Abstract
The chapter deals with the relevance of hermeneutics and phenomenology for cross-cultural studies, with an emphasis on the works of Gadamer and Merleau-Ponty. In the literature, hermeneutics is often defined as the theory of textual interpretation—which is a very limited view. In the treatment of Gadamer, hermeneutics has always been closely linked with practical “application” in such fields as theology, jurisprudence, and literature. The chapter at this point focuses on the connection between hermeneutics and ethics (in the Aristotelian sense). Beyond these traditional fields of application, Gadamerian hermeneutics also plays an important role in cross-cultural encounters aiming at mutual understanding. In order to avoid a “mentalist” or idealist construal of hermeneutics, the chapter turns to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology which alerts us to the affective and “inter-corporeal” character of cross-cultural dialogue and encounter.
The future survival of humankind may depend on our readiness…to pause in front of the other’s otherness—the otherness of nature as well as that of historically grown cultures of peoples and countries.
—Hans-Georg Gadamer
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Notes
- 1.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 198–199 (translation slightly altered).
- 2.
Ibid., 241.
- 3.
Ibid., 254, 257, 259–260.
- 4.
Ibid., 267–269.
- 5.
Ibid., 367–370.
- 6.
Ibid., 306.
- 7.
Ibid., 295. This midpoint is well captured by Nikolas Kompridis when he stresses the importance of resisting “two extremes: thinking of ourselves either as standing completely outside our traditions, in no way affected by or indebted to them, or as identical with our traditions, fatefully bound to or enclosed within them.” See his Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 7. Compare on this issue also my “Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Gadamer and Derrida in Dialogues ,” in Critical Encounters: Between Philosophy and Politics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 130–158; and my “Self and Other: Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Difference,” in Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, vol. 5 (1993): 101–124.
- 8.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 293. Continuing this line of thought, Gadamer (293–294) perceives in hermeneutical understanding an anticipation or “fore-conception of completeness” (Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit) aiming at the disclosure of “truth” (and hence bypassing any kind of relativism).
- 9.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 307–309.
- 10.
Ibid., 309, 324.
- 11.
Ibid., 329.
- 12.
Hans Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy” (1972), in Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 93, 101–102.
- 13.
“Hermeneutics and Practical Philosophy,” 90–92. The same volume also contains Gadamer’s important essay “What is Practice [Praxis]? The Conditions of Social Reason ” (1974), 69–87. Although perhaps unduly sidelining Heidegger’s influence, Richard Bernstein is surely correct in saying that Gadamer’s hermeneutics stands firmly in “the tradition of practical philosophy that has its sources in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics” where understanding takes the “form of phronesis.” See his Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), xiv–xv.
- 14.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Das Erbe Europas: Beiträge (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 28–31. As he adds: “And here it may be one of the special advantages of Europe that—more than elsewhere—her inhabitants have been able or were compelled to learn how to live with others, even if the others are very different.”
- 15.
Gadamer, Das Erbe Europas, 31–34.
- 16.
Ibid., 35, 46–48.
- 17.
Thomas Pantham, “Some Dimensions of the Universality of Philosophical Hermeneutics : A Conversation with Hans-Georg Gadamer,” Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research, vol. 9 (1992): 132.
- 18.
See, e.g., Charles Taylor, “Gadamer on the Human Sciences,” in Robert J. Dostal, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 126–142; and “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15–57.
- 19.
Charles Taylor, “Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights,” in Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, eds., The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 124–144.
- 20.
Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition ,” in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 66–68, 72–73. Compare also Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” in his Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 63–100.
- 21.
See in this respect especially John Dewey, “Search for the Great Community” from The Public and Its Problems (1927), in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 2, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 325–327. Compare David Foot, John Dewey: America’s Philosopher of Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
- 22.
John Dewey, “Nationalizing Education” (1916), in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 10 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975), 202–204.
- 23.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,” in Claude Lefort, ed., The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 133.
- 24.
Ibid., 133–34.
- 25.
Ibid., 134–35. On the issue of identity and non-coincidence compare the exemplary study by Bhikhu Parekh, A New Politics of Identity : Political Principles for an Interdependent World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
- 26.
Merleau-Ponty, “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,” 137–138. As he adds (139): “We are trying to awaken a carnal relation to the world and the other that is not an accident intruding from outside upon a pure cognitive subject…or a ‘content’ of experience among many others but our first insertion into the world and into truth.” As should be clear, “truth” here refers to a “disclosive” truth, not a propositional truth. On this distinction compare Nikolas Kompridis, Disclosure and Critique: Critical Theory Between Past and Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), also my Between Freiburg and Frankfurt: Toward a Critical Ontology (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991).
- 27.
Merleau-Ponty, “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,” 139–140.
- 28.
Ibid., 140–141; and “Everywhere and Nowhere,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 139. Compare also John Dewey, “Search for the Great Community,” in The Public and Its Problems (1927; reprinted, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1954), 143–184.
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Dallmayr, F. (2016). Cross-Cultural Encounters: Gadamer and Merleau-Ponty. In: Jung, H., Embree, L. (eds) Political Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 84. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27775-2_14
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