Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Language : Essays on Heidegger and Gadamer [1 ed.] 9781443882903, 9781443876506

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Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Language

Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Language: Essays on Heidegger and Gadamer By

Stefano Marino

Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Language: Essays on Heidegger and Gadamer By Stefano Marino This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Stefano Marino All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7650-X ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7650-6

To Giovanni Matteucci: A teacher and a friend

I was surrounded by a language In which I could say only ‘hello’ And ‘thank you very much’ But you spoke so I could understand. ANI DI FRANCO Hypnotized

You’re trying to see through it And it doesn’t make sense. MICHAEL STIPE Hope

Self-realized and metaphysically redeemed May not live another life May not solve our mystery. EDDIE VEDDER Mind Your Manners

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 Gadamer and McDowell on Second Nature, World/Environment, and Language Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 49 Gadamer on Heidegger: The History of Being as Philosophy of History Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 69 Gadamer’s and Arendt’s Divergent Appropriations of Kant: Taste, Sensus Communis, and Judgment Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 85 Gadamer’s Hermeneutical Aesthetics of Tragedy and the Tragic Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 105 Heidegger and Rorty: Philosophy and/as Poetry and Literature Bibliography ............................................................................................ 123

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my scientific supervisor, Prof. Giovanni Matteucci, for his ongoing encouragement, for the countless discussions on contemporary philosophical questions (including, but not limited to, those concerning phenomenology and hermeneutics), and for the opportunity to take part in and collaborate on very different but always interesting and exciting philosophical projects, such as those concerning the aesthetics of fashion and popular music, the philosophy of food, and Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics. I would also like to thank Prof. Carlo Gentili for permission to republish here his part of the text in Chapter 4, and Prof. Dr. Günter Figal for his openness and willingness to repeatedly invite me to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg i.B., where I spent several fruitful periods of study during the last years with the support of postdoctoral fellowships granted by the DAAD and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. I would also like to thank Dr. Jerome Veith at the University of Seattle for his precious help in the revision and correction of the English text. Most of all, however, my gratitude goes to my family (my beloved wife Valeria; my dear son Marco, the greatest gift I have ever had in my life; my parents Giuseppe and Karin; my brother Giulio), and to all my friends for their love, patience and generosity. Like Adam Duritz sings, “[you] shine like the sun”! Finally, I thank the following for permission to republish here my previously published writings: “Seconda natura e linguaggio, corporeità e libertà in Gadamer e McDowell”, in my previous book Fusioni di orizzonti. Saggi su estetica e linguaggio in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Aracne, Roma 2012, pp. 65-103; “Gadamer on Heidegger: Is the History of Being ‘Just’ Another Philosophy of History?”, in «The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology», 41/3, 2010, pp. 287-303; “Two Divergent Appropriations of Kant’s Critique of Judgement: Some Remarks on Arendt and Gadamer”, in «Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik», ed. by G. Figal, vol. 11, 2012, pp. 189-208; “The Role of Tragedy and the Tragic in Gadamer’s Aesthetics and Hermeneutics” (with Carlo Gentili), in «The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology», 44/2, 2013, pp. 145-162; “Philosophy and Poetry – Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: Some Remarks on Richard Rorty’s Heidegger Interpretation”, in D.

x

Acknowledgments

Espinet (ed.), Schreiben Dichten Denken. Zu Heideggers Sprachbegriff, Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 2011, pp. 56-68.

INTRODUCTION

Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer undoubtedly belong among the most important thinkers of the entire twentieth century. More precisely, they can be considered the preeminent representatives of twentieth-century phenomenological hermeneutics (i.e., philosophical hermeneutics resting on phenomenological grounds1) which represents, in turn, one of the major traditions within so-called continental philosophy. Respectively teacher and pupil, during their long and philosophically intense lives and careers Heidegger and Gadamer greatly contributed to the development of philosophical thought in our age, providing significant and often decisive contributions in various fields of philosophical inquiry. Their main works, Being and Time (1927) and Truth and Method (1960), respectively amount to the great “classics” of contemporary philosophy, both being extraordinarily influential books without which the history of twentieth- and also twenty-first century philosophy as we know it would not even be conceivable. But the undeniably ground-breaking nature of these two philosophers’ masterpieces, emphatically defined as “watershed event[s] in the development of philosophical hermeneutics”2, must not lead one to overlook the rest of their “rich and immense” philosophical oeuvres3. This book addresses a number of problems concerning aesthetics, metaphysics, language, philosophical anthropology, and the history of philosophy, by focusing on Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s specific contributions in these fields, and by establishing fruitful and original comparisons between their views and those of other relevant thinkers of our time, such as Hannah Arendt, Richard Rorty and John McDowell. In fact, in some of the chapters I adopt a comparative approach that aims to portray the complex philosophical problems and concepts at the core of my investigation from different points of view, thus broadening the philosophical horizon and generating a more comprehensive perspective. The basic assumption underlying my interest in a comparative approach to philosophy is that – as has been convincingly explained by Jeff Malpas with the following words – “the cross-fertilization that occurs through contact between different approaches and styles is an especially significant factor […] in driving new intellectual developments. In this respect, comparative work across traditions, and between philosophical styles, can

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Introduction

be seen as an antidote to the insularity and parochialism that otherwise provides a sure recipe for intellectual stagnation”4. Much of the newest literature on contemporary thought highlights the importance of studying philosophical questions in a comparative perspective, and although some scholars have argued that the analytic/continental divide (which plays an important role in at least some chapters of this book) has now become obsolete, I argue that it is actually still desirable to underline the compatibility of the different views and to show that, during the twentieth century and probably still today, some thinkers have simply talked past each other because they failed to see that their views were at least to some extent compatible. An inquiry into the questions concerning human nature (first chapter), or taste and aesthetic judgment (third chapter), or the relationship between philosophy, poetry and literature (fifth chapter), and other related problems, may be a fruitful way to do this, thus suggesting the idea that drawing comparisons can also be “a way of advancing a particular philosophical position”5. I have not attempted to be either exhaustive or even systematic in my treatment of Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s philosophical work6. Rather, this book is conceived as a collection of papers, all dealing with Heidegger’s and/or Gadamer’s philosophy but each focused on a specific question. Chapters 2-5 derive from previously published articles that I am republishing here with a few little changes. Chapter 1 instead is heretofore unpublished in English, although it rests on some materials that had been previously presented only in Italian.

Aesthetics, Language, History of Metaphysics

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Notes 1

The relationship between phenomenology and hermeneutics does not even need to be explicated, since from Heidegger’s Being in Time until today the roots of philosophical hermeneutics lie precisely in phenomenology. As Gadamer once said, “what one now calls hermeneutical philosophy is based to a large extent on phenomenology” (GW 3, p. 214 [HW, p. 51]). Heidegger, for his part, stressed his belongingness to the phenomenological tradition not only in Being in Time and the lecture courses that he held during the 1920s, but also in such a later text as the 1963 short essay My Way to Phenomenology (see GA 14, pp. 91-102 [Heidegger 1972, pp. 74-82]). In recent times the essential, intrinsic relationship between phenomenology and hermeneutics has been especially emphasized by Günter Figal, who first stresses the need today to move from the stage of “philosophical hermeneutics” to that of “hermeneutical philosophy” (Figal 2010, pp. 5-47), and then explains that “if philosophy is understood hermeneutically”, then it has basically to do with the inner belongingness of “interpretation, understanding, and objectivity […]. Only what is objective has to be interpreted; it is disclosed as what it is through interpretation alone, because only presentative recognizing preserves the exteriority of its matter. […] And, when a presentation is understood”, then one understands “not only something, but rather, always also the relation of interpretation, that is, of presentation, and object. What one understands in this way is the structure of presentation”. But the “philosophical contemplation of the structure of presentation is phenomenology”, so that “phenomenology here is supposed to have the character of an intensification of hermeneutical reflection” (Figal 2010, pp. 121-123). At a later stage Figal seems to have gone a step further, so to speak, and claims that even aesthetics is fundamentally, intrinsically phenomenological. As he explains, indeed, “insofar as philosophical reflection on aesthetic experience is concerned with the subject matter of this experience, and thereby especially with artworks, it is phenomenological. […] In this regard, art is no arbitrary theme of phenomenological description […]. Rather, an artwork is essentially phenomenal; it is an appearance that is not to be taken as the appearance of something, but instead purely as appearance. Accordingly, aesthetics essentially is phenomenology; it must be phenomenology if it wishes to grasp that which can be aesthetically experienced”, and in turn “aesthetics also at the same time alters phenomenology, insofar as phenomena capable of being experienced aesthetically are not pure correlates of consciousness, but rather things. […] Yet artworks are things of a special sort”: “essentially phenomenal things”, “phenomena that are essentially thing-like”, in a word “appearing things (Erscheinungsdinge)” (Figal 2015, pp. 3-4). 2 Malpas and Zabala 2010, p. XI. 3 Figal 2002a, p. 85. 4 Malpas 2002, p. 196. 5 Malpas 2002, p. 196. 6 I have attempted to provide a systematic interpretation of Gadamer’s philosophy in light of the question concerning the crisis of modernity and the limits of its

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Introduction

basically scientist worldview in my previous book Gadamer and the Limits of the Modern Techno-Scientific Civilization (see Marino 2011). This interpretation stays in the background here but it actually constitutes the ground upon which, or the starting point from which, I developed many of my investigations of specific aspects of Gadamer’s thought in this book.

CHAPTER ONE GADAMER AND MCDOWELL ON SECOND NATURE, WORLD/ENVIRONMENT, AND LANGUAGE

1. The philosophy of the entire twentieth century, and to some extent of the twenty-first as well, has been characterized among other things by the strong divide between analytic and continental approaches. Without detailing here the origins of this division (which, according to some scholars, may be even traced back to the discussions on the difference between natural and human sciences at the end of the nineteenth century1) or lingering on its most famous expressions (such as the Heidegger/Carnap controversy of the 1930s on the significance and indeed the very possibility of metaphysics, or the Derrida/Searle debate of the 1970s on deconstruction and speech acts theory), and without discussing here the meaning and rigorousness of the distinction criterion itself (defined by Bernard Williams as “a quite bizarre conflation of the methodological and the topographical, as though one classified cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese”2), what matters for the specific purposes of the discourse I want to develop here is that until relatively recent times the analytic/continental divide was strong and profound. As a matter of fact, during the twentieth century it often appeared very difficult to even establish a potential conversation and philosophical exchange between these different philosophical approaches; thus, for example, in 1981 Richard Rorty described the situation in the following terms: Analytic philosophers, because they identify philosophical ability with argumentative skill and notice that there isn’t anything they would consider an argument in a carload of Heidegger or Foucault, suggest that these must be people who tried to be philosophers and failed, incompetent philosophers. […] Conversely, I have heard fans of Continental philosophy

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Chapter One be obnoxious about the “mere logic-chopping” with which their analytic colleagues waste students’ time and dehydrate their minds3.

And this is how the situation was recently described by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi with specific regard to the philosophy of mind (but the same observations, in my view, can be easily applied to other fields of philosophy as well): By mid-century, and indeed throughout most of the latter part of the twentieth century, we find that […] there is very little communication going on between analytic philosophy […] and phenomenology. In fact, on both sides, the habitual attitude towards the other tradition has ranged from complete disregard to outright hostility. Indeed, up until the 1990s, it was unusual to find philosophers from these two schools even talking to each other. There has been plenty of arrogance on both sides of the aisle4.

Now, it is surely important to note that in the last decades the situation has changed, inasmuch as thinkers belonging to both sides have tried to enter into dialogue with colleagues belonging to opposite or even “rival” traditions, and that Hans-Georg Gadamer played an important role in this shift in at least two respects. First of all, he intensified his teaching and lecturing activities after his retirement in 1968, and “for two decades [he] taught in North America virtually every fall, thus preparing the basis for the spread of hermeneutic philosophy across that continent”5. Secondly, his unshakable faith in the possibility and even the need of always pursuing the fusion of different horizons led him, among other things, to never avoid “the debate with analytic philosophy” and instead continue searching for “possible ways to build bridges”6. On this basis, some scholars have inquired into the relationships between, for example, Gadamer’s and Donald Davidson’s philosophical conceptions of understanding, language and interpretation7, while a few outstanding representatives of analytic philosophy and pragmatism have tried to develop in their own fashion some fundamental Gadamerian themes and arguments. Among the latter, the most interesting and impressing cases are probably those of Richard Rorty – according to whom philosophy should move from the stage of epistemology to that of hermeneutics, whereas the latter is (in a very original but indeed not unproblematic way) conceived as “a polemical term in contemporary philosophy […] for the attempt” to radically and definitively “set aside […] epistemologically centered philosophy”8 – and two other philosophers deeply influenced, among others, precisely by Rorty: Robert Brandom9 and John McDowell. It is precisely the latter’s influential project of a naturalism of second nature,

Gadamer and McDowell on Second Nature…

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developed in some papers and in a more systematic way in his 1994 masterpiece Mind and World, that I will proceed to discuss here.

2. As has been noted, Mind and World represents a “powerful and complexly argued book”10; a recent “milestone” on the question of “the relationship between mind and nature, […] concepts and experience”11; an “enormously difficult book – as difficult as it is important”12. One of the book’s fundamental ideas is that human beings normally and, so to speak, naturally inhabit two different and indeed irreducible logical spaces. On the one hand, we move within what McDowell calls “the logical space of reasons” (borrowing this expression from Wilfrid Sellars, according to whom “the essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says”13) and defines as “the structure in which we place things when we find meaning in them”14. However, on the other hand, we also belong to “the logical space of nature”, which during the modern and contemporary age has been increasingly strictly identified with the “ways in which the natural sciences [find] things intelligible” (namely, “by subsuming them under lawlike generalizations”15), and which can thus be defined as “the realm of law”. McDowell describes this relationship as a real “contrast between two kinds of intelligibility”16, as a “distinction between two ways of finding things intelligible”17, namely as a sort of dichotomy between the dimension of reasons, motivations and justifications, on the one hand, and that of natural causes, or rather natural laws18, on the other hand. A dichotomy that McDowell, in my view, does not aim either at maintaining in its abstract dichotomous character nor at simply denying by opting instead for some kind of reductionism. Rather, he seeks to simultaneously incorporate and overcome the dichotomy by outlining an original philosophical perspective that intends to do justice to both the difference between the two logical spaces and their coexistence in the human being. In the first chapters of Mind and World, McDowell exemplifies this basic theme by concentrating on the question concerning the relationship between concepts and intuitions. The Kantian idea of the indispensable cooperation and interdependence between Verstand (intellect, understanding) and sensibility19, and the Davidsonian conception of the conceptual scheme/empirical content dualism20, serve as guides to this inquiry. What McDowell sketches here is a general view of modern philosophy as

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Chapter One

trapped in an impasse and somehow unable to avoid falling again and again into opposite but equally unsatisfactory conceptions, such as “a coherentism that threatens to disconnect thought from reality”, on the one hand, and “a vain appeal to the Given, in the sense of bare presences that are supposed to constitute the ultimate grounds of empirical judgements”21, on the other. Without detailing here McDowell’s particular reconstruction of the guiding tendencies in the history of modern philosophy, what matters for the specific aims of the present analysis is that he identifies the fundamental problem underlying such typical philosophical oscillations in the contrast between two basic conceptions of the human being that he calls “rampant Platonism” and “bald naturalism”. In light of this basic opposition, the various epistemological problems that McDowell addresses throughout his book (most noticeably, as mentioned, in the first chapters) actually appear as instantiations, so to speak, of a wider and more general philosophical-anthropological question: namely, the question concerning the need for us, today, of accounting for the particular nature of the human being in a more adequate way than it has been. Seeking “a way to dismount from the seesaw”22 and to overcome the fatal tendency of modern philosophy “to oscillate between a pair of unsatisfying positions”23, McDowell thus advances the idea of rethinking, and most of all of broadening, the basic naturalistic view that has been predominant in our culture since the seventeenth century. In short, what he proposes is to include second nature, i.e. what we may call the domain of reason, history, and culture, in our basic conception of human nature. McDowell defines the resulting perspective as “a naturalized Platonism” or better as “a naturalism of second nature”24, and he maintains that such a philosophical perspective may do justice, in a way that “rampant Platonism” and “bald naturalism” are both unable to, to the inextricable intertwining of reason and perception, spontaneity and receptivity, that characterizes our world-experience and that (in the words of McDowell’s friend and colleague Robert Brandom) is “distinctive of us as cultural, and not merely natural, creatures”25. On a philosophical-anthropological level, this perspective finally makes it possible to satisfactorily account for the fact that the capacity of inhabiting a linguistically and culturally conditioned space of reasons does not position human beings outside the realm of biology, but simply belongs to “our mode of living”26, to our being “animals whose natural being is permeated with rationality”27. “Exercises of spontaneity belong to our mode of living”, McDowell explains, and “our mode of living is our way of actualizing ourselves as animals”; but if “exercises of spontaneity belong to our way of actualizing ourselves as animals”, this removes “any

Gadamer and McDowell on Second Nature…

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need to try to see ourselves as peculiarly bifurcated, with a foothold in the animal kingdom and a mysterious separate involvement in an extra-natural world of rational connections”28. With regard to the concept of human nature, then, he claims that “our nature is largely second nature” and it is the way it is not just because of the potentialities we were born with, but also because of our upbringing, our Bildung. […] Our Bildung actualizes some of the potentialities we are born with; we do not have to suppose it introduces a non-animal ingredient into our constitution. And although the structure of the space of reasons cannot be reconstructed out of facts about our involvement in the realm of law, it can be the framework within which meaning comes into view only because our eyes can be opened to it by Bildung, which is an element in the normal coming to maturity of the kind of animals we are29.

McDowell’s concept of second nature thus refers to “capacities of a subject that are natural but have to be instilled through education”30, and postulates a continuous but not reductive relationship between nature and culture31. In this context, language is of fundamental importance for properly understanding the acquisition of second nature, a process of “being initiated into conceptual capacities, whose interrelations belong in the logical space of reasons”32. As McDowell claims in a more recent work, entitled Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge, human beings are distinguished indeed “from the rest of the animal kingdom” in that they are “rational animals”, “animals that occupy positions in ‘the logical space of reasons’”, and also (implicitly equating reason with the mastery of language and, in particular, with “language with which one can give expression to one’s credentials for saying things”) “language-using animals”33. In the last sections of Mind and World he thus explains that, in his view, human infants are mere animals, distinctive only in their potential, and nothing occult happens to a human being. […] Human beings […] are born mere animals, and they are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of coming to maturity. This transformation risks looking mysterious. But we can take it in our stride if, in our conception of the Bildung that is a central element in the normal maturation of human beings, we give pride of place to the learning of language. In being initiated into a language, a human being is introduced into something that already embodies putatively rational linkages between concepts, putatively constitutive of the layout of the space of reasons, before she comes on the scene. […] Human beings mature into being at home in the space of reasons or, what comes to the same thing, living their lives in the world;

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Chapter One we can make sense of that by noting that the language into which a human being is first initiated stands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness, of the possibility of an orientation to the world34.

3. It is precisely at this point that Gadamer comes into play, as McDowell in Mind and World makes explicit reference to his hermeneutical conception of the “human experience of the world [that] is verbal in nature”35. The fact that McDowell refers to a thinker like Gadamer, belonging to a philosophical tradition quite different and sometimes viewed as even opposite to the analytic tradition in which he has been trained and works, should not be surprising if one just pays attention, for example, to the resemblance between the aforementioned dichotomy of the different logical spaces of nature and reason, on the one hand, and the basic contrast of explaining (erklären) and understanding (verstehen) underlying nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical hermeneutics, on the other. This resemblance has been noted, among others, by John Haldane36 and by McDowell himself, who in his response to an essay by Michael Friedman about Mind and World hints at this comparison and recalls the old “tradition […] in which verstehen is distinguished from erklären and the Geisteswissenschaften from the Naturwissenschaften”37. The specific aspect of Gadamer’s hermeneutics that McDowell explicitly refers to in Mind and World is the relationship between the concepts of language and world, and the way in which this conceptual relationship can help us to distinguish human beings from other animals. According to McDowell, those “creatures on which the idea of spontaneity gets no grip”38 (that is, animals lacking rationality and language) actually live in an environment, while human beings alone, by virtue of their conceptual and linguistic capacities, live in a world. The basic distinction at issue here is clearly that between environment and world, Umwelt and Welt: a distinction that McDowell makes use of in order to differentiate the nature of human beings from that of nonhuman, i.e. non-rational animals, and that he openly borrows from Gadamer39. More precisely, McDowell refers here to a few particularly important pages of Truth and Method concerning language as experience of the world, where Gadamer’s characteristic ontological account of language40 is somehow fused to anthropological observations. As he explains indeed, language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world; rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all. The world as world exists for man as for no other creature that is in the world. But this world is verbal in nature.

Gadamer and McDowell on Second Nature…

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[…] Thus, that language is originarily human means at the same time that man’s being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic. […] To have a world means to have an orientation toward it. To have an orientation toward the world, however, means to keep oneself so free from what one encounters of the world that one can present it to oneself as it is. This capacity is at once to have a world and to have language. The concept of world is thus opposed to the concept of environment, which all living beings in the world possess. […] But it is thus clear that man, unlike all other living creatures, has a “world”, for other creatures do not in the same sense have a relationship to the world, but are, as it were, embedded in their environment. […] Moreover, unlike all other living creatures, man’s relationship to the world is characterized by freedom from environment. This freedom implies the linguistic constitution of the world. Both belong together. To rise above the pressure of what impinges on us from the world means to have language and to have “world”. […] Animals can leave their environment and move over the whole earth without severing their environmental dependence. For man, however, rising above the environment means rising to “world” itself, to true environment. This does not mean that he leaves his habitat but that he has another posture toward it – a free, distanced orientation – that is always realized in language. […] To have language involves a mode of being that is quite different from the way animals are confined to their habitat. […] Whoever has language “has” the world41.

Both in his 1960 magnum opus and in other writings, Gadamer indeed insists on the possession of language – conceived by him as “the entrance to the world (Weltzugang)”42 and as “the means by which and in which the concept is brought to conceptualization”43 – as the distinguishing criterion between human and nonhuman animals. And in making this claim, he (like McDowell himself, by the way44) makes clear reference to Aristotle’s famous definition of the human being as zoon logon echon, “the only animal who has the gift of speech”45, “the living being who has logos”46; Gadamer proposes to translate the latter definition not only with animal rationale, i.e. “the rational being, distinguished from all other animals by his capacity for thought”47, but also (and perhaps even in the first instance) with “the living being that possesses discourse”48: “man, as an individual, has the logos. He can think and he can speak”49. However, just like McDowell, by referring to “a demanding interpretation for words like ‘concept’ and ‘conceptual’”, neither aims at debunking “animal mentality” in general, nor advocates “a reductive conception of biological imperatives”50, so it must be said that Gadamer also never denies the existence of animal forms of intelligence and communication, although he warns us not to confuse them with human forms of rationality and language. Thus, with regard to the problem of intelligence, Gadamer

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Chapter One

criticizes a diffuse scientific and philosophical tendency “to define the concept of human intelligence through direct analogy with that of animals”, thus simply comparing and in fact equating them; in his view, this approach implies “a fundamental impoverishment” of the concept of human intelligence, since it considers the human person in terms of the instinctual forces which are proper to animal forms of life. Animal “intelligence” betrays something quite different than in the case of human beings, for whom the constraints of instinct are transformed through a powerful institutionalization of cultural forms. […] In the end we are astonished to discover that talk of the intelligence of animals is not in fact a dubious form of anthropomorphism. Rather, the way we commonly talk of the intelligence of human beings, one which is informed by the normative ideal of a measurable quota of intelligence, represents a secret and unacknowledged theriomorphism51.

With regard to language, Gadamer goes so far as to claim that “coming to an understanding (Verständigung)” – which he somehow considers the very essence of all language52 – is “a life process in which a community of life is lived out”, and so, “to that extent, coming to an understanding through human conversation (die menschliche Verständigung im Gespräch) is no different from the understanding that occurs between animals”53. At this point, however, he adds that “human language must be thought of as a special and unique life process since, in linguistic communication, ‘world’ is disclosed”54, thus confirming his interest in grasping both the resemblances and differences between human and nonhuman animals. In this context, it is also remarkable that Gadamer, in a work published more than thirty years after Truth and Method, introduced the conceptual distinction between “being together-with (Mitsamt)” and “being with-one-another (Miteinander)” in order to account for “the area of animal behavior” and that of human behaviour which, “on the basis of natural determination of humans due to human language, supports human being with-one-another”55. As has been noted, however, by doing so Gadamer is in no way trying to resuscitate old dualisms as that “of nature and mind” in order to define a strong and insurmountable “border between the animal and the human”, because the border is instead “fluid” and the Mitsamt/Miteinander distinction “is only a logical distinction: considered ontologically, one is interwoven with the other”56. In fact, with regard to this distinction Gadamer explains that “it is difficult to imagine that one could clearly differentiate together-with and with-one-another in the area of animal behavior”, just like “of course we realize that human behavior acquires its form not independent of natural drives”57. So, in Gadamer’s view, human beings represent a sort of “interlacing of together-with, to

Gadamer and McDowell on Second Nature…

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which we are determined as natural beings, and, on the other side, humanity, by which we structure ourselves and our with-one-another”58. As far as the relationship between the two philosophers (Gadamer and McDowell) is concerned, one must also note how they connect the human capacity of inhabiting the space of (linguistically embedded) reasons, i.e. in hermeneutical terms the human Verstehen, to the fact of being free. According to McDowell, indeed, “the space of reasons is the realm of freedom”, by which he means “the idea of something that empowers us to take charge of our lives” and which entails that it is precisely “freedom that gives its distinctively human character to human life”59. At the same time, “the freedom of spontaneity” is not understood by McDowell as “a kind of exemption from nature, something that permits us to elevate ourselves above it”, but rather as “our own special way of living an animal life”: “what I am committed to denying in the case of mere animals”, McDowell explains, “is precisely, and only, something correlative with possession of spontaneity. […] The point is just that dumb animals do not have Kantian freedom”60. This also finds precise resemblances and perhaps even correspondences in Gadamer’s philosophy, inasmuch as the latter clearly distinguishes “the way of life of human beings […] who alone are active on the basis of free choice (prohairesis)” from “that of other living beings” which is “fixed by nature”, characterized by a “sheerly natural component within a mode of behavior” and guided by “the schemes of innate vital instincts”61. Beside the Aristotelian concept of prohairesis62, with regard to this subject Gadamer also relies on Kant’s basic intuition according to which humans are “citizens of two worlds”. “We live not only in the sensible” but also “from the ‘supersensible standpoint’ of freedom”, Gadamer writes, although from a Kantian perspective freedom is obviously “not an object of experience, but a presupposition of practical reason”63. At the same time, however, he refuses to derive from the existence of such peculiar living creatures as human beings any plea for implausible forms of anti- or supernaturalism64. So, for example, Gadamer never hesitates in admitting that modern biology demonstrates “how continuous are the transitions from animal to human behaviour”65, and admits that “the impressive wealth of knowledge that we have from recent behavioral research brings the events of the animal world and the behavior of humans together in an often shocking and touching way”66. “Man shares a great deal with the other animals”, he writes, and “animals and human beings resemble one another in so many respects” that one is led to suspect that “the borderline between them [might] become blurred”67. Once again, however, recognizing that the animal/human distinction may appear “questionable” today, in the light

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of the results of “the modern study of animal behavior”68, does not imply for Gadamer that the distinction as such can be simply overcome and cancelled. Rather, according to him this distinction should be understood by taking into account that it is actually not we who arbitrarily set limits to modern naturalism and scientific reductionism, aiming at reducing the human being to an animal species among others; rather, it is nature itself that sets such limits, inasmuch as “during the great process of the universe’s evolution it let such beings like humans emerge, which have been equipped from nature itself in such a way that they do not have to simply fulfil their natural determination, but […] have to shape the order of their own lives within nature”69. So, in his conclusive contribution to the important collection in seven volumes Neue Anthropologie (co-edited by Gadamer), we read: The fact that the human being is a living creature among others and that it has something in common with all other living creatures is something obvious. It is precisely in the demolition of ancient theological prejudices on this subject that modern biology, evolution theory and behavioural theory have succeeded and produced a decisive break with the past. However, the human place in the cosmos […] is such a peculiar one that sometimes the possibility of transferring our knowledge about animals to the human realm appears problematic […]. This has nothing to do with theological or philosophical prejudices in favour of the human being, […] but it has rather to do with a sort of deep antagonism which is present in nature itself […]. The fact that many natural factors determining the existence of the human being become visible on the basis of scientific investigations of the anthropoids’ or other animals’ societies is something astonishing and at the same time highly instructive. Dissolving ancient theological preconceptions that actually precluded becoming aware of such resemblances between human beings and animals, however, must not lead to the opposite extreme, namely to ignoring how the human being’s peculiar biological equipment also freed it from the exclusive instinctual constraint that otherwise determines the animals’ mode of behaviour70.

4. Now, it is a well-known fact that the question of whether or not there is an unbridgeable gap between mind, thought, behaviour, and communication in human and nonhuman animals (namely the discussion between “the supporters of the point of view of discontinuity” and those of “the point of view of continuity”71) is a very old, much debated and, most of all, still open one. This applies not only to contemporary scientific debates in this field, but also to philosophical debates72, as testified (just to mention a few

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examples among the many that one might cite) by some works of such twentieth-century leading philosophers as Donald Davidson73, Jacques Derrida74 and Alasdair MacIntyre75. The philosophical position of the latter, in particular, is very interesting for the specific purposes of my discourse, since in Dependent Rational Animals, after having paid close attention to, and indeed criticized, some ideas on this subject of both analytic and continental philosophers (respectively, Norman Malcolm, Donald Davidson, Stephen Stich, John Searle and Martin Heidegger)76, MacIntyre eventually denounces the persistent attitude to ignore, or at least minimize, “the analogies between the intelligence exhibited” by such animals as dolphins or chimpanzees “and the rationality exhibited in human activities”; then, he explicitly claims that this is precisely what “Hans-Georg Gadamer does” and even “John McDowell does […] after endorsing Gadamer”77. In this context, it is important to note that according to some interpreters McDowell’s “account of the relation of humanity to the rest of animal nature” actually needs to be put in close relation to “the theme of evolutionary continuity”78 more than he did in Mind and World. While other scholars, like Tyler Burge and Michael Ayers79, have raised analogous criticisms concerning McDowell’s general distinction between human and nonhuman ways of experiencing reality, in particular his view of the relationship between perception and conceptual capacities. Hubert L. Dreyfus has objected that claiming, as McDowell does, “that perception is conceptual ‘all the way out’” implies denying “the more basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with prelinguistic infants and higher animals”, and has suggested that McDowell could profit from phenomenological analyses of “nonconceptual embodied coping skills” and “nonconceptual immediate intuitive understanding”80. Even a philosopher like Hilary Putnam, who is otherwise very close to McDowell in many respects, has argued that McDowell mars an otherwise fine defense of a direct realist view of perception by suggesting that animals do not have experiences in the same sense that humans do. What leads McDowell to this – in my view, erroneous – idea is his failure to see that the discriminatory abilities of animals and human concepts lie on a continuum. And he fails to see this because his dependence on Kant’s discussion leads him to impose much too high requirements on having both concepts and percepts. (“No percepts without concepts” may be right if one is sufficiently generous in what one will count as a concept, but not if – as McDowell does – one requires both selfconsciousness and the capacity for critical reflection before one will attribute concepts to an animal – or a child). Another possible (but less likely) source of McDowell’s error may be the thought that the

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Chapter One “discriminatory abilities” of animals are to be identified with physical and chemical reactions – that is, that reductionism is the right stance to take with respect to the psychological predicates we apply to animals but not to humans81.

