Robert R. Sullivan Political Hermeneutics the Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer 1989

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'l'ho Pennsylvania State University PressUniversity Park and London

PoliticalHermeneutics

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Robert R. Sullivan

Quotations from Hans-Georg Gadamer's Dialogue and Dialec'úic, trans. Christopher Smith, reprinted with permission ofYale University Press, O 1980 Yale University Press.

Quotations from Hans-Georg Gadamer's Gessamelte Werke,vol. 5, reprinted with permission of J. C. B. Mohr (PaulSiebeck), Tübingen, Copyright O 1985 J. C. B. Mohr (PaulSiebeck).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sullivan, Robert R.Political hermeneutics.

Includes index.1. Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1900-

-Contributions in political science.

2. Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1900- -Contributions

in hermeneutics.I. Title.

JC263.G35S86 1989 320.5 88-43435ISBN 0-27r-00670-6

Copyright O 1989 The Pennsylvania State UniversityAll righte reeerved

Printed in the United States of Amorica

To the Memory of My Father

Francis T. Sullíuan1911-1983

Contents

lDrof'ace

I lntroduction to the Early Gadamer

2 On the Philological Background of Gadamer'sl)arly Writings

il 'l'he Initial Challenge to Altertumswissenschaft4 'l'he Gestalt of Platonic Argumentll h)thics, Phronesis, and the Idea of the Good

ll |toots, Education, and the State

7 'l'hr¡ Early Thinking of Gadamer

Notos

Itrdox

lx1

L7

53

87

119

r37165

193

204

Preface

'[his book was written over several years and has incurred forthe author numerous debts. Hans-Georg Gadamer was alwaysgenerous with his time and kind in his treatment of initiallytentative interpretations. He is certainly one of the finest con-versationalists of our time, and I am in his debt for that ex-perience. I am also grateful to Thomas McCarthy of North-western University and Hans Aarsleffof Princeton Universityfbr getting me started and keeping me going on this project.'lwo summer gtants from the National Endowment for thel{umanities and equal number of City University of New YorkProfessional Staff Congress grants were also helpful and aremuch appreciated. For incisive critical commentary,I am verymuch in the debt of Richard Palmer of MacMurray Collegeund Fred Dallmayr of Notre Dame University.

For helpful criticism, friendly comments, or simply goodconversation related to the topics that structure this book, Iwould also like to thank Professors Ed Davenport and Hilail(iilden of the City University of New York and Professors

x Preface

Horst-Jürgen Gerigk and Imre Toth of the Universities ofHeidelberg and Regensburg, West Germany. I am also en-debted to Elaine Bert, my department secretary, for cheerfullyand efliciently doing numerous unseen tasks and to my insti-tution, John Jay College of the City University of New York,and the CUNY Graduate Center, for providing support ser-vices.

Mostly, however, I am in the debt of my wife, Karin. Not so

much because she kept the children quiet and did the typing,neither of which was especially the case, but because as anartist she understood philosophical hermeneutics in a waythat no academic intellectual in my experience ever has. She

did not have to conceptualize philosophical hermeneutics inorder to live it. Rather, she lived it on a daily basis in herart, thereby providing a source for my conceptualization.

Needless to say, the interpretation that knits the followingpages into a book is my own and should not be held againstany of the above-mentioned persons. Similarly, factual errors,which hopefully are few, are traceable to the author alone.

I would like to acknowledge and thank Yale UniversityPress for permission to quote fromDialogue and Dialectic andJ. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) for permission to quote exten-sively from volume 5 of Gadamer's Gesammelte Werke'

1

Introductionto the

Early Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer is a contemporary German philosopherbest known in Europe and the United States as the creator ofphilosophical hermeneutics, a direction of thought that raisesa skeptical voice about knowledge claims in the modern world.This admittedly dry description of philosophical hermeneuticscan easily be dramatized: lf humans are historically situatedbeings, as Martin Heidegger taught, then it follows that cer-tain knowledge of the human condition is neither possible nordesirable. As Gadamer puts it, our historical situatednessmandates that knowledge begin in something that becamedisreputable in the seventeenth-century scientific Enlighten-ment: our prejudices. To be sure, responsibility to our ownHelves and to each other also mandates that we not act on prej-udices before we rigorously test and establish them as judg-monts. Yet even theee outcomes, much as we prize them,. are

2 PoliticalHermeneutics

not valid for all eternity. They are not certain knowledge.With the passage of time-that is to say, with the unfolding ofour historical situatedness-every judgment once again be-comes a prejudgment, or prejudice, and so the aging processinvariably obligates our species to return to its humble non-epistemological origins. This argument, presented here inthumbnail sketch, is a direct challenge to the modern Euro-pean Enlightenment.

Gadamer's major book is Truth and Method, first publishedin the German original in 1960, when the author was sixtyyears of age.t It laid out the case for philosophical hermeneu-tics. Since then, and since the American edition in 1975, otherwritings have been published and translated. They functionmainly to elaborate the argument made tn Truth and Method.The work called Philosophical Hermeneutics is not a book inany consistent sense but is rather a collection of smaller, pre-viously published pieces that comment on one or another as-pect of the title's theme.z Dialogue and Dialectic is a collectionof Gadamerian writings, all dealing with Plato and Platonicthinking.3 Some of the pieces collected here are from Gada-mer's early career, but they are not treated as being distinctfrom the direction he carved out in his 1960 book. They arerather treated as illustrations of Gadamer's art, and hence arealready subject to a distorting interpretation.

Similarly, Hegel's Dialectic is a collection of small, for themost part recent writings on Hegel's thought, and Reason inthe Age of Science is yet another collection of recent and not sorecent writings.a In contrast, the work entitled The ldea of theGood in Plato and Aristotle is a long essay written by Gada-mer late in life, and Philosophical Apprenticeshlps is a mem-oir-autobiography rather than a philosophical treatise.s Thepoint, in brief, is that the Gadamer known to us in the UnitedStates has written only one real book, now translated intomore than a dozen foreign languages, and the other books arecompilations or marginal efforts dependent for their successon the reputation the author had already established for him-solf in hís mognutn opus.

Introduction to the Early Gadamer 3

Why then write a book on the early writings of Hans-GeorgGadamer? Will this not simply and inevitably be a commen-tary on the long gestation period of Truth and Method? Does

Gadamer have anything to say in his early writings that isother than a premature formulation of his 1960 argument?The answer is suggested by the sketch already given of Gada-mer's American reception history.6 By publishing Truth andMethod first and everything else thereafter, the makings of adistorted reception were created. And the distortion is notwithout significance for this volume: It creates one good rea-son for taking a hard look at Gadamer's early writings ontheir own terms. But first, let me establish what those earlywritings were.

Gadamer completed his doctoral dissertation, called DosWesen der Lust in den plntonischen Dialogen (The Essense ofDesire in Plato's Dialogues), in 1922.7 Five years later, inL927,he published his first journal article,s an academic piecedrawn from the research being done on his habilitation thesis.The habilitation is a German institution that might best be

described as a second and more elaborate doctoral disserta-tion, needed to qualify for the German professoriat. Gadamer'shabilitation thesis was called Platos dialektische Ethik (Pla-to's Dialectical Ethics), and it was completed in 1928 and pub-lished as a book in 1931.'gIt qualified Gadamer for the Ger-man professoriat, although he did not actually get the calluntil 1938. Meanwhile, in 1934, Gadamer published a long es-

,ray on Plato's problematic relation with the poets,lo and in1942 a somewhat shorter essay on Plato's eoncept of an educa-tional state.rr The latter piece, according to Gadamer, wagwritten in conjunction with the 1934 piece, although publi-cation was held off for several years.12 In between and alongl,he way, he also published a long list of short reviews and re-view articles, three or four of which dealt directly with Platoor writings on Plato by Gadamer's contemporaries.ls Oneof these reviews, called "Die neue Platoforschung" ("RecentPlnto Research"), is significant for this book.la Anotherunpubliahed work, called "Praktisches Wissen" ("Practical


Knowledge") is also important.ls These are Gadamer's earlywritings.

The collapse of Germany in 1945 drove a wedge into Gada-mer's academic life and served to set apart the period fromL922 to 1945 as an early period. The sustained thinking he didon Plato in this period was returned to later, but only afterGadamer had published, Truth and Method in 1960. The pe-

riod from the end of World War II to 1949 was one in whichGadamer worked as an academic administrator in Leipzig andthen, in Frankfurt, as professor and editor for Vittorio Klos-termann. In 1949, he was called to Heidelberg to replace thedeparting Karl Jaspers, and now once again he regained theleisure to think and write. It was during this period that he be-gan the work that would lead to Truth and Method. This spanof years, rather than what came before it, is the gestation pe-

riod of Gadamer's major work.Let me first lay to rest the most likely interpretation of Gad-

amer's early period. This is the very understandable common-sense notion that Gadamer was acting out the first stage of aGerman academic career. He was, in sum, amassing a collec-tion of related but still unsystematic publications which weremotivated by the desire to impress the academic establish-ment and induce one or another recruitment committee to putout the "call," as Germans say. This argument is undeniablycorrect: The young Gadamer was as intent as any of his con-temporaries in securing a tenured professoriat. Indeed, I getthe impression that he was more intent than most. He wrotethe book reviews that every young German academic wrote,traveled to conferences to see and be seen, cultivated relation-ships with the notables, took substitute positions, and scrapedalong on starvation wages. At the point where normal humanswould have given up, Gadamer persisted.

But conceding this rather prosaic claim about career ambi-tions does not exclude the possibility that there might in addi-tion be something more to Gadamer's early writings. In myopinion, there is a compelling internal logic to the writingsGadamer did in the twenty-year period from the early 1920s to


the early 1940s. It is an elusive and incomplete logic, and assuch it provides the materials for an interpretation that wouldcomplete it.

II

Though I will argue that the early Gadamer was well on theway toward establishing a model of discourse rationality thatwould stand over against the model of founded rationality fa-miliar to the natural sciences and, Geisteswissenschafte¿ (hu-man sciences) of Gadamer's youth, this does not seem to me tobe the most compelling thread of Gadamer's early writings.Rather, those writings gain in internal coherence when onegrasps them in terms of the classical model .of political think-ing, familiar to modern readers in Aristotle's analytical break-down of ethics and politics as interrelated microcosm andmacrocosm, also familiar in Plato's more nuanced and poeticreferences to large and, by implication, small signboards onthe road to an understanding ofjustice. Now if this claim is tobe redeemed, it has to be understood correctly. So Iet mesketch it out.

The logic of the argument runs as follows: In the German ac-ademic world at the end of the 1920s, it was fashionable to ac-cept the authenticity of Plato's letters and argue that Platohad taken up philosophy as an alternative way of engaging inpolitics. Gadamer subscribed to this way of looking at Plato,for it allowed him to deny the doctrine of objective ideas androot Plato's thinking in something more worldly, more situ-ated, and hence more accommodating to the notion of dis-course rationality that the early Gadamer was wont to de-velop. This move enabled Gadamer to cultivate the literaryfigure of the "Platonic Socrates" and use this figure to defendthe charge of intellectualism in Plato's moral philosophy.(iadamer simultaneously adopted the Aristotelian format of


doing political philosophy and constructed his interpretationof Plato on its basis. For Aristotle, politics is a continuation ofethics, meaning in sum that desirable modes of acting at theindividual level serve as reference points for the constructionof the polis. T ie polis is the ethical individual writ large, inother words. In its turn, the polls then serves as referencepoint for the construction of the individual soul. Character isscribed, as it were, according to the ethical norrns that bodyforth in the polis.

With this format in mind, Gadamer then wrote a book onPlato's ethics and followed it up with one unpublished paperand two major articles on Plato's treatment of the polis. Nowalthough "Plato's Educational State" is obviously a treatmentof politics, "Plato and the Poets" is not so clearly so. But it canbe interpreted as such. It plays a pivotal role on the way to thevision of the educational state insofar as it clears the way or,differently stated, cleans up the transition between Plato's di-alectical ethics and Plato's educational state. The early Gada-mer was adopting an anti-establishment position on Plato'sthinking and then reconstructing it in terms of the comfort-able categories of Aristotelian ethics and politics. In this man-ner, Gadamer was a budding political thinker.

Was all of this done by the early Gadamer with tongue incheek, in the Aesopian manner of someone who wanted towrite about the collapse of established ethics in Weimar Ger-many and the rise of raw, unadorned power in Nazi Germany?The idea is an attractive one, and iffor no other reason than torefute the suggestions that Gadamer might in some way havebeen accomplice to what was happening-through a relativ-istic philosophy, through an opportunistic careerism-I wouldlike to be able to demonstrate that this was indeed the case.But my argument would be no more than speculation on themotivations of a young German academic.lo I do not knowwhat personally motivated Gadamer to concentrate for fifteenyears on ethics and politics. I only know what is knowable,and that is the internal logic of a sequence of writings onPlato. If these shed light on the motivatione of their author,


they suggest that he was anything but a political authoritar-ian in his personal thinking.

Well and good, but for philosophical purists an interpreta-tion of the young Gadamer as budding political theorist maycome as a more perverse distortion than that provided by amore conventional version of his reception history. It calls pri-mary attention to a format that must at best be judged second-ary. If the later Gadamer had become a conscious politicaltheorist, then the line of political interpretation sketchedabove, even if far-fetched in the initial impression it makes,would be of real interest. Gadamer, however, did not become apolitical theorist but rather became the originator of a schoolof philosophy called philosophical hermeneutics. Whateverelse philosophical hermeneutics is taken as, it is not politicaltheory, and it has had limited impact on contemporary politi-cal theorists. Its main impact has been in philosophy itself,where it has given heart to the so-called continental school ofphilosophy against the analytical tradition, and in literarytheory and the philosophy ofscience. It has had and continuesto have growing influence in the art world. It has had someimpact on the philosophy of law, but it has still to the best ofmy knowledge not significantly influenced contemporary po-

litical philosophy.l? Hence there is reason for going back overthe same ground, viewing the political thinking as incidentaland at best implicit rather than primary. In this view, the cor-rect approach is to look for the budding hermeneutic philoso-pher in the early writings.

This of course can be done, and with some profit, but the out-come of the exercise is to reduce the early writings to a pre-view of coming attractions. Moreover, the danger is that ther:arly writings will be viewed from the perspective of the chiefconcepts of Truth and Method.If, for example, the term "aes-thetic consciousness" appears in an early writing, this will beinterpreted as significant solely because it is the first instanceof the use of a now-famous term. If, furthermore, the use of thetorm "aesthetic consciousness" was slightly different in 1934I'rom what it became in 1960, then so much the worse for the


1934 usage. It will be said that Gadamer developed from aclumsy early beginning to the mature stage of thinking hereached in 1960. The problem is of course immediately appar-ent. The past (Gadamer's past) is being interpreted in terms ofthe present. The interpretation is highly prejudiced, and onemay have to go through complicated mental gymnastics tosustain it.

Hence, the exegetical approach itself presents significantproblems. But it does have a singular advantage: The more Itried it out, the more I was persuaded to revert to the model ofseeing the early Gadamer as a political theorist. When I didthis, I produced a simpler and, for me, far more elegant inter-pretation. For example, the term "aesthetic consciousness," as

it is used in the 1934 piece called "Plato and the Poets," func-tions to describe the effect of beautiful poetic language on thethinking of the Athenian people. It distracts them from thereally significant problems and aspects of community andthereby paves the way for the disintegration of communalnorms. They thus lose their political edge. Functioning in thisway, the concept of "aesthetic consciousness" provides a main-stay of Gadamer's defense of Plato's exiling of the poets. Platois intent on reforming the polis, and this is a matter of re-turning language to a more prosaic form so that it might bet-ter come to grips with the Athenian everyday. Politics in thissense is a matter of reforming Ianguage and consciousness tomake them adequate to deal with the everyday problems ofreal life. Such a conception of politics really is a continuationof the dialectical ethics Gadamer sketched out in his habilita-tion thesis.

In other words, the discrepancy between the use of identicalterms in the early and the later Gadamer could be more effec-

tively explained by the notion that Gadamer was a politicalthinker (but perhaps not a "theorist") than by the notion thathe was merely the still underdeveloped creator of philosophi-cal hermeneutics. I had similar experiences with other con-cepts-for example, the term "play" as it is used in the habili-tation thesis and eleewhere. In Truth and Method, the term

Introduction to the Early Gadamer I

"play" is very nearly developed into a concept that is usable asa tool wherever one chooses to employ it-in aesthetics, phi-losophy, law, or the like. In the early writings, it is alwaysused more narrowly, which is to say that it is more situatedand hence less of a concept. It describes a nonterminologicalquality of language which is desirable insofar as it is rooted inthe need of the soul to sound itself out in its continuous effortto achieve Gestalt, or form. The notion of "play" in the earlywritings is virtually synonomous with the notion of "dialec-tical ethics" or an "educational state." It cannot easily be dis-engaged from its situatedness. So once again to the point:Gadamer's personal history, his life, as it were, was not simplya long preparation for the book he published in 1960. Therewas something different in the early Gadamer, and even if hehad not continued it, I did not want to lose it.

My political interpretation of the early Gadamer in thisbook is also spelled out in terms of an academic conflict. It of-fers an interesting parallel to my political interpretation andis worth summarizing here. Classical philology (Altphilologie)in the Germany of Gadamer's youth was in a crisis. Overagainst an entrenched tradition of defrning the field as a posi-tivistic science there was a growing movement to return thefield to its origins as an interpretive humanistic effort. Alter-tumswissenschaft, or the science of the ancient world, saw it-self as a technical science equipped with powerful methods forestablishing facts, which in turn would reveal patterns thatwould make sense of supposedly individual moments of gen-ius. Altertumswissenschaft proütced great works of scholar-ship, but it was increasingly ridiculed for forgetting just whyit was that anyone would want to know Greece. The point wasnot to explain Plato but rather to present him in such a waythat the full force of his thinking could live again. Schiller, theSchlegel brothers, and above all Hólderlin had understoodthis point one hundred and fifty years earlier, as had Nietzschefifty years after Hólderlin. The point was to make Plato a

model, or Gestalt, for young Germans. This direction laid theomphasis on interpretation at the cost of explanation, and the


conflict provided a model that could be carried over to politicalthinking.

The term politics, in its modern usage, invariably suggeststhe presence of the state, and the state, as we know it, is adistinctly modern phenomenon. It is a centralized amassing ofpower that extends its determining and rationalizing influ-ence into every aspect of everyday life. Its power is based onthe industrializing economy and is closely allied with thescientific establishment. Its premise is that if the conditions oflife can be controlled, then human action can be made pre-dictable and hence governable. Modern political theory is dis-tinguished as modern by its concern with the state. Either itwants to increase the power of the state or restrain an alreadyamassed power by the development of a set of restrictions onthe use of that power. In these respects, the early Gadamer isclearly not a moderz political theorist.

Classical political thinking, in contrast to modern, is con-cerned with thepo/is rather than the state. It is, consequently,not really concerned with power and its methods of managinga human nature standing over against the state. Surely thereare exceptional moments, such as in Thucydides'Melian dia-logue, where interest is focused on power, or the openingspeech of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic, but these are ex-ceptional moments, and in any case there is no question ofmanagement. The polis of classical political philosophizingrather stands "over against"-if that is the appropriate termhere-the soul, and truth rather than method is the means bywhich it gives character to, rather than manages, the soul. Forthese reasons, the rationality of classical politics is finallybased on language and conversation and not on any putativelogic of human nature.

Reflection on the writings of the early Gadamer finallyyields up an interpretation that does not fit any establishedcategory. The early Gadamer is a political thinker who is con-cerned with sketching in the outlines of the classical polis interms not always palatable to the modern person. He starts


at the microcosmic level of ethics, portrays a situation inwhich traditional values have failed, and attempts to constructa model of discourse rationality along the lines of whichnew ethical conclusions can be reached. Then he projects thismodel onto the macrocosm of the state. It gives him a criticalframework for his 1934 piece on Plato and the poets and a pre-scriptive framework for his L942 piece on Plato's educationalstate. Throughout there is a strong concentration oflanguage,which goes hand in hand with a discourse model of rationality.It is in this sense that the early Gadamer is to be understoodas a political thinker.

One last question brings me full circle to where I began: Ifthe early Gadamer is so different from the later Gadamer ofTruth and Method, then why did he change so greatly? My re-sponse may seem disingenuous but is not. I do not think thelater Gadamer is all that different from the early. There is no"break" in the thinking of the two men. The basic structureof the early thinking is retained and presented anew in ab-stract form in Truth and Method. A good deal of enrichment isadded, but this should come as no surprise. Implicitly, Truthand Method argues against founded rationality along muchthe same lines that the early Gadamer implicitly arguedagainst the modern power state in his writings on Plato. Ex-plicitly, Truth and Method argues a case, Gadamer's case, forthe alternative of discourse rationality, just as the early writ-ings argue the case for a dialectical ethics or apolis that restsfinally on a "philosophical conversation." Nearly everythingGadamer wrote in his early period may be construed as anargument against founded rationality, above all against theconcept of a rationality based on a nature that stands overagainst mind as "reality." In sum, against method, as thatterm emerged in the scientific revolution of the seventeenthcentury. His argument, construed positively, makes the casefor discourse rationality, by which I mean a mode of thinkingthat seeks and finds whatever anchorage it has in the agree-ment of others in conversation. In sum, discourse rationality is


a matter of speech and finally language; it is a matter of philo-sophical hermeneutics. I do not think there is a decisive breakin the basic structure of Gadamer's thinking'

But my claim and argument in this book is not about thelater Gadamer. It is rather about the early Gadamer, and it istime to see how that argument will unfold in this volume'

ilI

I am confident that in the Weimar period forms of discourserationality arose in all of the disciplines associated with thehuman sciences, but it is inappropriate in a book limited inscope by its focus on the writings of a philologian and philoso-pher to track them all. What is called for, it seems to me, is aclose look at the discipline from which the early Gadamer, theengaged philosopher, took his inspiration. This field is philol'ogy, specifically classical philolow (Altphilologie). Chapter 2will provide an extended look at the development of estab-lished academic cultures and subcultures within the disciplineof classical philology in Germany. This chapter grew out of apaper I gave at a National Endowment of the HumanitiesSeminar at Princeton University. It provided me with the op-portunity to deepen my background knowledge of the humansciences in nineteenth-century Germany. It sets the stage forthe writings of the early Gadamer by showing to what extentthe study of classical philology was dominated by notions offounded rationality, especially prevalent in the reception ofPlato.

Chapter 3 looks intensely at Gadamer's first publicationfor the reason that it involved him in a friendly conflict withWerner Jaeger, the then-reigning king of the classical philol-ogy establishment. Jaeger was an excellent philologist but leftBomething to be desired as a philosopher. This showed up inhig still well-known intellectual biography callod Aristotle.t'


At the core of Gadamer's quarrel with Jaeger is the attemptto show that a specific text of Aristotle was more a part ofthe oral tradition of discourse than the written tradition ofacademic writing. My point is that this little quarrel showsGadamer trying to unfreeze a specific tradition of founded(written) rationality in favor of a tradition of discourse (oral)rationality. This introductory writing leads into Gadamer'shabilitation thesis, which he was doing at the same time.

Chapter 4 is a recounting and a reflection of the theoreticalsections of Gadamer's habilitation thesis. This work, whichwas published as Gadamer's first book in 1931, was a study ofa late Platonic text and was carried out in a conventional aca-demic manner. That is to say, Gadamer first set the stage in along theoretical section or chapter, then he applied the stan-dards he had established and defended to an actual case study.Now the text Gadamer chose, the Philebus, was of renewed in-terest in the academic world because it posed anew (thanks toJaeger) the problem of Aristotle's relation to the later Plato.Gadamer wished to show, once again, that the later Plato wasnot becoming ossified into a founded rationalist. He was, atleast when confronting ethical problems, openly engaged in adialogue with himself, with the problem, and with others. Inmy terminology, he was something of a discourse rationalist.

I do not pay a great deal ofattention to the actual analysis oft}:e Philebus. I am more interested in the way Gadamer setsthe stage for his treatment of this Platonic text, and what Ihope to show is that Gadamer at this early stage of his careerproduced his first detailed philosophical hermeneutics. That isto say, he produced his first extended reflection on languageand attempted to make the case for language as the means forthinking what we are doing. Key to this is the attempt to showthat Plato is not a founded rationalist, proposing always thetheory of ideas, but is rather a kind of discourse rationalist,falling back as it were on conversation and its agreements asthe beginning and end of public rationality.

Let me pause to illustrate just what Gadamer is claiming[hat makes me characterize him as a discourse rationalist. His

L4 PoliticalHermeneutics

point, Gadamer tells us in a poetical moment \n Platos dialek-tische Ethik, is not to show that Plato's ethics are dialecticalbut rather that dialectics are themselves ethical. I quote: 1ú

wiII not be claimed here that Platonic ethics are dialectical butit will rather be asked in uhat sense the Platonic dialectic isethics.te This is a cautious, introductory (it is the fourth sen-tence of the original Preface) way of saying that Plato did nothave a founded doctrine of ethical ideas which he then ex-pressed in dialogue form. He rather invested all his energiesinto the development of a systematic dialogue form, which forGadamer was itself ethical. In other words, Plato has no doc-trine of founded ethical values which are to be expressed inthe language of dialogue. This would turn language into atool. Rather, dialogue itself is the ethical way of life because itis the manner in which we reflect on what we are doing andtry to produce some normative, ethical conclusions about it.

Chapter 5 supports the conclusions tentatively reached inthe previous chapter. It considers Gadamer's unpublished1930 paper called "PraktischeE Wissen," which might best betranslated as "Practical Knowledge." It draws a sharp dis-tinction between Plato and Aristotle, making the latter thefounder of Begrffi or analytical philosophy and Plato thepractitioner of a "dialogical dialectics" which did not aim atthe creation of an instrumental consciousness.

In Chapter 6 I am finally in a position to redeem my claimabout the political content of Gadamer's treatment of Platobecause I am finally in a position to consider "Plato and thePoets" (1934) and "Plato's Educational State" (1942). Here itis clear that Gadamer is adhering to the classical mode of po-

litical theorizing insofar as he is following his thinking aboutethics with thinking about politics. These writings are toobrief to be well developed. This I regret, if for no other reasonthan that it seems to weaken my case. But the weakening ispurely material. It is the consequence of brevity rather thanany change in Gadamer's argumentative course. In fact, eachof theee articles says as much as most books do about what isreally important to the classical polie,I once aeked Gadamer


why he had not combined these two articles into a book andhis response was that he had had precisely that intention inthe early 1930s. But his stay in Marburg was interrupted byhis substituting for Richard Kroner in Kiel, and after his com-ing back to Marburg he did not return to the study-morethought than research-on Plato's vision of an educationalstate. Only later did he put the unfinished work into the formof a paper and publish it.'zo

Chapter 7 is a conclusion in the normal sense of being asumming up and an attempt to redeem claims or at least drawconclusions from claims that were redeemed along the way.My point in this final chapter is that the early writings ofGadamer are well worth looking at if one bears in mind thatGadamer, like Max Weber in his essay "Politics as a Voca-tion," was responding to a real crisis. But where Weber wasdirectly responding to the crisis of German politics in thetwentieth century, Gadamer's response was indirect and so

therefore my thoughts on it are mainly speculative.Briefly, and on the basis of what has already been demon-

strated, I attempt in this concluding chapter to distinguishGadamer's thinking from Heidegger's and show why, on thebasis of this thinking, Gadamer was anything but a Nazi. Ialso attempt an excursus in this final chapter by comparingGadamer's thinking to that of Mikhail Bakhtin, viewing boththinkers from the perspective of the continental traditionof rooting thinking in something more humanistic than theanalysis of human nature.

I believe this book will best show its worth if the followingthought is borne in mind: the philosophical hermeneutics ofthe later Gadamer of Truth and Method is itself a relativelyabstract concept. It is available to be applied to numerousfields, such as art, law, literary criticism, and the like. It pos-

sesses a universality and makes a universality claim thatemphatically identifies it as a kind of lngos katV auto or auton-omous philosophical concept. This is not the case with the po-

litical hermeneutics of the early Gadamer. The early writingspresent a more full-bodied version of philosophical hermeneu-


tics, but in being full-bodied, the presentation is more earth-bound. As such, the political hermeneutics are not yet ready tobe applied universally but remain rather a more finite three-dimensional, quasi-literary reflection on one experience, thatof the soul in its partnership with the political community.Thus the early writings of Gadamer, his political hermeneu-tics, remind us that the study of politics before the advent ofpolitical science in the seventeenth century was a distinctlyhumanistic concern of transmitting and renewing Westernvalues.

2

On the Philological Backgroundof

Gadamer's Early Writings

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Hans-Georg Gadamer did his doctoral dissertation relativelyearly in life, completing it in L922 at the age of twenty-two'lHis doctoral adviser, Paul Natorp, was nearing retirementat the time Gadamer worked with him, but the associationwith Natorp was nonetheless significant for the shaping ofGadamer's mind. Natorp was a first-rate thinker who had con-

centrated his efforts on modern science and on Plato scholar-

ship. The latter effort had resulted in a controversial book

in 1902, called Platos ldeenlehre' in which Natorp had ar-gued the unusual thesis that Plato had no doctrine of ideas inthe conventional sense of that term.2 That is to say, Natorpclaimed that Plato did not believe in a realm of preexistingobjective ideas after which reality was formed. Rather, Platobelieved that ideas were more or less like hypotheses' or men-

tal configurations-much like Kantian noumena-and this


meant that they were subjective conjectures to be tested for fitagainst a perceived reality.

The importance of Natorp,s argument can be grasped bycomparing it to saussure's basically similat."g.r-".rt on thenature of language.t By arguing that language was irreduci-bly arbitra4y, saussure set the stage for the coming of linguis-tic relativity in modern language philosophy. wrrat he meantwas that a word did not have a preestablished meaning thatendured through time. The meaning of a word dependeJfdlyon the context in which it was used. Therefore, meaning wascontext-bound, language was absolutely historical, interpre-tation was inescapable, and there was no method that couldguarantee access to meaning prior to the actual use of a word.similarly with Natorp, if Platonic ideas do not have objectivemeanings, then philosophy cannot be a matter of finding outwhat ideas mean and then using them accurately. The rnean-ing of ideas is context-bound, ideas are therefore absolutelyhistorical, and interpretation rather than method is the appro-priate way to do philosophy. If ideas have no fixed *"árrirrgprior to their actual usage, then meaning is arbitrary_thatis to say, it is attained in context-and hence philosophy9an have no prior knowledge and must be interpretive, orhermeneutic.

The significance of this argument for platonic philosophy isimmense. It actually rearranges everything, for if there is nodoctrine ofobjective ideas, then plato is conceivably a politicalphilosopher. That is to say, if ideas have no preestablishedmeanings, then the focus of pratonic philosophy necessarilyshifts from knowledge of the meaning or id"r", which can bethe preserve of a class of experts, to argument aimed at estab-lishing meaning, or to a situation in which expertise necessar_ily means nothing more than a better capacity to marshalinformation and argue it more persuasivety. rrám this pointof view, a Platonic text is not telling us whal an idea means. Itis rather arguing what socrates or crito or Gorgias claims itmeans, and it is up to us-as readers_to go

"long with the

argument and accept, reject, or modify what plató inhnds.

On the Philological Background 19

Plato is a political philosopher because his texts locate them-selves in this uncertain, changing, arbitrary world, and if hesometimes slips and seems to argue that an idea has "objec-tive" or preestablished meaning, then this is only one moreargumentative strategy that has to be taken from what it isworth. Politics, in this sense, is the ongoing attempt to deter-mine meaning through conversation, and we do well to graspin advance that every determination is a judgment which,with the passage of time, will be revealed to be arbitrary andhence a prejudice.

Natorp's book did not have a positive reception history. Itargued against conventional German academic wisdom andhence posed a challenge to the German professorial establish-ment. Not surprisingly, numerous German academics took thebook as an opportunity to establish their own orthodoxy byarguing in print against it.a By the same token, dissidentacademics in the field of Plato scholarship were attracted toNatorp because he provided the rare combination of an estab-lished name and deviant scholarship. This became even morethe case when, toward the end of his life, Natorp began to beattracted to the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and Indianmysticism.s This influenced him to shift even more in hisPlato thinking, emphasizing the humanism in Plato at the ex-pense of the scientism. He first announced this shift to human-ism in a talk given at the University of Berlin in 1913, butthese ideas were not published until Natorp included them inrevised form as part of a "Metakritischer Anhang" (Metacrit-ical Supplement) to a second, postwar edition of his PlatosIdeenlehre.6

Let me try to sum up Natorp's significance for the earlywritings of Gadamer: In the first two decades of the twentiethcentury, Natorp represented a resurgence of the forces whichhad originally inspired the rise of classical philology in Prus-sia over a century earlier. Along with Wolf, Hólderlin, Schil-ler, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and above all Nietzsche, PaulNatorp represented the beliefthat the purpose ofclassical phi-lology was Bildung, the education of the spirit through Kzl-


tur, and, that the best way to achieve this purpose was notthrough the positivistic accumulation of facts about the an-cient world but rather through a reinterpretation ofthe greatminds of Greece that placed emphasis on their creativity, andthis meant placing emphasis on their language. Natorp thusdrew Gadamer to one of two dominant trends of nineteenth-century German philolory. In this chapter, I shall call thattrend t}re Bildungs tradition, and I shall perhaps somewhattoo persistently set it over against the positivistic tendenciesof the opposed trend toward Altertutnswissenschaft, an un-gainly term perhaps best translated as Antiquity Studies.Both traditions have real problems, especially as they relateto political theory and practice, and so it might help to sketchthem in detail as a deeper background to Gadamer's earlythinking.

il

To get to the root of the Bildungs tradition it is best to go backone hundred and fifty years and locate its beginning in thethinking of Johann Gottfried Herder in respect to the study oflanguage in Germany. Herder is doomed to be misunderstoodas long as it is held that the purpose oflanguage is to expressknowledge.T Herder shifted away from this Enlightenment po-sition and heid that the purpose of language was to form theself, and, for this end it was perfectly adequate.s If languagewere to record the emergence of self and the consciousness ofself (Selbsú-bewusstsein), then it had to be whole and filledwith feeling, gestures, and action. If, on the other hand, lan-guage was understood to be a tool for passively expressingsomething that existed prior to it or outside it, whether this bePlatonic "objective" ideas or knowledge or a pronouncement ofthe King of Prussia, then it was hardly adequate, especially inits poetic form. For the sake of knowledge,language had to be-come flat, sequential, prosaic, and analytical. Herder was in

On the Philological Background 2L

favor of the emergence or construction-the German word forwhich is Bildung-of the self through language, and for thispurpose a holistic language of action was necessary.

Herder was not particularly interested in classical Greece,and so the application of his more general thinking to thespecific contours of the Greek language was left to classicalphilologists, poets, and other hellenophiles. Wolf, Humboldt,Schiller, Hólderlin, Goethe, the Schlegel brothers and Schle-iermacher in one fashion or another all adopted Herder'sgrasp of language and applied it to the Hellenes.s In respect toPlato, the application of Herderian thinking meant that thePlatonic dialogues were no longer taken to be clumsy modes ofexpressing the Platonic doctrine of ideas. That is to say, thePlatonic dialogues were not intent upon conveying knowledge;they are rather about the formation of the self. They weretaken to be scenes in which the speaker was actively and ex-pressively forming himself in words, and hence Plato wastaken by this first generation to be a literary figure ratherthan a philosopher in the Enlightenment sense of the term.

Given what was earlier said about the political significanceof reinterpreting Plato in this way, it is worth pausing to con-sider thepolitical thinking of the creators of the German tradi-tion toward which Gadamer would tend, although not adhere.Herder, Humboldt, Fichte, and of course Hegel all wrote aboutpolitics in a theoretical manner, but finally it was Schiller'swriting that captured the idealistic spirit of the founding gen-eration of the Bildungs tradition.lo On the one hand, Schillermore than anyone else rejected the possibility of meaningfulparticipation in the practical politics of the day in Prussia. Itwas not that reform could not be achieved. It was rather thatreform was not enough. Schiller wanted a whole new founda-tion for politics, and this could be achieved only througb Bil-dung, the most radical reconstruction of the German spirit.Schiller thus differed markedly from Humboldt, who certainlybelieved that reform of Prussia could be achieved, and if we¡rre to locate the difference precisely, then we have to focus oni,he changing meaning of the term politics.

22 Political Hermeneutics

Schiller's envisioned polity contained within itself an inte-rior contradiction. It was shaped in terms of the goal of the ut-most cultivation of spirit (Geist), but spirit was so conceivedthat it could only develop by complete immersion in the clas-sics of learning, and this meant complete withdrawal from thetawdry realities of everyday Prussian politics. The educa-tional experience was to be sublime, and it was to result in therealization of a utopia here on earth, presumably somewherein Germany. The main practical result of such a perfectionistscheme was to set the stage for what Fritz Stern has in oneplace called "the political consequences of the unpolitical Ger-man" and in another "the politics of cultural despair."rt Inother words, the political theory of the German Bildungs fta-dition exacted a high price to be calculated in terms of the po-litical effectiveness of the educated middle classes, the Bil-dungsbürgertum. The Greeks, as they were imagined in theclassical period at the end of the eighteenth century, sym-bolized an almost purely idealistic rationality, and the realmeaning of this was that they were not political. The conse-quence of this attitude, when it was adopted by the Bildungs-bürgerturn, was to concede everyday politics fully, thus open-ing the way for the expansion of Realpolitik.

Moreover, the political theory of the Bildungs tradition wasfilled with potential for sharpening class differences, whichwere sharp enough anyway in nineteenth-century Germany.The definition of classical education was so extremely culturalas to exclude virtually everyone from the working classes, andthe emphasis on actually learning the Greek language made iteasy to test class background at any time one wished. Finally,the rejection of prosaic politics by the Bild,ungsbürgertumconceded to bureaucrats untouched by Kultur the actual day-by-day running of the German government and hence pavedthe way for a predictably uncultivated and mechanical ra-tionalization of German society. fn sum, the political con-sequences of the political theory associated with the Bildungstradition were, to say the least, pregnant with the possibilityfor disaster.

On the Philological Background 2g

There are few less plausible places to locate the origin ofGadamer's concept of aesthetic consciousn¿ss than in Schiller'sessay on the "Aesthetic Education of Mankind,,'but curiouslythere is a dimension to Schiller's writing that would be re-tained by Gadamer. This was the notion, more an attitudethan a clear idea, that Kultur would produce a being whowould be truly creative, and such a person would be politicaiin the most radical sense of the term. The same notion is atwork in the most distant of Humboldt's writings, such as hispiece on the Cavi language, where Humboldt argues that ahighly inflected language, like the Greek, is superior to anuninflected language because it allows for possibilities ofsynthesis that are simply beyond the capabilities of lesserlanguages and lesser minds. Hence politics in the most rad-ical sense of the term-not mere politics-is only accessi-ble by means of the superior education offered by the Bild,ungstradition.

If there was a counter to the enthusiastic aloofness to ,,mere"

politics characteristic of the founders of the Bildungs tradi-tion, it was the rationalization of classical philology intro-duced by the originators of Altertumswissenschaft, tlre scien-tific study of the ancient world. It is difficult to say when andhow this academic draining of idealism from Greek studieshappened. It was rather more a shift of emphasis: the enthusi-asm of the amateur philologists of the first generation died outand was replaced by the rigorous methods of a new generation,perhaps symbolized by no one more than August Bóckh, withhis redefinition of philology as the knowledge of what wasknown.12 Here, conveniently, was the shift back from the con-struction of the sef emphasized by Herder and Humboldt tothe construction of knowledge emphasized in the Enlighten-ment conception of language. Bóckh, who was appointed to thechair in classical philolory at the new university of Berlin in1815 and who continued to lecture from this chair for over halfa century, was the true founder of Altertumswissenschaft,ttreintent of which, put as plainly as possible, was to reconstructthe economic, political, social, and cultural contexts of the an-


cient world so that its great figures-thinkers like Plato andwriters like Aeschylus-could be explained.'s The growthand success of Altertumswissenschaft was immense in themid-nineteenth century, but for those like Nietzsche who re-called what had motivated the first generation of classicalphilologists, the success was one in which the genius of theGreeks was systematically drained away by being explainedaway. It was a pyrrhic victory.

Alterturns wis senschaft had obvious political signifi cance. la

It was apolitical in a way very different from that of t}re Bil-dungs tradition. Instead of constructing a Greece that was a

distant Republic of Letters led by great minds, it lost itselfin the near-at-hand, the pursuit and establishment of facts.

Where the Bildungs tradition threatened to make educated

Germans politically ineffective by making them too culti-vated, Altertumswissenschafi threatened to make educated

Germans politically ineffective by denying them all cultivatedinterpretive vision. Altertumswissenschaft simply assumed

that alt basic problems about Greece had already been solved

and that what remained was the technical mopping-up opera-

tion of filling in details about economy, polity, society, and cul-tural mores. It, too, was laden from the outset with seriouspotential for crippling the political effectiveness of the Ger-man-educated classes.

To sum up, the discipline of classical philology was through-out the nineteenth century deeply divided into two opposed

camps. The older Bildungs tradition was obviously keyed to ahermeneutic approach to the study of Greece, intent upon anunderstanding of the exemplary achievements of great men.

The newer Altertumswissenschaft was keyed, in contrast, toan explanation of human behavior in terms of the establishedfacts of politics, society, and economy. The split in the aca-

demic discipline of classical philology reiterated a split inGermany itself, between a nation keyed to a romantic and he-

roic image of itself and a nation determined to industrializenot only the economy but also the German life'world itself.Fueled by this wider, national split, the academic tempest


within classical philology would take on a mean spirit in thelast decades ofthe century.

III

Upon completing his doctoral dissertation under Natorp, Gad-amer continued working in the Philosophical Seminar at theMarburg University, but he needed a replacement for the re-tiring Natorp if he was to move purposefully toward }rrisHabil-itation.ts This was neither an automatic nor an immediatemove, and so uncertain was Gadamer of what he was movingüoward that he chose to push in two complementary directions.He continued to read philosophy and to work in the Philosoph-ical Seminar, where in 1923 he heard the first lectures ofNatorp's successor, the young Martin Heidegger. Simultane-ously, however, Gadamer moved in the direction of becoming aclassical philologist, and this brought him into close associa-üion with Paul Friedlánder, a protege of the great Berlin phi-lologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Gadamer per-l'r¡cted his Greek under Friedlánder and in this context becamepart of a Thursday-evening reading group at the home of thetheologian Rudolf Bultmann.

