Intro to Hermeneutics

“Hermeneutics” is derived from the Greek word for interpretation. It has a complex history, with roots in Greek literary interpretation, scriptural interpretation, and Renaissance humanism. In an 1808 work, the German philologist Friedrich Ast formulated a first version of the hermeneutic circle, emphasizing that we encounter a sort of chicken-and-egg relationship between the meaning of the parts and the meaning of the whole in a text. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833 – 1911) promoted a discipline of hermeneutics as the grounding for a distinctive kind of scientific method for the human sciences. In contrast to Dilthey, Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) emphasized that we do not begin from the outside with a theoretical methodology, but rather find ourselves in the world along with the things we seek to understand.

The name most strongly associated with 20th century hermeneutics is Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 – 2002). Combining neo-Kantian and Heideggerian influences with a strong interest in Platonic and Aristotelian ethics, Gadamer emphasized that all understanding has the character of a dialogue, and dwelt extensively on Aristotelian phronesis, or practical wisdom regarding concrete situations and what to do.

Another major figure is Paul Ricoeur (1913 – 2005), who dwelt on the nature of human beings as responsible ethical agents, while rejecting claims that the self is immediately transparent to itself, or fully master of itself. He sought to understand subjectivity without falling prey to subjectivism or presupposing a sovereign Subject. Both he and Gadamer also emphasized the irreducible role of language in understanding.

At least on these points, there is an interesting convergence with themes I have been pursuing here. I see philosophy as fundamentally hermeneutic, rather than seeking to formulate a “system of the world”. The kind of semantics I have attributed to Aristotle, along with his use of dialectic, seems to me to be the earliest developed philosophical hermeneutics, with roots in Socratic questioning. Brandom’s mix of semantics with what he calls normative pragmatics, in conjunction with his work on Hegel, can be considered as a very original form of hermeneutics within analytic philosophy.

Tyranny

Plato diagnosed tyranny as first and foremost an affliction of the soul. Socrates in Plato’s Republic characterizes the tyrannical soul by a malformed desire that strongly resists any kind of balanced consideration of other factors. This kind of desire wants its way immediately and unconditionally.

The tyrannical soul wants a kind of unquestioning recognition from others, without reciprocally recognizing them. This kind of attitude represents the opposite end of the spectrum from what Aristotle called magnanimity or great-souledness; rather, it is characteristic of the attitude of Mastery denounced by Hegel. Unfortunately, modern egoism, with its emphasis on a narrow kind of self, tends to devolve in this direction. (See also Freedom Without Sovereignty.)

While a tyrannical soul may be an Aristotelian cause of particular unjust acts, this does not mean that injustice as a whole is reducible to matters of individual character. Injustice is not just caused by the bad acts of individuals, but also often involves institutions and social structure, which have their persistence in part from a kind of materiality of their own.

Why Brandom’s Hegel?

Brandom offers us an ethically oriented Hegel, read as anticipating many 20th and 21st century concerns. He provides an ethical path to overcoming the separation of subject and object.

Importantly, Brandom’s Hegel even turns out to have anticipated the main concerns of the 1960s French anti-Hegelians, while standing untouched by their criticism. He turns out to be the original critic of mastery and totalization; never uses subjectivity as an unexplained explainer; and claims no forward-moving historical teleology.

While Brandom’s approach to Hegel involves more original philosophical development than historical scholarship, I nonetheless believe based on my own independent reading that with a few caveats on nonessential points, it is historiographically sound. (That is far from saying it is the only valid or interesting interpretation; historiographical soundness just means that a reasonable case can be made.) At any rate, I find it both sound and tremendously inspiring.

Independence, Freedom

Brandom points out that Hegel in the Spirit chapter explicitly contrasts the truly desirable form of freedom with the bad total “independence” or one-sided freedom of the Master. The voluntarism I have been concerned to reject effectively equates freedom with such independence. Some of Hegel’s superficial rhetoric about freedom leaves it unclear what kind of freedom is at issue, while seeming to repeat some voluntarist tropes. Pippin’s work previously helped me see past that. Here is another confirmation of what Hegel intended. (See also Freedom Without Sovereignty; Hegel and the French Revolution.)

Desire of the Master

Serious readers of Hegel have long known that he presents the Servant who learns about the world through work in far more positive terms than the Master. Mastery is a false freedom that is actually an obstacle to true freedom.

The Master effectively claims total independence, or authority without responsibility. Brandom renders Hegel’s critique of “the ills of Mastery”, “all these dimensions of defectiveness”, “the subordination-obedience model of normativity allegorized as Mastery” in wonderfully sharp terms. At bottom, “Pure independence is a Bad Idea” (underscore in original). (I would extend this diagnosis to voluntarisms theological, psychological, legal, political, and historical, as well as to claims of sovereign power. I say no power can even possibly be normatively sovereign or unconditional.)

Brandom characterizes Mastery by a second-order desire to have all its desires immediately satisfied (directly constitutive of reality), which ends up leading to a desire for a sort of imperial sovereignty that is inherently in conflict with anyone else having the same desire. Mastery wants its way with no other consideration and is unable to share power, like Plato’s tyrant. (To me at least, this seems a very undesirable sort of desire. All the desirable desires seem to me be sharable. But unfortunately, on a social scale we are still deeply afflicted by the Master’s desire.)

Mastery is thus also the totalizing impulse par excellence. Hegel’s very strong rejection of it is a fortiori a very strong rejection of the desire for totalization that has often been attributed to him, as far back as Kierkegaard. This is a veritable revolution in the interpretation of Hegel’s most fundamental intent, which also seems to be strongly supported by Terry Pinkard’s biography.

Mastery for Brandom is unequivocally an evolutionary dead end, not something to be rationalized and excused as somehow historically progressive. Only the Servant moves forward at all. This is huge. Our troubled potentially rational ape-kind rather desperately needs a bold clarity of this sort. Not only is Mastery not the answer, there is no convoluted path that makes it a justifiable means to an answer. Of course the Trumps of the world will not be enlightened by this, but we can be. (Marx may have been right that the leisure of a few at the expense of the many was a temporary historical economic prerequisite for the emergence of higher culture, but that is an argument in a material register, not a normative one.)

This is helping me with my difficulty over Brandom’s theses about modernity and an ethical importance of the Enlightenment. His usual wordings make me think of what I consider to be highly questionable Cartesian and British empiricist epistemology, then wonder what about this has to do with any new ethical insight. But there was also an important strand of rejection of Mastery in the Enlightenment, especially in France. I think more of the group around the Encyclopedia as documented by Jonathan Israel’s recent trilogy, whereas Brandom through Kant seems to be thinking more of Rousseau’s ideas about equality, and of the general idea of a social contract as partly anticipating Hegelian mutual recognition. (See also Ego; Freedom Without Sovereignty.)