Patti Giddy's List: Postmodern

• Richard E. Palmer
• ontological gap, a gap between the thinking of the gods and that of humans.
• According to legend, he had (1) a mysterious helmet which could make him invisible and then suddenly reappear, (2) magical wings on his sandals to carry him swiftly over long distances, and (3) a magical wand that could put you to sleep or wake you up. So he not only bridged physical distances and the ontological gap between divine and human being, he bridged the difference between the visible and the invisible, and between dreams and waking, between the unconscious and the conscious. He is the quicksilver god ["Mercury" in Latin] of sudden insights, ideas, inspirations. And he is also the trickster god of thefts, highway robbery, and of sudden windfalls of good luck.
• This exegesis brought out the meaning, sometimes a hidden meaning. Hermeneutics as the exegesis of texts of course related in antiquity to rhetoric, which had a much broader scope in ancient times than it generally does today, but also it applied to explicating dreams, oracles, and other difficult texts, plus legal texts and precedents, and literary and religious texts. Traditions of interpretation of rules for how to interpret literary, legal, and religious texts have come down from antiquity, and these furnish the subject matter of hermeneutics broadly defined as related to the interpretation of texts.
• Hermeneutics in its various historical forms from antiquity to modern times in general offered methodological help in solving interpretive problems that arise with certain kinds of texts: dreams, laws, poetry, religious texts. But in the early 19th century (1805ff.), Friedrich Schleiermacher wondered whether there could be a hermeneutics that was not a collection of pieces of ad hoc advice for the solution of specific problems with text interpretation but rather an allgemeine Hermeneutik, a "general hermeneutics," which dealt with "art of understanding" as such, which pertained to the structure and function of understanding wherever it occurs
• "universal hermeneutics.
• Wilhelm Dilthey, a half-century later, began to see real possibilities for continuing Schleiermacher's general hermeneutics project as a "general methodology of the humanities and social sciences
• an "allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften
• Hermeneutics was for Dilthey still a methodology, but now a general methodology he hoped would become the theoretical foundation for all the humanities and social sciences.
• Emilio Betti in his three-volume Teoria della interpretazione (also untranslated into English, but translated by Betti into German in his 750 page Allgemeine Auslegungslehre
• Every interpretation, according to Gadamer, was a combination of the present horizon and the past, so that the dream of a meaning coming objective and unchanged out of the past is impossible.
• adical hermeneutics of existential understanding.
• Heidegger
• Being, as it occurs in the everyday existence of human beings, he said, is understanding
• Understanding is the basic way for a human being to exist in the world. To "be" is to understand, it is to interpret the world in terms of one's own possibilities for being. In his Being and Time, Heidegger worked out the conditions for the possibility of human being in the world, and in this sense he offered a Kantian universalistic analysis. Every human being finds himself/herself to be a "geworfene Entwurf"‚ a "thrown project." That is to say, one finds oneself already thrown into a world at a certain time and place, and one finds oneself always already with a past that cannot simply be forgotten, since it provides the basis for one's project into the future.
• We can only say that hermeneutics took a major step forward in being once again articulated as a general, universal description of what understanding is and does, but this time in terms of the being of the being that is always "there"—somewhere—the Dasein.
• would like to pause here to point out the significance of Heidegger's contribution to hermeneutics: Human understanding become the universal door, process, filter, through which all thought of whatever kind must pass. The being of the world, the being of Truth, the being of one's own existence are understood. They are "always already" understood before they are linguistically articulated, i.e., before they are interpreted. There is a prior having, a prior grasp, and then a seeing of something as something—the "hermeneutical as" is the universal element found in every act of understanding in every discipline in every mundane act whatsoever.
• In the mental universe, or better, in the structure of being, understanding is the process present everywhere, the process by which everything is apprehended, placed, understood as something. Hermeneutics seeks to define this process.