The triangle comprising Heidegger, Friedlánder, and Bult-tnann was immensely important for Gadamer, for all threet,hinkers were, in their time, academic radicals. Heideggerwos about to launch a new movement designed to reshapeWestern philosophical thinking. Friedlánder was part of a dis-¡ident philological movement seeking to overturn the positiv-irtic establishment. Bultmann for his part was the leader of axturtling movement in the field of New Testament theoloryl,hut aimed at creating new modes of interpreting the Bible.All three men were bound to have an impact on the young(ladamer's thinking about hermeneutics. Yet there is reasonl,o look more closely at other influences on the shaping of the


young Gadamer's mind' As Gadamer said in a 1983 letter to

ihe ^imerican Richard Bernstein: "As important as Heidegger

and his L923 phronesds interpretations were for me' I was al-

t""ay pr"ptr"d for it on my own' aboye all by my earlier read-

i"g of ki""kegaard, by the Platonic Socrates' and by the pow-

erful effect of the po"t Stufutt George on my generation'"16 ItistoStefanGeorgeandhisCircleofacademicfollowersthatone turns to gain a deeper perspective on the early Gadamer'

The poet Stefan Ouotg" and the German academics who

identifiLd themselves *ith hi-, known collectively as the

Slefan George Circle, had an influence on the culture of twen-

tieth-century G".-"rry similar to that of Bloomsbury on the

culture of Énglish-splaking countries' Yet where Blooms-

¡*V t." been subje.t"¿ to -icroscopic scrutiny' the Stefan

Guorg" Circle has been all but forgotten''? Of the approxi-

-"tJfV fifty book titles listed under Stefan George in the li-

brary of the Germanistic Seminar in Heidelberg' fewer than

firre are studies of the cultural politics of the poet and his

Circle.Thisisremarkablewhenonereflectsontheculturalori-

gins of Nazism in Germany' For no group expressed more

ioig""Uv the rising culturaldespair of the German middle

"UJr", in the period-before and immediately after World War

I than did the G"org" Circle, and no group contributed more to

It " "y,,,Uotism

of ñatiorral Socialism than did the Georgians.

Theyused t}re swastiko as their emblem' employed the term

Führerto designate the leader they were seeking' made clear

tfr.t tlr" coming leader was to take charge of a new and.third

Reichto replace the barren second Reich, and, in speaking of

themselves as a KuIt of followers of the new leader' provided

the outlines of a totalitarian political party' And if this infor-

mation is thought to be merely coincidental' then it should be

added that Goábbels, Hitler's Propaganda Ministe-r-3n{ the

key person in orchestrating the theatrical side of National

So"iáU"*, studied in Heidelberg in the early 1920s and was

influenced there by a key member of the George Circle' Fried-

rich Gundor. coe¡uets could have written a separate testi-


mony to the influence of the poet Stefan George on his genera-tion, and indeed there are those who maintain that Goebbels'sfirst novel was just this.

Yet none of this is to say that the Georgians were Nazis.In fact, they were not, and precisely because they were thecreators of the cultural symbolism of Nazism, they wereamong the first to recognize Nazism as a sham. The poet

Stefan George in fact always showed excellent and sound prac-

tical political judgment, as, for example, when he warned hisyounger followers in 1914 not to interpret the outbreak ofWorld War I as the hoped-for collapse of the Second8eichthatwould pave the way for the coming of the new leader. Simi-larly, in 1933, when Hitler arrived in power, Stefan Georgewas among the first prominent non-Jewish and non-MarxistGermans to emigrate from Germany by way of protest. Hislast book of poótry may have been entitledDas Reich, but he

was not in the least confused by what Hitler was introducing.ln this respect, George's clear thinking contrasts sharply withühat of Heidegger, who in 1933 was an enthusiastic backer ofHitler's revolution. Finally, the man who carried out the July20,1944, plot on Hitler's life, Graf Stauffenberg, \Mas in hisstudent days one of the last disciples around the poet Stefan(ieorge. So the direct relationship of the Stefan George Circlewith Nazism is one of utter contempt.

Clearly, the cultural meaning of the Stefan George Circlei¡r difficult to assess in a balanced way. On the one hand, itsmembers were the most organized and influential expressionr¡f'the cultural despair that afflicted the German upper-middleclasses in Gadamer's formative years' In this respect, they arevery much like Bloomsbury in their significance. But wherellloomsbury's members were primarily engaged in a rejection¡¡l' Victorian society's values in favor of a more hedonistic,rnore private, ethical norm, this was not the case with the(loorgians. They rejected the values of an industrializing Wil-holmine Germany in favor of a more public set of values. Butit is precisely here that they went wrong, for their idea of whatconstitutes lhe public sphere was profoundly questionable.


For example, the ideas of the Führer,the Reich' anidt}nLe Kult

surroundini the leader and organizing the revolution are all

political-soinding concepts, but they are not at all public in

content. The Georgians expected the leader to be a poet' and

indeed this was why Stefan George himself was at the head of

the movement and why he, a poet, could write a book with a ti-

tlelikeDasReich.'sTheGeorgiansmadeittheirconcerntodir.ou"" poets and to put them forth as leaders for Germany'

Stefan George himself is widely credited with the discovery of

Hugo von Hoffmannsthal. Gundolf wrote very influential bi-

ográphies of Shakespeare and Goethe, and in each case made

,rá sácr"t that these poets captured the spirit oftheir respec-

tive nations. A young *ut,b"' of the George Circle named

Hellingrath presidedá,n", u rediscovery of the poet Friedrich

Hólderlin, saw to it that all of Hólderlin's works were reis-

sued,andhencemadeafetishofthispoetthatreacheditshighpoini in Heidegger's academic commentaries' Besides Stefan^G"org",

the Circle included other notable German poets' such

a, xári wolfskehl and Max Kommerell, the latter a close

friend of Gadamer at Marburg'Yet for all that, the Georgians were not putting fotlh a pub-

lic frgurewhen they extoll"á th" virtues of various poets. They

were"obviously thinking of archaic Greece when they thought

of their model of the poet, but a close examination of their

characterizationofthepoetsrevealsadistinctlymodernandvery romantic conception of the poet-as a lonely genius pos-

sessed of wisdom othárwise inaccessible to his contemporaries.

It is, furthermore, a wisdom about an alternative world un-

avaiiable to modern, industrializing Germans' It is a utopia in

which a perfect language, the langua ge of Dichtung' or poetry'

is spoken. It thus ""it"t"t"t a long-standing romantic desire to

re-create a synchronically perfect language' free of the ana-

lytic corruptions of modern-society' Not surprisinglV' t\ the-

ory of language associated with Stefan George and the George

circle *", " variation on the theme of I'art pour l'art' Lan-

Bt¡age, according to this thinking, was not an instrument that

áxisied for the passive expression of something outside of it' Of


course it could be made into this, and in modern scientific-industrial society, precisely this had happened. But pure lan-Buage, according to the Georgians, expresses nothing outsideitself. It is action, metaphorically cast. Indeed, so problematicis the wordexpressio¿ that it virtually became a pejorative forthe Georgians. Any writer who would express anything-be itthinking, ideas, emotions, feelings, or even mere opinions-would be revealing that he was not a true creator. He wasrather a servant of something outside of language, a mere con-duit, and hence a slave, the opposite of the Nietzschean super-man whom the Georgians adored. He clearly was a genius, buthardly a public figure.

w

'lhe Stefan George Circle traced its intellectual pedigree backthrough Mallarmé (who early influenced the young George) toNietzsche, but it is clear that they were also simply re-creat-ing in precious form the thinking and the mood of the firstgoneration of German-language philosophers, the founders ofLhe Bildungs tradition. The discovery of Shakespeare was notoriginal with the Georgians but was a repeat of an experiencet,hat had taken place frrst in the 1780s. The emphasis on theli¡rm or Gestalt of the self that took shape in language wasoriginal with Herder rather than with the Georgians, and sim-ilnrly the notion of a Republic of Letters that took shape in thecultivation of mind rather than in the accumulation of worldlypower was first sketched out by Schiller and was only takenovor by the Georgians.

Ilut there was a difference between the first generation of( lorman-language philosophers and the Georgians that needs

t,o bo isolated. The Prussians of the period from 1780 to 1820

woro dissatisfied with the Prussian state but were never reallyho¡tile to it. Therefore they could, if need be, work for it and


perhaps change it. Humboldt, Goethe, Fichte, and Hegel allhad ambivalent attitudes toward Prussia, but the pointis that their ambivalence encompassed a positive as well as

a negative side and this side enabled them to maintain aconstructive relationship to the Prussian state.'e Not so theGeorgians of the Second Reich. Although many of them, as

Professors, were state functionaries, all of them despised theReich and wished its end. The unexpected but predictable con-

sequence of this cultural despair was that the Georgians for-feited practically all influence over the policies of the Germanstate. They thus entered into a vicious circle in which theydefined themselves as outsiders and were taken for outsiders.They were free to theorize as they wished, but more often thannot this meant that they were free to be unrestrained in theirpolitical criticism because it would have no practical impact.

Every Georgian knew that Shakespeare, Hólderlin, andGoethe were dead and gone and would not return to save Ger-many from the linguistic morass, t}re Gerede, that was every-where to be heard. Therefore, the Georgians knew that theirreal task was not simply to dig up old poets but rather tosketch in as best they could tbe Gestalt of the coming leader.This German term, originally used by Herder in his prize'winning essay on the origin of language, meant for the Georgi-ans something akin to shape or form, and what it introducedwas a highly romantic element into Georgian thinking onpsychology. For Herder language was not, as I have alreadynoted, simply a flattened mechanism for expressing ideas orfeelings. It is rather the mode in which human beings takeshape, or rather form their Gestalt. There is no consciousnessof reality or self-consciousness except in terms of the Gestaltit takes in language. Herder's question about the origin oflanguage is somewhat misleading if we construe it dia-chronically. Language is always original, insofar as it is thestory of human creation, and hence it has to be grasped

synchronically.At this point, it might be helpful to insert a word about, time

and concepts of time in reference to the language theory.2'


The so-called timelessness of a play by Shakespeare or a poemby Goethe refers to a reader's experience that is anything buttimeless. That is to say, in a play by Shakespeare or a poem byGoethe, all time seems pulled together in an instant that en-dures because it is memorable and therefore, for the reader,meaningful. Indeed, one might claim that it is memorable be-cause it is meaningful. The quality at work here is a sort oftimelessness, and this is the quality of any literature or pieceof literature that merits the name classical. What is at workhere is a holistic conception of time, and the emphasis is on theharmonic coming together of the so-called past, present, andfuture. To this experience of a sudden synthesis of time, wemight apply the term synchronic, taking it from Saussure. Theopposite of a holistic or synchronic conception of time is a frag-mented or diachronlc conception, which is the one we are fa-miliar with from clocks and other analytic instruments. Thisis real time, expressed artificially in our measuring instru-ments. Here time is flattened out into discrete moments lo-cated in the past, present, and putative future. The clock artic-ulates time as a series of measurable (and therefore discrete)rnoments, and this quality enables us to articulate events ort,houghts into sequences. The diachronic conception of time iskcyed to positivistic thinking. Indeed, it is one of the condi-t,ions of the possibility of positivistic thinking. The Georgians,llcedless to say, were employing a holistic or synchronic con-ccpt of time when they looked to find L};.e Gestalt of a great lit-orary figure.

'lhe biographies of Shakespeare, Frederick the Great,(ioethe, Nietzsche, George himself, as well as Hellingrath's fa-rnous biographical sketch of Hólderlin are writings within agcnre called Gestaltsbiographien, or Gestalt-biographies. Toxuy that this genre did not make a clean separation betweenlirct and fiction is accurate but misleading. What it sought outi¡¡ the life of a person is precisely the legendary, the mythical,t,ho edifying, the illuminating, all of which are synchronic mo-rnonts. To use Heidegger's language, it sought out that whichh,t.d ¡tresence, and this was never factual in the analytic sense


of the term. A fact is a dismembered piece of the whole-Stefan George's adjective was zerstückelt. T}n.e problem withthe focus on facts that dominated Altertumswissenschaft isthat the whole came to be forgotten. The reason of course isdeceptively simple: The fact is itself a whole. It is a discretespatial or temporal entity that can be understood on its ownterms. The problem that arises is then one of communicationin a world of discrete facts. In reference to an individual life,what the Georgians were saying when they wrote Gestaltsbio-graphien was that a life is something more than an accumula-tion of individual facts. There is an organically whole qualityto life which precedes the analytically reduced factual life.Thus no matter how true all the established facts of academicPlatonic scholarship were, they necessarily missed the point ofPlato's life. It was this that the Georgians were after in theirGestaltsbiographien.

The first Georgian to apply the concept of Gestalú to Platowas Kurt Hildebrandt, whose introduction to a translation ofthe Symposizrn published in 1911 argued that Plato's lan-guage was self-sufficient and should be understood in purelyliterary terms. Hildebrandt thus cleared the way for anotherGeorgian, Heinrich Friedemann, to write the first real Ges-talt-biography of Plato. Friedemann had done his doctoral dis-sertation in Marburg under Natorp, was deeply influenced byFriedrich Gundolf (whom he considered a Führer), and laterhad gone to Berlin where he showed the work on Plato toStefan George. In 1914 it was published by Bondi, StefanGeorge's personal press, as Platon: seine Gestalt.2r T};.e key tounderstanding this book was once again the Natorpian argu-ment that Plato had no doctrine of ideas that he expressed inlanguage. On the basis of this claim, Friedemann was thenable to argue the subsidiary claim that Plato was a true Füh-rer introducing a new Reich.

Gadamer met Hildebrandt immediately after the war, inNatorp's office. He heard of Friedemann from Natorp and mayhave read him in this early period. He certainly had read himby the mid-1920s. In the same period, Gadamer made his first


acquaintance with the poetry of Stefan George, and by his ownaccount he was left thunderstuck by it." But however signifi-cant these moments are, they are mere moments and are henceminor when compared to the systematic and prolonged in-fluence exerted by Paul Friedlánder, yet another follower ofStefan George who was also Gadamer's professor in Greek phi-Iology in Marburg after the war. Friedlánder is worth lookingat in more detail because he was, unlike Hildebrandt andFriedemann, no outsider to the German academic establish-ment. Ironically, Friedlánder embodied the full force of thecontradictions of the German academic world because he wasnot just a follower of Stefan George but was also a star pupilof Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. Since Wilamowitzembodied everything that the Georgians detested, Fried-lánder somehow managed to get himself on both sides of one ofthe leading academic quarrels of the German nineteenth cen-tury. It is a spectacle worth describing in detail, but only aftergrasping the outlines of the German nineteenth-century edu-cational system.

V

When Wilhelm von Humboldt created the Prussian institu-tion of the Gymnasiurn, at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, he initiated a curriculum designed to effect a revolu-tion from above.23 Even the name Gymnasiurn tells us this,fbr it is not only a Greek term but is also the place where onentrips naked and prepares for action. Thus, symbolically atloast, the Gymnasium was conceived as a sanctuary where(iermans were to shed their passive provincialism and, bymeans of the inflected Greek language, actively constructtheir true selves. In the same period, around 1810, Humboldtnlso grasped that the reformed Prussian educational systemwould all too soon come to grief unless it were capped offby a


university system with an elite of philosophers keyed to pro-ducing inspiring books about the Hellenes. Although Hum-boldt never said as much when he created the University ofBerlin, he probably had in mind the sharp contrast in educa-tional values provided by the universities at Halle and Gót-tingen. Halle had served as a training ground for Prussianfunctionaries of ali varieties, and Góttingen had establisheditself as a new kind of university which stressed the construc-tion of the spirit. Obviously, Humboldt would have favored theGóttingen model, but as a Prussian functionary himself, hewould have wanted to have close control over it, and what bet-ter way to do this than by setting up a university in Berlin it-self. Thus as the intellectual support system for the new Prus-sian educational system, or rather as the crown of the entireeffort, the University of Berlin was created. From this center,a classical renaissance was supposed to radiate out over thespokes of the Gymnasium and reform the soul of every Prus-sian schoolboy.

The legendary beginning of this remarkable rise of class-ical Greek philology to its nineteenth-century position as thecrown jewel of the German educational system can even bedated: It occurred, so it was later said, on April 8, 1777, whenFriedrich August Wolf, registering at the University of GOt-tingen, insisted on being inscribed as studiosus philologiae."nThe meaning of this act was clear from the outset. Germanuniversities in the eighteenth century were basically voca-tional schools where one learned an upper-middle-class trade,like law, medicine, civil engineering, Lutheran theology, orpublic administration. Halle, as noted, was the prime exampleof this format. But the new emphasis on the creation of the selfthrough language that had emerged out of Herder's 1772 es-say quickly passed over into educational philosophy and fromthence into a program for educational reform. Wolf's symbolicmove in 7777 was the beginning of the reconstruction of thesecondary-school curriculum around a philological core, andalthough Góttingen was the legendary birthplace of the newemphasis on language, Jena soon caught up. But as Jena'g ex-


perience demonstrated-Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel alltaught at Jena but soon left, and Humboldt and Schiller madetheir home there but also soon left-there was a need to rou-tinize the new beginning. This systematization took placewith the founding of the University of Berlin by Humboldt in1810, a mere generation after Wolf's initial symbolic act.

Obviously there is a contradiction in this Prussian receptionof Greece that needs to be brought into sharp relief. WhateverHumboldt's intentions, he was capitalizing on an enthusiasmfor Greece-associated with the names of Wolf, Goethe, Hól-derlin, Schiller, and Hegel-that could not be separated froman enthusiasm for the ideas ifnot the actual experience ofrev-olution. Yet Humboldt, as a servant of the Prussian state,could not have intended to institutionalize revolution. He wasrather trying to channel its spirit, and in trying to channel it,he was undoubtedly trying to control it. But we shall neverknow exactly what Humboldt had in mind, and probably hehimself did not know. Like those rare thinkers who have ideasin private life and then suddenly find themselves in a publicposition that provides them the opportunity to institutionalizetheir ideas, Humboldt was ambivalent. The creation of theUniversity of Berlin as the capstone of the entire Prussian ed-ucational system was a revolutionary act and, simultane-ously, a very conservative act. It brought the spirit ofrevolu-üion to the very heart of Berlin, but by doing so it also broughtit within easy surveillance of the Prussian police.

The iron discipline of the Prussian Gymnasium and therapid rise of the nineteenth-century German university into arigid bureaucracy of state functionaries were to prove Hum-boldt correct. The energies associated with Greece could beput to conservative uses in the service ofthe Prussian state.Indeed, no one proved better at this than Hegel, who was atonce the ultimate Prussian professor but was also said to openu bottle of champagne every July 14. The dark, passionateGreece that Nietzsche invoked in Birth of Tragedy and which¡oemed to so many to be acted out in the French Revolutiont,hus was securely placed within German academic respect-


ability.zs But ironically, the success of Humboldt's plan for arebirth of Greece within the iron framework of the Prussianstate also carried within itself the seeds of later failure, forPrussia's growing strength made her the model for all Ger-many, and it was clearly doubtful whether the unification andindustrialization of Germany would lead to a simple andunproblematic expansion of the Prussianized Greek spirit.

Unification brought a sternly authoritarian and basicallyagricultural eastern state together with the more industrial-izing and urbanizing states of the Rhine area, and the fear wasthat Prussia, in achieving a political conquest of Germany,had ironically opened herselfto cultural conquest. The prob-lem may be put differently and more simply: Industrializationdemands that the study of science and the acquisition of ana-lytical skills be put at the core of school and university cur-riculum. Industrialization further demands that these core

curricular elements be treated with the love, honor, and obedi-ence that any centrally located academic discipline demands-in sum, that an industrial culture be created to sustain anindustrial civilization. But this kind of routinization, rational-ization, and bureaucratization-with its attendant divisionof labor-was precisely what the legendary WoIf was arguingagainst with his symbolic move on April 8, 1777. Now Hum-boldt's hellenophilic core curriculum was conceived to combatprecisely these tendencies emerging out of the European En-lightenment, and thus the unification of Germany created a

cultural problem that was unavoidable and deeply distressingfor any product of the Prussian Gymnasium.

Nietzsche was a pupil in the small Prussian city of Schulp-forte and a graduate of its Gyrnnasium, unquestionably thebest classical Gyrnnasium in nineteenth-century Germany.After university studies, he had begun his career as a classicalphilologist. Indeed, Nietzsche's early academic career wasone of the most brilliantly promising in nineteenth-centuryGermany. He had done his doctorate very rapidly, habilitatedwith record speed, and been appointed Extraordinarius attwenty'four years old, Ordinarius one year later. This was an


unheard-of rise in rigid nineteenth-century Germany. HadNietzsche played his cards right, he could have moved upfrom his somewhat geographically marginal first professorialposition in Basel to the key central position of Berlin Ordin-arius for Altphilologie. Whether Nietzsche ever thought thisway, we do not know. We only know that the Birth of Tragedydid not fit into t}rre L872 model of what a preeminent professorof classical philolory should be doing. It may have fit themodel of a Dionysian revolutionary Greece that Humboldt andhis contemporaries had dreamed of, but it did not fit the modelof Apollonian rationality that an industrializing Germanywas becoming. Nietzsche in sum posed a challenge to the in-dustrial determination of the German academic curriculumthat unification promised. In the euphoria of 1871, Nietzschestood out as a voice from the Prussian past, a hysterical funda-mentalist who had to be resisted in the name of the new Sec-ond, Reich.

Let me put this slightly differently and in a somewhat morelimited framework. The quarrel over Nietzsche's first bookwas not so much between a romantic Germany of the past andthe industrializing Germany of the future. To contemporariesit was more a quarrel between the vision of philology of thefirst generation of Prussians, men like Humboldt, Wolf, andSchiller, and the reality of the established Altertutnswissen-schaft of a second generation of men, such as Bóckh andMommsen. The newer Altertumswissenschaft was keyed toproducing and accumulating facts, the more material the bet-ter, and was inclined to take the romantic inspiration forgranted. Without ever intending as much, Altertumswissen-achaft was thus keyed to the mood of an industrializingGermany, also intent on producing and accumulating. Nietz-sche, in contrast, was keyed to the mood of a Prussia of theHumboldtian past, which was primarily concerned with theinspirational value of Greece in the Bildung of the nascentGerman nation. The quarrel over Nietzsche's first book wasfought out in this context.

The first and for a while the only person to point this out


publicly was another classical philologist from the Prussiantown of Schulpforte: Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.Wilamowitz's review was a bitter, unqualified attack that re-lentlessly pursued and made a mockery of every last detail ofNietzsche's effort.26 The review was so insulting that it had tobe rebutted or otherwise Nietzsche would have conceded hisentire academic career. Yet Nietzsche himself did not respond.He rather entrusted this task to a friend, thereby invitinga broadening of the conflict. The rebuttal was produced byErwin Rohde, yet another young scholar who would also be-come, with time, a leading and well-known classical philolo-gist, the author of an excellent book called Psyche.z1 ButRohde's defense of Nietzsche-called Afterphilologie! -didnot put an end to things.28 Wilamowitz only responded with astepped-up counterattack called Mehr Zukunftsphilologielzs("More Future Philology!"), and now he included Rohde as anobject of his attack and, by implication, the entire first-gener-ation tradition that they represented.

In the curious way these things work, the event was also thebeginning of Wilamowitz's own brilliantly successful rise tothe top of the German academic world. While Nietzsche slip-ped quietly out of academic life and into temporary obscurity,Wilamowitz rose to professorial position and eventually be-came no less than the Berlin Ordinaríus. He thus enraged hisopponents by arriving at the center ofthe old Prussian educa-tional system. He there and then used his grea! influence toadvocate a view of classical philology that was abhorrent tothe one that Nietzsche had represented. Where Nietzsche hadimplicitly claimed that the philologist's task was to capturethe real revolutionary spirit of Greece, its soul and its genius,Wilamowitz believe<l that the classical philologist was in-volved in a mere mopping-up operation, and he virtually saidas much. To the delight of his many enemies, Wilamowitzrepeatedly claimed that the only thing he had to teach wasmethod, thereby confirming the suspicion that he was at thecenter of the putative industrialization of German culturallife.'r" Furthermore, Wilamowitz made it no secret that he


meant method to be applied to obscure text materials that hadnot yet been reconstructed. Basically, Wilamowitz believedthat the writings of great thinkers like Plato or Aristotleshould not be repeatedly reworked because we already knewwhat they thought, a thesis which outraged those Germanswho believed that the creative potential of a great thinker isnever exhausted. For Wilamowitz, the classical philologistshould fully concentrate on marginal figures so as to provide acomplete picture of Greece. In sum, where Nietzsche had beena spirited revolutionary in providing thought-provoking inter-pretations of great Greeks like Aeschylus, Homer, Socrates,and Plato, Wilamowitz was an unabashed Altertumswissen-schaftler who believed in producing and accumulating clean-ed-up empirical materials from which induction could proceed.Nietzsche represented the old Prussia into which Humboldthad injected the revolutionary spirit of Greece, Wilamowitzthe new Germany of the industrialists of the Ruhr Valley.

It should be obvious by now that Wilamowitz was also inconflict with the spirit of the Stefan George Circle. As a group,the Circle did not take shape until the first decade of the twen-tieth century, and they did not immediately have a conscious-ness of the implications of Gestaltsbiographie for the quar-rel that was going on among classical philologists. But soonenough they did recognize that what Nietzsche was doing inBirth of Tragedy was a Gestaltsbiographie of Aeschylus, andthat Wilamowitz's continuing opposition to this genre madehim their enemy. They thus began publicly to attack Wilamo-witz, and recognizing that Wilamowitz would leave out noth-ing in his counterattacks, they made certain that their first at-tacks were as vicious as they could make them. Stefan Georgehimself attacked Wilamowitz, and Wilamowitz went so far asto get the University of Berlin to cancel a scheduled and fes-tive appearance by the poet himself in 1910. For a group of ac-r¡demics such as the early Stefan George Circle, this was per-coived as a crushing defeat and a stinging reminder of howpowerful Wilamowitz was.

'lhe point, to be as brief and circumspect as possible, is that


by 1910 the positivistic Altertumstaissenschaften had won outseemingly decisively over the Bildungs tradition. Yet on theother side, however unoriginal and outrageously romantic the

Stefan George Circle might appear to be, they were putting up

a remarkably good fight against positivism." People were lis-tening. Hence the years shortly before 1914 record a strikingirony: Positivism was at the height of its power in the aca-

demic world, but it did not follow from this that the specula-

tive opposition was at its nadir. It too was increasing its influ-ence. Hence the famous quarrel between Nietzsche and

Wilamowitz was far from over in the first decades of the twen-tieth century. In almost all respects, it was more heated in1910-14 than it had been forty years earlier.

VI

In 1918, as the Second Reich began to show unambiguous

signs that its end was very near' so too did Wilamowitz' Inthat desperate year the Berlin Ordinarius completed a long-

awaited major book called Platon.szIt was not a response to

the Georgians, who after all were a minor thorn in Wilamo-witz's side. It was rather a comprehensive statement of wila-mowitz's lifetime of thought and scholarship about Plato, and

hence it was designed to be above petty academic quarrels.

Yet for all that, this book showed far more than its author ever

intended. It was not, as far as I know, attacked by anyone from

the Stefan George Circle. In fact, from all sides it was metwith an embarrassed silence or with respectful but vague

praise for the great scholar's entire career, the academic

reviewer's curious way of drawing attention away from the

near-at-hand.The reason for this had less to do with Wilamowitz person-

ally than with Germany's changed circumstances in 1918'

Wilamowitz's Platon was flat in its language, yet it was more

than a rehash of familiar and established opinions on Plato. It

On the Philological Background 4L

was in fact a first-rate piece of Altertumswissenschaft.It mighthave been construed as a final statement of Wilamowitz'slong-standing claim that although there was little more to sayabout the so-called great thinkers, a good deal couldbe said about their contexts, and from this point of view, agood deal could be said about them. But this was not what waswanted in the Germany of 1918. Wilamowitz was faltering aL

precisely a time where leadership was most needed. Germanywas nearing defeat on the battlefield, and the least far-sightedGerman knew that this would mean revolution at home. Whatwas sought in 1918 was a Plato who would address himself tothe changes that were needed in Germany, a Plato who wouldrecognize the cultural órisis and would respond to it with con-crete arguments for change at the deepest levels of the Ger-man Geist. Precisely the kind of writing Max Weber was todo in 1918 and 1919, Wilamowitz was unable to do in 1917.Wilamowitz pretended to be aloof from the dirty political real-ities of 1918, but his readers were not. He was the unpoliticalGerman, but at precisely this moment the educated Germanpublic was ceasing to be quite so unpolitical.

It is said that Wilamowitz's Platon was the beginning ofthe end for Wilamowitz. Behind his back, a movement beganto ease him out of the Berlin chair for Altphilologie, and themovement was not simply an expression of the career ambi-tions of younger men but was more so a reflection of the needfor spirited leadership at the center of the German educationalsystem, a conclusion which was shared not just by academicsbut also by key people in the Ministry of Education. Wilamo-witz retired in proper form in 1919, but there is no indicationthat he sought this retirement. There is rather every reasonto believe that the University and the Ministry used everycivilized means at its disposal to coax Wilamowitz into thisdecision.

The identity of Wilamowitz's successor had been obvious foryears. He was Werner Jaeger, who had been Professor at Kielrince 1912 and had also established himself as having a way oflooking at Greek philosophy that differed from Wilamowitz's.


Jaeger was the obvious choice for this position at this time fortwo reasons. He was first of all an established and respectedphilologist, one of the best in Germany. What should be em-phasized is that on academic grounds alone Jaeger might stillhave been chosen to be Wilamowitz's successor. But whatmade Jaeger the obvious choice was that he was also a forcefuland attractive politician.s'Thus on this second ground, takenalone, he might have been chosen for the position of BerlinOrdinarius, even if he had been a second-rate philologist,which he was not. The fact that Jaeger put together academicand political qualifications made him the obvious choice forthe position.

Jaeger was by no means a Georgian, but he was nonethe-less a humanist who believed that philology could not be con-ducted according to the naive positivistic method practiced byWilamowitz and the conventional AltertumswissenschaftIer.Jaeger had rather been impressed by the work of HermannIJsener, a great philologist, already admired by Nietzschewhen Usener was at Leipzig, before he moved on to become theBerlin Ordinarius." IJsener had married Lily Dilthey, thesister of the Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, and therebyhad come under the influence of Dilthey's life philosophy. In-deed Usener became Dilthey's leading follower in his lifetime.He believed that life was the basic category of academic schol-arship, and that it could be used in classical philology as anorganizing tool for the basic categories of Altertumswissen-schaft. usener's thinking thus promised to restore the whole-ness oflife that had been destroyed in the analytic approach ofA lt e rt um s u i s s e ns c haft .

LJsener's life philosophy could also be used to address knottyeveryday problems like the dating of manuscripts, and this iswhat Jaeger did in his famous 1923 biography called Arus-totle.3s He conceived of Aristotle's life as a whole that wentthrough certain necessary stages, beginning with Platonicidealism and culminating in Aristotelian realism. He also con-ceived of Greek civilization itself as conforming to life catego-rien, and hence all Greek thought in Jaeger's eyes waB a move-


ment from poetic idealism to analytic realism. Jaeger wouldlater employ this enlarged concept of life in writing his multi-volume Paideia,so but in the 1920s he became the center of astorm of controversy for ttis Arístotle.31

Jaegar did not consider all of Aristotle. He was only inter-ested in the ethics, and given Jaeger's active political career,it seems only reasonable to say that hls Aristotle was remark-ably well keyed to his political program for the reform of edu-cation and society in Weimar Germany, a program which hecalled tll.e Third Humanism. The problem with this programwas that Jaeger's Aristotle seemed to be a reincarnation of anineteenth-century German AltertumswissenschaftIer: Hetook a distinctly positivistic approach to the making of his sys-tem of ethics. Jaeger's Aristotle began with the idealism ofPlato and thus in the opening stages of intellectual life corre-sponded, however roughly, to the idealistic first generation ofGerman philologists, honest but immature philhellenes likeHumboldt and Hólderlin. Jaeger's Aristotle then outgrewPlatonic idealism and became a realist, thus roughly movingalong the same path by which more scientific thinkers likeBóckh created Altertumswissenschaft. If one were not blindedby the admitted brilliance of Jaeger's philology, one mighteasily miss the conservative political message that gave thephilology its thrust and its structure: Greece was still themodel for Germany, but it was hardly the Greece of Hólderlin,Humboldt, or Nietzsche. It was rather the Greece of Bóckh,Wilamowitz, and now Jaeger. This was a Greece which wasnot irrational and revolutionary but was rather reasonable,positivistic, and thoroughly rational in the construction ofeth-ical and political life. It was a thoroughly opolitical Greece.

In the characteristic fashion of Altertumswissenschaft,Jaeger based his scholarship upon a grasp of time that wasthoroughly positivistic. By this I mean that Jaeger flattenedhuman life by addressing it in terms of sequentially orderedcategories. This enabled him to date manuscripts, and whileühere ie no doubt that his achievement is brilliant, it is alsoquestionable as a way of reconstructing genuinely original


thinking. The problem is that it employs a diachronic concep-

tion of time, that is to say, a sense in which time is flattened so

that a measuring rod may be provided for establishing facts.This may lead to impressive scholarly achievements alongthe lines of Alterturnsutissenschaft, but such a diachronic ar-rangement is deadly to the possibility of producing a Gestalt-biography. Events of a life become mere facts, preceded andsucceeded by other facts. The danger ofthis conception is thatwhen applied to mind it will cause us to miss what is most im-portant, namely, the synchronic character of any thought thatis worth reflecting on.

The signifrcance of Werner Jaeger for the emergence of thepoint of view of the early writings of Hans-Georg Gadamerwill become apparent in chapter 3. Jaeger is an ambivalentfigure. On the one hand, he represents a break with the tradi-tion of Altertumswissenschaft. His clear intent is to return tothe Bildungs tradition of the first generation of Germanclassical philologists. Yet simultaneously, he is a prisoner ofhis own superb training: Even with the adoption of lJsener'slife categories, he still is prone to organize the life of a greatthinker into factual segments, and this adds up to a flatteningof the life of the great thinker. Jaeger never intended to writeaGestalt-biography of Aristotle, but on the other hand, he alsodid not intend Aristotle's life to become a mere sequence of il-lustrations of a larger historical process that determined thatlife. Yet the latter is what Jaeger's achievement in his Aris-totle added up to. It therefore became Jaeger's fate to provide aperfect foil for what the young Gadamer wanted to say: Hewas an Altertumswissenschaftler w};Lo had almost, but notquite, made it back to the first principles of the founders ofGerman classical philology.

VII

Jaeger's succession to the Berlin chair is only one aspect of thedecline of the Altertumswissenschaft represented by Wilamo-


witz. Another aspect, and a more telling one for the formationof Gadamer's career, was the defection of another star pupil ofWilamowitz, namely, Paul Friedlánder. There was never anyreal chance that Friedlánder could have succeeded to the keyBerlin chair. As a scholar and a personality he was never theequal of Jaeger, and in addition he was a Jew at a time whenJews were allowed into some academic positions, usually Er-traoidinarien,butmost certainly not into the chairs and neverinto the key Berlin chair. When Friedlánder left the army atthe end of the war, he thus did not head back to Berlin but in-stead went to Marburg to take up a position there as a profes-sor of classical philology. It was from this place that his defec-tion took place in 1922.

In that year, Friedlánder wrote Wilamowitz a long letter,more than twenty pages in handscript.ss He outlined the rea-sons for his defection, and perhaps inevitably the letter was amanifesto of a new approach to Plato. Friedlánder addressedWilamowitz as "Master," a form of deference that was stillcommon in German academic life but in the circumstances ofthis letter was bound to come across in an ironically painfulmanner. Friedlánder recounted his experience in the trenchesof the eastern front and made clear that the war had helpedhim reevaluate his relationship to classical philolory. Hehad come to value Plato more highly as a great and originalthinker. As a result, Friedlánder came to view himself differ-ently. Friedlánder had obviously gone through a Bildungsprocess, and he had arrived at a new level of Selbstbewusst-sein, ot self-consciousness.

Friedlánder wrote that he no longer considered himself amere laborer on the margins of classical literary tradition. Heno longer wanted to do the kind of mopping-up operations thatdistinguished Wilamowitz's approach to classical philologT.This was a clear rebuff to Wilamowitz, who had always em-phasized Altertumswissenschaffs emphasis on context anddeemphasized the great figures of Greece. But then Fried-lánder went on to mete out what had to be received as an evensharper rebuff: He argued that upon reflection he agreed withNietzsche and Stefan George in their appreciation of the

I

i


Greeks, and he could only mean by this that he was doing acomplete about-face from Wilamowitz's approach to classicalphilology. A few sentences of Friedlánder's long letter to WiIa-mowitz suggest its flavor and are hence worth quoting:

In recent years I have been pained by an uncertaintyin my relationship to you, something I did not feel ear-lier. I am in opposition to you in many things that areimportant, struggle against you in my inner being andhave the feeling that you do not quite dismiss me butnonetheless look at me with disapproval. I have to goback to the past. You were for me in my youth the deci-sive person, an important aspect of my fate because youwere by far the strongest of persons and simultaneouslygenerous and helpful as no other. . . . Since then I havecome a long way. Much of the best that I have comesfrom you. But what I have now become-and this is myother side-I have become in a struggle against you or,perhaps better, against the Wilamowitz in me. Had Iearlier not given myself over to you so strongly, the so-lution now would not have become so painful. . . . If Iwere to name the names that brought about this rever-sal, they are . Nietzsche, who since my youth hasgradually determined with urgency my comprehensiveview of life and who especially helped me to form myview of what ís historical. . .. And in recent years it hasbeen [Stefan] George who has brought on the greatestshock and the strongest rearrangement of all forces.With that you have a brief sketch of my way and youwill understand what I earlier called the struggleagainst the Wilamowitz in me.

Clearly, if this much could be said, the long hegemony ofUlrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was at an end. Fried-lánder was torn because as a person Wilamowitz was verygenerous but as a scholar represented an ideal that was impos-sible for the postwar generation. The Wilarnowitz in me to


which Friedlánder refers is the nineteenth-century positivis-tic model of classical philology propounded originally by thelater Bóckh. It was against this dehumanized conception thatFriedlánder was rebelling, and the rebellion was carried outin the name of Nietzsche and Stefan George because they hadalways represented the alternative. Friedlánder intimates inthis letter what that alternative was when he stresses suchterms as Nietzsche's vision of the historical, by which Fried-lánder meant a holistic or, as I have called it in this chapter, a

synchronic approach to the portrayal ofpast events.se

Let me sum up before concluding this chapter. Throughout Ihave been trying to emphasize, from varying points of view,that German classical philology in the nineteenth century wastorn between two conflicting points of view. The first was thatof the founding fathers of German classical philology-menlike Wolf, Humboldt, and Schleiermacher-and it emphasizedthat the redeeming purpose of classical studies was to capturethe heroic spirit of ancient Greece and convey this throughBildung to new generations of German students. These men-along with Nietzsche, Natorp, and the academic philologists ofthe Stefan George Circle-wanted to spark a revolution of thespirit in the soul of those few Germans who were capable ofsuch a revolution. Against this minority there was, increas-ingly as the nineteenth century wore on and Germany grewprosperous through unity and industrialization, a tendency toroutinize classical philology and insist that it perform as anyother disciplined academic study. The men who insisted in go-

ing in this direction came to be known as Altertumswissen-schaftler, and what was held against them was their material-ism and positivism. Although this movement started underAugust Bóckh, it reached its positivistic zenith in the person¡rnd the work of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. TheAlterturnswissenschaftler were in some sense symbolic of thexpirit of Wilhelm's Second Reich, and with the collapse of thatIleich in World War I, the way was opened-at long last, theNietzscheans and Georgians would say-for a serious bid toruturn to the revolutionary spirit of the founders of classical


philology. Although Paul Friedlánder rffas a minor figure inthis movement, he was Gadamer's teacher, and hence he rep-resents a key link in a chain of events that leads up fromHumboldt through Nietzsche and the Stefan George Circle toGadamer's early writings.

We do better to turn from Friedlánder directly to his studentGadamer to get an even fuller answer to what the influence ofStefan George was on the early Weimar generation. In 1983,Gadamer delivered a paper in Heidelberg on the "Influence ofStefan George on Scholarship."ro One of the things he did inthis paper was to define precisely the same term to whichFriedlánder referred. What Stefan George gave to the youngGadamer was a clear sense that the historical was above all asensitivity for the unique in all that is transmitted to us fromthe past. The historical in this sense was contrasted to histor-icism, which was identified by Gadamer as the attempt to sub-sume the individual under larger impersonal categories. Thehistorical school of the German nineteenth century in effectdeindividualized the individual with its diachronic conceptionof time, while the advocates of a holistic or sSrnchronic grasp oftime sought to restore uniqueness. The reason for this was toenable the past to really speak to us. If we subsume every-thing into diachronic categories with which we are alreadycomfortable, then the past cannot speak to us, and conversa-tion is impossible. It is only when the past regains its authen-tic voice that a key condition of conversation is created. It wasin respect to this sense of the really unique in the past, Gad-amer notes, that he introduced the term fusion of horizons.

What becomes clear upon a careful reading of Gadamer'srecollection of the influence of Stefan George on the sciences isthat the Dichter George brought a holistic vision of a very spe-cial kind to an area that tended to be flattened out by whatGeorge, according to Gadamer, called tnechanical thinking.For example, Gadamer notes, George makes a typographicaldistinction between Ich and, ich,both of which mean / in Eng-lish. What Stefan George wants to say is that the ego, the /writ large, can be holistically restored only by bringing it into


conversation.InJahr der Seele, Stefan George warned againstthe notion of biography as a record of the establishment of theseemingly autonomous Ego. What really stands behind thesupposedly autonomous lch (the.I writ large) is a conversationbetween t}r'e ich (the / writ small) and t}re du (the intimateform of you). Once the l and t}ne thou are restored as conversa-tional partners, what becomes clear is that they share thesame soul. So what Stefan George is getting at, according toGadamer, is that soul is a universal, a holistic thing that wecan get back to if we overcome the subjectiobject dichotomycharacteristic of the modern period.

It pays to pause for just a moment to capture the meaningof this thought. The German terms for "you" are a familiarand communal du and a distant and societal Sie. In these twowords, Gemeinschaft, or community, is set against Gesell-schaft, or society. Gadamer, following this line of reasoning,then makes an artificial distinction between the ich and theIch that corresponds to this other distinction. He then assignsto the poetry of Stefan George the demand for a return frommodern societal formalization-the artificial relationshipbetween the Sie and the lch-to a real conversation betweenthe du and the ich. What Gadamer drew from George wasprecisely the same impetus that led Nietzsche, Natorp, andFriedlánder to seek to return from the positivism of Alter-tumswissenschaft to the real revolutionary possibilities ofHumboldtian classical philology, t}lie B ildungs tradition.

For Gadamer what was important was the sound, not thesight, of George's poetry, and if I understand Gadamer cor-rectly here, what is being emphasized is the mythologicalquality of George's words. "Myth," says Gadamer, "is some-thing that one must listen to lhórenf and in respect to whichone cannot do justice except as a hearer [ein Horchenderl andaB one who obeys fgehorchendl." Every German speaker inGadamer's audience would have heard the play of words inthis sentence and would have understood that George's andGadamer's reason for rediscovering the importance of thesound of language had to do with the lost wholeness of the


word. Gadamer repeats this thought in different form a fewpages later. He argues that in poetry, " . language is notonly a bearer of meaning, so that one takes from it somethinglike a piece of information. It is rather also that into which oneenters and dwells." Language can, Gadamer notes, be like aritual. With ritual nothing is taken note of, but one is simplytaken in by the poetry of it. Gadamer criticizes Protestantswho claim that the saying of the rosary by Catholics is mind-less because the words are simply mumbled without being un-derstood. His point is that there is nothing to know, that whatis foremost in the rosary is the ritual itself, and it is for thatreason that it endures. "The word," Gadamer concludes, "isnot a mere bearer of meaning."

