Cynthia R. Nielsen

This essay discusses Vladimir Putin’s use and abuse of “History”­­ in the context of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. It takes as its point of departure Sergey Radchenko’s essay, “Putin’s Histories,” in which he charts three important strands of Putin’s Historical Narrative, which are summarized as (1) Putin’s (imperialist) History of Russia, (2), the “Great Patriotic War” narrative, and (3) Putin’s NATO ressentiment. The essay examines and expands each of these in turn, analyzing how they are used in Russia’s war against Ukraine and how they help us to see that a central factor driving this war is Russia’s inability to see it itself as anything other than an empire.

_Purpose._ The authors aim to disclose the anthropological dimension of ecocide during and after Russia’s war against Ukraine, relying on the multidisciplinary practices and intellectual production of ecofeminist women thinkers, including philosophers, sociologists, historians, psychologists, and others. _The theoretical basis_ methodological approaches in philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, analytical philosophy, communicative philosophy, existentialism, ethics of justice, and ethics of care determine the study’s theoretical basis._ Originality._ For the first time, a systematic analysis of the anthropological dimension of ecocide has been carried out based on ecofeminist methodology. The specifics of the Ukrainian resistance to ecocide were revealed as part of a single struggle – an anti-imperial and ecological struggle for independence and prosperity. It is emphasized that during the war, the opposition to ecocide is a component of the fight for national sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country, and therefore, the ideas of pacifism in this period are subordinated to this primary goal. After the war, preventing threats of ecocide should become an integral part of the struggle for stable peace and prosperity. Ecofeminist pacifist perspectives should be a priority among the most essential goals for that period. _Conclusions._ Ecofeminist methodological assessments offer valuable insights into the anthropological dimension of ecocide in wartime and post-war contexts, highlighting the complex interplay between gender, violence, and environmental destruction. By focusing on the experiences and perspectives of women and marginalized communities, ecofeminist analyses contribute to a more holistic understanding of ecocide and its impacts on both human populations and ecosystems.

This is my translation of Gadamer's 1990 lecture "The Diversity of Languages and Understanding of the World." "In his lecture, Gadamer presents his views of language and world in a distinctively hermeneutical key. For example, he emphasizes language as that which 'belongs to conversation.' That is, language as conversation helps to bring about understanding and involves the play of dialogical exchange. 'Language is not proposition and judgment; rather, it is what it is, only when it is question and answer.' Language involves another; it is on-the-way [unterwegs] to another. In fact, when addressing his question—what does world mean—Gadamer clarifies that humans and world are intimately connected; the world is that in which we are 'in the midst' and 'understanding is understanding oneself in the world.' But we are also in-the-world with others, and understanding ourselves in the world, means to understand ourselves with others. Gadamer goes so far as to say that our self-understanding as achieved in relation to others, as well as our understanding of others, should be taken in a moral and political sense. That is, the other is not there as merely a means to our ends or to exploit. Rather, 'the other indicates a principal limit to our self-love and self-centeredness. This is a general moral problem. It is also a political problem.' He goes on to emphasize the difficult task of achieving genuine solidarity with those from different cultures. Such a task requires language as conversation, the back-and-forth of dialogical exchange in which we come to understand the other and the other comes to understand us. Again and again, Gadamer underscores the task that each of has in light of our pluralistic world “to learn to bridge and reconcile the distances and differences between us and that means that we respect, look after, care for the other, and give one other a new hearing.” In contrast with the story of the Tower of Babel in which the people sought a pseudo-unity or 'oneness' driven by a will to dominate, Gadamer embraces both cultural and linguistic diversity and warns against reducing these multiple horizons 'by any special contrivance of unity [Einheitsmechanik].' He encourages us to seek out the open spaces that arise in our interactions with one another, to resist the levelling of language that information technology tends toward, and to 'cultivate language in its most distinctive possibilities.' In our present age of disinformation warfare, which threatens democracies worldwide and is a direct challenge to truth and the possibility of a meaningful dialogue with others, we would do well to linger with Gadamer’s hermeneutical and ethical insights and contemplate how we might bring these insights to bear on the global and political crises that we face today—Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, our climate catastrophe, and ever new forms of technical sophistry and disinformation that seek to erode our trust in truth, reality, and language itself."

