History and Theory, Theme Issue 51 (December 2012), 6-22 Wesleyan University 2012 ISSN: 0018-2656

SolIDarIty aND traDItIoN IN GaDamerS HermeNeUtIcS

GeorGIa WarNke

abStract

commentators have compared Hans-Georg Gadamers focus on tradition in Truth and Method to his focus on solidarity in his later work in order to suggest that the latter signals a move away from ontological toward ethical and political concerns. this paper, however, is guided by Gadamers own view that his work, both early, late, and in Truth and Method, was always concerned with ethical and political issues. I therefore want to challenge the idea that his so-called politics of solidarity marks a new direction in his work. His politics of solidarity does mark a new direction in discussions of solidarity insofar as he disconnects it from any necessary grounding in preexisting affinities such as religion and nationality. Gadamers later work may also be more explicitly concerned with the question of differences and the other than is Truth and Method. Nevertheless, I want to argue that rather than signaling a new direction for Gadamer, both his politics of solidarity and his concern with otherness highlight important features already present in his earlier account of tradition. Indeed, I think attention to this earlier account discloses a political dimension to Gadamers thought that is more sophisticated than his remarks on solidarity. attention to this dimension of his earlier account allows us to challenge the now standard objection that it undermines possibilities for critical reflection.

Keywords: Gadamer, hermeneutics, tradition, solidarity, friendship, otherness, Truth and Method, horizon

In Gadamers philosophical hermeneutics, tradition designates the historically pregiven. as socialized human beings we are always already immersed in par-ticular ways of coping with our world. We possess certain forms of practical knowledge, do things in certain ways, and take certain concepts and conceptual relations for granted. these forms of knowing and acting function as deeply rooted pre-agreements, or what Gadamer calls prejudices, that orient our further explorations. We know how to live in houses, go down streets, and report for work before we learn how to rent a home, drive a car, or get a job. We belong to historical and cultural traditions in which novels, plays, and scholarly works have a part before we take certain texts to be novels, plays, and scholarly works. We grow up with certain terms for thinking about ourselves before we address criti-cal questions about who we are. Gadamer insists, We do not conceive of what tradition says as something other, something alien. It is always part of us, a model or exemplar, a kind of cognizance that our later historical judgment would hardly regard as a kind of knowledge but as the most ingenuous affinity with tradition.1

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. and transl. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald marshall (New york: crossroads Publishing co., 1992), 282.

Solidarity and tradition in GadamerS HermeneuticS 7to many critics, this ingenuous affinity with tradition has adverse conse-

quences for critical reflection. For examining the kind of cognizance that our traditions are or for assessing this cognizance in the light of other traditions, Gadamers hermeneutics appears to offer little support. traditions not only underlie our actions, understanding, and self-reflection but also, with their preju-dices, set the framework in terms of which we can assess these actions, under-standings, and self-reflections. In trying to evaluate the prejudices we inherit, then, we can only circle back over them with the prejudices of the same tradition that produces them. If these prejudices safeguard social and political relations of power there is no way to expose them. as albrecht Wellmer already claimed in 1974, the context of tradition as a locus of possible truth . . . is, at the same time, the locus of factual untruth and continued force.2 the same appears to hold for the possibility of assessing our traditions in the light of others, for we would seem to be able to approach other traditions only with the tools and conceptual resources that our own traditions afford. If Wellmer is correct, these tools and conceptual resources are as likely to be distorting as illuminating. Indeed, Jrgen Habermas thinks Gadamers hermeneutics is simply unable to deal with system-atically distorted communication.3

to other commentators on Gadamers work, the problem with his account of tradition is not that it has adverse consequences for critical reflection but that it has no consequences at all. Instead, the account forms part of the ontological and meta-theoretical claims of Gadamers magnum opus, Truth and Method. 4 richard J. bernstein thus claims that Truth and Method is largely indifferent to ethical and political concerns,5 while Jacques Derrida places Gadamer in a par-ticular epoch, that of a metaphysics of the will,6 and John D. caputo sees his affection for the truth of being as exploiting Heideggers conservative side.7 For caputo, Gadamers philosophical hermeneutics is a closet essentialism with deep roots in the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Hegel.8

at the same time, bernstein claims that after Truth and Method Gadamer began to move in the other direction . . . exploring the consequences of hermeneutics for praxis.9 more recently, commentators have attached this new exploration to a focus on friendship and solidarity. chris lawn notes that whereas Truth and Method never mentions solidarity, after Truth and Method references to tradition

2. albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society, transl. John cumming (New york: Seabury Press, 1974), 47.

3. See Jrgen Habermas, Der niversalittanspruch der Hermeneutik, in karl-otto apel et al., Hermeneutik and Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt: Surkamp Verlag, 1977), 120-159.

4. Darren r. Walhof, Friendship, otherness, and Gadamers Politics of Solidarity, Political Theory 34, no. 5 (october 2006), 570.

5. richard J. bernstein, What is the Difference that makes a Difference: Gadamer, Habermas and rorty, in Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, ed. brice r. Wachterhauser (albany: State University of New york Press, 1986), 348.

6. Jacques Derrida, three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer, transl. Diane michelfelder and richard Palmer, in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane michelfelder and richard Palmer (albany: State University of New york Press, 1989), 53.

7. John D. caputo, Gadamers closet essentialism: a Derridean critique, in michelfelder and Palmer, eds., Dialogue and Deconstruction, 259.