Thoughts like these were essential to the members of theStefan George Circle. Their theory of language always empha-sized that language did not express anything outside of it. Atits best, language was an expression of nothing more than theplay of words in the language, and one therefore had to.refocusone's awareness of wordplay in distinction to the presupposedfeelings, emotions, or thoughts that language was supposedlyexpressing. Let me note once again something that Gadameris not mentioning in his 1983 lecture. The thought that lan-guage does not express anything outside itself is basic to thereinterpretation of Plato as a Dichter rather than a philoso-pher. The thought sounds absurd on the face of it, but all itmeans is that Plato does not have a doctrine of ideas that heexpresses in his language. All he has is the wordilay of his di-alogues, and a right understanding of Plato the Dichter canonly be gained by listening to these dialogues. As Gadamerlearned from Natorp, it is the Platonic myths that really countin Plato, and these are not ideas.

Finally in the lecture on Stefan George, Gadamer turns toPlato and acknowledges the influence of the Stefan GeorgeCircle on the modern German reception of the great Greekthinkers. He mentions Hildebrandt and Friedemann, and henotes also the influence of thinkers influenced by StefanGeorge who published their Plato books in the 1920s,


specifically Friedlánder, Singer, and Reinhardt. Gadamer inthe 1983 paper manages all of these acknowledgments underthe rubric of what he calls The New Plato Picture, and he thengoes on to identify what was essential to this picture.

The new Plato picture has to do with what actually happens

in the didactic conversations that take place between socrates

and his interlocutors, and this happening must be understood

if one is to come to the correct understanding (dos rechte Ver'sttindnis) of Plato. What happens is a revelation of the innerrelationship between that which is thought and that whichone is. In Gadamer's words: "socratic-Platonic dialogue-logicis constructed on the basis of a doric harmony between Logos

and0rgon." Gadamer explains this as follows: Not everyone is

capable of every insight, and therefore someone who simplyrepeats a true proposition without realizing it reveals his lackof insight insofar as he cannot defend the proposition. "There-

upon rests Socratic dialogue: it is a test not only of proposi-

tions but also of souls." Clearly, the thought Gadamer is here

returning to and further elaborating is that ofthe real possi-

bility of conversation between the du and t}:,Le ich' What he

drew from the academic Georgians was this emphasis, and ofcourse what is being emphasized is Bildung in the form of an

integral relationship between the knowledge and the soul'

Knowledge cannot be separated out from spirit, as is done by

those who hold that Plato had a doctrine of ideas that is ex-

pressed in his language. What I am and what I know are inte-grally related.

This then is the new Plato picture.It represents the dissolu-

tion of a positivistically conceived monological thinker who

expresses a doctrine of ideas into a holistic or synchronicallyconceived dialogical thinker who records in wordplay the

conversation between the restored. ich and the counterpoised

dz. This is the picture that feeds into Gadamer's habilitationthesis, so nicely called Platos dialektische Ethih. Gadamer's

thesis, stated in his very first sentence, is very simple. He does

not mean to argue that Plato's ethics are dialectical He ratherwill argue that Plato's dialectics are ethical. He means' we can


now say, that it is in conversation between the restored ichand the du that we reattain the ethical life. There are no eth-ical principles outside the realm of language that language ex-presses. Rather, the ethical life is always already within thedialectical play of language. This is the new Plato picture. 3

The Initial Challengeto

Alt e r tu rn s w i s s e n s c haft

The Germany and the Central Europe of Gadamer's youthwere perceived by its more sensitive observers to be somethinglike an inscription, or what Gadamer calls a writing culture.Kafka as well as Dostoyevski (who was very popular in pre-

war Germany), Musil, and Thomas and Heinrich Mann de-

scribe typical Central European scenes in which characterstalk like written books. The underground man (who is actu-ally accused of sounding like a book when he speaks), Kafka's"K," Musil's man-without-qualities, and Aschenbach fromThomas Mann's Death in Venice, as well as Diederich Hess-

ling from Heinrich Mann's Der Untertan, are rigid characterswho reveal in their hard and precise speech the frozen qualityof their intellectual lives. The inner self they reveal in speech

is not really lively. Indeed, in all of the mentioned cases, theinner self is not different at all from the outer self' The innereelf is rather a product of socially established values.


If intellectual culture was this way, so too was the CentralEuropean state and the political culture that sustained it inthe years before World War I. Indeed, in all of the authorsmentioned above, the state is always hovering in the back-ground, as a kind ofpresence that takes final shape in the in-dividual character of an inspector or bureaucrat or middle-level official of some type. The pre-World War Central Euro-pean state had rapidly evolved from its absolutist beginningsinto a huge bureaucracy of functionaries who expressed them-selves in written directives, proclamations, declarations,rules, and complex and simple signs hung on post offrce wallsand railroad stations throughout Central Europe. Similarly(because it was nothing more than the outer level of the Cen-tral European state), the academic world placed no less deci-sive an emphasis on published writing. The German univer-sity of the time, where professors were paid staté employeeswith a strong allegiance to the state, clearly favored the publi-cist and had no place for a thinker who could not keep pacewith the dominant written academic culture. Such a writingculture rapidly came to be seen as an iron cage from which, forwriters like Kafka and academics like Buber, there was noescape.

After the shock of defeat in World War I and the catastropheof 1918, the thought was bound to occur not merely to isolatedintellectuals like the young Heidegger but to artists like KurtSchwitters and even students like Karl Lówith and Hans-Georg Gadamer that they lived in a world stood upside down.The natural, preferred, and more humane order of things wasone in which human beings "dwell" in speahing cultures. Thisis not to say that there would be no writing but rather thatwriting was not the primordial human activity. Speaking wasprimordial, and the order of the day was to retrieve it.

In the minds of the first visionaries of a speaking culture,the domination of writing had to be broken. Schwitters didthis in very literal fashion by breaking words, trolley tickets,and public proclamations in half. His Merz art is named forthe second half of the German word Kommerz. Heidegger at-

The Initial Challenge to Altertumswissenschaft 55

tempted to break the established framework of established ac-

ademic writing by means of an unorthodox writing style. Buteven before he wrote Being andTirne,with its spoken style, hemade his reputation as a teacher by means of word-of-mouthand on the basis of what he spoke in the lecture hall. Freudwrote immense amounts, but there was no question that a mi-croscopic speahing culture involving patient and analyst wasabsolutely basic to his effort to establish the new science ofpsychoanalysis. Stefan George for his part placed decisive em-phasis on the spokenpoem, and hence his readings rather thanhis writings were the decisive moments of his life. Indeed,when the Georgians wrote, it was with a new calligraphy thatdeprivileged the German noun and emphasized the easy flowof uncapitalized words. All of these artists, writers, and think-ers represented the primordial mood of Weimar Germany. Intheir worli, they were keyed to breaking down the writing cal-ture and thereby freeing up the powers of the spoken word.

The shift is nowhere better illustrated than in the reinter-pretation of Dostoyevski that took shape in the Weimar period.In 1923 Otto Kaus published Dostojewski und sein Schicksaland argued that Dostoyevski's novels were basically dialog-ical and hence not traceable back to a monological point ofview.' Kaus thus fully anticipated the argument of MikhailBakhtin, but what makes Kaus especially interesting is thathe explained why Dostoyevski's works were dialogical interms of a social framework that was in transition from a tra-ditional form to a modern, specifically urban format in whichcharacters with different monological points of view werebrought together. In other words, what Kaus shows is thatvalues depend upon a monological social framework. With thebreakdown of that framework, or rather with the breakdownof traditional society, a real dialogue ensues, and the oftenhidden subject ofthis dialogue are social values.

What I am trying to sketch here is a very different sort ofbackground to the kind of classical philology Gadamer wouldundertake. I am not describing anything so sharply defined as

a paradigm shift in the German intellectual community. I

&r


am rather describing a mood, or better, a set of attitudes thatwere, if anything, all the more powerful as determinants pre-cisely because they were not sharply etched. What I am sug-gesting is that the defeat of Germany in World War I broughtabout a mood shift, and this mood shift was bound to lead to areevaluation of the nineteenth-century German appropriationof Greece. Sigfried Kaehler's reinterpretation of Humboldt isas much a part of this mood shift as is Kaus's novel interpreta-tion of Dostoyevski, and it reminds us that this mood shift hada direct bearing on German political thinking. The Weimarperiod could hardly avoid a mood shift away from the "east-ern" liberalism of Hegel, with its emphasis on the state, to amore "western" type of liberalism, with a decisive emphasisplaced on the autonomy of the creative, "speaking" individualand a new found desire to place limits on the institutionsof "written" culture, above all the state. Gadamer did notsimply plunge into this specific context with a full-blown bodyof thinking about modernization, but he did enter it in appro-priate fashion by framing his first published professionalthoughts in terms of the fashionable conflict between writingand speaking cultures.

II

There are few better ways to begin a German academic careerthan by picking the right quarrel with a respected and estab-lished scholar. If the young Dozent is lucky, the great scholarwill respond, and the Dozent will suddenly find himself thrustinto the coveted academic limelight. The unknown Wilamo-witz began his career in 1871 with just such an attack onNietzsche, and the young Kurt Hildebrandt, his with a 1910attack on the then fully established Wilamowitz.In 1927 itwas Gadamer's turn, and he chose in his first paper to launchand carry out a polite and respectful but nonetheless incisive


attack on Wilamowitz's successor in the Berlin chair, WernerJaeger.

Unlike the earlier career beginnings of Wilamowitz andHildebrandt, there was no biting, personal sarcasm to Gada-mer's piece, and so consequently he did not generate the per-sonal counterattack that inevitably follows when oversizedacademic egos are bruised by upstarts. In this respect, Gada-mer's first publication was a failure, but in another, moreimportant respect it was a success. It presented a subtle andsurprising argument to the effect that Jaeger did not under-stand the nature of language and its impact on philosophy.

In the next two sections I shall be analyzing this first publi-cation. It is a 1927 piece called in German, "Der aristotelschePROTREPTIKOS und die entwicklungsgeschichtliche Be-trachtung der aristotelischen Ethik."2 Loosely translated, thetitle would read, "Aristotle's PROTREPTICOS and theDevelopmental-Historical Mode of Looking at Aristotle's Eth-ics." The quarrel is over an obscure and early Aristoteliantext, more specifically, how that text relates to Aristotle's twoother and more famous texts on ethics: the Eudemian Ethicsund the Nicomathean Ethics.In the context of this rarified ac-tdemic question, Gadamer was able to develop his firstthoughts on language in its relation to culture.

In his 1923 book called Aristotle, Jaeger had argued thatt,here was an internal logic to Aristotle's philosophical think-ing which, if used as a standard of measurement, would allowl,he philologist to date Aristotle's texts on ethics.3 Jaeger ar-gued that Aristotle was initially a Platonic thinker and thathts ProtrepúiÉos demonstrated this because it adhered to thelflatonic doctrine of ideas and closely resembled the late Pla-tr¡nic text called t}lLe Philebos.o The mature Aristotle was rep-rosented by the Nichomachean Ethics, and this text estab-li¡rhed the science of ethics because it articulated concepts thatwore fully related to practical worldly activity. Now betweenlhr¡se two Aristotelian texts came the Eudemian Ethics, and.laeger argued that he could locate this text with certainty be-(:nuse of its level of conceptual development. It was not so far


away from the Platonic doctrine of ideas as the NichomacheanEthics,but it was not so close as the Protreptihos'

Gadamer's quarrel was not so much with Jaeger's philolog-ical achievement as with his grasp of Platonic philosophy.To argue, as Jaeger did, that the Protreptikos of Aristotle isclosely related to the Philebos of Plato is correct as far as itgoes, but to argue that both correlate because they are cen-

tered on the Platonic doctrine of ideas, as that formulation isconventionally understood in philosophical circles, is to makea questionable move in respect to Platonic thinking' To as-

cribe a doctrine of ideas to Plato was Jaeger's way of projectinga modern and established German academic convention on

Plato, and Gadamer would not participate in this' But howwas Gadamer to demonstrate that his own position, which stillfollowed Natorp's, was more plausible than Jaeger's?

The title of Gadamer's most famous book, Truth andMethod, seems to suggest a fundamental distinction. Gadamerhas sometimes declared that it does not suggest this, thattruthisin no inevitable conflict with method. What Gadamer'sfirst publication suggests is that the distinction between truthand, method is not basic but is rather derived from a logicallyprior distinction between a speaking and a writing culture. Atleast with the concept of method, this is expressly the case inGadamer's first publication, for a writing culture needs a

method to get at its fixed universal inscribed truths. A speak-

ing culture, in contrast, claims no prior truths. That, indeed, isprecisely why it is a speaking culture. Implicitly, truth for it issomething to be created in dialogue. So what this first writingsuggests is that a distinction between speaking and writingcultures is basic to Gadamer's work. Let me now try to betterlocate this distinction in reference to the actual argument ofGadamer's first academic publication.

According to Gadamer, the "meaning-context" (Sachzu-

sammenhang) of classical Greece was one in which practicalthinking as well as theoretical thinking was a mode of being ofNous, the divine spark that is still in human beings.6 This is adifficult thought, so it helps to put it more plainly' Nn¿s means


mind, and specific forms of thinking like practical thinking ortheoretical thinking are expressions of mind. Together, theseforms of mind describe the meaning-context of classicalGreece. That is to say, we think in order to produce meaning.Thinking has to have a purpose. The fact that we do it at all,the fact that we are always thinking, the fact that thinking isalways troubled-these self-evident facts of thinking stronglysuggest that meaning for human beings is not prescribed. Forordinary animals, still in the state of nature, meaning is in-scribed and hence prescribed. In a word, meaning is written.Itis prior to action, and hence action does not require mind. Itcan be done, as we say, instinctively. But this is not the casefor the human animal.

It is in this context of ascribing to man a divine capacity toreason that Plato's supposed doctrine of ideas must be set. ThePlatonic doctrine of ideas is only, according to Gadamer, a". . . special philosophical foundation" of what was everywherethe case in a "speahing civilízation."6 So right at the outset ofhis argument against Jaeger, we find Gadamer denying thatPlato has a conventional doctrine of ideas; all that Plato isclaiming is that man can reason, and this is equivalent to theclaim that man can speak intelligently, and the reason forspeaking intelligently is that normative answers, values, arenot written into our souls or our genes.

Earlier I argued that the distinction between a writing cul-ture and a speahing culture was helpful in understanding thequality of life in Central Europe both before and after the war.Now the point can be sharpened. The same distinction is help-l'ul for understanding philosophy in general, or German phi-krsophizing in the 1920s, or Platonic philosophy in particular.l'hilosophy in a writing culture will tend to privilege t};.e an-¡t¡r:r rather than the question. It will presuppose an answert,hat has been given-for example, a set of ideas that predatehuman beings-and then it will offer a method for uncoveringrrr revealing or discovering the answer. Philosophy in a speak-irrg culture, in contrast, privileges the question rather thanl,lro answer. The Ten Commandments, for example, are writ-


ten answers to forgotten or repressed questions, and they func-tion as foundations to a writing culture, one that is quite liter-ally based on the written book. Similarly, the laws of Solon arewritten answers to live problems which acted out social ques-tions, and they worked to establish a writing culture, one thatpresumably developed a method for passing from generationto generation the meaning of Solon's laws.

There is no end to the examples of writing cultures. For ex-ample, American civilization with its emphasis on a writtenconstitution. The problem is to find good examples of speakingcultures. Classical Greece, at least Gadamer's construction ofit, is one of these. Like Hannah Arendt's vision of workers'councils, the classical polis of the early Gadamer's imagina-tion is a speaking culture. It privileges the question because itis aware, at however subconscious a level, of its situatedness,which is nothing more than a different way of saying that thepolrs had an awareness that it did not possess definitive an-swers to the most troubling problems of human relations. Thevision here is Heideggerian, except that, as Gadamer noted in1983, he had the vision even before he met Heidegger.T Man isa finite animal who does not have the kind of inscribed an-swers that instincts represent in animals. Man must ratherthink what he is doing.

It is in the context of a speaking civilization that Plato'sPhilebos and Aristotle's Protreptikos have to be understood, ifthey are to be understood at all. Plato's text is a dialogue, andhence as a piece of "writing," it is as close as it can be to speak-ing. Similarly, Aristotle's Protreptikos is a kind of sermon, andhence it too is a piece of writing that is much closer to speak-ing than are Aristotle's other texts. Because both writings areclose to speaking, Gadamer argues, they do not employ termewhose meanings have been fixed for the sake of attaining sci-entific knowledge. By this I take Gadamer to mean that "writ-ings" like the Aristotelian Protreptikos arc designed by theirauthors to make their listeners reason. A protrepti,tos-andI mean the term in a generic sense-has to be interpreted.There is no other way to make it meaningful. This shift in the


locus of meaning thus throws the burden of intention on thehearer. If a protreptihos, any protreptikos, means anything atall, its final meaning will be an understanding arrived at as aconsequence ofthe dialectical interplay ofspeaker and hearer.

By raising the issue of language in his first writing, Gad-amer inadvertently raises a question about the locus ofmeaning. He does this in the 1920s, precisely the same periodin which Mikhail Bakhtin was raising the same kind of ques-tion about Dostoyevski's poetics, and Gadamer's claims arevery similar to those of Bakhtin. Dostoyevski's characters,claims Bakhtin, are indeterminate and hence independent oftheir author. They work out their characters in Dostoyevski'snovels, and hence they determine the meaning of the novels atleast as much as the author does. Now Gadamer is doing some-l,hing similar with Plato's dialogues and with Aristotle's Proú-reptihos. He is saying that they do not have fixed answers, de-[ermined by the author. They rather raise questions, andhence they provoke the hearer (or the reader) to answer thequestion for himself or herself, and this reader response iswhat brings the situation-better, the situatedness of thenovel-into play. Meaning, in any case, is not author deter-rnined. It is rather determined by the reader, and since everyreader is differently situated, emphasis is finally on the dia-logue between reader and text.

ln effect, Gadamer is arguing against the tendency of Ger-man Altertumswissenschaft to accumulate a body of facts andt:nll that "Greece." He is enlivening the project by remindingun that the authors of classical texts were real human beingswith real social problems. Every author no doubt to someoxtent determines a text to have a fixed meaning, but thatmoaning reflects the historical circumstances in which the au-l,hor constructed the text. Since these circumstances change,l,hon so too must meaning change, and indeed change shouldroflect changing historical circumstances. Every reader, or lis-t,onor, is thus a kind of author (or authority), reflecting his orhor own particular circumstances and hence reconstructingnronning to fit those circumstances. Of course there is a degree


of relativism here, but it is usually much less than is made

out.The conventional response to this historicization of meaning

is to deny that the original author was subject to historical cir-cumstances. This amounts to a privileging of the original au-

thor, and of course it cannot be done for every author. Thusthere is unlikely to be much dispute over the character of themeaning intended by Mark Thain or by Friedrich Nietzsche,for they were admittedly influenced by their historical circum-stances. They claim to be witnesses to the follies of their times.But insofar as the author or authors claim access to an ahis-torical truth-and by this I mean a truth that will not change

with time-a real contest will ensue' The Bible is subject toprecisely this kind of contest insofar as it is claimed that God

is the original author. Reader-response critics will make everyeffort to demonstrate that each page of the Bible is character-ized by errors, inconsistencies, and other indications ofits his-torical rather than divine origins.s This is a necessary argu-ment if the locus of authority is to shift from the author to thereader of the Bible. Opponents may admit these inconsisten-cies, but they will insist there is still a divine truth to be foundin the Bible, prior to any and all readings of the text. This di-vine truth will not change with time.

The Platonic writings are surrounded by this type of contro'versy. Insofar as the ideas which Plato speaks of are said to be

objective, they are necessarily ahistorical, and even thoughPlato the person was in history, his writings have to be treatedas expressions of something else. Plato is accorded roughly thesame treatment as a traditionalist Christian would accord toMatthew, Mark, Luke, or John. It is only the rare critic whowill claim that Plato, sometimes at least, has no privilegeddoctrine of ideas. It is much more likely that a well-trainedmodern reader, coming across a text by Plato that obviouslyhas no doctrine of ideas, will claim either that the text is notby Plato or that it is by an immature Plato or an aged or de'crepit Plato. The Parmenides, indeed was treated in precisely

this fashion in the established German academic world. Every

The Initial Challenge to Altertumswissensehaft 63

philological indicator said that the text was by Plato, but be-

cause it did not have a doctrine ofideas at its center, Platonicauthorship was denied by no less a classical philologist thanOtto Apelt.'g

Insofar as the claim is made that Plato has no doctrine ofideas, then the claimant is compelled to redeem what he has

r*taked out by demonstrating that Plato's language is irreduc-ibly incomplete, that it is not articulating an answer but israther raising a question. One way to do this is to argue thatl,he language being used is that of a speaking culture, for axpeaking language is speaking to someone other than the au-ühor and, as such, it invites the response that will complete thethought. Gadamer, writing ínL927, was not in fact making anoxplicit claim about the absence of a doctrine of ideas. But he

was making one of the possible arguments to support such aclaim, and this being the case, we are on fair grounds in con-

cluding that Gadamer was making his first move in the direc-l,ion of establishing an undoctrinaire Plato.

There was obvious political significance to the kind of im-

¡rlicit claim Gadamer was staking out in his frrst piece. In the(lermany of the 1920s, Jaeger could be read as supporting theostablished authorities, that is to say, state functionaries, pro-

lirssors, and the classical authors of texts. There were no sur-

¡rrises in this position. Gadamer, in contrast, was supportingl,he authority of nonestablished "authorities," namely, read-crs, listeners, and by implication students and lay persons.

,lueger was much closer to the position carved out by Alter-lu.mswissenschaftIer in the nineteenth century, Gadamerlnuch closer to the position of the first generation of amateur

¡rhilologists, readers like Hólderlin and Humboldt. Gadamer's( lroece was a speaking culture because it was designed torttise questions, not provide answers. Put differently, Greece

w¡ts classical because it had no answers. Its questions ratherl,hr¡n its answers are its enduring classical elements. All oft,lris indicated that Gadamer was at the very outset of his aca-

domic career part of a move away from the state-oriented lib-ernlinm of Germany'g nineteenth century and toward the more


western, individualistic liberalism that Germany would onlyfully subscribe to after 1945.

ru

It seems unreasonable to expect that Gadamer would introduceone of the main themes of Truth and Method as early as hisfirst writing. But this is precisely what he did, and althoughhis comments are brief and specifically directed to the immedi-ate task of comecting Jaeger's conception of Platonic phi-losophy, all the key points of Gadamer's later argument aretouched upon. That is to say, Gadamer introduces the theme ofmethod, ascribes to it a fetish for exactnessl0 characteristic ofthe modern desire to attain certain truth, and then goes on toargue that the truth Plato sought was to be attained by mix-ture (of speaker and listener) rather than by measured appli-cation of exact ideas.l' Gadamer's point is to establish thatthere is truth of sorts outside the certain methods of the sci-ences, and this of course is one of the themes that is at the cen-ter of Truth and Method.

In his L927 paper, Gadamer began his argument by claim-ing that it was awkward at best to seek a doctrine of method(Methodenlehre) in any protreptic writing, but that this wasprecisely what Jaeger wanted to do. Jaeger held, Gadamerclaimed, that in the Protreptikos of Aristotle, a certain validitywas still accorded to the old Platonic ideal of a mathematicallyexact method. By method, Gadamer meant a procedure origin-ating in the presupposition that the Ideas could be applied ex-actly, without interpretation, to worldly reality. Jaeger wasdoing this in order to set a beginning point for his own devel-opmental history. He would then go on to show how Aristotledrew away from this methodologically oriented Plato to be-come the flexible thinker of the Nicomachean Ethics.

Gadamer of course disagreed. In opposition, he argued thatthe Plato of the Philebos, which as a late Platonic text is

The Initial Challenge tn Altertumswissenschaft 65

roughly contemporary with Aristotle's Protreptikos, was itselfalready drawing away from the classically formulated doc-

trine of ideas of the Phaidon. But Plato did so not by abandon-

ing the ideal of a methodical reconstruction of the realm ofBecoming in terms of the realm of Being but rather in terms ofa different concept which, as already noted, Gadamer callsmix,ing. "In this manner," Gadamer notes, "the later Platosought to reconcile the motif of exactness (which was givenwith the primacy accorded to Being in the ideas) with the ac-

tual impurity of human reality."'2Aside from the obvious mixing of the thinking of the speak-

er and the listener, what further meaning does the concept ofmixing have, and what is its philosophical justification? "Theaim of the entire [Platonic] effort," Gadamer argued, "is tolimit the claim of phronesis [on the one hand] and hedone

lon the other handl on the well-being of actual human exis-tence."l3 If we extrapolate this reasoning, then Gadamer'siustification of mixing is simple: It records the recognition thatman is not simply a thinking being (phronesis) but is also apleasure-seeking animal (hedone).In other words, man has atouch of the divine, but only a touch. Plato, supposedly an ide-alist, turns out to be very much a realist if one pays attentionto the theme of hedonism that runs through Plato's writings.

Gadamer was well placed to make just such a recognition in-sofar as lnis L922 doctoral dissertation had traced the theme ofdesire through Plato's writings.la T}lLe 1922 dissertation was astandard exercise in which one theme-Lust, ot desire-wasxelected and traced through the entirely of Plato's writings.'lhis was a typical and well-established model for doing doc-

toral dissertations, and in choosing to follow it, the youthful(ladamer was staying to a safe course for gaining a doctorate.When asked in 1986 what his opinion of his doctorate was,(ladamer reflected briefly and then told the following story.l"te had asked his present wife to read it and give her opinion,nnd she had told him that if he submitted such a dissertationtoday, it would have a difficult time getting accepted. It ishnrd to quarrel with this judgment.


Gadamer drew no daring conclusions from his Lg22 doctoraldissertation, but by 1927 he was obviously ready to harvest amajor conclusion about Plato. The constant preoccupationwith Lust demonstrated that Plato was a realist as well as anidealist, and a problem of Plato scholarship was how to recon-cile these two seemingly conflicting threads. Put differently,because Plato was both idealist and realist, it was inappropri-ately one-sided for a Plato scholar to attempt to see Plato asapplying the Ideas in an exact mathematical sense to thehuman condition. It would be more appropriate to mix whatis ideal with what is natural and real. Gadamer puts thisthought in these words: "Only in a mixture need one seek theGood in this life."'5 By emphasizing mixture, Gadamer hadalready inL927 committed himself to a dialectical approach toPlato. Mixture is a synthesis that can be reduced to thesis andantithesis, and Plato, conceived this way, is a thinker whoseethical conclusions can be reduced to a tense relation to the di-vine longing for exact standards and the worldly desire forbodily pleasure.

Jaeger, needless to say, was not a dialectical thinker. Hecaricatured Plato by conceiving him as an idealist and there-by determined that his subsequent thinking about Aristotlewould be equally undialectical, or one-sided. If Plato was anIdealist, then Aristotle must be a Realist, etc., etc. This kind ofthinking is attractive because it simplifies everything andlays it out on a single plane. The mind then need only remem-ber the fundamental principles and follow up by extrapolatingtheir consequences. From such a monological point of view,any dialogical approach looks needlessly complicated, evencontradictory. Gadamer's approach to Plato is thus fundamen-tally different from Jaeger's, and it follows with some consis-tency that if Jaeger's caricature of Plato is mistaken, so too ishis caricature of Aristotle. That is to say, if Gadamer's Platois a dialogical thinker, then it should not be surprising thatGadamer's Aristotle will also be this.

From this kind of reasoning about the Philebos, Gadamercan then move on to another conclusion, this time about the


character of the language in Aristotle's Protrepti&os. If Jaegerwere to succeed in proving that Aristotle had adopted the Pla-tonic theory of ideas in the Protreptikos, then Jaeger wouldnecessarily have to show that Aristotle had adopted a termi-nological vocabulary. The word to emphasize here is terminol-ogy, andits meaning is that a word only has a single meaning.Hence a word like abstinence rernaíns a mere word as long as

it is subject to different interpretations. But as soon as it isgiven a precise, quantifiable, and hence measurable meaning,then it becomes a term. This is what Gadamer means. It is apoint Gadamer had already made in reference to speaking cul-tures, and now he repeats it in specific reference to Aristotle:

There is nothing to be said of a unified scientific termi-nology in these arguments ' We rather see the tertnino-logical composition changing from argument to argu-ment [Gadamer's italics]. And moreover' what isrevealed in all these arguments is the effort, so far as itis possible, not to burden lthe overall argument] withterminology."

This argument about language correlates with the argu-ment made earlier about thinking. That is to say, monologicall,hinking reveals itself in terminological language. Each word,or term, will have a clear and distinct meaning that is deter-mined by clear and distinct principles. In contrast, a dialogicallbundation in thinking will provide circumstantial evidence ofil,self by means of the absence of a terminological language.Words will have more than one meaning, and often these willlrc in contradiction with each other, thereby reflecting the dia-

krgical basis of thinking. Furthermore, if a thinker is at allnware of his own dialogical basis, then he can begin a playwith words. He can, like Plato, engage in irony and say al-ttrost anything with tongue in cheek. Or he can, like the early(lrtdamer, restore the meaning of contradiction to philosophy

lry recognizing that every claim (Anspruch) is necessarily

nrldroBsed to someone and seeks to elicit a contradiction or


counterclaim(Widerspruch) as a necessary step on the way toagreement. By claiming that Aristotle did not have a termino-logical language, Gadamer was in effect claiming that Aris-totle was not the kind of thinker Jaeger would like to havehim be. He was, in sum, a dialogical thinker.

What then finally is Gadamer to make of the AristotelianProtreptikos? His conclusion is stated very tentatively, yet hasall the earmarkings of a significant finding. In a footnote in anearly section of this paper, Gadamer suggests that the Pro-treptikos might in fact be dialogue.'7 Now this is a remarkablesuggestion considering the conventional wisdom that holdsthat all of Aristotle's dialogues have been lost, but it is none-theless a suggestion that flows smoothly from Gadamer's rea-soning. That is to say, if the classical Greek age was a speak-ing rather than a writing age, then it was not given to thecreation of a terminological language. Since Aristotle wasnot creating a terminological language in the Protreptikos, itfollows-at least it is suggested-that Aristotle's Protreptikoswas a piece of written speech. For Gadamer this means that itincorporated dialogue, and in his footnote he attempts to teaseout the dialogue, or at least to suggest that it can be heard out.What he then "hears" is Aristotle making an effort to reviewthe opinions of other thinkers, and this suggests to him thatwhat he is reading is not a monologue but rather a smoothed-over dialogue with other thinkers. In sum, what Gadamer isdoing here is demonstrating as best he can that writing oñg-inates in speaking, better: that language has a certainorder of development, and it is the opposite of what Jaegerpresupposes.

Since Gadamer had already made this same point in a dif-ferent way in the same paper, it is worth thematizing as thecentral conclusion of this 1927 publication. Language is notinitially writing which is then laboriously deconstructed intospeaking.If this were the case, then we would have to admitthat rationality was an iron cage from which we were alwaystrying to escape. In a scientifrc and bureaucratized civiliza-tion, such as the Central European of Gadamer's youth, it of-


ten did seem that uriting precedes speaking,but for Gadamerthis is not the primordial truth. If it were, then truth couldonly be attained by method, and any falling short of method-ical exactness into speaking could only be justified as a pleas-ant interlude, a playful relaxing, before getting back to theserious business of leading an exact life. But this is not Gada-mer's point.

The really interesting argument of this small quarrel withWerner Jaeger over the primordial structure of the disciplineof philology is that speaking precedes writing, indeed, thatwriting is either a shorthand way of speaking or it is a fallenform of speaking. When writing is the former, then we cantease out of it an original dialectical structure, as Gadamersuggestively did with the Aristotelian Protreptifros. Whenwriting is the latter, when it is a fallen form of speech, then atleast in the field of ethics it threatens to become a form of mor-alizing. Gadamer does not argue this in his first piece, but hewill later on, and hence it is not entirely inappropriate to an-ticipate it here.

Why should this particular order be the case? Why, that is,should speahing precede writing? If I understand the Gadamerof L927 correctly, the answer is not mysterious or profound.Speaking and writing are metaphors or synonyms for basic at-titudes we take up toward life. A speaking culture privilegesthe quest, and it does so because the quest retains a primordialawareness of the coming and going of Being, or rather its inde-terminate character. Transferred to the formality of philoso-phy, the privileging of the quest takes shape as a privilegingof the question. The magic of the question for philosophy, itsthaumatic quality, lies precisely in its indeterminacy. Thensecond, if we transfer this attitude to the social plane, what werecognize is that the characterization "speaking culture" is aHynonym for the culture of Weimar Germany for the simplebut compelling reason that values were everywhere in ques-tion in Weimar Germany. It was a culture in crisis, which is toray that it did not have answers but did have a critical atti-üude toward the answers of the German past.


It would not be at all surprising if a young philologist inWeimar Germany made a simple transfer of the basic attitudewe are describing and applied it to classical Greece. ClassicalGreece was a culture in crisis, according to Gadamer, which isto say that it was a culture torn between speaking and writ-ing. It was still a speaking culture, but it was threatened withbecoming a writing culture. It was threatened, that is, with aloss of understanding of its own values, above all the value ofthe endless conversation that is at the base ofany real speak-ing culture. This was the sickness, with dialectical philosophythe proffered cure.

With this kind of conclusion we are finally in a good positionto turn to Gadamer's habilitation thesis. Its title is curiousand is perhaps misleading. Easy to translate, it is best ren-dered into English as Plato's Dialectical Ethics.'8 Yet whenwe read the first paragraph of Gadamer's Preface, we are takenaback. He claims that his intent is not to show that Plato'sethics are dialectical but rather that Plato's dialectics them-selves are ethical.

IV

Plato dialektische Ethik begins by taking up tlre argumentleft off at the end of the L927 Jaeger piece. In fact, Jaeger ismentioned in the first paragraph of the Introduction, whereGadamer notes that it was Jaeger's interpretation of Aristotlethat made a reconsideration of Plato's Philebos imperative.leI would like to argue, however, that the real beginning of Gad-amer's habilitation thesis and of his early conception of philo-sophical hermeneutics is to be found a few pages later, buriedin a footnote, and furthermore a footnote that was altered inthe 1983 edition of Gadamer's collected works. The 1983 foot-note reads:

The Initial Challenge to Altertunrswissenschaft 7l

The method consciousness of this restriction deter-mines throughout the scientific claim of the Nico_machean Ethics. An interpretation of the NicomacheanEthics in respect to the problem of its scientific charac-ter is sorely called for. [In pursuit of this problem Ieventually drew philosophical consequences which ledto my work with hermeneutics. (Truth and Method andthe continuation of the philosophical hermeneutic in re_spect to this "practical philosophy', are to be found involumes one and two of the Collected Works)l.to

The words in square brackets were added in 19g3, or therea-bouts. They suggest, correctly in my opinion, that Gadamer'slife work began with the 1928 reflections on rnethod. conscious-ness to which Gadamer was referring in the footnote. whatthe 1983 footnote does not tell, however, is that Gadamer wasfully aware of the significance of this beginning fifty years ear-lier, in 1928/31, when he wrote the original footnote. In fact,the 1983 footnote slightly changes the wording of the originalr928l3]- footnote and thereby makes the 1983 bracketed com-ment look like an afterthought. The words ,,. is sorelyneeded" Ikite Notl do not appear in the 1gB1 edition.In their place are the words ". . . the author hopes to presentat a later time" Ihoffi der Verf. spciter uorzulegenl.2r NowGadamer did not mean later in the book he was then writing.He would not have used the word'.hope,'but rather would sim-ply have referred to the later pages. Gadamer means later inhis career. What Gadamer was doing was simply thinkingaloud. He was planning his agenda and laying out what hewould do once he had gotten through this academic require-ment of producing and publishing a habilitation thesis.

All of this becomes something more than a mere coincidenceif we refer back to the text and ask what Gadamer was talkingabout when he introduced the term method. consciousness inL927.He does so at the point of making a set of remarks aboutthe nature of concepts and conceptualization and how Aris-


totle, in moving toward a mode of philosophizing dependent

upon concepts, had drawn a curtain between himself and Plato

which made, or would make, the Aristotelian interpretation of

the Platonic doctrine of ideas so problematic'

Theargumentthatfollowsrunsthus:Gadamer'sclaimisthat Arislotle was the creator of a phiiosophical science of

ethics for the compellingly simple reason that he had indeed

moved away frorn Idealism and toward Realism. That is to

say, the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics privileged a pu-

taiive Reality in a way that Plato, ever the dialectician' never

did, and hence Aristotle determined himself to a different

moáe of analysis. In specific reference to ethics, Gadamer puts

this thoughi as follows: Plato's determinations about ethics

arc priuaiilre, meaning that they are deduced from thinkingaboút the Idea of the Good. Aristotle's in contrast are positiue,

meaning that they are drawn from a logic immanent to real

human relations'22The key to understanding Aristotle's method consciousness

lies in Gadamer's term'restriction' (Einschrtinkung), for what

Gadamer claims is that a Realist ethics is compelled to draw

the logic of its concepts from the actual way human beings re-

late ii the world, .nd thir can result in nothing more than "a

certain assistance" (eine gewisse Hilfe) to living life''z3 This is

a restriction of what Plato had intended. Positivism, for this is

what Aristotle is introducing, is committed to a preexisting

realm of factual relations. Precisely because this world is pre-

supposed to be real-that is to say, composed of established

facts which would exist whether or not we observed them-itcan be conceptualized, the concepts can be systematically or-

ganized, and the real world can be assisted, perhaps even reor-

áered, according to these concepts. The consciousness that pre-

supposes this real world is a method consciousness'

i ir,tr" hesitated to introduce the terms ldealism and Real-

ism for the simple reason that they can easily be taken in the

crude sense urrd thor serve to derail Gadamer's main line of

argument. The terms gerve to create a gulf between Plato and

Aristotle which is impossible to bridge and thus go against

The Initial Challenge to Altertumswissenschaft 7g

Gadamer's main intent. It is best to construe Gadamer to bemaking a mild rather than a strong claim about Aristotle'sRealism. I believe this position is borne out by Gadamer's useof the term restriction. Plato and Aristotle are not really op-posed to each other as Idealist and Realist. It is rather thatAristotle has lapsed into a one-sided position, one that repre-sents a "restriction" on the whole of ethical possibilities.

I thus think that Gadamer's treatment of Aristotle at theoutset of his habilitation thesis represents a refinement of hisearlier basic distinction between a speaking and a writing cal-ture. Reality, whatever it is-a painting by Rembrandt, aplay by Shakespeare, or even a dialogue by Plato-is presup-posed to be unambiguous. It thereby lends itself to the con-struction of a terminological language, or rather a languageühat is unambiguous in its meaning because it can be referredback to that certain Reality. Such a terminological languagelends itself to writing, because writing has a definitive andfinal quality to it. Or if it is spoken, a terminological languagetends toward the monologue of a lecture: There is no need tohave dialogue because the meanings of things are fixed.

But then how can we be certain that Gadamer is makingonly a mild claim about Aristotle and is rejecting the strongclaim about the Realist/Idealist break between Plato and Aris-totle? Quite simply because Gadamer says as much. He doesnot even bother to reject the crude arguments to the effect thatAristotle was a scoundrel setting up a strawman or that Aris-t,r¡tle was so stupid as to have misunderstood Plato. Gadamer'st:lnim is that Aristotle did not misunderstand Plato at all:"'l'hat Aristotle misunderstood Plato is a piece of informationrightly taken to be an impossibility . . ." Gadamer says in hishnbilitation thesis.2a Why, then, is Aristotle so wrong aboutl'luto? Gadamer's answer is that the riddle is a symptomaticexpression of the problem of philosophy itself. Plato's lan-guage possesses a three-dimensional reality, and Aristotle therenlint, committed as he is to conceptualizing the real world, istrompelled to treat philosophy itself the same way. This makesAri¡totle into the founder of scientific, academic philosophy,


and Plato into what might be called apre-Aristotelian or, bet-

ter still, a proto-philosopher. It is a position Gadamer wouldlike to get his Plato into.

A conceptualization of Plato, Gadamer goes on to argue inhis habilitation thesis, can produce nothing more than a flat-tening of Plato, such as is attained when real life is photo-graphed, put on slides and then represented by beingprojectedonto a wall.25 By this means' Aristotle achieves an unambiv-alent and reproduceable philosophical text-this is the condi-

tion for the emergence of a scientific, academic philosophy-but the price Aristotle pays for this achievement is high. It isto be calculated in terms of a lost Platonic multidimension-ality. Whether Aristotle is aware that his method conscious-

ness is perhaps playing a trick on him is a question not consid-ered by Gadamer. His claim is rather that the Plato Aristotlecriticizes is a conceptualized Plato, and this is already not thePlato of the dialogues.

If I read Gadamer correctly at this key point, he is suggest-ing that the origins of Aristotle's Realism lie in the characterof language. Aristotle had discovered that language need notbe used in a three-dimensional poetic fashion. Language couldrather be flattened out and used for analytical purposes. Aflattened-out language would take an undismembered realityand lay it out in sequential fashion, with each word standingfor a concept and each concept standing for a facet or piece ofthe reality. What Aristotle forgot was that a conceptualizedreality and reality itself were not the same thing' Ironically,Plato, with his three-dimensional language, was always closerto putative reality than the analytical Aristotle, but Plato wae

only this by remaining with a poetic language of action. Thismuch Aristotle failed to grasp: When he turned his analyticaltalents on Plato, all he could do was flatten out Plato and de'scribe him as a one-sided ldealist.

I can perhaps best get across what Gadamer means by tak'ing an example from elsewhere. A work of art of any kind,whether it be a painting, a play by Shakespeare, or a dialogue


by Plato, presents itself to the mind as a three-dimensional re-ality. It speaks, as it were, the language of action, and we readthis language not only by looking at it but also by hearing itand if need be by feeling the words in our mouths. This is whywe tell our students to read poems aloud and to press homecertain words. We are only saying that poems are works of artand are to be taken as sensual wholes, for it is only at thatlevel that we gain the immediacy of the experience they areconveying.

But then along comes the art historian, and what he or sheoffers is a secondhand, conceptualized version of the work ofart. The emphasis is now on seeing and seeing alone, and thelanguage is different. We read books and see slides, and if wehear lectures, then we are not hearing the work of art but arerather hearing about the work of art. We are being told howwe should see. We are hearing about the flattened and sequen-[ially arranged work of art. We are hearing a lecture, not thework of art. We leave the lecture with the illusion that weknow the work, perhaps without ever having experienced itlirsthand.

