Alexander Crist

While Hans-Georg Gadamer does not offer a substantial or systematic account of what he means by solidarity, several Gadamer scholars in recent years have begun to organize and clarify his comments on the topic within his broader project of philosophical hermeneutics. In this paper, I turn to Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man in order to clarify and challenge some of the conditions for solidarity that Gadamer puts forward. In particular, I focus on certain hermeneutic virtues such as openness, trust, charity, humility, and good will, all of which are necessary for Gadamerian solidarity. In The Confidence-Man, Melville depicts a world not only of strangers who lack these virtues, but one in which many of these strangers are conned by sophistical appeals to confidence and faith in one’s fellow human being. Melville’s text raises a series of important questions for Gadamerian solidarity: Is there any possibility of solidarity with those who are disingenuous actors, who yet hide beneath the guise of faith, trust, and confidence in humanity? How are we to discover new solidarities if we are fundamentally distrustful or suspicious of each other? What if the call for hermeneutic virtue is just another masquerade in a world marked by insincerity, iniquity, and alienation? Ultimately, I claim that Melville’s text demands that Gadamer scholars reexamine some of the limitations of the hermeneutic virtues, and by extension, the limitations entailed in affirming and discovering solidarity with others.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forth a crisis in rational public discourse and trust in authoritative institutions. Given its many issues related to language, communication, and solidarity, this crisis can be considered a hermeneutic crisis. This essay turns to Karl Jaspers' lecture series, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time, and to several works from Hans-Georg Gadamer, in order to develop a diagnostic concept of anti-hermeneutics. While Gadamer often discusses what it means to live hermeneutically, he rarely offers an explicit account of what it would mean to live anti-hermeneutically, namely, in a way that resists cultivating and acting from basic hermeneutic virtues. Jaspers' notion of anti-reason (Widervernunft) offers a model for thinking about what anti-hermeneutics would look like in Gadamer's hermeneutic project. Ultimately, the concept of anti-hermeneutics contributes to diagnosing the contemporary hermeneutic crisis as it has emerged over the last few years since the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a recent article, ―The Lacuna of Hermeneutics: Notes on the Freedom of Thought, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback raises an important question regarding the limitations of philosophical hermeneutics to be critical and attentive to the reality of current, concrete socio-political issues. In response, I claim that Gadamerian hermeneutics is well positioned to address current and controversial instances of epistemic injustice. In this article, I focus on the contemporary and controversial example of testimony of those who have been injured by the COVID-19 vaccines. In turning to selections from Gadamer‘s Truth and Method, as well his lectures and essays on health and medicine, I argue that Gadamer‘s emphasis on hermeneutic openness and readiness, as well as an attunement to the linguistic and embodied experience of pain, allow us to consider a responsible approach to testimonies of the vaccine injured. Instead of providing a set of criteria or a particular method for distinguishing true from false testimony, Gadamerian hermeneutics calls for an examination and transformation of one‘s prejudices, especially prejudices which may impede one‘s ability to interpret and understand the subject matter in the first place.

For Hans-Georg Gadamer and philosophical hermeneutics, Paul Celan’s poetry and prose have always been decisive in thinking through the possibilities and limitations of language and interpretation. Recently, important hermeneutic research has begun to point to an unavoidable liminal encounter between the body and language in Celan’s texts, which approaches an often-neglected theme in hermeneutic thought: the body and embodied experience. Yet in order for hermeneutics to engage Celan on matters concerning the body, language, and interpretation, it is necessary to understand the profound role that the body and embodied experience plays in Celan’s works. In this essay, I offer three prominent instances of embodiment in Celan’s texts that contribute to such an account. I turn first to his preliminary notes from his 1960 Meridian speech in which he discusses the poem as ‘pneumatic.’ Second, I read Celan’s letter to Hans Bender in 1960 in which poetry is both a tactile Handwerk and a handshake. Third, I engage Celan’s reading notes from two physiology textbooks from 1967 and his poem, “Seelenblind.” While the first two instances affirm the possibility of an embodied encounter with the singularity of the poet, the third instance considers the body as a site of interpretive breakdown.

In “Pain,” Hans-Georg Gadamer offers several reflections on the experience of pain and its importance for both modern medicine and hermeneutic thought. Having already celebrated his 100th birthday at the time of this lecture, Gadamer speaks of his own experience with polio and the pains of old age, and the influence that his friend and physician, Paul Vogler, had on his approach to the treatment of pain. In the year 2000, Gadamer is concerned with the dominance of technology and chemical “pain management” in the professional medical community, which has largely forgotten the more natural or traditional healing methods in approaching pain and recovery. In light of this, what is crucial for Gadamer is that individuals approach the challenges of pain by taking an active part in their own recovery. For Gadamer, hermeneutics speaks to these encounters with pain and recovery as decisive for human life and understanding.

In this text, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780–1819), an influential but often overlooked figure in German Idealism and German Romanticism, offers an account on the relationship between revelation and philosophical thought. For Solger, the being of the eternal reveals itself in and to existence as a “creation out of nothing.” Similarly, existence seen from the position of the being of the eternal is the “nothing of being.” For the being of the eternal to enter into existence requires the sacrifice of existence, that is, the annihilation of the nothing of being. For Solger, the task of philosophy is to think these oppositions of the eternal and existence as a complete “passing over” movement, one which is comprised of creation and annihilation. Ultimately, “true philosophy” should attempt to think the “absolute fact” of revelation, namely, revelation as both thought in consciousness and experienced in its actuality in existence.

Since Truth and Method, Gadamer’s account of language or linguisticality as the medium of hermeneutic experience has prompted an ever-recurring reflection and critical engagement with the interpretive implications of this claim. For Gadamer, there is no subject matter that comes to the fore without linguisticality, that is, without the possibility of the subject matter to come into language in the first place. However, in later essays, he briefly discusses what he calls ‘prelinguistic’ in hermeneutic expe­rience. In this essay, I offer an account of the prelinguistic in Gadamer’s works that still maintains the primacy of language in his hermeneutic project. The prelinguistic marks not only a kind of precondition of linguisticality itself, but it also marks the fundamentally disclosive and demanding character of hermeneutic experience as such. As a precondition, the prelinguistic is not something beyond or outside of language, but is the very impulse or drive towards linguistic expression.

While philosophical hermeneutics has often been criticized for not engaging issues concerning the body and human finitude, Gadamer’s ‘Defense of Pain’ in his final public academic appearance is an underappreciated hermeneutic contribution to the way in which we experience and respond to the physical and existential demands of pain. In light of his criticism, that the modern medical community is occupied with the utter eradication of pain, Gadamer is concerned with the consequences of such a sensibility which does not appear to focus on developing and fostering the patients’ own capacities and participation in the process of their own convalescence. For Gadamer, the patients’ active participation in the recovery from pain is an opportunity to experience the joys of recovery and to engage in their own vibrant rhythm of health. Yet more than this, pain is an opportunity to return to an existential and hermeneutic truth about one’s own finitude. Through reflections on the newborn’s cry at birth and the forgetfulness of our own mortality, we find in Gadamer’s presentation an intriguing account of pain as a deeply embodied and hermeneutic experience that furthers interpretation and understanding of our own intimate relationship with birth, death, and life.