8. Ibid., 264.9. bernstein, What is the Difference that makes a Difference, 348.

georgia warnke8seem to vanish from the lexicon.10 In a similar vein, Darren r. Walhof claims that we can acquire a more nuanced, richer understanding of the political dimen-sion of Gadamers thought if we examine three concepts: solidarity, friendship, and otherness, that have not received enough attention.11

In this paper, I am guided by Gadamers own view that his work, both early, late, and in Truth and Method, was always concerned with ethical and political issues.12 I therefore want to challenge the idea that what Walhof calls his politics of solidarity13 marks a new direction in his work. to be sure, this politics of soli-darity marks a new direction in discussions of solidarity insofar as Gadamer dis-connects it from any necessary grounding in preexisting affinities such as religion and nationality. Gadamers later work may also be more explicitly concerned with the question of differences and the other than is Truth and Method. Never-theless, I want to argue that rather than signaling a new direction for Gadamer, both his politics of solidarity and his concern with otherness highlight important features already present in his earlier account of tradition. Indeed, attention to this earlier account permits us a more nuanced, richer understanding of the political dimension of Gadamers thought than do his remarks on solidarity. moreover, attention to this dimension of his earlier account allows us to challenge the objec-tion that it undermines possibilities for critical reflection. I begin by examining the analysis of solidarity in Gadamers later work.

FrIeNDSHIP aND SolIDarIty

Gadamers reflections on a politics of solidarity are not systematic even in the 1999 essay entitled Friendship and Solidarity that is his most extensive treatment of it. Nonetheless, the essay does provide comments on what he considers three impor-tant characteristics of friendship, and these are meant to carry over to solidarity. First, Gadamer suggests that friendship involves that which constitutes being at home, where everything is trusted.14 Friends possess a community with and loy-alty to one another that parallel that of a family. Friendship therefore involves more than being well disposed toward someone. rather, friends possess a bond to one another and inhabit a life together. Gadamer makes the same point in a 1985 essay, Friendship and Self-knowledge: reflections on the role of Friendship in Greek ethics: even if . . . sympathy or good will were . . . to occur on both sides . . . it would be mere friendliness so long as the two people were not really openly bound to each other. the common condition of all friendship is more than that: the true bond thatin various degreessignifies a life together.15

10. chris lawn, Gadamer: A Guide for the Perplexed (New york: continuum, 2006), 106.11. Walhof, Friendship, otherness, and Gadamers Politics of Solidarity, 571.12. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Interview: the 1920s, 1930s, and the Present in Gadamer, On

Education, Poetry and History, ed. Dieter misgeld and Graeme Nicholson (albany: State University of New york Press, 1992), 150.

13. See Walhof, Friendship, otherness, and Gadamers Politics of Solidarity, title.14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Freundschaft und Solidaritt, in Hermeneutische Entwrfe: Vortrge

und Aufstze (tbingen: mohr Siebeck, 2000), 58. 15. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Friendship and Self-knowledge: reflections on the role of Friendship

in Greek ethics, in Gadamer, Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Religion (New Haven: yale University Press, 1999), 134.

Solidarity and tradition in GadamerS HermeneuticS 9Somewhat in contrast, the second important characteristic of friendship signals

a respect for difference and otherness rather than the commonality of a bond. Gadamer rejects the idea that the life together that friends have either begins or ends in identification. If friends are at home with one another, it is not because they share affinities or similarities with one another any more than if we possess ties to our siblings it is because we are necessarily like them. Instead, Gadamer claims that in friendship, one recognizes oneself in the other and . . . the other also recognizes him or herself in us. Not only in the sense of thus is he but also in the sense that we grant to the other his or her being other.16 Friends are not the same nor do they seek to remake one another in their own image. rather, they acknowledge and appreciate one anothers distinctiveness.

the third important feature of friendship follows. because of the community and life together that friends have they can expose themselves to one other. by the same token, because of their difference they can help one another to come to new understandings of themselves. our friends are those to whom we can reveal ourselves and who can help us reveal ourselves to ourselves precisely by being different from us. by providing a different perspective on our actions, aspira-tions, fears, and the like, they allow us to understand ourselves differently just as, by providing a different perspective on them, we can reveal new aspects of themselves to them. In this way, friendship allows for mutual self-understanding and insight or what Gadamer calls reciprocal co-perception.17 our friends are those who can assess our actions, provide counsel to us, and increase our self-understanding precisely because they are simultaneously bound to us and other from us. Gadamer notes aristotles view that the essence of a friend consists in someones being able to understand his neighbor more easily than himself.18 He also writes, because this other, this counterpart, is not ones own mirror image but rather the friend, all powers come into play of increasing trust and devotion to the better self that the other is for oneself, and that is something more than good resolution and inward stirrings of conscience.19

taken together, these characteristics of friendship signal the value of a life together, the importance of recognizing a separateness or otherness, and the reciprocal self-understanding that can thereby develop. In Gadamers terminol-ogy, friendship involves a being at home with another, whose being-other or different from oneself one endorses, from whom one also gleans the distinctive-ness of him- or herself, and to whom one gives the credit for that increase in self-understanding. the result of such friendship is a form of enrichment that Gadamer thinks is uniquely human. Following aristotle, he suggests that a kind of friend-ship with oneself is a precursor to friendship with others. at the same time, also following aristotle, he suggests that full friendship with oneself reflects a kind of self-sufficiency available only to gods. there may be some merit in under-standing and coming to terms with oneself. yet this self-understanding is never complete and never free from the tendency to harbor illusions about oneself. In

