Gadamer and the Transmission of History by Veith Jerome

Author:Veith, Jerome
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

CONTINUITY AND RUPTURE

Gadamer thus seeks to transpose Hegel’s thought into a hermeneutically open position that is rooted in the concrete experience of transmission. Because it is a transposition, there are ways in which this stance still remains close to Hegel. The latter’s insights into historical mediation and its movement represent crucial foundational points for philosophical hermeneutics. Indeed, the relation that Hegel describes as the unity of substance and subjectivity bears important similarity to what Gadamer describes as the intertwining of understanding and tradition in historical effect. This relation accounts both for the continuity that we inherently share with the transmission of tradition and for the fundamental interpretive and intersubjective task of grasping the continuity in more explicit and reflective terms. This proximity to Hegel explains Gadamer’s remark that his philosophical hermeneutics aims to “retrace the path of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it.”119 It might initially sound far too deferential to Hegel, with its passive language of seemingly external determination. However, if one recalls the sense of negative determination (or determinate negation) that Hegel espouses, one can see that Gadamer is here locating, in substantiality, the continuity that constitutes the movement of transmission. In other words, through his account of dialectical movement, Hegel is urging us to acknowledge and reconcile ourselves to our ongoing historical situation.

It is precisely in the characterization of this situation, however, that an irreconcilable tension divides Gadamer and Hegel. The tension concerns the nature of tradition’s continuity, and our relation to it. Since we belong to the movement of tradition, it is a question of self-relation, and Gadamer reads Hegel as a thinker who intended to overcome, but always remained embroiled in, the problems of self-consciousness.120 While recognizing our historicity, Hegel also states the criterion of experience to be transparent self-knowledge or the full awareness of the assured continuity of tradition, thereby positing something that “does not do justice to hermeneutical consciousness,” and that does not account adequately for our historicity or our finite experience.121 Gadamer’s concept of the consciousness of historical effect thus shares similarities with absolute knowing, but stays open or undecided in crucial ways that, as we have seen, are only hinted at in Hegel. Despite the validity of the structure and even the open-ended direction of dialectical movement in Hegel’s analyses, then, Gadamer emphatically stresses the need to admit of an openness in another direction, an experience of “inner” infinity that “exceeds the omnipotence of reflection.”122

This experience is precisely that of a limitation at the heart of our historicity. To be sure, as the mere recognition of the necessity of further experience, this would sound strictly future-oriented and like a demand for open-ended interpretation in the style of Hegel’s historicity. However, the limitation is far more than a project that, once begun, would remain uncertain in the precise manner of its development. It is really the assertion of the impossibility of immediate or thetic beginning, an insurmountable “occlusion in temporal becoming.”123

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