El problema de la conciencia histórica

by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Agustín Domingo Moratalla (Translator)

El presente texto reúne las conferencias que Hans-Georg Gadamer dio en Lovaina en 1957. En aquel año ya tenía elaborado el borrador de «Verdad y método»; de ahí que supongan una anticipada síntesis de esta importante obra de la filosofía contemporánea. Con este texto la hermenéutica filosófica se ofrece como la transformación que precisaba la fenomenología para ser una respuesta histórica, epistemológica y ética a la «Crisis de las Ciencias Europeas». Respuesta con la que dar cuenta y razón de la racionalidad que exigen las ciencias humanas en este período de entre siglos. Quienes aún se preguntan por el tipo de racionalidad que puede responder a los desafíos de la era tecnológica tienen en «El problema de la conciencia histórica» un texto breve y básico. En él se analizan las relaciones entre la experiencia histórica y el conocimiento ético, en diálogo con Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger y, sobre todo, Aristóteles. Estas lecturas aportarán las claves fundamentales para la clarificación de una propuesta ética como la hermenéutica que pretende desmarcarse del relativismo y del dogmatismo moral. El libro cuenta, además, con una interesante introducción de Agustín Domingo Moratalla, que contiene una presentación de cómo se gestó el pensar gadameriano indicando su situación concreta (influencias, dedicaciones, contactos, lecturas...), así como una exposición general de la filosofía de Gadamer, centrándose en su paso de la fenomenología a la hermenéutica, que es la respuesta propiamente gadameriana a la tarea de haberse tomado en serio el salto hacia el «otro comienzo» que reclamaba Heidegger en sus «Baiträge».

Genres: Philosophy

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Hans-Georg Gadamer was born February 11, 1900 in Marburg, Germany.
(Arabic: هانز جورج غادامير)

Gadamer showed an early aptitude for studies in philosophy and after receiving his doctoral degree in 1922 he went on to work directly under Martin Heidegger for a period of five years. This had a profound and lasting effect on Gadamer's philosophical progression.

Gadamer was a teacher for most of his life, and published several important works: Truth and Method is considered his magnum opus. In this work Heidegger's notion of hermeneutics is seen clearly: hermeneutics is not something abstract that one can pick up and leave at will, but rather is something that one does at all times. To both Heidegger and to Gadamer, hermeneutics is not restricted to texts but to everything encountered in one's life.

Gadamer is most well-known for the notion of a horizon of interpretation, which states that one does not simply interpret something, but that in the act of interpretation one becomes changed as well. In this way, he takes some of the notions from Heidegger's Being and Time, notably that which Heidegger had to say about prejudgements and their role in interpreting and he turns them into a more positive notion: Gadamer sees every act and experience (which is a hermeneutical experience to a Gadamerian) as a chance to call into question and to change those prejudgements, for in the horizon of interpretation those prejudgements are not forever fixed.

Gadamer is considered the most important writer on the nature and task of hermeneutics of the 20th century, which was still widely considered a niche within Biblical studies until Truth and Method was widely read and discussed.

He died at the age of 102 in Heidelberg (March, 2002).

Reviews

[José Simões]

De Dilthey a Heidegger, passando por Aristóteles, é a questão da consciência histórica que Gadamer disseca aqui, orientado pela busca por uma hermenêutica que supere a dos românticos.

Grosso modo (muito grosso modo mesmo), do pensamento de Dilthey o autor recupera a importância do «ser conscientemente influenciado» e da «Verstehen (compreensão)», que aquele opôs ao «grandioso e épico esquecimento de si» perfilhado por Ranke e pela escola historicista. Nesse sentido, mostra como uma Lebensphilosophie é incompatível com a assimilação das ciências humanas às ciências da natureza: embora o Homem procure os «sólidos» (crenças que o orientam moral, espiritual ou politicamente), a dúvida natural não se pode comparar à dúvida científica, do mesmo modo que o método científico não pode ser aplicado tout court. De resto, como afirmava Hegel, o método é a própria coisa. Não obstante, as contribuições de Dilthey para a valorização da experiência e do pensamento humano, cuja vertente filosófica será apenas uma derivação deste, são imprescindíveis.

Do pensamento de Heidegger resgata a radicalidade da compreensão enquanto «forma originária de realização do ser humano enquanto ser-no-mundo», questão ontológica que servirá depois para justificar a importância do intérprete (de um texto, de uma conversa, de uma imagem ou de um elemento histórico proceder a uma tomada de consciência (sendo a consciência histórica apenas uma das faces da consciência de si), caracterizada pelo abandono de posições prévias que condicionem a interpretação, tais como preconceitos, «noções populares» (Heidegger queria com isto dizer crenças ou valores) ou informações que condicionam a marcha do círculo hermenêutico. É aí que entra em cena a consciência da influência diltheiana.

