Self and Other: Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Difference

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Volume 5 Issue 2 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Article 9 January 1993 Self and Other: Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Difference Fred Dallmayr Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh Part of the History Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Fred Dallmayr, Self and Other: Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Difference, 5 Yale J.L. & Human. (1993). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol5/iss2/9 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities by an authorized editor of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . Dallmayr: Self and Other Self and Other: Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Difference Fred Dalmayr Philosophy's relation to the world of lived experience (the life-world) is complex and controverted. In traditional vocabulary, the issue is whether philosophy's habitat resides inside or outside the Platonic cave. The issue has not come to rest in our time. While "analytic" philosophers prefer to externalize or distance their targets of analysis, Continental thinkers (at least since Heidegger) refuse the comforts of this spectatorial stance. Like sensitive seismographs, European thinkers register the subterranean tremors which in our time affect the (once solid) underpinnings of Western culture: the pillars of subjectivity, of the cogito, and of rationality seen as a means of mastery over nature. What emerges from these seismographic soundings is an experience of dislocation or ontological decentering, blurring the boundaries between subject and object, between self and other, and between humans and nature (the former res extensa). As it happens, this experiential tremor is accompanied in our time by a broader geopolitical dislocation: the displacement of Europe from center stage and her insertion into a global welter of competing cultures and countercultures. To be sure, Europe (and the West in general) still forcefully asserts its hegemony; but the self-assurance of this hegemonic position has been irremediably lost or at least placed in jeopardy. The present pages seek to explore this double move of dislocation by attending to one particularly prominent and reliable seismograph: the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Born in 1900, Gadamer has been an astute participant and reflective witness (not just a spectator) throughout the entire course of our troubled century. The adopted focus of these pages can readily be further justified. Since his early writings on dialogical politics-that is, a politics not dominated by a totalizing ideology--Gadamer's reflections have continuously concentrated on the porous relations between self and other, between reader and text, and between speaker and language; to this extent, his work has served as a beacon for several generations of students now, illuminating the dimly lit landscape of refracted identities and of a selfhood infected with otherness. At the same time, his work resonates deeply with larger Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 1993 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 5, Iss. 2 [1993], Art. 9 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 5: 507 global concerns. As the foremost contemporary representative of European humanism, Gadamer has persistently reflected and commented on the significance of European culture, alerting us both to its intrinsic grandeur and to its tragedy or possible limitations. Thus, I want to argue, Gadamerian hermeneutics is not just a parochial ingredient of Continental thought, but an important building stone in the emerging global city and in a dialogically construed cultural ecumenicism. 1 In this essay I shall proceed from the issue of self-other relations to broader cultural concerns and especially to the topic of cross-cultural dialogue. The opening section takes as its guide a short book titled Wer bin Ich und wer bist Du? [Who am I and Who are You?], which contains Gadamer's comments on the poetry of Paul Celan and, in this connection, probes the interpenetration of self and other and of identity and difference. The discussion of Celan is supported and fleshed out in the first section by references to some of Gadamer's responses to Derrida, having to do chiefly with the role of dialogue and the "good will" in dialogue. The second section shifts attention to the larger cultural arena, taking as its reference point one of Gadamer's more (unjustly) neglected writings, The Legacy of Europe [Das Erbe Europas]. In a concluding section, I will bring out Gadamer's relevance in the ongoing process of hegemonic Westernization and especially for the alternative project of an interactive dialogue-perhaps an agonistic dialogue-among competing cultures. I Gadamer's work has always revolved around the issue of self-other relations. During the waning years of the Weimar Republic and in the face of fascist totalitarianism, the young Gadamer sketched the contours of a dialogically interactive republic-an image heavily indebted to the legacy of Platonic dialogues (though minus any resort to a "guardian class" possessed of ultimate wisdom). Steering clear both of utilitarian interest aggregation and utopian holism, dialogue in this context was the medium of a community constantly in the process of formation, a process in which both the sense of public life and the selfhood or identity of participants are persistently subject to renegotiation. 2 This view of dialogue was deepened and philosophically corroborated in the postwar years as a result of Gadamer's intensified turn to language and hermeneutical understanding, a turn which at least in part was an outgrowth of 1. Regarding global ecumenicism, compare, for example, Hans Kiing, Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic (New York: Crossroad, 1991); and Paul Tillich, Christianityand the Encounter of the World Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). 2. For a perceptive discussion of Gadamer's early writings on dialogical politics, see Robert R. Sullivan, Political Hermeneutics: The Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989). https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol5/iss2/9 2 1993] Dallmayr: Self and Other Dallmayr his prolonged encounter with Heidegger. A magisterial apex of his mature thinking, Truth and Method (of 1960) presented dialogue as the connecting link between reader and text, between present and past, and between indigenous and alien culture. Still, notwithstanding their rich insights and achievements, Gadamer's writings up to this point continued to be attached to a certain kind of idealism: that is, an outlook where difference was attenuated in favor of a nearly preestablished harmony between self and other and of an eventual "fusion (...truncated)