It is perhaps due to these and still other critical comments to Mind and World that McDowell, in some of his more recent works (as, for example, the lecture Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge), concedes that one might be tempted to understand Sellars’ and also his own conception as expressing “a kind of human chauvinism”, but then claims that such an interpretation “would be point-missing”82. In his view, indeed, Sellars’ topic is “knowledge as an act of reason in a sense that he connects with language and self-consciousness. But that need not be prejudicial to a more liberal application of epistemic concepts”, so that we can “take him to conceive his topic as a species of a genus, which, for all he cares, can be recognized as being instantiated also in the lives of at least some nonhuman animals, and, we might add, in the lives of human children. […] Directing our attention to perception as a capacity for a distinctive kind of knowledge, knowledge that is an act of reason”, he explains, “need not be prejudicial to the possibility of acknowledging that perception is, on some suitable understanding, a cognitive capacity in many kinds of non-human animals, and in pre-rational (pre-linguistic) human children, also”83. In this slightly softened version of the human/animal distinction, “giving a special account of the perceptual knowledge of rational animals” is consistent then with regarding perceptual knowledge in rational animals as a sophisticated species of a genus that is also instantiated more primitively in non-rational animals and pre-rational human children. […] Perceptual capacities, rational or not, are modes of responsiveness to features of an animal’s distal environment that are strikingly undetermined by impingements on sensory nerve endings in the animal’s perceptual equipment. That poses a set of questions about how that perceptual equipment extracts information – as it is natural to say – about the distal environment, of course fallibly, from those immediate sensory impacts. Such questions arise no less urgently for rational perceivers than for non-rational perceivers. And in many cases they are answered, for rational perceivers, by theories that apply also to non-rational perceivers. […] It is a fine thing to know how the perceptual systems of human beings and other animals do their work. […] But knowing how perceptual systems work is not a substitute for getting straight about perception as a self-consciously possessed and exercised capacity for knowledge. […] Perception as an operation of rationality is our distinctive species of something that is generally animal84.

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It is not my aim here to debate the theoretical plausibility and tenability of such human/animal distinctions. In fact, my philosophical scope is more limited and basically has to do with a historical-philosophical comparison between Gadamer’s and McDowell’s views, contextualized in the more general picture of a possible fusion of the horizons between continental and analytic approaches. So, after having swiftly hinted at some common general elements among Gadamer’s and McDowell’ philosophies, let us return now to the aforementioned Welt/Umwelt distinction, namely to the question concerning the relationship between the capacity of using concepts and language and that of living in a world instead of in a mere environment. The point that I would like to emphasize is the following: from a rigorous point of view, what McDowell calls “Gadamer’s account of how a merely animal life, lived in an environment, differs from a properly human life, lived in the world”85, should be defined as, say, an only indirectly Gadamerian account. In fact, in claiming that he borrows “from Hans-Georg Gadamer a remarkable description of the difference between a merely animal mode of life, in an environment, and a human mode of life, in the world”86, McDowell does not take notice of the fact that, just like he borrows from Gadamer the abovementioned description, Gadamer for his part borrowed it from a long and complex philosophical and even scientific tradition87. In brief, and without going into the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of the language/world relationship in German philosophy that can be traced back to the so-called Hamann-Herder-Humboldt tradition88, it can be said that the original coinage of the world/environment distinction that Gadamer refers to can be found in the works of the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, such as Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (1909), Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung (1913), Theoretische Biologie (1920) and Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (1934). It was probably Uexküll who first put the notion of Umwelt in general at the centre of scientific inquiry, immediately raising great interest in the domain of philosophy as well89. As Giorgio Agamben has noted, where classical science saw a single world that comprised within it all living species hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms up to the higher organisms, Uexküll instead supposes an infinite variety of perceptual worlds that, though they are uncommunicating and reciprocally exclusive, are all equally perfect and linked together as if in a gigantic musical score. […] Uexküll begins by carefully distinguishing the Umgebung, the objective space in which we see a living being moving, from the Umwelt, the environment-world that is constituted by a more or

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Chapter One less broad series of elements that he calls “carriers of significance” (Bedeutungsträger) or of “marks” (Merkmalträger), which are the only things that interest the animal. In reality, the Umgebung is our own Umwelt, to which Uexküll does not attribute any particular privilege and which, as such, can also vary according to the point of view from which we observe it. […] Every environment is a closed unity in itself, which results from the selective sampling of a series of elements or “marks” in the Umgebung, which, in turn, is nothing other than man’s environment. The first task of the researcher observing an animal is to recognize the carriers of significance which constitute its environment. These are not, however, objectively and factically isolated, but rather constitute a close functional – or, as Uexküll prefers to say, musical – unity with the animal’s receptive organs that are assigned to perceive the mark (Merkorgan) and to react to it (Wirkorgan)90.

As has been noted, however, Uexküll’s attention was focused instead on the continuity between human and nonhuman animals91, such that he identified a merely quantitative difference, i.e. a difference pertaining to their breadth and dimension, between environment and world, and eventually conceived “the Umwelt […] as the mere sum of individual Welten”92. It was the phenomenologist and founder of German philosophical anthropology Max Scheler who, in his 1928 work The Human Place in the Cosmos, borrowed from Uexküll the world/environment distinction, but interpreted it in terms of a radical and even immeasurable difference between the human being and all other forms of life. According to Scheler, the concept of Umwelt should in fact only be used with reference to animals, while the notion of Welt is apt to grasp the specific and indeed extraordinary character of the human being, the only living creature that is at the same time “a being having spirit” and that, for this reason, “is not tied anymore to its drives and environment, but is ‘non-environmental’ or […] ‘world-open’”93. As Scheler emphatically claims, “such a being has ‘world’”: in his view, the ultimate determination of a being with spirit – no matter what its psycho-physical makeup – is its existential detachment from organic being, its freedom and detachability – and the detachment of its center of existence from bondage to, the pressure of, and the organic dependence on “life” and everything which belongs to life, and thus also its detachment from its own drive-related “intelligence”. […] Furthermore, a being having spirit is not only able to rise above its basic given centers of “resistance” and reaction to its environment – animals have nothing more than this and are ecstatically immersed in their environs – but this being turns its centers of resistance and reaction into “objects” in order to grasp the “what” of all objects itself. […] The structure of the environment fits exactly to, and is

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“fixated” in, the physiological peculiarity of an animal and indirectly to its morphological structure, and so its environment also fits the firm function of its unity of drive and sense structures. Everything which the animal notices and grasps in its environment is securely embedded in the frame and boundary of its environment. […] This is quite different from a being having “spirit”. If such a being makes use of its spirit, it is capable of a comportment which possesses exactly the opposite of the above structure. […] The form of such comportment must be called “world-openness”, that is, it is tantamount in principle to shedding the spell of the environment. […] The human being is that X who can comport himself, in unlimited degrees, as “world-open”. Becoming human is tantamount to being elevated to world-openness by virtue of spirit. […] An animal is not removed from its environment and does not have a distance from its environment so as to be able to transform its “environment” into “world” (or a symbol of the world) as humans can […]. Because of spirit, the being we call human is […] able to broaden his environment into the dimension of world94.

One can find analogous theses in Martin Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, lectures held at the University of Freiburg in 1929-30 that have been defined as “a secret principal work”95 in which Heidegger “for the first time puts forward a kind of nature philosophy – an attempt unique for him and never to be repeated later”96. In fact, the second part of his lecture series is entirely dedicated to a long and complex “comparative examination of three guiding theses: the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming”97. Heidegger explicitly connects this to Uexküll’s aforementioned distinction, inasmuch as he proposes to elucidate the animal structure and condition (defined with the term “absorption in itself”) as “captivation”, and claims that the latter “is the condition of possibility for the fact that, in accordance with its essence, the animal behaves within an environment but never within a world”98. “To say that captivation is the essence of animality”, Heidegger explains, means that “the animal as such does not stand within a manifestness of beings”99. Hence for him the animal is bound to its environment, while the human being (or, in Heidegger’s own terms, Dasein) is world-open and indeed world-forming. Thus he ultimately speaks of an “essential contrast between the animal’s being open and the world-openness of man. Man’s being open is a being held toward…, whereas the animal’s being open is a being taken by… and thereby a being absorbed in its encircling ring”100. However, the thinker who drew most powerfully on the world/environment distinction and even reinforced it by interpreting the two concepts as mutually exclusive and connecting them to his famous idea of the human being as a “deficient being (Mängelwesen)”101, was the

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philosopher and sociologist Arnold Gehlen. As we read in his 1940 work Man: His Nature and Place in the World, while “the environment is an unchanging milieu to which the specialized organ structure of the animal is adapted and within which equally specific, innate, instinctive behavior is carried out”, man is instead “world-open”, inasmuch as “he foregoes an animal adaptation to a specific environment”: his “lack of physical specialization, his vulnerability, as well as his astonishing lack of true instincts together form a coherent whole which is manifested in his ‘world-openness’ (Scheler) or, what amounts to the same thing, in his lack of ties to a specific environment”102. In Gehlen’s philosophicalanthropological view, the human being is thus incapable of surviving in truly natural and primitive conditions because of his organic primitiveness and lack of natural means. […] In order to survive, he must master and re-create nature, and for this reason must experience the world. […] The epitome of nature restructured to serve his needs is called culture and the culture world is the human world. There are no “natural men” in a strict sense […]. Culture is therefore the “second nature” – man’s restructured nature, within which he can survive. […] The cultural world exists for man in exactly the same way in which the environment exists for an animal. For this reason alone, it is wrong to speak of an environment, in a strictly biological sense, for man. His worldopenness is directly related to his unspecialized structure; similarly, his lack of physical means corresponds to his self-created “second nature”. […] The clearly defined, biologically precise concept of the environment is thus not applicable to man, for what “environment” is to animals, “the second nature”, or culture, is to man; culture has its own particular problems and concept formations which cannot be explained by the concept of environment but instead are only further obscured by it103.

Now, even this brief historical-philosophical outline clearly shows that there is a long, articulated and complex history underlying Gadamer’s use of the world/environment distinction. This is definitively confirmed, however, by the fact that Gadamer himself, in the section of Truth and Method that McDowell actually refers to in Mind and World, explicitly (although quite cursorily) mentions some of the aforementioned authors. Thus, precisely when he claims that, “unlike all other living creatures, man’s relationship to the world is characterized by freedom from environment” which “implies the linguistic constitution of the world”, so that rising “above the pressure of what impinges on us from the world means to have language and to have ‘world’”, Gadamer also explains that “it is in this form that recent philosophical anthropology […] has worked out the special position of man and shown that the verbal constitution of

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the world is far from meaning that man’s relationship to the world is imprisoned within a verbally schematized environment. […] The concept of world is thus opposed to the concept of environment, which all living beings in the world possess”104. Here, in a footnote, Gadamer explicitly cites the names of Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen, clearly indicating them as sources of inspiration for him in the development of this particular topic of Truth and Method105; a few pages later he also mentions “the environmental studies of the biologist von Uexküll” who aimed at investigating “the particular structures of the habitats in which living things have their being”106. Gadamer’s interest in “the insights of philosophical anthropology developed by Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen”107 (thus mentioning together the three founding fathers of this philosophical tradition) is also confirmed in other important contributions, such as the essays The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as Play, Symbol, and Festival and Theory, Technology, Praxis. Quite surprisingly, however, it seems that this particular conceptual indebtedness of Gadamer’s to the aforementioned authors has passed quite unnoticed until now. In fact, with regard to the Welt/Umwelt distinction, McDowell only speaks of “Gadamer’s thesis”, “Gadamer’s topic” or “Gadamer’s description”108, and claims that in Mind and World he is actually “appropriating Gadamer’s notion of an environment” and adapting “Gadamer’s remarks [on] the role of language in disclosing the world to us […] to [his] purposes”109, without even asking himself whether Gadamer might have been influenced by other thinkers in introducing the world/environment distinction in Truth and Method and thus without further inquiring into his sources. In a later work, the essay What Myth? (written as critical response to the objections against Mind and World raised by Hubert L. Dreyfus110), aside from emphasizing some affinities between Gadamer’s interpretation of Aristotle’s phronesis and his own treatment of this subject111, McDowell occasionally returns to the world/environment distinction. Demonstrating what may be a greater awareness of the distinction’s origins and history, McDowell speaks here in the first instance of “Heidegger’s distinction between being open to a world and merely inhabiting an environment”, and only in the second instance refers to Gadamer, mentioning “Gadamer’s version of the distinction between being oriented towards the world and merely inhabiting an environment”: “a version that”, according to him, “Gadamer does not regard as diverging from Heidegger’s”112. However, although McDowell correctly notes here that what we read in Truth and Method is just a new version (to be sure, an interesting and intriguing one) of a conceptual distinction originally developed elsewhere, he only traces the

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origin of this distinction back to Heidegger and never mentions the authors who had already coined that distinction before him (and to whom Heidegger himself, at least in the 1929-30 lectures on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics, makes reference). Even more surprising than this, however, is the fact that beside McDowell himself, who is perhaps not very well acquainted with philosophical anthropology (which is hardly surprising, given that this German philosophical tradition has never received in the context of AngloAmerican philosophy the same attention raised instead by other continental traditions, and which is also confirmed by McDowell’s honest admission in his reply to a paper of Hans-Peter Krüger “that [he] was ignorant of Plessner’s work until [he] read Krüger’s paper”113), almost no one among his interpreters and even among scholars of phenomenology and hermeneutics has paid any attention to the rich, complex and multifaceted history underlying Gadamer’s use of the concepts that McDowell borrows from him. So, for example, in her interesting article Practical Reason and its Animal Precursors Sabina Lovibond refers to the contrast between McDowell and MacIntyre concerning the human/animal distinction, and claims that for MacIntyre “this aspect of McDowell’s thinking places him in a tradition which has done European philosophy more harm than good”; however, notwithstanding this hint at the European philosophical tradition in general, Lovibond mentions no other thinkers beside Heidegger and Gadamer, and cites the Welt/Umwelt distinction as simply a “Gadamerian opposition of human ‘world’ to animal ‘environment’”114. In his instructive introduction to McDowell’s thought, Tim Thornton claims that “the cast of characters [in Mind and World] is impressive”, since “McDowell’s account of the relation of mind and world draws on the work of, among others, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson and Evans”, while “a number of minor characters [also] make appearances, such as Strawson, Dummett and Kripke from the analytic tradition, but also Weber, Gadamer and even Marx”115. However, although Thornton takes into account several aspects of McDowell’s philosophy, he offers no analysis of the question concerning the world/environment distinction (which actually plays a very important role in Mind and World), and hence no hint at the real origin and coinage of those concepts can be found in his book. Another introductory study by Maximilian de Gaynesford deals with the relationship between naturalism and humanism in McDowell, and in this context mentions his “eccentric” view that creatures like “nonhuman animals [and] human infants […] cannot experience the world, and have no world to experience” because they are “incapable of engaging in conceptual

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activity”; this conclusion, according to de Gaynesford, is “precedented in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer”116 (which is surely true), but he does not recognize that in employing the concepts of Welt and Umwelt Heidegger and Gadamer, for their part, rely on other sources. Similarly, John Haldane plainly speaks of “terminology borrowed [by McDowell] from Gadamer”117, and Sandra M. Dingli simply notes that “McDowell follows Gadamer”118 in defining the concepts of Bildung, world and environment, with no further mention to the philosophers from whom Gadamer, for his part, borrowed that terminology. One can find no hint at philosophical anthropology in such important anthologies dedicated to analyzing McDowell’s naturalism of second nature as those edited by Cynthia and Graham MacDonald, Jakob Lindgaard, Joseph K. Schear, and Nicholas H. Smith119 (with the exception of Axel Honneth’s contribution to this last collection, which implies that considering “the essential features of such an expanded naturalism” as that presented in Mind and World “one can hardly help making certain associations with the tradition of philosophical anthropology established in the first third of the twentieth century”120). Still, in his persuasive article John McDowell’s “Mind and World” and Early Romantic Epistemology, Andrew Bowie observes that the key concepts that McDowell borrows from Gadamer actually originate from Heidegger’s early works121, and even a careful interpreter of Gadamer as Kristin Gjesdal – in claiming that, according to her, McDowell’s appropriation of “Gadamer’s distinction between a mere environment and a historical, human world” is problematic because he “fails to ask to what extent such a distinction really can, without further argumentative labor, be imported into a philosophical context like his own” – maintains that McDowell “fails to note that Gadamer himself borrows this notion from Heidegger”122: whereas it would be more precise to recall that Gadamer, in the pages of Truth and Method that McDowell refers to, explicitly cites Scheler, Gehlen, and Plessner as inspirational figures, and even to say that Heidegger himself, in the aforementioned lectures where he developed his attempt of a philosophy of nature, was clearly indebted to Uexküll and perhaps even to Scheler and Plessner (both of whom had published their philosophical-anthropological masterpieces in 1928). Of course, not having acknowledged the long and complex philosophical and even scientific tradition underlying Gadamer’s reference to the world/environment distinction does not in any way invalidate the significance and value of McDowell’s adoption of those concepts and original development of this subject, nor does it in any way weaken the general relevance of the aforementioned works on McDowell and Gadamer. Yet it is clear that acknowledging the historical-philosophical

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roots of the concepts of Welt and Umwelt as connected to the human/animal distinction can pave the way for a deeper and wider investigation into direct connections between philosophical anthropology and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and into indirect but still possible connections between continental traditions (phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophical anthropology) and an analytic-pragmatic philosophy such as McDowell’s123. On this basis, let us attempt now to undertake a sort of “open dialogue” or “fusion of horizons” between thinkers with different backgrounds and approaches on issues that are undoubtedly of great complexity and contemporary relevance.

5. In general, with regard to the relationship between hermeneutics and philosophical anthropology one must note that Gadamer’s references to the founding fathers of the latter current of thought (Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen) are not very common, though they are qualitatively intriguing and incisive. In addition to this, it must be noted that Gadamer’s references to Scheler are more frequent than those to Gehlen or Plessner, and also that Scheler is the only one of them to whom Gadamer dedicated a specific work, though it is only a short and mostly biographical piece124. At the same time, however, it is apparent that Gadamer considered Scheler to be philosophically more distant from him than Gehlen and Plessner, at least in terms of the human/animal distinction. In Scheler’s view, there is indeed a radical, essential, and unbridgeable difference between animals and human beings, which justifies the assignment to the latter of a special place in the cosmos. In fact, the human being also participates in the realm of spirit, and the movement of spirit is something essentially different from the movement of life: that is, it actually belongs to a different dimension of the real. Beyond the “levels of psychic powers and abilities” that, according to Scheler, are constitutive of “the whole bio-psychic structure of the world”, i.e. beyond what he calls the “four essential levels in which all existing things appear with reference to inwardness and selfbeing” (in hierarchical order: impulsion, instinct, associative memory, and organically bound practical intelligence), when attempting to answer the challenging question whether there is “more of a difference between humans and animals than there is of a gradual difference”, he feels compelled to introduce a new principle that is “beyond what we call ‘life’ in the widest meaning of the word”125, namely spirit. In Scheler’s words: the essence of the human being, as well as what one refers to as the cosmic special place that humans occupy, is far above mere intelligence and the

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ability to make free choices. […] The new principle is, first of all, opposite anything we call life, including life in the human being: it is a genuinely new, essential fact which cannot at all be reduced to the “natural evolution of life”. If reducible to anything at all, this new principle leads us back to the one ultimate Ground of all entities of which life happens to be one particular manifestation. Already the ancient Greeks asserted the existence of such a principle. They called it “reason”. We wish to suggest another and more comprehensive term for this X. […] This more comprehensive term is “spirit”126.

However, this metaphysical conception seems to collide, or at least does not coincide, with what Gadamer for his part thinks about this subject. Thus, for example, he argues that by spirit “we need not think of anything too elevated”127, and also stresses how “studies of biologists, ethnologists, historians and philosophers are in agreement that humans are not humans because they dispose of an additional endowment which relates them to an otherwordly order (Scheler’s concept of spirit)”128. In this context Gadamer also crucially wonders where Scheler’s “enormous intellectual gluttony” might have led him, if he had not prematurely passed away in 1928; Gadamer asks whether Scheler could have endorsed “Heidegger’s ontological inquiry”, which was beyond “the dualism of impulsion and mind”129. In light of this, it is not surprising that Gadamer (clearly referring to Scheler, although not explicitly mentioning him here) claims that “the traditional assertion of the special place of humankind in the cosmos […] in the face of the progress of the natural scientific understanding unmasks itself more and more as a residual prejudice of theology”130. Gadamer’s references to the other two main protagonists of twentiethcentury German philosophical anthropology, namely Gehlen and Plessner, are more positive and even convergent with his own position. As far as Gehlen is concerned, what seems to impress Gadamer the most is the aforementioned notion of the human being as a sort of deficient, undetermined and unspecialized creature131: an idea that Gehlen profoundly develops in his 1940 masterpiece Man following, among others, some insights of Nietzsche’s that even Gadamer occasionally refers to132. Furthermore, on the occasions in which Gadamer emphasizes the relevance of a philosophical-anthropological conception based on the paradigm of action, in the place of the traditional philosophicalanthropological conception based on the paradigm of selfconsciousness133, he clearly refers to Gehlen’s view of the human being as “an acting being”134, namely a creature that is, so to speak, biologically condemned to the domination of nature, since its only chance of survival

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rests upon the capacity of dealing with nature and actually transforming it. As far as Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is concerned, then, it must be noted that Gadamer sometimes positively cites his fundamental doctrine of “the ‘eccentricity’ of human beings”, which was elaborated in Plessner’s masterpiece Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch135, in order to distinguish the peculiarity of human beings from other forms of life, and which actually “distinguishes them in that they express themselves in behaviour by means of the body – for example, in gestures – but also can, by willing and acting, go beyond the natural endowment of a living being”136. According to Gadamer (who explicitly relies on Plessner’s theory here), it is “by virtue of the ‘eccentric’ constitution of human life that the differentiated modes originate in which human eccentricity is worked out. We call this humanity’s culture” (that is, humanity’s second nature or Bildung), and Plessner comprehends all this in the formulation that man “embodies himself”. Here arises and flows forth that other source of knowledge of humankind which is prior to natural science and which has given and shaped as a theme for researchers into nature their manifold contributions to the knowledge of humankind. For thanks to the knowledge humans have of themselves, the “science” which seeks to perceive everything that becomes accessible to it with its methodical means is confronted in a special way with the theme “human being”. Its task of understanding is posed to it as one that is unending, incomplete, continually in view137.

Furthermore, on other occasions Gadamer also refers to Plessner’s philosophical inquiry into laughing and crying, or more precisely into “the expressive character”138 of these phenomena, that Plessner interprets as specifically human and – what matters the most in this context – as unrelated to language. Now, Gadamer cites Plessner’s book Laughing and Crying when discussing, for example, the existence of “a pre-linguistic experience of the world”139 and even the “hermeneutical significance” of such “extra-linguistic, mimic communication phenomena as laughing and crying”140. However, it must also be noted that, in a later contribution on the fascinating question of the boundaries of language, Gadamer rather tends to interpret these phenomena as “something co-linguistic and not, as other forms of animal communication, pre-linguistic. In laughing, one says something. Animals do not laugh. […] Also in laughing there is a peculiar form of self-distancing”, and “this co-linguistic […], such as laughing”, is eventually defined as “closely tied to the linguistic”141. In any case, what emerges in general from this brief survey is Gadamer’s favourable attitude towards philosophical anthropology, whose “contribution […] to the science of humankind” he defines as

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“considerable”: in fact, “when set within the totality of the research situation, the contribution of philosophical anthropology over against the scientific models which cybernetics and physics have to offer” appears to him “of greater heuristic fruitfulness”142. It is not by accident, then, if he claimed on various occasions to be interested in “modern anthropological research”143 and even to be guided in some of his researches by the intention of philosophically inquiring into the “profound anthropological dimension”144 of such fundamental human experiences as those of art, play, and language. Now, if we aim at understanding Gadamer’s concept of Welt, at the same time acknowledging the philosophical sources that helped him define this concept, it is clear that beside (and probably even before) philosophical anthropology we must also mention the later Husserl’s notion of “life-world (Lebenswelt)” – to which Gadamer increasingly paid attention in the development of his philosophy, up to the point that some interpreters have spoken of a “hermeneutical turn towards the lifeworld”145 – and, most of all, Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein)”. In his various recollections about the beginning of Heidegger’s philosophical path, Gadamer often cites the latter’s famous and inventive formula “it worlds (es weltet)”146 and especially refers to his “analysis of world […] in Being and Time” which, due to the “power of the phenomenological intuition” it conveyed, has been always recognized as “a masterpiece of phenomenological analysis”147. It is mostly from Heidegger, then, that Gadamer borrows the idea of language’s central role in shaping the human way of experiencing the world; an idea that, according to him, “from out of the phenomenological tradition” Heidegger first gave “the central place that it holds in the current situation of philosophy”148. Notwithstanding all this, it is precisely with regard to these same concepts that some important differences between Heidegger and Gadamer emerge. Thus, for example, as far as the question concerning the significance of language in the whole of human existence is concerned, it must be noted that while Heidegger famously defines language as “the house of being” or “the house of the truth of being”149, Gadamer rather prefers defining it as primarily “the ‘house’ […] of the human being”150. This bears upon to the definition of world as well, inasmuch as Heidegger exclusively examines the ontological (in the specific meaning he confers to this term, i.e. in reference to Being’s own way of disclosure) aspect of “the worldliness of the world”151, whereas Gadamer interprets “the concept of the world” as referring to the “whole in which human selfinterpretation takes place”152. Hence, with reference to both concepts (namely, those of language and world), it might be argued that while

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Heidegger – on the basis of his critical interpretation of all anthropology as a result of metaphysical thought, the thought that he aimed at definitively overcoming153 – always refused “confusing” or even “corrupting” his radical and supposedly new ontological approach with any form of anthropological discourse154, Gadamer never eschewed the possibility of “contaminating” his hermeneutics with anthropological perspectives. From this point of view, it is remarkable that after Truth and Method, where language was assumed as the horizon of a hermeneutic ontology, it was mostly the anthropological dimension of “language itself [as] a form of life”155 that came to the fore.

6. Returning now to the Gadamer-McDowell relation, after having examined the world/environment distinction and having investigated its philosophical history, let us try to analyze some other aspects of their philosophies and verify whether other resemblances actually exist. The question I want to start from is that concerning the concept of second nature itself. It is a concept regarding which both Gadamer and McDowell clearly exhibit a high level of historical-philosophical awareness, inasmuch as they seem to agree that, in order to correctly grasp the “intelligibility and comprehensibility of an entirely different kind”156 (if compared to the “rigorous conformity with laws” that was assumed as “the basic feature of nature”157 in the modern age) that characterize our complex and peculiar nature, it is possible and indeed necessary to turn to some classical authors of the history of Western philosophy. So, as far as Gadamer is concerned, it must be noted that on the occasions in which he lingers on the concept of second nature he always makes reference to Aristotle’s notion of ethos158 and interprets this notion as “an habituation that has become second nature”159. However, in defining the concept of second nature Gadamer constantly refers to Hegel as well, in particular to his idea of Bildung as “rising to the universal”160, and in general to his philosophy of objective spirit. As is well-known, it is precisely this part of Hegel’s philosophical system that Gadamer appreciates the most, going so far as to define it as “the point with regard to which the indispensability of Hegel for philosophic thought is made most starkly manifest”161. As far as McDowell is concerned, then, it is surely remarkable that he too, like Gadamer, cites Aristotle and Hegel as the thinkers who, in some way, can still provide a decisive contribution to the understanding of the peculiar relationship between first and second nature in the human being. Hence, taking into consideration (exactly like Gadamer) the concepts of ethos and

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Sittlichkeit respectively introduced by these philosophers, McDowell explains that “the best way […] to work into [a] different conception of what is natural is by reflecting on Aristotle’s ethics”162, and then, on the basis of the affinity of his own concept of second nature with “what figures in German philosophy as Bildung”163, he even argues that he “would like to conceive this work”, namely Mind and World, “as a prolegomenon to a reading of the Phenomenology”, much as Robert Brandom’s systematic treatise Making It Explicit is, “among many other things, a prolegomenon to his reading of that difficult text”164. Bearing all this in mind, and bringing our discussion to a further level, let us now take into consideration another important point: the question concerning the connection between second nature and the bodily dimension of human existence. This is a question that McDowell deals with in a few sections of the fifth chapter of Mind and World entitled Action, Meaning, and the Self, as he observes that adopting a “naive” naturalistic and scientific view gives rise to great problems and difficulties “in our reflection about bodily action”165. In fact, if on the one hand “intentional bodily actions are actualizations of our active nature in which conceptual capacities are inextricably implicated”, but on the other hand a reductive and narrow-minded naturalism precisely and almost inevitably tends to exclude rationality, spontaneity, and “our mastery of concepts” from the realm of nature in general, or better “from what ought to be recognizable as actualizations of our active nature as such”, then it is clear that the apparently undisputed and unceasing success achieved by “a naturalism that disenchants nature”166 ever since the seventeenth century has had some relevant and indeed negative consequences on the way we understand ourselves as rational embodied agents. In short, “the withdrawal of spontaneity from active nature eliminates any authentic understanding of bodily agency”167. According to McDowell, once “the spontaneity of agency” is “shut out from the realm of happenings constituted by movements of ordinary natural stuff”, then it typically tries to take up residence in a specially conceived interior realm. This relocation of spontaneity may be seen as a renunciation of naturalism, or the interior realm may be conceived as a special region of the natural world. Either way, this style of thinking gives spontaneity a role in bodily action only in the guise of inner items, pictured as initiating bodily goingson from within, and taken on that ground to be recognizable as intentions or volitions. […] This withdrawal of agency from nature, at any rate from the ordinary nature in which the movements of our bodies occur, strains our hold on the idea that the natural powers that are actualized in the movements of our bodies are powers that belong to us as agents. Our powers as agents withdraw inwards, and our bodies […] take on the aspect

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As an example of quite unsatisfying conceptions of the relationship between mind and body, reason and nature, McDowell cites Kant’s famous notion of the “I think” and its problematic relationship to Descartes’ res cogitans/res extensa dualism, from which most problems in this field of philosophy and science actually derived169. According to McDowell, however, it is possible to avoid such unsatisfying conceptions, including those of many contemporary (and sometimes even unaware) heirs of Descartes. By adopting his original “second nature approach” we can indeed regain the idea that the subject of inner experience is our (embodied) ordinary self […]. Inasmuch as it has a second nature, the human biological subject can be identical to the first-person self, interpreted as the perspective centre of (the continuity of) the stream of consciousness. In this way the two sides of human experience, the articulations of the two epistemological regions that derive from it (namely, the space of reasons and the dimension of causes), find their common starting point in the particular nature of a subject that is finally conceivable in non-dualistic terms170.

Now, it is interesting to note that Gadamer also paid attention to such questions (although only in some essays published after Truth and Method, since in his 1960 magnum opus he concentrated on aesthetics, history, and language, but not on the bodily dimension of human experience). In fact, he notes that “when Descartes’s philosophical reflections led him to introduce the distinction between res extensa and res cogitans it signified the dawning of a new epoch, the age of modern science”171. And Gadamer, although always acknowledging the extraordinary significance of modern science, nevertheless emphasizes its limits as well, which are not limits we arbitrarily impose to scientific enterprises but rather correspond to the limits of the measurement and objectification of reality itself172. So, for example, he claims that “the living body (Leib) and life (Leben) are things that cannot simply be measured”, while “the term Körper, on the other hand, even in the broadest sense of the word, always refers to something which is readily susceptible to objectification and processes of measurement”173. By saying this, Gadamer clearly refers to the dual dimension of our bodily experience, namely to the dual way we can refer to our own body both as Körper (an objective body, i.e. a mere object, a thing among things examined on a third-person perspective) and as Leib (a lived body, the

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body of a living organism experienced on a first-person perspective), and simultaneously and consequently insists on the fundamental “psychophysical unity of man”, inasmuch as “the ‘soul’ does not represent just one particular domain among others, but rather reflects the totality of the embodied existence of the human being”174. According to him, however, during the modern age all this was reductively interpreted and indeed forgotten or eradicated. On the one hand, the sense of one’s personal identity was confined to a region of mere interiority, in the mere “indubitability of self-consciousness”175; on the other hand, what was lost was “an adequate concept of the living body, because all that became accessible for us through modern science resting on Cartesian foundations was the corpus, namely the object of a given reality that must be controlled and mastered by natural science. But the living body”, Gadamer explains, “is not the same thing as the corpus”176. On this basis, it is not difficult to see how close Gadamer and McDowell really are in calling into question the explanatory capacity of modern scientific naturalism when applied to the fact of our embodiment. “What is the relationship between science and bodily experience? How does the one arise out of the other? Can science be connected once again with our own lived experience?”, Gadamer asks, adding that “the first question which confronts us if we want to try to resolve the enigma concerning our own embodiment is why this phenomenon is so intractable and resistant to thematization”177. While McDowell, for his part, after criticizing both philosophical conceptions like Descartes’ Ego cogito and Kant’s Ich denke, as well as reductionist conceptions of the mind/body relationship in contemporary scientific debates, writes: If something starts out conceiving itself as a merely formal referent for “I” (which is already a peculiar notion), how could it come to appropriate a body, so that it might identify itself with a particular living thing? […] If we start from a putative sense of self as at most geometrically in the world, how can we work up from there to the sense of self we actually have, as a bodily presence in the world? […] Cartesian thinking confronts familiar difficulties about how to relate a subjective substance to objective reality, and Kant’s conception is beset by what look like descendants of those difficulties178.