This book offers a sustained scholarly analysis of Gadamer's reflections on art and our experience of art. It examines fundamental themes in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics such as play, festival, symbol, contemporaneity, enactment, art's performative ontology, and hermeneutical identity. The first two chapters focus on Gadamer's critical appropriation and movement beyond Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics (and includes a coda on Heidegger's influence). The final three chapters argue for the continued relevance of Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics by bringing his claims into conversation with contemporary art and music, as well as the ethical and sociopolitical dimensions of the Artworld and art-praxis. The ethical and sociopolitical aspects of art- and music-making are given particular attention in chapters devoted to 20th century African American artist Romare Bearden, Banksy's street art, and a range of jazz expressions, from traditional jazz to the complex practice of free jazz. Gadamer's Hermeneutical Aesthetics will appeal to researchers and advanced students working on Gadamer, philosophical hermeneutics, continental philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of contemporary art and music.

This is a translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 1988 essay, “Musik und Zeit: Ein philosophisches Postscriptum.” The essay, although brief, is noteworthy in that it contains Gadamer’s philosophical reflections on music—reflections which are largely absent in his masterwork, Truth and Method. In the essay, one finds several important Gadamerian hermeneutical themes such as the notion of art as performance or enactment (Vollzug), the linguisticality of understanding, the importance of lingering with an artwork or text, and how our absorption in the work gives rise to a particular experience of time.

Gadamer's Truth and Method: A Polyphonic Commentary offers a fresh look at Gadamer's magnum opus, Truth and Method, which was first published in German in 1960, translated into English in 1975, and is widely recognized as a ground-breaking text of philosophical hermeneutics. The volume features essays from fourteen scholars--both established and rising stars--each of which cover a portion of Truth and Method following the order of the text itself. The result is a robust, historically and thematically rich polyphonic reading of the text as a whole, valuable both for scholarship and teaching.

This article considers the limitations, but also the insights, of Gadamerian hermeneutics for understanding and responding to the crisis precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Our point of departure is the experience of deep disagreements amid the pandemic, and our primary example is ongoing debates in the United States about wearing masks. We argue that, during this dire situation, interpersonal mutual understanding is insufficient for resolving such bitter disputes. Rather, following Gadamer’s account of our dialogical experience with an artwork, we suggest that our encounter with the virus gives rise to new ways of seeing and experiencing ourselves and the world. Further, we draw on Gadamer’s account of the fusion of horizons to show how even competing perspectives on wearing masks arise within a shared space of meaning created by the virus. These insights provide hope for an improved model of political dialogue in the world of Covid-19.

Translators’ Abstract: This is a translation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s recently discovered 1952 Berlin speech. The speech includes several themes that reappear in Truth and Method, as well as in Gadamer’s later writings such as Reason in the Age of Science. For example, Gadamer criticizes positivism, modern philosophy’s orientation toward positivism, and Enlightenment narratives of progress, while presenting his view of philosophy’s tasks in an age of crisis. In addition, he discusses structural power, instrumental reason, the objectification of nature and human beings, the reduction of both to mere means, and the colonization of scientific-technological ways of knowing and being—all of which continue to impact our social and political lives together and threaten the very existence of every living being. This speech is essential reading for Gadamer scholars interested in the social, political, and ethical dimensions of his thought and for those interested in bringing Gadamer into conversation with critical theory

Like human existence itself, our enduring legacies—whether poetic, ethical, political, or philosophical—continually unfold and require recurrent communal engagement and (re)enactment. In other words, an ongoing performance of significant works must occur, and this task requires the collective human activity of re-membering or gathering-together-again. In the Symposium, Diotima provides an account of human pursuits of immortality through the creation of artifacts, including laws, poems, and philosophical discourses that resonates with Gadamer’s account of our engagement with artworks and texts. This essay explores common places among Gadamer and Plato; however, it does so through the complex character of Diotima the philosopher-priestess. Diotima’s teaching on the processive character of human existence and her understanding of knowledge as dynamic has been largely ignored. Given Gadamer’s historically oriented philosophical hermeneutics, not to mention his creative and critical engagement with Platonic themes such as beauty, recollection, and art, Diotima makes for an especially fruitful dialogue partner.