This distinction between art and the art historian is not farlcmoved from what Gadamer is trying to say of the relation-xhip between Plato and Aristotle. Gadamer does not arguel,lrat Aristotle was mistaken in his concept of Plato. He rathernrgues that "all scientific philosophy is Aristotelianism, inso-lirr as it is the labor of the concept. . . ."26 Moreover, Gadamert'ontinues, Platonic philosophy can only be philosophically in-l,r'rpreted by taking up the method consciousness of Aristotle.'l'l¡t-, immediate experience that Plato's dialogues have more tol,ltom than Aristotelian method consciousness conveys is anex¡rcrience which, because of its immediacy, does not let itselflx' communicated. Thus Gadamer:

It stands on the margin of all Plato interpretation, justas experience stands on the margin of all conceptualunalysis lBegriffsarbeitl, namely the insight that all at-


tempts to signify succeed only by making things unam-bivalent and one-dimensional, and insofar as this activ-ity opens things up, it also distorts things.27

One is then compelled to ask how Gadamer is going to pro-ceed to come to terms with Plato's thinking if analysis, thetreating of Plato's thinking in terms of concepts, is so inescap-able. Surprisingly, Gadamer admits that he necessarily mustfollow the same path:

Just as all reflection on the relationship of the living tothe concept can itself only be conceived in terms of theconcept, similarly the Platonic existence of philosophycan only be conceived insofar as the scholar himself re-peats a projection into the conceptual such as Aristotleundertook.2s

That Gadamer means what he says, at least for the long firstchapter of his habilitation thesis, is indicated several pages

later when he introduces the concept of play, only to immedi'ately disavow it:

. . . insofar as it lGadamer's interpretation] takes seri'ously that about which Plato is here speaking, it alsotakes what he is saying more seriously than Plato in-tended it to be taken. The ironic suspense, not only atthose points where everyone senses the irony but alsothroughout, that determines the character of the Pla'tonic writings, will be omitted completely from . . . lthieinterpretationl. . . . It adopts the attitude of a humor'less listener to one of those conversations thought tobe worthwhile only for the sake of the report one canmake of it, land Gadamer does this] because he seeks tomake clear the means by which Plato plays his seriouagame.2e

This adequately describes how Gadamer will treat Plato inthe first chapter of hie habilitation thesis, but it does not ads'


<¡uately convey how he wilr transcend Aristotre's humorressmethod consciousness to attain a truth about plato that norrnalysis of Plato can convey. This is the truth of what Gada_nrer called the immediate experience of plato,

""d ;; ,¡rf" ft¡rke Gadamer to mean the unmediated, multidimensiánal ex-¡rcrience of the Platonic writings.

V

l)lato does not have a doctrine of ethics (or ethical ideas), Gad-t¡mer claims, and this makes him into a socratic (for soárateshud no doctrines of any type) and the undoctrinaire Socratesirto Plato's Gestalt.zo plato's task was to take the unliterarybut obviously exemplary existence of socrates and gi"" ii rit-rrrary expression. Hence, if I may draw the conclusián clearlyxuggested by Gadamer,s claims, the platonic dialogues aretrrthing less than a series of Gestart-biographies of tñe figurec¡rlled the "Platonic socrates." More significanfly, plato is-notnr'lly a philosopher at all for Gadamer, at least in the conven_I i'nal sense of the term. He is rather a literary c"eato", arrdl¡ix creations will be, found in the shape his languag" tak"".when Gadamer finally addresses the tlree-dimeisiolnal exis-l'.nce of the Platonic socrates, he reverts fully to the ideals ofllro Stefan George Circle.

What follows from this? That is to say, how does one goalxrut writing a book called platos dialektische Ethik if one.rrrceiveg Plato as a Gestalt-biographer? The first thing to .roteir ¡rrrhaps obvious: The analysis will not be of plato ione but¡'nl'h.or of the figure of socrates that is being formed. well andgrxd, but this raises a specific probrem of classical scholarship.( ltt. must be clear about which socrates one is concerned. ob-vl,urly, as Gadamer noted in his lgg3 retter to Richard Bern-rl'ein, his interest was in the figure of the pratonic so"rot"",hul, what this entailed needs to be established.sr


First of all, a distinction must be made between t}l.e histori-cal Socrates and the literary Socrates, a basic distinction onwhich every classical philologist would agree.'2 The histori-cal Socrates is made up of what few undisputed facts we haveon Socrates. We know that he lived, philosophized, and was

tried and executed for his activities. Perhaps these facts can be

elaborated a little, but not much. The point is that we knowvery little that is certain about the historical Socrates. Alter'tumswissenschaft, or more generally positivism, thus failswhen it comes to the challenge of constructing an adequate

Socrates. We are of necessity forced back onto a literary fabri-cation of Socrates.

The literary Socrates is derived from three sources: Xeno-phon, Aristophanes, and Plato. The Xenophonic Socrates is arather routine character who could not conceivably have been

much of an inspiration to anyone, except perhaps the laterStoics. Not surprisingly like his creator Xenophon, the Xeno'phonic Socrates was a teacher of young men who held forth inpolished speeches but was never very profound' The Aristo'phanic Socrates, in contrast, is a much more lively characterbut is hardly admirable and is best recalled as something of afool. He gives ridiculous speeches from ridiculous positions

and is anything but profound. He would be as much consignedto oblivion in the modern world as the Socrates of Xenophon isif it were not for Nietzsche, who fully and vindictively resur-rected Aristophanes' Socrates.

So finally we come to the third literary version of Socrates,and this is the Platonic Socrates. This figure is familiar andperhaps hackneyed. He is profoundly philosophical, sharplyquestioning, and obviously a moral paradigm. But my point isnot to suggest that the Platonic Socrates is an unambiguousfigure. On the contrary, because Plato is the deeply ironicwriter he is, choices must still be made about what the Pla'tonic Socrates is. Plato, that is, distinguishes himself fromXenophon and Aristophanes by virtue of the fact that his Soc'

rates is not such a clear-cut case. Is, for example, the PlatonicSocrates really so ignorant as he makes himself out to be, or ia

The Initial Challenge to Altertu¡nswissenschaft 79

not the otherwise despised Thrasymachus correct when hetells Socrates to come off it in the first book of t}:e Republic?Would that the answer were clear from Plato's text, but it isnot. We like to pretend that Plato thought only pleasantthoughts about his Socrates, but this too is not so clear. Andalso, why is it that Socrates plays such a commanding role inthe early dialogues but then gradually disappears? Was Platogetting old, or was he losing interest, or had Socrates servedhis purpose and been laid to rest, in much the same mannerthat Conan Doyle laid Sherlock Holmes to rest? We have noclear answers to these questions.

The point here is fundamental to the understanding of her-meneutics. In the case of the Platonic Socrates, there is no waywe can locate meaning in the intention of the author. The Pla-tonic Socrates is irreducibly ambivalent. Hence, the focus onthe creation of meaning shifts fully to the reader. Could Platohave intended this shift in the responsibility for creatingmeaning? We shall never know. But we can be certain that atk:ast in this one case, there is no escaping the conclusion thatl,he construction of the Platonic Socrates is reader-determined.llence, the chief value of the Platonic Socrates is that, wheneonstructed by an interpreter, the construction then serveslrs a standard of immanent criticism not of Plato but of theinterpreter.

Therefore, the way Gadamer constructs the Platonic Socra-t,os will tell us a lot more about Gadamer than it will aboutI'lato. It will only tell us about Plato if Gadamer writes a dis-t,inctly academic book and airs all sides of the conventionalr¡uestions. But Gadamer has already told us in so many wordst,hat Plato wrote a Gestalt-biography of Socrates, and this sig-t¡uls Gadamer's belief that Plato made choices and settled for acortain kind of Socrates, specifically, a heroic figure. It islrr¡rd to believe that the twenty-seven-year-old Gadamer, wellvorsed as he then was in Plato scholarship, did not realize thatIt wus his own choice that he was describing. He had no inten-t,ion of writing yet one more academic rehash of the PlatonicHrrcrnten. His intent was to write his own GestalÍ-biography.


Hence we are now looking at the early Gadamer in the mirrorof the choices he made about his Platonic Socrates. The firstchoice Gadamer made was perhaps the most controversial ofhis book. He claimed that the existence-ideal of the PlatonicSocrates was not at all that of a philosopher who stood asidefrom political questions. The existence.ideal of Socrates wasfully political, and hence the writings of Plato must be under-stood finally in political terms.33 The significance of thischoice was sketched out earlier: It sets Plato outside theframework of analytic, academic philosophy. It is a choicewhich squares with Gadamer's earlier choice to accept the sig-nificance of Plato's three-dimensional language.

To back up this extraordinary claim, the young Gadamermade a move that had to be taken as provocative in 1927.Yetit was a move that had to be made if he were to support hisclaim about the Platonic Socrates being basically political.Gadamer fully accepted the authenticity of the Seuenth Letterof Plato.3n There is no point in going over the trivial philologi-cal arguments for and against the authenticity of this famousletter because they alone can never decide the question ofau-thenticity. The problem is philosophical rather than philologi-cal. And the philosophical problem in the Seuenth Letter isthat Plato says that he turned to philosophy for political rea-sons. Therefore, if we are to believe the Seuenth Letter, Platowas not really a philosopher. Plato was rather a politician, al-though perhaps it would be easier on twentieth-century earsto say that he was a would-be Founder of states. Philosophywas therefore the continuation of politics by other means. Nowregardless of the philological arguinents, such a claim is on itsface extraordinarily challenging to the vision of Plato as thepurest of philosophers.

Yet the authenticity of the Seuenth Letter can also be arguedon purely philosophical grounds: If Plato had no doctrine ofideas, if his ideas were merely starting points for conversa-tion, if he had no doctrine of ethics, if he was intent on usinglanguage to provoke public debate in a speaking culture, if hiswords did not have determinate meanings, then it followed

The Initial Challenge f"o Alterturnswissenschaft 81

logically from these several different perspectives that Platowas nothing other than a politician. Once again,theterm poli-tician may be troublesome, but what is meant by it is simplythat Plato fully accepts the situated quality of his own think-ing. He is not in the least otherworldly, seeking after eternaltruths, but is rather out to vindicate the world as it is and as itappears. At first glance, it seems as though Gadamer was tak-ing a risk in accepting the authenticity of the Seuenth Letter.Upon reflection it becomes clear that there was no risk at all.This was the only thing he could do. To not accept the authen-ticity of the Seuenth Letter would have been fully in contradic-tion with everything Gadamer had already staked out in hisfirst piece on Werner Jaeger.

The second choice that Gadamer made in reference to hisPlatonic Socrates was to accept the Socratic profession ofigno-rance, and this acceptance squares fully with the insistence onPlato's political origin.35 To view the matter in the opposedfashion, if the Platonic Socrates had claimed privileged knowl-edge, then he would have been no different from most if not allof his interlocutors. What distinguishes him politically andradicalizes him is the claim to have no privileged knowledge.This one move makes Socrates into a revolutionary, and it alsodistinguishes his kind of politics from the kind practiced in thecxisting Athenian state.

But let us be clear about what Gadamer's emphatic insis-tence on the Socratic profession of ignorance adds up to. It isubove all an indirect way of claiming that Plato had no doc-trine of ideas. That is to say, if Plato did have a doctrine ofobjective ideas, would not the Platonic Socrates have been axpokesman for those ideas? But the Platonic Socrates, accord-ing to Gadamer, only professes ignorance on ethical matters.lH this not a reflection back on his master, and does it not telluH something we already know about Gadamer, namely, thatho is party to that minority of academic philologians who dis-pute the claim of the German academic establishment aboutl'lato having a doctrine of ideas? What is exciting about Gada-mor at this point is that he ie not simply and flatly claiming

&


that Plato has no doctrine of ideas; he is rather constructingSocrates according to that radical claim. He is also con-

structing, or revealing, himself as a thinker who is opposed to

the notion that certain, fixed, prescribed knowledge is at thecenter ofphilosophy.

Let us now pass on to a third Gadamerian choice. It is diffi-cult to tell from the text of Gadamer's habilitation thesis whathe means by the term Athenian state.36 Narrowly, of course,

Gadamer must mean the state that condemned Socrates to

death, but it is much more interesting to construct the notionof the Athenian statebroadly and argue that Gadamer was re-ferring to all those conversational antagonists who claimedthey knew what the virtues were' In this respect, the failure ofthe Athenian state was a failure of self-consciousness, much

like the failure of self-consciousness of the Central Europeanstate of Gadamer's childhood. It, the Athenian state, did notrecognize that its knowledge was situated. Put differently, theAthenian political elite, precisely because it claimed to knowwhat the virtues were, was depoliticizíng itself and therebybringing about the cultural crisis of the Greek Enlighten-ment. The Platonic Socrates, in contrast, was the very model

of the statesman when he professed ignorance of the meaningof the virtues. Since they were situated truths, they simplycould not be known, except as prejudices characteristic of theAthenian state.

Because Socrates does recognize his situatedness, he quali-fies, according to Gadamer, as the statesman for Plato. Here

then, not in the doctrine of ideas, is to be found the origin ofPlatonic political philosophy.3? But the claim that the Pla-tonic Socrates is the real statesman of Athens has another,more local significance. It sets the stage for an important sub-

sequent publication of Gadamer called "Plato's EducationalState."38 The kernel of its idea is here laid out: Plato does notintend to reform the Athenian state but rather intends to startfrom scratch. This means that Socrates' project is to createnew men who will be capable of acting as founders of states'Their souls must be shaped, and this means that they must be


educated in philosophy. This entire project will be aimed atachieving an understanding of something we cannot know, be-ing situated beings. This is the ldea of the Good, and with thisidea, Gadamer introduces the central claim of his first bookand, arguably, his life's work.

Gadamer's Platonic Socrates provides the first reliableglimpse we have of Gadamer's own political thinking. He, likemany of his ccntemporaries, despairs of the existing state ofthings, although he makes no direct criticism of the Weimarstate. He thus migrates inwardly to a state that is above allcultivated, and first of all this means that it makes no brashknowledge claims that stand in the way of artistic creation.Gadamer's state is aKulturstaat, and specifically it is a speak-lng culture that stands over against the Central European re-ality of a writing culture. Gadamer's thinking resembles thatof Humboldt and Schiller in the 1790s, and equally it resem-bles the thinking of the Stefan George Circle. I am of coursestretching things by applying Gadamer's construction ofSocratic Athens to the Weimar of the 1920s, but I think thetransfer is justified by the nature of the Platonic Socrates. Gad-amer had to make choices, and they were bound to reflect thehistorical circumstances of his own time and profession. Hetoo was a situated being, and his situation was that of WeimarGermany.

In finishing up his Introductionto Platos dialektische Ethik,(ladamer finally adopted a method of interpretation appropri-ate to his grasp of Platonic philosophy. Negatively stated,(]adamer's 1928 method was not one of holding fast to Plato'sconceptual apparatus and building a unified system out ofhisteachings in order to then return to the individual dialogues¡rnd criticize their conclusions and arguments. Rather, the(ladamerian method is to also be under uay.It is to go alongwith the rhythm and sequence of the questions and thereforel,o be a questioner. Only under this presupposition is thererrnything of a doctrine in Plato. Gadamer goes on to argue onceugain that a terminologically fixed approach to Plato can yieldxhurp and impres¡¡ive renults, but they are not true to the


thinking they are investigating. Gadamer's Plato interpreta-tion would rather seek within the flexibility of Platonic lan-guage to work out the tendencies toward meaning that arein Plato, precisely the results that slip past the conceptualframework that Aristotle applies to Plato.

Gadamer then attempts to locate precisely what is differentabout his method: A conceptual framework such as Aristotle'swill miss that which may be most valuable because it will ex-plain only that which the restricted method is prepared toexplain. Other things it will take for granted as self-euident,which means that these things will not be explained. Theproblem with analytical philosophy, then, is that it inadver-tently priuileges the self-evident. Gadamer would privilegenothing. His interpretative method will seek to understandthat which claims to be understandable of itself l¿¿os sicávon selbst uersteht or das Selbstuersttindliche).t" That whichclaims to be understandable was not always so. It represents adifficult and lost way of understanding, one that has becomethe most primordial form of knowledge. Precisely what wetake most for granted has to be questioned most intensely be-cause it stands at the base ofour knowledge.

I hesitate to claim that what Gadamer is here identifying iswhat would later come to be called prejudices, yet if by theterm prejudices we understand forms of knowledge that areprivileged in the deepest sense and hence go untested, thenthat which claims to be understandable of itself is close to aprejudice. There are elements of knowledge of which we are ig-norant, which is to say that they are elements of the subcon-scious, and precisely because oftheir tendency to operate be-hind our backs, they have much more determining power overus than any conscious presupposition ofour knowledge. Theyare elements of factical Dasein insofar as they determine theconscious categories in terms of which we know whatever weclaim to know. It is these unconscious presuppositions thatGadamer's 1928 method was after.


VI

It is now possible to see why and how Gadamer's version of the"Platonic socrates" is a significant advance on Friedemann,s

^rgument of fourteen years earlier.'o Nietzsche had looked

rcornfully on Plato because he took him to be a dialecticait,hinker. There is no question that Nietzsche understood plato¡rs well as any classical philologist in nineteenth-century Ger-many' but there is reason to believe that Nietzsche's conceptof dialectics was colored by Hegel,s thinking, specifically bythe latter's figure of the master-slave relationship. As cittesl)eleuze has pointed out, Nietzsche rejected dialectics as arnode of thinking because he saw in it a model of the kind of( )hristian moralizing that he despised.al Hegel's paradig-rnatic master-slave relationship is for Nietzsche one that is de-l,ormined by the slave's point of view, not the master,s. It madex(!nse, according to Deleuze, for the slave to see himself asrnaster, but it made no sense at all for the master to see him-r*lf in the mirror image of the slave. This would lead to feel-ings of pity and the like, and these were not elements of a mas-l,or morality in Nietzsche's view.

lnsofar as Nietzsche saw the "platonic socrates" in theset,.rms, then he was bound to scorn him. And insofar as the con-r:rrpt of dialectics in Gadamer's habilitation thesis was drawnlhrm Hegel, then Gadamer's ',platonic Socrates', is a recon_rl,ruction of the character Nietzsche despised. But close ex-nmination of the Gadamerian discourse on language, as itrloveloped in his first article and in the Introductión tá the ha-Itllitation thesis, reveals that Gadamer's concept of d.ialecticslr really more a matter of free and unconstrained d,ialogue.( hrdamer writes in a superficial sense of circular relationshipsln which affirmations call forth negations, as, for u"u*piu,whon he notes that a claim (Spruch) calls forth a counterclaimlWkleruprucá). But these moments are seldom in the early(ladumer, Hie real argument is quite different.

ifI


Gadamer is striving to liberate speaking from writing, an ef-fort consistent with the intent to construct an overman whowill satisfy the Nietzschean requirement of being free. Such aSocrates does not see language as a method for decipheringpreexisting, objective ideas. This is Platonism in the worstsense of the term, and such Platonism is not politics. Gada-mer's "Platonic Socrates" is committed to dialogue as well asto politics, and this much enables us to arrive at a very prelim-inary sketch of Gadamer's concept of politics at the outset ofthis study of his early thinking. Politics is not a prescribed ac-tivity in which language is used as a method to get at the ob-jective truth. Politics is rather a completely unconstrained ac-tivity, appropriate for an overman, and conducted in a spokenlanguage that heroically professes ignorance of any prescribedtruth. Also, the recurrent concept of dialogue, if it means any-thing at all, means that politics is not an activity keyed to in'dividual heroism. It is an activity that demands a multiplicityof overmen, each willing to admit ignorance of a prescribedtruth, each willing to discourse until agreement is reached.However much I would like to call this political thinking themakings of a radical democratic theory, it is more a matter ofradical aristocratic theory. It is in any case not a radical mon-archical theory, and hence the conclusion that the philoso-pher must be king or the king a philosopher is inappropriate.It is more a matter of philosophers becoming overmen, or over-men philosophers.

The Gestaltof

Platonic Argument

Aller his Introduction, Gadamer begins pratos diarektischelNlhik wit}, a first chapter made up ofeight sections and run-Iting, in Volume 5 of the Gesammelte Werke, approximatelyrlxty pages.l This first chapter is entitled "on Fiatonic Dia-l.cl,ics" and contains an intensely developed theoreticalll'.mework. It describes, I believe, not simpl¡the best think-Ittg, that the young Gadamer could mustu" ut this stage of hislrutlding career but also a full-blown philosophical heimeneu-l ltrn and hence a foundation that would ."*" Gadamer for thero¡1, r¡f his long career as an academic philosopher. Each of theelght sections can be separately treated but finally all hang to-gel,hor and gain additional meaning from each other. rnitris'hnpüor,

I shall treat each section separately and then con-*lttd*.by pulling together the common stranás into an singrervorview of Gadamer's early thinking.

4


Gadamer begins with a reference to Werner Jaeger's devel-

opmental model but quickly sidesteps its positivistic charac'teristics to ask a more philosophical question. The problem isnot that Aristotle developed out of Plato and Plato in turnout of Socrates bat why.2 That is to say, the question' moresharply put, is why Aristotle's apodictic, which does not re'quire the agreement ofa conversation partner, develops out ofPlato's dialectic, which so manifestly proceeds on the basis ofconversational agreement.

Put slightly differently, the problem is as follows: Socratesengaged in dialogue, and this was a matter of conversationwith an Other whose agreement was in fact always needed tokeep the conversation going. Plato engaged in dialectic, whichis manifestly in agreement with Socratic dialogue as a type ofproceeding, only more refined. It too required the agreementof an Other, only the Other was now internalized' Aristotle,however, engaged in what is here called apodictic, whichmeans that Aristotle spoke from a foundation of certainty and

therefore did not require the agreement of a conversationpartner. How can this be, which is to say, how can somethingthat does not require agreement develop out of something thatrequires agreement?

The problem can be put yet another way to assure that ithas a distinctly contemporary edge. Aristotle appears to be

something of a foundationalist, by which I mean that he pre'supposes the existence ofan agreed-upon Reality which serveg

as a reference for his statements and gives them the certaintythat allows Aristotle to pass lightly over the need for conver'sational agreement. Plato, whose thinking is the main threadof this introduction, does not work this way. He, like Socrates,presupposes the need for agreement originating in the speech

of another. Therefore Plato proposes no foundation other thanthat of a shared willingness to reach agreement about funda'mentals. How can Aristotle, the Realist, be the product of thethinking of Plato, the dialectician?

In answering his own question, Gadamer reverte to one of'

the moet baeic themes of Heideggerian thinking, namely that

The Gestalt of Platonic Argument 89

of the situatedness of human beings. Indeed, in this first sec-tion, Gadamer claims that his interpretation is phenomen-ological and defines phenomenology as a retracing of humanknowledge back to its primordíal (ursprünglich) source in hu-man existence.3 More specifically, factical human existence isthe source of all sensory knowledge and, hence, the beginningof all philosophical reflection. In respect to Plato, this phenom-enological reduction provides an explanation of what dialecticis.

Classical Greek dialectics, according to Gadamer, origi-nated in the Eleatic philosophers' critique of sensory knowl-cdge. In tlrre Gorgias this kind of negative dialectic is a matterof putting forth what speaks for and what speaks against athing. Initially it looks like mere play, a back-and-forth gamewhich leads nowhere in particular. But in tt'e Parmenidesl)lato claimed that this was a very serious wordsgame, and inLhe Sophist, he went on to reveal that dialectic had a positivenide which justified it. In spite of the fact that one thing is de-monstrably different things to different people, Gadamer ar-gues, language (logos) continues to address it as one thing.'l'his demonstrates, according to Gadamer, the fact of reconcil-iution (Versttindig¿¿€t) through reason (also logos).n Things,whatever else they are, are determined by reason. They re-ccive their unifying certainty through a dialectical process oft,hinking in which antithetical positions are synthesized.

It might help to put this more simply: There are no objectiveideas behind things, recognizable as essences when we look atl thing. Therefore when I utter the word "tree" while point-ing at certain things made of wood with leaves on them, I am¡¡r¡t uttering a word which is identical with the essence of thel,hing I am pointing at. There are in "reality" (if I may use thisl,orm) many things, but reason sorts through the many to findl,ho one agreed-upon common strand that gives us our idea ofl,ho thing. Ideas are thus coeval with language, and hence con-vorsation aimed at reaching agreement about what wordsrn(tnn is an adequate way of representing what happens in theInind'e effort to come to terms, so to speak, with the flux of re-


ality. Once again we see that Plato does not have a doctrine ofideas expressed in his language, according to Gadamer. It israther the other way round: He has language (Iogos) whichworks to constitute ideas of reality.

To translate this line of thought into the terminologA ofcontemporary philosophy, Gadamer is arguing that theoryprecedes facts. There are no facts unless we are first given a

theoretical framework in which to recoglrize a faci, and thistheoretical framework is constructed dialectically throughlanguage. Theorizing, if I understand Gadamer correctly, is

the beginning of knowledge.u What we have prior to theoriz-ing is a kind of naive Realism (commonsense realism) whichfails to recognize how theoretical we always already are.

Therefore naive Realism takes facts for granted. The initialdestruction of this naive Realism in Eleatic criticism led to asustained effort to use language to construct more adequate

theories, and it is Plato's achievement to have discovered thepositive possibilities of this new use of language.

II

In the second section ofhis introductory chapter, called "Con'versation and Logos," Gadamer continues the line of argu-mentation initiated in the first section' There he had gone on

from a consideration of Plato to argue that science is a move'ment away from the flux of sensory knowledge toward techne

and finally theoria. He argued that both techne and theoriowere able to stabilize sensory impressions and find somethingpermanent which could be communicated. Now in this second

section Gadamer begins to make his case for conversation by

claiming that original speech is a common having to do withsomething.6 The argument parallels the earlier argument on

techne and theoria, but it is still worthwhile repeating in itsessentials. The only thing I want to ineist on at this point is


[hat the termoriginalnot be thought of in a diachronic senseas indicating a point distant in past time. A better term, onemore in accord with the thinking of the Stefan George Circle,would have been creative.

Original (or creative) speech is a matter of making some-l,hing apparent, which in turn is a matter of describing some-l,hing as something. Gadamer's first example is technological:'fo understand something as a hammer means to understandit as a tool for hammering. We understand it in its what-is-iL-for (wozu), an indirect reference on Gadamer's part tolleidegger's concept of Zuhtindenheit.T The point here is thatthe understanding of a thing we are not now acquainted withis contingent upon having a logically prior point of view: Welind ourselves in a workshop, we are presented with a thingnever before seen, and we come to understand it in terms ofwhat it does for us in the present context, in the situatedness,of'the workshop. Original speech is like this: It seeks to under-xtand things in terms of our interest, which is inseparablel'rom our situatedness in this contingent world.s

Yet there is a more basic form of speech which is free of¡rractical determination, and herein lies a deeper origin ofllu:oria. That is to say, the description of the hammer we re-vicwed above was situationally determined, and thereforel,he speech was not really all that original or creative. Hence(lndamer, here following Heidegger, wants to push on to ar¡rore basic form of speech, one that is not already theory-ladenlxrcause it is not practically situated. In making this move,(l¡rdamer introduces one of the better-known terms of his ma-l,trrc philosophy, namely that oÍ play. But in contrast to iso-lrttod exposition in Truth and Method, here it is put into a lan-guuge context-its own peculiar form of situatedness-thatlrolps us make sense of it.

l]etween tasks, in our moments of leisure-that is to say, inl,lto suspension of practical situatedness-we are able to askalx¡ut things for their own sake, and hence from the outsetour answers are not theoretically predetermined by practicalno¡¡d¡¡. If I am correct in following out Gadamer's argument at


this point, he is claiming that truly originol speech is a some-

what late arrival on the human scene. This is why I preferredto call it creatiue a few paragraphs ago. Original, or creative

speech, comes only after practical needs have been tended to.

It comes with leisure, for only at this point is man freed of thepressing situatedness of practical life. The character of thismodification, claims Gadamer, is indicated by an example,

namely ploy. Since Gadamer is here introducing a basic con'

cept of his philosophical hermeneutics, it is worth our while toquote him in full:

The character of this modification will become clearin a special form of relaxation, that of the game. It isessential to games that the players are 'there,' whichmeans that they let themselves be taken up by whatis expected in the game without bearing in mind thatthe game is not serious. This is the case even thoughthe game is for the purpose of recreation, that is, for thepurpose of a later activity' Existence for the sake of thething is therefore in playing actually neutral. It is notthe thing, however much it must be taken seriously,that constitutes the purpose of the game. It is rather themode of our being toward the thing, meaning that a

thing is the object of concern and effort without beingsomething which would be taken'seriously' as the ob-ject of such care. The object of the playful effort is some'

thing upon which nothing else depends: play itself isthe reason for being of the game.s

Gadamer then goes on to draw his first understanding ofconuersation from the model of the game. It is essential to realconversation that someone else be there, another player, and

it is also essential that the conversation not be determined by

an outside practical interest. Indeed, it is in the nature ofre-laxed conversation to want to be with someone else and towant to have that someone else, the Other, be a co-determi-nant of the course of the conversation. That is to say, every


conversation partner seeks the agreement of the Other. This,Gadamer claims, is in the nature of conversation, and surelycommon sense would tell us that he is correct in this: A talkbetween two persons in which one does not seek the agree-ment of the other is anything but a conversation. It lacks thevital element of play that is constantly to be seen in our effortsto get the Other to agree by nodding, by contributing his ex-perience, or even by disagreeing so that we know where hestands in respect to the final agreement that is sought. This isnot to say that agreement must occur for a conversation tohave taken place. We all have enough acrimony in conversa-tions to recognize that agreement ofben is the last thing pro-duced by conversation. Nonetheless, Gadamer seems on solidground in arguing that the quest for agreement is in the na-üure of conversation.

It pays to pause at this point and give some shape to theLerm conuersation. At times in his early writings, Gadamerclarifies his own meaning by using the adjective philosophicalbefore the term conuersation, and. what he means by this isthat the conversation is free of practical situatedness, or atleast as free as it can be. But more often than not, Gadamersimply uses the German term for conuersatio¿ without a quali-lying adjective, and it has to be understood that he is assum-ing the suspension of practical situatedness. Play, therefore,characterizes human relationships that are not under thepress of practical needs, and conversation is one form of thisplay.

Finally, the suspension of practical situatedness that is thecondition of the possibility of play should not be misunder-¡tood. The suspension does not amount to a denial of humanxituatedness itself but rather amounts to a denial (or satis-lirction) of the needs of the human body and the peculiar situ-¡ttedness imposed by those needs. In this respect, the termpractical is as ambivalent in German as it is in English. Onüho one hand, it refers to activities like labor or work whichnro determined by the needs of the body. On the other hand,tho term practical refors to activities like politics or philoso-


phy which have to free themselves from bodily determinationsin order to achieve their own being. A simple conversation or aphilosophical conversation in Gadamer's early writings is anactivity that has freed itself from practical bodily determina-tions in order to achieve its own free being. It ceases to takebodily needs seriously so that it can take itself seriously. AsPlato in the Parmenides notes, play is finally a very seriousthing.

Has Gadamer solved the problem with which he began?That is to say, has he shown why and how Aristotelian apodic-tic flows from Platonic dialectic? How can a mode of philosoph-ical proceeding that requires no agreement flow from one thatrequires agreement? Even without Gadamer's argumentation,we can provide the answer, simply by recalling what he said inhis 1927 piece on the AristotelianProtreptikos. Gadamer thenspeculated that the Aristotelian text called Protreptikos was adisguised dialogue. The same is now the case: Aristotelianapodictic is really disguised-or rather, assumed-Platonicdialectic. It is not so much that Aristotle's arguments requireno agreement. It is rather that the arguments proceed on thebasis of agreements already arrived at. In this way, Gadamerprovides a theory of philosophical development that is radi-cally different from that of Werner Jaeger. We do well at thispoint to recall why this is the case.

Jaeger argued that Aristotle abandoned Plato's Idealism fora form of Realism that was vastly superior. In providing adevelopmental explanation, Jaeger inadvertently created aproblem by inserting an epistemological break between Platoand Aristotle. Gadamer's solution does away with this breakby arguing that Aristotle's science presupposes and takesadvantage of the theoretical achievement of Plato. In otherwords, the Platonic dialogues are long, playful philosophicalconversations aimed at reaching agreements on moral terms.Precisely because Plato's dialogues succeed so well, Aristotleis able to presuppose them and go on to seemingly much moremonological and less playful argumentation of the N¿co-machean Ethics. Aristotle is indeed an Aristotelian, but Aris-


totelianism is inconceivable without the prior success ofPlatonism.

This exciting argument, central to Gadamer's book, as its

title indicates, can be restated in abstract but plain terms:

Thinking begins in the leisurely, playful activity of the con-

versation because in playful conversation, thinking is not pre-

determined by practical needs. In this experience of play, in-choate experience is tossed back and forth and agleement is

sought as to what it was that was experienced. This dialecticalquest for moral terms, if successful, results in agreements

which serve as the foundations for a subsequent form of argu-

mentation that, apparently, requires no further agreement of

a conversation partner. But it requires no further agreement

only because that agleement has already been gained. If thisargument can be accepted, then sense can be made of Gada-

mer's shorthand: not that Plato's ethics are dialectical butrather that Platonic dialectics are ethical. Ethics, as the cre-

ation by the free man of moral standards for this life, begins inthe free association of the imagination.

This argument can be restated as a description of thinkingitself. If I sit back and think about thinking, the first conclu-

sion I might reach is that thinking is a private affair and what

I then vocalize in public is a consequence of this private affair.The public sphere is thus an extension of the private sphere,

u..o"ding to this argument. But if I reflect just a moment

longer, it should occur to me that thinking itself, this seem-

ingly private affair, is a conversation I am having with myself,

u"álfl reflect on that internal conversation, I should quickly

recognize that all the arguments I make to myself are argu-

-"t 1. I have to varying degrees read or heard from someone

alse. Even reading, which at first seems so private, is really apublic affair. It is obviously a conversation with someone else,

Homeone not present, but nonetheless someone. Now according

to this argumentation, the public precedes the private, and in-

tloed the private activity of thinking is really not at all pri-

vate. Whát we call thinking is really internalized conversa-

tion, and like all conversation, requires the agreement of the


partners. It requires the agreement of me with myself, andthis is the most fundamental form of friendship.

The virtue of this argument in the young Gadamer's writ-ings is that it is not at all vague or half-baked. He may notdraw some of the conclusions I have drawn here, but he getsright to the essence of all these questions with his concept ofplny.For it is this concept that enables us to distinguish a realconversation from a pseudo-conversation. Also, by sketchingin the concept of play in opposition to the imperatives ofpractical, bodily needs, Gadamer gives us an absolutely pri-mary justification for leisure, education, theory, and a class ofpersons-apart from the working class-who will enjoy thesebenefits.

ru

In the third section, called "The Shared-World Motiv of Sub-stantiality," the mood of Gadamer's habilitation thesis shiftsdramatically. To this point, Gadamer has been writing aboutPlato, orienting his interpretations toward a dialogue theoryof Plato's writings, and establishing that science is not a theo-retical restatement of what is in fact the case but was ratheroriginally a conversation aimed at establishing the theorythat would in turn enable facts to be cognized in the first placeand then re-cognized. Now suddenly the focus shifts and be-comes contemporary. Gadamer now wants to analyze whatreally goes into conversation and consequently is willing todrop away the classical philosophical scaffolding and discussconversation as such.

Up to this point, Gadamer has used a somewhat mysteriousreference to the Other as an element in any conversation.roNow the Other begins to take shape as the ideal conversationpartner and hence takes on a vital importance. Gadamer nowgives vent to his own talents and gives this Other shape by


¡neans of a delightful juggling of his German terms. In doingso, Gadamer shows a keen appreciation of the power of word-

¡rlay." He introduces a game in which his wit shows hisrrwareness that words always have multiple meanings and

ühat the right word in the wrong context or vice versa can vir-t,ually compel the Other in a conversation to participate byrnaking the desirable adjustments. In this case, Gadamer isnot trying to be funny. He is rather trying to show that the keycomponents of conversation all have to do with language andspeech.

It is difficult and sometimes impossible to translate Gada-

mer's wordplay into English without losing its underlyingrnessage, so I shall install the German term immediately aftert,he English as soon as it appears' As already noted, the basic(lerman terms Gadamer uses relate to language and speech,

nnd they play off each other either because they rhyme or be-

cause they are nearly identical' Since Gadamer often uses thepronoun l to refer to the Other's conversation partner, I shalllbllow him in this too. But let me first list the words Gadamercmploys in his wordplay:

sprechenGesprtichansprechenwidersprechenAnspruchentsprechenstimmenzustimtnenübereinstimmenStimmung

(to speak)(conversation)(to address)(to contradict)(claim)(to conespond)(to voice, to agree)(to agree to)(to agree)(mood)

Now Gadamer: when the .I has a conversation, he is en-guging in a Gesprtich, tlrre literal meaning of which is "fromnpeech," a meaning which cannot be heard out of the English"conversation" but is clear in the German Ge-sprtich, íf weinnort a dash and pause at that point. It is also clear from


this term that the ^[ engaged in conversation will find himselfspeaking, since Gesprcich is derived from sprechen, w};;ichmeans "to speak." Now, in speaking conversationally, the .Iwill necessarily "address" himself to another. There is noother way to have a conversation except by addressing some-one.'The applicable German term here is ansprechen, meaningliterally "to speak to." Then, to complete our initial sketch,this conversation will only work if the other corresponds to the,[ in conversational ability, and the term for correspond in thissense of a balanced or equal ability is entsprechen, which liter-ally means to "speak from." The ideal of balance is an impor-tant one in Gadamer's theory of conversation, for without itnothing can be achieved.

What the.I seeks from the Other in conversation is "agree-ment," and the German term Gadamer uses is zustimmen,which literally translated means "to voice," the word forwhich is stimmen An "agreement" is a Zustimrnung, or a con-clusion to which one has "voiced" approval. Or alternatively,what is sought in conversation is Übereinstimnxung,which lit-erally means achieving "one voice above" the conversation. Italso suggests achieving a different "mood," the German termfor which is Stimmung. Therefore, agreement must be freelygiven, or otherwise it is incapable of achieving the new, highermood. Hence I must be willing to allow my conversation part-ner to contradict me, and here the German term is wider-sprechen, which literally means "to speak against." But thecontradiction should not be simply arbitrary. It rather takeson the form of a new argument, and hence it begins with aclaim, the German term for which is Anspruch, aterm whichderives from ansprechen, or "to speak to." At this point wecome full circle, for now the .I is being addressed and itsagreement is sought. The conversational process starts allover again, but the aim remains the same: to achieve the newand higher mood of shared agreement.

This is obviously a highly abstract description of what a con-versation is, and if we are to characterize it in a single word


appropriate to the thinking of the German 1920s, then thatword would, be Mitwelt.'2 ln translating the section title, Ihave deviated from the conventional translation of Mitwelt as"one's contemporaries" and translated this term literally as"shared-world," but it cannot be simply altered in this waywithout trying to grasp its significance. Above all, the termrefers to a social ideal, namely the ideal of community (Ge-

meinschaft) which has for so long fascinated Germans, and itstands opposed to the negative utopia ofsociety (Gesellschaft),

which represents the anomic, anarchic state that moderniza-tion had brought Germany to. These terms had been intro-duced into German academic discourse by Ferdinand Tónnies,the sociologist. In Gadamer's case, there is a considerablenarrowing from the normal use of the term Mitwelt. Gadameris not trying to identify the ideal community as such. He israther trying to identify the ideal philosophicol community,and this ofcourse is considerably less than the universal ideal.

The brief and playful discussion of the Other's characteris-tics as a conversation partner is a prelude to discussing themost basic corruption of the Mitwelt, the ideal philosophicalcommunity.'3 According to Gadamer, the fall from grace oc-

curs because speech always says more than it intends. That isto say, overt verbal speech is always accompanied by a lan-guage of gesture, and this may communicate an entirely dif-ferent message than the one intended. Normally, the lan-guage of gesture is more accurate in portraying one's self (as

opposed to what one is talking about) because it is involuntaryand hence, supposedly, more natural (and objective) thanspeech. Therefore the outcome of a conversation can be skewedone way or another by this underlying text. Ideally whatGadamer wants to identify is scientific speech, and hence heseeks to exclude the underlying text carried by the languageof gesture. He urges, insofar as it is possible, that there be adisregard (Absehen) from this subtext ofgesture, thereby pro-üocting the pure verbal argument from the dangers posed byflattery, muted hostility, or-as in the case of the not-so-


muted hostility of Thrasymachus in the first book of the .Re-

public-oltright fuming rage. The Platonic Socrates is clearlyable to disregard this subtext.

Gadamer next makes a move which widens the scope of thediscussion considerably.'a Until now, he has been talkingabout a conversation in the conventional sense of the term. Ifthe conversation is ideal, then the Other is not really an indi-vidual who will intrude himself into a conversation. He israther arguing against something, not against someone. Now

this kind of ideal Other-ideal because he is the embodimentof pure reason-can be replaced, and we should be clear as towhy this is the case. The individual who is expressing him-self-his hostility or his joy or whatever-is unique in thecontours of his personality and his argument. But the Otherwho is simply hearing and responding to an argument with acounterargument is doing something that any number ofother well-trained thinkers could do. For this reason' he can

be replaced or, as now becomes clear in Gadamer's presenta-

tion, displaced.What has been conversation in an external sense of the term

now becomes internalized, and this, as I have already indi-cated in the comments on Aristotle's apodictic, is what Gada-

mer calls thinking. That is to say, thinking is an internal con-

versation of the self with its Other. This is what I meant whenI said that the Other could be "displaced." It can be internal-ized. The function of the now-internalized Other is to corre-

spond to the /, to listen to the claims of the -I, to answer themwith agreement, if they are respectably argued, or with coun'terclaims if they are not. And to the extent that the 1is turnedinto the listener of the Other's counterclaims, he is turned intoa sort of "Other." The distinction between I and Other nowgradually begins to break down, and we become less awarethat thinking is originally a conversation. The two worlds,those of the I and the Other, now begin to become a teal Mit'uelr of thinking.

At this point, Gadamer takes the opportunity to argue hisown point against that of his friend and colleague Karl Lo-


with.ls In his own habilitation thesis, also done for Heideg-ger, Lówith had argued that thinki¿g was, to use Gadamer'swords, the "mere spinning out of solid presuppositions and amere logic of consequences. ." Gadamer noted that he

wanted to emphasize ttrat Lówith's analysis was "one-sided,"but in doing so Gadamer also said a good deal about his ownputatively two-sided analysis. Gadamer had wanted to focushis habilitation thesis on the idealistic notion of aMitwelt, andin doing so, he gave in slightly to the temptation to treat Ló-with's argument as a strawman. The title of Lówith's habilita-tion thesis may be loosely translated as "The Individual in theRoll of the Ideal Other" (Das Indiuiduum in der Rolle des

Mitmenschen), and it alone indicates that Lówith was deal-ing with the problem of how a Mitwelt could possibly emergefrom a society filled with bourgeois individuals. The extent towhich Lówith lost sight of the ideal of the Mitwelt and took updas Indiuiduurn as his own ideal is difficult to assess, butGadamer's criticism is based on his own judgment that this isin fact what happened.lo

IV

Yet Gadamer's criticism of Lowith was not gratuitous. A1-

though relegated to a footnote, it was part of an analysis that(ladamer had already initiated and which he intended to con-

tinue. This was the analysis of the corruption of conversationrund, we might now add, the corruption of thinking due to theintrusion of the subtext of the individual's personality. Thiscorruption, or Fall, as Gadamer puts it, now becomes Gada-mer's major theme.lt

By introducing the terrn Fall, Gadamer gives an indicationof the extent to which his own categories are neither modernnor claseical but rather biblical, and it might be appropriatehr¡re to briofly sketch the problem involved with biblical cate-

LO2 Political Hermeneutics

gories in a language philosophy. The notion of a FaIl entailsthe existence of a prior state in which language-or in Gada-mer's case, conversation-was perfect. In the Bible, the Ada-mic language spoken in the Garden of Eden is apparently per-fect because it was in exact correspondence with the animalsAdam names. In Gadamer, conversation was supposedly per-fect because the partners held to Socratic rules, such as theprofession of ignorance, etc. In the Bible, the Fall comes withthe introduction of sin, and it is seemingly irreversible. There-after everything is babel, so to speak. In Gadamer's case, theFall took place with the rise of sophism, and whether it was orwas not irreversible is a basic question of Platonic philosophyor, rightly understood, ofphilosophy itself.