• Then a German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who had been Heidegger's assistant for five years in Marburg, from 1923-1928, while Heidegger was writing Being and Time, came to see in Heidegger's thought-both in Being and Time and in the 1935 essay, "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes"("The Origin of the Work of Art," pp. 139-212 in Heidegger, Basic Writings) the basis for a "philosophical hermeneutics."
• First, there is the relevance of a new tool, a new method that accomplishes a purpose you want accomplished. This is the relevance of a tool that is suitable for a given task
• Our translator chose "relevance," but I think one misses in the English word, as I hear it, the dimension of time, of meaningfulness here and now, that is so important in hermeneutics.
• he second of the further dimensions I would add as associated with a stronger sense of relevance is that of critique. A critique is especially "relevant" when it calls one's worldview into question, one's approach, one's presuppositions, so that after it one cannot see the same topic in the same light.
• he third dimension of relevance is that of transformation. A thing or text we encounter may be relevant if it redefines what we are doing, such that we understand it and ourselves in a new light, a new way. We begin to place different requirements on what we do. We do things differently. We see the value and goals of our work differently. It may smash our present horizon and force us to form a new one, to become more aware of ourselves. In this case, relevance is not just the relevance of critique. It offers an alternative possibility for seeing and doing. It may change our self-understanding, and the self-understanding we have as interpreters. This is the transformative dimension.
• I believe, is ;look for what is meaningful now, not yesterday; it is not antiquarian. It puts our present approaches in question by its critique of our present horizon.
• One could call this the therapeutic dimension. It does not just criticize, it offers an alternative to the present perspective. I call this the transformative dimension of the relevance of hermeneutics.
• Gadamer's hermeneutics is a systematic philosophical defense of the relevance of the humanities. It shows why the study of art, literature, and poetry, are important.
• first Noble Truth, as you recall, describes the nature of the problem, the second the cause of the problem, the third the solution to the problem, and the fourth, the path of right belief and living
• The next steps, of right vocation and right application suggest the importance of Gadamer of listening and a right view of application
• . Music - Because hermeneutics traditionally involves reading a text and in effect vocalizing it as one reads, there is basically a performative element in the hermeneutical process. One brings a text to life in the same way a conductor or pianist brings a score to life. I even ventured to present some ideas on performance and hermeneutics at a conference on postmodernity and the arts some two decades ago. (See my articles, 1978.) A colleague, Melanie Jacobson, is exploring the relevance of hermeneutics to choral performance for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Iowa. There are many connections between musical theory and hermeneutics.
• 9. Technology - Gadamer goes back to the Greek interpretation of technê, which refers to using reason to produce things. But there are limits to such a use of reason, as Aristotle's discussions of phronesis show us.
• 10. Modernity - As I have indicated in my boundary 2 essay on Postmodernity and Hermeneutics , hermeneutics itself represents a postmodern standpoint.(See also my 1976 Article, "The Postmodernity of Heidegger.")² In offering a critique of the limits of technological reason and Enlightenment arrogance, philosophical hermeneutics goes beyond the presuppositions and illusions of Enlightenment modernity.
• 11. Sociology - Interpretation theory in sociology and the social sciences should find hermeneutics instructive as a critique of objectivizing modes of interpretation. There is an affinity here with participant observation, which makes use of non-objective criteria in understanding. More recently (1987), see Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan, Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look.
• 18. Rhetoric - Rhetoric is a very important factor in Gadamer's thinking. He is especially interested in the broader scope of rhetoric in antiquity. His essay, "Rhetoric and Hermeneutics," appears in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader, pp. 45-59. Also see my contribution to that volume, "What Hermeneutics can Offer Rhetoric," pp. 108-131. In that essay, I found twenty points where hermeneutics could offer something to rhetoric, but Gadamer after reading it, advised me to reduce it to ten by combining some points. Unfortunately if was already at the publishers and really not practical to change. But I agreed with him that it would have been more effective with ten or twelve points rather than twenty.