According to McDowell, it is once again possible to overcome these and other related difficulties by referring to, and indeed strongly emphasizing, the concept of second nature. In fact, if we avoid identifying the realm of nature in its entirety with the mere realm of law, and instead equip ourselves with “a seriously exploitable notion of second nature”, then it no longer appears impossible “to build up to a substantial presence,

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an embodied perceiver and agent”, “an experiencing and acting subject [who] is a living thing, with active and passive bodily powers that are genuinely her own”, who is “herself embodied, substantially present in the world that she experiences and acts on. This is a framework for reflection”, McDowell, explains, “that really stands a chance of making traditional philosophy obsolete”179. But these, as is well-known, are exactly the same theoretical demands of the continental philosophical traditions upon which I have previously focused my attention with regard to the question concerning the Welt/Umwelt distinction, namely hermeneutics and philosophical anthropology, both of which in turn have deep roots in phenomenology180. In fact, it is enough to cite the names of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, or Plessner to immediately recognize the great contribution provided by these philosophical traditions to the struggle to redeem embodiment from the oblivion in which the major part of Western philosophy and science (especially during the modern age) had put it. As has been noted, the “denial of the cognitive significance of the body has a long tradition”, stemming from Plato and arriving to the present age, inasmuch as “a disembodied view on the mind was also found in classical cognitive science”181. However, “it is certain that our cognitive experience is shaped by an embodied brain”, and “it is increasingly accepted that the brains we have are shaped by the bodies we have, and by our real world actions”182. “An alternative philosophical backdrop” or “alternative approach” to the perhaps still prevailing, but actually inadequate, conceptions of the mind/body/world relationship “is alive and well”, and has been “worked out in the phenomenological views” of various philosophers who attempted to “dig deeper into the meaning of embodiment, how it situates us and how it shapes our cognitive experience”183. Not by chance, phenomenological perspectives on the mind/body relationship have been at the centre of a quite recent rediscovery of the embodied character of human cognition by such leading theorists as Antonio Damasio and Andy Clark184 who “objected to the strong Cartesian mind/body dualism” that, according to them, “continue[s] to plague the cognitive sciences”, and pointed back to Merleau-Ponty and others “to develop their objections to disembodied cognition”185. According to phenomenological investigations, the body is not “one object among others”, but rather is considered a constitutive or transcendental principle, precisely because it is involved in the very possibility of experience. It is deeply implicated in our relation to the world, in our relation to others, and in our self-relation, and its analysis consequently proves crucial for our understanding of the mind-world relation, for our understanding of the relation between self and

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other, and for our understanding of the mind-body relation. The phenomenological emphasis on the body obviously entails a rejection of Cartesian mind-body dualism. But it should be just as obvious that this does not entail an endorsement of some kind of Cartesian materialism. It is not as if the phenomenological way to “overcome” dualism is by retaining the distinction between mind and body, and then simply getting rid of the mind. Rather, the notion of embodiment, the notion of an embodied mind or a minded body, is meant to replace the ordinary notions of mind and body, both of which are derivations and abstractions. […] The lived body is neither spirit nor nature, neither soul nor body, neither inner nor outer, neither subject nor object. All of these contraposed categories are derivations of something more basic. […] The body is not a screen between me and the world; rather, it shapes our primary way of being-inthe-world. […] Moreover, all of [the] aspects of embodiment shape the way I perceive the world. […] Since this is the lived body with which I perceive and act, it is in constant connection with the world. And this connection is not a mere surface-to-surface contact, as a corpse might lie on the surface of a table; rather, my body is integrated with the world. To be situated in the world means not simply to be located someplace in a physical environment, but to be in rapport with circumstances that are bodily meaningful186.

For the specific purposes of my discourse, recognizing all this makes it possible to open new perspectives and undertake new attempts at fusing different philosophical horizons, and even to improve and strengthen McDowell’s naturalism of second nature. In fact, it might be argued that the concept of second nature as such (i.e. without further inquiry into it, its origins and its conditions of possibility) is not enough for the ambitious aims of McDowell’s philosophical project. As has been noted, for example, McDowell simply equates Bildung with the logical space of reasons without analyzing other dimensions of our world-experience (including symbolic and aesthetic practices187) and, most of all, he does not explain how conceptual and linguistic capacities “are tied to the bodily structure that is peculiar of our species” and actually “constitutes the background, the presupposition [and] the condition of possibility of our rationality”188. It is precisely the peculiar character of the human body that constitutes the dimension tying together and connecting first and second nature, biological and cultural life, perception, rationality, and language. From this point of view, McDowell’s naturalism of second nature might be profitably complemented with a phenomenological-anthropological account of cognition that is always “embodied and situated” and, more generally, of such aspects as “the fact that we stand upright”, which is “distinctive for the human species”, “comes along with many other biological facts”, and “has far-reaching consequences with respect to

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perceptual and action abilities, and by implication, with respect to our entire cognitive life”189. These questions have played a central role since the very beginning of the phenomenological movement and philosophical anthropology, and also Gadamer makes reference to them (although unfortunately only occasionally and never in a complete or systematic way). In particular, with regard to “the experience of our bodily being” he reminds the reader of “Husserl’s analyses concerning the kinaesthetic constitution of our bodily being”, which “are of exquisite subtlety”, and then he mentions the contributions provided by “Merleau-Ponty and Aristotle [who] say it correctly: the body is nothing for itself, nor corpus”: in fact, “the soul is nothing other than […] one’s bodily actuality”, “this being-at-work of the body, its energeia and entelechia; and the body is nothing other than the soul’s ‘possibility’ in being awake and in thinking”190. “Perhaps, even for us today”, Gadamer explains, “Aristotle was right when he said that the soul is nothing more than the living character of the body, the form of fulfilled self-realization which he called entelecheia. […] This is something Aristotle knew. The soul is the living power of the body itself”191. So, at the end of this brief investigation into the concepts of second nature, world/environment, language, and embodiment in Gadamer and McDowell, the question concerning the significance of Aristotle’s peculiar kind of naturalism today seems to emerge again. In order to prevent possible misunderstandings, it is important to emphasize that Gadamer’s and McDowell’s interest in Aristotle is not aimed at weakening the importance of modern science, at levelling distinctions between scientific and non-scientific knowledge, at problematically claiming that “Anything goes!”, and finally at returning to anachronistic and outdated explanation schemes. As a matter of fact, both thinkers are quite explicit in claiming that it is not possible to “try to regain Aristotle’s innocence” or “return to mediaeval superstition”192, since today we can only consider as funny teleological views of nature according to which “fire moves upwards because it is at home there with the shining stars” or “a stone falls because that is where all other stones are and it belongs there”193. However, this does not prevent Gadamer and McDowell from identifying “the presumably deep-rooted mental block”194 underlying the philosophical malaise of our time with a peculiar kind of “scientism that shapes much contemporary thinking” and that “tends to represent itself as educated common sense” but “is really only primitive metaphysics”195. From this point of view, both Gadamer and McDowell – each working from his own presuppositions deriving from the different philosophical traditions they belong to – assume a critical position against a kind of naturalism and

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scientism that undoubtedly represented in the past centuries “an impressive embodiment of critical freedom” and “one of the major fruits of modern Enlightenment”196, but that nowadays sometimes runs the risk of being “dogmatically abused”197.

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Notes 1

See D’Agostini 1997, p. 60. According to some scholars, it is even possible to recognize the very first sign of “rivalry” between analytic and continental approaches in a critical review to Wilhelm Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences (first published in 1883) that was written by a pupil of Franz Brentano or perhaps by Brentano himself (see Mulligan 1992, p. 189). 2 Williams 2007, p. 300. 3 Rorty 1982, pp. 224-225. 4 Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, p. 2. 5 Grondin 2003, p. 322. As Donatella Di Cesare has noted, “certainly at the beginning not only the themes, but also his way of conceiving and practicing philosophy, were foreign to the American context. Nevertheless Gadamer did not give up. He continued to teach for two decades, and though at first he had access only to departments of humanities, eventually he was also invited by departments of philosophy. The 1970s were a decisive time, perhaps because Gadamer’s presence also coincided in the United States with a kind of critical self-reflection within analytic philosophy. Hermeneutics became both the motivation and the point of reference for a debate. It still seems difficult to evaluate the deep and lasting impact that Gadamer’s teaching activity had there on both the spread of ‘continental philosophy’ and the hermeneutization of analytic philosophy. On the other hand, it is necessary to remember that the experiences in the United States considerably expanded Gadamer’s own horizon, which until then had been restricted to the German world, and doubtlessly had deep repercussions on the content and manner of his thought” (Di Cesare 2013, p. 26). 6 Di Cesare 2013, p. 198. 7 On this particular subject, see for example Hoy 1997, Stueber 1994, Weinsheimer 2000, Malpas 2002 and Picardi 2004. 8 See Rorty 1980, p. 357. According to Rorty, Gadamer’s hermeneutics helps us to understand that “redescribing ourselves is the most important thing we can do. He does this by substituting the notion of Bildung (education, self-formation) for that of ‘knowledge’ as the goal of thinking”. Hermeneutics is thus for Rorty a philosophy concerned with “edification”, namely with the “project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” (Rorty 1980, pp. 358360). 9 See Brandom 2002, pp. 92-94 and 105-111. On Gadamer and Brandom, see Baynes 2007 and Lafont 2007. 10 Bubner 2002, p. 209. 11 Di Francesco 2003, pp. 11-12. 12 Putnam 2002, p. 174. 13 Sellars 1997, p. 76. 14 McDowell 1996, p. 88. 15 McDowell 2009, p. 247. 16 McDowell 1996, p. 70. 17 McDowell 2009, p. 246.

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McDowell indeed explains that, although “some followers of Sellars, notably Richard Rorty, put the contrast as one between the space of reasons and the space of causes”, he actually thinks that “it is better to set the space of reasons not against the space of causes but against the space of subsumption under, as we say, natural law. Unlike Rorty’s construal of the contrast, this version does not preempt the possibility that reasons might be causes. We need not see the idea of causal linkages as the exclusive property of natural-scientific thinking” (McDowell 2009, p. 258). 19 As we read in Kant’s first Critique (A50-51/B74-75): “Our cognition arises from two fundamental sources in the mind, the first of which is the reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions), the second the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations (spontaneity of concepts); through the former an object is given to us, through the latter it is thought in relation to that representation (as a mere determination of the mind). Intuition and concepts therefore constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition. […] Neither of these properties is to be preferred to the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (Kant 1998, pp. 193-194). 20 See Davidson 1984, pp. 183-198. 21 McDowell 1996, p. 24. 22 McDowell 1996, p. 9. 23 McDowell 1996, p. 24. 24 McDowell 1996, p. 91. 25 Brandom 2000, p. 35. 26 McDowell 1996, p. 78. 27 McDowell 1996, p. 85. 28 McDowell 1996, p. 78. 29 McDowell 1996, pp. 87-88. 30 Thornton 2004, p. 248. 31 As has been noted, according to McDowell “cultural evolution does not represent a break with biological evolution”: that is, “we can arrive at conceiving our conceptual capacities as natural even if we refuse considering them as susceptible of […] naturalistic reduction. […] If we aim at recognizing both the biological and conceptual (conceived in terms of spontaneity) elements that characterize our nature, there is no need to postulate a ‘non-animal’ part of us. The autonomy of the ‘space of reasons’ from the realm of causes does not imply the subject that inhabits it being separated from the rest of the natural world. Rather, it is the fulfilment of biological potentialities by means of cultural development that makes it possible for the subject to recognize this kind of autonomy” (Di Francesco 1998, p. 249). 32 McDowell 1996, p. XX. 33 McDowell 2011, pp. 9-10. In claiming this, McDowell explicitly refers to, and to some extent rests upon, philosophical views first presented by Wilfrid Sellars, who

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in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind connected “the ability to occupy positions in the space of reasons with the ability to use language” (McDowell 2011, p. 14). 34 McDowell 1996, pp. 123 and 125. 35 GW 1, p. 455 (TM, p. 444). To be precise, Gadamer’s words here are “Sprachlichkeit der menschlichen Welterfahrung” (“linguisticality of the human experience of the world”). 36 See Haldane 1996, pp. 22-23. 37 McDowell 2002, p. 273. On this specific point, see also his paper Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind (in McDowell 2009, p. 259), as well as some passages from Mind and World where the logical space of reasons, inasmuch as it represents “a logical space that is sui generis, by comparison with the realm of law”, is defined as “the kind of intelligibility that is proper to meaning” (McDowell 1996, p. 71). This could be clearly connected with the hermeneutical concept of “understanding the meaning of something” as opposed to, or at least irreducibly distinguished from, “explaining something in terms of causal relations” (see Jung 2001, p. 7 ff.). An interesting, although in my view questionable, attempt to develop a peculiar kind of reductionist naturalism applied to hermeneutics has been made instead by Mantzavinos 2005. 38 McDowell 1996, p. 48. 39 See McDowell 1996, pp. 115-119. 40 As is well-known, “The Ontological Shift of Hermeneutics Guided by Language” is exactly the title of the third part of Gadamer’s Truth and Method (GW 1, pp. 387-494 [TM, pp. 383-484]). 41 GW 1, pp. 446-448 and 457 (TM, pp. 440-442 and 449). 42 GW 10, p. 25. 43 VZW, p. 12 (RAS, p. 5). 44 See McDowell 1996, pp. 78-84. 45 Aristotle, Politics, I 2, 1253 a 10 (1991, vol. 2, p. 1988). 46 GW 2, p. 146 (PH, p. 59). 47 GW 2, p. 146 (PH, p. 59). 48 GW 4, p. 285 (EH, p. 58). 49 GW 2, p. 146 (PH, pp. 59-60). In doing so, i.e. in interpreting Aristotle this way, Gadamer obviously relies on the polysemous character of the Greek word logos, about which his teacher Heidegger had advised him since the early 1920s. Gadamer often recalls this biographical but also philosophical circumstance, for instance in GW 10, pp. 204 and 326, and in IG, p. 62). 50 McDowell 1996, pp. 47 and 182. 51 GW 4, pp. 286-287 (EH, p. 59). 52 According to Gadamer, indeed, “language has its true being only in dialogue (Gespräch), in coming to an understanding” (GW 1, p. 449 [TM, p. 443]). 53 GW 1, p. 450 (TM, p. 443). 54 GW 1, p. 450 (TM, p. 443). 55 GW 8, pp. 409-410 (Gadamer 2000a, pp. 26-27). 56 Di Cesare 2013, pp. 170-171.

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GW 8, pp. 409-410 (Gadamer 2000a, pp. 26-27). GW 8, p. 410 (Gadamer 2000a, p. 27). On this topic, see also the interesting observations of Gregorio 2011 (in particular, pp. 33-38). 59 McDowell 1996, pp. 5, 43 and 118. So, in Mind and World we also read that freedom is “spontaneity in the exercise of our understanding”, that “freedom [is] implicit in the idea that our conceptual capacities belong to a faculty of spontaneity”, and that “conceptual capacities are capacities whose exercise is in the domain of responsible freedom” (McDowell 1996, pp. 8, 10 and 12). 60 McDowell 1996, pp. 65 and 182. In claiming so, McDowell (1996, p. 44) relies not only on Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy, but also – and in a very significant way, indeed – on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, from which he explicitly quotes the following remark: “In thinking, I am free, because I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in communion with myself, and the object, which is for me the essential being, is in undivided unity my being-for-myself; and my activity in conceptual thinking is a movement within myself” (Hegel 1977, p. 120). 61 VZW, pp. 81-82 (RAS, pp. 90-91). 62 “Of course there is a decisive difference between animal and human being”, Gadamer claims. “This is expressed by the concept of prohairesis, which can be predicated only of human being. Prohairesis means ‘preference’ and ‘prior choice’. Knowingly preferring one thing to another and consciously choosing among possible alternatives is the unique and specific characteristic of human being” (VZW, p. 81 [RAS, pp. 90-91]). 63 GW 10, p. 233 (EPH, p. 216). On this topic, see, for instance, what Kant writes in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, where he claims that the human being, “as regards mere perception and receptivity to sensations […] must count himself as belonging to the world of sense, but with regard to what there may be of pure activity in him […] must count himself as belonging to the intellectual world, of which however he has no further cognizance. […] Now, a human being really finds in himself a capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things, even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and that is reason. This, as pure self-activity, is raised even above the understanding […]. Because of this a rational being must regard himself as intelligence (hence not from the side of his lower powers) as belonging not to the world of sense but to the world of understanding; hence he has two standpoints from which he can regard himself and cognize laws for the use of his powers and consequently for all his actions; first, insofar as he belongs to the world of sense, under laws of nature (heteronomy); second, as belonging to the intelligible world, under laws which, being independent of nature, are not empirical but grounded merely in reason. As a rational being, and thus as a being belonging to the intelligible world, the human being can never think of the causality of his own will otherwise than under the idea of freedom”. Hence, Kant finally infers that “when we think of ourselves as free we transfer ourselves into the world of understanding as members of it and cognize autonomy of the will along with its consequence, morality; but if we think of ourselves as put under obligation we regard ourselves as belonging to the world of 58

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sense and yet at the same time to the world of understanding” (Kant 1996, pp. 98100). 64 Robert Brandom has recently expressed this point in a very clear way, explaining that the fact that “conceptual norms are brought into play by social linguistic practices of giving and asking for reasons”, and are thus “products of social interactions [that] are not studied by the natural sciences”, does not mean that “they are […] for that reason to be treated as spooky and supernatural. In conferring conceptual content on performances, states, and expressions suitably caught up in them, those practices institute a realm of culture that rests on, but goes beyond, the background of reliable differential responsive dispositions and their exercise characteristic of merely natural creatures. Once concept use is on the scene, a distinction opens up between things that have natures and things that have histories” (Brandom 2000, p. 26). 65 GW 4, p. 251 (EH, p. 11). 66 GW 8, p. 409 (Gadamer 2000a, p. 26). 67 GW 8, p. 86 (RB, p. 123). 68 GW 8, p. 86 (RB, p. 123). 69 GW 10, pp. 218-219. 70 Gadamer 1975, p. 380. 71 Cimatti 2003, p. 167. 72 For a general survey of this subject, see for instance Wolfe 2003, Calarco 2008, Cimatti 2013 and, from an interdisciplinary perspective, Jeeves 2011. 73 See Davidson 2001, pp. 95-105. 74 See Derrida 2005, p. 180, where he concedes that “the chapter that [he] would most enjoy writing […] is about what we call, in the singular – which has always shocked [him] – the Animal. As if there were only one of them”, and then argues that what we need is nothing less than “a revolution in thought and action”, “a revolution in our dwelling together with these other living things that we call the animals”. On this topic, see also Derrida 2008. 75 See MacIntyre 1999. 76 The opening lines of the fifth chapter of MacIntyre’s book read indeed: “The philosophers whom I have discussed so far all belong to one or other version of the analytic tradition in philosophy. But this is not the only tradition within which sharp and, I believe, obscurantist lines have been drawn between nonhuman animals and human beings. Just such a line”, for example, “was drawn [also] by Heidegger” (MacIntyre 1999, p. 43). 77 MacIntyre 1999, pp. 59-60. 78 Lovibond 2006, p. 265. 79 See, respectively, Burge 2003 and Ayers 2004. 80 Dreyfus 2006, p. 43. 81 Putnam 1999, p. 192n. 82 McDowell 2011, p. 14. 83 McDowell 2011, pp. 14-15. 84 McDowell 2011, pp. 20 and 55-57. 85 McDowell 1996, p. 117.

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McDowell 1996, p. 115. For the following historical-philosophical reconstruction of the world/environment distinction I derived much useful information from Pansera 2001 (pp. 15-24 and 55-100) and Martinelli 2004 (pp. 201-225). 88 For a brief outline of this conception, see Lafont 1999 (pp. 5-116). Interesting observations on the world-disclosure function of language that “pervades the hermeneutic tradition as a whole”, and its relationship to analytic approaches to language, see Habermas 2003. 89 In general, on the influence of “Uexküll’s thought [that] trained and shaped entire generations of philosophers” (such as “Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen, […] Heidegger and Cassirer”, but also “Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno, Sebeok and Bateson”) and even some deplorable political consequences of his thought, see the interesting observation of Mazzeo 2010, pp. 7-33. 90 Agamben 2004, pp. 40-41. 91 See Mazzeo 2003, pp. 77-80. 92 See Mazzeo 2003, p. 80. 93 Scheler 2009, p. 27. 94 Scheler 2009, pp. 27-29. Scheler also adds that “an animal is stuck too firmly to and in the organic states that correspond to the reality of its life for it to ever grasp this reality as an ‘object’. […] True, in contrast to plants, an animal has consciousness; but it has no self-consciousness, as G.W. Leibniz already saw. An animal does not own itself, it has no power over itself – and this is why it is also not aware of itself. Peculiar to the human being is the one indissoluble structure of concentration, self-consciousness, and the ability to objectify original resistance in drives. […] An animal can hear and see – but without knowing that they hear and see” (Scheler 2009, p. 29). 95 Safranski 2002, p. 189. 96 Safranski 2002, p. 189. 97 GA 29/30, p. 261 ff. (Heidegger 1995, p. 176 ff.). 98 GA 29/30, pp. 347-348 (Heidegger 1995, p. 239). 99 GA 29/30, p. 361 (Heidegger 1995, p. 248). 100 GA 29/30, p. 498 (Heidegger 1995, p. 343). 101 According to Gehlen, man is indeed an “unequipped”, “undetermined” and “unfinished, not firmly established” being: “he finds his existence a challenge” and “draws upon his own aptitudes and talents to survive; of necessity, he relates to himself in a way that no animal does”. Hence, “in comparison to animals, man appears as a ‘deficient being’”, and this consideration represents the basis of Gehlen’s entire philosophical anthropology: in fact, he moves from this general consideration to draw the conclusion that man must be understood “as an ‘acting being’ (handelndes Wesen)”, since “only by pursuing this concept of an acting, undetermined being”, for example, “can man’s peculiar physical constitution be explained. The definition of man as an intellectual being does not in itself bring to light the relationship between the peculiar human bodily structure and the human mind. In terms of morphology, man is, in contrast to all other higher mammals, 87

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primarily characterized by deficiencies, which, in an exact, biological sense, qualify a lack of adaptation, lack of specialization, primitive states, and failure to develop, and which are therefore essentially negative features. […] Man, from a morphological point of view, has practically no specializations. He exhibits an absence of specialization that appears primitive from a developmental, biological stand-point. […] Compared to the great apes […] man appears hopelessly unadapted. Man is characterized by a singular lack of biological means” (Gehlen 1988, pp. 4, 10, 13, 16 and 25-26). 102 Gehlen 1988, p. 27. 103 Gehlen 1988, pp. 29 and 71. 104 GW 1, pp. 447-448 (TM, p. 441). 105 GW 1, p. 448 (TM, p. 489). 106 GW 1, p. 455 (TM, p. 448). 107 GW 8, p. 136 (RB, p. 46). 108 To be precise, McDowell writes: “Gadamer’s thesis” reads that “a mere animal does not weigh reasons and decide what to do”, and that “a life that is structured only in that way is led not in the world, but only in an environment” (McDowell 1996, p. 115); “Gadamer’s topic […] is the role of language in disclosing the world to us; it is language, he claims, that makes the ‘free, distanced orientation’ possible” (McDowell 1996, p. 116n); “in Gadamer’s description, merely animal life is a matter of dealing with a series of problems and opportunities that the environment throws up, constituted as such by biologically given needs and drives” (McDowell 1996, pp. 117-118) 109 McDowell 1996, pp. 182 and 116n. 110 See Dreyfus 2006. In short, Dreyfus accuses McDowell of avoiding the Myth of the Given in Mind and World, but, in turn, falling into another myth, namely the Myth of the Mental. McDowell, for his part, replies that it is actually Dreyfus, by urging in his paper that embodiment must be kept at distance from the domain of rationality, and thus implicitly arguing that conceptuality is detached from bodily life, who eventually falls into a myth, namely the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect. 111 McDowell 2009, pp. 310-311. 112 McDowell 2009, pp. 314 and 317. 113 McDowell 1998, p. 120. I argue that this applies not only to Plessner’s work, but also to the philosophies of Scheler and Gehlen. The title of Krüger’s original paper was The Second Nature of Human Beings: An Invitation for John McDowell to discuss Helmuth Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology (Krüger 1998). 114 Lovibond 2006, pp. 265 and 267. 115 Thornton 2004, pp. 1-2. 116 Gaynesford 2004, p. 36. 117 Haldane 1996, p. 25. 118 Dingli 2005, pp. 24 and 136.

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See, respectively, Smith 2002; MacDonald 2006; Lindgaard 2009; Schear 2013. Honneth 2002, p. 250. A similar, but even more general reference to philosophical anthropology in the context of a critical examination of McDowell’s Mind and World can also be found in Spinicci 2010, p. 195. 121 See Bowie 1996, p. 536n, where – in the context of a complex discourse on the significance of Kant’s schematism for both Heidegger and McDowell – we read: “Heidegger’s role in Mind and World is taken by Gadamer, even though the early Heidegger is actually the philosopher who often comes closest to McDowell’s notion of ‘the world’: many of the key ideas McDowell cites from Gadamer come straight from the Heidegger of the late 1920s and early 1930s”. 122 Gjesdal 2009, p. 128. 123 In defining McDowell’s philosophical project as both analytic and pragmatic I rely on some insightful observations by Richard J. Bernstein, according to whom “McDowell’s philosophic credentials as analytic philosopher are impeccable”, whereas “there is little evidence that McDowell has more than a superficial acquaintance with the classical American pragmatists”. However, “in his thoughtprovoking book, Mind and World, […] McDowell seeks to show that there is a way of dismounting from the oscillating seesaw between the myth of the given and coherentism. This was also the basic project of pragmatists […]. Like the pragmatists, McDowell seeks to develop a richer and thicker conception of nature in which we can find a place for the second nature characteristic of human beings. McDowell appeals to Aristotle to justify his conception of nature. But he might have just as well appealed to John Dewey, who argued for the continuity of human experience and nature” (Bernstein 2006, pp. 9-10). 124 See GW 10, pp. 747-761. 125 Scheler 2009, pp. 7, 30 and 25-26. Scheler asks indeed: “If animals do already have some intelligence, is there more of a difference between humans and animals than there is of a gradual difference, and can there still be an essential difference at all? Or: is there, beyond the essential stages we have looked into, something entirely different in humans, something which uniquely belongs to them, and which is not at all a part of choice and of intelligence?” (Scheler 2009, p. 25). 126 Scheler 2009, p. 26. 127 See ÜVG, p. 128 (EH, p. 97). 128 GW 4, p. 252 (EH, p. 12). 129 PL, p. 78 (PA, pp. 33-34). I have modified the English translation here (which originally read: “was Scheler in a position to follow Heidegger’s ontological inquiry and to manage the dualism of stress and mind?”) because the German terms employed by Gadamer are hinauskommen über and Drang, which I consider more adequately translated by, respectively, “getting beyond” and “impulsion”, than by “managing” and “stress”. 130 GW 4, p. 250 (EH, p. 10). 131 As we read in the final paragraphs of the long essay The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as Play, Symbol, and Festival, “it is constitutive of our humanity that our instincts are undetermined and we therefore have to conceive of ourselves as free and live with the dangers that this freedom implies. This unique 120

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characteristic determines all human existence in the most profound fashion. And here I am following the insights of philosophical anthropology” (GW 8, p. 136 [RB, p. 46]). 132 To be precise, I refer here to a famous statement of Nietzsche’s that reads: “man is the as yet undetermined animal” (Nietzsche 1966, § 62, p. 74). On the human being as “das noch nicht festgestellte Thier”, see also Nietzsche 1974, n. 25 [428], p. 121. Gehlen cites this statemement in the first chapter of his masterwork Man: His Nature and Place in the World (1988, p. 4), and Gadamer often mentions it precisely when referring to Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology. 133 See, for instance, Gadamer 1975, p. 391. 134 Gehlen 1988, p. 24. 135 See Plessner 1981, pp. 360-425. 136 GW 4, p. 252 (EH, pp. 12-13). 137 GW 4, p. 253 (EH, p. 13). 138 Plessner 1970, p. 65 ff. 139 GW 2, p. 204. 140 GW2, p. 431. 141 GW 8, p. 355 (Gadamer 2000b, p. 13). 142 GW 4, p. 251 (EH, p. 11). 143 GW 1, p. 110 (TM, p. 104). 144 GW 8, p. 137 (RB, p. 47). 145 Chang 1994, p. 114. On the concept of life-world in general, the most obvious reference is to Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl 1970). Gadamer specifically dedicates his essays Die Wissenschaft von der Lebenswelt and Zur Aktualität der Husserlschen Phänomenologie (GW 3, pp. 147-159 and 160-171) to an interpretation of Husserl’s Crisis. 146 See, for instance, GW 10, pp. 11 and 105. 147 GW 3, p. 190 (HW, p. 20). 148 GW 3, p. 142 (PH, p. 173). 149 GA 9, pp. 313 and 318 (Heidegger 1998, pp. 239 and 243). 150 EE, p. 172. 151 See GA 2, pp. 85-151 (Heidegger 1996a, pp. 59-105). 152 GW 3, p. 252 (HW, p. 99 [my emphasis]). It is not by chance then that, in referring to Heidegger’s concept of Welt, Gadamer sometimes interprets it as shifting “the emphasis from a cosmological problem to its anthropological counterpart” (GW 3, p. 327 [HW, p. 190: my emphasis]); this perhaps does not fully correspond to Heidegger’s own philosophical aims, but is surely revealing of at least some of Gadamer’s philosophical scope. It is also remarkable that on other occasions Gadamer also emphasizes the “strong pragmatic articulation of the concept of world” in Heidegger’s philosophy (GW 10, p. 194 [my emphasis]). For a recent and original phenomenological-hermeneutical account of the concept of world, see Figal 2010, pp. 146-153. 153 On this aspect, see above all the essay The Age of the World Picture, in GA 5, pp. 75-113 (Heidegger 2002b, pp. 70-85).

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As is well-known, Heidegger’s opinion of philosophical anthropology was always very critical. Just to mention a few examples, in §10 of Being and Time Heidegger emphatically differentiates his own analytic of Dasein from the human sciences in general, thus including anthropology that, he says, “remains undetermined in its decisive ontological foundation” and fails to give “an unequivocal and ontologically adequate answer to the question of the kind of being of this being that we ourselves are” (GA 2, p. 67 [Heidegger 1996a, p. 46]). Still, in § 37 of his 1929 book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger claims about philosophical anthropology – with specific regard to Scheler – that its idea is “insufficiently determined” and “its role within philosophy as a whole remains obscure and indecisive” (GA 3, p. 212 [Heidegger 1965, p. 219]). Finally, it is remarkable that in a letter to Georg Misch dated 1928 Heidegger defined “stupid” some observations made by Plessner on the difference between the concept of human “eccentricity” and the basic idea of an existential analytic (which, in Plessner’s view, still suffered from idealism and subjectivism), and then complained about Plessner who, according to him, had merely copied some parts of Being and Time “in his typical and very superficial way” (Heidegger’s letter to Misch dated March 1928, quoted in Martinelli 2004, p. 212 n). 155 GW 10, p. 70 (GR, p. 371). 156 GW 10, p. 218. 157 GW 10, p. 340. 158 See, for instance, GW 2, p. 469, and GW 10, p. 367. 159 LT, pp. 16-17 (PT, p. 8). 160 GW 1, p. 18 (TM, p. 11). 161 VZW, p. 43 (RAS, p. 29). In fact, it is precisely in the context of the philosophy of objective spirit that Hegel assigns great significance to the concept of second nature: a concept that would be later reinterpreted from a materialistic point of view by Marx and, following him, by such twentieth-century dialectical thinkers as Lukács and Adorno. As one reads in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right: “The basis of right is the realm of spirit in general and its precise location and point of departure is the will: the will is free, so that freedom constitutes its substance and destiny and the system of right is the realm of actualized freedom, the world of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature”; “the ethical, as their [scil. of individuals] general mode of behaviour, appears as custom; and the habit of the ethical appears as a second nature which takes the place of the original and purely natural will and is the all-pervading soul, significance, and actuality of individual existence” (Hegel 1998, pp. 35 and 195). 162 McDowell 1996, p. 78. With regard to the Aristotelian heritage characterizing their philosophies, it is surely of great relevance what McDowell writes in the essay What Myth?: “I first read Gadamer on Charles Taylor’s recommendation; he urged me to read Truth and Method because he was struck by an affinity between things he had heard me saying about phronesis and Gadamer’s treatment” (McDowell 2009, pp. 310-311). 163 McDowell 1996, p. 84. 164 McDowell 1996, p. IX.

