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FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE: GADAMER FINDS UNIVERSAL
UNDERSTANDING IN THIRD WAVE FEMINIST DISCOURSE
Emily Scherberth
California State University, Northridge
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 2
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic studies on understanding,
subjectivity and community were largely grounded in the realm of
philosophy. As Gadamer himself professes, "My real concern was
and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but
what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing" (1982b,
p. xxviiii). Yet following the publication of Gadamer’s Truth and
Method and Philosophical Hermeneutics, many scholars have
reinterpreted his concepts and extended his works into the social
and political arenas. This study attempts to do the same, by
exploring Gadamer’s concepts of fusing horizons, subjectivity and
community in the context of modern day feminism and the specific
political discourse of the Third Wave women’s movement. I will
build on other scholarly research that connects Gadamer’s
theories to feminism and show how the tension between the
individual and the collective which characterizes the discourse
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 3
of the Third Wave, can be explicated through a Gadamerian
framework.
Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics
In his seminal work, Truth and Method, Gadamer (1982b)
explores the basis for understanding between people and content.
He expresses that “understanding means, primarily, to understand
the content of what is said, and only secondarily to isolate and
understand another’s meaning as such” (Gadamer, 1982b, p. 262).
He goes on to explain that “to reach an understanding with one’s
partner in a dialogue is not merely a matter of total self-
expression and successful assertion of one’s own point of view,
but a transformation into a communion, in which we do not remain
what we were” (Gadamer, 1982b, p. 341). Therefore, in Gadamer’s
view, understanding takes into account individual subjectivity,
but as a means to an end which is to arrive at a transformational
communion of ideas, where one person’s perspective does not
dominate the other.
Linge (1976) also provides a helpful explanation of
Gadamer’s conception of understanding, which is that
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 4
“understanding is not reconstruction but mediation” (p. xvi). In
other words, understanding is not about trying to recreate
something, it’s about synthesizing the text with the
interpreter’s own positionality in a dialectical process. Or put
another way, understanding is the process of fusing the different
horizons of text and interpreter together “into a common view of
the subject matter – the meaning – with which both are concerned”
(Linge, 1976, p. xix). And as Chen (1987) summarizes, “Gadamer’s
model of the dialogue is not concerned with the subjective
meaning of the text, as intended by the author, rather it is
concerned with the truth claimed by the text” (p. 190). It is
through this authentic “participation in the dialogue, in the
form of constant questioning and answering, giving and taking,
truth(s) will gradually emerge” (Chen, 1987, p. 189).
Gadamer (1976) also clarifies that since the human
experience is temporal, so are any interpretations made by
humans, which makes historical mediation important as well.
In other words, our subjectivity limits the impact that our
awareness can have on understanding, which is why he advocates
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 5
for the fusion of horizons, or the synthesis of different
historical and individual perspectives to get the best
interpretation of a given text or discourse (Gadamer, 1976).
Extending Gadamer into the Political
It is through Gadamer’s notions of understanding,
subjectivity and fusing horizons in a specific historical context
that we can begin to form connections and relevance to a
political discourse. Other scholars have recognized this
connection and have argued that “the moral/practical/political
implications [of Gadamer’s work], have not been given sufficient
attention within the discipline of communication studies” (Chen,
1987, p. 184). For example, Kuan-Hsing Chen (1987) set out to
find the points of intersection between the hermeneutic tradition
and other critical work such as Marxism and feminism, in order to
find new possibilities for the study of communication. Based on
Gadamer’s (1982a) assertion that “no higher principle is
thinkable than that of freedom of all” (p. 9), Chen’s (1987)
reading of Gadamer casts philosophical hermeneutics as a
“humanistic, moral and practical enterprise with a political
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 6
intent to struggle for freedom” (p. 191). She goes on to argue
that “the struggle for freedom makes hermeneutics a political
project which seems to go hand in hand with other contemporary
intellectual discourses such as Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis
and post-structuralism” (Chen, 1987, p. 191).
Gadamer’s views on prejudice and subjectivity are also
similar to feminist standpoint theory which holds that where we
are situated in life - in terms of race, gender, sexuality,
socio-economic status, etc. – determines how we view the world.