16. Gadamer, Freundschaft und Solidaritt, 62.17. Gadamer, Friendship and Self-knowledge, 139.18. Ibid., 137.19. Ibid., 139.

georgia warnke10contrast, one of the real satisfactions of friendship is that someone who is not one-self, not like oneself, and whose otherness one grants nevertheless understands one and helps one to understand oneself. as Gadamer puts this point: the other, the friend, signifies an accession of being, self-feeling, and the richness of life.20

If friendship, then, involves bonds of commonality and a respect for difference that lead to self-knowledge and an accession of being, Gadamer thinks similar characteristics hold for solidarity. First, like friendship, solidarity involves a sense of being at home with others. our shared enterprises or shared circum-stances disclose the common life we have together. Indeed, in solidarity we discover a community to which, as in coming home, we already belong. Second, however and despite this common life, like friendship, solidarity involves differ-ence. our life together cannot be reduced to agreement in inclination and inter-ests, Gadamer insists.21 to be in solidarity with others in common enterprises or circumstances is not necessarily to identify with those others. the environmental movement serves for him as an example.22 this movement does not depend for its solidarity on identities in ethnicity, nationality, religion, or the like but rather spans a variety of groups and individuals with a variety of distinct characteristics and distinct ethnic, national, and religious affinities.

In a third similarity with friendship, solidarity involves mutual insight. Friend-ship is self-revelatory insofar as our friend helps us understand our distinctiveness as individuals. Solidarity is similarly revelatory according to Gadamer. Under contemporary conditions large bureaucratic societies with complex economies reduce individuals to numbers, collate them under categories, and process them technologically. Gadamer suggests that solidarity frees individuals from this fate by uncovering their particularity and retrieving their distinctiveness for us as people engaged with us in common pursuits or facing similar circumstances. because of the common life we share in solidarity, we can come to know one another. those with whom we are in solidarity are no longer faceless to us nor are we any longer faceless to them. rather, we disclose one another to one another as we do in friendship and thereby release one another from what Gadamer, fol-lowing Jaspers, calls the anonymous responsibility23 of contemporary mass societies. Freed from obscurity as an indistinguishable part of an undifferentiated bulk, we become distinct individuals for one another and recover the ability to act in concert.

the triple stress that Gadamers account of solidarity puts on discovering a common life, allowing for difference, and overcoming anonymity departs in significant ways from accounts such as richard rortys that rely on possibilities for identification as their grounds.24 to be sure, like Gadamers account, rortys emphasizes particularity. He denies that relations of solidarity identify an essen-tial human nature and insists that they rather comprise understandings of the

20. Ibid., 137.21. Gadamer, Freundschaft und Solidaritt, 61.22. Hans-Georg Gadamer, carsten Dutt, and richard e. Palmer, Gadamer in Conversation:

Reflections and Commentary (New Haven: yale University Press, 2001), 80.23. Gadamer, Freundschaft und Solidaritt, 56.24. See richard rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (cambridge, Uk: cambridge University

Press, 1989). lawn and Walhof both also compare Gadamer to rorty.

Solidarity and tradition in GadamerS HermeneuticS 11way specific others are like us in our specificity. We recognize others as fellow americans, fellow liberals, or the like. Indeed, while the Danes and Italians pro-tected Danish and Italian Jews from mass murder at the hands of the Nazis, rorty denies that they did so because they recognized them as fellow humans. rather, they did so because they recognized them as fellow Danes and Italians. as rorty writes, our sense of solidarity is strongest when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as one of us where us means something smaller and more local than the human race.25

Gadamer, however, does not simply unmoor solidarity from the recognition of an essential and common humanity to anchor it in more local affinities; more radically, he unmoors solidarity from any affinities at all. In Gadamers view, to be in solidarity with others is to pick them out and to be picked out by them from the anonymity of mass existence. What is crucial here is not that we recognize others as like us but that we recognize them at allthat is, that we see them as distinct others with specific differences that pick them out from an undifferenti-ated homogeneity. When we declare or find ourselves in solidarity with others, we distinguish and acknowledge them. Solidarity is thus a form of unconceal-ment, to use Heideggers term, in which we are mutually revealed and opened up to one another as particular others. like rorty, Gadamer refers to the solidarity individuals found with one another during World War II. yet his example is not the way Danes and Italians were able to recognize the Jews of their communities as fellow Danes or Italians; his example is the way anonymous people were able to acknowledge other anonymous people as their neighbors during the allied bombing of German cities: Suddenly, ones neighbor, this wholly unknown stranger under the conditions of city life, was awoken to life.26 Under the condi-tions of mass society we fail to be others to one another because we are undiffer-entiated parts of a mass. We are others to one another in the bonds of friendship, and the same holds for solidarity. We come to recognize the concrete otherness of previously unidentified others and they come to recognize our concrete otherness.

rorty insists that the similarities and dissimilarities one group of people finds relevant about another are historically and culturally contingent. the Danes recognized Jewish Danes as fellow Danes; the belgians did not recognize bel-gian Jews as fellow belgians. rorty does not think this historical and cultural contingency means that we cannot advocate for seeking more similarities than differences. rather, he sees historical progress as a capacity of the imagination to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation.27 Just as Danes can come to recognize some others as fellow Danes, we can surely come to recognize strange people as fellow sufferers.28 to be sure, rorty offers no ahistorical principle to which we might appeal in order to help us find pain and humiliation more relevant than tribe, religion, race, and the like. Instead, he links this sense of solidarity to a growing