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McDowell 1996, p. 89. McDowell 1996, p. 90. 167 McDowell 1996, p. 91. 168 McDowell 1996, pp. 90-91. 169 See McDowell 1996, pp. 99-104. 170 Di Francesco 1998, p. 250. 171 ÜVG, p. 184 (EH, p. 148). 172 In Robert Brandom’s simple but very incisive words, “the mathematized mature natural sciences have had great success in achieving what we might call algebraic understanding of great swathes of the inanimate natural world. […] But when the topic is culture rather than nature, another sort of approach is called for” (Brandom 2008, p. 212). 173 ÜVG, p. 169 (EH, p. 134). 174 ÜVG, pp. 212-213 (EH, pp. 172-173). With regard to this question, see for instance some observations expressed in the essays Bodily Experience and the Limits of Objectification and Philosophy and Practical Medicine, where Gadamer adopts a rigorous anti-dualistic approach and writes: “The phrase ‘the body and embodiment’, like ‘the living body and life’, sounds almost like a play on words and thus acquires for us an almost mysterious presence. It vividly presents the absolute inseparability of the living body and life itself. […] By the term ‘spirit’ here we need not think of anything too elevated. Let us say that spirit is both the body and that which animates it. Both together represent the spirit of our particular form of life, that which we all are […]. Here it is clearly a question of learning to translate the skills through which scientific knowledge is objectively applied into the other dimension where this animating force is sustained and renewed” (ÜVG, pp. 96 and 128 [EH, pp. 71 and 97-98]). 175 GW 4, p. 280 (EH, p. 50). 176 HE, p. 102. 177 ÜVG, p. 97 (EH, p. 72). 178 McDowell 1996, pp. 102-104 and 111. 179 McDowell 1996, p. 111. 180 Let me simply remind the reader that two of the founding fathers of philosophical anthropology, namely Max Scheler and Helmut Plessner, were also, respectively, a leading figure in the early phenomenological movement and a student of Husserl. The relationship between phenomenology and hermeneutics, in turn, does not even need to be explicated, since from Being in Time until today the roots of philosophical hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Derrida) lie precisely in phenomenology. 181 Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, p. 131. 182 Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, p. 132. 183 Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, p. 134. 184 See, respectively, Damasio 1994 and Clark 1997. 185 Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, p. 5. 186 Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, pp. 135 and 137. 166

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This specific objection has been raised, for instance, by Desideri 2011 (p. 202). An interesting application of McDowell’s original epistemological perspective to aesthetic questions has been made by Boyle 2011. 188 Mazzeo 2003, p. 42. 189 Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, p. 132. 190 GW 10, p. 103 (Gadamer 1994, pp. 106-108). 191 ÜVG, pp. 96 and 213 (EH, pp. 71 and 173). Although Gadamer only cites Aristotle’s name, without mentioning the title of any particular work, he arguably refers to the Stagirite’s famous definitions of soul, for example, as “the form of a natural body having life potentially within it”; as “an actuality of the first kind of a natural organized body”; as “the cause or source of the living body […] in all three senses which we explicitly recognize. It is the source of movement, it is the end, it is the essence of the whole living body” (see, respectively, On the Soul, II 1, 412 a 20-21; II 1, 412 b 6; and II 4, 415 b 9-12 [1991, vol. 1, respectively pp. 656, 657 and 661]). 192 McDowell 1996, p. 109. 193 EE, p. 17 (EPH, p. 226). 194 McDowell 1996, p. 69. 195 McDowell 1996, pp. 76 and 82. 196 ÜVG, p. 155 (EH, p. 122). 197 VZW, p. 140 (RAS, p. 163).

CHAPTER TWO GADAMER ON HEIDEGGER: THE HISTORY OF BEING AS PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

1. The dialogue with other thinkers always represented an essential moment of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s way of philosophizing. One of the most relevant, but at the same time most difficult philosophical dialogues for him, was surely that with his teacher Martin Heidegger, whose thought he addressed in many interpretive essays, later gathered in his collected papers. In his own words: “one cannot think of my becoming who I am without Heidegger”1; “I received impetuses for thinking from Heidegger very early on, and I attempted from the very beginning to follow such impetuses within the limits of my capabilities and to the extent that I could concur”2. It is important to note that such impetuses came both from Heidegger’s early and late philosophy. Gadamer, for example, compares his 1922 reading of the so-called Natorp-Bericht to “being hit by a charge of electricity”3, and he also points out the decisive importance of his 1923 attendance at Heidegger’s lecture course on Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity and seminar on Aristotle’s ethics4. Gadamer thus emphasizes the relevance of his teacher’s early hermeneutics of facticity for the development of his own philosophical project, stating that the “problem of hermeneutics [became] universal in scope, even attaining a new dimension”, only through Heidegger’s “transcendental interpretation of understanding”5. Anyway, as I said, Gadamer’s “hermeneutical philosophy […] follows the intentions of Heidegger’s late philosophy”6 as well, and he even claims that the basis of his own “treatment of the universal hermeneutic problem” is precisely formed by the latter’s subsequent “criticism of transcendental inquiry and his thinking of ‘the turn’”7. Now, Heidegger’s path of thought has been commonly understood as divided in two main phases, with a caesura represented by the famous and much discussed “turn (Kehre)”. My aim here is neither to suggest sharp

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and outmoded distinctions between Heidegger I and II8, thus neglecting the presence of certain continuity in his Denkweg (a continuity which, by the way, was always emphasized exactly by Gadamer9), nor to deny the existence of various middle passages even within its two main phases10. Rather, for the specific purposes of the discourse I want to develop here it is enough to assume that at least one basic change actually occurred in Heidegger’s philosophy by the end of the 1920s / early 1930s: the shift to the “new seynsgeschichtlich approach”, i.e. to the idea of being as “the history of unfolding epochs of self-manifestation”11. After the “turn”, the history of metaphysics is understood indeed as the ontological-historical happening of the forgetfulness of being, originated by the oblivion of the ontological difference in ancient Greek philosophy and culminating in the nihilistic character of our technological age. In this sense, metaphysics is viewed by Heidegger as virtually coinciding with nihilism12, which is “not just one historical phenomenon among others”, but is “on the contrary the fundamental movement of the history of the West”, the “scarcely recognized fundamental process in the destiny of Western peoples [that] moves history”13. Metaphysics and nihilism thus represent to him the “concealed ground of our historical Dasein”14, the happening that grounds history, that “runs through Western history from the inception onward” and that “the eyes of all historians will never reach, but which nevertheless happens”15. This obviously confers to history a singular fateful nature, since its essence appears determined by “destiny (Geschick)”, by “the sending that gathers (versammelnde Schicken), that first starts man upon a way of revealing”16. The history of metaphysics is now compared to “the destiny of being itself”, “the unthought – because withheld – mystery of being itself”, which forms “the historical ground of the world history”17. From this Heideggerian point of view, “the history of being is not to be abstracted from historical events, but rather historical events need to be understood on the basis of [this] history”18. As I said, Gadamer always recognized how important both the influence of Heidegger’s early philosophy and that of his later one were for him. “Any attempt to make sense of the later Heidegger must start out from the conception of being-historical thinking”, which he presented “in the lectures […] delivered in the mid-1930s”, but even more prominently “in the work he was privately composing during that period, the Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning”19. However, as I will try to show, it is precisely this general, basic conceptual framework that Gadamer (though accepting many particular themes of the later Heidegger) seems to question, and sometimes explicitly reject.

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2. I argue that Gadamer’s criticism of the being-historical perspective is based on at least three important reasons. First of all, this criticism derives from something that has to do with both philology and philosophy. When asked about possible objections against Heidegger, Gadamer admits indeed that it is “difficult to rule out as unjustified the complaint brought by classical philology (to which I belong to some degree) against the violence of Heidegger’s interpretations or even the incorrectness of certain of his interpretative strategies”20. Though always appreciating his geniality in reading texts, that is, his “ability of thought and linguistic imagination” which “compensate for all those weaknesses that often make philologists feel superior to Heidegger”21, Gadamer cannot hide a certain mistrust towards his way of interpretation. So, for example, he claims that “understanding what poems say […] was not Heidegger’s strength”, because he used to handle them “with the violence of his philosophy”, and that “it was really impossible to convince him”22 when he was wrong. But most of the time this scepticism concerns “Heidegger’s thoughtful dealings with the history of philosophy” (and especially with the Greeks), which are “burdened with the violence of a thinker who was veritably driven by his own questions and a desire to rediscover himself everywhere”23. Gadamer admits he could “never accept without resistance Heidegger’s etymologies”24, and with regard to the latter’s “use of the preSocratic texts” he explains that what Heidegger recognized in those texts “was certainly himself. […] Heidegger was using fragments when he attempted to erect his own building, fragments that he turned over and over again and assembled according to his own blueprint”25. As we read in one of Gadamer’s last interviews: whenever [Heidegger] came to me now with interpretations of Greek texts, I took every opportunity to drive home the fact that he didn’t have enough Greek. […] When, for example, he reads the Presocratics… well, in this case, if he really wants to hide behind the Presocratics… well, fine – I can see a motive for it. But ultimately he has to make the attempt not to mistreat the language of the Anaximander fragment in that way – it’s absolutely barbarous26.

For our specific purposes, the most relevant point of disagreement is probably represented by Heidegger’s Plato interpretation, which not mistakenly has been defined as a continuous challenge for Gadamer27. It is a well-known fact that Heidegger considers Plato as the thinker who somehow gave birth to the forgetfulness of being, reducing the proper

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essence of being to the realm of ideas, and shifting from the original meaning of truth as unconcealment (a-letheia) to the model of knowledge based on rightness, i.e. correctness of sight (orthotes). Whereas Gadamer, even because of the influence of the “Socratic” interpretation of Plato given by his teacher of philology Paul Friedländer28, claims that Heidegger was not fair to Plato. For Gadamer, Plato represents the non-dogmatic philosopher par excellence, who “in the end […] does not have a doctrine that one can simply learn from him, namely the ‘doctrine of ideas’”, since “the acceptance of the ‘ideas’ does not designate the acceptance of a doctrine so much as of a line of questioning that the doctrine has the task of developing and discussing”29. According to him, the “one-sidedness Heidegger showed in interpreting Plato rests upon two basic reasons. First of all, his knowledge of the Greek language was unfortunately quite limited, and whilst he had a reasonably good knowledge of Aristotle this was not the case for Plato […]. Secondly, he always saw a close relationship between Plato and the dogmatism of Catholic theology”30. Consequently, Gadamer argues that “the authentic meaning of the Platonic dialectic of ideas is ultimately something quite different” from Heidegger’s interpretation of “Plato’s doctrine of ideas as the beginning of the forgetfulness of Being”31. It is clear that such a definite philological disagreement has wide and important philosophical consequences. In fact, from the 1930s on, Heidegger “worked to reduce the structural commonalities of the metaphysical tradition to a formal framework in which he could fit every ‘fundamental metaphysical position’ in the history of the Western tradition”32. And since, according to him, “the unity of philosophy as Platonic metaphysics conditions its possible forms up to Nietzsche”33, then, from a Heideggerian point of view, the whole history of philosophy is somehow definable as Platonism. But Gadamer, while agreeing that “the history of metaphysics could be written as a history of Platonism”34, somehow aims to demonstrate that Plato himself, “who wrote only dialogues and never dogmatic texts”35, was no Platonist at all in the Heideggerian sense of this term! As he claims at the end of his lectures on the beginning of Western philosophy, “Plato was no Platonist” – like Heidegger, for his part, cannot “be held responsible for the Heideggerians”36! The second reason why Gadamer seems to reject, at least to a certain degree, the being-historical perspective, is related to his refusal of Heidegger’s basic idea of a “language of metaphysics, into which one supposedly falls again and again”: an expression that he explicitly defines as “poor, inexact”37. According to Gadamer, indeed, “there is no ‘language of metaphysics’. There is only a metaphysically thought-out coinage of concepts that have been lifted from living speech”, since even the

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“concept-words coined in the realm of philosophy are […] always articulated by means of the spoken language in which they emerge”38. By the way, this scepticism toward Heidegger’s concept of language can perhaps also explain why Gadamer always adopted a more accessible and understandable way of writing. In fact, he explains: I did not attempt what the later Heidegger was after: forcibly recasting language, so to speak. This is not language anymore, I said to myself. True, one always searches for the right word in language. Yet it is not the word which is decisive, but the whole process of communication. […] I told Heidegger that language is not the powerful word; language is reply39.

To be sure, Gadamer agrees that it is certainly “the language of metaphysics […] which makes [our] thinking capable of being formulated”, and that the “usages in Graeco-Latin times” of the “technical language (Schulsprache) of philosophy […] established ontological implications whose prejudiced character Heidegger uncovered”40. Nonetheless, he asks: “can a language […] ever properly be called the language of metaphysical thinking, just because metaphysics was thought, or what would be more, anticipated in it?”41. And most of all: “is there no rising above such a preschematizing of thought?”42. Given the fact that, for him, “no conceptual language […] represents an unbreakable constraint upon thought”43, Gadamer’s implicit answer to the last question is obviously “Yes” – which evidently marks another fundamental divergence with Heidegger. Hence Gadamer admits: “I myself have not been able to accept many of Heidegger’s linguistic violences with language and I have not been able to follow many of his powerful interpretations, but at the same time I have tried to develop further the hermeneutics impulse I received from him”44. Anyway, there is at least one more reason underlying Gadamer’s “suspiciousness” about Heidegger’s idea of the history of being, namely his interpretation of the Seinsgeschichte as a form of Geschichtsphilosophie – which, by the way, throws light on some aspects of his philosophical relation to Hegel as well. It is a well-known fact that, among the thinkers who surely exercised a great influence on Gadamer, Hegel must be mentioned. Disregarding the vastness and depth of his philosophical confrontation with Hegel, what we know for sure is that while he considers Hegel’s doctrine of the objective spirit absolutely fundamental and still topical, the so-called “Absolute viewpoint” of the philosophy of history is definitely less relevant for him; rather, it constitutes a point of discrepancy. This is implicitly confirmed by those important sections of Truth and Method in which he considers “how the ‘historical school’ tries

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to deal with [the] problem of universal history”, and claims that “representatives of the historical worldview [like] Ranke, Droysen, and Dilthey”, despite their “rejection of the aprioristic construction of world history” and their criticism of Hegel, in the end are not “free from metaphysical assumptions”45. Rather, they are closer to Hegel than they believe themselves to be, since they somehow share with him the idea of a “teleological […] ontological structure of history”, and the “basic viewpoint […] that continuity is the essence of history”46. Hence they simply replace the “full transparency of being, which Hegel saw as realized in the absolute knowledge of philosophy”, with the idea of a perfect culmination of knowledge in the “historical consciousness”, which similarly represents “transparency, the complete dissolution of all alienness, of all difference”47. But one of Gadamer’s fundamental beliefs is that the historically conditioned character of consciousness constitutes “an insuperable barrier to its reaching perfect fulfilment in historical knowledge”, which evidently questions every effort to reach an “historical viewpoint on everything” and understand history as “a structured whole”48. Here Gadamer’s criticism of Hegel explicitly emerges, since the ambition of the latter’s philosophy of history – namely, to develop a “thoughtful consideration of it”, to penetrate “the infinite complex of things” that “reveals itself in the world”, and to understand “that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process”, “the rational necessary course of the world-spirit”49 – appears to him quite illegitimate. As a matter of fact, such an ambition seems to presuppose the possibility of elevating oneself to the unhistorical, universal standpoint of the “Divine Providence” that “presides over the events of the world” and “leads into truth, knows all things, penetrates even into the deep things of the Godhead”, thus realizing the aim of an “absolute rational design of the world”50. According to Gadamer, however, “being historical” means precisely “never being able to pull everything out of an event such that everything that has happened lies before me. Thus, that which Hegel named the bad infinity is a structural element of the historical experience as such”51. Not by chance, Gadamer explicitly affirms that “the structure of historically effected consciousness” must be defined “with an eye to Hegel, setting it against his own approach”52. And he constantly warns “the interpreter of history” from “the risk of hypostasizing the connectedness of events”, since unless “Hegel’s conditions hold true” (that is, unless “the philosophy of history is made party to the plans of the world spirit and on the basis of this esoteric knowledge is able to mark out certain individuals as having world-historical importance”53), then the development of such grandiose

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narratives can only appear as a sort of philosophical-historical hubris. Moreover, sometimes Gadamer hints at Karl Löwith’s relevant discovery of the affinities between theological and philosophical views of history, respectively aiming “to understand the plan for salvation” and “to understand the coming to pass of history and to recognize its order”54. According to him, however, “such a philosophy of history [cannot] gain access to the reality of history”, because “it stands in complete contradiction to the finitude of man’s existence”55. Hence a “magnificent and yet violently construing philosophy of world history”56, like Hegel’s, runs the risk not to do justice to “the actual reality of the event, especially its absurdity and contingency […]. The finite nature of one’s own understanding is the manner in which reality, resistance, the absurd, and the unintelligible assert themselves. If one takes this finitude seriously, one must take the reality of history seriously as well”57. Gadamer’s own version of the criticism of the “poverty of historicism” (understanding here this term in its peculiar Popperian meaning58) thus relies on his objection “to the idea of […] totality as a completion, because any claim for an inner teleology and the completion of a development would have to be made from some position external to historical forms of life”59. Hence he concludes: There is indeed no disputing that the Christian and non-Christian histories of salvation – and even histories of un-salvation (Unheilsgeschichten) such as the Nietzschean one of the mounting European nihilism – are a legitimate need in a human reason that is explicitly conscious of its historical character. To this extent universal history is indisputably an aspect of the experience of our being in history. Like all other history, however, universal history too must always be rewritten […]; and each projection of writing a universal history has a validity that does not last much longer than the appearance of a flash momentarily cutting across the darkness of the future as well as of the past as it gets lost in the twilight. This finitude is a point of hermeneutical philosophy that I have dared to defend against Hegel60.

3. Now, Gadamer sometimes extends these ideas also to Heidegger’s being-historical perspective, and thus bases his criticism on the existence of some relevant affinities between Hegel and Heidegger. As is wellknown, Heidegger’s relation with Hegel was always very complex and tense. In Being and Time he is suspicious of the Hegelian interpretation of history, because it is “wholly moving in the direction of the vulgar understanding of time”61 and it privileges the past among the various

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dimensions of time. Afterwards he disclaims any affinity to Hegel’s history of spirit, claiming that “a matter of the history of being” is something radically different from “a matter of reversing one category for another or of a ‘dialectical’ representational meditation of the forms of representation”62, and that their dialogues with the history of philosophy are immeasurable, because “for Hegel, the conversation with the earlier history of philosophy has the character of Aufhebung”, whereas Heidegger “in contrast to Hegel” is interested in “what has always remained unasked throughout this history of thinking”63. In general, it has been noted that Heidegger over the years seems to shift from “a pure and simple refusal of the Hegelian problematic” to “an attempt […] to assimilate Hegel’s thinking, or rather to render it assimilable to his own”, and finally to a “setting at a distance which wants to be an appropriation”64. Gadamer surely acknowledges that Heidegger “never claimed in his own confrontation with the forgetfulness of Being and the language of metaphysics that there was a necessary progression from one stage of thought to the next”65. And he also recognizes Heidegger’s continuous efforts to “draw a sharp contrast between his own peculiar, negative teleology of the forgetfulness of Being and Hegel’s teleological system of the history of philosophy”66. According to him, however, even though Heidegger “never speaks of an historical necessity anything like the one which Hegel claims as the basis of his construing of world history”, nonetheless “in conceiving of metaphysical thought as a history unified by the forgetfulness of being which pervades it” he cannot avoid attributing “a kind of inner consequentiality to history”67. Furthermore, Gadamer argues that “it is made evident by certain of Heidegger’s phrases […] that there is even a connection between an increasing forgetfulness of being and the expectation of this coming or epiphany of being – a connection quite similar to that of a dialectical reversal”68. The very idea of a “radical deepening of forgetfulness of being in the age of technology” leads indeed to a sort of “eschatological expectation in thought of a turnabout”, and in Gadamer’s view “such an historical self-consciousness as this is no less all-inclusive than Hegel’s philosophy of the Absolute”69. Quite interestingly, Gadamer is not the only thinker who interprets Heidegger’s later thought in this way. According to Hannah Arendt, for example, “the History of Being, at work behind the backs of acting men, […] like Hegel’s World Spirit, determines human destinies and reveals itself to the thinking ego if the latter can overcome willing and actualize the letting-be”70. Even more emphatically, Karl Löwith argues that the later Heidegger “brings [the] supposedly fundamental happening” of nihilism “into a system in a philosophic-historical manner by tracing back

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to their incomprehensible origin, in a forgetting of Being, all appearances of progressive decline (Verfall), on the basis of the original falling (Verfallen) into beings”71. From this point of view, “Heidegger’s destructive retreat and descent” appears to Löwith as not different, in principle, from “Hegel’s constructive progress and ascent”: In seeming accord with world-spirit as the destining of Being, Heidegger lets world-history proceed as the history of decline, in connection with which he, like Hegel, […] interprets retrospectively what has been, in the blinding light of its supposedly necessary consequences, and unifies seamlessly the intellectual history of Being, the history of Being, with the history of the world. Onto-historical thinking and the essence of worldhistory must correspond entirely with one another, just as for Hegel the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history are essentially the same, if thinking corresponds to a behest of Being which for its own part is a historical-destining one72.

Similar remarks can also be found, among others, in the works of Richard Rorty, who ironically interprets the Seinsgeschichte as “a Bildungsroman about a character called ‘Europe’”73, and claims that Heidegger never really looked outside of philosophy books. His sense of the drama of European history was confined to the drama of his own Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics. He was never able […] to shake off the philosophy professor’s conviction that everything else stands to philosophy as superstructure to base. Like Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojéve, he thought that if you understood the history of Western philosophy you understood the history of the West. Like Hegel and Marx, he thought of philosophy as somehow geared into something larger than philosophy. […] On my reading, Heidegger is still doing the same sort of thing which […] Augustine […] tried to do […] when he imagined a City of God from which to look down on the Dark Ages. He is opting out of the struggles of his fellow humans by making […] his own story the only story that counts74.

Worthy of notice is that Gadamer sometimes distances himself from this kind of interpretation, claiming that the fact that Heidegger’s history of being presents “the history of philosophy […] as the interior of world history […] still does not mean that this is a metaphysics of history of the kind that Löwith has shown to be a secular form of Christian history, the most logical elaboration of which idea […] is Hegel’s philosophy of history”75. On other occasions, however, he clearly states that “Heidegger’s description of the history of Being” undeniably involves “a similarly

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comprehensive claim” as Hegel’s attempt “to penetrate the history of philosophy philosophically from the standpoint of absolute knowledge”76. Furthermore, as I said, Gadamer often praises Löwith’s discovery of the theological implications of the philosophy of history, and perhaps the fact he always draws attention to the religious dimension in Heidegger’s philosophy is no coincidence77. As a matter of fact, it is quite clear to him that “Heidegger’s whole life was the life of a God-seeker”78, and that “the question that motivated him and pointed out his way of thinking”, “his original and constantly advancing question”, was: “How can we speak of God without reducing him to an object of our knowledge?”79. Hence it should come as no surprise that Gadamer sometimes reads even the Heideggerian “interpretation of occidental metaphysics […] as the fate of the forgetfulness of being” like “some sort of secret theology of a concealed god”80. In the end, according to him, there is in Heidegger nothing of that necessity of historical progress that is both the glory and bane of Hegelian philosophy. […] But for Heidegger it is fate, not history (remembered and penetrable by understanding), that originated in the conception of Being in Greek metaphysics and that in modern science and technology carries the forgetfulness of Being to the extreme. […] And so Heidegger too appears to claim a genuinely historical self-consciousness for himself, indeed, even an eschatological selfconsciousness81.

This interpretation could be supported by some Heideggerian statements, which explicitly point out the fact that being, “as destining, […] is inherently eschatological”82. According to Heidegger, indeed, “without errancy there would be no connection from destiny to destiny, no history. […] Out of the epoche of being comes the epochal essence of its destining in which authentic world-history lies”83. Apropos of this, it has been observed that “what is most striking about Heidegger’s vision of the ‘history of being’ […] is the soteriological and apocalyptic ‘metanarrative’ that seems to underlie it. History is seen as a monolithic ‘happening’ that, springing from primordial origins, passes through a ‘dark night of the soul’ of forgetfulness, yet embodies the prospects for a redemption in the final recovery of its concealed origins”84. But before such an ambitious and all-encompassing doctrine, Gadamer’s “Kantian” belief in the inescapable finiteness of the possibilities of human knowledge leads him to ask: “which goal could history possibly contemplate – regardless of whether it be the history of Being or the history of the forgetfulness of Being – without straying again into the realm of simple possibility and phantasmal irrealities?”85.

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4. On the basis of all these remarks, I thus think we might agree that “certain themes which are central to Heidegger, such as distancing oneself from metaphysics as the forgetting of Being, seem in Gadamer to have disappeared completely”86. “Gadamer’s thought is historical, but it is not Being-historical, not thought in the terms of the Geschick, of Being’s sending-withdrawal. It is historical but not epochal, for it does not see the epoché of the Seinsgeschick in any given epoch”: his is “a kind of Heideggerianism without the scandal of the Ereignis and the play of the epochs”87. But Gadamer, apart from rejecting some decisive aspects of the being-historical perspective, often points out that “it is precisely the new trajectories of thought opened by the later Heidegger […] that have guided [his] way, or better confirmed [his] own path of thought”88. This evidently generates an ambiguous and perhaps even problematic situation, since on the one hand he mentions some particular themes of the later Heidegger as important sources of inspiration, but on the other hand he seems to refuse the general framework in which these themes must be situated in order to be properly understood. To be sure, I am not trying to “accuse” Gadamer of having misunderstood his teacher’s philosophy, which would be obviously absurd. In fact, if it is true that Heidegger sometimes distanced himself from his former student – for example, interpreting Truth and Method as a mere “fall back into consciousness (Rückfall in das Bewußtsein)”89, and declaring that “hermeneutical philosophy [was] Gadamer’s thing”90 and that “his term wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein [was] ‘straight out of Dilthey’”91 –, it is also true that he considered Gadamer his most gifted student92, and explicitly recognized that Gadamer had given excellent interpretations of his thought, for instance with regard to the philosophy of art93. Rather, I think that the real point is represented by the effective consequences of the two thinkers’ disagreement on such a fundamental doctrine as the Seinsgeschichte. Consequences which, in my opinion, are wider and more radical than usually recognized. First of all, we might probably mention their different evaluations of the humanist tradition94. Heidegger in fact, criticizes humanism because it “remains metaphysical”, i.e. it is “either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one”95, whereas Gadamer dedicates an important part of Truth and Method (if not the whole of his thought) to the rehabilitation of the value and significance of the humanist tradition96. Secondly, I think that their different evaluations of the world’s present-day condition somehow derive, among other things, from a basic disagreement on the question concerning the history of Being. As is well-known, indeed,

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Heidegger sometimes draws socio-political conclusions from his fundamental concept of being as “sending” and “destining”, claiming that metaphysics is in all its forms and historical stages a unique, but perhaps necessary, fate of the West and the presupposition of its planetary dominance. […] The “world wars” and their character of “totality” are already a consequence of the abandonment of Being. […] Beyond war and peace, there is the mere erring of the consumption of beings in the plan’s self-guaranteeing in terms of the vacuum of the abandonment of Being. […] One believes that the leaders had presumed everything of their own accord in the blind rage of a selfish egotism and arranged everything in accordance with their own will. In truth, however, they are the necessary consequence of the fact that beings have entered the way of erring in which the vacuum expands which requires a single order and guarantee of beings. […] The earth appears as the unworld of erring. It is the erring star in the manner of the history of Being97.

But Gadamer does not seem to accept such “apocalyptic” views, and declares to be quite uncertain “about Heidegger’s vision of the complete forgetfulness of being”: “I would not follow Heidegger”, Gadamer explains, “when he says that only a God can save us. Complete forgetfulness of being cannot be achieved”98. So, he replies to Leo Strauss (who accused him of lacking in radicalism) that his own “point of departure is not the complete forgetfulness of being, the ‘night of being’”, but “rather on the contrary […] the unreality of such an assertion”99. And with regard to the Nietzschian-Heideggerian idea of a “collapse of all principles in the modern world”, he says: “Don’t we all then run the risk of a terrible intellectual hubris if we equate Nietzsche’s anticipations […] with life as it is actually lived with its own forms of solidarity? Here, in fact, my divergence from Heidegger is fundamental”100. Thirdly, some relevant consequences of Gadamer’s refusal to adopt a being-historical perspective can also be found in the field of the philosophy of language. It has been noted, indeed, that Gadamer’s ideas on language are “freed from Heidegger’s Geschick”, and that he “does not make the history of Being part and parcel of his philosophy of language”101. Hence, while the later Heidegger conceives language as “the house of being” or “the house of the truth of being”102, Gadamer primarily thinks of it as “the house of the human being”103, i.e. as a dialogical, rhetorical and even ritual phenomenon104. Fourthly, while their concepts of art and aesthetics are at first sight very similar, observing them more carefully it becomes clear that their basic divergences on the history of metaphysics deeply condition their accounts of these subjects as well.