Much of German philology in the nineteenth century wasstructured in and perhaps determined by biblical categories.That is to say, it was presupposed without argumentation thatthere was a single, perfect speech in the beginning. This sortof linguistics is most ofben associated with the work of FranzBopp and Jakob Grimm, following the breakthrough made bySir William Jones with his claims for Sanskrit as a mothertongue. The device of the language tree, for example, is a re-vealing rhetorical figure in that it presupposes a single trunkfrom which all present languages are the branches. The aim ofsuch an effort was often to establish human brotherhood or, asis suggested with the term Indo-Germanic, to refer to the lostoriginal mother language (before Sanskrit) and also to suggestGermany's cultural pedigree among the European countries.There were of course philologists who argued that differentlanguages or language families had purely local origins, anargument that would fit in very nicely with the Heideggerianclaim that we are restricted by our circumstances in time and,presumably, place. But these linguistic relativists, as theywould come to be called in the twentieth century, did not sit atcenter stage in the linguistics of the nineteenth century.

The use of the term Fall by Gadamer in his habilitationthesis is potentially very damaging to Gadamer's case, for itsuggests that he believes there rvas a Socratic Garden ofEden


in which all participants were in perfect agreement and thatsophist vanity got in the way to spoil this philosophical utopia.His vocabulary, it would seem, determines Gadamer toward akind of linguistic foundationalism, to finding his way back to ascene in which perfect conversations were carried out. Or toput this matter into a distinctly Germanic form, such a con-cept as that of a Fall inclines Gadamer to a vision in which aperfect Gemeinschaft, or interpretive community, came first,followed by the atomized Gesellschaft, or mass society, led bythe Sophists. Yet within Platonic philosophy, it was the Soph-ists who were there at the outset, and it was in respect to thisproblem and the modified babel of the first book of Plato's.Ee-public that Socrates set out to do battle.

In Gadamer's case, the term FalI need, not be taken seri-ously at all. If anything, it is a habitual form, perhaps adoptedunthinkingly, but signifying nothing insofar as the vocabu-lary is not accompanied by the expected argumentation. It cor-responds to a certain ambiguity in Plato-namely, the notionof recollection of a life, more ideal than that of the present,once lived-but this is not a possibility that Gadamer showsany inclination to take seriously. In Gadamer's presentation,the notion of a Fall is rather used to provide an umbrella overarguments that Plato was making in specific texts. In theSophist, t}ne Laws, and the Seuenth Letter, Plato characterizesthe substantive spirit of conversational understanding inidentical terms: Plato's concern, according to Gadamer, is withthe exclusion of phthonos, or jealousy, which designates theimbalance that results in the Other being either slightlyahead or slightly behind the I in conversation. In this argu-ment, Gadamer's reading of Plato strongly implies that therewas once a situation of aphthonos, a certain balance in whichthe conversation flowed smoothly because all sides were intel-loctually equal. This can only refer to a situation of professedignorance of putatively objective ethical principles, for only atxuch a point can true ethical activity take its beginning. Atruch a point, it is clear that dialectics themselves are ethicallucause nothing is being privileged. It ie the situation of priv-


ileged knowledge claims that Plato would exclude, and he

would exclude them in favor of a new beginning.The essence of sophism is to take advantage of and, indeed,

expand the situation dominated by phthonos- Not only do thesophists make privileged language claims, but it is their in-tent in conversation to silence the Other. Sophist monologue istherefore not simply an accidental characteristic of the waythe Sophists go about redeeming their knowledge claims. It israther a characteristic of an atomized social situation whichis anything but democratic. It is this "fallen" situation thatPlato would reverse. It is therefore that t}rle Platonic Socratesis created as the personification of the virtues of the perfectphilosophical conversation.

V

The Platonic Socrates is treated by Gadamer in the fifth sec-

tion, entitled "The Socratic Dialogue," as the personificationof the theory of dialectic.'8 That is to say, the Platonic Socra-

tes is treated as an ideal type, and what Gadamer is lookingfor in his effort to reconstitute the theory of dialogue is thepresuppositions that are given in the Socratic effort to reachan understanding with the Other with whom he is conversing.This personification is best explained by an example.

At issue in any Socratic dialogue is knowledge, and part ofthe problem of reconstituting a productive dialogue is beingclear about what this term intends. The opponents ofSocratespresuppose knowledge to be a positivistic thing, which is tosay that they presuppose a preexistent reality which can be

known piecemeal and finally, through the accumulation ofpiecemeal knowledge, as a whole. But this kind of positivisticknowledge, given that it exists, is irrelevant to what Socratesseeks. For positivistic knowledge is something that one mayhave or not have to live an ethical life, says Gadamer' I, for ex'


ample, may not have a knowledge of the techniques that gointo the production of steel, and I as an ethical being may getalong quite well without such knowledge. Or I may not have aknowledge of medicine but can get along without it as an eth-ical being. But there is one kind of knowledge which every-one-the steelworker and the physician as well as I-musthave in order to be considered human beings at all. This ismoral knowledge, and it is the knowledge Socrates seeks.

It belongs to the being of man, Gadamer argues, to under-stand what man is in his virtue. This is not to say that onemust at this very moment have a clear idea of what virtue is,but one must at least seek to find out what it is, else one is not¡r (civilized) man. Hence in the Protagorus it is argued that itis a form of madness to fail to claim that one is just, and simi-lar arguments may be found in the Charmenides and the(lorgias, according to Gadamer.le These fragmentary argu-ments then set the stage for the .imperative quality of the ar-gument pursued in the Republic. Hence at this point, in his in-terpretation of Plato, Gadamer is making a very strong claim,indeed, a universality claim: Man is an ethical being, and thismeans that he is a thinking and knowing being. A knowledgertnd understanding of the Good is therefore absolutely neces-sary to human being. In contrast, a knowledge of technologicalrealities and possibilities is not necessary (although it may bedesirable) to the leading of a distinctly human life. Man is not,by virtue of his nature as man, a technological being. But manis, by nature, an ethical being.

In other words, to be a citizen is to live with others in a com-munity, and one necessarily must claim that one is just if oneis a citizen. There is a certain ineducible necessity to this po-r¡ition and Gadamer finds it compelling. Even the criminal, ifhe is not out of his mind, will claim to have been acting accord-ing to some concept ofjustice. To claim that one is zzjust andmean it in more than a rebellious or irrational sense is con-cr¡ivable but highly unlikely. Even Adolf Hitler, presumably,lxrlieved he was doing the just thing when he exterminatedt,her Jows. It is thia that makes even Hitler still a human being


and, therefore, still an object of our moral judgment' But then

if even the most misled human being does claim to be just'

then he or his lawyer (one of them is a potential conversation

partner) must be prepared to answer the question of why such

and such an action was just. One must be prepared to argue' to

use language, and theréby to participate in the constitution of

ttle polls. So ttg.r"t Gadamer, and at this point it becomes

clear why politics is a philosophic necessity and why the Seu-

enth Letieimust be deemed authentic. Man is, by his peculiar

nature, the animal that speaks, and the reason man speaks is

to seek out of the variety of human action a common moral

denominator.This is the first presupposition of Socratic argumentation'

when put into practice, it leads immediately to a conclusion:

socrates' contemporaries-his Mitw elt in the conventional us-

age of that term-do not satisfy this requirement' Put more

bluntly, there is no such thing as a Platonic dialogue in which

the Oiher conversing with Socrates is able to adequately ar-

gue a moral philosophy. Everyone claims he is just, but no one

Ian explain why' What is argued is the ruling understanding

ofjustice, or to put this into Gadamer's later terminology, the

p"l5odi"", of ttre times are argued, and for the best of young

*"it, th""" prejudices are never adequate' They thus lead to

doubt, and áoubts about the justice of a specific action leads

finallí to doubt about justice itself. We have to be careful at

this point to be clear that Gadamer is not saying that an ac-

tion is unjust if it cannot be argued' He is rather saying that

evenajustactionwillbecounterproductivetothenormsofthe community if no one can argue why it is just in terms of a

shared concept of justice.Gadamer then continues by arguing that the resulting skep-

ticism, especially in young men, will lead to the rise of hedon'

ism as an.alternativl to the argumentatively inadequate but

still prevailing social norrns. The reason that hedonism is at'

tractive to young men is that it substitutes very nicely for ar'gument, maeea, it performs more efficiently than any philo'


sophical argument. The attraction of hedonism, according toGadamer, is that it offers an immediate rather than a medi-

ated relationship between everday action and the Good. Ourinitial reaction on consuming a piece of home-baked cake is tosay something like: "It tastes good." The reaction is unmedi-ated. It is beyond question, and this means that it is beyondargument. It is the directness and immediacy of hedonism as

opposed to the indirectness and constantly mediated philo-sophical pursuit of the (Idea of the) Good that give hedonism

its strongest appeal.The situation now created calls upon Socrates to engage in

questioning aimed at refutation of hedonism, and Gadamermakes clear that the purpose of the effort is to establish a

philosophical Mitwelt with the conversational Other.20 Thatis to say, Socratic questioning is aimed at demonstrating thereal moral ignorance of his knowing contemporary, therebycqualizing the two conversation partners, insofar as Socrates

has already professed moral ignorance. When viewed fromthis perspective, Socratic irony and other techniques ofrefuta-üion all appear as part of a grand scheme. They are aimed atdestroying the foundationalism of hedonism for the sake ofgiving birth to an authentic practical philosophy.

At this point Gadamer can introduce the ldea of the Good as

n central theme of Platonic philosophizing and, one might add,

¡rf'his own life's work in philosophy. Perhaps because this is an

introduction or, perhaps, because this is a habilitation thesis

which will have to be defended before a board of academic ex'rtminers, Gadamer is as precise as he will ever be in defininghis notion of the ldea of the Good andmaking it cohere with allt,hat he has said thus far. But before reviewing Gadamer's ar-gument, it should be stressed that he is not speaking of the(lood as such but rather of the ldea of the Good. Now given

what has been claimed in this book about the denial of a doc-

t,rine of objective ideas in Plato, we are in a good position tounticipate that the Idea of the Good is basically a claim, thepurposo of which is to give philosophical argument a starting


point. Gadamer, or rather Gadamer's Plato, does not know

what the Good is, but he most certainly has a prejudice about

it.The Idea of the Good, Gadamer argues' has the general

character of a what's-it-about (wozu) of human existence'2l

That is to say, it identifies a central defining purpose of dis-

tinctly human activity, a logos kath' auto or universal (moral)

concept, to use the language of Aristotle. In this understand-

ing of seH, not just my self but self in general, the human be-

ing is given a point of reference, a place to take a stand, an

opportunity to locate all actions not simply in terms of thepléttrrt" they give but also and more so in terms of what they

contribute to the attainment of the human being that does not

yet exist, first formulated in the Idea of the Good. This general

."rrr" of the Good is already apparent, according to Gadamer,

in the Protagorus, where Socrates is able to compel his con-

versation partner to make a unified presentation of his un-

derstanding of human existence.22 He will then use thisstandard, the Idea ofthe Good generally stated by socrates's

conversation partner, as the standard in his refutation oftheself-same opponent.

The Idea of the Good seeks its own authentic good, which is

the realization of the human self, and this can never be the

product of the immediate good provided by the pursuit of hedo-

,rirti" good. The reason is that the immediate good or pleasure

experienced by the senses can always turn into a subsequent

Bad, or painful experience. There is no stability in pleasure.

Therefore no real human self can be the consequence of it.Thus for Gadamer, the Idea of the Good emerges as a constant

possibility of realizing the self, admittedly ideal. Actions thatare pleasánt in their immediate consequences can be repressed,

those which are immediately painful-such as dying for one'e

country-can be willingly undertaken, if they can be justified

in terms of this Idea of the Good'The Idea of the Good thus finally offers a standard of mea'

sure thatenables ethics to become something of a science, and

it is on precisely this basis that it demonstrates that it is a real

"Ihe Gestalt of Platonic Argument 109

knowledge in place of the seeming knowledge of hedonism. Astandard of any type must be detached from the matter that itis measuring, but hedonism's standard of measure-immedi-ate gratification of the senses-is not at all detached from thecxperience it is measuring. The Platonic Idea of the Good, incontrast, is detached, and this enables it to act to scientificallymeasure life's pleasures and pains. So finally what is revealedin Gadamer's presentation is that there is no necessary con-flict between the Platonic Idea of the Good and the pleasuresof everyday existence. If anything, the opposite is the case.'lhe Idea of the Good, if properly used, can ensure the optimumpossible pleasure, something which hedonism, with its empha-sis on immediacy, can never do. But this, we should be clear, isthe pleasure of an ideal self brought to the highest degree ofuchievement possible.

No doubt Gadamer's initial approach to the topic of the Ideaof the Good is keyed to locating this term in Plato, but whatntands out in Gadamer's juxtapositioning of the Platonic Ideaof the Good with hedonism is a mode of thinking characteristicof'modern German romanticism. Key to the construction ofmodern German romanticism in the late eighteenth centurywas the sensationalism of Locke and the materialism of thel'rench Enlightenment, and the charge against them was notxr much that they were mistaken but that Lockean sensation-rtlism provides no focus to the human mind. Mind responds towhatever has an impact on it, and the result is a willy-nillyct¡nstruction of the human mind or, if nature has an orderlyntructure, a mind whose order is not its own but is rather thatol'a mysterious nature outside us.

Hedonism functions in much the same way. There is no logicl,o the pleasures presented by nature. They are, as we like toriny, very much a matter of taste, pulling human beings in onetlirection, then another, leading to nothing in particular be-yond the "good" of the moment. Culture thus remains at some-t,hing of a standstill, never getting beyond the tastes of the mo-mont. Within an organized society, control over tastes can begninod and held as long as one remains aware of some of the


natural laws of taste, such as the law of diminishing marginalreturns. One taste succeeds the next and, hence, fashion pre-

dominates.The German romantic response to this situation was to em-

phasize ttre setf. Better: It emphasized consciouEnesE as themode of gaining access to the self, and language as the means

of putting the self into an objectified position from which itcould be "read" by human beings. In other words, German ro-

manticism reinvented or rediscovered the classical formula forhumanism: It relearned how to provide a model, or Gestalt, ofhuman imitation. Concretely, the cutting edge of romantichumanism was seen to be the literary canon' or rather those

pieces of established literature that were to be recommended

to the attention ofyoung people because ofthe potential theyhad for shaping a desirable self.In this context, the strugglefor control of the Prussian and later German Gymnasium inthe nineteenth century was a struggle for the control of theGerman mind, ultimately a struggle for control of the German

self.The Romantics represented an Idea of the Good, of the ideal

self, and, concretely this took shape as a canon of classical

Greek literary texts. The members of the stefan George Circlebrought this romantic inclination to its sharpest formulationwith their creation of the genre of Gestalt-biographies. As op-

posed to this romantic tendency, an industrializing Germany

emphasized the alternative self of scientific man' Increas'ingly, as industrialization took shape and Germány appeared

irrevocably committed to that course' the tendency of univer'sities was to make physicists, chemists, biologists, and mathe'maticians out of young Germans. It was a different idea of theself, one that was given to the immediate pleasures of theproducts of industrial civilization. Gadamer's position was

clear. He represented the Romantic notion that the educa'

tional establishment needed a clear picture or Bild of thewhole self for it to proceed in an effective fashion.

At this point, Gadamer's consideration of the Platonic Soc'rates concludes, and so too does Gadamer's theoretical argu'

T}:'e Gestalt of Platonic Argument 111

ment. He is now ready to go on to other works of Plato andfinally to a detailed consideration of the Philebos, a text whichGadamer takes to be an exercise in the internalized dialogueof moral thinking. This is to say that the dialogue that takesplace in the Philebos is between the / and its possible Other,but in the case of the Philebos, they are one and the same per-non, namely, the Platonic Socrates.

VI

ln concluding on Gadamer's habilitation thesis, we do well tomake things less rather than more complicated. That is to say,up to now I have attempted to reconstruct and unpack Gada-mer's dense argumentation, and at this point we do well tonimplify that argumentation for the sake of understanding.Hence I will attempt to focus on one theme-namely, thecharacter of philosophy-and see how well this thread can bewoven through all that Gadamer has said.

Philosophy has become a problem in the twentieth centurydue to the status of knowledge claims and how they are treated.'t'he problem is not with knowledge as a goal or as a fact of lifebut rather with the kind of status knowledge is given in a dis-cipline that also, at least since Socrates, claims to be aboutthinking. Regardless of what specific shape knowledge actu-nlly has, what distinguishes it and makes it problematic forühinking is that it claims to be a foundation for thinking, andinsofar as knowledge succeeds in establishing itself in thislirundational role, it is not only placing itself beyond the deter-rnination of thinking, it is also making itself into the determi-nunt of thinking.

We get a concrete anticipation of the problem I am pointingt,o if we look at the subfield of sociology called sociology ofknowledge. This subfield would not have arisen if academicsnnd, more generally, modern social structure, had not privi-

ILz Political Hermeneutics

leged knowledge over thinking and thereby created one of the

.orrditiott" of the material prosperity of the intellectual class.

The acquisition and control of knowledge as a means of pro'

ductiorhas been richly rewarded with money, status, and in'fluence in modern industrial societies, and thinking as a pure

activity, uncontaminated by acquisitive desires, has every-

where had a relatively difficult time. Therefore-that is, be-

cause knowledge was highly privileged and thinking not so

privileged-what gradually took shape in modern industrialsocieties were social classes which distinguished themselves

by virtue of their control of certain forms of knowledge. Mod-

ern universities, in other words, tend to be populated by so'

uants rather than thinkers.It is this unargued premise, which I take to be for the most

part correct, thal is behind such a book as Fritz Ringer's The

becline of the Gerrnan Mandarins.zs The premise is also at

work in tho-* Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Reuolutions,

where it takes the form of "normal science" (the knowledge

class) and "revolutionary science" (the thinking class)'" My

specifrc point is that Gadamer's early work also makes sense

in tet*s of this distinction between thinking and knowledge

which, like the distinction between speaking cultures and

writing cultures, is originally an attempt to break down the

mind óf a civilization whose intellectual life has become

frozen.Put differently, the problem is a mattet of privilege' All

claims made in philosophy are nothing more than the begin'

ning points of argumentation, and the hoped-for conclusion is

the reaching of an agreement, that which Gadamer calls an

understanding. This is something that is admittedly less than

the establishment of an absolute underpinning of knowledge.

But if a claim is privileged as "knowledge," then it is set out-

side the framework of dialogue, as happens whenever anyono

begins a conversation with the words, "As we all know ' ' ' ,"o"itA* everyone knows . . . ," or ttOf course ' ' ' ," or "Natu'rally . . . ," or "Obviously. . . ." These are all attempts, Eeem'

ingiy harmlees and not worth boorish objection, to privilege a

Tllre Gestalt of Platonic Argument 113

small area of agreement as being beyond argumentative dis-cussion and hence capable of serving as a determinant, whenneeded.

The most privileged positions in philosophy are occupied notby the opinionated upstarts we encounter in daily conversa-tion but rather the seemingly impeccable foundations or un-challenged claims of the established natural sciences. Thepopular notion that the natural sciences constitute the "hard"sciences or the "exaet" sciences already makes it likely thatconclusions reached in these sciences will be privileged as

hnowledge rather than taken as mere thinking and will, hence,

be available as determinants in philosophical conversation.Thus any effort to deprivilege philosophical claims based onthe natural sciences is especially diffrcult because they havestrong popular backing in the modern world.

In fact, unless a science is conducted in an inexact andsloppy manner, there is only one way to deprivilege the majorconclusions of the exact natural sciences. This is to claim and¿rrgue that their conclusions, although hard and exact as

claimed, are dependent upon a certain point of view, and ifl,his point of view-or paradigm, in Kuhn's language-is al-üered, then a different and equally valid set of conclusions maybe arrived at. If one presupposes the geocentric hypothesis,then methods based on empirical analysis, carefully executed,will work to demonstrate that the geocentric presupposition iscorrect: The sun does appear to go around the world. Ofcourse,il'one presupposes the heliocentric hypothesis, then the sameompirical tools can be used to provide evidence that the oppo-

¡rite is the case: It is entirely possible, even necessary, to imag-ine the modern intellectual as someone who "sees" that theourth goes around the sun. Nowhere in the modern world does

lheory determine fact more dramatically than in this seven-l,oenth-century argument among proponents of the geocentricnnd heliocentric hypotheses.

The point here is not to attack science or its achievements.'fhoy are the crowning glory of modern intellectual life. Thepoint is rather to demonstrate that science and its achieve-

]-L4 Political Hermeneutics

ments are initially based on opinion rather than knowledge.However painfully, we have come to learn that Darwin startedwith a point of view and that this was not the same as knowl-edge. Darwin then climbed a ladder, similar in structure tothe "line" described at the end of the sixth book of Plato's .Re-public,leading gradually to agreement that the theory of nat-ural selection provides an adequate framework for determin-ing our view of life on this planet. Darwinian knowledge isthus not something that predated Darwin. It is rather anachievement, the consequence of argumentation and evidence.It seems to be in the nature of all great scientific theories thatthey come to be taken for granted and thereby gain an atem-poral and unsituated aura that belies their situated historicalorigins. It is at this moment that a point of view gets privi-leged as knowledge: It is no longer something that is deter-mined by human effort but is rather something that claimsthe right to be a determinant of human effort. At this point therelationship between thinking and knowledge has been stoodon its head: Knowledge, the offspring of thinking, claims nowto be the parent. At this point, the chief concern of philosophyought to be to save itself by questioning the privileged positionof knowledge.

Gadamer's position is much narrower, but its direction isbasically the same as the one I am suggesting above. The priv-ileged position is that of the Realism of Aristotle, and Gada-mer's argument was initially aimed at deprivileging that posi-tion. At this point, I do not want to slip and have the earlyGadamer making the strong claim that reality does not exist. Irather want to argue, alongside the early Gadamer, that phi-losophy distinguishes itself from science only because it doesnot presuppose the existence of reality. Pure philosophyrather presupposes nothing at all, and thus positions itselftorecognize itself as pure theory, or a matter of words, as, forexample, in the case of Plato's city in speech. Thereby, andonly thereby, does it avoid positivism, for positivism-definedas the accumulation of raw data, brute facts, so that patternscan reveal themselves on their own natural terms-is not


possible without the privileging of a reality that is beyondquestion.

Gadamer's argument in his early writings is, in my opinion,on the right track. That is to say, he is not solely dealing withthe academic problem of explaining Aristotle's break with hismaster. At a deeper level, Gadamer is arguing that the posi-tivistic quality of science, and of Aristotle, is originally basedon a set of agreements, now taken to be commonplaces, firstworked out in dialogue. Aristotelian ethical science, whichprovides answers, originates in Platonic ethical (moral) think-ing, which raises questions. Aristotle is a magnificent moralphilosopher, but this is not because he broke with Plato. Onthe contrary, it is because he stood on the shoulders of the Pla-l,onic achievement and, probably for reasons of intellectualcconomy, presupposed it.

This argument thoroughly refutes Realism, for whateverelse Realism is, it represents a set of privileged (or presup-posed) first principles from which one argues logically. Gada-mer does not make the mistake of attacking in midstream,that is to say, attacking Aristotle's logic. He rather attackswhere it counts, and that is at the point where privilege is be-ing tacitly accorded, that is to say, where something is beingput beyond argument. Implicitly, Gadamer finds himself argu-ing the most radical of philosophical positions. This is that ifphilosophy is to really be philosophy, it must question everyprivilege accorded by mind. It cannot tolerate a single one, forphilosophy as such is absolutely defeated by the intrusion ofoven a single privilege. Philosophy is absolute argument or itis not philosophy.

This formulation is only seemingly radical. Why, one mightusk, cannot philosophy retain some privileged positions, aslong as it eliminates most? How, in fact, can philosophy hap-pen at all unless some positions are privileged, so that a standcan be taken? Indeed, how can an argument take place at allunless the I or the Other making the argument privilegesnome position as being true and hence worthy of the effort thatgoos into argument? Does not an absolute deprivileging of

1.&

ft


every position threaten philosophy itself with the anarchy ofrelativism? These questions are not trivial, for they remind usthat philosophy, too, is a finite human activity. It cannot cre-ate ex nihilo but must rather have some material which is be-yond question.

In his fashion, Gadamer answers all these familiar ques-tions in his treatment of Plato. First of all, by arguing thatPlato's ethics are dialectical, Gadamer means to say that theydo not privilege any single position but rather submit all posi-tions, including the position of the Platonic Socrates, to argu-mentative scrutiny. Plato is not an Idealist standing opposedto the Realist Aristotle for the simple reason that Plato doesnot privilege ideas. Following the thinking of Paul Natorp,which by 1928 had become so domesticated to Gadamer's mindthat it was used without acknowledgment, Gadamer takesPlato's ideas to be hypotheses, positions put forward not astruths but rather as propositions to be tested. There is no bet-ter example of this than the ldea of the Good as it is treated inGadamer's habilitation thesis. Gadamer comes perilouslyclose, so it would seem, to privileging this idea. In any case,there is no other ethical idea that is even argued in Gadamer'shabilitation thesis, and the Idea of the Good is argued with anintent to give it a defining position in ethics. Indeed, Gadamereven goes so far as to argue that it is a standard of measure forconduct, and this seems to be putting it into the unshakeableposition of a judge.

But close examination of Gadamer's text shows that eventhis position is finally dialectical. Gadamer, in the name ofPlato, is not simply asserting, and thereby privileging, theIdea of the Good as an objective, Platonic idea. He is arguingit, and moreover he is arguing it against the appeals of hedon-ism as a standard for judging human activity. The case for he-donism is in fact made, as is the case for the Idea of the Good,and in the end Gadamer himself does not draw a definitiveconclusion but rather leaves it to the reader to do that. Indeed,if we recall Gadamer's 1927 argument about the role of theconcept of mixing in Plato, there is every reason to argue, as I

The Gestalt of Platonic Argument ll7

did, that Plato did not intend the Idea of the Good as a deviceto exclude the pleasures that hedonism celebrates. He in-üended rather that the Idea of the Good be a standard forchoosing among everyday pleasures so as to maximize humanpleasure as such. This is a subtle argument, but if it is graspedcorrectly, it will be seen to be pulling the rug out from underhedonism by arguing hedonism's own main point. A life led ac-cording to the Idea of the Good will yield more, not less, plea-sure than a life led according to the immediate gratification of[he senses favored by hedonism.

If there is a privileging of anything in Gadamer,s position, itis not the Idea of the Good but rather the Idea of politics. yetcven here, if the argument is unfolded, it will be seen thatGadamer is not arbitrarily asserting the primacy of a preexist-ing thing calledpolitics but is rather urging the primacy of thephilosophical way of life in argumentative terms. Gadamertakes the autobiographical comments of the questionably au-[hentic Seuenth Letter to be authentic not for any of the rea-sons that would appeal to a professional philologist but ratherbecause they fit in with an argument being made in plato'sunquestionably authentic texts. Plato's philosophy could nothave been the antipolitical thing it is sometimes said to bewithout sacrificing its essential dialectical character. To ar-gue that Plato's philosophy is antipolitical is tantamount tonrguing that Plato and his followers were initiates into the So-cratic mysteries and that they concocted a theory of the statethat would make the philosopher into a king for the simple butgrotesque reason ofprotecting their own privileges. True, therrctual fate of Socrates and the repeated suggestions in the ge-public that the philosopher will be put on trial and perhaps ex-ocuted let on that Plato was aware of the possibility that themotivation of the philosophical exercise would be misunder-xtood. But we, following Plato and Gadamer, need not believel,ho charge against Socrates. We can set things aright by rec-rtgnizing that it was the existing state that r¡/as on trial. poli-l"ics is hardly put beyond question in this format.

5

Ethics, Phronesis,and the

Idea of the Good

One can easily distort Gadamer's early writings by readingühem from the point of view of his later writings, thereby fo-cusing on language to the exclusion of most everything else. Il¡ave already done some of this and will continue to do it, but itis also worth while to recall that the main theme of Gadamer'sourly writings is not so much language as it is ethics in theclussical, politically related sense. We run the risk of cheating¡¡urselves of a potentially rewarding harvest if we do not peri-rxlically come back to this more obvious thread and develop itlirr its own sake. Thus before looking at "Plato and the Poets"r¡nd "Plato's Educational State" from the point of view of lan-guage theorizing, I would like to locate Gadamer's ethicall,hcorizing.

'fhe term ethics is notoriously difficult to define. In fact, ifwo do actually eucceed in defining the term, we may have al-


ready defeated our purpose by narrowing its scope too much. Itis likely to lose its popular base in ordinary language and be

remade into an academically manageable, logically rigorouscategory called moral philosophy. This indeed is what profes-

sional philosophers normally do, and it is to Gadamer's creditthat he avoids this kind of winnowing. As I argued in the Pref-ace to this book, Gadamer thereby shows his thinking to be

nicely aligned with that of Max Weber in the latter's essay

called "Politics as a Vocation."lWeber argued against what he called a "perfectionist eth-

ícs" (Gesinnungsethik) and on behalf of what he called an "eth-ics of responsibility" (Verantwortungsethik).2 In doing this,Weber successfully reasserted a basic insight about politics,namely, that it has no privileged moral "truths" which it can

impose from above upon people. Therefore politics cannot be

narrowed to an ideology or academic specialty without losingsomething vital. Put differently, ethics, like politics, is not afounded discipline, and hence it does not lend itself to scientis-tic philosophizing. It is initially merely a word, never defin-able in advance, that refers to the situatedness of man and theneed to work out some provisional understandings on how tolive collectively. It is therefore so much like politics that Aris'totle and Plato could conceive the one to be the continuation ofthe other.

Gadamer's ethical thinking in his habilitation thesis is sim-ilarly conceived. It is first of all not a piece of moral philosophyand hence not the work of an academic "professional" philoso'pher. That is to say, Gadamer nowhere claims that there arefounded and therefore privileged moral truths originating inthe Bible, nature, reason, or even language from which one

might deduce a moral system that could serve as a systematicguideline for politics. He thus has no "perfectionist ethics"'Onthe contrary, he argues right from the outset a disavowal: ". . .

not that Plato's ethics are dialectical but rather that dialecticsare ethical. . . ." This would seem to be arguing a rationalityprinciple, and it is if we are talking about the kind of discourserationality I tried to sketch in at the outset of this book. But in

Ethics, Phronesis, and the Idea ofthe Good lz1-

any case, Gadamer's words are not setting forth a claim for afounded or substantive rationality. They are rather laying thegroundwork for an ethics of responsibility by claiming thatthere is no privileged knowledge and that argumentation it-self is the starting point for any responsible consideration ofethics.

The curious consequence of this is that there is apparentlyno discussion of ethics as such in Gadamer's habilitation the-sis. Of course, this is a deception, for the entire habilitationthesis is one long discourse on ethics. It is more accurate,therefore, to say that there is no moral philosophizing in Gad-amer's habilitation thesis. But with the claim that dialecticsitself is ethical, if follows that all discussion of the structure ofdialectical argumentation is also a discussion of how to leadthe ethical life. Hence the habilitation thesis can be read notsimply from the point of view of its contribution to languagephilosophy but also for its contribution to ethical thinking.But we must never forget that the discussion here is focusedon discourse (or unfounded) rationality rather than substan-tive rationality.

Following the classical model, Max Weber made his argu-ment on behalf of an ethics of responsibility in the context ofon essay about politics. That is to say, where a perfectionistethics might be appropriate to a religious association con-cerned about life in another world, an ethics of responsibilityis the only ethics appropriate to this-worldly societies. Weber,adhering to Aristotle's mode of seeing ethics as the microcosmof the macrocosm of politics, was obviously reasoning back-wards. He was, as his title indicates, discussing politics, and atühe point where ethics came up was simply and consistentlyurguing that the laws of the political macrocosm were also ap-plicable to the ethical microcosm. If responsibility is the chiefrule of politics, then logically it ought to be the chief rule ofr¡thics as well.

Gadamer proceeds in the reverse order. His introductorycharacterization of ethics as having no privileged truths virtu-rtlly compels him to make some kind of statement about the


political macrocosm. If ethics has no privileged truths, no doc'

trine of ideas, then logically it follows that the macrocosm ofpolitics will also not have privileged truths to guide it. Gada-mer's acceptance of the authenticity of the Seuenth Letter andhis construction of its meaning follow logically from his treat'ment of ethics in nonperfectionist terms. Thus does Gadameradumbrate his discussion of the state in his habilitation the-sis. The Gadamerian state is a very small Republic of Lettersmade up of Socrates and his Other, and eventually-afterSocrates internalizes even this small community of two-themacrocosm of the state can be extrapolated from the micro-cosm of this critically thinking individual: the complete Pla-tonic Socrates.s

II

These general insights into the character of Platonic ethicswere given concrete shape by the early Gadamer in an unpub-lished paper written in 1930 and called Practisches Wissen, or"Practical Knowledge."a Perhaps more than any other writingof Gadamer's early period, it incorporated thoughts takenfrom Martin Heidegger, specifically from his 1923 seminar onAristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Yet even here, as I will show,

Gadamer did not abandon the basic categorie's of thinkingwhich he had taken from the Stefan George Circle. He ratherincorporated Heidegger's insights into them and therebyachieved an outcome consistent with the direction of his ownthought.

The problem of the paper was how we moderns with ourJudeo-Christian concepts of ethics can ever come to under'stand classical Greek ethics.s In other words, how can we

overcome our modern prejudice and thereby take the first steptoward understanding a fundamentally different world. Thisis a problem not unlike the problem posed by Peter Winch in

Ethics, Phronesis, and the Idea ofthe Good 1^2g

his piece called "Understanding a Primitive Society," exceptthat here the other society is hardly "primitive" in the modernsense of the term.6 Formulated more specifically, the prob-lem is how anyone equipped with an "otherworldly" concept ofethics that emerges out of a religious way-of-life can grasp a"worldly" concept of ethics that emerges out of a politicalway-of-Iife.

Gadamer makes his problem more manageable by restatingit as a distinctly philosophical question. Insofar as philosophyis a discipline, it operates through conceptualization and withthe outcomes of this operation, namely, concepts. Philosophydistinguishes itself from other disciplines by being concernedwith concepts that are universals, and insofar as it beginswith wonder, it is wonder over these universals. These are thelogoi kath' auto of Aristotle, and insofar as it is Aristotle whooriginated this particular intellectual activity, he is the origi-nator of philosophy as we know it. Indeed, it is he who origi-nated the problem of this unpublished and still untranslatedL930 paper, for the Judeo-Christian conception of morality asa relationship between otherworldly ideas of the good andworldly immorality first received its philosophical rendering,actually preconception, in Aristotle's thinking.

By arguing this way, Gadamer makes Aristotle into some-thing of béte noire, but Gadamer does not trivialize the prob-lem by personalizing it. That is to say, it is not claimed thatAristotle made his key move out of reasons ofjealousy or stu-pidity. He did what he did because of a certain logic internal tophilosophy. It was Aristotle, according to Gadamer, who firstraised ethics "from the dialectical paradoxes of the Socraticquestion to the analytical clarity of the concept."T In his mostdramatic formulation, Gadamer puts the matter as follows:

The fate of philosophy first became visible in its world-historical form in Aristotle: the form of life, which itlAristotelian philosophyl first painted with the grey ongray of concepts, was already old and could be recog-nized but not restored to its youth. In this manner,

ris4t


Aristotle and the origin of the history of philosophy dis-tinguished itself from the dialogical dialectic of Plato.'

We do well to underscore the significance of Gadamer'scharacterization of philosophy at its origin. Philosophy is amatter of conceptualization, of rendering life in the gray-on-gray of precisely formulated concepts. Life, not life itself butlife as thought by a prephilosophical mind, is a three-dimen-sional Gestalt, a form in which elements are not separated outby the analytical mind of the philosopher but are retained inpictoral or narrative form.e The operation called "conceptuali-zation" was what distinguished philosophy from life so formu-lated. But what distinguished philosophy from other possible

intellectual disciplines was its tendency toward universals, to-

ward a concept of knowledge that was not local. It was thispossibility that Aristotle realized. In Gadamer's words:

When Aristotle dissolved the connection between poli-tics and philosophy, it was not because he had recog-

nized the untenabitity of a mathematical-universalgrounding of politics but rather the other way round' Itwas because he realized the possibility of dissolving thephilosophical universality of what is known from thelife of the individual soul. Because concepts exist whichdetermine what is meant and make it repeatable foreveryone [the logos kath' autof, a philosophy equipped

with this theoretical possibility will necessarily dis-solve its connection to politics.'o

The issue in this paragraph can be formulated as a question

about truth. Philosophy emerged as a discipline independentof politics because it realized the possibility of conceivingtruth-as-such, or universal truths. Politics, as a local affair, isby nature only equipped with a capacity for realizing truths'for-us, or local truths. Such a mode of doing philosophy paveg

the way for the reception of Judeo-Christianity in the Westernmind. It undermines the more tribal instinct that tells us that

Ethics, Phronesis, and the Idea ofthe Good L25

truth is something that applies in this valley but not the next,among the Azandi of East Africa but not among the English tothe north, in Athens but not in Sparta.

When Gadamer goes on to say that this Aristotelian way ofdoing philosophy is for us virtually self-evident in its validity,he is only saying that we as moderns have come to grasp lifeas something that can be thought not just after it is livedbut even before it is lived. This is the immanent possibilityofuniversals: They are true not only at all places but also atall times. Morality, or the way we ought to live life, can bepainted in the gray-on-gray of concepts before we live it. Thisis so taken for granted by us as moderns as to negate the ne-cessity of argumentation. What is not so obvious is the pla-tonic indifference to this Aristotelian formulation of philoso-phy and its relation to life. It is at this point that Gadamerintroduces his explanation of the unique quality of platonicthinking:

Plato does not address politics in terms of the principlesof a theory of ideas, just as he does not instruct in termsof a doctrine of ideas. The high road to a vision of thehigh-heavenly scene and the low road of the self-con-cerned carc fSorgel for one's own being are one andthe same way. Philosophy is not politics because Platobelieved in a naive-abstract synthesis of the Good in theuniverse and the human world but rather because thephilosopher and the statesman live in the same con-cern [Sorge]. Both must have true knowledge, and thismeans that they must know the Good. Yet one cannotknow the Good from a detached and universal point ofview but must rather know it originally for one's self.Only from this attending to one's own self (the soul) cantrue knowledge awake and bear fruits that are true.This caring is philosophy.ll

It is well to pause at this point and reflect for a moment onwhat Gadamer, through Plato, is saying. He, as a budding


professional philosopher, is not denying the possibility of uni-versals. There is truth-as-such as well as truth-for-us. WhatGadamer in this interpretation of Plato is doing is saving poli-tics. In order to begin the climb up the ladder to truth-as-such,we must begin with the truth-for-us of politics. This negatesthe supposed classical distinction between idea and, doxa asthe thought materials, respectively, of philosophy and politics.It saves opinion as a form of local truth. It paves the way for anintroduction of the Gadamerian notion of prejudice and, al-though Gadamer writing in 1930 did not yet have this handyconcept, he did have a related word:

The capacity to correctly judge the unique and to findthe right way obviously grows with and out of life-expe-rience. This means, however, out of a rising pre-knowl-edge [Vorwissen). Nonetheless, the authentic essence ofphronesis exists in this capacity for on-the-spot think-ing, and the substantive pre-knowledge which accom-panies concrete reflection is secondary. (An increase ofthis pre-knowledge, as is the case with an'ethic', is onlyan increase ofconcrete, practical consciousness. . . .)12

The point of introducing the notion of uorutissen, or "pre-knowledge," was to support the claimthat that practical knowl-edge has a historical dimension. Yet the formulation here isnearly poetic, and it is not yet as rigorous as Gadamer wouldmake it. It thus behooves us to go on to another argumentwhich is more rigorous in the way it addresses the question ofthe different forms of knowledge.

m

Gadamer began his paper with a defense of the Platonic Socra-tes against the charge of intellectualism, and it is by this

Ethics, Phronesis, and the Idea ofthe Good 127

means that the problem of knowledge was introduced. Theclaim that Socrates reduced ethics to knowledge is for Gada-mer not merely absurd but also deeply revealing about themodern mind and its prejudices. For implicit in the claim of in-tellectualism is the prejudiced view that knowledge and actionare two entirely different things. If knowledge is the acquisi-tionof truth-as-such,then the charge of intellectualism makessense. But if knowledge is a local affair, a matter of truth-for-us, then the charge of intellectualism makes no sense atall, for action is also a local affair and as such cannot be sepa-rated from local knowledge. From this point of view, the mod-ern claim of intellectualism reflects more on the questionerthan on Socrates. In Gadamer's words:

To test surrounding truths in terms of their reality andtheir effectiveness was not the introduction of some-thing new. It was rather a matter of taking old truthsseriously, of taking them as if they were what theywanted to be. This was the sense of Socratic dialogue.It had its peculiar power in the demonstration of igno-rance, because for it the connection between knowledgeand reality was indissoluble. That which is calledhnowledge in this Socratic equation must thereforeemerge from the mandatory connection of reality andprd*is. To presuppose knowledge in which this equationis incomprehensible or forced in effect turns the chargeof intellectualism against one's self.'3

Not only is the charge of intellectualism against the pla-üonic Socrates absurd. Equally absurd is the claim that Socra-tes was motivated by an interest in pure, mindless action. Thisüakes the form of a claim that Socrates was the first utilitar-iun.'n Against this charge, Gadamer defends the platonic So-crates in detail, and while it will be worth our while to recountGadamer's argument, it is also helpful to set it in context, andthis means dealing with the subject matter of Heidegger's1023 seminar on Aristotle's Niconachean Ethics.


Book six of the Nicomachean Ethics deals with knowledge

and attempts to establish its different forms.l5 However in-

complete the discussion is, it demonstrates that philosophy at

its birth was capable of self-reflection, by which I mean ryl"t-tion on the various modes by which the mind was capable of

thinking and gaining knowledge. Aristotle discussed several

different modes, the chief among which being episteme' or ex-

act knowle dge, techne, or applied knowledge, andphronesis' or

knowledge or no* to get along in the intersubjective human

world. Itls helpful to give a thumbnail sketch of these forms

before turning to Gadamer.The natural sciences as we know them aim at exact knowl-

edge, or episteme- They thus produce theories that are sub-

mitted to the test of logical coherence as well as colTespon'

dencetoreality.Darwin,stheoryofnaturalselectionorEinstein's theory of relativity are epíste;'zes insofar as they are

logically coherent and compelling as well as accurate in their

"olr""spóttdence to reality. They are, however, macrotheoreti-

cal tháories insofar as they fit only a reality larger than that

accessible to the human senses. At the less arcane level of a

life lived in Chicopee, Massachusetts, a theory of social selec-

tion might work bltter than the theory of natural selection to

explain mating patterns. Similarly, on the planet earth' the

theories of Newtonian physics are still much more applicable

than Einstein's theory of relativity'My point is that exact knowledge is not always practical'

Therefore we have techne,or applied scientific knowledge. The

construction of a motor, for example, is an activity under-

standable as applied science. Yet a motor, for example an au-

tomobile engine, is not a simple application of scientific princi'

ples. There i, ,ro *ry that a motor can be constructed in terms

if.ny single, logically coherent scientific theory' It is rather a

combinatián of iheories of mechanics, electronics, hydraulics,

thermodynamics, and the like. Put differently' one can ana'

lyze asuccessful automobile engine in terms of exact gcientific

tireories, but never in terms of one exact scientific theory.