25. Ibid., 189.26. Gadamer, Freundschaft und Solidaritt, 64.27. rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 192.28. Ibid., xvi.

georgia warnke12self-doubt among inhabitants of . . . democratic statesdoubt about their own sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of others, doubt that present institutional arrangements are adequate to deal with this pain and humiliation, curiosity about possible alternatives.29

Gadamer also attaches solidarity to contingent circumstances and historical needs. Nevertheless, in a second divergence from rorty, he thinks that solidari-ties need to be discovered rather than created. on the one hand, Gadamer thinks that modern political organizations impede solidarity to the extent that they emphasize matters on which citizens disagree. on the other hand, he claims that the real task of these organizations is to disclose the solidarities that already exist. that is, in solidarity we not only disclose one another to one another; we also disclose what we are already are to one another. We are already neighbors, fellow Danes, people concerned with environmental peril. Gadamer also thinks that soli-darity, or what he also calls authentic solidarity, must be conscious. If Danes could unreflectively protect the Jews of their communities, the solidarity in which Gadamer is interested is one that must consciously rediscover those communities, digging beneath anonymity and putting faces back on neighbors. Given the con-scious nature of this sort of solidarity, Gadamer further insists that it can impose on us. as an example, he uses the obligations and sacrifices solidarity imposed on the Greeks during the Persian wars and notes how archeological remnants depict the awfulness of the partings between fathers and sons. He also refers us to the discipline of the party that is difficult to maintain in many instances of political life, such as if one is of a completely different opinion from the majority of ones party. but this is almost the principle of democracy, he continues, that within certain limits . . . communal action . . . remains possible.30

thus, whereas rorty links solidarity to the recognition of similarities and advocates a future of expanding solidarities based on imaginatively seeking out additional similarities, Gadamer links solidarity to the recognition of distinct oth-ers whose distinctness for us has always been there but has been obscured by the conditions of modern mass society. Gadamer thinks we need consciously to dis-close for one another these communities of solidarity to which we already belong. but, because we need not restrict solidarity to those who are like us or extend it by way of locating additional similarities or similarities with additional groups, we can always discover additional circumstances, similar to environmental dan-ger, in which we find that we are already at home with others in seeing the need for collective efforts. Furthermore, because such solidarities do not need to be created but only discovered, they simply continue the project of self-knowledge begun in friendship. because we trust our friends and their loyalty to us, we can reveal ourselves to them and learn from how they understand us; we also reveal ourselves to one another in solidarity, and we recover a sense of community in which we can once again grant to the other his or her distinct otherness. Despite the sacrifices that solidarity brings with it, Gadamer suggests that, as in friend-ship, these impositions have a point: they remind us that we are bound to others whose otherness we must grant if we want to disclose or to understand ourselves.

29. Ibid., 198.30. Gadamer, Freundschaft und Solidaritt, 64.

Solidarity and tradition in GadamerS HermeneuticS 13the important features of Gadamers politics of solidarity are thus its

emphasis on community, difference, and reciprocal understanding. yet these features do not mark a radical split with either the hermeneutics of Truth and Method or its attention to tradition. Truth and Methods description of I-thou relations, for example, already emphasizes community, otherness, and recipro-cal understanding. to be sure, as early as 1975 Gadamer criticized an I-thou terminology for beginning from the subjective position of the I as opposed to an intersubjective position involving others who are others to one another.31 at the same time, Truth and Methods exploration of I-thou relations indicates the place that community and difference already have in his hermeneutics as conditions of understanding and insight.

Gadamer situates I-thou relations along three levels of moral adequacy. on the first and lowest, the I regards the other simply as an object that either furthers or impedes the Is plans. the I conceives of itself as independent and of its plans as wholly unaffected by the other or others. Furthermore, the I reduces the other to just those characteristics that have the potential to affect its actions. the other is not a real other to the I at all but merely an object to be managed and controlled. on the second moral level, the I regards the thou as a person rather than a set of behaviors. Nevertheless, the thou has no separate identity from the I. rather, the I claims an empathetic understanding of the thou and even to know the thou bet-ter than the thou knows itself. the thou is understood, Gadamer says, but this means it is co-opted and pre-empted reflectively from the standpoint of the other person.32 once again, the other disappears into the I. to be sure, the I may no longer subject the thou to prediction and control; nevertheless, it simply stands in for it.

although friendship and solidarity are often aligned with the kind of empathet-ic identification that Gadamer attributes to the second I-thou relation, his account of them belongs more appropriately to the third level of I-thou relations. on this level the other remains other. on the one hand, I and thou are in a relationship with each other; on the other hand, the thou is neither an object to be manipu-lated nor simply the I. Instead, Gadamer suggests that such I-thou relations are dialogic. We grant the otherness of the thou in being interested in what he or she has to say and in acknowledging that what he or she has to say can differ both from what we think we already know and what we anticipate the other to believe. like friendship and solidarity, then, genuine I-thou relations develop knowledge. because we acknowledge that what the other says in dialogue with us is neither verbal behavior to be coded and quantified nor necessarily what we ourselves already believe, we can learn from it. Significantly, Gadamer thinks the same tension between relationship and otherness holds for hermeneutics in general as a condition of the understanding it involves: Hermeneutic work is based on a polarity of familiarity and strangeness. . . . Here too there is a tension. It is in the play between traditionary texts strangeness and familiarity to us, between being

31. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity, Subject and Person, in Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000), 282.

32. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 359.

georgia warnke14a historically intended, distanciated object and belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between.33

of course, to claim that some part of Truth and Method emphasizes the impor-tance to insight and understanding of both relation and otherness is not to show that its specific view of tradition emphasizes the same importance. In fact, in referring to the texts position midway between being a historically intended, distanciated object and belonging to a tradition Gadamer seems to identify tradition only with belonging. He also writes of tradition, all self-knowledge arises from what is historically pre-given, what with Hegel we call substance because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both sketches out and limits every possibility for understanding any tradition whatsoever in its historical alterity.34 Here belonging to a tradition seems to impose a limit and to curtail the recognition of difference or alterity. Hence, once again, it seems to represent only the pole of belonging rather than also the pole of differentiation. Nevertheless, in what follows I want to show that Gadamers account of tradition encompasses both belonging and difference and that, because it does, it contrib-utes to insight and understanding. It follows, I shall argue, that tradition does not block critical reflection but is rather bound up with it. although Truth and Method offers many starting points for this argument, I begin here by exploring its vision of tradition as an ongoing fusion of horizons.

traDItIoN

In Truth and Method Gadamer defines a horizon as the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.35 Horizons define the vistas available to us from particular spatial and temporal positions. on the one hand, our horizons are always limited; we cannot see everything from the particular time and space we occupy. on the other hand, the alternative to a horizon is the absence of any view at all. Horizons occlude what is outside their frameworks, but they also pick out and illuminate what is inside them. they determine foregrounds and backgrounds both spatially and temporally, and they set each element in their range in relation to the others.

of course, we are not bound to any particular spatial horizon. If the one we possess at any given time restricts our view we can always move in order to get a better or different view. We can move closer to take a more detailed look at what we are trying to see, and we can thereby correct some of our previous misper-ceptions; we can also move farther away to take in a wider and more expansive view. In addition, moving in space allows us to reconfigure the relative positions of foreground and background and reset what has more or less prominence in our visual field. In this way, we can discover the limitations of what we previously were able to see and expand our understanding of that which we are investigating. the same does not hold for temporal horizons, however. We cannot move in time the way we can move in space, and we therefore cannot abandon our current tem-

33. Ibid., 295. (emphasis in original.)34. Ibid., 302. (translation altered.)35. Ibid.

Solidarity and tradition in GadamerS HermeneuticS 15poral horizon to obtain a closer, more contemporaneous understanding of a given event or action. Nor can we zoom out from our temporal horizon into the future to obtain a longer, more comprehensive view within which to place past or present events. our temporal horizons are rather situated in a particular historical time and are dependent on that time for what they can reveal. Unlike spatial horizons, then, they appear to be closed without possibilities for extension or correction.

Nevertheless Gadamer suggests that focusing only on the limitations of our temporal horizons overlooks precisely the sort of sight and insight that they make possible. Here his view in part echoes William Faulkners claim: the past is never dead. Its not even past.36 In Gadamers terms, this claim points to the way the past already extends into the world in which we find ourselves. We live in its results as the product of its actions and events and of their ongoing conse-quences. terence Hawkess claims about Shakespeares Hamlet make this point as well. In his view, the play sets the range of political and moral stances we think it is possible to adopt; determines the modes and types of relationship we find thinkable; and establishes our ideas of how men and women, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, uncles and nephews, sons and daughters ought respectively to behave and interact.37 the horizon of the past is not closed but rather fuses with the horizon of the present. Furthermore, were we able to undo this fusion, we might release ourselves from our historical place and time, but we would also forego the framework for what we are trying to understand that it makes it possible to understand it at all. Not only would Shakespeare fail to help orient us to our possible stances, relationship modes, and behaviors; noth-ing would help orient us and we would therefore forfeit both what Hawkes calls large categories of modern thought38 and any way of conceiving our present.

Faulkners claim also means more for Gadamer, however: not only that the past fuses with the present but also that the present fuses with and changes the past. the thirty years War is the thirty years War only after it ends; the start of an economic recovery is a pronouncement possible only in retrospect. the same holds for the texts we read. they become part of an ongoing history that connects their meaning to that of texts that had not yet been written when they first appeared, to that of criticisms that not yet been made and to the meaning of actions and events that had not yet occurred. as marjorie Garber writes of The Merchant of Venice, a play that began its stage career with a comic Shylock in a false nose has become transmuted, over the centuries and especially after the Holocaust, into a drama of pathos, loss and mutual incomprehension.39 this extension of the present into the past means that what we accept as our past has always already been modified by the present it constructs. moreover, it means that a counterfactual capacity to see the past as it happened diminishes rather than increases our understanding. It gives up on understanding Hamlets Freud-ian themes, for example, on thinking with tom Stoppard about rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and on wondering with Garber about The Merchant of Venice:

36. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New york: Vintage books, 1975), 80.37. terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (New york: routledge, 1992), 4.38. Ibid., 4.39. marjorie Garber, Shakespeare after All (New york: anchor books, 2005), 282.

georgia warnke16Is The Merchant of Venice perhaps an ironic glimpse at christian hypocrisy, rather than an endorsement of christian behavior? are Salerio and Solanio, who mock and tease Shylock for his manner of speech, ideal citizens of a christian Venice? Is antonios willingness to spit upon Shylocks traditional costume, his Jewish gabardine, something that should give the audience pause? Is Portia a heroine or a spoiled darling, a bossy self-regarding manipulator who treats Shylock with unwarranted cruelty, despite her fine words about the quality of mercy? ambivalence is everywhere, at least to a modern audience.40

to be temporally situated means both that the past furthers our inquiries into and reflections on the present and that the present furthers our inquiries into and reflections on the past.