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5. Although an interest in art, and in particular in poetry and literature, is already present in Heidegger’s early philosophy, it is only in his works following the “turn” that this feature becomes fully evident in his thought. This means that Heidegger’s philosophy of art, from a systematic point of view, fully belongs to the being-historical perspective105. His most relevant writings on art “must therefore be seen in the light of the Beiträge zur Philosophie”, and the entire question concerning the truth of art “has its place in the whole of the sixfold configuration of the fugue of the truth of Being in its presencing as the event of appropriation” that “the Beiträge make up”106. Finally, I think it is worth noticing that “since the root of the problem of modernity is metaphysics, the principle by which Heidegger selects the exceptional artists he considers to be genuinely significant is the overcoming of metaphysics. The art which is important to our ‘needy’ times is art which provides an antidote to metaphysics”107. But since for Gadamer the root of our problems is not metaphysics, then it becomes clear that his concept of art and aesthetics essentially differs from Heidegger’s. For example, he locates the turning point of the history of aesthetics in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (whose epoch-making significance he points out on various occasions108), whereas Heidegger claims that “since Plato […] the essence of art […] has been determined in accordance with metaphysics”109, and thus connects the modern aesthetical standpoint to the ancient metaphysical interpretation of art. In other words, while the former sees the foundation of modern aesthetics as “the end of a tradition” and “the beginning of a new development”110, the latter, on the other hand, stresses the continuity and homogeneity of philosophical meditations on art from Plato to Nietzsche111. As a result, in Heidegger’s case one must speak of “contra-aesthetics” or even “trans-aesthetics”, i.e. of a radical intention of overcoming, transvaluing and getting over the whole history of Western philosophy of art112, whereas Gadamer “simply” aims at destructuring the modern foundations of this discipline113. To sum up, although Gadamer openly and gratefully acknowledges the pivotal role played by Heidegger’s discussion of art and truth in The Origin of the Work of Art (1936), he titles his own project “transcending the aesthetic dimension” (die Transzendierung der ästhetischen Dimension) in contrast to “the overcoming of aesthetics” (die Überwindung der Ästhetik), the title Heidegger uses for his own project. […] Gadamer uses Heidegger’s insight into the happening of truth in our encounter with works of art and poetry,

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In addition to this, let us not forget that some of Heidegger’s last and more enigmatic writings seem to transfer the suspect of a secret metaphysical character from aesthetics, i.e. the philosophy of art, to art itself. Accordingly, not only does he try to reach a new non-aesthetic and non-metaphysical point of view on art, but he also searches for traces of new non-metaphysical forms of Art115, in parallel to his search for a nonmetaphysical concept of Being (with the term literally crossed out). Gadamer on his part might have even considered meaningless the notion itself of non-metaphysical art. In fact, according to him “Heidegger’s Destruktion of metaphysics has not […] robbed metaphysics of its importance today”116, and he simply thinks that “the arts, taken as a whole, quietly govern the metaphysical heritage of our Western tradition”117, i.e. they represent an important counterbalance to the ruling scientism of our age. Given all these relevant points of disagreement, I think that even the two thinkers’ conceptions of the truth of art are quite different. As a matter of fact, Heidegger’s concept of “the setting-of-truth-into-the-work” as an event of ontological disclosure somehow infers the being-historical narrative and the doctrine concerning the “oblivion to the difference between being and the being […] with which the destiny of being begins”, and which constitutes “the event of metaphysics”, “the richest and broadest event in which the world-history of the West achieves its resolution”118. But Gadamer, as we have seen, explicitly objects to this allencompassing narrative, and sometimes even compares the ontological difference to a theological doctrine, pointing out its somehow “obscure” character119. Accordingly, it has been noted that even if both thinkers aim at re-establishing “the connection between art and truth”, and even if Gadamer also analyzes “the ontological depth of art” and “the Ereignis in which the work itself is”, nonetheless “the truth that is taken to be served by art, at least according to certain of Gadamer’s analyses, seems to be limited to ontic truth, to the truth of beings; it seems in certain instances not to extend to truth in the originary sense in which Heidegger […] understands it, namely, as unconcealment”120. Hence “it remains to be decided whether in Gadamer’s account there is anything corresponding to what Heidegger” (moving from being-historical presuppositions) “invokes in characterizing art as das Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit”121. All these remarks would obviously imply further considerations regarding many other aspects of the Heidegger-Gadamer relation. This, however, is not the place to undertake such discussions. In the end, I hope

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that my analysis of Gadamer’s peculiar and selective reception of Heidegger’s late philosophy can provide useful information and insights for a better understanding of their philosophical relationship, which still represents an important task in this field of research. As a matter of fact, “Gadamer never really clarified […] the relation between hermeneutics and philosophy’s past, particularly metaphysics”, and this “has given rise to numerous misunderstandings”: one of the reasons is probably that “a clarification would surely have entailed an explicit distantiation from Heidegger and the question of Being”122. On this basis, I think that the famous Habermasian image of Gadamer’s hermeneutics as “urbanization” (and perhaps even “secularization”) of Heidegger’s provocative thought123 can still prove to be useful, but only if not intended in a reductive way. Gadamer, indeed, is commonly read through a Heideggerian lens, as if he were just a proselyte of Heidegger, but “the image of Gadamer limiting himself to the “urbanization of the Heideggerian province” would have to be revised. Certainly Gadamer himself contributed to this picture, by suggesting to many inattentive readers that his thought was a continuation of, rather than a break from, Heidegger’s. Perhaps he himself did not want to recognize this break entirely, let alone emphasize it. Nevertheless, the filiation is much less direct than has often been thought”124.

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Notes 1

GLB, p. 293 (GR, p. 425). GW 3, p. VI (HW, p. VII). 3 GW 3, p. 263 (HW, p. 113). 4 See, for instance, GW 2, p. 485; and GW 10, pp. 4-5, 21, 32, 61 and 66. 5 GW 1, p. 268 (TM, p. 254). 6 GW 3, p. 220 (HW, p. 58). 7 GW 2, p. 446 (TM, pp. XXXII-XXXIII). 8 A distinction which, by the way, Heidegger himself criticized (see Heidegger 1974, p. XXII). 9 Gadamer, indeed, “interprets Heidegger’s long and winding ‘path of thought’ in the sense of a substantial continuity, tracking down a sort of subterranean and almost imperceptible permanence of the deep influence of phenomenology […] in the so-called ‘second part’ of his thought as well” (Gregorio 2008, p. 14). 10 Franco Volpi, for example, proposes to distinguish at least three different phases already in Heidegger’s early philosophy of the 1920s, and various stages in the four decades following the “turn” (see Volpi 2002, pp. 23-25). 11 Guignon 1993, p. 15. 12 On this topic, see for instance Ruggenini 2002, pp. 235-243. 13 GA 5, p. 218 (Heidegger 2002b, p. 163). 14 GA 40, p. 100 (Heidegger 2000b, p. 99). 15 GA 40, p. 40 (Heidegger 2000b, p. 39). 16 GA 7, p. 25 (Heidegger 1993a, p. 329). 17 GA 5, pp. 264-265 (Heidegger 2002b, pp. 197-198). 18 Dreyfus and Wrathall 2005, p. 12. 19 Guignon 2005, p. 399. 20 GW 3, pp. 376-377 (Gadamer 1992, p. 17). 21 GW 10, p. 45. 22 IG, pp. 68-69. 23 GW 3, p. 307 (HW, p. 165). 24 GW 10, p. 36. 25 GW 3, pp. 288-289 (HW, p. 143). 26 UD, p. 135 (ACP, p. 132). 27 See Dostal 1997. On Gadamer’s interpretation of Plato, in general, see Della Pelle 2014. 28 See GW 10, pp. 403-405. On this topic, see for instance Girgenti 2008. 29 GW 2, p. 502 (Gadamer 1997, p. 33). 30 Gadamer 2001, p. 135. 31 GW 2, p. 502 (Gadamer 1997, p. 34). 32 Thomson 2002, p. 109. 33 Magnus 2002, p. 142. 34 GW 2, p. 502 (Gadamer 1997, p. 34). 35 GW 2, p. 333 (DDGD, p. 24). 36 IFO, p. 150 (BP, p. 125). 2

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GW 10, p. 132 (DDGD, p. 121). GW 2, pp. 365-366 (DDGD, p. 107). 39 Gadamer 1995, p. 123. 40 GW 3, p. 237 (HW, p. 78). 41 GW 3, p. 236 (HW, p. 78). 42 GW 3, p. 237 (HW, p. 79). 43 GW 2, p. 332 (DDGD, p. 23). 44 GW 10, p. 69 (GR, p. 370). 45 GW 1, pp. 204-205 (TM, pp. 197-199). 46 GW 1, pp. 207 and 213 (TM, pp. 201 and 206). 47 GW 1, pp. 215 and 233 (TM, pp. 208 and 223). 48 GW 1, p. 235 (TM, p. 225). 49 Hegel 1952, pp. 156-157. 50 Hegel 1952, pp. 158-159. 51 GW 3, p. 221 (HW, pp. 58-59). 52 GW 1, pp. 351-352 (TM, p. 341). 53 GW 1, p. 377 (TM, pp. 364-365). 54 GW 2, pp. 139-140 (Gadamer 1972, pp. 235-236). Gadamer here makes reference to Löwith 1949. 55 GW 2, p. 140 (Gadamer 1972, p. 236). 56 GW 3, p. 214 (HW, p. 50). 57 GW 2, p. 445 (TM, pp. XXXI-XXXII). 58 As is well-known, Poppers subsumes under “historicism” every kind of philosophical “belief in historical destiny” and “prediction of the course of human history”, which for him is just “sheer superstition” (Popper 2002, p. IX). 59 Pippin 2002, p. 229. 60 GW 4, p. 481 (GR, p. 342). 61 GA 2, p. 569 (Heidegger 1996a, p. 394). 62 GA 65, p. 135 (Heidegger 1999, p. 94). 63 GA 11, pp. 58-60 (Heidegger 1969, pp. 49-50). 64 Souche-Dagues 1992, p. 247. 65 GW 3, p. 300 (HW, p. 157). 66 GW 3, p. 304 (HW, p. 161). 67 GW 3, p. 95 (HD, p. 109). 68 GW 3, p. 96 (HD, p. 109). 69 GW 3, p. 96 (HD, p. 110). 70 Arendt 1978, vol. 2, p. 179. To be sure, Arendt affirms that “certainly Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte cannot fail to remind us of Hegel’s World Spirit”, but then she adds: “The difference, however, is decisive” (Arendt 1978, vol. 2, pp. 179-180). 71 Löwith 1995, pp. 78-79. 72 Löwith 1995, pp. 71 and 79. 73 Rorty 1989, p. 117. 74 Rorty 1991b, pp. 49 and 70. 75 GW 2, p. 412 (TM, p. 527). 38

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GW 3, p. 230 (HW, p. 71). See GW 3, pp. 308-319 (HW, pp. 167-180). 78 Gadamer 1995, p. 117. 79 GW 3, pp. 321 and 331 (HW, pp. 183 and 194-195). 80 GW 3, p. 285 (HW, p. 139). 81 GW 3, pp. 230-231 (HW, p. 71). 82 GA 5, p. 327 (Heidegger 2002b, p. 246). To be sure, Heidegger then adds: “We do not, however, understand the word ‘eschatology’ […] as the title of a theological or philosophical discipline. We think of the eschatology of being […] from within the history of being” (GA 5, p. 327 [Heidegger 2002b, p. 247]). 83 GA 5, pp. 337-338 (Heidegger 2002b, p. 254). 84 Guignon 1993, p. 24. 85 GW 3, p. 221 (HW, p. 59). 86 Vattimo 1997, p. 3. 87 Caputo 1987, pp. 114-115. 88 GW 10, p. 139 (DDGD, p. 94). 89 This episode is reported by Riccardo Dottori, who was present at the 1970 Heidelberg Seminar during which Heidegger made that objection (see Dottori 1996, p. 201). Gadamer discusses it, and clarifies his particular use of the concept of consciousness, in GW 2, pp. 10-11 and 495-496; and in GW 3, p. 221 (HW, p. 58) – where he writes: “the effective historical consciousness […] has more Being than being conscious; that is, more is historically affected and determined than we are conscious of as having been effected and determined”. 90 “Die ‘hermeneutische Philosophie’ ist die Sache von Gadamer”: see Heidegger’s letter to Pöggeler dated January 5, 1973 (quoted in Pöggeler 1983, p. 395). 91 Palmer 2010, p. 123. This episode is reported by Richard E. Palmer, who was “in a group walking from the Heidelberg University Philosophy Department up to the lecture hall (the Alte Aula) back in July 1965” and said to Heidegger “in German: ‘You must be very proud of your student [Gadamer] and his philosophical hermeneutics’. To which he replied, ‘Perhaps, but do you know his term wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein?’. ‘Of course!’. ‘It is straight out of Dilthey!’. ‘Oh!’. Silence. […] I even asked Gadamer himself about Heidegger’s remark”, Palmer adds, and “Gadamer replied that Heidegger had already expressed to him that he did not like the implications of Gadamer’s use of the term Bewußtsein (consciousness). The term suggested that Gadamer was falling back into thinking about the human subject within a world of objects. Gadamer had apologized to Heidegger and now to me: he did not like the term ‘consciousness’ either – but ‘I could not find a better term!’. My suspicion”, Palmer concludes, “is that Heidegger did not like the way that Gadamer was making deep Geschichte into shallow Historie when he called for a rehabilitation of tradition and history in modern thinking” (Palmer 2010, pp. 122-123), which is obviously of great importance for the specific purposes of the discourse I am trying to develop here. 92 Heidegger’s letter to Stadelmann dated September 1, 1945 (in GA 16, p. 395). 77

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93 Heidegger’s letter to Gadamer dated September 3, 1960 (in Heidegger 20052006, p. 37). 94 On this issue, see Grondin 1997. 95 GA 9, p. 321 (Heidegger 1998, p. 245). 96 See GW 1, pp. 9-47 (TM, pp. 3-42). 97 GA 7, pp. 75, 91-92 and 96 (Heidegger 2003, pp. 90, 103-105 and 108-109). 98 Gadamer 1988, p. 26. 99 Gadamer’s letter to Strauss dated April 5, 1961 (in Gadamer and Strauss 1978, p. 8). 100 Gadamer 1983, p. 264. 101 Kusch 1989, pp. 242-243. 102 GA 9, pp. 313 and 318 (Heidegger 1998, pp. 239 and 243). 103 EE, p. 172. 104 On this last issue, see GW 8, pp. 400-440 (Gadamer 2000a). In this context it is important to mention Günter Figal’s opinion, according to whom Gadamer, in his later works, quite in contrast to the ontological conception he had presented in the third part of Truth and Method, rather opted for a philosophical-anthropological “description of life-world comportment [and] ritual” as “a complex of behavior patterns to which one must become accustomed to be able […] to say that which has meaning in the context of customary behavior” (Figal 2002b, p. 123). 105 See GA 65, pp. 503-508 (Heidegger 1999, pp. 354-357). 106 Von Herrmann 1994, pp. 68 and 57. 107 Young 2001, p. 124. 108 See, above all, GW 1, pp. 48-61 (TM, pp. 37-49). 109 GA 53, p. 19 (Heidegger 1996b, p. 17). 110 GW 1, pp. 48-61 (TM, pp. 37-49). 111 See, for instance, GA 6/1, pp. 74-91 (Heidegger 1981, pp. 77-91). 112 On the Überwindung or Verwindung of aesthetics, see for instance Schrag 1973, Perniola 1985, Gentili 2003b, Sallis 2005, and Cattaneo 2009 (pp. 240-245). 113 On this topic, see for instance Grondin 2000 (pp. 30-32) and Liessmann 2003. 114 Wright 1998, pp. 261 and 263. 115 See, for example, Heidegger 1993b, p. 11. 116 GW 2, p. 505 (Gadamer 1997, p. 37). 117 GW 8, p. 373 (Gadamer 2006, p. 57). 118 GA 5, pp. 364-365 (Heidegger 2002b, p. 275). 119 GW 10, p. 58 (GR, p. 358). On the problematic character of Heidegger’s concept of ontological difference, see also IFO, p. 147 (BP, p. 123). 120 Sallis 2007, p. 55. Similar remarks can be found in Matteucci 2004 (in particular, pp. 133 and 147-148). 121 Sallis 2007, p. 55. 122 Di Cesare 2013, p. 178. 123 See Habermas 1983. 124 Di Cesare 2013, pp. 79-80.

CHAPTER THREE GADAMER’S AND ARENDT’S DIVERGENT APPROPRIATIONS OF KANT: TASTE, SENSUS COMMUNIS, AND JUDGMENT

1. It is a well-known fact that Hannah Arendt and Hans-Georg Gadamer had many things in common from a philosophical and biographical point of view. For example, Arendt and Gadamer grew up philosophically, so to speak, as Heidegger’s pupils in the 1920s. More precisely, it has been noted that they were both students “in Heidegger’s famous 1924 seminar on Plato’s Sophist, in which book 6 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics received extended treatment”1. Hence, it is not by accident that the names of Arendt and Gadamer are usually associated with the wide and complex philosophical movement generally referred to as “neo-Aristotelianism” or “rehabilitation of practical philosophy”. As a matter of fact, both thinkers seem to belong to the “neo-Aristotelian paradigm of practical philosophy”, which has represented in the last decades one of the “leading philosophical paradigms […] for the understanding of agency and its orientation” – Arendt’s “basic conception (Grundintuition)” being describable as a “rehabilitation of praxis”, and Gadamer’s being definable as a “rehabilitation of phronesis”2. Notwithstanding these well-known points of convergence, a closer look at the philosophical and human relations between these two thinkers actually reveals some interesting points of divergence as well. Indeed, although Arendt and Gadamer were both Heidegger’s pupils, they had “only fleeting contact”3 during the 1920s. In addition to this, it is worth noting that there is almost no trace of Arendt in Gadamer’s whole collected works, with the only exception of two brief references to her in the third volume, where she is generically put on the list of those contemporary philosophers who were strongly influenced by Heidegger4. Quite significantly, on her part, Arendt’s famous 1952 letter to her husband laments the “pseudo-intellectualism”, the “shamefully low […]

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level of instruction”, and the “sectarian, cliquish […] general atmosphere” of the University of Heidelberg (where she had just delivered a lecture, and where Gadamer taught philosophy since 1949), mentioning that she was happy not to have “anything to do with it”5. In light of this, one might also note that there is almost no trace of Gadamer in the long correspondence between Arendt and Heidegger, with the only exception of a letter dated February 15, 1972, in which the author of Being and Time recommends her to “read Gadamer’s Hegel studies and the third volume of his Short Essays”6. On this basis, Jean Grondin underscores that, “in spite of their otherwise striking philosophical affinities, evidenced by their Heideggerian heritage and their important contribution to the rehabilitation of practical philosophy”, there was “never much mutual respect between Gadamer and Arendt”7. Generally speaking, from a philosophical point of view both thinkers had indeed a critical view of the modern age, seen as an epoch characterized by increasing subjectivism and individualism, loss of common sense, and restriction of human reason to mere instrumental rationality or calculating thinking. What Arendt and Gadamer criticized was above all the modern attempt to apply those methods typical of the natural sciences to the understanding of human experience. Accordingly, they sought to rehabilitate practical wisdom and judgment, which, compared to the mathematical-experimental approach of modern science, actually represent a different kind of knowledge. However, while Gadamer seemed to aim at rescuing the significance of a broken, interrupted tradition (namely, what he calls “the humanist tradition” in Truth and Method), Arendt appeared quite sceptical towards such “conservative” ideas, and preferred following Heidegger in conceiving the need, in our time, of a radical “overcoming (Überwindung)” or “getting over (Verwindung)” of the Western tradition as such. With regard to this, one notes indeed that “for Arendt the whole tradition of political thought in the West obscured the true nature of politics, just as in Heidegger, ‘substance metaphysics’ eclipsed the authentic understanding of being”8. But Gadamer, on his part, never seemed to accept the later Heidegger’s conception of the history of being, that is, the idea that “metaphysics is in all its forms and historical stages a unique, but perhaps necessary, fate of the West and the presupposition of its planetary dominance”9. As has been noted in previous chapter, on various occasions Gadamer actually expressed his uncertainty about Heidegger’s conception of the language of metaphysics and his vision of the history of metaphysics as the “history of being (Seinsgeschichte)”, i.e. the history of the “forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit)”. “I would not follow Heidegger”, Gadamer thus

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admits, “when he says that only a God can save us. Complete forgetfulness of being cannot be achieved”10. Now, I argue that these basic differences between Arendt’s and Gadamer’s philosophies have wide and profound consequences, which are also relevant for the specific issues at the centre of this chapter. As I said, Arendt and Gadamer share the same fundamental idea that matters of praxis and phronesis are not susceptible to scientific proof. At this point, however, while neo-Aristotelians like Gadamer “rediscover Hegel’s conception of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) and/or move toward a theory of institutions”, Arendt “denies the existence of anything like an ethical community that could provide the basis for the exercise of phronesis”, since the “existing common sense”, according to her, is “rather like the sphere of Heidegger’s ‘Man’, the sphere of inauthentic being”11. As has been noted, “it was in particular Arendt’s experience of Nazi Germany that provided the negative background for her theory of judgment”12. As a matter of fact, what she always looked for, in her writings of the late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, was a sort of “independent human faculty” that would make judgment possible even “in conditions where every moral act [is] illegal and every legal act [is] a crime”13, such as those experienced under totalitarian regimes. Not by chance, Arendt often refers to “the total collapse of all established moral standards in public and private life during the 1930s and 40s”: that is, to “the many things which were still thought to be permanent and vital at the beginning of the century and yet have not lasted”, like “the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong, […] and whose validity was supposed to be self-evident”, until, “without much notice, all this collapsed almost overnight”14. Whereas Gadamer, on his part, when dealing with “the case that there were no single locus of solidarity remaining among human beings”, provocatively asks: “But have we reached that point? Will we ever?”, and then adds: “Rather, I am concerned with the fact that the displacement of human reality never goes so far that no forms of solidarity exist any longer”15. After this short introduction to some general aspects of Arendt’s and Gadamer’s philosophies, let us now turn to our specific subject, i.e. to their divergent interpretations of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and, in particular, of his concepts of taste, common sense and judgment.

2. It is evident that “one of the most enduring contributions of Arendt’s political thought is to be found in her reflections on judgment which were

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to occupy the last years of her life. Together with the theory of action, her unfinished theory of judgment represents her central legacy to twentiethcentury political thought”16. As is well-known, the former theory was presented in a somehow complete or systematic way in The Human Condition (1958), while the latter was to be developed in her later, unfinished masterpiece The Life of the Mind, which was interrupted by her untimely death in 1975 and posthumously published three years later. From this point of view, some interpreters have defined Judging, the third part of The Life of the Mind, as “a necessary fragment”17 in Arendt’s philosophical corpus. Nevertheless, even if we lack final draft of Judging, we fortunately possess the text of the Kant lectures she held at the New School for Social Research in the autumn of 1970. Arendt’s interest in the Kantian conception of judgment did not suddenly arise at the end of her career. Rather, this interest accompanied the development of her thought through the decades, as testified by the fact that “the themes and concerns that Arendt eventually wove into the reflections on judging” already emerged “in her essay Understanding and Politics, published in ‘Partisan Review’ in 1953”18. For our specific purposes, the most relevant writings preceding The Life of the Mind which deal with these issues are probably represented by the 1960 essays The Crisis in Culture and Freedom and Politics. Here, in the attempt to “formulate a definition of freedom that is in harmony with political experience”, Arendt refers to Montesquieu and Kant, as the philosophers who, “as far as political theory and philosophy are concerned, are perhaps the greatest and most profound that the modern age has produced”19. Then, she explicitly stresses the fact that the first part of the Critique of Judgment “is, in reality, a political philosophy”, even though this is “seldom mentioned in works on Kant”20. The same idea is confirmed in The Crisis in Culture, where Arendt hints at the “common element connecting art and politics”, namely that “they both are phenomena of the public world”, and then claims that the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment contains perhaps the greatest and most original aspect of Kant’s political philosophy. […] That the capacity to judge is a specifically political ability in exactly the sense denoted by Kant, namely, the ability to see things not only from one’s point of view but in the perspective of all those who happen to be present; even that judgment may be one of the fundamental abilities of man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient himself in the public realm, in the common world – these are insights that are virtually old as articulated political experience. […] What, however, is quite new and even startlingly new in Kant’s propositions in the Critique of Judgment is that he discovered this phenomenon in all its grandeur

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precisely when he was examining the phenomenon of taste and hence the […] kind of judgments which […] concern merely aesthetic matters21.

Quite interestingly, these issues are also at the core of some of her writings of the 1960s and 70s. In the essay Truth and Politics, for example, Arendt emphasizes the importance of Kant’s discovery, in the Critique of Judgment, of “the capacity for an ‘enlarged mentality’ that enables men to judge” – even though she admits that Kant “did not recognize the political and moral implications of his discovery”22. Later, in her 1971 lecture Thinking and Moral Consideration, she takes into account “the faculty of judging particulars (as Kant discovered it), the ability to say, ‘this is wrong’, ‘this is beautiful’, etc.”: that is, “the faculty to judge particulars without subsuming them under those general rules which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced by other habits and rules”23. Having said this, let us now turn to the abovementioned Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, and briefly analyze Arendt’s account of the concepts of taste, common sense, and judgment. First of all, according to her, “to talk about and inquire into Kant’s political philosophy has its difficulties”, because “he never wrote a political philosophy”24. Yet, since “the topics of the Critique of Judgment [are] of eminent political significance”, in Arendt’s opinion “the best way to find out what he thought about this matter is to turn to his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, where, in discussing the production of artworks in relation to taste, […] he confronts an analogous problem”25. In particular, Arendt notes that taste represents for Kant “the vehicle of the mental faculty of judgment”26, and detects the essence of taste and judgment in the capacity to see things from a wide and impartial perspective. From this point of view, even though the first part of the Critique of Judgment deals only with aesthetic matters, it also bears upon the eminent political question concerning the “enlargement of the mind”, in Arendt’s translation of Kant’s concept of erweiterte Denkungsart. That is, it has to do with impartiality, with “taking the viewpoints of others into account”, and thus with “communicability [which] obviously implies a community of men”27. So, at the end of her lectures Arendt takes directly into account §§ 39-41 of the Critique of Judgment, focusing her attention on the concepts of sensus communis and disinterested judgment, and claiming that in its very special Kantian meaning […] common sense is community sense, sensus communis, as distinguished from sensus privatus. This sensus communis is what judgment appeals to in everyone, and it is this possible appeal that gives judgments their special validity. […] Private conditions

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Chapter Three condition us; imagination and reflection enable us to liberate ourselves from them and to attain that relative impartiality that is the specific virtue of judgment. The less idiosyncratic one’s taste is, the better it can be communicated; communicability is again the touchstone. Impartiality in Kant is called “disinterestedness”, the disinterested delight in the Beautiful. Disinterestedness is actually implied in the very words beautiful and ugly, [and] Kant remarks that the Beautiful teaches us to “love without selfinterest”28.

3. After having quickly surveyed Arendt’s interesting, original, but not at all unproblematic interpretation of Kant, let us now direct our attention to Gadamer’s reading. The first trace of Gadamer’s interest in the Critique of Judgment can be found in a short 1939 essay entitled On Kant’s Foundation of Aesthetics and the Meaning of Art29, which was later excluded from the ten volumes of his collected writings. Here he pays special attention to §§ 16, 17, and 42 of the third Critique, and offers a first analysis of some important Kantian themes of which he will provide a more detailed account in his later writings. So, for example, in the 1958 essay On the Problematic Character of Aesthetic Consciousness Gadamer points out the epoch-making meaning of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Here he accuses Kant of having grounded the aesthetic judgment of taste on a mere subjective principle (namely, the subjectivity of our cognitive faculties), and thus of having reduced the complexity of aesthetic experience to the mere inspiration of genius30. Gadamer also copes with these problems in his 1960 essay The Truth of the Work of Art, first published as an introduction to the Reclam edition of Heidegger’s writing The Origin of the Work of Art. Here he claims that it is necessary to “gain some insight into the prejudices that are present in the concept of a philosophical aesthetics”, or even “to overcome the concept of aesthetics itself”31. Hence, he turns to the Critique of Judgment, which “established the problem of aesthetics in its systematic significance”, and writes: In the subjective universality of the aesthetic judgment of taste, [Kant] discovered the powerful and legitimate claim to independence that the aesthetic judgment (die ästhetische Urteilskraft) can make over against the claims of the understanding and morality. […] What sets the beautiful apart […] manifests itself in a subjective factor: the intensification of the Lebensgefühl [life feeling] through the harmonious correspondence of imagination and understanding. What we experience in beauty – in nature as well as in art – is the total animation and free interplay of all spiritual powers. […] We must acknowledge that this justification of the autonomy

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of art was a great achievement in the age of the Enlightenment […]. Basing aesthetics on the subjectivity of the mind’s powers was, however, the beginning of a dangerous process of subjectification [and] the grounding of aesthetics led inevitably to a radical subjectification in further development of the doctrine of the freedom of the genius from rules32.

For our specific purposes, however, it is probably the first part of Gadamer’s 1960 masterwork, Truth and Method, which is particularly relevant. As a matter of fact, in the first two chapters of the book Gadamer questions the Kantian subjectivization of aesthetics, and focuses his attention on the decline, in the modern age, of the guiding concepts of humanism: namely, the concepts of Bildung, sensus communis, judgment, and taste. It is here, i.e. in the first part of Truth and Method, that Gadamer’s approach to Kant’s third Critique unequivocally emerges: he views these humanistic concepts always taking into consideration the historical changes they have undergone. From this point of view, it is also clear that his analysis of the Critique of Judgment is related to his overall “philosophical perspective” that “can be understood as a defense of humanism”33. According to Gadamer, a long and well-established tradition, spreading from Aristotle and Roman Stoicism to modern thinkers like Vico, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, conceived common sense as the “sense that is acquired through living in the community and is determined by its structures and aims”, as “love of the community or society, natural affection, humanity, obligingness”, namely as “a social virtue”34. In Gadamer’s view, however, “the German philosophy of the age of Kant and Goethe”, which was so influential for “the human sciences’ self-reflection in the nineteenth century”35, narrowed the wide and all-encompassing meaning that the concept of sensus communis previously had36. Thus, he writes: Whereas even today in England and the Romance countries the concept of sensus communis is […] a general civic quality, in Germany the followers of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson did not, even in the eighteenth century, take over the political and social element contained in sensus communis. […] The concept of sensus communis was taken over, but in being emptied of all political content it lost its genuine critical significance. Sensus communis was understood as a purely theoretical faculty: theoretical judgment, parallel to moral consciousness (conscience) and taste. Thus, it was integrated into a scholasticism of the basic faculties37.

Gadamer also notes that the concept of sensus communis, while being “emptied and intellectualized by the German Enlightenment”, was also “closely connected with the concept of judgment”38. More precisely, “the

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meaning of sensus communis” was reduced to that of the judgment of taste, that is, to what “Kant calls […] an aesthetic judgment”39. In addition to this, he also explains that it was “not only a question of narrowing the concept of the sense of community to taste”, but also “of narrowing the concept of taste itself”40. Given these assumptions, Gadamer draws attention on the decisive importance of Kant’s second and third Critiques, which actually represent “a turning point”, “the end of a tradition but also the beginning of a new development”41. So, for example, he argues that, if the idea of “an ethics of good taste” (that is, the idea that, in a certain sense, “all moral decisions require taste”) “admittedly sounds strange to our ears”42, it is precisely because we have been and still are deeply influenced by the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgment. As a matter of fact, even though Gadamer obviously does not ignore that Kant actually imagined some possible connections between the moral and aesthetic dimensions, he nevertheless emphasizes the fact that Kant’s greatest “achievement in moral philosophy” was to purify “ethics from all aesthetics and feelings”43. To be sure, Gadamer’s interpretation of the Critique of Judgment is not entirely critical. As has been correctly noted, on the hand he acknowledges that “Kant’s great achievement […] is to have gathered” the guiding concepts of humanism together, “and thought them systematically insofar as he demonstrated how aesthetic judgment is defined precisely by these notions”44. On the other hand, however, Gadamer criticizes Kant, because he “does not do justice to the experience of the work of art insofar as he radically subjectivizes and isolates it”45. So, in the end, I think that Gadamer’s fundamental critique of the Kantian “transcendental justification of aesthetic judgment” concerns the fact that restricting “the idea of taste to an area in which, as special principle of judgment, it could claim independent validity”, gave birth to an epoch-making and “radical subjectivization”46 of our experience with art. Consequently, Gadamer also accuses Kant of having deprived the concepts of taste, judgment, and common sense of their intrinsic moral and political significance. By saying so, however, he gives an account of Kant’s philosophy that, in a sense, is precisely the opposite of Hannah Arendt’s reading.

4. Generally speaking, it seems that both Arendt and Gadamer share the basic idea that judgment facilitates agreement, understanding, mutual respect, or the “fusion of horizons”. On the basis of these remarks, I thus think that Gadamer would have probably agreed with Arendt’s concept of

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judgment as “the most political of man’s mental abilities”47, i.e. as “the capacity to anticipate what others will think on some public matter and try to see why they think as they do and also to see whether in their place one would think, or have to think, as they do”48. Nonetheless, I think that he would have surely disagreed with her claim that judgment was “in terms of discovery the late-comer of our mental abilities”49. For Arendt, indeed, before Kant’s third Critique appeared, this faculty “had been unnoticed by philosophers except in the field of aesthetics”50, while Gadamer thinks that concepts like taste, judgment, and common sense previously possessed a “basic moral sense”, which was “totally excluded”51 precisely by Kant. In other words, Kant is praised by Arendt for having politicized some basic aesthetic concepts, but he is criticized by Gadamer for having depoliticized and aestheticized those same concepts! In general, Arendt affirms that taste, “not beginning with Kant but ever since Gracián”, had been “elevated to […] the vehicle of the mental faculty of judgment”: namely, to the ability of establishing whether something “can be judged to be right or wrong, important or irrelevant, beautiful or ugly”52. Gadamer, in contrast, clearly distinguishes the preKantian notion of taste from Kant’s one, and claims that “when Kant calls taste the true common sense, he is no longer considering the great moral and political tradition of the sensus communis”53. Moreover, he criticizes Kant for having reduced the sensus communis (previously understood as “the sense that founds community”) “to a subjective principle”, namely to the merely “subjective relationship [of] a free play of imagination and understanding”54. Whereas Kant, for Arendt, represents the thinker who had the greatest awareness of the existence of “something nonsubjective in […] matters of taste”: that is, the thinker who discovered “the nonsubjective element [of] intersubjectivity”, and conceived the sensus communis as the “community sense”55. Thus, regardless of the different opinions one may have on this subject, what we know for sure is that Gadamer and Arendt deal with the “very same categories”, but then come to an “evaluation of Kant [that] is the very opposite […]. For Arendt, […] the third Critique reveals an unconscious political genius”, whereas “Gadamer exactly inverts this conclusion”, and poses “a serious challenge to any attempt, along the lines proposed by Arendt, to model a theory of political judgment on the Kantian critique of aesthetic judgment”56. Going into detail, I would also like to point out that the two thinkers focus their main attention on different sections of the Critique of Judgment, something that clearly reflects their different approaches to this work. Gadamer, for example, considers § 42 (On the Intellectual Interest in the Beautiful) as a key section to understand Kant’s entire aesthetics.