De Aristóteles recupera a comparação entre o saber ético e o saber técnico, uma vez que ambos necessitam (na perspectiva do Estagirita) de um material: a ética, tal como a técnica, a justiça ou a sabedoria não existem per se no mundo, mas são antes, digamos, relacionais ou situacionais, na medida em que dependem de um sujeito e de uma situação/objecto. O saber ético distingue-se, portanto, do ser ético. Essa distinção permitirá depois a Gadamer estabelecer uma diferenciação entre o saber histórico e o ser histórico que compõem, em conjunto, o conhecimento histórico. O saber enquanto resultado da interrogação do passado, de acordo com as condições que vimos acima; o ser, na medida em que, ao contrário dos historicistas, não se trata de eliminar a «distância temporal» e esquecer-se de si para se assimilar ao tempo do objecto histórico, mas antes compreender que também possuímos a nossa historicidade, que seremos influenciados por ela e por muitas outras coisas, mas que fazemos parte de uma sucessão de tempos. Portanto, quando analisamos uma dada tradição, é também em função da tradição em que nos inserimos que o fazemos. Devemo-lo fazer, portanto, conscientemente, interrogando os nossos preconceitos e crenças a priori, mas avaliando também os dados da tradição que interpretamos. Interrogar, compreender, interpretar são, assim, formas de preencher o espaço entre nós e o objecto, a lacuna que sobra à primeira linha de sentido, imediato, através da qual nos lançamos ao exercício da hermenêutica, duvidando metodicamente de tudo. Não será o método descartiano, mas uma posição de princípio do questionamento. Não andamos muito longe do território da desconstrução, já se vê.

[VII]

I read the english version found here: https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/p...

This was much better than I expected, though I wish I could say the same for its difficulty. Gadamer slowly builds an argument in favor of tradition and against the notion that we can have access to ahistorical things. For this he employs a modification of the hermeneutic circle that is close to the Heideggerian one. The idea is that when we try to understand anything, our understanding is already affected by prejudices that come from tradition or history, but these prejudices are essential for understanding. Even if we use the scientific method, that's a prejudice. The goal then is to make a negotiation between what is to be understood and the prejudices we use to understand with the goal of being open to lessen our prejudices and to let what we try to understand affect them, which will literally makes us different people (since it will change our understanding). But this will not be to understand the thing by itself. That's impossible. There is no ahistorical understanding of anything; there is a series of “unities” between what comes from the past and what we, living in the present, want to do with them. No naked thing, no naked I, only unities. As usual, I wrote a summary for my own purposes, with part five being his constructive part and the first four some preliminary historical remarks.

1. He starts by wondering if there is a difference between the human sciences and the natural sciences, and whether there is a way for the first to become the fundamental ones, but not by, like Kant, making everything subject to reason, but by making everything subject to history. This can be done if we accept that the natural sciences provide explanations and the human sciences interpretations (understanding), following Nietzsche's “all statements dependent upon reason are open to interpretation”. But we also have to accept that the human sciences have their own method. Maybe we can find regularities in human sciences too but what we actually care about is understanding a particular person at a particular moment.

2. Dilthey was the first to see that this can't be done with Hegelian historicism because it's metaphysical and not empirical. He thought that we can achieve understanding by having historical consciousness, by understanding every era in its own terms. He believed that by realizing the importance of historicism we don't just continue tradition; we acquire “a reflexive relation with [ourselves] and with tradition”, and he thought that knowledge lies in our everyday life, in “lived experience”, in art and myths. But the problem, for Gadamer, is that he still had in mind the model of the natural sciences and thought that all these “relativities” amount to something absolute and rationalistic. But for Gadamer morality, law and religion can only concern a particular society, not every society.

3. Heidegger saw understanding as the primordial mode of being of the Dasein, with scientific knowledge being a sub-species of the knowledge we get from life, from experience. Dasein is historical in the sense that its life is a process of anticipation and forgetfulness. It is oriented towards the future projecting possibilities but it also “thrown” in a historical situation that affects it. Translating these notions to hermeneutics, our ethics and morality have a past that affects us but are also our project, something we always try to perfect. Our first worry for Gadamer then, shouldn't be to liberate ourselves from tradition but to continue it. And even if we wanted to, it's impossible to have supposition-less science since both the meaning of the objects of investigation and the method we use are part of a (in this case scientific) tradition. Having a historical consciousness is just being comfortable with the fact that tradition always plays a role, and having the aim of analyzing the network of historical research and the living tradition.