Other feminist scholars have already connected Gadamer’s theories
to feminism. For example, Ryan and Natalle (2001) use Gadamer’s
“emphasis on position and historicity” (p. 69) to develop their
own connection to feminist standpoint theory in a study that
fuses standpoint hermeneutics and invitational rhetoric. Ryan
and Natalle’s (2001) research builds on earlier work done by Foss
and Griffin (1995) who argued that the concept of rhetoric purely
as persuasion is flawed, and introduced the alternative practice
of invitational rhetoric which drew from the Gadamerian concept
of dialogue.
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 7
But the connection between Gadamer, feminism and the
individual-versus-collective tension in current Third Wave
feminist discourse, on which this study is focused, would be
incomplete without an exploration of the relationship between his
concepts of individual subjectivity and community.
Gadamer and Community
In Truth and Method, Gadamer (1982b) emphasizes that
individuals should to keep themselves “open to what is other – to
other more universal points of view...[which results] in rising
above [oneself] to universality. To distance oneself from oneself
and from one’s private purposes” (p. 17). Here Gadamer is putting
forward the idea that for universal understanding to be achieved
within a community, an openness between individual “others” is
required, which ultimately leads to a transformation of everyone
involved.
John Arthos (2000) asserted that Gadamer’s idea of community
“is strangely tied to the subjectivism he rejects.” (p. 17).
Michelfelder (1997) offers that Gadamer aims for self-
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 8
understanding, and “how one’s own individual life is bound up
with others” (p. 499). Smith (1997) believes that Gadamer’s
hermeneutics is grounded in the social construction of identity,
where individuals learn “to rise above our initially individuated
and private existences and to participate in the communities of
language and culture” (p. 517). Chen (1987) takes this idea
further by asserting that Gadamer has a “moral and practical
commitment to human communal life” (p. 192). And Arthos (2000)
concurs that “insight is lodged in the individual by the nature
of consciousness but realized in the community by necessary
relation of moral deliberation to the persons affected” (p. 25).
So if Gadamer favored a moral commitment to communal life
that recognized individual experience, yet found it an
insufficient path to universal understanding, how do we arrive at
truth in this context? Arthos (2000) offers that Gadamer
“weights communal identity neither towards subjective
individualism nor any kind of relational system, but in the
creative and uncompleted intermedium of conversation. The
priority Gadamer gives to the event of dialogue as the engine of
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 9
unexpressed human identity is the pivot of his entire hermeneutic
enterprise. The ontological preeminence of the unfinished
‘conversation that we are’ has implications for the theory of
communication yet to be seized upon and worked out” (p. 15).
It is here that we find the most direct natural link between
Gadamer and feminist theory as it relates to the current
discourse of the Third Wave. In utilizing a Socratic dialogue
model and emphasizing the power of the conversation to illuminate
both individual identity and universal understanding, Gadamer is
aligned with one of the major tenets of feminist theory which
advocates for a more dialogical, dialectical approach to
knowledge and understanding. Next we will turn to a deeper
exploration of feminist theory and how feminists conceptualize
the relationship between the individual and her community.
The Personal is Political
In order to understand how Gadamer’s framework for
individual subjectivity and community is relevant in the context
of Third Wave feminism, we must also look at the origins of the
relationship between the individual and the collective in the
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 10
political discourse of modern day feminism. As Chen (1987)
reminds us, Gadamer’s focus on context “stresses the necessity of
historicizing communicative action in concrete social, cultural
and political contexts” (Chen, p. 197).
The slogan, “the personal is political” emerged in the
second-wave women’s movement in the 1970’s as a way to
acknowledge that the oppressive experiences that women had in
their private lives reflected a greater problem in society. In
other words, personal experiences weren’t just personal and
isolated to a few; they were widespread and representative of how
women suffered from sexism all over the country. One of the main
ways that women came to realize that they weren’t alone was
through organizing and participating in consciousness-raising
groups. It was in these groups that women shared their personal
stories with each other, started to form collectives and
concentrated their power in order to bring the fight to the
government and institutions that were oppressing them.
The “the personal is political,” also challenges the idea
that women cannot hold power in private spaces. It was, in fact,
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 11
in these private spaces that these consciousness-raising groups
were formed and leveraged their power as collectives to fight the
oppression of women. As Collins (2006) notes, the goals of these
groups were to, “1) heighten individual women’s awareness of
gender oppression in their lives; and 2) organize this group of
individuals into a collectivity that would jointly design and
implement action strategies that resisted women’s oppression” (p.