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Here we read: “Someone who alone (and without any intention of wanting to communicate his observations to others) considers the beautiful shape of a wildflower, a bird, an insect, etc., in order to marvel at it, […] takes an immediate and certainly intellectual interest in the beauty of nature”57. Namely, an interest which “at least indicates a disposition of the mind that is favorable to the moral feeling”58. Arendt, in contrast, pays special attention to § 41 (On the Empirical Interest in the Beautiful), which she considers the definitive proof substantiating Kant’s interest in communicability, plurality, and sociability59. Here, indeed, Kant writes: “The beautiful interests empirically only in society; and if the drive to society is admitted to be natural to human beings, […] then it cannot fail that taste should also be regarded […] as a means for promoting what is demanded by an inclination natural to everyone”60. That is, for promoting sociability (Geselligkeit). Furthermore, Gadamer is interested in the whole Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, and in Truth and Method he refers to various sections of Kant’s work. Whereas Arendt skips the whole Analytic of the Beautiful, takes directly into account only §§ 39-41, and occasionally quotes from a few other sections of the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments. Finally, it is almost astonishing to note that they never pay attention to the second part of the Analytic of Aesthetic Judgment (namely, the Analytic of the Sublime)61, nor do they take into account the second half of the work, the Critique of Teleological Judgment, which perhaps “sooner than ‘Aesthetic Judgment’ […] ties together the whole of Kantianism”62. As a matter of fact, Arendt constantly underlines that “the Critique of Judgment grows out of the Critique of Taste”63, while Gadamer, on his part, is only interested in the consequences of Kant’s philosophical aesthetics for the philosophy of art64, although he sometimes acknowledges that Kant’s transcendental reflection on taste and judgment “basically […] does not permit a philosophical aesthetics in the sense of a philosophy of art”65. Now, this kind of “disinterest” in the overall structure and contents of Kant’s work is perhaps a sign of the incompleteness of both interpretations. As we have seen, indeed, Gadamer and Arendt seem to reduce the whole Critique of Judgment to just one of its parts (namely, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment), and they both give interesting, original, but not at all unproblematic accounts of taste, judgment and sensus communis. For example, they pay no attention to the subtle distinctions introduced in §§ 20 and 40 of the Critique of Judgment, where Kant explains that common sense (Gemeinsinn; sensus communis) “is essentially different from the common understanding (vom gemeinen Verstande) that is sometimes also called common sense”66, and even distinguishes common sense, i.e. “the

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idea of a communal sense”, from the “common human” or “merely healthy understanding” (gemeiner Menschenverstand; bloß gesunder Verstand), calling the first one sensus communis aestheticus and the second one sensus communis logicus67. Furthermore, in the case of the Kantian notions of subjective universality, common validity, and “claim to the consent of everyone” based on the “subjective universal communicability of the kind of representation in a judgement of taste”68, both Arendt and Gadamer seem to forget that “Kant’s transcendental theory of common sense” is precisely characterized by the fact that “through common sense […] the aesthetic judgment can be intersubjective as well as subjective”69. So, while the former pays attention only to the “hermeneutically situated generality […] of the aesthetic judgment”70, the latter “pushes the subjective moment in Kant’s ‘subjective universality’ into the direction of a ‘private opinion’, thus undervaluing the importance of the universal moment”71. On the basis of all these critical remarks, I think it does not appear surprising that over the years both interpretations have been criticized by several Kant scholars. To be sure, I am neither trying to “accuse” Gadamer and Arendt of having misunderstood Kant’s philosophy (which would be obviously absurd), nor trying to deny the philosophical relevance and the extraordinary Wirkungsgeschichte of their interpretations. Rather, what I am trying to point out are some positive and negative aspects of their readings of Kant, my working hypothesis being that such a comparison somehow confirms the general idea that the history of the reception of Kant’s philosophy “might appear to a rigorous Kantian as the history of productive misunderstandings”72! In short, I think that in Kant’s third Critique the tendency to raise such opposed readings as the ones proposed by Arendt and Gadamer is surely fascinating, and I hope that my analysis of their peculiar and “selective” appropriations of Kant’s aesthetics may highlight an interesting aspect of the Kantian legacy in the twentieth century. Hence, I think we might conclude that, although neither of the two interpretations of the Critique of Judgment is perhaps fully adequate or convincing, Gadamer’s interpretation is probably hermeneutically more careful as for its textual adequacy, while I argue for Arendt’s position being more useful for thinking through other ideas in ethics or politics.

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Notes 1

Villa 1997, p. 205 n. Volpi 1992, pp. 12-13 and 15. 3 Grondin 2003, p. 125. 4 See GW 3, pp. 333 and 369. I think it is also worth mentioning that Gadamer, in 1962, wrote a short review of Arendt’s 1958 masterpiece The Human Condition, published in Germany in 1960 under the title Vita Activa oder vom tätigen Leben (see Gadamer 1962). 5 Arendt’s letter to Heinrich Bluecher dated July 18, 1952 (quoted in Ettinger 1995, p. 95). 6 Arendt and Heidegger 2004, p. 191. 7 Grondin 2003, p. 457 n. 8 Hinchman 2006, p. 22. 9 GA 7, p. 75 (Heidegger 2003, p. 90). 10 Gadamer 1988, p. 26. Quite significantly, with regard to this particular aspect, some interpreters have wondered whether Arendt “slavishly follow[s] in the master’s footsteps, jettisoning only his reactionary politics and cultural sensibility”, or whether she uses “Heidegger violently, twisting his thought in directions he would neither have recognized nor endorsed, overcoming her teacher in a manner similar to the creative appropriations of such other Heidegger students as Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Herbert Marcuse” (Villa 2006, p. 44 [my emphasis]). 11 Wellmer 2006, p. 218. 12 Wellmer 2006, p. 219 (my emphasis). 13 Arendt 1964, p. 187. 14 Arendt 1994, pp. 742 and 740. 15 Gadamer 1983, p. 264. On this topic, see also Gadamer’s interview with Claus Grossner entitled Sensus communis gegen Technokratie (Gadamer 1971). 16 Passerin D’Entrevès 2000, p. 245. 17 Nordmann 1994, p. 108. 18 Beiner 1982, pp. 94-95. According to Beiner, “surveying Arendt’s work as a whole, we can see that she offers not one but two theories of judgment”, “two distinct conceptions of judgment”: namely, one “from the point of view of the vita activa”, and the other one “from the point of view of the life of the mind” (Beiner 1982, pp. 91-92). According to other interpreters, however, if “it is quite plausible” and even “textually demonstrable […] to speak of not one, but two theories of judgment in Arendt”, it might also be argued that “Arendt’s emphasis on independent or autonomous judgment, while perhaps more pronounced in the later writings, in fact underlies both phases”, so that there is no “fundamental tension in Arendt’s thought about judgment” (Villa 1999, pp. 12-13 and 20-21). 19 Arendt 1961a, pp. 205-206. 20 Arendt 1961a, p. 207. 21 Arendt 1961b, pp. 218-221. 22 Arendt 1968, p. 241. 2

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Arendt 1971, p. 446. Arendt 1982, p. 7. To be sure, Arendt acknowledges that Kant wrote a “few essays that are usually connected under [the] rubric” of political philosophy, but she openly claims that they actually are not relevant writings, and that “Kant became aware of the political […] rather late in life, when he no longer had either the strength or the time to work out his own philosophy on this particular matter” (Arendt 1982, pp. 31 and 9). 25 Arendt 1982, pp. 14 and 61. 26 Arendt 1982, p. 64. Arendt refers here to § 50 of the Critique of Judgment, where Kant writes: “For beautiful art, therefore, imagination, understanding, spirit and taste (Einbildungskraft, Verstand, Geist und Geschmack) are required”, and then adds in a footnote: “The first three faculties first achieve their unification through the fourth” (Kant 2000, p. 197 and n). 27 Arendt 1982, pp. 42-43 and 40. 28 Arendt 1982, pp. 72-73. 29 See Gadamer 1939. 30 GW 8, pp. 9 and 11-13. 31 GW 3, p. 253 (HW, p. 100). 32 GW 3, pp. 253-254 (HW, pp. 100-101). 33 Grondin 1997, p. 161. 34 GW 1, pp. 28 and 30 (TM, pp. 20 and 22). On this topic, see for instance Hance 1997 and Verene 1997. 35 GW 1, p. 32 (TM, p. 24). 36 It seems to me that Gadamer’s view has been recently contradicted, among others, by Jennifer Dobe’s interpretation of Kant (although she never makes explicit reference to Gadamer). According to her, Kant conceived indeed the power of reflective judgment “as the common sense”, and “his conception bears a strong resemblance to that of Aristotle, who views it as a unitary sense faculty. […] In addition to Aristotle, Kant’s complete view also draws from the Roman tradition, even as he emphatically distinguishes it from the ‘common human understanding’ (der gemeine Menschenverstand), by linking the common sense to society and sociability” (Dobe 2010, p. 48). 37 GW 1, p. 32 (TM, p. 24). 38 GW 1, p. 35 (TM, p. 27). 39 GW 1, p. 37 (TM, p. 28). 40 GW 1, p. 40 (TM, p. 31). In other words, while “a concept such as taste” in the eighteenth century still had “moral and social, as well as aesthetic, resonances”, according to Gadamer “Kant concentrates exclusively on the latter” (Weinsheimer 1985, p. 79). 41 GW 1, p. 46 (TM, p. 36). This does not mean, however, that Gadamer underestimates the extraordinary relevance of Kant’s first Critique, which he emphatically defines as the beginning of a new epoch in world-history. On this topic, see GW 4, pp. 336-348 (Gadamer 1985). 42 GW 1, pp. 45-46 (TM, pp. 35-36). 24

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43 GW 1, p. 46 (TM, p. 36). It is a well-known fact that the question concerning the relation between aesthetics and morality is probably one of the most complex in the Critique of Judgment. Some interpreters, for example, have observed that such a question is discussed in at least “three different places” in the third Critique, namely in the General Remark following § 29, then in § 42, and finally in §§ 59-60 (Crawford 2001, pp. 62-63). According to others, apart from the Analytic of the Sublime which is entirely concerned with the question of “the moral importance of contemplation of the sublime”, there are “two sections of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” (namely, §§ 42 and 59) that disclose a “relationship of the beautiful to the moral” (McCloskey 1987, pp. 90 and 95). Yet other interpreters, however, have claimed that there are “at least six specific connections between aesthetics and ethics” in the Critique of Judgment (Guyer 2006, p. 324), as mainly testified by §§ 17, 29, 30, 42, 51, 59 and 60. In fact, “each of [the] forms of aesthetic experience” – namely, “the experience of beauty”, that “of the sublime”, and finally “the experience of fine art” – “has a distinctive connection to morality, so we can only appreciate the full range of the links that Kant draws between aesthetics and morality once we have recognized that Kant does not reduce all aesthetic experience to a single model” (Guyer 2006, p. 312). 44 Schmidt 2007, p. 31. 45 Schmidt 2007, p. 31. In other words, even though Gadamer recognizes “the great significance of taste’s claim to subjective universality”, which “grounds the uniqueness and autonomy of the aesthetic”, he also stresses the fact that “grounding the autonomy of the aesthetic on subjective universality implies, […] as Kant’s successors inferred, that art is essentially a matter of subjective experience” (Weinsheimer 1998, p. 265). On this topic, see also Velkely 1981 and Gjesdaal 2005. 46 GW 1, pp. 46-47 (TM, p. 36). 47 Arendt 1978, vol. 1, p. 192. In Gadamer’s view, indeed, law, ethics, and politics are connected with “the relationship between the universal and the particular”, i.e. the application of “something universal to a particular situation”, but not in the sense that we already have knowledge “and then apply it to specific situations” (GW 1, pp. 317 and 322 [TM, pp. 310 and 315]). That is to say, not in the sense of Kant’s determinant judgment, which simply subsumes the individual case under a universal category; rather, what is required here is the capacity “to determine what the concrete situation asks”, and to do “the right thing in a particular situation – i.e. seeing what is right within the situation and grasping it”, which is actually something similar to taste and reflective judgment, both belonging to “the realm of that which grasps, in the individual object, the universal under which it is to be subsumed. […] Thus taste is in no way limited to what is beautiful in nature and art, […] but embraces the whole realm of morality and manners. Even moral concepts are never given as a whole or determined in a normatively univocal way. […] Judgment is necessary in order to make a correct evaluation of the concrete instance” (GW 1, pp. 318, 322 and 43-44 [TM, pp. 311, 314 and 34]). 48 Kateb 1994, p. 777. 49 Arendt 1978, vol. 1, p. 111.

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McCarthy 1978, p. 243. GW 1, p. 38 (TM, p. 29). 52 Arendt 1982, pp. 64 and 67. 53 GW 1, p. 49 (TM, p. 38). 54 GW 1, pp. 26 and 49 (TM, pp. 19 and 38). 55 Arendt 1982, pp. 67 and 71. 56 Beiner 1983, pp. 21-25 and 12. 57 Kant 2000, pp. 178-179 (my emphasis). 58 Kant 2000, p. 178. 59 See Arendt 1982, p. 73. 60 Kant 2000, pp. 176-177. Quite significantly, Arendt’s quotation from the third Critique is: “the Beautiful […] ‘interests only in society’” (Arendt 1982, p. 73). But in this way she omits the adverb “empirically (empirisch)”, which is actually of decisive importance to understand Kant’s conception. Moreover, Arendt does not pay attention to what Kant says at the end of that same section: “However, this interest, attached to the beautiful indirectly, through an inclination to society, and thus empirically, is of no importance for us here, for we must find that importance only in what may be related to the judgement of taste a priori, even if only indirectly. […] This much can certainly be said about the empirical interest in objects of taste and in taste itself, namely, that […] the interest in the beautiful, if it is grounded on this, could afford only a very ambiguous transition from the agreeable to the good” (Kant 2000, pp. 177-178). 61 Gadamer, indeed, admits in a footnote that “the analysis of the sublime in its compulsory functioning would have been particularly important” in order to provide a more comprehensive account of the Critique of Judgment (GW 1, p. 57n [TM, p. 94n]). 62 Riley 1987, p. 383. 63 Arendt 1982, p. 68. Arendt, indeed, always claims that the “links between its two parts are weak”, and that “the Critique’s second part […] is so different from the first that the book’s lack of unity has always provoked comment” (Arendt 1982, pp. 12-13). Sometimes she even identifies the critique of judgment with the critique of taste, saying that it was “the phenomenon of taste […] that actually led Kant to produce his Critique of Judgment”: something which, in her opinion, is proved by the fact that, “as late as 1787, he still called it a Critique of Taste” (Arendt 1982, p. 66). By saying so, however, Arendt pays no attention to the long and complex genesis of the third Critique. As is well-known, indeed, Kant’s interest in “the principles of feeling, taste, and power of judgment” was already testified by his letter to Herz dated February 21, 1772 (see Kant 1999, p. 132). Nevertheless, he explicitly refers to the first draft of a Critique of Taste only fifteen years later, in the famous letters to Reinhold dated December 28 and 31, 1787, where he announces the discovery of “a new sort of a priori principles” (Kant 1999, p. 272). To be precise, until March 1788 Kant still calls his new work Critique of Taste (Letter to Reinhold dated March 7, 1788: see Kant 1999, p. 278), but between March 1788 and May 1789 a decisive enlargement of the original project seems to occur. So, in the letters to Reinhold and Herz respectively dated 51

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May 12 and 26, 1789, he finally speaks of a “Critique of Judgment (a part of which is the Critique of Taste)” (see Kant 1999, p. 302; see also Kant 1999, p. 311). 64 On the historical and systematic-conceptual difference (or at least non-identity) between philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of art, from Kant and Hegel onwards, see the remarkable observations of Figal 2015, § 3. 65 GW 1, p. 61 (TM, p. 49). For this reason, in a later essay Gadamer admits that, in Truth and Method, he provided only a partial and one-sided account of Kant’s aesthetics (see GW 8, pp. 201-202). 66 Kant 2000, p. 122. 67 Kant 2000, pp. 173 and 175n. I owe these insights into the complexity of Kant’s concept of common sense to Menegoni 2008, pp. 100-105. 68 Kant 2000, pp. 101 and 103. 69 Makkreel 1990, p. 157 (my emphasis). 70 Flynn 1988, p. 135. 71 Höffe 1983, p. 266. 72 Höffe 1983, p. 281 (my emphasis).

CHAPTER FOUR GADAMER’S HERMENEUTICAL AESTHETICS OF TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC*

The question concerning tragedy and the tragic undoubtedly belongs to the fundamental questions that have characterized the history of Western philosophy of art. After all, “the oldest surviving treatise [of aesthetics] of any significant length” is “Aristotle’s Poetics”, which, “apart from a general introduction, contains only a theory of tragedy”1. It is also wellknown that tragedy and the tragic have been an object of great interest and concern for many of the most significant philosophers and art theorists of the modern and contemporary ages, from Lessing and Schiller up to such present-day thinkers such as Girard and Nussbaum2. More precisely, following Peter Szondi’s insight, one might say that “since Aristotle, there has been a poetics of tragedy”, while “only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic. […] Begun by Schelling in a thoroughly nonprogrammatic fashion, the philosophy of the tragic runs through the Idealist and post-Idealist periods, always assuming a new form”3. Gadamer surely belongs to the main representatives of twentiethcentury continental thought, and his hermeneutical aesthetics undoubtedly represents, in turn, one of the most considerable and substantial aspects of his entire philosophy. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the great importance of art and aesthetic experience in Gadamer’s thought, at least one part of this thought, namely his conception of tragedy and the tragic, has actually received little attention by interpreters and scholars of his philosophical hermeneutics4. As a matter of fact, the research contributions on this aspect of Gadamer’s philosophy are quite rare and sporadic, contrasting sharply with Gadamer’s own explicit interest in tragedy and the tragic in at least two relevant sections of Truth and Method (namely, those on the example of the tragic and the concept of hermeneutical experience), as well as in some essays later gathered in his Gesammelte Werke. In this chapter, I take up the issue of Gadamer’s conception of tragedy and the tragic. In the first part of the chapter I analyze the role played by the tragic in Gadamer’s concept of the structure of human experience.

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Then, I turn to the portion of Truth and Method specifically devoted to the example of tragedy, where the latter is shown to be a model for Gadamer’s understanding of aesthetic experience in general. On this basis, and by adopting a comparative perspective that takes other authors’ contributions into account, the last part of the chapter ultimately explains why Gadamer’s theory of tragedy represents a highly promising answer to the longstanding question concerning the origins of Greek tragedy.

1. When looking back at his 1960 masterpiece Truth and Method, Gadamer claimed on various occasions that “the section on experience takes on a systematic and key position in [his] investigation”5, and went so far as to define the section on the concept of experience as “the centrepiece of the whole book”6. For Gadamer, in order to do justice to our non-methodical understanding – which, although “not concerned primarily with amassing verified knowledge, such as would satisfy the methodological idea of science”, is still “concerned with knowledge and truth” – it is necessary “to take the concept of experience more broadly”7 than modern philosophy actually did. The decisive importance of the concept of experience gains confirmation through several distinguished scholars of philosophical hermeneutics, according to whom this section represents “the centre of the investigation […] in Gadamer’s vast and many-sided philosophical work”8, and even “the highest result of Truth and Method as a whole”9. Nonetheless, as Gerald L. Bruns correctly observed, this section of Truth and Method still remains “pretty much unread”10, and this holds particularly true if one thinks of the role played by tragedy and the tragic in it. Thus, providing an in-depth examination of this particular aspect is especially useful in achieving a better grasp of Gadamer’s thought concerning experience. In the section on the concept of experience and the essence of the hermeneutical experience, Gadamer begins by observing that, strangely enough, “the concept of experience”, notwithstanding its wide diffusion and its everyday usage, is “one of the most obscure we have”11. This situation, in his view, has a precise and easily graspable cause, consisting in the fact that the concept of experience “plays an important role in the natural sciences in the logic of induction”; accordingly, ever since the seventeenth century this concept “has been subjected to an epistemological schematization” that “truncates its original meaning”12. From this point of view, in Gadamer’s opinion, “the main deficiency in theory of experience hitherto […] is that it is entirely oriented toward science”13. Gadamer also

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expresses this idea by saying that the concept of experience, in the modern age, has been fundamentally (but erroneously) reduced to that of the natural sciences’ experiment. As he confirmed more than thirty years after the publication of Truth and Method, experience is the least well known concept in philosophy as a whole, and this is because the so-called sciences of experience took the experiment as their startingpoint and made it a paradigm for experience. These sciences only grant space to an experience if they can obtain from it methodically guaranteed answers to questions. But on the whole, our life is not like this. Our lives are not lived according to scientifically guaranteed programs and secure from crises; rather, we have to undergo our experiences ourselves14.

On this basis, it is clear that Gadamer’s account of experience will not let itself be guided by what he calls the scientific model: a model that attempts to “purify” experience by means of methodical procedures, and to “objectify” it until it no longer contains any hermeneutical, i.e. historical, practical and life-worldly elements. In order to revise the notion of experience that is currently taken for granted, and in order to show that experience contains aspects other than those grasped by scientific experiment, Gadamer turns to three great figures of the Western philosophical and literary tradition: Aristotle, Hegel and Aeschylus. Without entering into details regarding Gadamer’s interpretations of these three authors, one should note that he pays attention only to particular features of their works: namely, those features that assist in giving an account of what genuine experience is. This is the case, in particular, with Aristotle’s concepts of induction and experience, Hegel’s dialectical theory of experience as a reversal of consciousness, and Aeschylus’ idea that “wisdom comes through suffering” as expressed in the Hymn to Zeus of the Agamemnon tragedy15. In short, what Gadamer derives from the perspectives disclosed by these authors are three basic features of human experience: its openness and unpredictability (Aristotle), its dialectical negativity (Hegel), and its radical finiteness (Aeschylus). It is here, then, that Gadamer’s reference to Greek tragedy arises, as he claims that if we need a witness for this specific “element in the nature of experience, the best is Aeschylus”, who actually “found the formula – or, rather, recognized its metaphysical significance as expressing the inner historicality of experience – of ‘learning through suffering’ (pathei mathos)”16. As has been noted, it is indeed Aeschylus, even more than Aristotle and Hegel, who exemplifies in the best way the hermeneutical concept of experience17. In fact, what is at stake here is “far more than the insight that through being injured we become smarter”18. Rather,

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“Aeschylus is showing us our finitude. In our experience we bring nothing to a close; we are constantly learning new things from our experience”: “this I call die Unabschließbarkeit aller Erfahrung [the interminability of all experience]”19. Hence the pathei mathos formula indicates, in general, that “what a man has to learn through suffering is not this or that particular thing, but insight into the limitations of humanity”, and it is precisely this kind of insight – which is “ultimately a religious insight”, concerning “the absoluteness of the barrier that separates man from the divine” – “that gave birth to Greek tragedy”20. Gadamer thus concludes that experience, in its very essence, “is experience of human finitude. […] Experience teaches us to acknowledge the real. […] Real experience is that whereby man becomes aware of his finiteness”21. Experiencing the insurmountable character of certain questions somehow constitutes the tragic side of “the logic of question and answer”22 (which, in Gadamer’s view, represents one of the basic features of our life experience as such), namely the tragic side of the human condition, its constitutive and inescapable ambiguity and dramatic power, or, to use Gerald L. Bruns’ fitting expression, “the tragedy of hermeneutical experience”23. As Bruns further describes it from a Gadamerian angle, “experience is always of limits and refusal”, i.e. it “always entails an ‘epistemological crisis’ that calls for the reinterpretation of our situation, of ourselves […]. Hence the relevance of tragedy”, which is precisely “that which does away with everything except ‘what is’. This is, so to speak, the key to its philosophical, or at all events critical, nature as a hermeneutics of the inescapable”; on this basis one might conclude that “hermeneutical experience always entails the event of exposure that belongs to tragedy”24. Given all this, it is hardly surprising to read, in an essay written soon after Truth and Method, that the real significance of Greek tragedy (Gadamer specifically refers here to Sophocles’ Oedipus) “lies in the fact that [it] provides an exemplary illustration of the ambiguities of fate that hang over every one of us. […] The ambiguity of poetic language”, and especially of the language of tragedy, answers “to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value”25. Hence “the traumatic experience of the tragic” basically represents “an act of identification, a deep and disturbing encounter with ourselves”, that at the same time “overcomes us”26. At this point, one might expect Gadamer to undertake a serious and detailed analysis of Greek tragedians’ and especially of Aeschylus’ work. This, however, does not occur in Truth and Method. Indeed, after having outlined the structure of experience in general, Gadamer suddenly turns to what he means by “hermeneutical experience”, and begins his analysis

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with the somehow surprising claim that this kind of experience “is concerned with tradition. This is what is to be experienced”27. The reason why this equation “hermeneutical experience = encounter with tradition” may appear surprising to the reader of Truth and Method is because, once one arrives at the end of the first part of this section, one would expect Gadamer to turn to a phenomenology of the life-world and of prescientific experience. In fact, as we read at the very beginning of the book, the hermeneutical problem “is not a problem specific to the methodology of the human sciences alone”28. Hence, when he suddenly turns to the understanding of tradition, claiming that hermeneutics is only “concerned with understanding texts”29 and that “historically effected consciousness” is basically limited to the “hermeneutical activity […] of the philologist as well as of the historian”30, this may appear as an unjustified restriction of the whole realm of problems concerning non-methodical experience. However, Gadamer later recognized these limitations or restrictions of the universal significance of hermeneutics and, regarding his reduction of hermeneutical experience to the aspects of historical tradition and textual interpretation in Truth and Method, claimed: “The problem is really universal. The hermeneutical question, as I have characterized it, is not restricted to the areas from which I began in my own investigations”31. .

2. Returning now to the question concerning the influence of Greek tragic thought on the construction of Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory of experience, it bears underscoring that, apart from two brief references to the role of hope and memory in Aeschylus’ Prometheus32, his only reference to Aeschylus in Truth and Method consists of the quotation from Agamemnon: “learning through suffering”, pathei mathos. Yet notwithstanding such a reservedness in Gadamer’s explicit references to Greek tragedians, the latter’s centrality for his concept of experience remains clear and undeniable. First of all, one should note that while Gadamer praises Aristotle’s and Hegel’s contributions to a theory of experience, and also criticizes them for some aspects that do not fit with his own concept of experience33, with regard to Aeschylus he instead seems to have an exclusively positive assessment, i.e. he praises the pathei-mathos maxim as showing the real significance of our finitude. One can note, furthermore34, that such an interesting but perhaps all-too-brief reference to Aeschylus might be broadened and complemented by taking into account Gadamer’s interpretation of another key-figure of Greek

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tragedy, namely the character of Prometheus in the homonymous Aeschylean play. Sixteen years before Truth and Method appeared, Gadamer delivered a lecture entitled Prometheus and the Tragedy of Culture, which was published in 1946 and later included in the ninth volume of his collected works. After briefly sketching the origins of the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days35, Gadamer turns to Aeschylus’ own version of the story, which conferred a new spirit on the myth and “presented the figure of Prometheus in the light of the tragedy of culture”36. In Gadamer’s view, Prometheus perfectly embodies an essential feature of the human experience of life: its being constitutively suspended between openness to possibility on the one hand (a form of hope and faith in the future), and an awareness of death as our inescapable and insurmountable limit on the other. Gadamer goes so far as to speak of a “tragic contradiction lying at the heart of human culture as such”, and thus considers Prometheus as “the mythical reflection of the human cultural act”37. One of the most important aspects of Gadamer’s overall hermeneutical concept of experience, then, is actually contained in the tragic nature of experience. The conclusion concerning experience in Truth and Method is that “experience itself can never be science”, and that the “structure of the hermeneutical experience […] totally contradicts the idea of scientific methodology”38. Nonetheless, experience “also has its own rigor”39, and the basic hermeneutical phenomena, i.e. understanding and interpretation, are “concerned with knowledge and with truth”40. Hence what Gadamer highlights in regard to this issue is the difference between the scientific ideal of full objectivity and the hermeneutical awareness of the fundamental belonging of the knowing subject to the object of knowledge. In the end, hermeneutical experience proves to be synonymous with nonscientific experience in all its vastness and variety, and “the problem of hermeneutics” is considered by Gadamer “to be one of a general theory of historicity, facticity, the lifeworld, and dialogue”41. Hermeneutical consciousness has to do indeed not only with historical tradition, as it appeared in Truth and Method, but rather with “the whole of our experience”, with “our own universal and human experience of life”: “what I am describing”, Gadamer asserts, “is the mode of the whole human experience of the world. I call this experience hermeneutical for the process we are describing is repeated continually throughout our familiar experiences”42. Now, it is evident that aesthetic experience, inasmuch as it is a nonscientific and unmethodical experience, represents for Gadamer one of the

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most eminent forms of hermeneutical experience. “In the experience of art”, after all, “we see a genuine experience induced by the work, which does not leave him who has it unchanged”43. Thus, it is not by accident that Truth and Method precisely begins with an investigation into the real meaning and value of our experience of art. In the first part of his masterpiece, after having criticized the Kantian subjectivization of aesthetics and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century predominance of the aesthetics of genius and the concept of Erlebnis, Gadamer focuses on two theoretical aims (both of which are closely related to each other): the retrieval of artistic truth and the outline of an ontology of artworks. It is precisely in the context of this latter aim that his interpretation of Greek tragedy arises, since tragic drama serves as an excellent model both for Gadamer’s overall conception of the basic structure of aesthetic experience as an event (Geschehen)44, and for the ontological significance of artworks, which he famously defines through the concept of “play” or “game” (Spiel). As has been recently noted, “play is a central notion in Gadamer’s philosophy”, particularly as “a defining characteristic of art and language. […] All art and artistry in some way draws upon play”, the exemplary case being “a drama presentation, that is, a ‘play’”, in which “the audience is essential to the performance”45. For Gadamer, the decisive point is that it is always “the game that is played”, i.e. it is quite “irrelevant whether or not there is a subject who plays it. […] The movement of play as such has, as it were, no substrate”46. This also holds true with regard to the relationship of players to play. As he explains: “Play fulfils its purpose only if the player loses himself in play. […] For play has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play. […] The players are not the subjects of play; instead play merely reaches presentation through the players”47. Hence Gadamer emphatically speaks of “the primacy of play over the consciousness of the player”, and explains that “this is the point at which the mode of being of play becomes significant” for the attempt of clarifying “the mode of being of the work of art”, namely “the object of [his] examination”48 in the first part of Truth and Method.