Ethics, Phronesis, and the ldea ofthe Good 129

What this suggests is that techne is a form of knowledge sepa-rate from the exact natural sciences. It is a matter of applyingthe otherworldly knowledge of the exact sciences to the de-manding natural confines of the human condition.

The most basic organizational categories of German univer-sities are the Naturwissenschaften and t}re Geisteswissen-schaften. They may be said to correspond to the two principlesof knowledge spelled out above. The natural sciences, includ-ing mathematics, aim at exact knowledge, and in doing sothey serve industry, which aims at the technical application ofexact theoretical knowledge. But what about the Geisteswis-senschaften? Do the human sciences aim at understanding hu-man cultural achievements as an application of the principlesof exact knowledge? The hidden premise here is that the uni-verse is a logically coherent place that can be fully understoodin terms of universal principles and their local application.Arguably, this is the way Marx understood history. When hesaid that culture was epiphenomenal, he meant that it was de-l,ermined by the forces and relations of production, and he sawfhese are determined by exact principles of nature, under-¡rtandable by the natural sciences. Hobbes and Saint-Simonbefore him and Marx, Lenin, and Taylor after him are not allfhat different from Marx. They see the Geisteswissenschaften¡rs a local application of the principles discovered in theN¿ú¿r-wissenschaften. Contemporary German academics, especiallythose in the institutes built around Neuphilologie, would notlike the above formulation, but they are not always philosoph-ically equipped to argue against it.

Contemporary German scholars would rightly object thatlhe organization of knowledge in German universities wastnd is more complicated than is indicated above. But in orderl,o philosophically argue their case, they would have to proposen different concept of knowledge, and this might lead them to¡¡ rediscovery of Aristotle. As already noted, he conceived al,hird category of knowledge, namely, phronesis. This was akind of knowledge that wae necessary for getting along with


and among other human beings' Yet even though Aristotle

discussedfh ronesisas a concept, it is by no means certain that

we can gtátp and use this concept of knowledge'

It can be understood, although by no means explained' by

reference to the basic organizational structure of American

universities. In contrast to the twofold German division into

ttle Naturwissenschaften and t}re Geisteswissenschaften, we

¿irri¿" up our academic pie into the natural sciences, the social

sciences, and the humanities' We understand the first interms of the ideal type called episterne, or the quest for exact

knowledge. we ur"ilss clear about the social sciences, but ifthe current status of the field of economics is any indication,

the social sciences aim at becoming a kind of technical science,

a field in which the exact knowledge of the natural sciences is

blended into a smoothly functioning motor'

We Ameri.urs g"rr"rally stand somewhat perplexed when

confronting the humanities, however' We cannot explain and

justify them in terms of episteme or techne' Like our German

colleagues, we usually donot have a concept of knowledgc to

provide a rigorous philosophicaldefense oftheir continued ex-

istence. It does not followlrom this that we are silenced, how'

ever,forthisscandalcausesnoendofdebate'AttheeverydaylevelofcollegecurriculumcommitteesinAmericancollegesanduniversities,thehumanitiessurvivebecausemostaca-demics are simply too embarrassed to vote against them or be-

.uor" of the appealing argument that they help scientists and

social engineéis to succ""a in life' They providé the 'finish'

thatdistinguishestheso-callededucatedmanfromthemassegof technocrats. These of course are hardly philosophical justi'

fications. They are practical, sociological justifications' and

while not reducibb tí techne for their justification, they lack a

concept of knowledge that might stabilize their existence'

If we look to thJmore arcane level of contemporary philo'

sophizing,wefindmuchthesamesituation'RichardRorty'sliilotoply and. the Mirror of Nature, for example' rightly ar'

gues thatihilosophy should not be conducted according to the

ó"norm of ipisteme. Lut when it comes to providing a justifica'


tion for the kind of philosophy Rorty wants, he is only ableto spin out large sections about "endless conversations" andthe like. What can be said of Rorty can also, I believe, be saidof Bernstein, Oakeshott, or Habermas. They all argue wellenough against "scientism" in human affairs, but they do notargue nearly well enough for an alternative which justifiesour belief in the humanities as a distinct form of knowledgethat exists by virtue of something more than the suffrage ofso-called educated persons.

This genuinely scandalous state of affairs does not charac-terize Aristotle's thinking. He introduces a term, phronesis,and places it alongside episteme and techne as a form of knowl-edge. He thus provides the philosophical justification for whatin American universities are called the "humanities," and her¡ets the stage for a challenge to the domination of scientismftechne) in the social sciences. Unfortunately, he does not ade-quately spell out what practical knowledge is, and hence booksix of the Nicomachean Ethics leaves us with a problem thathas long perplexed philosophers. It also provides Gadamerwith his starting point in the unpublished paper called "Prack-lisches Wissen." Now, with this as background, precisely whatis it that Gadamer has to say aboutphronesis?

First, the form of knowledge called phronesis is character-ized by Gadamer as being existential.lu It comes into beingwhen we grasp that technical knowledge cannot answer thequestion of how we are to exist. Technical knowledge, rightlyunderstood, is prior knowledge of how to do something. By be-ing prior, it allows us to distance ourselves from human situa-t.ions. But existence, as Gadamer understands it, is revealedrrt, precisely the point when it presents us with situations forwhich no advance knowledge is appropriate. In a workshop,we always know what to do with tools. But then one day ourhammer breaks. De we know how to "help ourselves" is such a¡rituation. At such a point, the mystique of techne is brokenr¡nd an existential crisis, admittedly poetic, is introduced.(lndamer does not use this illustration from Heidegger, butl,hig is what he means.


Second, there is an excell ence (arete) to technical knowledge

that is now a part of practical knowledge.l? one can get better

at using a tool by practicing with it. But the maxim that "prac-

tice makes perfect" does not apply to existential situations.

one cannot get better at handling unique situations, and it isprecisely this uniqueness and newness that distinguishes the

Lxistential from the routine. To the extent that family crises

are routine, the police can learn to manage them by means of

simulations, but to the extent that a situation is really unique,

there is no excellence that can be gained by practicing how to

handle ít. Phronesis therefore has a somewhat messy quality

to it, and as such it shows itself to be the virtue or form of

knowledge best keyed to existence defined as situatedness.

Third, as has already been pointed out above, practical

knowledge is not fully without history. one cannot step out-

side exisience and practice for it, but one can accumulate lifeexperience and thus gain a sense of how to act in a unique sit-

o"iiorr. But this prioi knowledge (Vorwissen) is really a kind

of ,,prejudice," for the simple reason that there is no final guar-

antee ttt.t it will work. Technical knowledge, viewed as ad-

vance knowledge, is not really "prejudice" because it is guar-

anteed by the exactness of scientific knowledge. It really does

yield predictive power. But not so practical knowledge. In itsaccumulated, historical form, it is always, at best, approxi-

mate, and that is why it is a matter of "prejudice'" If it were

anything other than that, then it would deny the surprising,

,uálly néw quality of existence. With this argument Gadamer

provides a rationale for his concept of prejudice'

Fourth, there is a curious lack of free choice to phronesis

which is not a part of technical knowledge''s We can always

choose our professions, and when we choose one, this meang

that we choose not to practice the others. we can then practice

our trades on a nine-to-five basis, so to speak' Or we cannot

practice with our tools, and consequently we can forget the

.l<itls we have acquired. None of this is true of practical knowl-

edge. we cannot freely choose not to exist. No matter what our

chósen profession, we will be confronted every day with exis'


tential situations that call upon practical knowledge. We cantry to reduce the scope of practical knowledge by applyingtechnical knowledge, but we are unlikely to succeed. We can-not forget our own existence. We can pretend to, but it willhaunt us, and so we do better to confront it.

Fifth and finally, where technical knowledge is for the mostpart in the service of the body, practical knowledge is in theservice of the human soul, and what is good for the body is notnecessarily good for the soul.le Because the soul is not thebody, the question of the Idea of the Good is raised as a philo-sophical problem. Gadamer does not treat it exhaustively inthis early paper, but he does say enough to indicate the direc-tion of his thought.

I have already said something about this above, so here it iscntirely possible to settle for a summary overview. For Plato,uccording to Gadamer, the Idea of the Good is not divisible. Itf'unctions at the micro level of the individual and at the macrolevel of the larger signboard of the polis and, even at a cosmiclevel. The key point to make with Plato is that there is no highroad and low road to the vision of the Good, that is to say, nodistinction between philosophy and politics. The same, how-over, cannot be said of Aristotle. Because of the possibility pre-¡rented by the notion of a universal truth (Iogos kath' auto),Aristotle was able to make a separation and speak of a Good-tts-such and a Good-for-us (or a Good-for-me). In other words,Aristotle was able to separate philosophy as the pursuit of theldea of the Good-as-such from politics as the pursuit of theldea of the Good-for-us. It is with this separation that Gada-rner disagrees.

Hence Gadamer can finally speak of a "political phronesis"t¡nd mean by this a sense of how human relations are orga-nized in the spheres of economics, government, legislation,nnd justice.2o Statesmen, such as Pericles, can be character-izt¡d as phronomoi and recognized by thinkers such as Aris-tr¡üle as being distinct from philosophers because what they doix based on a different concept of knowledge. Indeed, Aristotleirc etill well enough attuned to the real meaning of phronesis to


be capable of distinguishing political scientists from states-men. The early version of the political scientist is to be foundin those "stateless statesmen, the sophists, who teach the artof governing from books as if it were a techne."zl

IV

The unpublished 1930 paper called "Practisches V[issen" in-corporates much of what transpired in Heidegger's 1923 semi-nar on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Clearly, however, it isnot dominated by Heidegger. It is rather framed in terms ofcategories provided by the Stefan George Circle and hencedovetails nicely with what Gadamer had already done in hishabilitation thesis. This can be seen in the large role assignedto the figure of Socrates in this paper, but more clearly it canbe seen in Gadamer's final paragraph, where he uses the Geor-gian term Gestalt several times to describe the problem he istrying to come to grips with.

I would hazard the guess that Gadamer early realized thatHeidegger's thinking was itself a conceptualization of existen-tialism. In this respect, the virtue of the thinking of the StefanGeorge Circle was to be found in its refusal to conceptualizeexistence. Precisely this characteristic, of course, forced theGeorgians to the margin of the German acadefnic world orbeyond. But simultaneously it was this revived three-dimen-sional thinking that enabled Georgians like Hildebrandt orFriedemann to sou¿ Plato and the Platonic Socrates from therejection they had undergone at the hands of Nietzsche and,later, Heidegger.

The gray-on-gray of Aristotelian conceptualization couldnot really capture the three-dimensional liveliness of Greekethics. It could only remind us of what had once been alive butwas now flattened out into concepts. If one persists and askswhat it was that was sought by Greek ethics, Gadamer's an'

Ethics, phronesis, and the Idea ofthe Good 195

swer-formulated at the end of this essay-was that it was amenschlicher Gestalt, a human form. This is, according to Gad-amer, the beautiful, and it is in the realization of der schónenGestalt, the beautiful form, that practical knowledge tookshape. That this was the life of Socrates is clear from the open-ing pages of Gadamer's paper, where Socrates is defendedagainst the charge of intellectualism with the argument thatit was he and practically he alone who understood that theIdea ofthe Good could not be separated from everyday politi-cal life. Gadamer's paper is not so much a rejection of Aristote-lian concepú philosophy as a necessary corrective to it. Mypoint is to recognize that this corrective was only made possi-ble by Gadamer's early association with the Georgians and thephilological tradition they represented. It is hardly accidentalthat the final words of Gadamer's unpublished 1930 paperbring us back to "the dialogical dialectics of Plato."22

6

I

IfII

Poets, Education,and

the State

All that has been said about ethics in the two previous chap-ters is said by way of preparation for Gadamer's more focuseddiscussion of the state in two essays written in the 1930s. Thefirst is a discussion ofthe peculiar problem ofPlato's relationwith the poets of Athens, contained in Gadamer's long paperentitled "Plato and the Poets."l This problem is usually han-dled under the academic category of Plato's philosophy of art,but my claim here will be that Gadamer's essay makes muchmore sense if its focus is taken to be philosophy of politics.That is to say, the immediate problem between Plato and thepoets obviously is an issue ofthe artful use of language, butthis issue can be best understood if it is grasped in terms of itsconsequences to ethics and politics.

The fact that Gadamer introduces his concept of aestheticutnsciousness in "Plato and the Poets" does not jeopardize the


claim that the main thread of "Plato and the Poets" is one ofpolitical theorizing.2 Plato is not criticized by Gadamer in theusual modern fashion for his failure to appreciate art. It israther the other way around: Abstracted art is being criticizedby Gadamer's Plato for its failure to appreciate the irreduciblyethical dimension of t}rre polis. The language of the poets has tobe expelled so that true dialogue can be restored. Hence Gada-mer's thinking in "Plato and the Poets," with its main threadin politics, is fully and rigorously consistent with his thinkingin his first article on Werner Jaeg.er and with his habilitationthesis: Politics, as the continuation of ethics by other means, isgoverned by the same norms as ethics.

Similarly, the brief essay called "Plato's Educational State,,can easily be misunderstood if we treat it out of context andfail to credit the mind of the early Gadamer with its character-istic persistence and consistency.3 Here, too, Gadamer is notbeing an academic philosopher interested in Plato's philoso-phy of education. Just as art is not the main thread of "Platoand the Poets," so too education is not the main thread of ',Pla-to's Educational State." Education is understood and judgedby Gadamer according to what it contributes to the formationof the human soul, and the reason for wanting a soul (if wehave to ask) is because we are ethical beings. Put somewhatdifferently, it is because we have so little (instinctual) in-scribed or, better, written nature to guide our actions that it isour (civilized) nature to need a soul, or a harmonious makeup,as prelude to decision in the world of action. It is the state'schief function to shape that soul.

Hence, finally, with "Plato's Educational State," we returnto the theme which has been given so much emphasis in thisbook: the idea of Gestalt.I argued that in his habilitationthesis Gadamer was inclined to write a biography of Socratesalong the model of the genre established in the Stefan GeorgeCircle. But because Gadamer was a good deal cleverer thanmost members of the Stefan George Circle, he took this man-date figuratively rather than literally. Therefore, the Gestaltofthe Platonic Socrates turns out to be an exercise in bringing

Poets, Education, and the State 1gg

into high relief the elements of a speaking civilization: dia-logue and dialectic. We do well to understand that this occursbecause the Platonic Socrates, Gadamer's Platonic Socrates, isemphatically an ethical being. If Plato's ethics is dialectical,as Gadamer claims, then the Platonic Socrates-as a thor-oughly ethical being-ought to be given over equally thor-oughly to dialogue and dialectics. How else can he lead theethical life?

The function of "Plato's Educational State" can also be un-derstood-indeed, it can only be understood-in terms of thenecessity of giving a Gestalt to the human soul. Hence whatbegins with an effort to portray t};ie Gestalt of a single individ-ual ends with the effort to portray the Gestalt of the entirecommunity. There is thus a common ethical thread runningthrough Gadamer's early writings from beginning to end, butunfortunately it is difficult to see because of the sheer quanti-tative imbalance of Gadamer's early writings. The theme ofPlato's relation to the poets is a detail in Plato's intellectualbiography, and frankly it deserves no more attention thanGadamer gave it. But the theme of Plato's educational state isno such minor detail. As Gadamer's emphasis on the authen-ticity of the Seuenth Letter tells us, there is nothing moreimportant in Plato interpretation than the recognition thatpolitics provides Plato's classical thinking with its point ofdeparture.

Hence, I would argue, Gadamer's early period should haveended with a book entitled Plato's Educational Snte.It didnot. It rather ended with a short article with the same title,and Gadamer then never again came back to this thread. I willthus have to give Gadamer's last early writing short shrift butwant to note here that the failure to write a Gestalt-biographyof the Platonic state is the single most significant failing of theoarly period of Gadamer's career. Indeed, it is this failing thatputs an end to Gadamer's early period, and it is probably themain reason why so little attention has been paid to his earlywritings.


II

Language and education do not proceed in a vacuum but ratherare always already situated or contextualized in the polis, andt};.e polis is constituted as a set of unwritten laws by which per-sons relate to each other in society.a Gadamer's grasp of thepolis in "Plato and the Poets" is subtle and compelling. Hepays no attention to the tip of the political iceberg formed bywritten laws or visible forms of government, the characteristicconcern of Altertumswissenschaft. He is much more concernedfor the unwritten laws of society and the unformed govern-ment of persons who take advantage of those unwritten laws.In classical Athens, according to Gadamer, "the ethos prevail-ing in . . . society which, though concealed, secretly molds hu-man beings" is articulated by the poets, who therefore act as akind of unformulated government of the state.s Plato's strug-gle with the poets is not, as Nietzsche would have us believe,an artistic contest. It is rather a political struggle for the gov-ernment of Athens.

The poets, in effect, are authorized to give Gestalú to the un-seen polis, and this polis ís in turn authorized to give Gestaltto the souls of the young men of Athens. The issue in "Platoand the Poets" appears to be language, and indeed this is thestated issue, but the specifrc language ofthe poets is broughtto issue because of what it contributes to the Gestaltung or for-mation of the Athenian polis and the soul of every Athenian.And to the extent that Plato has an alternative to the lan-guage of the poets, it is because he better understands theproblems of Gestaltung.It is theiefore that Gadamer's Platoonce again opts for dialogue and dialectics, for the spoken lan-guage over the written language. The soul of Athens and itscitizens is the real underlying issue.

By the late fifth century, what Gadamer calls a "binding po-litical ethos" had ceased to exist in Athens, and I take Gada-mer to mean by this that the Athenians had lost their self-con-scious relation to public ethics.6 By this Gadamer did not

Poets, Education, and the State l4I

mean that ethics had been privatized. Rather, what came toexist was a situation in which unwritten political rules of pri-vate aggrandizement had replaced the unwritten rules of amore community-oriented ethics. In sum, Gesellschaft had re-placed Gemeinschaft. lt was in this situation that the realclass of conspirators, the Sophists, were able to rise to promi-nence as a class of educators. They simply made explicit andpoliiically operative what was already implicit in the existingGreek polis. "For the sophists," Gadamer notes, "ethical prin-ciples are no longer valid in themselves but only as a form ofour mutual 'keeping an eye' on one another."T The basic un-written rule of the Athenian constitution, according to Gada-mer, is the following: No one does what is right uoluntarily.sThe unwritten ethics of Greece are such as to record the de-struction of the public sphere of Greek life.

The question that arose for Plato, according to Gadamer,was whether to reform the existing state or go beyond it in aquest for a much more radical solution. Plato's choice wasagainst reform, and hence in favor of philosophy conceived asa more radical solution to political problems. This being thecase, the quarrel with the poets was radically political. Inbrief, the basic problem was with the poets's use of language toshape the psyche. The quarrel with the poets was in no man-ner a simple quarrel over aesthetics. In Gadamer's words, the

. . . actual truth of the matter is that the meaning andintent of lPlato's] critique of the poets can be estab-lished only by departing from the place where it occurs.It is found in Plato's work on the state lthe Republic). . . which is erected before our eyes in words alone fromthe building blocks which alone suffice for it. The cri-tique of the poets can be understood only within the set-ting of this total refounding of a new state in words ofphilosophy, only understood as a radical turning awayfrom the existing state.e

What we need to note here is the combination of approachesassociated above with the influence of the poet Stefan George

-l

t42 Political Hermeneutics

and his Circle and that of the new way of doing philosophy ofMartin Heidegger. The Platonic idea of the state, for example,is one in which language obviously does not express some-

thing outside it. Language is rather thoroughly creative' Cre-

ativity now refers to ethical rules, and the idea or claim beingput forth is that the state creates ethical rules without anyprior determination from outside. In other words, public dia-

logue itself is ethical because it is the rational procedure by

which ethical rules are arrived at.Indeed, to take this idea one step further, the Platonic state

is itself a creation in words. Gadamer says as much severaltimes in his 1934 essay: Plato's state is "a state which is erected

before our eyes in words alone from the building blocks whichalone suffice for it."ro Or elsewhere: "For that reason ltoawaken the powers which form the statel Socrates erects a

state in words, the possibility of which is given only inphilos-ophy."" The Platonic state is, Gadamer tells us, "a state inthought, not any state on earth." And as with any state inwords, its purpose is "to bring something to light and not toprovide an actual design for an improved order in real politicallife."l2 It is a pure creation of the well'tuned soul, that of thePlatonic Socrates, and it is undertaken because ofthe felt need

of the well-tuned soul to exist in a supportive context. It is aparadigm "for someone who wants to order himself and hisown inner constitution. Its sole raison d'étre is to make it pos-

sible for a person to recognize himself in the paradigm. Ofcourse the point is precisely that he who recogirizes himselftherein does not recognize himself as an isolated individualwithout a state."l3 Platonic philosophy can therefore not be

gtasped if that philosophy is treated as an expression of some-

thing outside it. Quite literally, it has to be taken on its own

terms. Plato's philosophy of art is therefore a detail that willbe hermeneutically interpreted by being referred back to thispolitical context. This approach, to use Gadamer's words, is úo-

tal, ít is the actual truth, and it gets at tbe intent of Plato'sphilosophy.

Now at this point we should pause to be clear as to what the

Poets, Education, and the State LAB

political context is that is being referred to here. Once again,it is not any context that is outside Plato's writings. That is tosay, Plato is not aRealist in the Aristotelian sense of the term.Gadamer makes this clear in his essay. He says at a key pointin his argument that Platonic justice "is no longer to be clearlyidentified with any given reality [my italics]."ra What then isit to be identified with? In Gadamer's words, "when knowledgeof it must be defended against the arguments of a nerry ,en-

lightened' consciousness, a philosophical conuersation abotlttthe true state becomes the only true praise ofjustice.,"5 Henceif we want to know what the phrases "the state in words,' or"the city in speech" refer to, the answer is that they describe aphilosophical conversation, such as the one Gadamer wroteabout in his habilitation thesis. If, as Gadamer claimed in1928, dialectics is ethical, then we can already make the guessthat dialectics is also political. In 1984 Gadamer finally saysas much.

The context of Plato's ethics is politics, then, but the politicsare ideal, not real. This is not to say that so-called political re-ality does not play a role in shaping Plato's political thinking.In fact, as we shall soon find out, it plays a decisive negativerole. Political reality, in the commonsense use of that term, isprecisely what Plato wants to change. Yet once Plato hasmade his case against political reality, he has to go on andmake a positive case for the ideal city, and this is the city inspeech.

The problem with the poets, according to Gadamer, is thatLhey imitate rather than create. Put differently, the poets usewords to express a reality outside their language. Gadamerthen argues why this is a problem: "He who really imitatesnnd only imitates, in mime, is no longer himself. He giveshimself an alien character."16 Without ever using the Heideg-gerian term, the entire argument is then keyed to the issue ofhuman authenticity. The term Gadamer does use is self, anditoccurs repeatedly in his argument: Imitation produces a,,splitin the selfi" it induces a "turning away from oneself." The per-Hon engaging in it becomes "oblivious to himself," he does not

L44 Political Hermeneutics

"preserve himself." Imitation leads to "self-exteriorization,"or to "self-estrangement," or to "self-alienation," or to "self-forgetting." So here Gadamer is employing that key theme ofGerman nineteenth-century thought: The purpose of educa-tion is to construct an authentic human being, and this has tobe done in terms of an image of the self.'1 The purpose of po-etry is to provide an image of all that human beings can be,and at least in the classical age of Greece poetry was failing todo this.

Plato's critique of imitation "is at the same time a critique ofthe mnral problematic of AESTHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS."I8This is Gadamer's italicization and capitalization, and henceit seems fair to infer that he intends to emphasize the destruc-tiveness of this form of consciousness. In grasping fully whatthe term means in this essay, we can do no better than to turnback to the lengthy paragraph with the recurrent referencesto the self. The really operative German word that describeswhat happens to the self in a society dominated by poets isciussern. Christopher Smith translates this term as "exterior-ize" ot "external," or the like. He is not mistaken, but the Ger-man term can also be correctly translated as express, therebyrecapturing the thread originating in the Stefan George Cir-cle's thinking. Thus a person who is characterized by an aes-thetic consciousness is one who is expressing values that areinauthentic. He is what Heidegger would have called a massman. Along similar lines, art or literature that imitates isexpressing something outside itself, and this makes it inau-thentic.

Political reality in classical Athens was inauthentic in thisway. Poets did not take themselves to be creative beings. Theyrather believed that they were expressing Homer, or to putthis in Gadamet's terms, "the role of the poets in Greek edu-cation [was] to ju.stify the whole of one's knowledge-in anyarea-by recourse to Homer."te Their knowledge was thusinauthentic because it was imitative, or expressive of Bome-thing outside their own poetry. In the listeners (readers) to thepoetry, this had the effect of corrupting them by making them

Poets, Education, and the State l4S

forget themselves: "Aesthetic self-forgetfulness afforded to thesophistry of the passions an entree into the human heart.,'roThis microcosmic relationship then grew and took community-wide form. Classical politics, according to Gadamer, then tookon the "colors of the Athenian theatrocracy."2l

The term aesthetic consciousness can be given added under-standing by referring it back to the German nineteenth cen-tury. The original purpose of subjecting Germans to the studyof classical Greece was to provide them with a model whichwould bring out the fullest humanity in modern Germans.Nietzsche was the first to recognize ttrat Altertumswissen-schaft had defeated this purpose by presenting a Greece thatwas all factual and hence easily imitated. Nietzsche reintro-duced a countervailing and counter-factual notion of Greece,placing heavy emphasis on the irrational in the Birth of Trag-edy. Nietzsche was not interested in the irrational for its ownsake but rather for what it revealed to us about the creative.Unquestionably Nietzsche exaggerated, but he nonethelesslaunched a mode of interpreting Greece that led direcdy toRohde's Psyche and to Freudian psychology. The Greeks-Nietzsche's Greeks-were not to be imitated at all. The threadthat began with Nietzsche thus is one that intends to do battlewith an aesthetic consciousness of the Greeks characteristic ofthe positivism of Altertumswissenschaft. Gadamer is here ar-ticulating that thread.

The reality of classical Greece is that the human psyche isalienated from itself. It has become other-directed, imitative,and hence uncreative. Plato intends to move away from thisaestheticized reality toward the authenticity of ideality. Buthow? That is the next step, and with Gadamer it is not at all alogical step. That is to say, there is nothing in aestheticized re-ality that leads one to recognize it for what it is. It is a cave,and the way out of it is not at all logical.

Hence in the progress of Gadamer's argument, the next stepis a d,ecision, a completely original starting point that does notexpress anything outside itself. Gadamer says this more thanonce: when epeaking of Plato, Gadamer notes that ,,his posi-


tion is the quite conscious expression ofa decision, a decision

made as a result of having been taken with socrates and phi-

losophy."22 This decision was "made in opposition to the en-

tire political and intellectual culture of his time, and made in

the conviction that philosophy alone has the capacity to save

the state."23 And elsewhere Gadamer criticizes the poet be-

cause the persons he cannot abide are those who "preserve

that quiet energ'y which grows from resolve."2n The emphasis

is on án origin that comes from an authentic personality'

we should understand that the emerging hero of Gadamer's

argument is none other than Plato himself' It is he, Plato, who

t as the resolve and the conviction to burn his poetry and make

a fresh start on the project of politics. However briefly, the

emerging figure of Plato is therefore similar to the Gestalt fig'or", á"r.ribe¿ i" the biographies of the members of the Stefan

George Circle. They were creators ex nihilo, writers who did

not express some truth or reality outside their writings but

who instead used words to create new reality. That is what

Plato will now do when he creates a city in speech. He willdemonstrate that politics at its ideal essence is the opposite of

accepting the dictates of reality.Vát tnére is nothing mysterious about the city in speech' No

matter how Gadamer describes it, what we finally see is thatPlato's language returns us, quite literally, to the soul' The

ideal city is very much the opposite of the real city' Where the

real city alienates the self, the ideal city returns the selfto it-self. But this ideal city is in language, so it behooves us to in-

quire into how this return is brought about'

ru

The problem with the language of the poets is that it is imita-

tive, and so we can expect the same arguments to be employed

against it by Gadamer as were earlier aired in reference to hu-

Poets, Education, and the State 147

man psychology. And sure enough, Gadamer, in following hisPlato, does just this. He of course refers to the lon, an earlyPlatonic writing that records a conversation between Socratesand the rhapsode Ion. It is here that Plato attacks the poets forbeing inspired, by which he means that they are filled withthe gods and hence do not express themselves. When Gadamersays that the poets are "less qualified to interpret than are anyof their listeners" he means that they lack any authentic in-tention of their own that would enable them to understandwhy poetry exists and what can be done with it.F The poet is,once again quoting Plato, a winged and holy thing who cannotcreate until he is filled by the god and is "unconscious and rea-son is no longer in him."26

Gadamer notes that Plato is not the first classical Greek tocriticize Homer's poetry. The great tragedians of the fifth cen-tury did this as well, but Gadamer argues that "Plato's criti-cism goes "infinitely further."2? "Drama too falls before hiscritique," for the reason that it too is basically imitative.r8Gadamer's point is that Plato does not simply want to takedown Homer. He would have been in good and moderate com-pany if that were his sole aim. Plato is actually much moreradical than this. He wants to take down the entire poeticfbrm of language, and the basic reason for this is that poeticlanguage is irreducibly imitative.

Here as elsewhere, Gadamer is consistent with the lan-guage philosophy of the Stefan George Circle. Correctly un-derstood, the problem for the Georgians was not so much thatlanguage was imitative or expressive of something outside it.Everyday language had always functioned this way, and nopurpose was served in endless criticism of the prosaic qualityof everyday life. The problem was rather that Dichtung, or po-ctry, was a peculiar form of language insofar as its authentic-ity depended upon it being self-sufficient. The more reason-uble among the Georgians would always have recognized thatprose expresses something outside it, but they wished to re-Horve a purity for Dichtung that would enable it to lay claiml,o being a creativo Bourco-and hence a linguistic foundation


-for human life. Thus the corruption of poetry in the nine-teenth century was for the Georgians a serious matter. It had

to be combatted by restoring poetry to its pristine purity, and

this was a central mission of the Georgians. It is at this pointthat Gadamer necessarily would break with the Georgians, forhis Plato was not intent on restoring poetry but rather in re-

placing Homeric poetry with prosaic, but creatiue, philosophic

language.Poetry, whether it be that of Homer or that of Aeschylus,

was basically narrative, and so it was utterly dependent upon

direct speech. This quality of poetry could not have been re-

formed without fundamental changes in grammatical struc-

ture, and these were more the product of the slow development

of Greek culture than anything else. Indirect speech did not oc-

cur in archaic, tribal Greece. It was the consequence of grad-

ual urbanization and the slowly dawning awareness that theproblems of living together, ethical problems, could be han-

dled more gracefully by a language that offered the speaker

the possibility of distancing himself from the action. Thisgrammatical possibility was fully in place by the time Platolived, and hence Plato was able to write differently than Ho-

mer and approach the ethical problems of classical Greek soci-

ety with a more appropriate because more nuanced language.

Gadamer rightly notes that Plato was fully conscious of thispossibility and hence demonstrated a language consciousness

that supposedly did not exist in classical Greece.'n Gadamer

takes the following example from the lliad:

And as he wandered on, now alone, the oldman

Implored Apollo, the son of long-locked Letho,fervently.

Hear me, oh god, who with silver bow dostbestride Chrysa

And holy Cilla, thou who are the mighty lordofTenedos.


Smintheus! If ever I have built a lovely templefor you

Ifeven I have burnt for thee choiceshanks

Of bulls or of goats, then grant me this,my desire:

May the Achaeans pay for my tears underthy shafts.3o

Plato then rewrites this in t}:e Republic as follows:

And the old man on hearing this was frightened and de-parted in silence, and having gone apart from the camphe prayed at length to Apollo, invoking the appellationsof the god, and reminding him of, and asking requitalfor, any of his gifts that had found favor whether in thebuilding of temples or the sacrifice of victims. In returnfor these things he prayed that the Achaeans shouldsuffer for his tears by the god's shafts."

The argument in reference to these passages is primarilyphilological but it has significance for the emergence of philos-ophy: Homer could not have written in indirect speech becausethat grammatical form was a late development in the ancientGreek language. Indeed Plato was one of the first Greek writ-ers to use indirect speech extensively, and when Plato has thePlatonic Socrates announce his intent to use indirect speech, itis by having Socrates claim that he is not a poetic man. [Re-public,394al. Unlike Monsieur Jourdain, then, Socrates is notjust discovering that he has been speaking prose for fortyyears without being aware of it. He is rather shifting from di-rect to indirect speech because this is a new possibility oftheancient Greek language.

We must then ask why the Platonic Socrates would makesuch a shift. One answer is readily apparent in the Republic.lndirect speech has the distinct advantage of allowing the

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emotions to be detached from the subject being discussed. Di-rect speech, in contrast, blends emotions and action into one

literary form and thus makes literature a problem as well as a

pleasure. Literature is a pleasure because we are able to feel

what is happening but a problem because our own feelings as

readers interfere with our thinking about what is happening.Indirect speech, because it is so much more devoid of immedi-ate emotional content, facilitates thinking what we are doing.I am not saying that rendering an action in indirect speech isthe same as thinking what we are doing but rather that it isthe condition of the possibility of such thought.

Thus indirect speech is necessary to the emergence of phi-losophy insofar as philosophy is a matter of reasoned ratherthan impassioned argument. That Plato is aware of this isclear from many of his best writings. Socrates is always por-

trayed as someone who, whatever else his strengths and vir-tues, is in control of his emotions' His antagonists, in contrast,are not nearly so in control and are also, not surprisingly, in-clined to use direct speech. Now I am not so much talkingabout poets as about sophists. For example, Thrasymachuscomes on stage in the Republic in the following introduction:

Now Thrasymachus had many times started out totake over the argument of our discussion, but had been

restrained by the men sitting near him, who wanted to

hear the argument out. But when we paused and I saidthis, he could no longer keep quiet; hunched up like awild beast, he flung himself at us as if to tear us topieces.32

But by the middle of the discussion, Thrasymachus has been

cured of his emotionalism, his language of action, and this has

been very much a matter of weaning him from direct speech

and bringing him over to indirect speech:

Now Thrasymachus did not agree to all of this so eas-

ily as I tell it now, but he dragged his feet and resisted,


and he produced a wonderful quantity of sweat, for itwas summer. And then I saw what I had not yet seenbefore - Thasymachus blushing.s'

By the end of the argument, Thrasymachus is a different man,and the difference is in no small measure due to the kind ofspeech used by Socrates. With tact that is the consequence ofhis self-control, Socrates gives Thrasymachus credit for the re-sulting quality of argument:

"I owe it to you, Thrasymachus," I said, "since youhave gotten gentle and have left off being hard onmg.ttt'

Socrates has in effect gained a conversation partner, a sig-nificant Other. Although Gadamer does not handle these ma-terials in this manner, everything he goes on to say about thePlatonic use of language points in this direction. For the keyto understanding language in Plato is the effect language hasin returning us to ourselves, more accurately, to an authenticvision of the philosophic self inus. This is a self that is capableof engaging in sustained discourse, undetermined by privi-leged knowledge claims, aimed at reaching agreement aboutthe meaning of a moral concept, and thereby capable of serv-ing as a foundation for whatever community human beingsare capable of achieving.

I have taken the liberty of drawing this conclusion out ofPlato for the simple reason that it has been a direction pointedat by Gadamer from his earliest writing on Werner Jaeger'sthinking and through his habilitation thesis. It is a directionwhich continues in "Plato and the Poets," but often in moresuggestive than developed form. What was initially an em-phasis on a speaking as opposed to a writing culture, on a dia-lectical as opposed to an apodictic conception of philosophy,now takes form as a distinct shift from poetic to prosaic lan-guage in Plato. Such a shift has odd as well as predictablecharacteristics.


Thus, according to Gadamer, even when Plato is bad, he isgood: "Plato tells his tale'poorly,' showing no concern for therequirements of any narrative which is intended to absorb thenarrator and listener alike in the spell cast by the shapeswhich it conjures lrp."'u The key to understanding why Platotells his tale poorly and thereby facilitates the possibilities ofphilosophy lies in the concept of play. Six years earlier, Gada-mer had introduced the concept of play in his habilitation the-sis, but it is only in "Plato and the Poets" that the concept isput to work.36 Its use can best be understood by recalling, yetone more time, what language, in the thinking of the membersof the Stefan George Circle, was supposed to do. Language ide-ally is not an expression of something outside itself but israther a framework within which meaning is created. When-ever language is used as a tool to express something outside it-self, it lacks play and playfulness. It tends to take on the op-posite characteristic of seriousness, and for good reason' wemight add. It is no easy business to be a tool, and the practicallife of providing food, clothing, and shelter is not a relaxed ac-

tivity. Hence play has little to do with everyday language.Put differently, if the poets take their own writing seriously,

it is because they take it to be the expression of somethingelse. If it is not the expression of something else, then it mustbe taken playfully, for there is no other way to take writingthat creates meaning in its own play of words. Once again toGadamer: ". . . lighthearted play would celebrate that which istaken truly seriously," and this is the ethos of the commu-nity.37 The poetry that Plato objects to, according to Gada-mer, is one that claims to be "the soul's representation of selfin the mirror of an exalted reality."38 Hence for Gadamer se-

riousness enters poetic language and play leaves it when it at'tempts to imitate an exalted reality and when it forgets that itis giving shape to nothing more than l}lLe ethos of the com-rnunity.In explaining what he means by this claim, Gada-mer says that "only the poet who was really an educator andwho really shaped human life could play the game of poetry in


real knowledge of what it was about: Only those poets can be

taken seriously who do not take their poetry writing to be

ultimate."seIt might well be conceded that play and playfulness are

characteristic of a theory of language that claims that mean-ing lies within rather than outside of language, but what arewe to make of the meaning thus created? Is it not arbitrary,simply the product of language facility and nothing more?Perhaps, but this is not the case with Plato. If we dare use theterm express after giving it such harsh notices, playful lan-guage-indeed, Plato's language-does express and therebybring into reality something that initially may be within lan-guage but is finally a rcalization of language. This is the hu-man soul, and what happens in playful language is that thesoul is first constituted. This idea is at the center of Gadamer'sinterpretation of Plato's work.

Nowhere is this idea of the constitution of the soul in lan-guage better illustrated for Gadamer than in Plato's myths.These for Gadamer are constructed in the teeth of the GreekEnlightenment tendency to reduce myth to natural structuresand hence explain them away. In the face of this tendency to"explain the soul itself and to eliminate the mystery whichsurrounds the powers ofjustice and love by reducing them toclever (or weak) contrivances or infirmities, Socrates emerges. . . as the visionary who sees his own soul."ao The importantfeature of Platonic myths, according to Gadamer, is that theynever lose sight of the human soul. They are not entertain-ment designed to call attention to the soul. "[To] be sure, inthese poetic myths the soul does not transform itself into a

variety of figures which assert themselves against us whilekeeping us in ignorance of their truth."ar The soul rather re-turns "from its journey through the surreal realms of myth inwhich Socratic truth rules as the real law of things, chastisedand set right in its beliefs."a2 So the journey into myth, litera-ture as it were, is justified by the need to give the soul a G¿-

úalt, or form. Yet the Socratic myth is not literature per se


but is rather philosophizing: "These [mythical] worlds makeall too obvious the importance of its philosophizing, a taskfrom which no revelation . . . sets it free."n3

The Platonic myths thus lay the groundwork for philoso-phizing, but this important activity takes place in the dia-logues even more than in the myths. Once again, Gadamer re-verts to his favored theme of play: "Precisely because of theseriousness of his purpose, Plato gives his mimesis the levityof a jocular play. Insofar as his dialogues are to portray philos-ophizing in order to compel us to philosophize, they shroud allof what they say in the ambiguous twilight of irony."n'In thisway, Gadamer continues, Plato is able to escape the trap ofwriting, which is not able to come to its own aid because writ-ing is so definitive. Plato thereby creates a real philosophicalliterature that is able to refer to something serious beyond it-self. Plato's "dialogues are nothing more than playful illusionswhich say something only to him who finds meanings beyondwhat is expressly stated in them and allows these meanings totake effect within him."'5

These references to meanings beyond the language of the di-alogues or myths may be taken as problematic, an indicationthat Gadamer is not holding to the Georgian idea of a purelanguage, but I do not think the problem is real. Once again,we do well to recall the thread of the irrational in Greek lifebegun by Nietzsche and continued by Rohde and Freud. I be-lieve Nietzsche's point was that language reflects more thanthe rational side of life. it also reflects and gives shape to theirrational forces in life, and precisely because these forces areirrational, they have to be shaped in mythological forrns whichapparently defy any further "rational" explanation. To at-tempt further explanation is often a matter of "explainingaway" and is thus a form of repression. Nietzsche, Rohde, andFreud all argued against this kind ofrepression, so character-istic of the German nineteenth century, and here we haveGadamer also arguing against it, implicitly, by paying atten-tion to Plato's myths.

And finally, as a way of clinching this particular argument


about Plato's language, Gadamer notes that Plato allows onetraditional form ofpoetry to continue to exist. These are songsofpraise for the gods. The reason is that "the song ofpraise inthe form ofpoetic play is shared language, the language ofourcommon concern."a6 In songs of praise of the gods, there isfurthermore "no danger of . . . self-estrangement. . . . In prais-ing, neither the one who praises nor the one before whom thepraise is made is forgotten."aT It is in the nature of praisingthat the "standard by which we evaluate and comprehend ourexistence is made manifest."as

Thus, in sum, what Platonic myths, dialogues, and songs ofpraise do is to recall us to the self. these are the forms of lan-guage which, Iike indirect speech, are justified because theyare not distractions from the central concern of ethical life,which is the state of the human soul. Language is ultimatelyrevealed to be educational insofar as it has this maieuticpower to bring out the soul. It is thus the ideal preface to theidea of Plato's educational state.

IV

The concept of education contained in "Plato's EducationalState" has need of being located and contextualized.ae HenceGadamer begins this essay by once again returning to thetouchstone of Plato's autobiographical comments in the Seu-enth Letter. This time, however, Gadamer treats t}rre SeuenthLetter explicitly rather than implicitly and focuses its impor-tance in his own autobiography. He notes that the SeuenthLetter became significant in Plato research in Germany afterWorld War I, and he gives as the reason that it provided a ba-sis for reaching an understanding of Plato's works and his phi-losophy. He then notes that as a consequence ofthe enhancedstatus of the Seuenth Letter, Plato's Republic "came to occupy amore central position than it had ever held before."uo In sum,


Gadamer is here trying to contextualize Plato's diverse philo-

sophical elements as being political' There is nothing new

here, nothing that was not already done in Gadamer's habili-tation thesis and in "Plato and the Poets." Yet it should be em-

phasized that this continuity, this repetition, is itself signifi-cant. It is a hallmark of Gadamer's early writings that Plato is

treated not just as a philosopher who roamed from one depart'ment to the next in his philosophical inquiries but that all ofhis wanderings make sense only from the samepolitical inten-tion. Thus the earlier concerns with ethics and with literatureare related to the concern for education by being tied into thesame political context.