traditions for Gadamer are just this reciprocal construction of and insight into the present by the past and of the past by the present. We live in the pregiven as our orientation to our world. Nevertheless, this pregiven is already suffused with the history of different understandings of it. tradition does not represent the hold of a cemented past over us. or, rather, to the extent that the past does have a hold on us it is a past already modified by the knowledge consecutive presents have brought to it. to this extent, the relationship between past and present mirrors the relationship between friends and between those in solidarity with one another. Just as friends and those in solidarity with one another reveal one another to one another, so too do past and present. the past helps structure the way we under-stand the present and hence what we hand down to future generations as the past. likewise, the present brings particular concerns and interests to the study of the past and thereby discloses aspects of it that it could not see.

the same horizonal knowledge structures our relations to other traditions. our understanding of other forms of practical knowledge, other ways of doing things, other concepts, and other conceptual relations reflects the particular horizons our tradition offers us. likewise, the understanding others have of our traditions reflects the horizon of their own. We are each at home in our traditions. yet the horizons each establishes are not merely limitations on what either tradition can understand of itself or the other. Instead, the vistas of each allow for reciprocal forms of insight, or to use the term Gadamer uses for friendships, for reciprocal co-perception. because of the orientation their traditions offer them, others can illuminate aspects of our practices and history that we have not recognized just as, because of the orientation our traditions offer us, we can highlight features in their texts, practices, and history that they have not seen. traditions ask questions of one another and by doing so they help one another reflect on themselves in the same way that Gadamer attributes to the capacity of past and present, to friends and to those in solidarity with one another. because we are each other to the other and because of the different ways others who remain others understand each other, we each learn to understand ourselves differently as well. to the extent that these different ways affect our self-conceptions, they also affect our actions and become part of the history we hand down to future generations. Similarly, what we understand, given our horizons, of their practices and history reflects back on their self-conceptions and becomes part of their history and tradition. In short, traditions are fusions of horizons both vertically, as fusions of past and present,

40. Ibid., 303.

Solidarity and tradition in GadamerS HermeneuticS 17and horizontally, as fusions of distinct traditions. more important, the fusion pro-ceeds through the insights attributable to reciprocal co-perception.

of course, it is not yet clear that the co-perception Gadamer ascribes to tradi-tions rises to the level of critical reflection. the past may help us understand the present, but can the pasts extension into the present not also serve to entrench certain ways of conceiving of things? How, given the influence of Hamlet on the way we conceive our present, might we rethink our ideas of how men and women, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, uncles and nephews, sons and daughters ought respectively to behave and interact? to take a different sort of example, does the force of tradition not make it difficult for americans to under-stand abortion as anything other than the taking of a life? Pro-life and pro-choice advocates might differ on the question of whether abortion can ever constitute a justified form of killing, but they seem to agree that it is killing. yet, suppose we need not understand it this way? Does the entrenchment of the idea that abortion is the taking of a life not preclude other ways of conceiving of it? Similar ques-tions arise with regard to the extension of the present into the past. the present may be crucial to our understanding of the past but can we not opportunistically bend the past to fit our present purposes? If Nietzsche becomes an ex post facto standard bearer for the Nazis, is this result one we ought to praise as exhibiting the self-knowledge of traditions? Nor is the interplay between cultural traditions always salutary. think of the way traditional dances and art forms change under the onslaught of tourism and commercial appropriations as well as under the export of culture as an exotic commodity. traditions may embody insight of a certain kind. Nevertheless, it is not clear that this kind of insight can dampen the objection raised by Gadamers critics that traditions also foreclose an examina-tion of the quality of those insights. How do we know when the influence of the past on the present forecloses opportunities for insight into the present or when the influence of present concerns distorts the meaning of the past, or, finally, when who we are ensures that we fail to understand the other?

as a response to these questions, Gadamer suggests another: what is the alter-native to the reciprocal insights offered in and by traditions? because we are temporal beings, we cannot distance ourselves from the pregiven that constructs us and that we also retroactively construct. We are inevitably entwined with the history to which we belong. as a consequence, achieving a critical perspective on that history must occur within it, with those who live it with us but whose saving grace for us is that they are also different from us. In other words, if we are to open rather than foreclose opportunities for insight, we must be sensitive to the otherness of the other and to his or her possibility of telling us something different from what we already think we know. Gadamer conceives of this sen-sitivity as a precondition for an interest in understanding in the first place. that is, if we are interested in understanding texts, actions, events, and so on at all, it is because we think we can learn from them. and to the extent that we think we can learn from them, we anticipate that what they have to say will differ from what we already believe. open to the possibility that there are alternatives to our own assumptions, we can acknowledge the Shakespearian character of our ideas of how men and women, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, uncles

georgia warnke18and nephews, sons and daughters ought respectively to behave and interact. moreover, we can ask how these ideas stack up against those others. likewise, if the equation of abortion with taking a life is entrenched in the current american debate, sensitivity to what we might learn from aspects of both our own history and that of other cultures can help us locate different templates. the same holds for the worry that indigenous art forms can appear to us only as commodities for consumption. Here sensitivity to otherness has a practical punch. How, we might ask, must we change so that we are able to see these art forms differently?