4. Next, he turns to Aristotle because of two analogies. One between understanding how something can be grasped differently in different historical situations, and how something general can be applied in a particular situation and two, of how being a historical being is similar to being an ethical being. In ethics it is not enough to have general knowledge but you have to be the kind of person that can understand what's relevant for his decision in each particular situation. It's a habit that's acquired through knowledge and practice and deciding what to do is not determined by the object but by the man as ethical being and the ethical know-how, similar to hermeneutics where understanding is determined by man as a historical being and the tradition. And to establish the difference between the human sciences and the natural sciences he makes a further analogy between the Greek ethical know-how and the Greek techne, the technical know-how, presenting three -not that important in my opinion- Aristotle's arguments.

5. So, Gadamer will combine Aristotle's model of ethical knowledge, he will avoid Dilthey's attempt to make historical knowledge objectivist and he will follow Heidegger who sees knowledge as a historical existential event. Lastly, he will use the hermeneutic circle of the traditional hermeneutics. They thought that to understand a text (remember though that Gadamer doesn't talk just for texts, but for every act of understanding) we start by making a guess on its content but this guess keeps changing while we read it and in the end the parts make sense because of the whole. But traditional, romantic hermeneutic thinkers thought that to have a perfect understanding we also need the subjective condition of the writer, something that Gadamer rejects. In his understanding, this initial guess will be the tradition. The relation then will be one between the text and the reader who becomes the mediator between the text and what the text implies, changing himself in the process.

Following Heidegger, Gadamer sees the hermeneutic circle not as a necessary evil but as the only way to understand. Understanding is a constant strife that necessarily starts with presuppositions but to be open to what it is examined, the presuppositions have to change during the process. It's a continuous oscillation between our presuppositions and what we examine, and the result is not the text itself, but a fusion between the two. The result is not something “objective”; it necessarily contains and is confirmed by our presuppositions too. We neither can, nor want to forget who we are and let what we examine determine itself, but we also can't let our prejudices determine it.

Heidegger sees our preconceptions formed by the history of metaphysics so we have to understand them to examine how our understanding works. It's not enough to be historically conscious if we don't understand that history is always present and affects us even in our secular prejudices, and that this is not a necessary evil but part of what is to understand.

For this we also necessarily assume that what we encounter “perfect coherence” (surprisingly, this reminds me of Davidson's radical interpretation). We expect what we get to make sense and also to be a statement about the things themselves and not the intentions of another (I suppose that here this “things themselves” is to be taken by his own definition. If not, I don't think that's true. I also suspect that it's here to defend against idealism or to widen the scope of the “method”).

Lastly he talks about the “temporal distance”. In traditional hermeneutics when we wanted to examine something that comes from tradition we needed to close the distance by trying to place ourselves at a previous era. They were seeing this distance as a bad thing. Gadamer wants to see it as a good thing because what we get passes the test of time. We make arbitrary judgements when something is new and only after some time we can make a more critical evaluation, by making a rewened encounter with tradition. He also connects this with the above -suspicious for me- thought that something “calls to us”, something true, and if we don't listen to it and we try to “bracket” our prejudices, we end up with a mistaken idea of what questioning (Descartes) is. The point of questioning is to be open to possibilities. Also, when we identify a prejudice it is not automatically replaced by a truth. The old prejudice is required because the new one has to be aligned towards it to understand what is denounced.

Historical objectivism forgets its own historicity and thinks that the historicity is something to overcome so that we can see things as they are, without the mistaken beliefs of our ancestors that are included in it. It poses ahistorical objects. Gadamer, on the other hand, thinks that everything that comes is already a unity between the past and the present and we can only mediate to form new perspectives. This is what will allow us to know them both. (I understand it as a new conception of what an object is).

[Asier Montero]

"Contrariamente a lo que a menudo se imagina, el tiempo no es sólo un precipicio que se debería franquear para retornar al pasado; es en realidad el suelo que acompaña el futuro y donde el presente hunde sus raíces. La distancia temporal no es una distancia en el sentido en el que se habla de franquear o vencer una distancia. Éste era el prejuicio ingenuo del historicismo. Creía poder lograr el terreno de la objetividad histórica esforzándose en colocarse en la perspectiva de una época y pensar con los conceptos y las representaciones propias de la época. En realidad se trata de considerar la distancia en el tiempo como fundamento de una posibilidad positiva y productiva de comprensión. No es una distancia que haya que franquear, sino una continuidad viva de elementos que se acumulan para llegar a ser una tradición que, ella misma, es la luz donde todo lo que nos es transmitido hace su aparición."

[Johan Alvarino]

Es un material que funciona como iniciador de los problemas que se ampliarán en las propuesta hermenéutica filosófica del autor.
Hace un recorrido interesante por el pensamiento de diversos intelectuales que aportaron y desarrollaron ideas para una hermenéutica universal.

[Pablo]

MECLAP reading

[Genio96]

Todo bien hasta que llega a la postulación hermenéutica, que resulta propiamente autocontradictoria.