By David Simmons
"[I]t is the fate of Truth and Method to have been disseminated by not by Gadamer's disciples but by his critics..."
-Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method, xii.
What does Weinsheimer mean by this? Well, take this example from a preeminent literary theorist:
"It might be as well to ask Gadamer whose and what 'tradition' he has in mind. For his theory holds only on the enormous assumption that there is indeed a single 'mainstream' tradition; that all 'valid' works participate in it; that history forms an unbroken continuum, free of decisive rupture, conflict, and contradiction; and that the prejudices which 'we' (who?) have inherited from the 'tradition' are to be cherished. It assumes, in other words, that history is a place where 'we' can always and everywhere be at home; that the work of the past will always deepen-rather than, say, decimate-our present self-understanding; and that the alien is always secretly familiar. It is, in short, a grossly complacent theory of history, the projection on to the world at large of a viewpoint for which 'art' means chiefly the classical monuments of the high German tradition. It has little conception of history and tradition as oppressive as well as liberating forces, areas rent by conflict and domination. History for Gadamer is not a place for struggle, discontinuity and exclusion but a continuing 'chain,' and ever-flowing river, almost, one might say, a club of the like minded."
-Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory
We might begin deconstructing this statement with Gerald Bruns's observation that Eagleton is speaking of tradition "in the usual way, which is to say, without a second thought" (Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, 195) - thus raising the question of whose theory of history is really "grossly complacent." By now, the fetishization of "rupture, conflict, and contradiction" has become cant in the academy.
No one who has read carefully Gadamer's description of German Romanticism and its relationship to both Roman Catholic and Reformation dogmatism could possibly make the claim that Gadamer views history as an "unbroken continuum," or that he believes in anything like a "mainstream" tradition. Indeed, even in our time and despite the hegemony of postmodern theory in our millenarian age, the "mainstream" remains largely indebted to Romantic thought (try asking anyone if they dispute the notion that art is self-expression, for example), so the very fact that Gadamer finds Romantic hermeneutics "questionable" indicates the extent to which he feels tradition to be monolithic, homogeneous, and authoritative (i.e., NOT AT ALL). And we have not even mentioned the fact that Gadamer's immediate intellectual predecessors were iconoclasts to the nth degree.
Readers familiar with the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" will find Eagleton's description of Gadamer's understanding of tradition eerily resonant with T. S. Eliot's, not as far as I know a great influence on Gadamer's thought. Readers aware of the criticism of Gadamer's right-wing detractors will recognize that the question of "validity" is a preoccupation of E. D. Hirsch, whose book Validity in Interpretation was in part conceived as a refutation of Gadamer's relativism. Readers intimate with the monuments of the high German tradition will scratch their heads at the classification of Hšlderlin and Celan (the two poets Gadamers spent the most time engaging) as "classical," much as they would find the inclusion of Plato and Augustine (who dominate the last hundred pages to Truth and Method) in this tradition stretching the notion German literature to the breaking point. Much to my own chagrin, Gadamer does not spend much time talking about Goethe even, much less Lessing and Schiller, or the German artists Myron and Tischbein, who became the subjects of so much aesthetic thought during the period of German Romanticism. One reason for the absence of concrete "criticism" of this kind in Truth and Method is that Gadamer's project of grounding hermeneutics philosophically is decisively NOT to establish the rules of an interpretive METHOD.
If we are to grant any relevance to Eagleton's polemic, it is in the notion that "the alien is always secretly familiar." Personally, I think a more refined understanding of Gadamer would say rather that for hermeneutic philosophy, the alien is never wholly alien, inasmuch as the alien is also part of the world to which Dasein belongs. But this would lead me to a digression on Heidegger. There is no doubt that Gadamer's depiction of intersubjectivity is attackable for its reliance on Heidegger's "analytic of Dasein" and the "hermeneutic of facticity" as inaugurated in Being and Time. But this is a criticism about Gadamer's own relationship to the world outside of texts, and to really get into you have to read his encounters with Habermas. But inasmuch Heidegger's work is attackable as the basis of Gadamer's discussion of Horizontverschmelzung, you just have to read Levinas, who laments that Heidegger's way of viewing the world reduces the human Other to just another object to be cognized, like a hammer or a work of art (Twilight of the Idols, anyone? Ouch!).