Education is then further located by being tied into the Re-

public, and the main point here is that Plato in the Republic is

not intent upon a course of political reform. This too is a famil-iar topic in the writings of the early Gadamer' so it need not be

elaborated at length. The point is that Plato is not intent upon

reform for the simple reason that the Athenian state is beyond

reform; this much is made clear to Gadamer by the discontinu-ous discussion of justice in the Republic's Book I. This being

the case, Plato shifts his approach and treats the state in autopian manner. Gadamer's point here is similar in my opin-

ion to the basic approach taken up in his initial writing on

Jaeger's interpretation of Aristotle's Protreptikos' If Platowere to accept the existing state, his approach to its ethical oreducational problems would be positivistic. He would be look-

ing at established facts and their relationships unquestion-ingly. He could thus formulate himself in writing and articu-late the logic of facts. But Plato intends to question politicalfacts. The Republic's initial book thus demonstrates that thething called justice does not exist, or at least does not have astable existence. It is not a fact in classical Athens, or put dif-ferently, one cannot learn anything worth knowing about jus-

tice in Athens by following a positivistic approach' A dialec-

tical approach is adopted because a new concept of justice

must be created. Ttre Republic is adialogue without a final an'swer to its own question. Its real intention is to engage us indialogue.

Poets, Education, and the State L57

Let me put this point somewhat differently: Gadamer ishere claiming what he had been saying since his early ac-quaintance with the thinking of the poet Stefan George. Ifthings are taken for granted, then language exists merely as atool to express them. If, however, the existence of things, likejustice, is brought into doubt, then language takes on a greatersignificance. It does not express things but is rather the locusof the creation of things. This is precisely the case in the 8e-public, where the chief political thing-namely, justice-isvery much called into question in Book One, thereby con-fronting the three conversationalists assembled at the outsetof Book Two with the choice of collapsing into relativism oradopting a dialectical approach to politics to replace the dis-credited positivistic approach. They cannot say what justice is,and so therefore they construct it in words. Through dialogue,justice takes on an initial literary shape. The Platonic state ofl};.e Republic is indeed a utopia.

The Platonic Socrates is not a utopian first and a dialecti-cian second. This formulation gets the logic of cause and effectbackwards. The Platonic Socrates is a seeker of knowledge forwhom positivism fails. This is what happens in the first bookof the Republic. The Platonic Socrates only thereafter fallsback on a dialectical approach. This makes the Platonic So-crates into a utopian, but utopia here does not mean that thePlatonic Socrates is describing some ideal realm that hasnever existed and never will. It rather has the much more lim-ited sense that Socrates is creating the state in words. If thisstate is utopian, it is not because it is perfect in some idealisticsense but simply because it exists only in speech, and thisadmittedly is a tenuous existence. Plato's educational stateis the continuation of ethics by other means. Nonetheless, atleast in its utopian form, the means are the same as they werefor the ethics: words.

The real subject matter of the Republic is the soul. Like thestate, it is not an entity that has a prior existence that a goodpositivist methodology can ferret out. Gadamer goes to greatlengths to make this point. He does this by denying that thereis any such thing ae a nature to the soul, a move which will

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of course enable him to deny the positivistic method: "Thehealthy soul . . . is not simply in the hands of some 'nature'which takes care ofit, it does not possess a natural good consti-tution which could be said to govern it."5' Then, speaking ofjustice as well as the soul further on in the same paragraph,Gadamer says that "they are not of a certain 'nature' and arenot good by dint of a good 'nature.' This holds for the soul as

much as it does for the state."52Because the soul does not possess a nature, it logically fol-

lows that it needs knowledge of itself. That is to say, if it had anature, then there would be a tendency toward positivism. Wewould no doubt reflect on the soul, but ultimately we wouldtest our insights against a wider, more universal theory ofnature. Ultimately, that is, the soul would be seen as a micro-cosmic restatement of laws that prevail everywhere in thenatural universe. But Gadamer does not take this approach,and hence the soul's knowledge of itself must be handleddifferently.

The soul "knows always about the danger of being out oftune because it is knowingly keyed to being in unison with it-self. It is always aware of being in tune with itself, which is tosay that it is always endangered."uu So the soul may not havea nature, but it does have something of a supernature in theconcept of tonal harmony that is indigenous to it. It does haveat least a tendency that gives us guidance and thereby makescreative language something more than merely arbitrary.Gadamer then goes on by noting in distinctly Heideggerianterms that the

. . . Greeks have a beautiful expression for this innerreferencing of the well-constituted soul to Dasein'sknowledge of itself: sophrosune, which Aristotle ex-plains as phronesls. With phronesis conceived as theknowing self, Dasein succeeds in winning a durablegovernance of itself.sa

So clearly the point is that the absence of a natural constitu-tion in the soul leads to the requirement that it have knowl-


edge of itself. The law of harmony here prevails. The reflectingsoul knows that it has the correct knowledge of itself when itfeels itself in harmony. The ultimate purpose of reflection onthe soul is to bring this harmony into words.

If I understand Gadamer correctly, I think he is saying thatPlato's Republic is a Gestalfs-biography of the human soul.The fact that the Platonic Socrates looks to the larger sign-board of the polis does not conflict with this, since the polis isin any case a continuation of ethics by other means. Thus aforming in words of the state, which is the manifest theme ofthe Repubhrc, is simultaneously a forming in words of the hu-man soul. Plato's educational state is a literary creation witha purpose. It comes into wordy existence to serve as a mirrorupon the soul. It has no purpose beyond this, and so if it en-ables us to see ourselves better, it has served its purpose. Thisis Plato's educational state.

Put slightly differently, the soul is constituted as a reflec-tion of the state. The Platonic state, insofar as it is itself theunwritten ethos of the community in which we live, turns outto be something like what Karl Marx meant when he spoke ofthe economy being t}re educator. Education in this sense isnothing so simple and superficial as the lessons we learn inclassrooms or from books. Indeed, these lessons are only possi-ble in terms of how well they fit into the unwritten ethos of thecommunity. The teaching of foreign languages, for example,fails in the United States but succeeds in a country like Hol-land because in each case the ethos of the community differs.American society does not value highly the learning of foreignlanguages, and hence the teaching offoreign languages gen-erally fails. The opposite is the case in Holland because thelearning of foreign languages is believed to be a matter of na-tional survival. In each case the real educator is the ethos ofthe community.

The substance of Plato's educational state is justice, whichwe can now reasonably take to be a set of unwritten rules, theethos of the community, which Plato, with his distinctly lrfer-ory method in now, in the Republic, putting into words. Theossonce of this educution is not to give advice based upon ex-


perience. This was early ruled out in the Republic. Its essence

is quite different: "Only justice can bring about a solid and

end-uring state and only he who is a friend to himself is able

to win the solid friendship of others."5s Plato's educational

state is really a description in words ofjustice. It is a literaryachievement. when reflected back upon to the soul, it incul-

cates the rules by which the soul comes to be in tune withitself.

The emphasis on the unwritten rules of the communityfinally returns Gadamer to a theme with which he had begun

his early writings. This is that Greece was not a writing crtl-

ture but was rather a speaking culture. Plato's educational

state is not a real thing that can be grasped by the positivisticmethods of the Altertumswissenschaften. It is rather a utopia"

that exists only in the potential of an idea, and the idea must

first be brought into speech before it can have any hope ofreal-ity. That Greece-more accurately, Athens-is still a speak-

ing culture, and the possibility of aphilosophical conuersation

was frankly its only hope of redemption. Certainly, from thepoint of view of Germans hoping to redeem themselves in the

1920., it was the only good reason for studying Greece' The

implied message was that Germans, too, could free themselves

from the rigid, written forms of their civilization by returningto conversation.

V

The value of the two essays covered in this chapter is not whatthey add to Gadamer's habilitation thesis but rather whatthey reveal about the author. obviously, Gadamer's habilita-tion thesis was about ethics and language, and without doubt

the habilitation thesis was connected to an incipient concept ofthe state. Yet many of these themes were not carried to fru-ition in Gadamer's habilitation thesis, and had they been they


would have distracted from the single oveniding theme of ar-ticulating a theory of Plato's dialectical mode of constructingan ethics. In the two essays I have covered in this chapter,however, concreteness has been given to the ancillary themesofeducation, the state, and ethics, and one by-product ofthishas been added clarity about Gadamer's intentions.

Gadamer's early thinking was very much keyed to the val-ues that were fought over in the philological movement of theGerman nineteenth century. From Aprll 22, 1777 -the leg-endary day on which Friedrich August Wolf had inscribedhimself as a student of philology rather than as a student ofsome technical field-the purpose of the philological move-ment had been to counter the fragmenting tendency of mod-ernization by shaping education to the terms of a vision of theideal whole person. The first generation of German classicalphilologists had followed this lead and always managed to pro-duce works that were technically flawed but educationally in-spiring. The writings of Hólderlin, Schiller, and Goethe arethe model writings for this first generation. But with the riseof Altertumswissenschaft, a distinctly positivistic and histor-icist tendency took over and submerged the central literarytendency of the philological movement.

The high point of this movement toward Alturtumswissen-schaft was reached with the arrival of Wilamowitz to the Ber-lin Chair for classical Greek philology, and the high pointof the reaction to this triumph of Alterturnswissenschaft wasspread out over the works of Nietzsche, Rohde, and the the-matics of the Stefan George Circle. They recaptured, not al-ways perfectly, the humanist edge that had been lost by aca-demics like Wilamowitz. With German defeat in World War I,the stage was set for a complete return to the original human-istic values of the German philological movement.

Gadamer's early work represents a neglected chapter inthat return. Jaeger's Third Humanism commanded centerstage, but unfortunately Jaeger was not capable of producingthe revolution that was needed. He grasped that there was aproblem but continued to address the problem in the manner

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of an Altertumswissenschaftler. He never broke with Wilamo-witz, as Friedlánder had, and consequently Jaeger placed him-self in an ambivalent position from the outset. Gadamer'swork was not paid attention to because he was young and un-known, and it would have been too much to expect that he

would have taken himself more seriously than he did. Hisprime interest was in securing a professorship, and this pre-

vented him from seeing and capitalizing on the real import ofhis thinking.

The two essays considered in this chapter emphasize thecontinuity of the young Gadamer with the values of the earlyclassical philologists. Greece is valued not for its own sake butrather for what it could provide in the way of an image of theideal self that could stand at the center of the German educa-

tional venture. The state is conceived and valued not for itsown sake, which invariably is a concentration of power, butrather for the sake of what it might contribute to the shapingof the human soul. Language is conceived and valued for itsimmanent power to provide forms which can be emulated. Thevision is nothing if not romantic, in the looser and better sense

of that term.Yet the distinctive value of these early writings of Gadamer

is not simply in their extension of the romantic project. Theirdistinctive value is in recognizing the crisis of the Germanphilological movement and addressing it philosophically. In-deed, this kind of emphasis points up the decisive differencebetween the young Gadamer and the members of the StefanGeorge Circle, and it is what makes his early thinking wellworth considering, even today. Where the members of theGeorge Circle blindty extend the emphasis on literature, on

what Germans like to call Dichtung, Gadamer shifts the mean-

ing of this key term and turns it into something more appro-priate to the prosaic realities of the twentieth century. No-where is this better illustrated than in the essay "Plato and

the Poets," for here we have Plato exiling the poets from thecity, and hence taking a direction diametrically opposed to


that of the Georgians, who would put poets at the center of thecity.

The relationship between Gadamer and the Stefan GeorgeCircle is reminiscent of the conversation between the PlatonicSocrates and Ion: Socrates would puncture poetry because theaesthetic consciousness it fosters works against the sober as-sessment of the real problems of ethics. So too would Gadamer.Ion would rely fully on the mystical meaning of the Poet, andso too the members of the Stefan George Circle. Although notalways keyed to poetry, they would certainly have placed thevision of heroic, poetic thinking at the center of their Reich.By the 1930s, Gadamer had clearly outgrown his early attach-ment to the romanticism of the Stefan George Circle.

These considerations enable us to focus the distinctive con-tribution of Gadamer's early writings. His thinking is not atall romantic in the narrow sense of that term. It is soberly re-alistic in confronting the spiritual bankruptcy of his times,and he produces a theory oflanguage that is keyed to address-ing the problems of Weimar Germany. No values can be pre-supposed. This is not to say that there were no values in Wei-mer Germany-that would be an absurd statement-butrather that there was a proliferation of value systems thatmade Weimar Germany look like a nightmarish projection ofthe scene described in the first book of Plato's Republic. Insuch a context, there was nothing better to do than ban theideologues from the city and start from scratch.

Gadamer's habilitation thesis had already proposed some-thing like this, but in a political vacuum. The two last essaysmove to close that vacuum by addressing themselves directlyto the political context of language, but as a matter of timing,they were already too late. "Plato and the Poets" was first pub-lished in 1934, one year after the Nazis had come to power,and "Plato's Educational State" eight full years thereafter.They had no chance to begin the debate that would lead totheir realization. There is thus, unfortunately, no develop-ment of Gadamer's early thinking into political theory. There


is movement in the direction of democratic political thinking,and it was recognized by none other than Karl Goerdeler, the

Mayor of Leipzig and a central figure in the July 20, L944, at'tempt to assassinate Hitler.56 But nonetheless Gadamer's de-

veloping political thinking remained stillborn. It is thereforeleft to us to complete it.

7

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The Early Thinkingof

Gadamer

The great achievement of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the reformof the Prussian educational system, was from the outset a cu-riously ambivalent affair. He in fact did change the internalstructure of the Prussian state in a way that would seem tohave favored the advent ofclassical Greek values. But in a re-markably short span of time, the bureaucratic Prussian stateput forth a set of demands that functioned to convert the cre-ative and poetic appropriation of classical Greece by men likeSchiller, Hólderlin, and the other figures of the romantic gen-eration into the flattened and systematic scientism of Alter-tumswissenschaft. Personified in the figures of Bóckh andlater Wilamowitz, the new science of the classical world in-corporated all the social values of modern natural scienceand hence set the stage for the rebellion that began withNiotzsche.


The ideal classical philologist of Altertumswissenschaft wasrecognizable as a Lockean laborer, clearing away the "rub-bish" from the ruins of classical civilization so that "facts"could make themselves felt and patterns could be revealed.The "master builders" of Locke's imagination, men like New-ton, had their counterparts in the giants of classical Greece,men like Plato. Locke's intent was to make Newton's "meth-od" plain and simple, and so he reduced it to empiricism. Theintent of BOckh and Wilamowitz was to reveal such men tohave been products of their times. They, too, had a "method"for doing this, and it was Wilamowitz's claim that he hadnothing other than "method" to teach. Clearly, the intent ofAltertumsuissenschaft was to drain away all genius from clas-sical Greece, to effect an Entzauberung that would match thedemythologization of nature that had taken place in Locke'scentury. Only then would a true science of the ancient worldtake shape. It was against this growing academic "normal sci-ence" that Nietzsche rebelled.

The Stefan George Circle made a sustained, abstract, andhighly emblematic contribution to this Nietzschean genre ofcultural criticism. In effect, the Georgians looked for new val-ues, although there is every reason to believe that they did notknow what they were looking for or why. If Nietzsche focusedon the irrational in Greece as a way of structuring his rebel-lion against the maddening emphasis on rationality in Greeklife, the Georgians made irrationality the hallmark of their re-bellion. They were, in sum, cultural critics in the most pessi-mistic sense of the term.

What concerned the Georgians and fueled their irrational-ity was the gradual weakening of the German life-world underthe impact of advancing bureaucratization and, by the end ofthe century, industrialization. At best, the German state wasfully incapable of addressing this problem. At its worst, theGerman state was an accomplice to bureaucratization andindustrialization. It was hostage to the industrialists of theRuhr, the bankers ofDüsseldorf, and the traders ofFrankfurt.But it was also the successor to the already heavily bureau-

The Early Thinking of Gadamer 167

cratized Prussian state. Prussia's conquest of the industrial-izing Rheinland was thus the creation of the worst of possiblecombinations. Altertumswissenschaft was an aspect of thisbureaucratized, industrializing Germany of the Wilhelmineperiod.

For the Georgians, what was called for was a revolution thatwould replace the present state with an entirely new one capa-ble of ushering in a new culture. It was never clear to theGeorgians what this new culture should actually look like,only that it should be modeled on the personality profile of theleader. Absurdly, they each chose their own favorite leader intheir quest for a figure who would sanction new values in hisactions. And the acts of the various heroes were always soclose to pure act that the Georgians were incapable of trans-lating these actions into prescribed social and political values.It was an article of faith of the Georgians that none of themcould or would say in advance what the new empire wouldlook like. To even describe the coming Reich would turn it intosomething planned, and they wanted none of this. The leader'sGestalt would fully determine the shape of things to come.

Because Nietzsche was a classical philologist, the Georgiansalways retained an interest in the classical model, however,and in the thinking of Hildebrandt, Friedemann, and Fried-lánder, they developed a thread of thought that contained adistinctly different departure. Against the growing scientisticrationalization of the German life-world, they proposed not anirrational rebellion but rather'a rebellion in terms of a differ-ent norm ofrationality. They discovered Socrates and Plato asembodiments of this rationality and hence moved on to con-ceive these men as Gestalt figures. Their models are strikinglyundeveloped or poorly worked out, but this is beside the pointthat they initiated a new line of thought among the Georgi-ans. All three were attracted to Paul Natorp for the simplereason that he too deviated from the established modes of ap-propriating Plato. Marburg in the early 1920s became the cen-ter of this small movement.

It is appropriate at this point to thematize what was hap-

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pening among the Georgian classicists, and this can be done interms borrowed from Thomas Kuhn. The Georgians were ask-ing for a "revolutionary science" of the ancient world, one thatwould effect a paradigm shift away from the model that gov-

erned the thinking of the established "normal science" calledAltertumswissenschaft. They fully understood that the studyof Greece in imperial Germany was \Morse than useless be-

cause it was being used to sanctify the bureaucratization andindustrialization that was taking place. The paradigm shiftthat they wanted was one that put forth a distinctly differentpicture of Greece, one that would defy the categories of scien-tistic culture. The flattened would again become three-dimen-sional. The diachronic would take synchronic form, the zers-tückelt would be restored to a whole, and a world that wa's

dead would again become arecognizable life-world.They-and I refer to Hildebrandt, Friedemann, Fried-

lánder, and even Natorp-could not effect that paradigmshift. Neither for that matter could Gadamer, as the successor

to the above-mentioned classicists, but he went further anddid more to give shape to their vision than did any of his con-

temporaries. He adopted the device of the Gestalt-biographybut did not exaggerate it. He was deeply informed and en-riched by the insights of Martin Heidegger but as a trainedclassical philologist had a more disciplined grasp on Greece.Also unlike Heidegger, Gadamer was able to give a politicaltwist to his work, by which I mean that he was able to see

Plato and the "Platonic Socrates" as thinkers intent upon es-

tablishing or reestablishing the life-world of thepolis. As a re-sult of all these differences, there is a continuous emphasis inGadamer's early work on the development of practical think-ing. It sets him apart.

Gadamer's early writings therefore present an exception tothe tendency toward what Weber would call a "perfectionist"ethics. This is not to deny that the Platonic Socrates was a cul-tural superman. He was cast in this role as early as 1914 byFriedemann. He is, however, not the worst of possibilities. Wehave now seen Gadamer's Platonic Socrates in his full devel-


opment, and he is a good sight more palatable than other pro-jected Germanic ethical supermen. Marx's proletariat, Nietz-sche's Übermensch, tlne routine Gestalt figures of the StefanGeorge Circle biographies, are all characters distinguished bytheir superhuman and hence extralegal characteristics. Theyare "perfect" in their fashion and hence adequate personal-izations of the notion of a perfectionist ethics. Gadamer's Pla-tonic Socrates is from the outset much less superhuman, muchmore willing to assert and emphasize his humanity, muchmore given to an ethics of responsibility that is not sanctionedby a universal law and hence much better keyed to act as apersonalized model of a responsible German state.

Obviously I am urging that there is a similarity betweenWeber's Verantwortungsethik and Gadamer's dialektischeEthik.r Yet there is also a difference. Weber compensates forthe constitutional failings of the German state by imposing anethical burden of responsibility on the individual. Gadamergoes far beyond this. In the personalized theory ofthe PlatonicSocrates, he constructs an ethical paradigm that is a model forthe state and not merely compensation for the constitutionalshortcomings of the existing German state. It is not, finally,the individual who is expected to act responsibly in a contextin which states do not. With Gadamer it is rather that theportrait of the responsible individual is really a personalizedtheory of the responsible state. This image is Aristotelian inspirit. It is an image of the polis as the continuation of ethics.It is worth looking at in more detail.

II

Take, for example, the profession of ignorance of Gadamer'sPlatonic Socrates. It represents a brilliant first step insofaras it indicates a Buperman who is intent upon emphasizinghis humanity. It locates a superman who is super for the rea-

L7O Political Hermeneutics

son that he does not claim to be intellectually superior. Overagainst this distinctly human Socrates, all others claim toknow what justice is, yet all that they indicate by their profes-sions of superior knowledge is their political narrowness, andhence their actions reveal just how superhuman the Socraticprofession of ignorance really is. From the outset, the PlatonicSocrates reveals his awareness of the basic pluralism of soci-ety and thus appeals to anyone who is not narrow himself inhis concept ofjustice. The Platonic Socrates prefigures a statewhich is restrained in its claims upon its own citizens andupon other states because it recognizes that it does not haveobjective truth.

Depersonalization of the literary figure of the Platonic Soc-rates reveals the theoretical point that the profession of ígno-rance is but another name for the argument that politics isbased on opinion (or prejudice) rather than truth. Thereforepolitics as such is a limited activity, and hence the state (notmerely the individual) is duty-bound to act responsibly. Thisis a theoretical point that is universally applicable, by whichI mean that it is not only appropriate to a theocratic stateclaiming access to divine truths from another world but also toa secular state claiming access to the scientific knowledge ofthis world. The monolithy of both kinds of states is challengedby the pluralism of the Platonic Socrates. My point, in brief, isthat the Socratic profession of ignorance does not escape allforms of absolutism only to fall into relativism. Ironically, ithas its own quasi-transcendental quality: It is a finite abso-lute. The implicit claim of Socrates'vision of politics is that noone possesses the transcendental truth that can serve to putan end to politics as a dialogue.

To push this argument about the Socratic profession of igno-rance to its extreme, we have to look at the way it functionsin a larger context. It allows the Platonic Socrates to teach po-litical responsibility for the reason that he can hold othersanswerable for their own knowledge claims. Seemingly, theprofession of ignorance allows the Platonic Socrates to escaperesponsibility by hiding behind a feigned ignorance, but Gada-

The Early Thinking of Gadamer l7l

mer's Platonic Socrates never really does this. Rather, fromthe first page of t}re Republic to the last, he allows himself tobe repeatedly "arrested" and held answerable for his claims. Inboth respects, then, in holding others answerable and in al-lowing himself to be held answerable, the figure of the Pla-tonic Socrates is a model for the well-constituted state.

The further development of Gadamer's Platonic Socratesdoes not belie this brilliant beginning. The very notion of dia-Iectics is one that incorporates into one's thinking a theoreti-cal principle of constitutionality, and hence it is the secondstep, after the profession of ignorance, in articulating a per-sonalized model of a responsible state. To once again deper-sonalize the dialectics of the literary figure of the PlatonicSocrates: Every claim is legitimate only insofar as it opens it-self to the real possibility of counterclaim. In Gadamer's Ger-man: Anspruch gains its legitimacy only insofar as it can tol-erate Widerspruch. Thus the Socratic profession of ignoranceis nicely followed up by a rational procedure, dialectics, whichfurther articulates the principle behind the practice of pro-fessing ignorance. That is to say, only because one remembergthat one does not really know what justice is can one be opento listen to the counterclaim of the Other in conversation.

In emphasizing dialectics, Gadamer contributes to return-ing European philosophy to its first form. That is to say, dia-Iectics is the appropriate basic form of philosophy because itexcludes the prejudice, common to everyday life, that there is(or must be) a truth, conventional or transcendent, which canguide the carrying out ofthe everyday activity ofphilosophy.The truth-for-us of philosophy is that there is no truth-as-suchwhich, once arrived at, simply has to be systematized for phi-losophy to put an end to its own peculiar business. Becausethere are no exceptions to this, dialectics turns out to be theuniversal form of Greek philosophy and,I would argue, philos-ophy itself. Of course, dialectics could itself be brought intoquestion, and such a question would be legitimate, but thequestion whether dialectics was the universal form of philoso-phy could only bo airod diak¡ctically, and hence cven tho con-

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L72 Political Hermeneutics

clusion that there was a single, universal law that was non-contingent and hence transcendent would itself be contingentupon the dialogue that led up to such a recognition.

Put differently, philosophy ends, if it ends at all, in politics,and this is the case quite simply becausepolitics is nothing butanother word for the situated, finite, human condition. So

therefore philosophy ends where it began, in the human condi-tion, which is just another way of saying that the debate abouttlne end, of philosophy is itself an illusion. The claim that Platois an antipolitical philosopher is hence a claim that Plato isnot a philosopher after all. But this is not Gadamer's claim.His emphasis on the authenticity of the contested Seuenth Let'úer represents the taking of a necessary position in Platoscholarship, and I need not repeat here the argument as towhy it is necessary. What needs to be emphasized in the con'text of this concluding argument is that the Gadamerian vi-sion of politics as reducible to dialectics but then irreduciblytragic (because it cannot be further reduced to an absolute) isyet another instance of the tendency of the thinking of theearly Gadamer to accept politics for the imperfect thing it is.Put differently, the refusal to accept politics as irreduciblytragic is the condition ofthe possibility ofperfectionist absolu-tism. It is the refusal to accept the inescapably tragic humancondition that opens the way for absolutism, and the charm ofabsolutism is its perfectionism: It clearly offers escape fromthe pain of everyday politics.

Moreover, in the articulation of the constitutional model,the Platonic Socrates of Gadamer is unlike every other Ger-man superman of the nineteenth century in that he does ¿oú

want to be alone. He does not want to establish a dictatorshipof a single class, the proletariat, or retreat with his animals toa mountaintop in the fashion of Zarat'hustra, or decisivelyshape other human beings in terms of a single image, as does

the typical Gestalt figure of the George Circle. In other words,he has no Führerprinzip of ethical leadership. Gadamer'sPlatonic Socrates wants a conversation partner. He wantssomeone who will and can effectively oppose him. He is thus,


rnutatis mutandis, asking for a constitutional principle of limi-tation in the shape of a legitimate opposition party.

The distinction here is subtle and has already been indi-cated in reference to the idealized Marxian conception of theproletariat: Given the problem ofan absence ofconstitutionalrestraints on the power of the state, the intellectual develop-ment of a superman who rises up to challenge the state is notan improvement in the basic situation if there are no constitu-tional restraints on the superman. Indeed, the reality of theperfectionist proletarioú in power or the perfectionist Führer inpower represents nothing so much as a worsening of the situa-tion because there is no opposition (or opposing principle) totheir domination. Once again, the appeal of Gadamer's Pla-tonic Socrates is that he incorporates constitutional restraintsfrom the very outset. He is thus an alternative to the consti-tutionally unrestrained power state. This is his strongestappeal.

Let me put this third point into different words by empha-sizing a distinctly modern characteristic which Gadamer'sPlatonic Socrates does not possess: will power. The professionof ignorance, dialectics, conversation, the emphasis on theirreducible tragedy of politics-all of these features of Gada-mer's Platonic Socrates suggest that he cannot possess theNietzschean will-to-power and is hence not a modern man.What Nietzsche recognized as the quintessentially distinctivetrait of the modern man was the capacity to disengage fromthe everyday flow of life in order to gain control of it. This formof willpower can best be seen in the seemingly naive exampleof the modern professional: In its twentieth-century defini-tion, a professional is a person who learns to perform one ac-

tivity, let us say medicine, in terms of objective standards. Thephysician makes a distinct profession of knowledge. He pro-fesses to be acting in a way which is, finally, under the controlof will, either the personal will of the physician or the collec-tive will of a medical association or a hospital. This example isnaive because it is seemingly beyond reproof: No one wouldwant to put himself under the scalpel of a physician who was

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I74 Political Hermeneutics

anything other than professional in the above sense of theterm.

But politics cannot be professionalized in this way withoutsacrificing something essential to politics. The surgeon in theoperating theater is an absolutist, and we would have it noother way, but when the politician begins to act the absolutist,we have-or should have-problems with this behavior. Sim-ilarly, philosophy is not a profession that submits to willpowerwithout losing something essential. The philosopher, like thepolitician, has to be willing to listen to the contradicting argu-ment of an opponent and has to be willing to concede that theopponent may have the better case. Therefore the philosopher,like the politician, must not only profess ignorance in order toavoid the lethal dangers of a profession of knowledge, he mustalso profess a desire not to be alone, which is but another wayof saying that the philosopher, like the politician, must professto be a cultural being rather than an egoist.

These characteristics ofthe personality ofthe Platonic Soc-rates can easily be depersonalized because, if my informedguess is correct, the Platonic Socrates is himself o lread.y a per-sonalization of an underlying political theme. He is, as I havestated several times, a literary figure. The Platonic Socrates isanything but the historical Socrates. He is a literary figureand as such the product of Plato's creative mind. But moreoverand even more significantly, the Platonic Socrates is so ladenwith playful Platonic irony that it is impossible for the modernreader to fix this particalar Gestalt without making somechoices. As soon as one makes these choices, as the youngGadamer most certainly did in his habilitation thesis, the Ge-stalt one is talking about becomes one's own. I believe thatthis is what happened in the 1920s when the young Gadamerchose to write on Plato and the figure of the Platonic Socrates.

Gadamer's Platonic Socrates is in my opinion the embodi-ment, the personalization, of the theme of d.iscourse rational-ity, and if this theme does not exactly correspond to the statedneed to develop constitutional restraints for the power of themodern state, it is close enough to be worth articulating. Dis-

The Early Thinking of Gadamer L75

course rationality does not simply define a set of limits onstate power but rather makes-when applied to an individuallike the Platonic Socrates-a set of demands on the develop-ment of individual character which, if carried out, will resultin a figure, a Gestalt, who is effectively assertive over againstthe power of the state. Put differently, it is not enough to guar-antee freedom of speech from infringement by the state, as theFirst Amendment of the United States Constitution does. It isalso necessary that the individual be sufficiently developed tomake effective use of freedom of speech. This is not simply amatter of skills but is also a matter of will, although the willreferred to here is not the same as Nietzsche's will-to-power.Without the intent to be political and the skills to carry outthe intent, political rights remain mere hollow legalisms.When this kind of thinking is collectivized, it leads invariably,I would argue, to a theory of legitimate political opposition.

But this is not all:. Discourse rationality is a term which re-fers to a culture. It designates a group of individuals-such asSocrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus-who have already sub-mitted to established discourse norms. When a newcomer-let us say the Thrasymachus of the second book of the Repub-Iic-arcives on the scene, he does not at first accept the normsof discourse rationality. But gradually, because of the validityof the norrns of discourse rationality, even Thrasymachus iscompelled to submit. Thus the individual (in our case

Gadamer's Platonic Socrates) may provide the model for theculture, but even at the first moment the culture provides thenorm for individuals. The relationship between self and cul-ture is also dialectical.

The personalization of discourse rationality in the Gestalt ofthe Platonic Socrates put a brake on Gadamer's political theo-ñzing, however. Indeed, personalization provides a superb ex-ample of what it means to displace political theorizing. As adevice, there is nothing wrong with the Gestalt-biography. Butif the displaced political theory ends there, then it can beworge than useless because it can lead to the conclusion thatthe author is advocating a Führerprinzip.In Gadamer's case

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this is not a problem, for the irreducible incompleteness ofthe Platonic Socrates compels the reader to look beyondhim to the dialogue. This is just another way of saying thatthe need of Gadamer's Platonic Socrates for a conversationpartner is a pointer to the collective nature of discourserationality.

This is not the place to expand on a theory of the legitimatepolitical opposition. It is mainly a latent possibility of Gada-mer's displaced political thinking, no more significant thanthe latent possibility of the Fürerprinzip that is in Nietzsche'svision of the superman. Just as Nietzsche cannot really be sad-dled with responsibility for Nazism, so too, the early Gadamercannot be given the credit for the success ofthe open politicalsystem adopted in West Germany after World War II.

III

No less significant than these indications of nascent constitu-tionalism in the figure of the Platonic Socrates is the relationthis literary figure has to value formation in an industrial-izing society. In a form that was conventional for Germanthinkers of the time, Gadamer had turned to a superman toapotheosize the values he chose to emphasize.Yet in a mark-edly unconventional manner, Gadamer's values were not inblind reaction to the modernization process. Indeed, they weresurprisingly keyed to the still-inconclusive character of mod-ernization in an industrializing society.

Gadamer connects to the values of modernization at the twopoints in his early writings where he introduces the concept oftechne. The more valuable discussion occurs in the unpub'lished 1930 piece called "Practisches Wissen." I do not want torepeat here what has already been said but rather want tonote that this particular discussion conveys the constructiveway in which Gadamer understands the modernization prob-


lematic. He is not blindly opposed to moderni zation,an opposi-tion which usually takes shape as a hostility to technolory- andto its attendant instrumental consciousness. Gadamér canaccept the need for techne because he has a well-developedconcept of phronesis. Put differenfly, because Gadamer hasa well-articulated concept of phronesls, he can effectivelyset a boundary to techne and provide the humanities with aneeded rationale, something which no other thinker inWeimar Germany was able to do.

It is at this point that the contrast between the young Gada-mer and his mentor Heidegger can most profitably be ómpha_sized. Heidegger, as is well known, joined the Nazi party andmade himself notorious in his Recktoratsred.e of rg3á. Hemay have distanced himself from the party in later years, butevidence recently provided seems to indicate the contrary.,Gadamer for his part made opportunistic compromises withNazism, all of them understandable in terms of establishing acareer.s Unlike Heidegger, however, Gadamer was neveran enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi party or even a mildsupporter. Once he had attained his professorship, he offerednothing to the Party. He remained politically ne,-tral and hadthis neutrality certified after the war when the soviet occupa-tion authorities accepted him as the first postwar rector of theLeipzig University. Gadamer,s record is not heroic or evenpretty, but it is certainly not Heidegger,s.

I believe the reason for this difference is to be found in thethinking of the two men. Gadamer's thinking differed in keyrespects from that of Heidegger and provided the basis for sub-stantially different cultural relation to Nazism. The key dif-ferences can be approached from the shared concern with a ris-ing technological society. Heidegger saw techne as a dominantforce in the modern world, one that was expanding away fromits narrow base in the fabrication of things into the broaderfield of shaping the human soul. This universalization of theclaims of techne was the product of the western ontologicaltradition-so Heidegger-and it was a condition so far ad-vanced that littlo other than Destruktion could be advocated,


Heidegger perceived himself as living in a mass society madeof mass men who related socially in terms of technical norms.In such a despairing human condition, Heidegger was alreadyinclined to Nazism even before it appeared on the scene as amajor social force. Whatever Heidegger's personal or careerreasons for joining the Nazi Party, his thinking placed nobarriers in his path. In fact, given the success he had alreadyhad in his career, one is compelled to believe that it was Hei-degger's thinking more than anything else that led him toNazism.

This is not at all the case with Gadamer, and the contraststands out most clearly at those few points where a discussionof techne brings his thinking into touch with the related think-ing of Heidegger. Gadamer is no less opposed to the domina-tion of techne in human affairs than is Heidegger, but becausehe has a stronger concept of phronesis, he is able to scribe asharp line around techne. This is not to say that Heidegger hadnot had the same thoughts on phronesis. Everything about his1923 seminar on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethlcs suggests thathe had already worked out much of what Gadamer said in his1930 paper. What really distinguished Heidegger's thoughtfrom that of his young student was to be found in their concep-tion of philosophy's history.

Both Heidegger and Gadamer drew a sharp distinction be-tween literature and philosophy. Each admired literature be-cause it was true to life, that is to say, three-dimensional in itsportrayal of the complexities of human charactér. Each con-ceived of philosophy as a move away from literature, a movethat was characterized as a "flattening" of the three-dimen-sionality of literature. The key term each used to describesuch a leveling activity was Begriff, or'concept.' That is, phi-losophy distinguished itself from literature by accordingcommanding position to the concept of things. The concept ofsomething became more important than the thing itself, and ifthe experience of the thing did not fit the concept, then somuch the worse for the experience. In other words, philosophy,with its decisive reliance on the concept, threatened life, or


rather the soul's relation to the life-world. The basic Heideg-gerian insight is still exhilarating: He perceived everything inthe human condition as a kind of uerkehrte or upside-downworld in which every mailman and bus driver was a philoso-pher equipped with aWeltanschauung and he, Heidegger, wasthe last human being struggling to regain a full-bodied rela-tion to life.

All of these aspects of the Eristenz thinking of the 1920swere shared by the teacher and his pupil. But where Gadamerdiffered from his master was in his appropriation of Plato, andfor this decisive difference he had the Georgians to thank.Heidegger drew the line between literature and philosophyjust before Socrates. Therefore his prime literary interest wasin the pre-Socratics and his sharpest criticism was reservedfor the classical triumvirate of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. Inthis respect, Heidegger never broke with Nietzsche. Gadamer,as we have seen, did break with Nietzsche on precisely thispoint, and for this difference he had Hildebrandt, Friedemann,and Friedlánder to thank. Gadamer drew the line between lit-erature and philosophy before Aristotle but after Plato. Thisdifference in the concept of philosophy's history then made allthe difference in the world in the way Gadamer could con-struct himself as an Existenz philosopher. Plato for Gadameris a literary creator. He is not primarily a philosopher inter-ested in concept-formation but is rather an engaged thinkerpassionately concerned for politics, or in full-bodied human re-lationships. His Socrates is never an analytical thinker intenton cutting up and destroying the true-to-life claims of others.He is rather the "Platonic Socrates," a three-dimensionalcharacter whose dialectic is aimed at restoring the full-bodiedcharacter of life in the Athenianpolls.

Recall for just a moment how Gadamer handled the chargeof intellectualism aimed in the Platonic Socrates. In his 1g30paper, he argued that the Platonic Socrates was anything butan intellectual (read: philosopher) in his handling of moralquestions. He was not trying to separate thought from action.He was rather insisting that in the good society, thought and

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action were harmoniously related and that therefore good

actions had to be understood. If anything, the Sophists werethe true intellectuals, for it was they who were claiming thatthought and action could be so sharply separated that thoughtscould be packaged and sold in the marketplace' Socrates wasjust what he claimed to be in his Apology. He was the defenderof the ancient values of Athens.

Thematized, this argument looks as follows: The professionof ignorance is aimed at claims to know moral values sepa-

rated from action. No such intellectual things, or moral "con-cepts" exist or can exist. The Platonic Socrates then demon-strates the ignorance of nascent philosophers, the all-knowingSophists. The Platonic Socrates then "thinks" what his fellowAthenians are doing and engages in this activity of thinkingwithout the aid of moral concepts. This necessarily throws thePlatonic Socrates into a number of literary games keyed tosketching out this or that facet of Athenian life. The life of thePlatonic Socrates is indeed a life of thinking, but the thinkingis never for a moment detached from the complexities of Athe-nian life. He does not submit his thought to intellectual normsof logical consistency but rather submits it to life, and as a re-sult his thinking is itself three-dimensional and true-to-life'

And then Gadamer turns the tables. Anyone who would ac-

cuse the Platonic Socrates of intellectualism sheds more lighton himself than on the Platonic Socrates. Such a claim origi-nates in the Judeo-Christian prejudice that accords perfectionto moral ideas and sees this world as a godforsaken place.

From a purely chronological point of view, such a prejudicefirst came into the world in the form of Aristotelian Begriffi-philosophie or concept-philosophy. Can this 1930 argument beused to demonstrate that Gadamer was already rejecting hismost famous teacher? I believe so, but that in any case is notmy point. My argument is rather that Gadamer's philosophi-cal thinking does not at all lend itself to Nazism. Where Hei-degger's startlingly nihilistic thinking places no barrier in hisway toward Nazism and may even encourage him, Gadamer'sthinking most certainly places a barrier in his way. Every'


thing in Gadamer's thinking points him away from Nazism,not in the direction of mass popular democracy certainly, butsurely in the direction of the well-integrated political commu-nity. If Gadamer did have a flirt with Nazism, it can only beaccounted for in terms of the career ambitions of a young Ger-man academic.

These considerations return us, finally, to the reflections onthe Platonic Socrates with which we began this conclusion. Al-most all of the thinkers who turned to a heroic figure did so inthe hope of finding substantiue values that would work to re-verse or overturn the modernization process. They wanted tobe told what to do by a leader. Only that obscure line of think-ers running from Natorp to Hildebrandt to Friedemann toFriedlánder to Gadamer reversed this tendency by focusingpositively on the Platonic Socrates. Each contributed some-thing to the construction of this particular Gestalt figure, butonly Gadamer provided the kind of systematic unfolding of thecharacter that enabled him to at once escape the perils ofro-manticism on the one hand and an overly dry academic styleon the other.

The key to Gadamer's success is that he emphasized dis-courEe values. His Platonic Socrates does not tell us what to dobut does tell us how to go about thinking through whatever itis that we are doing. Gadamer has no substantive values tocommunicate to us through his figure of the Platonic Socrates,but he does have a number of conversational, or discourse,values. In moving in this direction, Gadamer makes his con-tribution, however modest, to the philosophical debate overmodernization.

IV

Ever eince Hegel, continental philosophy has distinguisheditself from analytical philosophy by rejecting the dominant

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methods of the natural sciences. Instead of making itself overin terms of the metaphor of handmaiden to the sciences, thecontinental tradition has looked away from the scientific un-derstanding ofa nature presupposed to stand over against usto a vision of the humanities for suggestions of a model for phi-losophy. Arguably, such an effort began for Germans withHerder, who looked to history for guidance in the effort to con-struct philosophy. The mode then shifted from one humanisticendeavor to another, but what did not change was the insis-tence that philosophy had to be constructed in terms of a meta-phor different from that provided by the analytically orientednatural sciences.

I use the word "continental" as a technical term to refer to atradition of resistance to the scientistic model of philosophy.In a previous section I compared Gadamer to Max Weber, whoI believe would be widely accepted as a conscious political the-orist of the tradition of continental philosophy. In this sectionI would like to take the comparison in a different direction. Iwould like to compare the thinking of the early Gadamer tothat of Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary theorist.a

My point here is that Bakhtin demonstrates a latent politi-cal thinking very much like Gadamer's. I realize I am going offon a tangent in doing this comparison, but I think the compar-ison wins significance if it illustrates the strikingly differentways in which politics can be thought in the continental tradi-tion. The concentration on legal and constitutional structuresis the characteristic mode of the analytical tradition of politi-cal philosophy. It presupposes that by breaking existing politi-cal structure down to its parts and showing how and why theywork or fail to work, we can come up with answers to guideus in the reconstruction of the political machinery that sur-rounds us. Basic to whatever analysis is carried out is the pre-supposition that human nature stands over against the polityin the same way that nature stands over against the sciencethat intends to put it on the rack. Abstract legality, policy-making, ideology, bureaucratic rationalization, and a wholehost of other aspects of the analytical political tradition are


not the innocent things they first appear to be. They representforms of m.ethod consciousness. They each presuppose a hu-man nature that stands over against the state or the policy-maker or the ideologue and which needs, so to speak, to be puton the rack.

