Theodore George

The purpose of this piece is to examine the contribution made to the philosophical study of hermeneutics by James Risser’s recently published book, The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics. The author argues that Risser’s emphasis on the relation of understanding to factical life places him among contemporaries, such as Donatella di Cesare and Günter Figal, who seek to advance hermeneutics beyond the context of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s approach. The author argues that Risser’s hermeneutics is distinguished by his concern for the radical finitude at stake in the experience of tradition, language, and beauty. In view of this, the author broaches questions that bring into focus the proximity between Risser’s hermeneutics and Jacques Derrida’s project of deconstruction

This article offers a survey of some main ideas in Günter Figal's hermeneutics as he presents them in his recent Gegenständlichkeit: Das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie [ Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy ]. Figal promises a new approach to the philosophical study of hermeneutics in this work that would advance beyond Gadamer, Heidegger, and others in significant respects. His project opens out from the belief that hermeneutical experience is guided by exteriority; such experience is directed toward and sustained by what stands outside the subject and its sphere, or, as he develops this idea, by what is objective ( das Gegenständliche ). His orientation toward this sense of objectivity leads him to establish a notion of hermeneutical philosophy based on novel views of interpretation and understanding. This discussion reveals that hermeneutical philosophy belongs in the world, taken as hermeneutical space organized by the dimensions of freedom, language, and time. His hermeneutics culminates in an elucidation of human life as it is lived in this space.

Abstract The broad concern of this article is to contribute to discussions within hermeneutical philosophy that address the question of life as a form of correlation. More specifically, its purpose is to shed light on the character of life as correlation with reference to a basic aspect of this correlation: our living relation to things. To this end, the author focuses, first, on the later Heidegger's suggestion that our proper relation to things takes shape as an enactment guided by the releasement or letting-be ( Gelassenheit ) of things in their independence; and, second, on Günter Figal's recent claim that this enactment, in turn, depends on our referential relation to the exteriority or objectivity of things. The author concludes that our living relation with things may be understood best in terms of the movement or mutual interplay of these two conditions

Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of the ‘inoperative community’ is one of the most original attempts in recent memory to develop a theory of the political that addresses contemporary concerns for difference and singularity. In this paper, I will argue that despite the deep rapprochement between Nancy and Heidegger, Nancy’s insistence upon the connection between community and singularity allows him to twist free from the more duplicitous features of his Heideggerian heritage. In contrast with Heidegger, Nancy interprets the political significance of finitude with reference not to the work of a people, but, instead, to the finitude of singular beings that we encounter in our exposure to the death of others. From Nancy’s interpretation emerges a view of community that resists, or, as he puts it, unworks all tendencies toward totalitarian politics.

Some more recent scholarship that challenges received wisdom about Gadamer not withstanding, it remains common to associate his hermeneutical approach to art and literature, along with his hermeneutics generally, with political and cultural conservatism. In this essay, however, the author argues that some of Gadamer’s significant, but underappreciated, later essays on Hegel’s aesthetics further support and nuance the rising recognition of Gadamer’s sensitivity to the discontinuities, dislocations, and fractures that pervade any experience of the past. Specifically, Gadamer’s critical response in these essays to Hegel’s familiar thesis that art is a “thing of the past” sheds light on the special hermeneutical difficulties faced in the present historical juncture—a time, which Gadamer suggests is increasingly alienated from its own heritage. As I wish to show, Gadamer believes this schism to signal not an end of Western art, but, rather, a liberation of art that releases novel possibilities for artistic practice and for the interpretation of art. Far from being a conservative who might deny or lament the rupture of tradition, then, Gadamer’s take on the Hegelian thesis reveals Gadamer to acknowledge and even embrace this withdrawal of tradition as a source of new meaning and experience.

In the “Postscript” to his Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger suggests that one important aim of his investigation into the relation between truth and art is to subject to scrutiny Hegel’s famous thesis on the end of art. The purpose of my essay is to contribute to this project by reexamining aspects of Hegel’s discussion of art in the Phenomenology of Spirit that appear to subvert his own thesis. Hegel’s treatment of ancient Greek drama and, specifically, some of his remarks on comedy, not only bring Hegel’s claim about the end of art into question, but also lend new insights into the possibilities for the relationship between truth and art in our age.

The essays that follow concern one of these contributions, Günter Figal’s Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010; English translation of Gegenständlichkeit: das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie, Mohr Siebeck 2006). These pieces are drawn from an “Author Meets Critics” session sponsored by the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics (NASPH) in conjunction with the 2012 meeting of SPEP. As conceived by the NASPH organizers, the principal purpose of the “Author Meets Critics” session was to further discussion of the significance of Figal’s Objectivity for current research.

