Francis Ambrosio

As this quotation indicates, the development of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics over the years has been characterized by a tension arising from the desire both to differentiate his thought from Hegel’s and to identify with it in an abiding spirit of agreement. The effect has been a noteworthy shift of emphasis in Gadamer’s relationship to Hegel as he has moved from a “profiling” stance in Wahrheit und Methode to one of appropriation in his more recent essays. My goal here is to examine this shift of emphasis and to reflect on its philosophical significance. This will be done in three stages: first, we shall examine the way Gadamer “profiles” himself against Hegel in Wahrheit und Methode by highlighting different shades of meaning that emerge from the notion that “the true is the whole” when that notion is rethought “from the center of language”; second, we shall revisit with Gadamer the “neighborhood of the great teacher of concrete universality, Hegel,” in order to appropriate the enduring significance of this Hegelian theme for hermeneutics as an evocation of the way reason works in history to achieve freedom; and finally, we shall reflect upon the way in which the thinking of Hegel and Gadamer “belong-together” in their relation of difference amid identity, and upon the significance this has for our own thinking regarding the way in which the questions of truth and freedom belong-together in human existence.

The goal of this study is to investigate the meaning and significance of the concept of die Virtualitat des Sprechens as it functions in the thought of H. G. Gadamer. The primary thesis proposed is that the success of Gadamer's enterprise in Wahrheit und Methode of providing a corrective to misunderstandings about the experience of understanding and the event of truth arising out of a model based on the ideal of scientific objectivity, depends on his ability to display how the human relationship to the world emerges into language as a virtual whole of meaning. ;A secondary thesis is put forward in the course of the investigation proposing that in order to understand Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics as a whole, and in particular the meaning which he attributes to the notion of virtuality as its central element, it is necessary to recognize how Gadamer develops that meaning in dialogue with Heidegger, Hegel, and Plato. Consequently we examine how Heidegger's thought on the nature of truth occurring as an historical event in language provides the basis for the meaning of virtuality. Next, we follow Gadamer's extension of the meaning of virtuality by redefining Hegel's speculative and dialectical logic of the wholeness of truth by re-thinking it from the "center of language." We then explore the Platonic character of Gadamer's attempt to provide a concrete referent for the meaning of virtuality by identifying the "discipline of dialogue" as the open-ended principle of determination which is required both to hold these diverse currents in Gadamer's thought in a productive tension and to answer the question of how living language can mediate the universal openness of the world to understanding with the radical finitude and historicality of the event of truth. ;By way of conclusion, we attempt to appropriate Gadamer's meaning of virtuality by applying it to the question of the role of the individual interpreter in the process of understanding. Based on a conversation with Professor Gadamer, this application unfolds in terms of a consideration of the possible relationship between die Virtualitat des Sprechens and the nature of authentic human creativity in the event of truth.

It is argued in what follows that “culture warfare” is symptomatic of an imminent threat to the continued sustainability of human culture as a whole. The nature of this threat can be characterized as trauma induced paralysis of the human cultural imagination, without which cooperative adaptation to potential credible dangers of self-induced species or even planetary life extinction is impossible. The structure of this paradoxical “possible impossibility” as the destiny of humanity is examined here within the context of an interpretive framework which is broadly characterized as “cultural genetics”. On the basis of a schematic and preliminary outline of that framework, a suggestion is made regarding the direction in which hope of avoiding that destiny might be sought.

Understanding certainly does not mean merely the taking over of traditional opinion or the acknowledgment of what has been enshrined by tradition. Heidegger, who had first identified the concept of understanding as a universal determination of Dasein, means thereby precisely the character of understanding as project, which is really to say, Dasein in its orientation toward its own future. At the same time, I do not wish to deny that I for my part have emphasized within the universal matrix of the elements of understanding its direction toward the appropriation of what is past and has been handed-down. Heidegger, too, like many of my critics, may here feel the absence of an ultimate radicality in drawing out consequences. What does the end of metaphysics as a science mean? What is the significance of its ending in science? If science climaxes in a total technocracy and brings on with it the “cosmic night” of the forgetfulness of being, the nihilism foretold by Nietzsche, is one then permitted to look back toward the last rays of dusk as the sun sets in the evening sky instead of turning to watch out for the first shimmer of its return?

This volume makes a valuable contribution to the growing body of Gadamer's work translated into English. Specifically, it follows in the direction of the collections of his interpretive essays on Heidegger, Hegel, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as the intriguing autobiographical window on the German intellectual world of the first half of this century which is opened for us in Philosophical Apprenticeships. Education, Poetry, and History, continues to fill in the historical and philosophical horizon against which Gadamer's magnum opus, Truth and Method, must be understood if its full significance is to be appreciated and the proper limits of its achievement comprehended.