Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes

by Gary Brent Madison

In a postmodern age, Author G.B. Madison (former Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University and Graduate Faculty Member at the University of Toronto, Canada) postulates the fate of traditional philosophical themes. These debates are chronicled by Madison in The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity, a series of essays involving notable intellectuals, philosophers and educators of the day including Derrida, Husserl, Hirsch, Barthes and Ricoeur.

Genres: Philosophy

224 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1989

Reviews

[Drenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very enjoyable reading for me. I read it after finishing Truth and Method, and found this to be compatible with my take on the classic Gadamer and enlightening in ways I had never considered. However, two comments by Madison trouble me, and these two actually collapse into one concern. Madison essential mentions Habermas once, admittedly this in a chapter on Merleau-Ponty, wherein he compliments both these thinkers on their "communicative rationality", this being a "properly hermeneutic conception of reason" (p. 72). By extension, I, at least, would assume that Habermas' communicative rationality would be compatible with the the most prominent hermeneutists around, and around whom Madison's book centers, Gadamer and Ricoeur. However, Gadamer and Habermas were the poles of a debate which, I believe, never came closer to resolution with time. Habermas thought the "hermeneutic conception of reason' too dependent on tradition as the only support for their conception of truth. He feared that it could lead to a concensus that only looked backward. I don't think this is true of Gadamer, but Madison himself makes me think Habermas had a point when, in the second to last paragraph of this book, he writes: (we are in truth) " when our narratives are such as to contain a significant amount of ongoing coherence , when in our rewritings and retellings we are able to preserve and to take up, in a more meaning-giving way, with greater subtlety of narrative, the "truth" of our past, i.e.,all the 'data' that we have already made use of and their interpretations....they are in the truth when, in their ongoing self-transformations they are able to incorporate in their even sometimes revolutionary projects their own specific traditions or personal histories." This makes me think that this person in truth is very well adjusted but would have trouble being revolutionary.

One of the basic thrusts of hermeneutics is that we can properly look forward only if we are aware of the prejudices that make up our past. This is difficult business and very far from being fully accomplished in any instance. At least in this last paragraph, Madison seems to be too enthusiastic for the comforts of coherence. Gadamer emphasizes much more the necessary temporariness of any of the 'tellings' of our stories-we are always about to tip over into some new narrative-this frightening incoherence allowing for much more creativity.
FIRST DRAFT AS OF JANUARY 8-I HOPE FOR CHANGES, ADDITIONS

[Steven Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I experienced my last glorious academic sabbatical, I had two separate goals. One, to carry out some standard political science research to generate some publications. Two, to make an effort to acquaint myself with postmodernism and its political implications. This book was an important part of that process. It served as one of my takeoff points in the second effort. I assigned myself several "accessible" works on postmodernism to give me some vocabulary, so that I was in some kind of shape to begin reading Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Chantal Mouffe, and so on. For me, daunting works to explore. But books like Madison's volume did help give me the base for reading the primary sources.

Madison begins by noting what postmodernism is reacting to--the modern view of humankind. Here, the assumption is that humans are "knowing subjects," who, through reason, can assess what external objective reality is. The roots of this, the Enlightenment, go back to Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," where those with wisdom can come to see the light outside the cave and know truth.

However, as Madison notes, there are traditions in philosophy that question such conceptions of rationality and modernism. One such perspective is hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation. Madison discusses some key figures here, such as Husserl and Gadamer. Gadamer's work, "Truth and Method" (which I have reviewed here a while back), argues that we cannot possibly recover original meanings of works; we can only interpret their meaning as best we can. In an illuminating chapter (Chapter 7), Madison juxtaposes several key thinkers, Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, to explore what separates them and what might unite them, in terms of the modern project of truth and reality seeking. Chapters such as this were immensely helpful in terms of my sabbatical as I tried to understand the debates among critics of modernism and what was at stake in those debates.

The book closes with a quotation from Stanley Fish (Page 191): ". . .like it or not, interpretation is the only game in town." This emphasizes a rejection of the rationality of modernism, which itself claims that through our reason we can apprehend and understand objective reality "out there." Not so, says Fish, and other contemporary hermeneutists in the Gadamerian tradition as well as postmodern thinkers.

Anyhow, this book helped me to make sense of the debate before I plunged into reading some almost unreadable thinkers (Foucault once described Derrida as an "obscurante terroriste"--a person who wrote in a difficult manner [obscurante:] and then savaged those whom he felt misinterpreted him [terroriste:]). This book itself is not easy reading, but it is a nice introduction into a rich and almost intimidating literature.