One of the most pressing issues for contemporary continental philosophy turns on the determination of a concept of community that twists free from the dangerous tendency in the canon of Western thought to associate the perfection of political affiliation with complete unity, even totality and immanence. In this article the author suggests that in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel provides important resources for this project—not, of course, in his conception of that community indicated by the absolute spirit, itself a preeminent example of political totality, but instead in his discussion of a very different form of togetherness, one achieved in the tragic work of art. As the author argues, this is a sense of community that takes as its very basis the impossibility of political totality, for Hegel an impossibility evoked by a crisis concerning the political significance of the dead.

In Tragedies of Spirit, Theodore D. George engages Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to explore the philosophical significance of tragedy in post-Kantian continental thought. George follows lines of inquiry originally developed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida, and takes as his point of departure the concern that Hegel’s speculative philosophy forms a summit of modernity that the present historical time is called to interrogate. Yet, George argues that Hegel’s larger speculative ambitions in the Phenomenology compel him to turn to the resource of tragedy in order to give voice to issues of incommensurability, discontinuity, otherness, strife, and crisis. From this standpoint, Hegel’s interest in the tragic proves to be more pervasive and to run deeper than has previously been recognized. The author shows that Hegel’s reliance upon the tragic not only stretches and tests assumptions of speculative philosophy, but also illuminates original insights into human finitude. While situating Hegel’s approach to tragedy as part of a broader response to Kant, George also contextualizes Hegel’s interest in tragedy with reference to figures in German Idealism and Romanticism, such as Schelling, Hölderlin, and Schlegel.

In this essay, the author maintains that Gadamer’s affirmation of the relation among art, truth, and beauty is less a sign of conservatism or nostalgia than it is a key to his innovative and insightful examination of our experience of art. Gadamer’s approach to both the truth claim and the beauty of art flows from his association of the being of art with enactment (Vollzug). Yet, increasingly over the course of his writings, Gadamer appears to relinquishes talk of art in this sense as a ,work‘ in favor of an emphasis on the kinship between art and the phenomenon of play. In light of this shift, it is argued that Gadamer’s conception of the truth claim and beauty of art may best be understood not as properties of a product or artifact, of something already enacted and thus complete in itself, but, instead, as nothing other than the very enacting of that freedom which he finds at the heart of human play.

The author argues that Günter Figal sheds novel light on language in his recent Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy through a debate he appears to stage with the position Jacques Derrida develops in some of his early essays on deconstruction. Figal describes language as a form of showing and emphasizes the openness and flexibility of expression involved in determining significance. Yet, he rejects the idea he finds in Derrida that such flexibility should lead us to wholesale suspicion of the capacity of language to fix significance. Whereas Derrida concludes that all attempts to fix significance through supplementation of our expressions can only end in the need for further supplementation, Figal stresses the dialectical mien of language that allows supplementation to yield genuinely determinate significances.

In the “Postscript” to his Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger suggests that one important aim of his investigation into the relation between truth and art is to subject to scrutiny Hegel’s famous thesis on the end of art. The purpose of my essay is to contribute to this project by reexamining aspects of Hegel’s discussion of art in the Phenomenology of Spirit that appear to subvert his own thesis. Hegel’s treatment of ancient Greek drama and, specifically, some of his remarks on comedy, not only bring Hegel’s claim about the end of art into question, but also lend new insights into the possibilities for the relationship between truth and art in our age.

The Symposium is one of Plato’s most literary and poetic dialogues. How might one reconcile this evidence of Plato’s predilection for poetry in light of his severe critique of poetry in the Republic? Though his critique is modified and refined in other dialogues, the power of his critique is nowhere significantly undermined. I argue in this paper that Plato’s poetic writing is not inconsistent with his critique, and that in fact there is an affinity between his practice of poetry and his critique. Plato’s critique of poetry is not aimed against poetry itself, but just against its problematic claims and false promises. In turn, Plato’s use of the poetic image, especially in relationship to eros, delimits philosophy, and places it in relation to that which is not attainable for it. The battle between poetry and philosophy is seen to involve a reciprocal benefit for both, and a hidden affinity. In this sense, the poetic image has its philosophical sense precisely because it falls outside of the philosophical perspective.

The purpose of this essay is to examine Giorgio Agamben’s important but underappreciated debts to the early German Romantics and to Hegel. While maintaining critical distance from these figures, Agamben develops crucial aspects of his approach to radical passivity with reference to them. The focus of this essay is on Agamben’s consideration of the early German Romantics’ notions of criticism and irony, Hegel’s notion of language, and the implications of this view of language for his notion of community.

The purpose of this essay is to examine Giorgio Agamben’s important but underappreciated debts to the early German Romantics and to Hegel. While maintaining critical distance from these figures, Agamben develops crucial aspects of his approach to radical passivity with reference to them. The focus of this essay is on Agamben’s consideration of the early German Romantics’ notions of criticism and irony, Hegel’s notion of language, and the implications of this view of language for his notion of community.