By David Simmons
Distilled from Jean Grondin, "Hans-Georg Gadamer und die französische Welt." In Von Heidegger zu Gadamer: Unterwegs zur Hermeneutik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001).
In the final chapter of Grondin's book, which is a justification of Gadamer's appropriation of Heidegger's early thought as hermeneutic philosophy, Grondin attempts to explain why Truth and Method (and thus Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics as a whole) was so poorly received in France, given the French preoccupation with German philosophy in general, which Grondin refers to as "Germanophilia." He writes: "From Bergson to Derrida, and Kojève, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Ricoeur, Foucault and Deleuze in between, one cannot imagine French philosophy in the 20th century at all without Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, to say nothing of Freud and Marx. In this century this applies in greatest measure for Heidegger. . . To name only the most important streams, which carried the world along with them, he was without doubt the muse behind the existential philosophy of Sartre and the Deconstruction of Derrida, perhaps even behind Foucault's genealogical studies. . . This earthquake-like effect of Heidegger stands in crass contrast to the rather restrained reaction of the French to the work of his student Hans-Georg Gadamer." How to explain this reticence, when Gadamer shares with the French an interest in art, rhetoric, and poetry, and when the work of Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida seems so obviously hermeneutic?
Here's part of the problem: the first French translation appeared in 1976 (Editions Seuil), abridged by 200 pages. Which 200? Only the historical basis of the entire study -- the beginning sections of the first two parts, according to Grondin, including:
In Part I, The question of truth as it emerges in the experience of art:
I Transcending the aesthetic dimension
1 The significance of the humanist tradition for the human sciences
2 The subjectivization of aesthetics through the Kantian critique
3 Retrieving the question of artistic truth
In Part II, The extension of the question of truth to understanding in the human sciences:
I Historical preparation
1 The questionableness of romantic hermeneutics and its application to the study of history
(A) The change in hermeneutics from the Enlightenment to romanticism
(B) the connection between the historical school and romantic hermeneutics
2 Dilthey's entanglement in the aporias of historicism
3 Overcoming the epistemological problem through phenomenological research
In other words, the French translation left out everything Gadamer had to say about: Bildung, Vico, judgment, taste, Kant's aesthetics, Erlebnis, Erlebniskunst, genius, Schleiermacher, Ranke, Droysen, Dilthey, Husserl, Count Yorck, and Heidiegger's hermeneutic phenomenology.
WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?!?!
Even worse: "It was only in 1996 that Pierre Fruchon, who died recently, prepared a complete translation, on which I also worked." And as it turns out, there was no complete translation in French of Being and Time until the MID-80s. Grondin calls the French Heidegger school "thoroughly unhermeneutic" -- Heidegger was viewed as the continuation of Husserlian phenomenology, whereas in Germany he was always seen as Husserl's opposite: "The unmistakable un-Husserlian emphasis on temporality, historicity, and facticity was seen in Germany as self-evidently grounded rather in Dilthey, German Romanticism, and its continuing development in the hermeneutic tradtion." Heidegger reception in France did not know Dilthey, and Dilthey reception in France did not know Heidegger, so it was difficult to show the close relationship between the two thinkers.
Gadamer reception was further complicated by the fact that Paul Ricoeur had already developed his own hermeneutic philosophy independently of Gadamer (Grondin points out that Freud and Philosophy (or. 1965), The Confict of Interpretations (or. 1969), and his treatise on metaphor (La Metaphore Vive (1975), sensibly rendered in German as Die lebendige Metapher) were all written prior to any confrontation with Truth and Method, that these studies grew out of his work on the hermeneutics of religious symbols in the 1950s, and that the theological cast of much of Ricoeur's writings on interpretation and the human sciences that put him in conversation and conflict with both structuralists and deconstructionists. Grondin suggests that this left little room for Gadamer to register in France. In this context, Dilthey reappears as the decisive precursor that separates Gadamer from everyone else in France: Gadamer reads Ricoeur's project of grounding the human sciences in hermeneutics as an attempt to continue what Dilthey started, a "Cartesian remnant" in his thought that prevents Ricoeur from immersing himself in Heidegger and the "hermeneutic of facticity." "In this regard Ricoeur was immunized by Dilthey against Heidegger, just as Gadamer was immunized by Heidegger against Dilthey," Grondin comments.
So the upshot is that the French simply did not know enough about the tradition of German philosophy of the human sciences -- surprise, surprise -- then waited sixteen years (during which time Foucault and Derrida established themselves as the new gods of French intellectual life) before translating Gadamer's magnum opus, and when they finally got around to it excised from that work the very parts that would educate them about this tradition, about Gadamer's relationship to it, and that would compromise its own understanding of Heidegger. Not to mention the fact that these are the aspects of the study that most resemble a Foucauldian genealogy.
Grondin also analyzes the instutional changes occurring in the French academy during the 1960s, which inadvertantly aligned Gadamer to the old-guard metaphysicians trying to crush the new intellectual revolution: "A hermeneutics of the human sciences was not exactly attractive to anyone in this context."
The last two paragraphs of the essay are really, really good, as they try to pick apart exactly why Gadamer could never jump on the Nietzsche bandwagon, and why the disciples of Gadamer and their Derridean opponent are fairly doomed to keep talking past each other. But I'll leave these to translate another day.
Jean Grondin:
Einführung in die philosophische Hermeneutik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991.
Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer, Introduction by Hans-Georg Gadamer. New Haven: Yale University, 1994. Includes a 60-page bibliography on philosophical hermenetics, arranged thematically.
Sources of Hermeneutics. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995. A collection of essays, translated, revised, and edited into book form, attempting to ground more deeply the origins of modern hermeneutics in classical and classic texts.
Joel Weinsheimer:
Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method. New Haven: Yale University, 1985.
Truth and Method, second revised edition. Revised and translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989.
Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory. New Haven: Yale University, 1991.
Eighteenth-Century Hermeneutics: Philosophy of Interpretation in England from Locke to Burke. New Haven: Yale University, 1993.
Publication history of Wahrheit und Methode:
1st ed., Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1960 (ditto all subsequent editions)
2nd, expanded ed., 1965
3rd, expanded ed., 1971
4th, unaltered ed., 1975
5th ed., revised and expanded as Volume I of the Gesammelte Werke, 1986.
First English edition, based on the 2nd ed., appeared in 1975, translated by W. Glen-Doepel, edited by John Cumming and Garrett Barden.
First French edition, abridged: Editions Seuil, 1976.
Second, revised English edtion based on the 5th ed. of 1986, appeared in 1989.
First full French edition, Editions du Seuil, 1996. Here's a link to another death notice that has a brief paragraph about how little of Gadamer's work appears in French:
http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3382--266783-,00.html