Fanon’s insistence that the oppressed retain their ability to resist and (re)configure their subjectivity has political, ethical, and philosophical import, as it highlights the fact that the subjugated are not mere things determined from the outside. To the contrary, just as several contingent factors coalesced to create the historical situation in which the colonized subject finds herself, other equally contingent factors can emerge and help to bring about socio-political transformations. Like Aimé Césaire, Fanon understood that the process of decolonization would occur over time and in various stages. By studying Fanon’s complex relationship to the Négritude movement, his resistance tactics come into sharper focus. In short, I argue that Fanon’s employment of essentialized narratives can be interpreted as a variant of “strategic essentialism” (Spivak). Consequently, Fanon’s historically attuned strategy signals a movement beyond a mere reactionary response trapped within an abstract Manichaean binary.

In this chapter, I argue that one can articulate a historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as a historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz’s open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and aesthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the sociopolitical, legal (Jim Crow and copyright laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afromodernism highlights the sociopolitical, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the sociopolitical import of bebop, one’s understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put.

In this essay, I analyze Romare Bearden’s art, methodology, and thinking about art, as well as his attempt to harmonize his personal aesthetic goals with his sociopolitical concerns. I then turn to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reflections on art and our experience (Erfahrung) of art. I show how Bearden’s approach to art and the artworks themselves resonate with Gadamer’s critique of aesthetic consciousness and his contention that artworks address us, make claims upon us, and even reveal truth. Lastly, I discuss Gadamer’s emphasis on the spectator’s active yet non-mastering role in the event of art’s address—an event that implicates the spectator and has the potential to transform him or her. This leads to a discussion of Gadamer’s notion of the type of self-(and world) understanding that occurs through aesthetic experience. I close by returning to Bearden in order to discuss how his art unearths a crucial feature of our being-in-the-world. I call this feature “world-unmasking” and show how it expands and enriches Gadamer’s account.

In Interstitial Soundings, Cynthia R. Nielsen brings music and philosophy into a fruitful and mutually illuminating dialogue. Topics discussed include the following: music's dynamic ontology, performers and improvisers as co-composers, the communal character of music, jazz as hybrid and socially constructed, the sociopolitical import of bebop, Afro-modernism and its strategic deployments, jazz and racialized practices, continuities between Michel Foucault's discussion of self-making and creating one's musical voice, Alasdair MacIntyre on practice, and how one might harmonize MacIntyre's notion of virtue development with Foucauldian resistance strategies.

Frederick Douglass, in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, describes how his sociopolitical identity was scripted by the white other and how his spatiotemporal existence was likewise constrained through constant surveillance and disciplinary dispositifs. Even so, Douglass was able to assert his humanity through creative acts of resistance. In this essay, I highlight the ways in which Douglass refused to accept the other-imposed narrative, demonstrating with his life the truth of his being—a human being unwilling to be classified as thing or property. As I engage selected passages and key events from Douglass's narrative, I likewise explore the ways in which the resistance tactics.

Several prominent contemporary philosophers, including Jürgen Habermas, John Caputo, and Robert Bernasconi, have at times painted a somewhat negative picture of Gadamer as not only an uncritical traditionalist, but also as one whose philosophical project fails to appreciate difference. Against such claims, I argue that Gadamer’s reflections on art exhibit a genuine appreciation for alterity not unrelated to his hermeneutical approach to the other. Thus, by bringing Gadamer’s reflections on our experience of art into conversation with key aspects of his philosophical hermeneutics, we are able to better assess the viability of Gadamer’s contributions to contemporary discussions of difference and alterity. Sections two through six focus on key concepts in Gadamer’s account of art’s dynamic ontology and our experience of art. Such concepts include the play structure of art, hermeneutic identity, tarrying with a work, and contemporaneity. The opening sections provide not only a discussion of these central themes, but they also (1) draw attention to the various ways in which difference and otherness are integral to Gadamer’s account, and (2) utilize relevant musical examples that prepare the reader for a more focused discussion of a Gadamerian approach to free jazz in section seven. By highlighting how Gadamer’s understanding of art possesses a dialogical play structure, is characterized by identity and difference, requires actively engaged spectators and auditors, and is amenable to what many criticize as an unintelligible musical expression, viz. free jazz, Gadamer’s project is shown as other-affirming and open to ambiguity and dynamism. That is, the essential structures and concepts characterizing Gadamer’s reflections on art are likewise central to his overall hermeneutical project, and hence are not rightly described as un-attuned to difference or other-negating. Rather, Gadamer’s philosophical project upholds difference, since it requires a dialogical interplay between self and other that creates the possibility for a transformative experience.