• 20. Postmodernity - Gadamer's hermeneutics contains a critique of the thought-forms of modernity. As such it marks a turn to postmodernity, as I have pointed out in my article "Postmodernity and Hermeneutics" in boundary 2 (see Articles, 1977) and elsewhere. A recent conference arranged by Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago on the topic, "After Postmodernity" (see the report at www.focusing.org/conferencereport.html) reflected many of the themes of hermeneutics.
• 21.Phenomenology - The question of phenomenology is inseparable from the development of hermeneutics. Gadamer was Heidegger's assistant from 1923 to 1928, during precisely Heidegger was making a double move of using phenomenology to free himself of life-philosophy and neo-Kantianism and at the same time adding jibes in class about Husserl. Here, his logic lectures of 1925, recently translated, are relevant. For the view of their split from Husserl's perspective, see the recently published volume 6 of Edmund Husserl's collected writings in English from the period 1927-1931, Psychology and Transcendental Phenomenology: Husserl's Britannica Article, Amsterdam Lectures, and Marginal comments in Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. (1997). Also, see G. B. Madison's view that a phenomenological hermeneutics is the solution to the problems of postmodernism (see his Web page). It is significant that Dermot Moran's Introduction to Phenomenology includes a 48-page chapter on Gadamer. Gadamer's thought is phenomenological and inextricably intertwined with the development of 20th century phenomenology. (See his conversation on phenomenology with Alfons Grieder in JBSP (published May, 1995), which will be included in my forthcoming Gadamer in Conversation (Yale, 2001).
• hermeneutics an ontology of understanding
• ubjectivizing involved in making interpretation a psychological process, and an objectivizing which omits/denies the interpretive moment in the reader.
• adamer also follows Heidegger in defining understanding as self-understanding. While Gadamer avoids the terminology of existentialism, he continues to take the view that understanding is not just of an external object or subject but rather involves a moment of self-understanding as one understands. To understand in a way that transforms one's view of the world and oneself, as often happens in encountering a great work of art, also results in an enhanced self-understanding.
• here can be no disinterested understanding or even presuppositionless understanding of anything.
• For Gadamer there is no escape from history or from prejudices, although one must continually become aware of them. But they are the basis of our understanding at all, so "prejudgments" are always already there.
• 27. Method - It is a mistake to see Gadamer as the arch-enemy of method. Method is basic and indispensible to every area of human investigation. He recognizes this. The problem arises when method is viewed as the best and only avenue for obtaining knowledge. Here, hermeneutics attempts to show through philosophical analysis the limits and liabilities of method, its non-universality. It is hermeneutics which is universal, according to Gadamer, not method. Methodically generated truth closes the investigator to other forms of truth, and thus Gadamer's title, Truth and Method. And even the universality of hermeneutics is a major point of contention in the debate with Jürgen Habermas. [See Hermeneutik und Ideologie-Kritik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971, o.p.]
• This focuses not so much on the text as rather how that text is perceived/received. In America we have the "reader response" criticism of Norman Holland (Dynamics of Literary Response and 5 Readers ReadingJane Tompkins (Reader Response Criticism: From Structuralism to Formalism, and Stanley Fish (cited in #25 above) among others. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics sees in reception-aesthetics a step beyond the Aristotelian realism of the New Criticism (although Aristotle's analysis of tragedy in the Poetics is an early example of reception-aesthetics) in that the aesthetics of reception realizes that the happening of the work occurs in the reader and thus it is pointless to exclude what the perceiver brings to the act of encountering a work of art.
• Poststructuralism puts forward a theory of language and a hermeneutics of suspicion that reads between the lines for where the action going on contradicts the words. We see this illustrated with particular brilliance in Barbara Johnson's great essay on Melville's "Billy Budd." In my article comparing four texts of Gadamer and four of Derrida (see Articles, 1994), I conclude that the two approaches to the phenomenon of reading and of interpretation are supplementary, not mutually exclusive. Both offer light on the event of understanding that we would not otherwise have.

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