Practical Reasonableness, Theory, and the Science of Self-Understanding

Abstract

The practical nature of all human understanding lies at the heart of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, yet the stress he places on practicality and his appeal to Aristotle remain relatively neglected by the secondary literature. This neglect is due in part to a failure to see the great extent to which Gadamer relies on the Aristotelian concept of phronēsis (practical wisdom) and, to a lesser extent, on the Hegelian concept of the concrete universal. The purpose of this paper is to show how the proper understanding of Aristotle's notions of practical wisdom and theoretical knowing, both of which are crucial to an appreciation of Gadamer's description of human understanding as Spiel (“game” or “play”), will help to reverse two of the recurring mischaracterizations of philosophical hermeneutics: first, that it is ultimately anti-science (against method and theory) and second, that critical reason or rationality plays only a minor role within it.

Notes

Notes

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Ethics of Value and Practical Philosophy” (1982), in Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Cited hereafter as HR. Gadamer notes in Philosophical Hermeneutics how his first studies under Heidegger in 1923 were on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and the notion of phronēsis. See Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 201–2. Cited hereafter as PH. Heidegger's “violent reading” (Ibid., 202), according to Gadamer, may have been somewhat exaggerated but served Heidegger's early project greatly by revealing a way of knowing from within one's concrete situation that could not be made objectifiable in the scientific sense.

2. Self-understanding is not self-consciousness, an ego or “I” aware of itself as an entity separate from the world. Self-understanding does not refer to a self-conscious subject.

3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 312–23. Cited hereafter as TM. Gadamer's first lecture at Marburg in 1928, “On the Concept and History of Greek Ethics,” shows his early interest in “how philosophical research in value could justify itself in contrast to the normative character of practical reason.” See Gadamer “The Ethics of Value and Practical Philosophy,” in HR, 101.

4. See, for instance, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); and Praise of Theory, trans. Chris Dawson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

5. Ironically, while Gadamer turns to Aristotle in order to combat the priority given to thinking over doing, it is Aristotle that many credit as one of its greatest proponents. Moreover, the very finitude and immediacy of every event of understanding that Gadamer describes in explicitly non-metaphysical terms is, by Gadamer's own admission, based in Aristotle.

6. Citations and references from the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics are from Aristotle: Selections, trans. Terence Irwin and Gail Fine (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995). Nicomachean Ethics is hereafter cited as NE.

7. Aristotle uses phronēsis both in reference to understanding in general and in a more limited sense, as in NE, as the deliberative virtue of practical intellect.

8. For an interesting paper on the role of emotion in phronetic deliberation, see Arash Abizadeh, “The Passions of the Wise: Phronesis, Rhetoric, and Aristotle's Passionate Practical Deliberation,” The Review of Metaphysics 56 (December 2002): 267–96.

9. See Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, 163.

10. There are a number of conflicts we might draw attention to in order to show the relative unease of interpretation. Joseph Dunne's Back to the Rough Ground: ‘Phronesis’ and ‘Techne’ in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), is one of the most accomplished and accepted of contemporary works devoted to understanding phronēsis both in Aristotle and in contemporary philosophy. In it he considers the relationship between practical wisdom and/or poiēsis (understood as a kind of technē) as a way of clarifying phronetic insight (rather than focusing on the relationship between theory and practice as I have done). Yet others, such as John Wall, have responded to Dunne by claiming that he has failed to appreciate the full nature of phronēsis. Wall argues that scholars continue to place too much emphasis on phronēsis as knowing the right ends and the human good itself, to the exclusion of the means to achieving them. A fuller sense of phronēsis, for Wall, must consider its inventive dimension. See John Wall, “Phronesis as Poetic: Moral Creativity in Contemporary Aristotelianism,” The Review of Metaphysics 59 (2005): 317. Similarly, in his “Art, Practical Knowledge, and Aesthetic Objectivity,” David Carr argues that “a suitably modified notion of phronesis may provide the key to understanding the relationship of aesthetic sensibility to artistic knowledge.” See David Carr, “Art, Practical Knowledge, and Aesthetic Objectivity,” Ratio (new series) 12 (1999): 240.

11. Rosalind Hursthouse's “Practical Wisdom: A Mundane Account” is helpful because it highlights some of the remaining confusion surrounding just what it is that the phronimos perceives. Confusion persists, she argues, because Aristotle simply is not clear, especially on nous in Book VI. Her main argument is that those who seek to be wise must pursue knowledge of all kinds, including that which will foster our “technical deliberation.” See Rosalind Hursthouse, “XI – Practical Wisdom: A Mundane Account,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (2006): 283–307.