164). And as Carol Hanisch (1978), who wrote a famous essay
entitled, “The Personal is Political,” asserts, “these analytic
sessions are a form of political action. It is at this point a
political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really
believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to
say” (p. 204).
Tension in Third Wave Feminist Discourse
The Second Wave women’s movement was successful due to the
ability of feminists to organize and work within the system to
enact change. Women banded together within powerful collectives
that fought for equal opportunity, equal pay and reproductive
freedoms. The Third Wave women’s movement that began in the
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 12
1990s, however, is marked by lack of a consistent focus and a
collective effort toward any one goal. If there’s a common theme
to the Third Wave, it is one of inconsistency, multiplicity and
contradiction that prizes individual subjectivity over collective
consciousness-raising and political action. In fact, many young
females today refuse to even identify as feminists, and instead
adopt a rhetoric of choice to explain their experiences as
liberated women, completely disregarding the hard work that the
women of the previous generation did to make those choices
possible (Gill, 2007; Budgeon, 2011).
Many have argued that neoliberal values have fueled this
anti-feminist/postfeminist sentiment, and essentially hijacked
any larger collective purpose that feminism might serve, throwing
it backwards into a preoccupation with highly-individual
concerns. Angela McRobbie (2004) even goes so far as to argue
that feminism is essentially “dismantling itself” through
postfeminism and neoliberalism. Feminist scholar, Rosalind Gill
(2007) describes neoliberalism and postfeminism as being
preoccupied with “self-surveillance, monitoring and self-
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 13
discipline [and] a focused on individualism, choice and
empowerment” (p. 147). Her research also reveals the dark side
of neoliberalism “where the individual must bear full
responsibility for their life biography, no matter how severe the
constraints upon their action” (p. 163). Mendes (2012) also
concurs that neoliberal values represent a “problematic
construction for those seeking collective social change” (p.
554).
Other feminist scholars like Shelley Budgeon (2011) have
even attempted to reconstruct the subject of feminism for a new
generation, by demonstrating how the tenets of the Third Wave,
which recognizes the multiplicity and contradictory nature of
women’s lived experiences, can be constructive and provide “an
opportunity for a revitalized feminist project” (p. 281) through
maintaining a respect for individual experiences while
challenging women to also think critically about their lives in a
collective sense. She implores that “third-wave feminist
political strategies must provide opportunities to transcend the
ideological incitement to engage uncritically in a project of
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 14
self-definition found upon individualized female success and the
values of choice, freedom and self-sufficiency” (Budgeon, 2011,
p. 289). It is precisely at this point where a Gadamerian
framework finds a useful application. By challenging women to
transcend the neoliberal imperative toward isolation and
individualization, and encourage a more communal mindset in which
individual women “distance oneself from oneself and from one’s
private purposes” (Gadamer, 1982b, p. 17), the tension between
the individual and the collective can be minimized. Following is
a more in-depth exploration of this idea.
Fusing the Individual and Collective Horizons in the Third Wave
In Gadamer’s published conversations with Jacques Derrida,
he delves deeper into the way history affects the individual’s
experiences. Gadamer (1989) asserts that:
“History does not belong to us; yet we belong to it. Long
before we understand ourselves
through the process of self-examination, we understand
ourselves in a self-evident way in
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 15
the family, society and state in which we live. The focus of
subjectivity is a distorting
mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a
flickering in the closed circuits of
historical life. That is why the prejudices of the
individual, far more than his judgments,
constitute the historical reality of his being” (p. 276-7).
If we take Gadamer’s view on the historicity of individual
subjectivity and apply it to the individual subject of the Third
Wave, we can see how the historical construct of neoliberalism
affects the female experience. In other words, since women are
continuously bombarded with messages that implore them toward
“self-surveillance, monitoring, self-discipline…and
individualism” (Gill, 2007, p. 147) in our neoliberal society,
their subjectivity is a “distorting mirror” (Gadamer, 1989, p.
