Abstract
In the last chapter the nature of hermeneutics was explored and then set in the context of the Habermas–Gadamer debate. The purpose was to highlight the nature of hermeneutic concepts such as tradition, prejudice, and horizon so that in due course it could be seen how the classic is woven in with tradition as the interplay between past and present. The effect of this interplay is to allow us to see the grounding link between the ‘exceptional’ qualities of the classic and its historical context or as Gadamer describes the issue: the classic text’s simultaneous ‘historicity’ and ‘eminence’.
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Notes
- 1.
These are Gadamer’s terms; see his ‘The Eminent Text and Its Truth’ (1980).
- 2.
- 3.
It is these inevitable limitations of the actor’s self-understanding that lie behind Gadamer’s wish to replace a psychological version of Verstehen with a hermeneutic one.
- 4.
At this point, ironically, it is Gadamer who appears closer to Danto than Habermas in his rejection of quasi-positivist assumptions as applying to writing of history. In addition to the idea of the ‘last historian’ as a regulative principle for history writing, Habermas also seeks to develop another regulative principle: ‘the ideal speech situation’ which is also in a sense ‘beyond’ history. In this, empirical contingencies are to be held in check to allow only the force of the better argument to hold sway. Such a view, however abstract, it was hoped, would serve as the principle for a critique of the social world that would be ‘beyond’ the distortions of tradition. Gadamer responded to these attempts to establish a transcendental point of view in his ‘Reply to my critics’ in Orison and Shrift (1990).
- 5.
Habermas does deal with this issue in his later work where he acknowledges that myth and enlightenment are interwoven, but still insists on them being categorically different. This work, though, is pitched against the effects post-structuralism rather than hermeneutics; see Habermas 1987: Chap. V, 1996: Chap. 1.
- 6.
By ‘non-normative’ Habermas means factors that structure social life but are not thermalised as such within the normative system.
- 7.
At this stage of Habermas’ work he looks to psychoanalysis as a model to provide an Archimedean point. His concern is not with psychoanalysis as such, but with its model of communication between psychoanalytic ‘theory’ and the patient or ‘analysed’. The wider aim is to transfer the structure of this model to a praxis-orientated Critical Theory. Subsequently he drops this model and develops a ‘universalist’ theory rather than a ‘transcendental’ one, in the form of ‘universal pragmatics’.
- 8.
This language might seem exaggerated, but a pertinent quotation from Habermas, albeit from a different time, declares that ‘the dominance of the past, which returns like a nightmare to hang over the unredeemed present, can only be smashed by the analytic power of a form of remembering that can look calmly at what happens as history without seeing it as morally neutral’ (see Scheibler 2000: 44).
- 9.
Jauss’ later ideas change and draw much closer to those of his erstwhile teacher, Gadamer. For an account of these changes see Wagner (1984).
- 10.
For Gadamer’s response to Jauss, see Palmer, R.E. (2001: 63–65).
- 11.
See How (2011).
- 12.
I have referred to this example previously and more extensively in How (1995: 63–76).
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How, A.R. (2016). Hermeneutics, Tradition and the Classic Text. In: Restoring the Classic in Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-58348-5_8
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