The continental tradition in contrast does not take up themechanical or "work" or method metaphor of the analyticaltradition. Basically, it is informed by the Hegelian notion ofthe human spirit (Geist), or in its more secularized version,mind (also Geist). There is therefore a strong latent tendencyin the continental tradition to run to the creative communityor the creative individual for a source of values. Bakhtin in-corporates much this tendency in his writing, and it leads toresults not unlike those of Gadamer.

There is no possible way that the young Gadamer of the1920s and the 1930s could have known of the writings ofBakhtin, who was living, thinking, and writing in the prov-inces of the Soviet Union. And needless to say, Bakhtin wouldnot have heard of Gadamer, although there is every reason tobelieve that Bakhtin was influenced by the same continentaltradition as Gadamer was. Indeed, in one of Bakhtin's writ-ings, he actually claims that his thinking finds its origins inthe figure of Socrates.s Yet in Bakhtin's case, the chosen eth-ical superman was not Socrates but rather was Jesus Christ.Now Jesus is perhaps the only figure in the history of Westerncivilization whose life has a claim greater than that of thePlatonic Socrates to serve as a model for ethics and for the re-construction of the modern state along more humanist andless legalistic lines. To my knowledge, the first continentalphilosopher to develop this direction of thought was the youngHegel, who in his "Spirit of Christianity" introduced the im-age of Jesus as Gestalt figure who stood as a humanist overagainst the abstract legalism of traditional Judaism.6

Like the Platonic Socrates in his relation to the superhu-man Platonic doctrine of ideas, Bakhtin's Christ as model fig-ure labors under the burden of the divinity ascribed to him bytradition. The divinity of the Christ figure is both advantage


and disadvantage. In a traditional society, it functions to sanc-tify values that are then passed on by the tradition. But in amodernizing society, the divinity of the Christ figure poses aproblem, especially from the point of view of the humanities.In a word, Bakhtin's Christ figure is in need of humanizationif he is to succeed as a souree of modern values. This was pre-cisely the kind of effort engaged in by David Strauss (that soimpressed Nietzsche) and, in different fashion, by Rudolf Bult-mann in Gadamer's circle. Now the problem of a divine figurein a desacralized world posed itself for Bakhtin.

Where Gadamer dissociates the Platonic Socrates from thedoctrine of quasi-divine objective ideas in order to bring himto life as a Gestalú who makes real and not divinely inspiredchoices, Bakhtin dissociates his Christ from divinity in orderto establish }nis Gestalt figure as a real human being makingreal ethical choices. As long as Jesus is quasi-divine, hischoices and actions are not ethical in the strict sense of theterm. They have no human pathos in them. They are not realchoices. But with his divinity taken away, Jesus, like the Pla-tonic Socrates, emerges as a truly heroic figure-dare one sayPromethean-because he is tragic and therefore qualified tomake ethical choices. He does not arrive on the scene equippedwith already redeemed knowledge claims.

In sum, Bakhtin locates his Jesus as a historically situatedbeing, precisely the same thing Gadamer did when he deniedto his Platonic Socrates the otherworldly comforts of the Pla-tonic doctrine of ideas. Bakhtin thus facilitates the rethemat-ization of facticity or, put differently, historical situatedness,if for no other reason than that he, like Gadamer, is personal-izing his thinking but, unlike Gadamer, is doing it in a Chris-tian literary setting rather than a classical one. Both Bakhtinand Gadamer, but perhaps somewhat more Bakhtin, are nar-rative thinkers who grasp and communicate theoretical pointsby means of dramatic personae.

What the dramatic persona of Bakhtin's Jesus demonstratesis that human ethical ualues are not characteristics or posses-sions of the individual but are rather shared, or communal,

The Early Thinking of Gadamer f 85

qualities. This characterization of values is a fairly significantdirection of thought, easy to communicate but difficult to holdin place in the modern West. As long as we in the West con-ceive values as discrete things, presupposed to exist with orwithout our agreement, then they become things that we canpossess as properties. I speak of my values, you speak of yourvalues. We become self-righteous when offended if for no otherreason than that our private property has been trespassed on.I become morally sefconscious insofar as my values are dis-tinguished from yours. The frailty, perhaps absurdity, of theWestern mind is revealed at those moments when two individ-uals agree to respect each other's values, treating them in pre-cisely the same manner as a piece of real estate is treated.

Now, the argument that values are shared characteristics issignificant because it is so unusual, assuming that it is seri-ously meant, as I believe it is in Bakhtin. The argument forthe shared quality of values is not to be confused with the ar-gument for social ualues, which are similar in look but differ-ent in their origin from what Bakhtin is trying to get at. Socialvalues are generally presented as entities that stand overagainst us, and such a characterization presupposes that soci-ety stands over against us in the same way that nature standsover against the scientist in the tradition of method conscious-ness. Something different is being said by Bakhtin. What Ithink Bakhtin wants to say is that values do not take on an ex-istential quality until they are agreed upon. Then they be-come shared values. Prior to this, the individual values wehold are no more the prejudices, or pre-values, idiosyncraticpositions waiting to be tested and agreed upon. Vlhat Bakh-tin's thinking does is shift the focus of our attention in ethicaldiscourse away from monologue and toward the dialecticalmode commonly called conuersation.

As a dramatic persona, the Platonic Socrates does the samething. He advances his personal values as prejudices andseeks the agreement that would make them shared values.The dramatic persona of Jesus is perhaps even more compel-ling because tradition burdens him even more heavily than


Socrates with divinity. Bakhtin's secularized Jesus deepensour sense of distinctly human self-consciousness because,through him, we become aware of our individual selves as in-complete beings. Completeness is achieved through values,and values are no more than understandings we share withother human beings. Bakhtin's Jesus is nearly identical withGadamer's Platonic Socrates but may be slightly more per-suasive to us for the reason that the Christian tradition hasbeen somewhat more influential with us than the classical inthe construction of the modern world. Thus Bakhtin, likeGadamer, conceives the self and the other as being insepara-bly linked. The medium that binds the self and the other isalso the same: It is language.

Language for Bakhtin is utterance-the German term forwhich is Áusserung, or'outer-ance.' Language is utterance ofour inner selves, of incomplete, idiosyncratic being striving tobe complete. Here, as noted, Bakhtin's Jesus is nearly identi-cal with Gadamer's Platonic Socrates. The logical coherence ofany individual's Innerlichkeit or inner self is complete onlywithin the terms of his or her own discourse. It is revealed tobe distinctly incomplete when confronted with the terms ofdiscourse of another individual because it cannot, on its ownterms, achieve completeness of understanding. The challengeconfronting the individual is then to use language in all itsplasticity to reach out and establish a world of shared valueswith the other. In this vision of language, Bakhtin is not farfrom saying, with Gadamer, not that ethics are dialectical butrather something much more radical: that dialectics itsetf isethical.T

Hence, Bakhtin can conceive the human universe as a po-lyphony of different and initially uncommunicating voices. Anovel by Dostoyevski is, from the perspective of Bakhtin'sthinking, rnuch like a dialogue by Plato.s Specifically, a novelby Dostoyevski is polyphonous in the way that Book One ofPlato's Republic is. The author's voice cannot be identified,which is simply a different way of saying that the text is a po-lyphony of voices. Each voice takes on authenticity precisely

The Early Thinking of Gadamer 18?

because it is not author-determined. As a result, determina-tion of meaning in a novel by Dostoyevski, just as in a dia-logue by Plato, is necessarily supplied by the reader. Just as inGadamer's hermeneutics, the completion of the work of art ienot provided in Bakhtin's theory. Hence the creative act thatbegins with the work of the artist ends with the interpretationof the reader. Bakhtin has been criticized for this emphasis onincompleteness, but the criticism is misconceived. It is pre-cisely here that the genius of Bakhtin's thinking lies.e

The charm of the personalized vision of Bakhtin is that itprovides a model of a well-constituted state, in his case a Rug-sian state. It appropriates a dramatic persona whose life storyis familiar at the grass roots of Russian culture, and recon-structs that story so that it can serve as the personalized foun-dation for the political modernization of the Russian monolith.It envisages the individual not at all in individualistic termsbut rather as a part that achieves completion or fulfillment(and hence real individuality) only in the state that comesabout through polyphonous individual efforts. It thus strikee ablow at exaggerated Western individualism while simultane-ously striking an even heavier blow at monolithic Russianabsolutism.

Gadamer wrote in an Aesopian political language similar tothat of Bakhtin, thereby providing the makings of an argu-ment rather than the argument itself. He wrote in this veinuntil the collapse of the German state in 1945. Then for rea-sons of his own, he did not return to the drawing board to con-struct an explicit political theory. His voice, like Bakhtin'svoice, represented a claim on a humanistic future more thansimply the latest example of the dispirited German (or Rue-sian) tendency to escape the realities of state power by flightinto the beauties ofperfectionist ethics.

The term "continental," as noted, is a technical term whichindicates an approach to thinking best defined by its oppoai-tion to the analytical tradition. Put most simply, the continen-tal tradition refers back to the humanities rather than to thenatural sciences for guidance. The continental tradition is

&


nonetheless as capable of producing political monsters as isthe analytical tradition. It is this because the humanities caneasily be construed to be made up of narrative structures de-scribing the lives of supermen, the choice of hero then beingleft to the individual scholar. The humanities work best whenthey rise above this circumscribed level to become a dialogueof competing characters, and this presupposes at the leastthat the humanist is widely and deeply read. The latent polit-ical thinking of Bakhtin and Gadamer results in a visionmore humanistic than the focus on any individualized super-man can be because it incorporates this higher vision of thehumanities.

V

Because the early Gadamer was also interested in the develop-ment of a personalized model for philosophy-albeit a philoso-phy that, as the emphasis on the Seuenth Letter indicates, wasintegrated with politics from the outset-he articulated a Pla-tonic Socrates who internalized the dialectical principle in thecourse of his career and hence also provided a model for philo-sophical thinking. Thus politics, which conventionally andat its democratic best is an external dialogue with another,serves also as a constitutional principle for the construction ofthe internal thinking soul of the philosopher.

In other words, the dramatic persona of the Platonic Socra-tes does double duty. The outward dialogue of politics becomesthe inner dialectic of the well-ordered philosophical soul, andhence from the initial pages of Gadamer's habilitation thesis,where he first mentioned the idea of an educational state, it isunclear whether education, in Gadamer's vision, is supposedto produce a citizen or a philosopher. My point is that the edu-cational function of Gadamer's state is to do both. It is broughtinto being for the sake of building into the soul the principle of


dialogue, the outstanding virtue of which is that it is self-restricting, and this serves both politics and philosophy. Theearly Socrates of the Crito and the lon is an exemplar of theouter principle of dialogue. He is, in his actions, a model forthe well-constituted state. The later Socrates of the Philebos isa model of the inner principle of dialectic. His thinking is aninternalized conversation of the soul with itself. It is a modelfor philosophy.

Therefore, with the thinking of the early Gadamer we havea strikingly new definition of the famous Innerlichkeiú of nine-teenth-century German intellectuals. Yes, the good man is toretreat from the reality of political power, just as Plato re-treated from the reality of power politics in Greece becausethere was no way to reform that reality. But the Platonic phi-losopher is not to retreat into a realm of inner beauty whichaffords escape from political reality. He is, as Plato tells us inthe seventh book of the Republic, to learn dialectic for the sakeof being able to return to the cave of power politics. Neitherdoes the "good German" latent in Gadamer's thinking merelyescape from politics. He retreats inwardly in order to constructhis soul according to different principles. Those principles dif-fer only in that they speak against the reality of contemporarypower politics and describe the constitutional framework of di-alectic which, when it reenters the world of action, will serveto restrict the power of the state. Just as the Plato of the S¿u-enth Letter retreats from political reality for the sake of con-ducting a more radical political campaign, so too the Gadamerof the early writings retreats from politics to philosophy forthe sake of eventually returning to politics better armed.There is no conflict between politics and philosophy in thisformulation.

In "Plato and the Poets," for example, aesthetic conscious-ness is treated as a mode of awareness that was alienatedfrom practical politics. Here Gadamer came as close as he everwould to rejecting the German Innerlichkeit that retreatedfrom the exigencies of everyday politics into the beauties ofmental contemplation. That this was no accident or exception

t

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in Gadamer's thinking was made clear by the treatment oflanguage in the same piece. Plato is exiling the poets from thecity because the language they speak furthers the retreat intotlae Innerlichkeit of aesthetic consciousness. The languagethat Plato wants is one that leads away from the beauties ofidealism toward a greater capacity to confront politicalreality.

It should be noted that in "Plato and the Poets" the alterna-tive to poetry is not prose but rather a philosophical conversa-úioz. Thus, reasoning backwards from the concept of philo-sophical conversation, we also do well to recognize that theproblem with poetry, in spite of the term aesthetic conscious-ness, was never its beauty. The term aesthetic consciousnessdoes not refer to an obsession with beauty but rather with thelack of a critical faculty. Put slightly differently,the problemwith poetry and with the aesthetic consciousness that charac-terized its reception in classical Greece was its lack of the dia-lectical principle, and more specifically, this becomes a philo-sophical problem because it worked and continues to workagainst thinking. By the classical age, Homeric poetry had be-come a mindless monologue, sung by rhapsodes like Ion whowere possessed, were thus admittedly winged and holy things,but were not good teachers for the reason that they were notgood dialecticians. An alternative to poetry is thus called for,and it is philosophical conuersation for the reason that philo-sophical conversation incorporates the dialogue principle.

What Gadamer was doing with language in "Plato and thePoets" was not all that different from what he was doing in his1927 critique of Werner Jaeger's thinking. There he had madea distinction between a writing culture and a speahing cultureand argued that classical Greece was a speaking culture. Thiswas a roundabout way of claiming that the Aristotelian Prot-reptikos wás a dialogue. That is to say, classical Greece hadnoü resolved its moral problems. It did nothave the answers tothe problems of the human condition, and hence it was com-pelled to remain in a condition in which questions had to bedebated. To claim that Greece had noú resolved its moral prob-


lems, that it had zoú produced definitive answers to questionsposed by the human condition-this was but a different wayof saying that Greek culture was still aware of its situatedbe-ing. In other words, the Greece being described by Gadamer inthe article on Werner Jaeger's thinking was a Greece involvedfor good reason in a philosophical conuersation. On the sur-face, the 1927 piece appears to have nothing to do with the1934 piece on "Plato and the Poets," but beneath the changingvocabulary there is a remarkable continuity of thought. It isaccounted for by the unchanging situatedness of man, which isgermane to our question insofar as it concerns the rationalefor philosophical conversation.

The identical thought that is expressed differently in the de-scriptions of Greece as a speaking culture and a culture inneed of a philosophical conversation is perfectly keyed to thenotion of a responsible state. Therefore, it would seem logicalto argue for a responsible state. Instead, in "Plato's Educa-tional State," Gadamer argues on behalf of the constitution ofthe soul. At first glance, this seems to be a move away from po-litical realism toward the kind of utopian Innerlichkeit thatcharacterized so much German thinking in the nineteenthcentury. Yet it is not, and even in "Plato's Educational State,"Gadamer reminds us why. There he speaks of the significanceof Plato's Seuenth Letter for him and his generation, and forone last time in his early writings, reminds us that Plato wasnot interested in education for its own sake. He was not a merephilosopher of education. His interest in education is ratherpolitically motivated. It is an educational state that he is inter-ested in. If Plato were interested in education for its own sake,then his educational state would turn out to be one or anotherversion of the Kulturstaatl, but it is not.

"Plato's Educational State" is an appropriate final piece forGadamer's early career for the reason that it demonstratesthat politics is indeed the sine qua, non of Gadamer's interpre-tation of Plato's philosophy. The political contextualization ofphilosophy is appropriate because there are few better waysthan politics to humanize the soul. Certainly the soul of many


a middle-class humanist had already been deeply informedby art, literature, and music but had remained virtually un-touched by a sustained and disciplined contact with the situ-ated and hence questioning and questionable world of politics.Without dialectic, that is to say, without the debate that ischaracteristic of a world that is irreducibly uncertain, all ofthe other academic disciplines become misleading to the mind.

Is this to suggest that politics rather than music, mathemat-ics, poetry, or the arts is the definitive humanist study? Inso-far as politics is more uncertain and hence more humanizing,the answer has to be yes, but I prefer to answer this questionmore precisely by noting that politics more than any of theother humanist disciplines leads philosophy toward a concep-tion of rationality based on discourse. It thus stands in con-trast to conceptions of rationality that are founded, whetheron the external certainties of nature, uncontingent mathemat-ical reasoning, or the ethereal beauties of the poetry Platowanted to banish from his polis. The thread of politics thatruns through Gadamer's early writings is thus not at all ar-bitrary and is always fortuitous. Alone among the severalthinkers who traced their intellectual pedigree to the poetStefan George, Gadamer was able to shape aGestalt in the fig-ure ofthe Platonic Socrates appropriate to the grim realitiesof politics in the twentieth century, and if this beginning didnot lead consistently to the career ofpolitical theorist, that isno occasion for regtet. The significant fact is that the earlyGadamer found a key metaphor for establishing a tough andflexible concept of discourse rationality, and this provided himthe resource he needed to move on to the philosophical herme-neutics of Truth and Method.

Notes

Chapter 1

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Mefl¿od (New York: Continuum,1975). The German original is Wahrheit und Methode and is publishedseparately (Ttibingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1960) or as volume 1

of the newly published Gesammelte Werke (Tnbingen: J. C. B. MohrlPaul Siebeckl, 1985).

2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermene¿úics (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1976). The Introduction by David E.Linge is especially good.

3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1980).

4. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel's Dialectic (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1971); Reason in the Age of Science (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1981).

5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The ldea of the Good in Plato and Aristotle(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Philosophical Apprentice-ships (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

6. Surprisingly, Gadamef s German reception history does not dif-fer eignificantly from his American. He became well known as a conse-quonco of tho 1960 publicuti<ln of Trulh and Method, and thereafter his

ta;fiii1¡

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I94 Political Hermeneutics

early writings were reissued to be read in the light of his major work. Forexample, Plotos dialektische Ethik was reissued in 1968, 1983, and 1985.I was told by a Heidelberg professor who was then a student that in 1960Gadamer was taken to be a "Loser," as a man whose time had come andgone without a major intellectual achievement.

7. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Das Wesen der Lust in den platonischenDialogen" (unpublished doctoral thesis, a typescript copy ofwhich is inthe library of the Philosophical Seminar in Heidelberg). I shall not treatthe doctoral dissertation in detail in this study because it is not an out-standing work. In routine fashion, it takes a single theme-Zusf, ordesire-and traces it as a thread through all of Plato's writings.

8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Der aristotelische PROTREPTIKOS unddie entwicklungsgeschichtliche B etrorhtung der aristotelischen ETHIK,"in Gesa¡nmelte Werke, vol 5.

9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Platos dialektische Ethik, in GesammelteWerke,vol.5.

10. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Plato und die Dichter," in GesammclteWerke, vol. 5. The English translation of this piece is "Plato and thePoets" and is in Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic.

11. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Platos Staat der Erziehung," in Gesam-melte Werke, vol. 5. The English version is "Plato's Educational State,"in Dialogue and Dialectic.

12. Author's conversation with Gadamer, Heidelberg, August 1985.13. Especially valuable is "Die neue Platoforschung," in Gadamer,

Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5. This review article indicates how diligentlythe early Gadamer kept abreast ofcurrent thinking on Plato.

14. Gadamer, Gesammelte W erke, 5:2L2-29.15. Gadamer, Gesamm.elte Werke, 5:230-48.16. For such an argument, see chapter 7.17. There are of course exceptions. See, for example, Richard Bern-

stein's Beyond Objectiuism and Relatiuisz¿ (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1983).

18. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press,1934,1962,1967). First published in Berlin in 1923.

19. Unfortunately this sentence is omitted by Gadamer in the reprintof his habilitation thesis in the Gesammelte Werke. But it is to be foundin the original edition. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Platos dialektischeEthik (Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1931; Hamburg, 1968, 1984), xv.

20. Author's conversation with Gadamer, Heidelberg, August 1985.

Notes 195

Chapter 2

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Das Wesen der Lust nach den platoni-schen Dialogen" (typescript in the Library of the Philosophical Seminarof the University of Heidelberg).

2. Paul Natorp, Platos ldeenlehre (Darmstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft, 1961).

3. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1959), as well as Jonathan Culler, Saussure (Hassocks,Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976).

4. For Gadamer's opinion on Natorp's unusual reception, see his'?ieneue Plato Forschung," first published in 1933, in Hans-Georg Gadamer,Gesammelte WerÉe (T\ibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1985), 5:228n.

5. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 11.

6. Paul Natorp, "Uber Platos ldeenlehre" (Berlin: Pan-Verlag RolfHeise, 1925). This is a reprint of the 1913 lecture delivered to the KantSociety of the University of Berlin. "Ihe "Metakritischer Anhang" is inNatorp, Platons ldeenlehre.

7. For an excellent biography of Herder, see Robert T. Clark, Herder(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955).

8. Here I follow the argument of Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy ofSymbolic Forr¡¿s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), chap. 1.

9. The classic study is Eliza M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece ouerGermany (New York: Macmillan, 1935).

10. See Wilhelm Bóhm, Schillers "Briefe uber die ocsthetische Erzieh-ung der Menschen" (Halle: M. Niehmeyer, Lg27), as well as Ernst Cas-sirer, Id,ee und Gestalt (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1921).

11. Fritz Stern, The Failure of Liberalism (New York: Knopf, 1972),3-25, as well as Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1961).

12. For this definition of philology, see August Bóckh, On Interpreta-tion and Criticism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 12,where Bóckh uses this phrase for the first time. This is a translation ofthe first chapter of Bóckh's Encyklopcidie und Methodologie der philolo-gischen Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1877), unquestionably themost influential writing on methodolog'y in German nineteenth-centuryclassical philology. Here Bóckh argued that the task of Altertumswissen-schaft was to reconstruct the mind of the ancient world. The reconstruc-tion was to be undertaken in a thoroughly positivistic manner: Throughthe sheer accumulation of facts, the outlines of the classical mind wouldemerge.


13. Bóckh's great work of this type has been translated as The PublicEconomy of Athens (London: J. Murray, 1828).

14. For Bóckh's engagement with politics, see Festrede..auf der Uni'uersitcit zu Berlin, 1855, the telling subtitle of which is Uber das Ver'hriltnis der Wissenschaft zu Staat und Fürsú [On the Relationship of Sci-ence to State and Princel.

1 5. Gadamer, P hilo s op hical Apprentice s hip s, 14 - 15.16. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectiuism and Relatiui'sr¿ (Philadel-

phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 265.17. There is not yet an adequate treatment ofStefan George and his

Circle in the English language, but a good beginning has been made inMichael M. Metzger and Erika A. Metzger, Stefan George (New York:Twayne, 1972). The most interesting German work on Stefan George inrespect to language is Jürgen Wertheimer, Dialogisches Sprechen imWerke Stefan Georges (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1978).

18. Stefan George, Das Reich (Berlin: Bondi, 1929).19. See Siegfried Kaehler, Wilhelm uon Humboldt und der Staal (Ber-

lin: R. Oldenbourg, 1927). Also, Gebhardt Bruno, Wilhelm uon Hurnboldtals Staatsmann (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1896, 1899), 2 vols.

20. Here I follow Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguis-úics (New York: McGraw-HilI, 1959), 101ff. and 140ff.

21. Heinrich Friedemann, Plato Seine Gestalú (Berlin: Blatter für dieKunst, 1914).

22. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Die Wirkung Stefan Georges auf die Wis-senschaft" (typescript, 1983).

23. See Eduard Spranger's Books, especially Wilhelm uon Humboldtund die Humanitcitsidee (Berlin: Reuther, 1909). For the idea of the Ger-man university in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see

Fritz Ringer's The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1969). Ringer is a sociologist of knowledgewith a definite ax to grind. But the book is still excellent.

24. It was Nietzsche's opinion that the revolution in German classicalphilology began with Wolf's registration inL777. See Hugh LloydJones,"Nietzsche and the Study of the Ancient World," in James C. O'Flahertyet al., Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition (Chapel Hill: Uni-versity ofNorth Carolina Press, 1976), 4.

25. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: RandomHouse, 1967). Nietzsche is somewhat mistakenly given credit for initi-ating the modern concern with the irrational side of the Greeks in thisbook. Nietzsche might not have known of Humboldt's concern for thisside of the ancient world, but he most certainly would have been well ac-quainted with the Symbolik und Mythologies der alten Vólker, besondersder Griechen (1810-12) of G. F. Creuzer. For the definitive English-

Notes L97

language treatment of this theme, see E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and theInational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).

26. See Karl-Friedrich Gründer, Der Streit um Nietzsche's Geburt derTragódie (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1969).

27. Erwin Rohde, Psyche (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). This bookwas in its eighth German edition by 1921 and was translated and pub-lished in the United States for the first time in 1925.

28. Gründer, Streit.29. Gründer, Streit.30. On the attitudes of Wilamowitz, see Manfred Landfester's "Ulrich

von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff und die hermeneutische Tradition des 19.

Jahrhunderts," in Hellmut Flashar, Karlfried Gründer, and Axel Horst-mann, Philologie und Hermeneutik im 19. Jahrhunderl (Gtittingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979). But Wilamowitz is not the originator ofthis method consciousness in classical philology. It is also to be foundwrit large in the first chapter of Bóckh's Encyklopiidie.

31. See Kurt Hildebrandt, "Wilamowitz und Hellas," in Peter Land-mann and Gunhild Günther, Stefan George und Sein Kreis (Hamburg:Hauswedell, 1976).

32. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellend orff , Platon (Berlin: Weidemann,1919, 1920), 2 vols.

33. Werner Jaeger, Humanistische Redcn undVortrrige (Berlin: Wal-ter de Gruyter, 1960). These are, as the German title indicates, speeches

and presentations, but in both cases they are enthusiastic portrayals ofGreek thinking and its value for education.

34. On IJsener, see Flashar, Philologie und Hermeneutik, L60-63.35. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press,

1967).36. Werner Jaeger, Paideia (New York: Oxford University Press,

1963), 3 vols.37. For a brief overview of the controversy, see Majorie Grene, A Por-

trait of Aristotle (C}licago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), chap. 1.

38. William Musgrave Calder, III, "The Credo of a New Generation:Paul Friedlánder to Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff," Antike undAbendland 26 (1980).

39. For what Nietzsche meant by the historical, see James Whitman,"Nietzsche and the Magisterial Tladition of German Classical Philol-ogy," in Journalof theHistory of ldeas (July-September 1986),453*68.

40. Gadamer, "Die Wirkung Stefan Georges auf die Wissenschaft"(typesoipt, 1983).


Chapter 3

1. Otto Kans, Dostoeuski und sein Schicksal (Berlin: E. Laub, 1923).

2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Der aristotelische PROTREPTIKOS unddie entwicklungsgeschichtlich.e Betrachtung dcr aristotelischen Ethik," inHans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke (Tnbingen: J. C. B. Mohr,1985), vol. 5.

3. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press,1967).

4. Plato's Philebos in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, ?heCollected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1982).

5. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:77 2.6. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:172.7. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectiuism and Relatiui'sr¿ (Philadel-

phia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1983), 265.8. For example, Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cam'

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), perhaps the leading text ofthe reader-response movement in the United States. I might note at thispoint that my use ofthe term truth in this paragraph should not suggestthat I necessarily take it to be relative to time and place. If there is a di-uine truth, it certainly need not be contingent. But ifwe are speaking ofhuman truth, then that would have to be relative to time (and place), atleast in Gadamer's thinking.

9. Otto Apelt, Beitrtige zur Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie(Leipzig: Teubner, 1891), 1, 17, 18, and especially 31-37.

10. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:I7 4.11. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:176.12. Gadamer, Gesamrnelte Werke, 5:776.13. Gadamer, Gesannmelte Werke, 5:177 .

14. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Das Wesen der Zusl (typesciipt in the Li-brary of the Philosophical Seminar in Heidelberg).

15. Gadamer, Gesammclte Werke, 5:L77 .

16. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:17 8.17. Gadamer, Gesarnmelte Werke, 5:767 .

18. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Platos dialektische Ethik, in Gadamer, Ge-

sammelte Werke, vol. 5.19. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:5.20. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:8.21. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Platos dialektische Ethik (Hamburg: Felix

Meiner Verlag, 1983). This is a reprint of the 1931 edition.22. Gadamer, Gesarnmelte Werke, 5:8,23. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:8.24. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:9.

Notes 199

25. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:9.26. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:L0.27. Gadamer, Gesamrnelte Werke, 5:70.28. Gadamer, Gesamrnelte Werke,5:9- 10.29. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:14.30. Gadamer, Gesannrnelte Werke, 5:5.31. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectiuism and Relatiuisr¿ (Philadel-

phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 265.32. See A. E. Taylor, Socrates (New York: Anchor Books, 1953).33. Gadamer, Gesarnmelte Werke, 5:5-6.34. Gadamer, Gesamrnelte Werke,5:6. See also Gadamer's "Dialectic

and Sophism in Plato's Seuenth Letter," in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dio-logue and Dialectic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

35. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:7 .

36. Gadamer, Gesarnrnelte Werke, 5:6.37. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:6.38. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:13.39. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:I3.40. Heinrich Friedemann, Platon seine Gestalt (Berlin: Bondi, 1914).41. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosopáy (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1983), 8- 10.

Chapter 4

1. Hans-Georg Gadameq, Gesamrnelte Werke (Tibingen: J. C. B.Mohr lPaul Siebeck], 1985), 5:15-73.

2. Gadamer, Gesam.melte Werke, 5:15.3. Gadamer, Gesammelie Werke, 5:18, n. 3.4. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:L6.5. It certainly helps Gadamer's case that the Greek termlogos serves

to designate theory as well as language and word. Hence the claim thattheory precedes facts can be rendered as: In the beginning was the word,and the word was made flesh.

6. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:23.7. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:23.8. Precisely this kind of determination of practical philosophy-

human situatedness in the world-is fundamental to the thinking of an-other 1920s student of Heidegger, namely, Hannah Arendt. See Arendt'sThe Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

9. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:25.10. For example, at the beginning of section three, where Gadamer

writes . , ,lslelbet wo ea nicht zum Aussprechen undVerloutbaren kommt,im DENKEN, denkt man in einer Sprache, die als Sprache auf mógliche


Andere uerweist, die dieselbe Sprache sprechen und daher meine GE-DANKEN uerstehen wiirden, wenn sie IN IHNEN LESEN kónnten. Ga-damer, Gesammelte W erke, 5:27 .

11. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:27 -33.12. Gadamer, Gesamrnelte Werke, S:27. Probably the best translation

of the title of Gadamer's third section (Die mitweltlichen Motiue der Sach-lichkeit) would be "The Communal Motivs of Thingness [Objectivity]."

13. Gadamer, Gesarnmelte Werke, 5:33.14. Gadamer, Gesannmelte Werke, 5:32-33.15. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:32, n.7.16. Gadamer reviewed Lówith's habilitation thesis when it was first

published. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: J.C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1987), 4:234-39.

17. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:33.18. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:38.19. Gadamer, Gesamrnelte Werke, 5:40.20. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:4L- 42.21. Gadamer, Gesarnmelte Werke, 5:44ff.22. Gadamer, Gesarnmelte Werke, 5:45.23. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).24. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scíentific Reuolutions (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1961).

Chapter 5

1. In Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Frorn Mas Weber (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1966). An excellent discussion of theclassical relation of ethics to politics is to be found in Jürgen Habermas's"The Classical Doctrine of Politics in Relation to Social Philosophy," inHabermas's Theory and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974). For a re-cent discussion of the classical doctrine of ethics, see Martha Nussbaum'sThe Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philos-opñ.y (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

2. The German tetm Gesinnungs means "conviction" or "principled"but has come to be translated as "perfectionist" when combined with theterm ethics. Quote is from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Platos dialektischeEthik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983), xv.

3. Gadamer says as much in "Plato and the Poets," Dialogue andDialectic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 52, 70.

4. Gadamer, Gesarnmelte Werke, 5:230-48.5. Gadamer, Gesamrnelte Werke, 6:230,6. In Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, Underúanding

Notes 207

and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press,1977), 159-88.

7. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:248.8. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werhe, 5:248.9. Bruno Snell, ?he Discouery of Mind (New York: Dover, 1982).

10. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:239-40.1 1. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werhe, 5:239.12. Gadamer, Gesamrnelte Werhe, 5:242.13. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:231.14. Gadamer, Gesannmelte Werhe, 5:232.15. J. A. K. Thomson, The Ethics of Arístotle (New York: Penguin

Books, 1978).16. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:24L.17. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werhe, 5:24L-42.18. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:242.19. Gadamet, Gesammelte Werke, 5:234.20. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:243.21. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:244.22. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, 5:248.

Chapter 6

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Plato and the Poets," inDialogue andDia-lectic, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press,1980). The original German version can be found in Hans-Georg Gada-mer, Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1985),5:187 -ZLL. My citations will be from the translated version.

2. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 65. See Christopher Smith's foot-note for elaboration.

3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Plato's Educational State," in Dialogueand Dialectic, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1980), 73-92. The German version can be found in Gadamer, Ge-sammelte Werke, 5:249-62. My citations will be from the translatedversion.

4. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 48.5. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 49.6. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 50.7. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 50.8. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 50.9. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 48.

10. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 48.11. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 5l-52.12. Gadamor, "Plato and Poots," 48.

¡*¡


13. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 49.14. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 66.15. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 67.16. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 63-64.17. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 64. All the references to the sef

occur here.18. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 65.19. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 47.20. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 65.21. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 63.22. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 47.23. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 47.24. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 63,25. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 42.26. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 42.27. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 44.28. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 44.29. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 44.30. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 44-45.31. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 45.32. Plato's Republic,336 b. The citations will fit any edition.33. Plato's -& epublic,350 d.34. Plato's.Bepublic, 354 a.35. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 68-69.36. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 50,58,66,68, 69,70,7L.37. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 66.38. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 68.39. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 60.40. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 69.41. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 70.42. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 70.43. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 70.44. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 70.45. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 71.46. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 66.47. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 65.48. Gadamer, "Plato and Poets," 66.49. Gadamer, "Plato's Educational State."50. Gadamer, "Plato's Educational State," 73.51. Gadamer, "Plato's Educational State," 88.52. Gadamer, "Plato's Educational State," 89.53. Gadamer, "Plato's Educational State," 88-89.54. Gadamer, "Plato's Educational State," 76, where Gadamer dis-

cusses the utopian aspects ofthe Platonic state.

Notes 203

55. Hans-Georg Gadamer, P hilosophical Apprenticesáips (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1985), 98.

56. Gadamer, P hilo sop hical Apprentic es hip s, 98 - 99.

Chapter 7

1. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Fronr Mox Weber (New York:Oxford University Press, 1946), 77 -I29.

2. See Victor Fañas, Heidegger et le Nazísn¿ (Paris: Editions Verdier,1987).

3. See Sheldon Wolin, "Philosophical Apprenticeships," New YorkTimes Sunday Book Reuiew, 28 July, 1985, sect. VII, 12:1.

4. For my thoughts on Bakhtin, I am endebted to Joseph Frank'spiece called "The Voices of Mikhail Bakhtin" in the Ne¡¿ York Reuiew ofBooks,23 October, 1986, and to Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist'sMikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

5. Bakhtin's key concept of the polyphonic novel is especially inter-esting because of his attempt to trace it back to Socrates or, more spe-cifically, to the Platonic attempt to balance conversation by giving theopponents ofSocrates the best possible statement oftheir positions. SeeMikhail Bakhtin, Probl,erns of Dostoeusky's Poellcs (Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press, 1984), chap. 4.

6. G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

7. See Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

8. Bakhtin, Problems, chap.8.9. Frank's otherwise excellent analysis of Bakhtin breaks down at

the point where the gxeatest rewards are to be harvested. Instead offol-lowing Bakhtin to the implied conclusion that the work of art is by itsnature (as a work of art) incomplete, Frank imposes his own prejudicein favor of completeness and then labels Bakhtin a failure. See Frank,"Voices," 59.

Aeschylus, 24, 39aesthetic consciousness, 2, 137, I44,

145, 163, 189-91Altertumswissenschaft, 9, 20, 23, 24,

3t,37-47Apelt, O., 63Arendt, H., 60Aristophanes, 77Aristotle, 5, 12, I3, 39, 43, 44, 57, 60,

6t,64,66-77, 84, 88, 94, 100, 114,115, 120, Izt, r23, I24, t27 -34, I43,156, 169, 178, 179, 180

art, philosophy of, I37, I42

Bakhtin, M., 15, 55, 61, 182-88Basel, University of, 37Berlin, University of, 34, 35, 39Bernstein, R., 26, 77, l3lBible,62, 101, 102, 120Bildung, Bildungstradition, 20-24, 29,

37, 40, 44, 45, 47, 49, Lr}Bóckh, A., 23,37, 43, 47, 165, 166Bondi (Press), 32Bopp, F., 102Buber, M.,54Bultmann, R., 25, 184

Chicopee, Massachusetts, 128Christ, 183-86

Continental political ühinking, 182-88conversation, 92-100, 102, 143, 160

Darwin, C., Il4, 128Deleuze, G.,85dialectics, l7I-72Dilthey, L., 42Dilthey, W.,42discourse rationality, l7 4-7 5, I92Dostoyevski, F., 186-87

education, philosophy of, 138, 155, 156,159, 188-89

Einstein, A. (theory), 128ethics, philosophy of, II9-22existence, 131-34

Fichte, J. G., 21, 30, 35Frederick the Great, 31Freud, S. (psychology of), 55, 145, I54Friedemann, H., 32, 33, 50, 85, L34, L67,

168, 179, 181Friedlánder, P.,25,33, 45, 46, 41, 48,

49,5L, t62,167, 168fusion ofhorizons, 48

Geiste sw is sensc haften, 1 29-30Goerdeler, K., 164

George Circle, 26=31, 39, 40, 47,48,77,83,9t, rt0, t22,134, 135, 138,

179George, S., 26-33, 39, 45-48,50, 141,

t57, t92Gestalt, 9, 29-32, 7 7, 87, ll0, 124, 134,

135, 138, 139, 140, 146,r53, 167, 169,t72, r74, 175, 181, t84, 192

Gestalt biographies, 3t, 32, 39, 44, 77,79,110,138, 159,168

Goebbels, J.-P., 26Goethe, W., 21, 30, 31, 35, 161Good, idea of, 107-11, 116, 119, 133

Góttingen, University of, 34Grimm, J., 102Gundolf, F.,26,27,32

Habermas, J., 131Halle, University of, 34Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 21, 30, 35, 56, 85,

183Heidegger, M., 15, 25,26,27,28, 31,

54, 60, 88, 91, 101, L02,r22,r27,13r,t34, r4r, r43,144, r58, t77

Heidelberg, University of, 48Hellingrath, N.,27,31Herder, J. G.,20, 25,30,34,182Hildebrandt, K., 31, 33, 50,56,57,134,

167,168, 179, 181

Hitler, A., 27,105, t64Hobbes, T., L29Hoffmannsthal, H., 27Hólderlin, J. C., 19, 21,30,35,36,43,

63, 161, 165Homer, 39,144,147, I48,149, 190Humboldt, W., 19, 2I,23,27,30, 33,

34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 43, 47, 56, 63, 83,165

Humanities, 130-31, 184, 187-88, 192

I nnerli.chkeit, 189-90

Jaeger, W., 12, I3, 41, 42, 43, 44, 57,58, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 81, 88,94, 138, 151, 156, 161, 162, 190-91

Jaapere, K., 4Jena, Univorsity of, 34, 36Jonss. W,. 102

Index 205

Kaehler, S.,56Kafka, F., 53, 54Kaus, O., 55, 56Kiel, University of,4lKierkegaard, S.,26Klostermann, V., 4Kommerell, M.,28Kroner, R., 15

Kuhn, T., 112, 168

Leipzig, University of, 177

Ianguage, 186-90Lenin, V. I., 129Locke, J., 109, 166

Lówith, K., 54, 100, 101

Mallarmé, S.,29Mann, H.,53Mann, T.,53Marburg, University of,45, t67Marx, K. (Marxism), 129, 159, 169, 173

method, idea of, 10, 11, 64, 71,74,75,160, 182-83

Mommsen, T.,37moral philosophy, 120Musil, R.,53

Natorp, P., 17, 18, 19,25,32,47,48,50,58, 116, 167, 168, 181

N aturw isse nsc hnften, L29, 130Nazi Germany (Nazis, Nazism), I5, 26,

27, 163,177-8LNewton, I. (Newtonian physics), 128,

166Nietzsche, F., 9, 19, 24,29,3t,35,36,

3?, 38, 39, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48,62,78,85, 86, 134, t45, r54,161, 165, 166,167, 169, t73, t7 5, t77, t79, t84

Oakeshott, M., 131

Pericles, 133phenomenology, 89phronesis, 131-33Plato, 2, 3, 4, 5,8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14,

15, 17, 18, r9,24,32,39, 40, 4r, 45,50, 51, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66,67, 70, 72, 73, 7 4, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79,

Index

206 Index

Platn (continueú Schwitters, K., 54

80, 81, 82, 84, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 96, Shakespeare, W., 29, 30, 31, 73, 74

103,105,108,109,111,114, lL6,It7, Singer, K., 51124,125,133, 137, 138, 139, l4},l4l, Smith, C., 144t42,L43,L46,r47,148, 149, 150, 151, solon, 60152,153,154,155,159,160,163,166, soul, 133, 138, 157

16?, 168, 172,179,189, 190, 191 Stauffenberg, K., 27Platonic Socrates, 5,77,78,79, 80, 81, Stern, F., 22

82,83,85,86, 100, 104,110, 111, 116, Strauss, D., 184

L22, t26, r27, t34, 138, 139, r49, 157,159, 161, 163,168,169,170, t71,172, Tagore, Rabindranath, 19

173,174,I75,L76,179, 180, 181, 183, Taylor, F. W., 129

186, 188, 192 Third Humanism, 43play, 8, 9, 50, 67, 76, 89, 91-94, 95, Thrasymachus, 10,79, 100, 150, 151,

96,97,r52,153,154,155,156 L75politics, philosophy of, 137 Thucydides, 10

prejudices, 84,126,132, 180 Tónnies, F., 99Princeton University, 12 Twain, M., 62

Rembrandt, H. V. R., 73 Usener, H.,42,44Ringer, F., 112Rohde, E.,38, 145, 154, 161 values, 185

Rorty, R., 130, 131Weber, M., 15, 41, l2O,l2I, L82

Saint-Simon, H., 129 Wilamowitz, U., 25, 33' 38' 39' 40' 41'

Saussure, F., 18, 31 43, 44, 46, 47, 56, 57,101, 102' 165'Schelling, F. W. J., 35 166

Schiller, J. C., 9, 19,21,22,23,29,35, Winch, P., 1223?, 83, 161, 165 WoIf, F. A., 19, 34, 35, 36, 37, 47, 16I

Schlegel, K. W. F.,9 Wolfskehl, K.,28Schleiermacher, F. E. D., 19,2I, 47Schulpforte,36 Xenophon, T8

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Robert R. Sullivan Political Hermeneutics the Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer 1989