3. Gadamer in Question
10. Radio Nietzsche, or, How to Fall Short of Philosophy
GEOFF WAITE
Radio-activity It's in the world for you and me.
KRAFTWERK,“Radioactivity”
I grant you also a very general but not universal agreement could come from a transmission diffused throughout the whole of mankind.
LEIBNIZ,New Essays on Human Understanding
A good place to start is from where and whom we distance ourselves, even if ultimately we all think, make our decisions, and act “in the emptiness of a distance taken.”[1] Well-known statements by Gadamer observe a certain distance from Nietzsche, and Gadamer is not the explicit subject of my intervention in this anthology devoted to him and his repercussions. An essay on Nietzsche may be out of place, hors de saison et de combat, so I should justify my inclusion here with a prologue.
Distance from Nietzsche demarcated Gadamer from other philosophers in what mirabile dictu has just been dubbed “Gadamer's century.”[2] Heidegger and Derrida are the ones he publicly highlighted in his “Nietzsche connection,” but it is crucial not to forget Strauss. As for “Gadamer's century,” I'd prefer the term “current period of the globalizing tendency of liberal-parliamentarian free-market capitalism,” though perhaps they amount to much the same thing—both promoting “moderation,” “dialogue,” and the like. Two of Gadamer's remarks about Nietzsche are especially well known and yet insufficiently analyzed individually or together.
Gadamer welcomed part of Strauss's epistolary response to Wahrheit und Methode. In Gadamer's published paraphrase, whereas “the point of critical orientation for Heidegger was Nietzsche, for me [it was] Dilthey.”[3] This distanced him also from Strauss, who is by common consensus Nietzschean, though not qua Heideggerian (and certainly not Diltheyan).[4] Gadamer never mentioned that Dilthey and Nietzsche had had a brief but intense contretemps in the i88os over the then new concept of “inner experience”
The second of Gadamer's two relevant statements about Nietzsche still involves Heidegger but expanded to Derrida. It was published in “Destruk-tion und Dekonstruktion” (1985), Gadamer's postmortem on his contretemps with Derrida that had begun four years earlier but symptomatically terminated before it began. Gadamer summed up the difference between philosophical hermeneutics and deconstruction by remarking that “evidently Nietzsche marks the critical point,” and then stated bluntly that, unlike and against Derrida, “I am in fact convinced by Heidegger's interpretation.”[10] This concession would require viewing Nietzsche as the famous “completion” or “perfection” of the history of metaphysics leading back at least to Plato and the purported “fall away from Being.” Yet Gadamer's own Plato was sooner the originator of the “unwritten” or esoteric philosophy expressed in open-ended dialogic form, a seminal hermeneutic model with perduring significance. And this is how Gadamer had interpreted Nietzsche a year earlier in his only detailed analysis of what he called “Antipode Nietzsche.”
We have observed four things so far, the first three mostly obvious, the last tacit, i) Gadamer agrees with a relatively friendly Nietzschean interlocutor (Strauss) that Nietzsche for him (unlike for Heidegger, or Strauss) was not his “point of critical orientation,” and takes for his own such point one (Dilthey) opposed to Nietzsche. 2) Gadamer reacts to a quite hostile Nietzschean non-interlocutor (Derrida) by averring that he himself (contra Derrida) is “convinced” by the interpretation of Nietzsche by the philosopher (Heidegger) with the rival point of orientation, Nietzsche. 3) When Gadamer produces his extended reading of Nietzsche it is in terms less of Platonic metaphysical closure than of open-ended Platonic dialogue. 4) Two thematic threads emerge from what Gadamer precisely does not say. These are the history of philosophy's two most embarrassing problems, each in its own way “unwritten” and “unsaid”: insanity and esotericism.
