical openness” that it intends to criticize. For a better account of the limited openness of horizon in Gadamer with respect to Plato’s dialogues, see Nielsen (2021, forthcoming).
40 It is important to note that Gadamer does not agree with developmentalist accounts of Plato’s work: for him, the Ideenlehre is visible and important throughout all dialogues. See e.g. PDE, 113.
41 It should be specified that Plato made the Republic a written text, unlike the interlocutors of the dialogue, who simply construct a new city in speech. Yet we must resist the temptation to conclude that, in writing the Republic, Plato laid down a written constitution. Such a conclusion presupposes that the dialogical composition of the is a mere artifice and that there is no genuine difference between Plato and his prominent interlocutors. Following the philological paradigm of the great philologist Paul Friedländer, who discovered or rediscovered (for allegedly some Neoplatonists, especially Proclus, had already seen this) that Plato does not merely speak through the voices of his protagonists but rather through the complex interweaving of λόγοι and ἔργα that structure his dialogues, Gadamer is always careful not to conflate Plato’s thought and what his dramatis personae say.
42 This point has been made recently by Gonzalez (2021, 203). It is confirmed by Gadamer in the detour of a sentence toward the end of his 1983 piece (GW 7, 288). “Das ist es, was jeder platonische Dialog verlangt, und so geht es uns auch bei den politischen Utopien, wie die ‘Politeia’ eine ist” (my emphasis).
43 Indeed, this was until the 1980s an exceptional and unorthodox approach to Plato’s dialogues – see e.g. Press (1996).
44 On the resemblance between Gadamer’s Kallipolis and Aristotle’s πολιτϵία, see my Pageau-St-Hilaire (2019, 182-184). On the harmonization of Plato and Aristotle with respect to the Ideenlehre, see Gonzalez (2017) and my Pageau-St-Hilaire (2019, 184-190). On this harmonization on the issue of φρόνησις, see Fruchon (1994, 333-398), Renaud (2019, 352) and my Pageau-St-Hilaire (2019, 190-194).