3. Now, this definition of play seems to refer to at least two different yet closely connected aspects. On the one hand, play comes “to its true consummation in being art”, i.e. in what Gadamer calls “transformation into structure”: “only through this change does play achieve ideality” and become “permanent. It has the character of a work, of an ergon and not

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only of energeia”49. Gadamer uses the term Verwandlung to clarify this peculiar kind of transformation, and carefully distinguishes it from Veränderung (alteration), since the latter is analogous to the Greek term alloiosis and means that “what is altered also remains the same and is maintained”, whereas the former concept entails that “something is suddenly and as a whole something else, that this other transformed thing that it has become is its true being, in comparison with which its earlier being is nil”50. As in the case of art, “what no longer exists is the players” (poets, musicians, etc.), since their individual identities do not “continue to exist for anybody”, and what now exists is “only what they are playing”51. This way art makes it possible for us to transform “the everyday world not into an aesthetic dream but another perspective on reality”52 (one that is essential, instead of merely accidental). Above all, transformation into structure entails that “what no longer exists is the world in which we live as our own”53. Our basic and most common experience with art, namely that of overcoming the reality of our everyday life, thus implies that what we now experience is actually “the lasting and the true [that] represents itself in the play of art”: for this reason, Gadamer defines transformation into structure as “a transformation into the true”, or even a “transformation back into true being”54. It is precisely this process that, according to him, gives to the play of art the character of an event. On the other hand, however, this process of transformation into structure relies on another presupposition, namely on the fact that the validity of every kind of play is basically due to something like an Abgrenzung: a separation, delimitation or “setting off [of] the playing field”55. Gadamer refers to Huizinga’s influential account of play in his 1938 masterpiece Homo ludens, where the Dutch historian claimed that a play, a performance or a rite “is played or performed within a playground that is literally ‘staked out’, and played moreover as a feast, i.e. in mirth and freedom. A sacred space, a temporarily real world of its own, has been expressly hedged off for it”56. Huizinga also underlined how this peculiar feature tightly connects play with “making music”, which actually “bears at the outset all the formal characteristics of play proper: the activity begins and ends within strict limits of time and place, is repeatable, consists essentially in order, rhythm, alternation, transports audience and performers alike out of ‘ordinary’ life”57. According to Gadamer, if we follow Huizinga’s original insights, we realize that such an Abgrenzung is akin to “setting off sacred precints”, and above all is aimed at setting off “the sphere of play as a closed world, one without transition and mediation”58 to the world of everyday life.

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Despite this, however, Gadamer thinks that a basic feature of such a “closed world” is precisely that of demanding a certain essential openness. Indeed, the fact that play “holds the player in its spell, draws him into play” – that is, it “presents the man who plays it with [the] task” to give himself entirely to the play, and thus transforms his usual attitude and “the aims of his purposive behavior”59 – means that the mode of being of play is that of a self-presentation (Selbstdarstellung). “First and foremost, play is self-presentation”, and hence it also involves “the player’s achieving, as it were, his own self-presentation by playing – i.e. presenting – something”60. On the one hand, this means that all play and presentation are essentially representations of something for someone, while, on the other hand, this someone is always included, in principle, in the representation as such. It is precisely this aspect that constitutes the peculiar openness of play that determines, at the same time, its perfect closure: play and representation form a closed universe that nevertheless aims to include within its borders everything that stands outside. Gadamer identifies an exemplary model of this particular feature in religious acts, rites and processions, which form a kind of representation or spectacle that is “more than a spectacle, since its real meaning is to embrace the whole religious community”61. This makes it possible for us to see exactly what both religious rites and theatre plays, i.e. both sacred and profane representations, have in common. The former “is a genuine representation for the community”, while the latter “is a kind of playing that, by its nature, calls for an audience”, and however much both of them represent “a world wholly closed within itself”, in the end they are both “open toward the spectator”, whose presence alone allows them to achieve their “whole significance”62. This kind of “representing for someone” thus brings play to its fulfilment: “it is not really the absence of a fourth wall that turns the play into a show. Rather, openness toward the spectator is part of the closedness of the play”63. Thus, according to Gadamer, there is a profound affinity between religious rites and works of art, and a correct interpretation of this affinity would make it possible to grasp the real ontological meaning of art. Yet this last point demands more clarity. As a matter of fact, Gadamer does not conceive rituals and sacred representations as mere “antecedents” of artworks and artistic events, as if they were the object of a specific kind of scientific knowledge (for instance, ethno-anthropology or the history of religions). Despite the undisputed importance of such sciences, Gadamer remains adamant that the questions at stake here are genuinely aesthetic, or, more precisely, questions of a hermeneutical aesthetics, given his well-known claim that hermeneutics should be understood “in so comprehensive a sense as to

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embrace the whole sphere of art and its complex of questions. […] Aesthetics has to be absorbed into hermeneutics”64. All this becomes quite clear if we attend to the difference between Verwandlung and Veränderung, transformation and alteration. Moreover, since we are dealing with a real transformation and not a mere alteration, it is not possible to follow the whole process “step by step”, that is, to understand each moment of the transformation in light of its proximity to the origin (the religious ritual) or to the final result (the creation of the work of art). Such an incremental analysis would mean that each moment of the process was somehow autonomous, whereas the concept of Verwandlung ins Gebilde precisely entails that the final result, i.e. the structure into which the whole process finally turns, takes the place of what stood at the origin of the process itself. According to Gadamer, it is thus impossible to analyse the various steps that finally lead to the structuring of a Gebilde; instead, the Gebilde is what it is because it reminds us of the origin that has now been transfigured and transformed into it. As I will try to show, Gadamer’s attempt to provide a hermeneutical account of tragedy and the tragic on the basis of the aforementioned concepts of Spiel, Geschehen and Verwandlung ins Gebilde represents one of the most meaningful and original contemporary contributions to the history of ancient tragedy and its ritualistic and religious origins.

4. According to some scholars, the persistence of this latter question concerning the ritualistic and religious origins of Greek tragedy is largely due to the influence of Nietzsche’s concept of tragedy and his interpretation of the Dionysian, rather than stemming from accurate historical documentation. One can point in particular to the influence of Nietzsche’s thought on twentieth-century German and French culture, but also to the impact of Frazer’s scapegoat theory on contemporary anthropology. Both theories were able to address a question which, despite many important concepts and approaches, had basically remained unanswered: the question as to why ancient tragedy, despite it being peculiar to Greek humanity and culture, has since acquired an almost universal meaning and thereby also achieved the status of an exemplary model for Christianity and modern civilization. By advancing the hypothesis of the religious origins of tragedy, one was able to locate the latter’s meaning in its capacity for posing radical questions about humankind’s position in the world and its relationship to transcendence

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and impenetrable divine decrees. More precisely, this relationship was already assumed as the paradigm of the conflict between freedom and fate in the age of German idealism and, in particular, in Schelling’s 1795-96 Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism65. “Dogmatism is passivity in the face of an objective absolute, while Greek tragedy is one of the finest examples of resistance to it. Still, for the vast majority of humanity, the ideals of Greek tragedy – the simultaneous acceptance of and battle with fate – would lead only to despair. […] Therefore, we must embrace freedom”66. This is the essence of Schelling’s early thoughts on tragedy. On his view, however, human freedom will only achieve its real significance by struggling against the threat of objective powers aimed at annihilating it, and – in a paradoxical and tragic way – by giving in to the overwhelming power of fate. During this desperate struggle in the name of human freedom, mortal creatures like us must necessarily surrender; yet at the same time it is precisely through this endured punishment that human freedom is ultimately acknowledged and honoured, as freedom for Schelling only manifests itself in the struggle against the insurmountable objectivity of fate and necessity. Greek tragedy embodies this tragic paradox – which transgresses human reason and can only be represented by artistic means – in an exemplary way. If tragedy is to be understood essentially as the representation of conflict and struggle, then it must bear within itself the sign of duplicity. Once we accept such hypotheses, the idea that Greek tragedy was put under the sign of Dionysus from the very beginning – the groundbreaking idea that Nietzsche developed in his writings and lecture courses of the early 1870s – immediately appears convincing and coherent. Nevertheless, such distinguished scholars as Jean-Pierre Vernant raised strong objections against this seemingly unquestionable interpretation. To be sure, tragic competitions were held every year on the occasion of the Great Dionysia, and this might lead one to consider the worship of Dionysus to be the religious precedent and immediate reference of Greek tragedy. According to Vernant, however, all recent attempts to verify and certify this presumed original connection between religious cult and tragic representation are doomed to failure due to the dearth of any verifiable facts or documents – with the relevant exception of the tragedies themselves which, apart from Euripides’ Bacchae, do not bear any trace of Dionysus. Whatever the origin of tragedy, in Vernant’s view, what matters for us is the fact that tragedy became what it is, e.g. what we currently know as tragedy, by outdistancing its very origin in order to assume the fictive character that belongs to an autonomous aesthetic form. Against those who support the hypothesis of a religious origin, Vernant objects

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that the documents upon which these scholars ground their hypothesis actually seem to demonstrate something else. Indeed, the fact that the Athenians, as recalled by Plutarch (Quaestiones conviviales, I, I, 5, 615 a), while watching the first stage plays of Phrynicus and Aeschylus asked in astonishment: “tis pros Dionyson” (“What has it to do with Dionysus?”) or, according to The Suda, explicitly claimed: “ouden pros ton Dionyson” (“This has nothing to do with Dionysus!”) – this fact, according to Vernant, does not prove in any way the Dionysian origin of tragedy, but rather confirms the latter’s extraneousness to Dionysian rituals. In fact, “with very few exceptions, one being Euripides’ Bacchae, all the tragedies take as their subject heroic legends with which epic had made every Greek familiar and that, strictly speaking, had nothing to do with Dionysus”67. And, for Vernant, even Aristotle’s famous statement that tragedy “began in improvisations”, “originating with the authors of the dithyramb”68 (the hymn sung in honour of Dionysus), was not referred to the supposed Dionysian origin of tragedy, but rather indicated “the series of transformations that, at every level, led tragedy, if not to turn its back upon, at least to break with its ‘dithyrambic’ origins in order to become something else”69. According to Vernant, even the circumstances that seem to confirm the connection of ancient tragedy to Dionysus – for example, the fact that theatres were consecrated to Dionysus and included temples in which an image of Dionysus was kept; the fact that the thymele, i.e. the altar dedicated to Dionysus, stood at the centre of the orchestra; and finally the fact that the priests of Dionysus always held a place of honour on the theatre’s flight of steps – are merely testimonies of the institutional framework within which tragic competitions took place, but had no bearing on the characters and contents of tragedies. The same holds true for the use of the tragic mask, which for Vernant does not refer to the half-brutish world of the Satyrs, but is linked instead to specific aesthetic functions of the play, i.e. it was meant to “meet the precise requirements of the dramatic spectacle”70. It is clear that Vernant interprets both the origin and the development of tragedy through a basic aesthetic concept that he also extends to philology: the concept of form. Indeed, tragedy presents itself as a form, or a structure, that acquires its peculiar autonomy by differentiating and emancipating itself from all pre- and non-aesthetic aspects. As a consequence, these latter aspects enter the definition of tragedy only in contradistinction to the typically aesthetic aspect. Thus, for Vernant tragedy becomes an exemplary model for the autonomy of the work of art. Among the main features of the tragic form, he highlights its being “an invention”, and thereby underscores “its innovatory aspects, the

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discontinuities and breaks with both religious practices and more ancient poetic forms”71. The universal significance that one commonly ascribes to tragedy thus lies in the universality of its form or structure; a structure that disclaims, so to speak, the fact of being the result of a historical process72. It is precisely due to this type of universality that the tragic form could be filled with new historical content, thus becoming – according to Vernant – the space in which the new values of the Greek polis were discussed and affirmed. That is, “tragedy could be said to be a manifestation of the city turning itself into theatre”, in which “the legendary hero, extolled in epic, becomes a subject of debate now that he is transferred to the theatrical stage. And when the hero is thus publicly brought into question, in fifthcentury Athens, it is the individual Greek in the audience who discovers himself to be a problem, in and through the presentation of the tragic drama”73. For Vernant, this is the very essence of tragedy, and from this point of view tragedy actually represents an almost insuperable model of political art. Every attempt to associate Greek tragedy with its presumed origin and, in particular, with the Dionysian cult, desecrates its formal, aesthetic autonomy, the autonomy deriving from the fact that the result of a developmental process actually matters more than its origin. Vernant thus labels as “ideological” that line of interpretation grounded in Euripides’ Bacchae and aimed at completely resolving tragedy into Dionysianism. He ascribes this central nineteenth- and twentieth-century line of interpretation to such scholars as E. Rohde, M.P. Nilsson, J.E. Harrison, W.F. Otto, E.R. Dodds and H. Jeanmaire74, and claims against them that “whatever it is that we call Dionysism […] is not a piece of factual evidence: It is a product of the history of religions produced, from Nietzsche onward, in our modern age”75. In Vernant’s view, it is wrong and illegitimate to reduce Greek tragedy to its religious origins and to completely dissolve it into them. Vernant is probably right in his claim. Inasmuch as it is essentially form, tragedy has surely turned into something other than what it originally was. At the same time, however, the process of its progressively gleaned aesthetic autonomy is understandable only on the assumption of its original heteronomy and by contrast with this. If the ritual is the theatre of the theophania, as W.F. Otto claimed, then what happens in it is a real event, and this, in turn, can be connected with the definition of the artwork itself as an event. This obviously leads in the direction of the mutual relationship between aesthetics and hermeneutics. As a matter of fact, what we have just described is precisely the path that Gadamer pursued in his attempt to formulate a theory of tragedy. In any case, it seems that Vernant – whose fundamental contribution to this debate is probably the

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essay The God of Tragic Fiction, first published in 1981, more than twenty years after Truth and Method – completely ignored Gadamer’s contribution. A theory like Vernant’s, that interprets tragedy as pure form seems to correspond, to some extent, to that typical tendency in modern philosophy of art which Gadamer criticizes through the concepts of aesthetic consciousness and aesthetic differentiation. His concepts of play and transformation into structure seem to align perfectly with the real historical development of the tragic form, whose origins had already been forgotten by the time of Aristotle (the first historian of Greek tragedy, who consequently could only conjecture about such origins and make general hypotheses). Further, it is not by accident that tragedy embodies for Gadamer the fulfilment of the ontological significance of art; there is another element that prompts us to establish a connection between religion and aesthetics, namely the nature of theorein. The theoros, he who observes and contemplates something, was in origin someone who took part in “a delegation to a festival”, someone who participated “in the solemn act through his presence at it […]. Thus watching something [was] a genuine mode of participating”, and theoria meant “a true participation, not something active but something passive (pathos), namely being totally involved in and carried away by what one sees”76. On this basis, Gadamer argues that it is possible to understand “the religious background of the Greek concept of reason”77. And it is precisely this background that was transfigured and transformed in the tragic form, and that allows us to define tragedy as an exemplary model for the definition of the artwork as such. When dealing with this topic, Gadamer explicitly refers to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, which “may serve to exemplify the structure of aesthetic being as a whole” because Aristotle actually “made a decisive contribution to the problem of the aesthetic: in defining tragedy he included its effect on the spectator”78, that is, katharsis. It is the spectator, indeed, that is responsible for fulfilling the artistic event, and the experience of catharsis, reinterpreted by Gadamer from a hermeneutical-ontological point of view, reflects the capacity of play to shape the spectator’s identity. In other words, by passing through the annihilating moments of eleos and phobos – which Gadamer translates as Jammer and Schauer, “misery” and “shuddering”, instead of the more common Mitleid and Furcht, “pity” and “fear”, in order to emphasize the fact that these are “modes of ekstasis, being outside oneself”79 – the spectators experience a peculiar way of asserting themselves over such annihilating powers. “Tragic pensiveness” thus affirms “a metaphysical order of being that is true for all”, and

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reflects “a kind of affirmation, a return to ourselves”, a participation “in the communion of being present”80 which, for Gadamer, perfectly exemplifies his own concept of aesthetic non-differentiation. The final result of “the tragic affirmation is an insight that the spectator has by virtue of the continuity of meaning in which he places himself”81. For all of these reasons, Greek tragedy has an exemplary significance in the context of Gadamer’s hermeneutical aesthetics, and he defines “the tragic” as “a concept fundamental to the aesthetic”82. The fact that the tragic is “a phenomenon basic to the aesthetic in general”83 means that the materials and contents that the tragedians re-elaborate, reinterpret and reinvent (thus conferring on them a new, specifically aesthetic identity) are not properly understandable as fully autonomous and separated from the tragic form itself. In other words, it is almost impossible to study such materials and contents apart from the way the great tragedians re-elaborated them: they can only be studied by taking into account the new identity they assumed once they were reinterpreted in the tragedies. Thus tragedy is not reducible to its origin, that is, the undeniable religious origin of tragedy does not completely “absorb” or “resolve” it: what is to be understood is the development into a new form that the original contents have undergone, their transformation into a new structure84. I would like to prove the tenability of this conception by referring to the three main elements of Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy, namely eleos, phobos and katharsis85, which originally belonged to the Greek religious tradition. The fact that Aristotle stressed the need of purifying oneself from “pity” may sound striking to our modern ears that will perhaps perceive in this feeling, namely pity or compassion, an echo of the Christian neologism compassio, which stood for participating to the representations of the passio Christi86. However, as Max Kommerell observed, “compassion, for Aristotle, was something bad, a sort of evil”: the Greeks, indeed, could not think of compassion as a “moral feeling”, but rather “as an emotion characterized by a disturbing power, which threatens the human soul as to its steadiness, and is therefore drawn close to fear”87. If we understand the affinity of compassion and fear in Aristotle’s thought, we are then able to comprehend the real meaning of the emphasis he put upon the need of purifying oneself from eleos. In fact, eleos represents a threat to the Greek ideal of the autarkeia, i.e. the soul’s self-sufficiency and perfection. Even Aristotle shaped his rational image of the human being with an eye to this ideal, which, in turn, was in competition with the traditional religious image of the human being88. As to the second of the three elements, phobos, it is especially the character of Tiresias in The Bacchae who reminds us of the religious origin of this

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feeling, when he states: “Sometimes an army is in full gear, standing in order, / and they’re struck by a panic (phobos) before a weapon is touched. / That madness (mania) comes from Dionysus too”89. Finally, as to the moment of katharsis, its religious significance stems from its original denotation of the process of expelling what disturbs the human soul, in order to maintain the latter in an ecstatic disposition favourable to the encounter with the divine. As Jacob Bernays showed, before Aristotle spoke of catharsis within a specifically aesthetic discourse (also relying, by the way, on the medical and pathological meaning of the term), the notion of katharsis had a religious history and application. Thus, for instance, Plato used this word to assert the continuity between religious traditions and philosophy, as he urged philosophers to embrace that peculiar kind of purification (katharsis) which was prescribed by an ancient doctrine, namely the so-called Orphic mysteries, and which aimed at separating “the soul as far as possible from the body and accustom it to gather itself and collect itself out of every part of the body and to dwell by itself as far as it can both now and in the future, freed, as it were, from the bonds of the body”90. Indeed, “it is only those who practice philosophy in the right way”, according to Plato, “who always most want to free the soul”, and so this kind of purification, consisting in the “release and separation of the soul from the body”, can be defined as a real “preoccupation of the philosophers”91. If all of these quotations and observations demonstrate that the main elements of tragic representation originally belonged to religious traditions, it is nevertheless once again the Aristotelian theory of tragedy that reveals the latter’s real nature, inasmuch as it confers a new aesthetic identity on those moments of Greek religious life. In other words, the prehistory of the tragic is completely moulded by the history of tragedy. As we examine and study the origins of Greek tragedy, the latter’s aesthetic form plays the role of an a priori which, for its part, demands to be constantly interpreted with an eye to the unknown depth of the “abyss” from which tragedy stemmed. While Vernant’s proposal ultimately leads one to deny, or at least empty, the significance of the religious origin of tragedy in order to affirm the latter’s aesthetic autonomy, Gadamer’s historical-interpretive perspective, grounded on the idea of a peculiar kind of hermeneutical discipline of questioning and answering92, makes it possible for us to recognize the religious origin of tragedy without at the same time being forced to deny tragedy’s autonomous aesthetic value. Instead, we are able to confirm the latter precisely by means of comparison and dialectical mediation with its opposite, heteronomous element.

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Notes *

Sections 1-2 of this chapter were written by me, while sections 3-4 were written by Prof. Carlo Gentili. I would like to thank Prof. Gentili for permission to republish here his part of the text. 1 Tatarkiewicz 1970, p. 138. 2 For a general overview and an analysis of the main modern and contemporary philosophical interpretations of tragedy and the tragic, see Gentili and Garelli 2010, pp. 111-246. 3 Szondi 2002, p. 1. 4 This dearth of attention finds expression, for example, in the absence of any entry for “tragedy” or “the tragic” in C. Lawn’s and N. Keane’s Gadamer Dictionary (2011), as well as in the fact that almost no contribution in the many collections dedicated to Gadamer in the last decades specifically deals with the role of tragedy and the tragic in his hermeneutics. 5 GW 2, p. 445 (TM, p. XXXII). 6 HÄP, p. 32 (GC, p. 53). 7 GW 1, pp. 1 and 103 (TM, pp. XX and 84). 8 Bianco 1992, p. 110. 9 Barbariü 2007, p. 213. 10 Bruns 1992, p. 183. 11 GW 1, p. 352 (TM, p. 341). 12 GW 1, p. 352 (TM, p. 341). 13 GW 1, p. 352 (TM, pp. 341-342). 14 HÄP, p. 32 (GC, p. 53). 15 See Aeschylus, Agamemnon, vv. 176-178 and 250-251 (1959, pp. 40 and 42): “Zeus, who guided men to think, / who has laid it down that wisdom / comes alone through suffering. […] Justice so moves that those only learn / who suffer”. 16 GW 1, p. 362 (TM, pp. 350-351). 17 See Di Cesare 2013, p. 103. 18 HÄP, p. 32 (GC, p. 53). 19 HÄP, p. 32 (GC, p. 53). 20 GW 1, p. 363 (TM, p. 351). On the peculiar, close relationship that Gadamer identifies between aesthetic and religious experience, see GW 8, pp. 143-155 (RB, pp. 140-153). 21 GW 1, p. 363 (TM, p. 351). 22 See GW 1, pp. 375-384 (TM, pp. 363-371). It is no coincidence that the section on the logic of question and answer is placed at the end of the chapter on the analysis of historically effected consciousness that also contains the section on the concept of experience and the essence of hermeneutic experience, and Gadamer is very clear in claiming both that “historically effected consciousness […] has the structure of experience” (GW 1, p. 352 [TM, p. 341]), as well as that “the openness essential to experience”, for its part, “has the structure of a question” (GW 1, p. 368 [TM, p. 356]).

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See Bruns 1992, pp. 179-194. Other interesting contributions on Gadamer’s concept of tragedy and the tragic are those provided by Bottani 2008 (pp. 367-390) and Tate 2008. 24 Bruns 1992, pp. 183-187. 25 GW 8, p. 23 (RB, p. 71). 26 GW 8, p. 84 (RB, p. 121). 27 GW 1, p. 363 (TM, p. 352). 28 GW 1, p. 1 (TM, p. XX). 29 GW 1, p. 389 (TM, p. 387). 30 GW 1, p. 346 (TM, p. 336). 31 GW 2, p. 226 (PH, p. 10). 32 See GW 1, pp. 355 and 357 (TM, pp. 344-345). 33 To be precise, Gadamer charges both Aristotle and Hegel of having conceived experience only in regard to knowledge and only in terms of its result, thus ignoring the fact that experience is basically a process that “has its proper fulfilment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself” (GW 1, p. 361 [TM, p. 350]). 34 I follow here a brilliant insight into Gadamer’s interpretation of Greek tragedy provided by Bonanni 2004, pp. 31-46. 35 See GW 9, pp. 152-154. 36 GW 9, p. 155. 37 GW 9, pp. 157-158. 38 GW 1, pp. 361 and 467 (TM, pp. 349 and 459). 39 GW 1, p. 469 (TM, p. 461). 40 GW 1, p. 1 (TM, p. XX). 41 Grondin 1995, p. 31. 42 GW 2, pp. 228 and 230 (PH, pp. 13 and 15). 43 GW 1, p. 106 (TM, p. 86). 44 “The experience of art should not be falsified by being turned into a possession of aesthetic culture”, Gadamer explains, “for all encounter with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part of this event. This is what must be emphasized against aesthetic consciousness and its neutralization of the question of truth” (GW 1, p. 105 [TM, p. 85]). 45 Lawn and Keane 2011, pp. 109-110. 46 GW 1, p. 109 (TM, p. 104). 47 GW 1, pp. 107-108 (TM, p. 103). 48 GW 1, pp. 110 and 108 (TM, pp. 105 and 103). In fact, just like we cannot find an answer to the question concerning the nature of play itself “if we look for it in the player’s subjective reflection”, since “the mode of being of play does not allow the player to behave toward play as if toward an object”, so “the work of art is not an object that stands over against a subject for itself”, and then even “the ‘subject’ of the experience of art […] is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself” (GW 1, p. 108 [TM, p. 103]). On the persistent tendency, ever since the Greeks, and then especially with Kant and Schiller, “to link the

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experience of art with the concept of play”, see also GW 8, pp. 89-93 (RB, pp. 127-130). 49 GW 1, p. 116 (TM, p. 110). 50 GW 1, p. 116 (TM, pp. 110-111). 51 GW 1, p. 117 (TM, p. 111). 52 Lawn and Keane 2011, p. 142. 53 GW 1, p. 117 (TM, p. 111). 54 GW 1, pp. 117-118 (TM, pp. 111-112). 55 GW 1, p. 113 (TM, p. 107). 56 Huizinga 1955, p. 14. 57 Huizinga 1955, p. 42. In this context, it is worthy of notice, I think, that Horkheimer and Adorno actually express a similar idea: “Art has in common with magic the postulation of a special, self-contained sphere removed from the context of profane existence. Within it special laws prevail. Just as the sorcerer begins the ceremony by marking out from all its surroundings the place in which the sacred forces are to come into play, each work of art is closed off from reality by its own circumference” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, pp. 13-14). 58 GW 1, p. 113 (TM, p. 107). 59 GW 1, pp. 112-113 (TM, pp. 106-107). 60 GW 1, p. 114 (TM, p. 108). 61 GW 1, p. 114 (TM, p. 109). 62 GW 1, p. 114 (TM, p. 109). 63 GW 1, pp. 114-115 (TM, p. 109). With regard to this aspect, one should point out that an analogous “mediation” takes place in the chorus of Attic tragedy, and it is on this basis that Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, finally accepts “the deeper meaning of Schlegel’s concept [of] the chorus [as] the ‘ideal spectator’”, and thus writes: “the audience of Attic tragedy identified itself with the chorus on the orchestra, so that there was fundamentally no opposition between public and chorus; the whole is just one sublime chorus, either of dancing and singing satyrs, or of those who allow themselves to be represented by these satyrs” (Nietzsche 1999, p. 42). 64 GW 1, pp. 168-169 (TM, p. 157). 65 See Schelling 1979. 66 Foster 2009, pp. 117-118. 67 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, pp. 182-183. 68 Aristotle, Poetics, IV, 1449 a 10-11 (1991, vol. 2, p. 2319). 69 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, p. 183. 70 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, p. 183. 71 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, p. 185. 72 From this point of view, Vernant’s conception is reminiscent of Schiller’s famous Mannheim Speech, inasmuch as Vernant’s original interpretation of Greek tragedy seems to present some affinities with Schiller’s concept of beautiful appearance (see Schiller 1993, p. 823). 73 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, pp. 185-186. 74 See Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, p. 384.

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Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988, p. 383. GW 1, pp. 129-130 (TM, p. 122). 77 GW 1, p. 130 (TM, p. 122). Gadamer refers here to Krüger 1963. 78 GW 1, pp. 133-134 (TM, pp. 125-126). 79 GW 1, p. 135 (TM, p. 126). On the different translations of these Greek terms, see Fuhrmann 1973, p. 91 ff. 80 GW 1, pp. 136-137 (TM, pp. 127-128). 81 GW 1, p. 137 (TM, p. 128). 82 GW 1, p. 137 (TM, p. 128). 83 GW 1, p. 134 (TM, p. 125). 84 Incidentally, this also implies that the idea of the Urtragödie – the “music drama” that Nietzsche could only postulate but whose historical existence he could not demonstrate – inevitably requires a comparison with the effective form assumed by the great tragedians’ works (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides). 85 See Aristotle, Poetics, VI, 1449 b 27-28 (1991, vol. 2, p. 2320). 86 Jauss 1984, p. 173. 87 Kommerell 1970, p. 102. 88 See Bernays 1970, pp. 48-49. On Bernays’ interpretation of Greek tragedy and, in particular, his influence on Nietzsche, see Gentili 1996. 89 Euripides, The Bacchae, vv. 303-305 (1999, p. 12). 90 Plato, Phaedo, 67 c-d (1997, p. 58). 91 Plato, Phaedo, 67 d (1997, p. 58). 92 The very last paragraph of Truth and Method presents this idea as the humanistic counterpart, so to speak, to the methodology of the natural sciences: “The fact that in such knowledge [scil. the human sciences] the knower’s own being comes into play certainly shows the limits of method, but not of science. Rather, what the tool of method does not achieve must – and really can – be achieved by a discipline of questioning and answering, a discipline that guarantees truth” (GW 1, p. 494 [TM, p. 484]). 76

CHAPTER FIVE HEIDEGGER AND RORTY: PHILOSOPHY AND/AS POETRY AND LITERATURE

1. The question concerning the relationship between philosophy, poetry and literature has played an important role throughout the entire history of Western philosophy. It is a well-known fact, for example, that Presocratic thinkers expounded their philosophical doctrines by poetic means, i.e. by writing poems conventionally known as On Nature. In particular, let us recall Anaximander’s saying1, whose dark, attractive, and “rather poetical language”2 was underlined by such commentators as Simplicius and Theophrastus (who, in turn, as observed by Heidegger, criticized Anaximander “for speaking more poetically than it [was] necessary”3); or let us recall Parmenides’ poem, whose famous proem contains a mythical narration that, as far as its poetical strength and value are concerned, was even compared by the philologist Werner Jaeger to Hesiod’s Theogony4. In this context, one must obviously mention Plato, who on the one hand condemned the traditional Greek paideia based on the “false stories” that “Homer, Hesiod, and other poets tell us”5, but on the other hand, in writing his dialogical works, proved to have an indisputable poetical talent6. And one must also recall Aristotle’s influential assessment of poetry as even “more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars”7. In any case, it may be assumed that from the origins until the modern age, in general, most thinkers considered philosophy to be something different from poetry and literature, for example something concerning the profound essence of the real rather than mere surface or appearance of things, even arriving sometimes at considering the latter (namely, poetry and literature, and art in general) as a dangerous threat to the rigorous philosophical search for knowledge and truth. It was probably only with

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Romanticism (let us think of such figures as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Byron, Hölderlin etc.) and, above all, with Nietzsche’s provocative and influential thought (emphatically defined by Theodor W. Adorno, for example, as “a true turning point of Western thought”8) that the relation and indeed the intersection between philosophy, poetry and literature acquired a new meaning and significance. As a matter of fact, with such provocative statements as “truth is a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished”9, or “poets lie too much [but] Zarathustra too is a poet”10 and “I am ashamed that I must still be a poet!”11, Nietzsche somehow pushed towards a general rethinking of the entire question concerning philosophy and/as literature. This, in turn, was closely connected in the first half of the twentieth century with the new and unprecedented developments brought by the many avant-garde movements that suddenly arose in all artistic fields, including poetry and literature. So, for example, Maurizio Ferraris has emphasized the important role played by the reprise of the question of écriture in twentieth-century French culture, inasmuch as writing was mostly conceived in that context as an eminently poetic-expressive activity: according to Ferraris, from emphasizing the expressive-aesthetic value of writing in the first half of the century to arriving at the widespread diffusion of textualism in the second half of the century it was just a short step, as testified for example by the reception and fortune of French poststructuralism and deconstructionsim in the United States, of which the literary critics of the so-called Yale School (Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller) may be considered the main representatives12. Among the various consequences of these new developments it may be observed, for example, that throughout the twentieth century many authors (both thinkers and writers13) were led to emphasize the resemblances, rather than the differences, between philosophy and literature, or even the fact that the question concerning the “search for style”14 became a widespread and predominant concern for many philosophers. Meaningful contributions to this and other related topics have indeed been provided by authors belonging to most of the leading currents of contemporary thought, in particular within the so-called continental tradition and its inner ramifications like phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstructionism and Frankfurt-school critical theory. But it is worthy of notice that even a thinker like Wittgenstein, in the very first page of his masterwork Philosophical Investigations, paid attention to the question concerning the

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adequate presentation form in philosophy, and actually advised the reader that he had written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, of which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another. – It was my intention at first to bring all this together in a book whose form I pictured differently at different times. […] After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks […]. And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. […] The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. […] Thus this book is really only an album15.