276) that results in a distorted view of themselves. As Cindy
Griffin (2009) explains that neoliberal and postfeminist
“principles and practices echo an all-too-familiar ruggedly
individualist narrative, and this narrative relies on a
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 16
disquietingly familiar refrain: if you haven't ‘succeeded,’ it's
your own fault” (p. 7). Under these influences, women are not
only isolated told they don’t need to confront the external,
institutional forces that work to oppress them, they also
systematically reject the feminist community that so desperately
wants to work for their freedom. If we look back to historical
context of the 1970’s, the feminist collective was a powerful
force that the individual female subject identified with and
sought to be a part of. Women had to band together in the 1970’s
and fight oppressive forces in society to gain equal rights. As
Arthos (2000) offers, Gadamer believed that “the relation of self
to other, friend to enemy, is finally nothing but history itself”
(p. 32). Today, women are fighting other women, demonstrating
that the neoliberal self-directed subject in opposition to the
collective is a purely historical phenomenon. Therefore, it can
be argued that the individual subjectivity of today’s women is a
historical construct, and unfortunately, is distorted in such a
way that continues to undermine women’s power. Instead of
reinforcing the unproductive binary opposition between the
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 17
individual and the collective that is so present in the Third
Wave feminist discourse, I think Gadamer would encourage a way to
bridge the two through dialogue, through what Aimee Carrillo Rowe
(2008) describes as ‘coalitional subjectivity’ which decenters
the individual and instead emphasizes our belongings and
relationships to others.
While decentering the individual is consistent with
Gadamer’s prescription for arriving at a universal understanding
within Third Wave discourse, it is important to note that Gadamer
would not advocate for a complete erasure of individual
differences. As Arthos (2000) explains, “Gadamer’s difference is
always a productive relation…that advances understanding” (p. 32)
and allows for “the other’s claim to truth” (Gadamer, 1982b, p.
299). Second Wave feminist author Audre Lorde (2003) offers a
similar view, expressing that:
“Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund
of necessary polarities between which our creativity can
spark like a dialectic. As women, we have been taught either
to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 18
separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change.
Without community there is no liberation…But community must
not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic
pretense that these differences do not exist” (p. 26).
It is precisely through the dialogue between the Second Wave
collective philosophy and the multiplicity and individuality of
Third Wave feminist thought that we see what Gadamer (1982b)
means when he says “to reach an understanding with one’s partner
in a dialogue is not merely a matter of total self-expression and
successful assertion of one’s own view, but a transformation into
a communion, in which we do not remain what we were” (p. 344).
As feminist scholar, Glora Anzaldúa (1983) passionately argued
self-awareness not only involves “going deep into the self and
expanding out into the world” it is also “a simultaneous
recreation of the self and a reconstruction of society” (p. 208).
Carrillo Rowe (2009) offers that “for Anzaldúa the subject exists
in ‘symbiotic relationship to all that exists’…agency for
Anzaldúa assumes a collective subject—that subjects are ‘co-creators
of ideologies’” (p. 16). In other words, the tension present in
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 19
the individual-versus-collective debate that characterizes Third
Wave feminism can be ultimately transcended by forming community
through a productive dialogue about individual differences.
Conclusion
The goal of this paper was to extend the work of previous
scholars in showing how Gadamerian hermeneutics could have
relevance in the political context of today’s feminism. By using
Gadamer’s concepts of individual subjectivity and community, and
applying his dialogic method for achieving universal
understanding, I have demonstrated how the tension in Third Wave
feminist discourse can be rectified through a Gadamerian
framework. This study found that by respecting individual
differences and forming a collective built from a productive
dialogue about these differences, the feminist project can find a
new purpose that frees it from a limiting binary opposition that
only reinforces the oppression of women. In other words, by
fusing the horizons of the Second Wave’s collective identity and
the Third Wave’s individual differences, we can transcend the
limitations that the current feminist project is facing.
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 20
The use of a Gadamerian framework in this study also has
implications for other political discourse that has been shaped
by neoliberalism, such as the socialized healthcare debate, the
Patriot Act, and the growing tension around the Second Amendment.
I would argue that Gadamer’s concepts of individual subjectivity,
historicity and community have relevance in any discussion that
poses individual liberties against the greater good of the
community. In the future, more research should be done in the
communication studies discipline that leverages Gadamer’s work to
examine these issues.
FUSING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE 21
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