to be sure, combating possible foreclosures to insight with the demand that we be sensitive to otherness from the start seems less an answer to the question tradi-tions raise than the precursor to another question. If our interest in understanding texts, actions, events, and so on stems from the belief that we can learn from them, why suppose we necessarily have this interest? Why should we think we need or ought to learn from others? In one of his essays on friendship, Gadamer cites the Delphic oracle that was once supposed to provide the Greeks with knowledge. the Delphic injunction, know thyself, he writes, belongs to the deepest consciousness of a human being that he needs to know about himself, that he is no god.41 In connection with friendship, Gadamer uses this injunction to contrast a gods self-sufficiency to our own lack of it. Gods need no friends because they already possess full self-knowledge, and they do not need the other or others to save them from illusions. the same does not hold for us. We need friends at least in part because they understand us and help us to understand our-selves in a way we could not accomplish without them. the Delphic injunction also applies to the self-knowledge of traditions. Here the reminder that we are no gods is a reminder that the traditions to which we belong lack self-sufficiency. they need others and need to explore the specific contours of otherness because they are prey to illusions and cannot vet their beliefs and prejudices entirely on their own.

of course, the reminder that we need others to vet our own beliefs still assumes that we want to vet our own beliefs and that we already have an interest in critical reflection. consequently, the argument thus far remains inconclusive: We look to others of whose possible difference from us we are aware in order to gain a perspective on ourselves. Still, what ensures that we seek a perspective on our-selves? In relation to traditions, the Delphic injunction to know oneself and to know that one is no god has an additional meaning. It means not only that we need others but also that we cannot know the future. We are finite beings, part of a temporal continuum that begins before us and goes on after us. our participa-tion in this continuum may make knowledge possible insofar as past and present mutually interpret each other. Still, our finitude means that that our understand-ing and self-understanding will always be incomplete, that the future will always have the potential to change or discard what we think we know. For Gadamer, it is therefore the worst sort of hubris to presume that our insights need not be held only tentatively. they not only depend upon particular pasts and on the concerns of particular presents; they are also circumscribed with regard to the future so

41. Gadamer, Friendship and Self-knowledge, 137.

Solidarity and tradition in GadamerS HermeneuticS 19that whatever we understand is always open to the possibility of being understood differently.

In this regard, Gadamer reverses the relation between experience and knowl-edge peculiar to the experimental sciences. For these sciences, the sort of experi-ence that contributes to the growth of knowledge is the sort that can be repeated. that is, the validity of a scientific claim depends upon the continuing success of other experimenters in reproducing the results that justify it. For Gadamer, how-ever, a more fundamental relation between knowledge and experience is wholly negative. We have an experience in ordinary parlance when what happens is different and unexpected, when our anticipations are not fulfilled or when some-thing other than what we expected occurs. In this case what we assumed would transpire does not and what we thought we knew turns out not to be the case. to be experienced is not only to know how to proceed or what to do. It is also to know that any of ones practices or assumptions may need to be revised in light of new experience. as Truth and Method puts this point, the experienced person proves to be . . . radically undogmatic. . . . the dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself.42 experience is already the experience of otherness that Gadamer later writes into friendship, solidarity, and the self-knowledge they make possible. more to the point, experience asks us to hold our views modestly, tentatively, and with openness to the possibility of refutation by what comes next. Scientific results are valid only to the extent that they are con-firmed; yet the validity of all our ideas requires constant testing. We hold them up against others and we acknowledge that they may not be adequate in the future.

conceived of in relation to the temporality of our horizons, traditions thus make three contributions to knowledge: they contain an understanding of events and actions even the partial completion and meaning of which are available only to the present; they allow for our orientation toward present institutions and activities as well as our insights into their production; and they undermine dog-matism insofar as they accede to the consequences of possessing a particular past and of not knowing the future. together these forms of knowledge comprise a form of critical reflection, one that depends upon an awareness of its limitations and for this reason holds itself continually open to correction and revision in its encounter with the other. traditions may be, in Wellmers words, the locus of factual untruth and continued force. yet, they reap the full consequences of this ignorance only when they do not know themselves, as it were, and forget that they are part of history. the extent to which traditions embody critical reflec-tion, however, is the extent to which they are prepared for things being other from what they assumed, the extent, in other words, to which they are humble and open to both the other and the possibility that the future may always require them to change.

Truth and Method goes further. a critical reflection humbled by the antici-pation of difference in the form of the other and the future is not only open to change but also eager to discover when it may be necessary. Indeed, to the extent

42. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 359.

georgia warnke20that we know that we are tradition-bound, we already possess the curiosity rorty attributes to Western liberal self-doubt. For Gadamer this self-doubt is less a function of our present institutional arrangements, as it is for rorty, than it is the better part of wisdom. Gadamer thus compares the knowledge of traditions to Socrates contention that if he knew more than others, it was because he knew that he did not know. as in Socrates case, a critical reflection that knows that it does not know issues in the questioning of others in the urge to find out. once again, belongingness and otherness go hand in hand: the finitude that characteriz-es our participation in historical traditions also leads us to value the other. mean-while the future, as the forever other, cautions humility for all our conclusions.

coNclUSIoN

the idea of solidarity enjoys greater cachet in contemporary ethical and political thinking than does that of tradition. the contribution of Gadamers own politics of solidarity is to detach it from the requirement that those in solidarity with one another possess some affinity to or identity with one another. rather, communi-ties of solidarity appropriately encompass the appreciation of difference and con-crete otherness. at the same time the relation between community and difference that solidarity establishes is one that Truth and Method already attributes to tradi-tion. moreover, as is the case for solidarity, the relation is crucial to understand-ing and insight. Friendship and solidarities disclose both self and other to each other, and the same holds for traditions. In each case, in fact, it is with respect to the other that we understand and can critically reflect on ourselves.