12. See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

13. The primary work in this regard is Gadamer's The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. On Heidegger, see, for example, the interesting piece by Michael Allen Gillespie, “Martin Heidegger's Aristotelian National Socialism.” In it he shows how from 1919 to 1933, Heidegger worked out a notion of praxis and politics, based in Aristotle, that was meant to instill a renewed appreciation for practical wisdom, over and against the domination of technoscience and theory. For another helpful paper on Heidegger and phronetic wisdom, consider Daniel L. Smith, “Intensifying Phronesis: Heidegger, Aristotle, and Rhetorical Culture,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36 (2003): 77–102.

14. Walter Brogan proposes that the highest happiness attained through contemplation, for Aristotle, should be understood practically and politically. Brogan argues that in Aristotle's notion of friendship, theory and practice come together. See Walter Brogan “Gadamer's Praise of Theory: Aristotle's Friend and the Reciprocity Between Theory and Practice,” Research in Phenomenology 32 (2002).

15. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Aristotle and the Ethic of Imperatives,” trans. Joseph M. Knippenberg, in Action and Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle, ed. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Albany, NY: New York Press, 1999), 59.

16. For an example of how Aristotle has been reread after Gadamer, consider Joseph Dunne, “Aristotle after Gadamer: An Analysis of the Distinction between the Concepts of Phronēsis and Techne,” Irish Philosophical Journal 2 (1985): 105–23.

17. Gadamer, “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem (1966),” in PH, 3.

18. Martin Eger, “Hermeneutics and Science Education: An Introduction,” Science and Education 1 (1992): 337.

19. Though rarely with the intention of fully proving or disproving the theoretical assumptions.

20. Gadamer describes experimental science in terms of isolation and interrogation. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Language and Understanding (1970),” trans. Richard E. Palmer, Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 15.

21. The further concern is to what degree this leads negatively toward mastery and control. See, for example, Gadamer's discussion in The Enigma of Health, trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). Cited hereafter as EH.

22. Don Ihde, “Perceptual Reasoning—Hermeneutics and Perception,” eds. Márta Fehér, Olga Kiss, and László Ropolyi, Proceedings of the First Conference of the International Society for Hermeneutics and Science (The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 14.

23. See Gadamer, TM, 103.

24. See especially Gadamer, “Theory, Technology, Praxis,” in EH.

25. Similarly, Heidegger claims that Dasein is the being that always has an understanding of the Being of beings that shapes its comprehension. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 36.

26. “To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible” (TM, 361). For Gadamer's views on the scope of hermeneutical reflection, see, for example, PH, 18–43.

27. Gadamer makes this point in reference to Aristotle's belief that the beginning principle from which one should begin deliberation about the good is “the that”—recognizing a given norm. See Gadamer, “The Ethics of Value and Practical Philosophy,” in HR, 108–9.

28. In “The Ethics of Value and Practical Philosophy.”

29. Gadamer makes this point in a number of places, including The Relevance of the Beautiful and TM.

30. See, for example, “The Ontology of the Work of Art and Its Hermeneutical Significance,” in TM, 101–69. Gadamer's notion of play is not the same as either Kant's or Schiller's, for both of whom play holds an important role.

31. I owe the insight into Gadamer's analysis of the ontology of the experience of understanding as being far more Hegelian than prior commentators have suggested to Jeff Mitscherling. See Jeff Mitscherling, “Hegelian Elements in Gadamer's Notion of Application and Play,” Continental Philosophy Review [formerly Man and World] 25 (1992): 61–67. Also, I should like to thank Dr. Mitscherling for his helpful comments on this paper.

32. See Hegel, “The Notion,” in Logic, vol. 2, sec. 1, chap. 1.

33. As quoted by Jeff Mitscherling from W. T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel (London: Dover Publications, 1955), 228.

34. Concerning the experience of the work of art Gadamer says, “Everything familiar is eclipsed.” See Gadamer, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” in PH, 101.

35. “My thesis, then, is that the being of art cannot be defined as an object of an aesthetic consciousness because, on the contrary, the aesthetic attitude is more than it knows of itself. It is a part of the event of being that occurs in presentation, and belongs essentially to play as play” (TM, 116).

36. Agreeing with Hegel, Gadamer argues that all “experience has the structure of a reversal of consciousness and hence it is a dialectical movement” (TM, 354). Later on he argues that “every experience worthy of the name thwarts an expectation” (356).