As has been noted by Arthur C. Danto, philosophy indeed appears as a “singular […] crossbreed of art and science”, and it is hard to “think of a field of writing as fertile as philosophy has been in generating forms of literary expression” if one just reflects upon the fact that the history of Western philosophy has been, among other things, a history of dialogues, lecture notes, fragments, poems, examinations, essays, aphorisms, meditations, discourses, hymns, critiques, letters, summae, encyclopedias, testaments, commentaries, investigations, tractatuses, Vorlesungen, Aufbauen, prolegomena, parerga, pensées, sermons, supplements, confessions, sententiae, inquiries, diaries, outlines, sketches, commonplace books, […] and innumerable forms which have no generic identity or which themselves constitute distinct genres: Holzwege, Grammatologies, Unscientific Postscripts, Genealogies, Natural Histories, Phenomenologies, and whatever the World as Will and Idea may be or the posthumous corpus of Husserl, or the later writings of Derrida, and forgetting the standard sorts of literary forms – e.g., novels, plays, and the like, which philosophers have turned to when gifted those ways16.

Having this in mind, Danto adds, it may even appear as “somewhat surprising that only lately has it seemed imperative to some that philosophy be viewed as literature”17! Now, regardless of the different opinions one may have on this subject (namely, the possibility or impossibility to level, or at least soften, the genre distinction between philosophy and literature18), what we know for sure is that there are perhaps few thinkers in the whole history of Western philosophy who prioritized the relation between philosophy and literature the way Martin Heidegger did19, and that, in turn, Richard Rorty

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represented the most radical, resolute, and consistent interpreter of the philosophy-as-literature (rather than simply philosophy-and-literature) line of thought. It is precisely with some theses of these two important protagonists of twentieth-century philosophy that I am going to deal in this chapter.

2. An interest in art, and in particular in poetry and literature, is clearly present already in Heidegger’s early philosophy. For example, in his early lectures courses20 there are several hints to such authors as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky21, Rilke22, Homer, Vergil, Dante and Goethe23. Moreover, despite the absence of a specific section devoted to artistic activities, it is indeed possible to find in Being and Time a description of “the true aim of ‘poetic’ speech” as “the communication of the existential possibilities of attunement, that is, the disclosing of existence”24. However, it is only in his works following the “turn (Kehre)” that this feature became fully evident in Heidegger’s thought. In fact, since in Being and Time “thinking failed in the adequate saying of [the] turning and did not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics”25, starting from the 1930s Heidegger began to view poetical language as a precious resource for the development of a new kind of non-metaphysical thought. As Hans-Georg Gadamer once put it, it was Hölderlin who “freed a tongue for Heidegger’s thinking”26. From this moment Heidegger thus emphasized the fact that “the togetherness of thinking and poetizing is so intimate that sometimes thinkers excel precisely thanks to the poetic dimension of their thought, while poets actually become what they are, namely real poets, thanks to their nearness to the authentic thought of thinkers”27. According to him, thinking […] goes its ways in the neighborhood of poetry. Poetry and thought, each needs the other in its neighborhood, each in its fashion, when it comes to ultimates. In what region the neighborhood itself has its domain, each of them, thought and poetry, will define differently, but always so that they will find themselves within the same domain28.

The importance of poetry for the development of Heidegger’s philosophy also finds testimony in his own poetical production. This, throughout the years, proceeded together and indeed almost step-by-step with his philosophical production, and has recently been collected in an apposite volume, articulated in four sections (Frühe unveröffentlichte Gedichte, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Gedachtes für das Vermächtnis eines Denkens, and Vereinzeltes), of the complete collection of his

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works29. Finally, I think it is worth mentioning that Heidegger, when dealing with the relevant question of the beginning and end of Western philosophy as such, often pointed out the “double nature” (both philosophical and poetical) of such fundamental figures as Parmenides and Heraclitus, whose “thinking [was] still poetic”30, and also Nietzsche, “the last thinker of Western philosophy, […] the ‘poet’ of Thus Spoke Zarathustra”31.

3. Now, among the contemporary philosophers who paid close attention to this conception one must mention Richard Rorty, “arguably the most controversial American philosopher […] in the second half of the twentieth century”32. As a matter of fact, Rorty’s interest in Heidegger’s philosophy played a decisive role throughout his career, and one of his main philosophical aims was that of “bringing together the upshot of both the Quine-Putnam-Davidson tradition in analytic philosophy of language and the Heidegger-Derrida tradition of post-Nietzschean thought”33. During the 1970s, Rorty calls Heidegger one of “the three most important philosophers of [the twentieth] century”, together with Wittgenstein and Dewey: philosophers who, according to him, first tried “to find a new way of making philosophy ‘foundational’”, but later “came to see [the] earlier effort as self-deceptive”34. Elsewhere, Rorty identifies Heidegger as “the ‘Continental’ author who has had the most influence on [his] philosophy”.35 And at the beginning of the 1980s he even started work on a book about Heidegger36, namely “a book called Heidegger Against the Pragmatists to give an account of how Heidegger managed to see Nietzsche’s quasi pragmatism as dialectically correct […] but nonetheless as a reductio ad absurdum of […] the Western tradition”37. This project however, never came to a conclusion, and so the first part of Rorty’s second volume of collected papers “is made up of four papers on Heidegger” which actually represent “the fruit of an abortive, abandoned attempt to write a book about him”38. At first sight, such an interest in Heidegger might actually appear quite surprising, especially given the latter’s well-known and perennial distrust towards both the “elaboration of logic into logistics”39 that deeply influenced the development of the rigorous analytical approach in which Rorty himself was trained for many years, and pragmatism, which Heidegger considered as a mere form of “Americanism [that] still remains outside the realm of metaphysics”. According to Heidegger, “Americanism” represents indeed “something European. It is that still uncomprehended

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species of the gigantic – the gigantic that is still not properly assembled and still fails to arise from the complete and collected essence of modernity. The American interpretation of Americanism in terms of pragmatism still remains outside the realm of metaphysics”40. However, as we will see, Rorty’s appropriation of some Heideggerian themes can rely at least to some extent on the actual existence of some “pragmatic” features in Heidegger’s thought. But this appropriation of Heidegger’s philosophy is also made possible by Rorty’s transformation of pragmatism itself, i.e. by his attempt to develop a “historicist, antireductionist version of pragmatism”, which is based on the “demythologizing of the natural sciences”, and considers the “poetic activity [as] the most noble of human practices”41. Given these basic assumptions, Rorty is thus legitimated in claiming that “the pragmatist rejects scientism just as Heidegger does”42, and that “both pragmatism and ‘Continental’ philosophy have a common interest in debunking a certain traditional conception of philosophy”43.

4. Quite interestingly, Rorty’s Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger focused, from its very beginning, on the idea that philosophy today should “cease to be an argumentative discipline, and grow closer to poetry”44. This idea was first expressed, although still in a somewhat embryonic way, in Rorty’s introduction to the 1967 influential anthology The Linguistic Turn – where he “envisioned six possibilities for the future of philosophy”; among them “the later Heidegger’s poetic meditation on the problem of being”45 – and was then reaffirmed in most of his successive writings. For our specific purposes, it is probably the 1986 essay Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics which is of particular interest. Here, indeed, Rorty claims that three main conceptions of the aim of philosophizing were developed during the twentieth century, namely a scientistic, a poetic, and a pragmatist-political conception. The second and the third views are to be understood as reactions to the “familiar ‘scientistic’ answer […] to the question of how we should conceive our relation to the Western philosophical tradition” which was “common to Husserl and his positivist opponents”46, and can be respectively associated to the names of Heidegger and Dewey. According to Rorty, “Heidegger turns away from the scientist to the poet”, and so “the Heideggerian thinks that the philosophical tradition needs to be reappropriated by being seen as a series of poetic achievements”47. As Rorty explains yet again in the 1991 essay Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism, Heidegger aims at directing

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our attention to the difference between inquiry and poetry […]. He wants to suggest what a culture might be like in which poetry rather than philosophy-cum-science was the paradigmatic human activity. […] He wants us to see metaphysics as an inauthentic form of poetry, poetry which thinks of itself as antipoetry, a sequence of metaphors whose authors thought of them as escapes from metaphoricity48.

Rorty places Heidegger within the context of a more general tendency to level off genre distinction between philosophy and other kinds of writing. This obviously matches his own view of the relation between philosophy and literature, clearly expressed in the 1978 essay Philosophy as a Kind of Writing, in which philosophy “is delimited, as is any literary genre, not by form or matter, but by a tradition – a family romance involving, e.g., Father Parmenides, honest old Uncle Kant, and bad brother Derrida”49. As I have already said, Rorty is surely not the only thinker who in recent times has paid close attention to the question concerning the interaction of philosophy and literature; however, what we is certain is that he presents the most radical, resolute, and consistent interpretation of the philosophy-as-literature line of thought. In fact, he seems to praise “a general turn against theory and towards narrative”50, and to promote “the idea of a seamless, undifferentiated ‘general text’”, with the consequent reduction of metaphysics to “that genre of literature which attempted to create unique, total, closed vocabularies”51. Rorty indeed hypothesizes “an intellectual life” that “would not make much of the line between ‘philosophy’ and something else, nor try to allot distinctive cultural roles to art, religion, science, and philosophy”52. And it is from this point of view that he declares he agrees “with the late Heidegger” when he says that “the science/poetry/philosophy distinctions we have lived with are outmoded”53. In addition, Rorty sometimes points out the existence of a sort of primacy of literature over philosophy itself, given its greater importance (according to him) in social and political matters. At least since the mid 1980s his chief aim was indeed that of suggesting “the possibility of a liberal utopia: one in which ironism, in the relevant sense, is universal”54. Given these assumptions, Rorty seems to think that literary texts may help us discover “more resourceful ways for describing [ourselves] or altering [our] vocabularies for a variety of purposes”, and thus may give us the chance “to enlarge ourselves by enlarging our sensitivity and our imagination”55. In other words, “the poets and novelists help us become friendlier and more tolerant”, and “expand our range of sympathy” in a way that philosophers cannot do, and this is precisely what constitutes for him literature’s “contributions to moral progress”56. According to Rorty,

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we should pay more attention “to our novelists than to our philosophers or to our poets”, and instead of thinking “that philosophy tells [us] how to read nonphilosophy” we should rather “read philosophical treatises in the same way [we] read poems – in search of excitement and hope”57. For these basic reasons, Rorty sometimes even assigns a primacy to the novel over poetry itself, something which obviously marks a difference between him and Heidegger. So, in the 1989 essay Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens, after appreciating the novelists’ attempts to “substitute […] the appearance-reality distinction” with “a display of diversity of viewpoints, a plurality of descriptions of the same events”58, he explicitly stigmatizes Heidegger because of his preference for lyrical poetry over the novel. According to Rorty, “narrative is, for Heidegger, always a secondrate genre – a tempting but dangerous one”: “theorists like Heidegger” seem to regard “narrative as always a second-best, a propaedeutic to a grasp of something deeper than the visible detail”59. Thus, notwithstanding “Heidegger’s greatest gift”, of being “able to spin a dramatic tale”60 like the Seinsgeschichte (explicitly and ironically defined by Rorty as “a Bildungsroman about a character called ‘Europe’”61), Rorty somehow feels compelled to admit that Heidegger’s favourite genre “is the lyric: his hero is Hölderlin, not Rabelais or Cervantes”62.

5. Now, my aim here is neither to detail the deep philosophical presuppositions underlying Rorty’s thought-provoking and indeed subversive views on the reduction of philosophy to just a literary genre, nor to linger on the general aim underlying his “plausible yet questionable readings of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey and his creative uses of Quine, Goodman, and Sellars”63. Rather, I will try to point out some positive and negative aspects of his interesting, original, but not at all unproblematic, interpretation of Heidegger. Among Rorty’s merits, I think one can surely mention the highlighting of some “pragmatic” features in Heidegger’s philosophy. For example, in the 1974 essay Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey Rorty points out “some obvious points of agreement” between the two philosophers, and cites “their parallel views”64 on several topics. On various occasions he then refers to Heidegger’s well-known criticism of the correspondence theory of truth, which is obviously of great importance to a thinker like Rorty, who claims that pragmatism “consists very largely in the claim that only if we drop the whole idea of ‘correspondence with reality’ can we avoid pseudo-

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problems”65. Rorty indeed interprets “the pars construens of Heidegger’s conception of truth” as a foreshadowing of the anti-representationalist conception of knowledge […]. Anti-representationalism is understood by Rorty as the common feature shared by all pragmatic epistemologies, from Peirce to Davidson, consisting in the refusal of what Dewey defined the “Spectator View of Knowledge” […]. Rorty thus gives credit to Heidegger for having suggested a radical anti-Cartesian view of our being-in-the-world, and that is another reason why, according to Rorty, Heidegger should be included in the great family of pragmatic thinkers: a club in which Heidegger, as is well-known, would never have deigned setting his foot66.

Among the “pragmatic” features of Heidegger’s philosophy one might recall then “the primacy assigned by Heidegger to social praxis over theoretical knowing”67, and Rorty indeed repeatedly points out the “insistence [in] the first Division of Being and Time […] on the priority of the ready-to-hand, the Zuhanden, over the presence-at-hand, the Vorhanden, and on the inseparability of Dasein from its projects and its language”68. An insistence which has also been highlighted by other contemporary pragmatic thinkers, like Robert Brandom69. Finally, it can be said that Rorty shares with Heidegger “a distrust for the search for philosophical principles to ground culture, our lives and practices, in ahistorical standards”: they both believe “in the rootedness of truth, knowledge, and morality in traditions and social practices”, and regard “human language [as] the vehicle through which traditions are carried on, however modified”70. Now, these pragmatic remarks are probably useful in order to grasp some aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy which otherwise could easily escape us. It is thus one of Rorty’s great merits to enable us to read Heidegger in new ways and to understand the enduring relevance of his thought. As Günter Figal put it: A philosopher’s significance, like that of an artist, lies not in his or her originality, but rather and especially in his or her power to adapt and to transform. No one starts from scratch, and no one develops ideas that are simply and solely their own. It is therefore decisive how successfully one makes that which is given and taken over unmistakably one’s own. For this to occur, one must take up questions and problems, methods and concepts, and set them within a new context so that, in a favorable case, they are understood differently, perhaps even better. In this sense, every significant work of philosophy is at the same time both a summation and an opening of new possibilities of thought. Martin Heidegger’s thinking is significant in precisely this sense71.

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Nevertheless, I think it is quite difficult to deny that Rorty’s reading of Heidegger as a forerunner of the philosophy-as-a-kind-of-writing approach is hermeneutically careless, as it does not adhere to Heidegger’s own texts72. To be sure, insofar as he aims at numbering Heidegger among the thinkers who stressed the affinity of philosophy and poetry, rather than that of philosophy and science, Rorty can surely rely upon abundant textual proof73. But when he takes a step further, and claims that “one way to describe what Heidegger does in his later work is to see him as defending the poets against the philosophers”74, I think his interpretation runs the concrete risk of appearing untenable75. Sometimes Rorty tends to forget that Heidegger did not simply give up philosophy’s traditional demand of being “scientific”, but rather set the modern mathematical-experimental idea of science, which according to him “does not think”76, up against the model of a more original and rigorous form of thought: namely, phenomenological ontology77, variously defined in the 1920s as “science of the origin (Ursprungswissenschaft)”78 or “pre-theoretical original science (vortheoretische Urwissenschaft)”79, and yet again conceived in 1963 as “the possibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought”80. So, in the lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology one reads that “phenomenology is not just one philosophical science among others, nor is it the science preparatory to the rest of them; rather, the expression ‘phenomenology’ is the name for the method of scientific philosophy in general. Clarification of the idea of phenomenology is equivalent to exposition of the concept of scientific philosophy”81: philosophy does not relate in a positive manner to some being qua this or that particular being […]. We are able to grasp beings as such, as beings, only if we understand something like being. […] We must understand being so that we may be able to be given over to a world that is […]. We assert now that being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy. […] Philosophy is the theoretical conceptual interpretation of being, of being’s structure and its possibilities. Philosophy is ontological. […] That philosophy is scientific is implied in its very concept. […] Philosophy is the science of being82.

And in the lecture course Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy Heidegger explains that positive sciences are those for which what they deal with, what can become their object and their theme, already lies there. Numbers are already there, spatial relations exist, nature is at hand, language is present,

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and so is literature. All this is positum, it lies there. It is a being; everything uncovered in science is a being. Positive sciences are sciences of beings. […] Accordingly, if philosophy is critical science, such that it is preeminently “critical” in character, then there takes place in philosophy a differentiating in a preeminent sense. But what can be differentiated from beings other than beings? What can we still say of beings? They are, and only beings are. They are; they have Being. From beings and in beings what can be differentiated is Being. This differentiation does not concern beings and beings, but beings and Being. […] To see and to grasp Being in beings, to differentiate Being from beings, is the task of the differentiating science, philosophy. Its theme is Being and never beings83.

In addition to this, it must be said that Rorty has the tendency to forget that while Heidegger emphasizes the affinity between philosophy and poetry, he never disregards their differences, as attested in such famous statements as these: “the thinker thinks toward what is un-homelike (das Unheimische), what is not like home, and for him this is not a transitional phase; rather, this is his being at home. The poet’s questioning, on the other hand, is a commemorative questioning that puts the homelike itself into poetry”84; “what is stated poetically, and what is stated in thought, are never identical; but there are times when they are the same – those times when the gulf separating poesy and thinking is a clean and decisive cleft. This can occur when poesy is lofty, and thinking profound”85. To be precise, Rorty surely admits that “Heidegger makes a distinction between poets and thinkers”, but then he adds: “I have never been able to make sense” of this distinction, because “as soon as you try to re-create the Platonic contrast between poetry and philosophy you’re in danger of reifying [them]”86. Evidently, Rorty’s interpretation is partial and incomplete, since he never takes the whole of Heidegger’s thought seriously into consideration, but “endorses only the Heidegger who is interested in language as poetic novelty, the one who offers metanarratives that allow us to see how we may begin to be disenchanted with old mythologies and begin to articulate new languages and narratives”87. It should also be noted how Rorty, when taking Heidegger’s philosophy into account, does not pay attention to the basic distinction between Poesie and Dichtung88 which is actually essential to properly comprehend Heidegger’s thought. According to Heidegger, indeed, thinking is poeticizing – though not in the sense of poesy or song. The thinking of being is the primordial form of poeticizing in which, before everything else, language first becomes language, enters, that is to say, its essence. Thinking says what the truth of being dictates. Thinking is the ur-poetry

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I would also like to point out that Heidegger, despite all his criticism of the adaequatio intellectus et rei conception, never lost interest in the question of truth, and actually developed his whole conception of the relation between philosophy and poetry while keeping in mind the concept of truth. According to him, indeed, the original truth-event – conceived in close connection with the notions of Lichtung and Ereignis – takes place “in the founding of Being (poetry)” and “in the grounding of Beyng (thinking)”90. This suggests that Heidegger would strongly disagree with Rorty’s “minimalism about truth”, namely with his idea that there is “less to say about truth than philosophers had usually believed”, because truth simply is not “a goal of inquiry”91. One last element I would like to highlight concerns the connection of the abovementioned issues with the one concerning the end of the Western philosophical tradition, a connection which Rorty views as another point of supposedly relevant affinity with Heidegger. Now, I think that Rorty’s interest in the ideas of Überwindung and Verwindung of metaphysics, and in the question concerning “the end of philosophy and the task of thinking”92, mostly relies on the fact that what he calls “a ‘poeticized’ culture” should be at the same time “a ‘post-metaphysical’ culture”: namely, “one in which the imperative that is common to religion and metaphysics – to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one’s thinking […] – has dried up and blown away”93. But I also think it is clear that the two thinkers, despite their common philosophical aim of demetaphysicizing the Western culture, would probably disagree on almost everything concerning the history of metaphysics, which Rorty simply interprets as a global, “endless attempt to make the intellect sovereign over the imagination”94, while Heidegger emphatically defines it as the “concealed ground of our historical Dasein”95, the happening that grounds history, that “runs through Western history from the inception onward” and that “the eyes of all historians will never reach, but which nevertheless happens”96. In the end, on the basis of all these critical remarks, I thus think we could agree with Charles B. Guignon’s quite ironic demand to save Heidegger from Rorty!97 More precisely, I guess it should be recognized, on the one hand, that many aspects of Heidegger’s thought are perhaps “illuminated by the pragmatic interpretations”98, which bestows a general philosophical importance on Rorty’s “misreading” of Heidegger; but, on

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the other hand, that “there is a great deal that is wanting in this line of interpretation”99.

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Notes 1

“[…] the arkhe is neither water nor any of the other things called elements, but some other nature which is apeiron, out of which come to be all the heavens and the worlds in them. The things that are perish into the things from which they come to be, according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice in accordance with the ordering of time” (Fragment DK 12 B1 [quoted in Curd 2011, pp. 16-17]). 2 Fragment DK 12 A9 (quoted in Curd 2011, p. 17). 3 GA 5, p. 330 (Heidegger 2002b, p. 249). 4 Jaeger 1947, p. 93. I borrow this remark from Gentili 2003a, pp. 16-17. 5 Plato, The Republic, II, 377 d (1997, p. 1016). 6 On this particular issue, see among others Gadamer’s essay Plato and the Poets (GW 5, pp. 187-211 [DD, pp. 39-71]). 7 Aristotle, Poetics, IX, 1451 b 5-7 (1991, vol. 2, p. 2323). 8 Adorno 1990, p. 23. 9 Nietzsche 2006a, p. 117. 10 Nietzsche 2006b, p. 99. 11 Nietzsche 2006b, p. 157. On the complex and often paradoxical Nietzschean conception of the relationship between philosophy and poetry, see among others Fornari 2009 and Zavatta 2009. 12 See Ferraris 1986, in particular pp. 47-67 and 103-132. 13 On the fascinating intersection between the philosophers’ work and that of poets and novelists see, for example, Givone 2005 (in particular, pp. 131-203). In general, on the relationship between philosophy and literature, see for instance Rée 1987, Gabriel and Schildknecht 1990, Lang 1990, Lloyd 1993, Gentili et al. 2003, D’Angelo 2012, Figal 2014. 14 I borrow this expression from the title of the second chapter of Gillian Rose’s accurate introduction to the thought of Theodor W. Adorno (see Rose 1978, pp. 11-26). 15 Wittgenstein 1986, p. VII (my emphasis). 16 Danto 2005, pp. 135 and 141. 17 Danto 2005, pp. 135-136. 18 Strong criticism against the very idea of dissolving once and for all the genre distinction between philosophy and literature (as at least some representatives of deconstructionism, textualism and pragmatism actually attempted to) has been raised, for example, by Habermas 1992 and 1998. 19 In claiming this, I am obviously and consciously adopting here a very general concept of literature that also includes poetry: namely, a concept which, adopting more specific definitional criteria, does not fully correspond to Heidegger’s own intentions. On the distinction that Heidegger actually made between literature and poetry, understood in turn on the basis of his more fundamental distinction between the written-pronounced word and the silent-listening word, see Aurenque 2011.

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20 I owe much information on Heidegger’s early interest in art and poetry to Rosa Maria Marafioti’s instructive book La questione dell’arte in Heidegger (see Marafioti 2008, in particular pp. 11-68). 21 See GA 58, p. 85. 22 See GA 24, pp. 244-246 (Heidegger 1988, pp. 172-173). 23 See GA 34, p. 64 (Heidegger 2002a, p. 47). 24 GA 2, p. 216 (Heidegger 1996a, p. 152). 25 GA 9, p. 328 (Heidegger 1998, p. 250). 26 GW 3, p. 328 (HW, p. 190). 27 GA 50, p. 95. 28 GA 12, p. 163 (Heidegger 1982, pp. 69-70). 29 See GA 81. An accurate analysis of Heidegger’s poetical work and its intersection with his own philosophy has been provided by Cassinari 2000 (in particular, pp. 13-26, 37-54, 79-145, 163-199 and 215-274). 30 GA 40, p. 153 (Heidegger 2000b, p. 154). 31 GA 50, p. 95. 32 Guignon and Hiley 2003, p. 1. 33 Rorty 1991b, p. 5. 34 Rorty 1980, p. 5. 35 Rorty 2006, p. 38. 36 See Rorty 1982, p. IX. 37 Rorty 2006, p. 19. 38 Rorty 1991b, p. 1. 39 GA 12, p. 110 (Heidegger 1982, p. 25). See also GA 8, p. 23 (Heidegger 1968, p. 21): “[Knowledge] concerning logic has been made scientifically fruitful only quite recently, in a special science that calls itself ‘logistics’. It is the most specialized of all specialized sciences. In many places, above all in the AngloSaxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the spirit”. 40 GA 5, p. 112 (Heidegger 2002b, p. 85). Rorty’s comment to this remark, halfway between irony and sobriety, is: “It is unlikely that Heidegger meant that cryptic sentence as a compliment”, and he “probably meant that Americans are so primitive that their understanding of their own technological frenzy does not even take a respectably philosophical form. But one could take Heidegger to be paying pragmatism a compliment. One might read him as saying that America is still, happily, innocent of metaphysics” (Rorty 1990, pp. 1-2)! 41 West 1989, pp. 202-204. 42 Rorty 1991b, p. 18. 43 Rorty 1991a, p. 75. 44 Rorty 1988, p. 34. 45 West 1989, p. 196. 46 Rorty 1991b, p. 9.

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Rorty 1991b, p. 9. Rorty 1991b, pp. 36-37. 49 Rorty 1982, p. 92. 50 Rorty 1989, p. XVI. 51 Rorty 1991b, pp. 87 and 105. 52 Rorty 1991a, p. 76. 53 Rorty 2006, p. 21. 54 Rorty 1989, p. XV. 55 Rorty 2006, p. 124. 56 Rorty 2006, p. 68. 57 Rorty 1998a, p. 137. 58 Rorty 1991b, p. 74. 59 Rorty 1991b, pp. 69 and 80. 60 Rorty 1991b, p. 68. 61 Rorty 1989, p. 117. 62 Rorty 1991b, p. 76. 63 West 1989, p. 203. 64 Rorty 1982, p. 42. 65 Rorty 1991a, p. 132. 66 Picardi 2009, pp. 161-162. 67 Dahlstrom 2001, p. 425. 68 Rorty 1991b, p. 59. “With Okrent”, Rorty explains, “I read Division One of Being and Time as a recapitulation of the standard pragmatist arguments against Plato and Descartes” (Rorty 1991b, p. 33). Rorty makes reference to Mark Okrent’s book Heidegger’s Pragmatism (1988). 69 Brandom stresses the importance of Heidegger’s “anti-traditional assertion of the ontological priority of the domain of the Zuhandensein to that of the Vorhandensein” (Brandom 2002, p. 298), and even includes Heidegger among those “prominent theorists who are pragmatists in the sense of subscribing to use theorists of meaning” (Brandom 2000, p. 11). On Brandom and Heidegger see Haugeland 2005 and Merker 2009. 70 Hollinger 1985, pp. XII-XIII and XVI. 71 Figal 2009a, pp. 1-2. 72 Rorty admits he reads Heidegger “by [his] own, Deweyan lights”, but he then adds that “to read Heidegger in this way is just to do to him what he did to everybody else” (Rorty 1991b, p. 49)! In fact, analogous reproaches have been made about “Heidegger’s construal of philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche […] as Being’s own historic destiny” which, if viewed “from within the standard canons of historiography […], cannot stand” and rather constitutes “an historical misreading” and a “poetic misprision” (Magnus 2002, p. 139). 73 Heidegger, indeed, repeatedly claims that “philosophy in general and fundamentally is not science”, that “art – which includes poetry too – is the sister of philosophy”, and that “all science is perhaps only a servant with respect to philosophy” (GA 29-30, pp. 3 and 7 [Heidegger 1995, pp. 2 and 5]). According to him, “what is essential in the discovery of reality happened and happens not 48

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through science, but through primordial philosophy, as well as through great poetry and its projections […]. Poetry makes beings more beingful” (GA 34, p. 64 [Heidegger 2002a, p. 47]). 74 Rorty 1991b, p. 34. 75 The hermeneutical “limitedness” of Rorty’s interpretation is also proved by passages like these: “the word ‘Being’ is more trouble than it is worth. I would be happy if Heidegger had never employed it […]. But I do not think that the word ‘Being’ was essential to [his] thought […]. At best, its use is a technique for relating to an audience” (Rorty 1991a, p. 71). “If, as I do, one forgets about Being and thinks that beings are all there are, then this ‘humanist’ outlook – one which Heidegger himself despised – will be what one understands by Heidegger’s claim that ‘language speaks man’ and by his exaltation of ‘the poetic’ as what ‘opens up worlds’. […] I want to stand Heidegger on his head – to cherish what he loathed” (Rorty 1989, p. 113 n). 76 GA 8, p. 9 (Heidegger 1968, p. 8). 77 Rorty’s “lack of feeling” for phenomenological research is proved by statements like this: “Heidegger’s Being and Time is an interesting attempt to restate Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean ideas in rather pompously professional terms by treating them as parts of an ‘analytic of Dasein’ carried out by a mysterious method called phenomenological ontology” (Rorty 2006, p. 94). 78 GA 58, p. 1. 79 GA 56-57, p. 63. 80 See GA 14, p. 101 (Heidegger 1972, p. 82): “The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over. It is already taken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schools of philosophy. But in what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought. If phenomenology is thus experienced and retained, it can disappear as a designation in favor of the matter of thinking whose manifestness remains a mystery”. 81 GA 24, p. 3 (Heidegger 1988, p. 3). 82 GA 24, pp. 13-17 (Heidegger 1988, pp. 10-13). 83 GA 22, pp. 6-7 (Heidegger 2008, pp. 5-6). 84 GA 4, p. 129 (Heidegger 2000a, p. 151). 85 GA 8, pp. 21-22 (Heidegger 1968, p. 20). In other words, philosophers and poets, the “saying of the thinker” and the “naming of the poet”, “‘dwell near one another on mountains most separate’”: that is, “poetizing and thinking are most purely alike in their care of the word”, but “are at the same time farthest separated in their essence. The thinker says being. The poet names the holy” (GA 9, pp. 311312 [Heidegger 1998, p. 237]). 86 Rorty 2006, p. 140. 87 Mendieta 2006, p. XVI. 88 See, for instance, GA 5, pp. 59-66 (Heidegger 2002b, pp. 44-50). 89 GA 5, pp. 328-329 (Heidegger 2002b, pp. 247-248).

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GA 69, p. 144. The original German words are respectively “Stiftung des Seins (Dichtung)” and “Grundung des Seyns (Denken)”. 91 Rorty 1998b, pp. 21 and 27. On this topic, see also Rorty and Engel 2007. 92 See GA 14, pp. 67-90 (Heidegger 1972, pp. 55-73). 93 Rorty 2006, p. 46. 94 Rorty 1998a, p. 138. The problematic relation between Heidegger’s aim to overcome metaphysics and the so-called post-metaphysical thinking has been pointed out by Günter Figal, who writes: “Heidegger’s most spectacular aftereffect in contemporary philosophy is post-metaphysical thinking. For the philosophically inclined, it usually suffices to hear the names of Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and Gianni Vattimo to substantiate this effect”. But Heidegger “did not wish to criticize metaphysics as a whole, and certainly not to leave it behind in the sense of a ‘post-metaphysical’ thinking” (Figal 2009b, pp. 185 and 187). 95 GA 40, p. 100 (Heidegger 2000b, p. 99). 96 GA 40, p. 40 (Heidegger 2000b, p. 39). 97 See Guignon 1986. 98 Dahlstrom 2001, p. 427. 99 Dahlstrom 2001, p. 427.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Collected Works of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer (GA) Martin Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, 102 vols., Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 1975(GW) Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols., Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1999 (UTB)

2. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Books and Collections of Papers (Original Editions) (EE) Das Erbe Europas. Beiträge, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1989 (GLB) Gadamer Lesebuch, ed. by J. Grondin, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1997 (HÄP) Hermeneutik – Ästhetik – Praktische Philosophie. Hans-Georg Gadamer im Gespräch, ed. by C. Dutt, Winter, Heidelberg 1993 (HE) Hermeneutische Entwürfe, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2000 (IFO) L’inizio della filosofia occidentale, ed. by V. De Cesare, Guerini, Milano 1993 (IG) Im Gespräch: Hans-Georg Gadamer und Silvio Vietta, Fink, München 2002 (LT) Lob der Theorie. Reden und Aufsätze, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1983 (PL) Philosophische Lehrjahre. Eine Rückschau, Klostermann, Frankfurt a.M. 1977 (UD) L’ultimo Dio. Un dialogo filosofico con Riccardo Dottori, Meltemi, Roma 2002 (ÜVG) Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit. Aufsätze und Vorträge, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1993 (VZW) Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft. Aufsätze, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1976

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