yet in comparison with his analysis of tradition, Gadamers account of solidar-ity is actually somewhat thin. In the first place, it has a defensive slant that the analysis of tradition with its emphasis on openness and fusion lacks. In remarking on the solidarity of the Greeks against the Persians, Gadamer claims, europe is europe because this kind of true, lived solidarity of Greek life set its distinc-tive ways against the expansionist orient.43 this example is of a piece with Gadamers other examples. Faced with extermination, whether by the Persians, allied bombing, or the devastation of the earth, we can pull together to defend some part of our life together. the same holds for the extermination of our concrete otherness that mass societies demand. Just as the Greeks enlisted their solidarity in defense against the Persians, in communities of solidarity we release one another from the reciprocal strangeness44 in which mass societies place us and we rediscover the ties that bind us. at the same time, it is not clear how this defensive vision constitutes an agenda of political and ethical aspirations for the future.45 Indeed, although caputo, for one, sees a reactionary gesture46 in Gadamers account of tradition, this description might attach more appropri-

43. Gadamer, Freundschaft und Solidaritt, 61.44. Ibid., 57.45. lawn, Gadamer: A Guide for the Perplexed, 106.46. John D. caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic

Project (bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5.

Solidarity and tradition in GadamerS HermeneuticS 21ately to his politics of solidarity. traditions include the potential for expansion whereas solidarities react to external forces.

this reactive defensiveness also raises the question of whether solidarities are suited to moving forward on our aspirations for the future. Gadamer says that the task of modern political organizations is to help disclose our various solidari-ties, to help find those elements of modern mass societies that bind anonymous strangers together and reveal them to one another in their particularity. yet as the war between the Greeks and the Persians suggests, solidarities also create intransigent enemies. rather than displaying the openness to otherness that Gadamer ascribes to traditions, communities of solidarity can be dogmatic and stubborn. Indeed, Gadamer seems to embrace just these qualities in his equation of solidarity with the discipline of the party. resolving important questions of peace and justice across nations and of social, political, and economic equality within them arguably requires discussion across communities, discourse about different interests and need-interpretations as well as the openness to rethinking ones position in communication with others with whom one is not in solidarity. Truth and Method takes such communication and dialogue seriously as measures of our recognition that others are others who can surprise and teach us. Inasmuch as we acknowledge that they may have different views on that which we are trying to understand, we try out our understandings of meaning with them and listen to what they say. to the extent that an emphasis on solidarity demands the discipline of the party, however, it moves against this very capacity to learn from one another that Truth and Method accentuates.

Gadamers politics of solidarity raises at least one final worry. For, despite its attention to matters of reciprocal co-perception and insight, it also works against them. In examining friendship as at least a partial model for solidarity, Gadamer emphasizes the capacity of our friends to mirror our better selves back to us, a mirroring he sees as even more productive and powerful than the internal stir-rings of conscience. yet surely this aspect of friendship has two sides. on the one hand, we can define our true friends as those who bring out the best in us. they allow us insight into our better selves and because of their respect for those better selves influence us to act as them. on the other hand, in disclosing to us our potential for virtue our friends can blind us to our potential for vice. In com-menting on friendship, Gadamer writes, It is almost valid to say with Droysen: So must you be, for so I love you.47 yet this comment is ambiguous. It can mean both that you ought to try to be as virtuous as I love you for being and also that whatever you are I will take for virtue. Here our life together and our distinct otherness seem to pull apart. although our friends otherness allows him or her to reflect our virtues back to us, our closeness to our friend makes it difficult for him or her to reflect productively or dispassionately on or with us.

to the extent that friendship provides a model for solidarity it partakes in this same tension: those with whom we are in solidarity can both serve as our better selves and endorse whatever self we have. Indeed, Gadamer sometimes seems to equate it definitively with the latter meaning. He says that ones own city always

47. Gadamer, Freundschaft und Solidaritt, 62.

georgia warnke22remains the most beautiful to one and continues, We all know that home is something immemorialsomething, from where we cannot say, why it thus stirs the soul and why it thus binds human beings. but that home and origin represent a bond, a kind of solidarity of a genuine kind does not require that one first clarify ones solidarity. one is it and does not want to know at all what is actually in play there.48 Nonetheless, to the extent that one does not want to know what is actually in play there, this account of solidarity minimizes the capacity for insight that Gadamer also attributes to it and limits itself to reflecting affects that remain unexplored.

yet while Gadamers politics of solidarity emerges primarily as a reaction to life-threatening actions and circumstances, while it requires a discipline that can strengthen dogmatic enclaves, and while it represents ties that can resist insight or critical reflection, traditions are very different. they persist as the orienting ground of insight and action; they are perpetually revised and revisable as history continues; they permit a critical self-knowledge keyed to recognizing their lack of self-sufficiency and finitude; and they encourage a curiosity to understand in dif-ferent ways. Gadamers account of tradition may not be without problems, espe-cially perhaps in the extent of its appreciation for the others capacity for insights. the move to solidarity is not the solution, however. We live in a world of deadly and dogmatic extremism, much of it founded on insular solidarities. In contrast, a form of critical reflection that rests on exposure to other traditions that remain other, on the mutual education of past and present, on modesty in the face of the future, and on an openness to change is, at the very least, worth our consideration.

University of California, Riverside

48. Ibid., 60.