Observation number 4 may be controversial, but there's no doubt that Gadamer's “Nietzsche connection” has ushered us into a hermeneutic circle that is “political.” I mean this (thus far) in the wholly uncontroversial sense that Gadamer's dialogue with different partners in the polls is differently policed by certain prejudices or prejudgments (more or less explicitly stated) about who that partner is, and what that partner stands for. In the properly Platonic tradition, politeia (the political, politics, or constitution) “designates … the way of life of a society … decisively determined by hierarchy,” and “implies … something like a right of un-wisdom, a right of folly” because “the polis as polis is characterized by an essential, irremediable recalcitrance to reason.”[12] In any case, the Gadamerian hermeneutic circle, or circle of dialogue, is at once closed-and-open, open-and-closed, and so forth. This is one of the most rudimentary features of the subtending system—not just its politics, but what I'd call its political economy. There's nothing novel or interesting here, either, at least in formal, procedural, or theoretical terms, and certainly not for the true believers. Jean Grondin, for one, has argued that the circle of philosophical hermeneutics is not the circle of fundamental ontology due in part to their differing views of the circle's limit qua metaphor. Whereas Heidegger sees its explanatory power as overly restricted existentially and ontologically, Gadamer's objection is comparatively epistemological and hermeneutic. For Gadamer, still according to Grondin, “there is not really a circle, because it only expresses a requirement of coherence that calls for a constant revision of the hypotheses of interpretation (following the anticipation [of] perfection).”[13] My own focus is not only on the allegedly ongoing and open-ended processes of Gadamerian understanding, interpretation, and dialogue, but also and even more on Grondin's parenthetically stated phrase, “anticipation [of]
Here … we see that understanding means, primarily, to understand the content of what is said, and only secondarily to isolate and understand another's meaning as such. Hence the most basic of hermeneutic preconditions remains one's own fore-understanding of completeness [Vorgriffder Vollkommenheit], which comes from being concerned with the same subject. This is what determines what can be realized as unified meaning and thus determines how the fore-conception of completeness is applied.[14]
But it is here that Gadamer adds to the authoritative edition of Wahrheit und Methode what is its most remarkable footnote—indeed “passage” in all senses. As stated:
There is one exception to the anticipation of perfection: the case of disguised or encrypted writing [den Fall des verstellten oder verschliisselten Schreibens]. This case poses the most difficult hermeneutic problems [die schwierigsten herme-neutischen Probleme].[15]
Way back in 1809 Schleiermacher (Nietzsche's ‘Veil-maker”) had memorably written that “the difference between easy and difficult writers only exists via the fact that there is no complete understanding.”[16] So why is Gadamer's only admitted exception—to all of Gadamer, in effect—big news? We will return to der Vorgriffder Vollkommenheit shortly, but first a word about its exception.
Without mentioning the term, Gadamer's footnote refers to the great tradition philosophical esotericism, as the reference to Strauss in the note's continuation makes clearer. (Gadamer's objection to Strauss is so cursory and imprecise that it may be intentionally misleading, but that is a demonstration for another time.) Gadamer refers to Strauss on several other occasions in his collected works, but in terms far less of the basic problem of esotericism than of the merely subsidiary one of taking different sides in les quereUes des anciens et des modernes and debates about natural right.[17] On other occasions, Gadamer alludes to the general problem of esotericism, as is well-nigh unavoidable in so many reflections on what Aristotle famously dubbed Plato's “unwritten” philosophy and its first principle, though he has comparatively little to say anywhere about the ensuing “logographic necessity” of the “noble lie.”[18] In any event, Gadamer's stated single exception (qua enonciation) to what philosophical hermeneutics can understand is itself exceptional (qua enonce). Given all his fine attunements to subtilitas leg-endi, prudentia, and der richtige Takt, it is note and question-worthy that Gadamer never treated esotericism with anything remotely like the attention
Once again summarily and crudely stated, the hermeneutic structure of Gadamer's relation to the “Nietzsche connection” is indeed not fully circular. But nor is it (pace Grondin) fully open through “constant revision of the hypotheses of interpretation (following the anticipation [of] perfection),” though that is precisely its public or exoteric face. The unsaid and esoteric structure is that of a political economy adjustable to specific interlocutors and situations, and ultimately closed to full disclosure or debate.[19] As such, Gadamer's “Nietzsche connection” is homologous with his foreclosure of open dialogue about esotericism, which is the one exception to the basic precondition of hermeneutic understanding called der Vorgriff der Vollkom-menheit. The tertium quid articulating the two terms of this homology is the signifier “Leo Strauss” insofar as it represents, at once: i) the point of critical departure not shared by Gadamer; and 2) the exceptional problematic of philosophical esotericism not analyzed by Gadamer. Since what I call Radio Nietzsche is an esoteric Nietzsche, and since Strauss is more help in identifying its existence than anyone else, the justification I give for the inclusion here of my essay on Radio Nietzsche is a type of argument per nega-tionem. Perhaps the best I can hope for is that the Gadamer Industry will now be informed (to paraphrase John Cage) by “a space, an emptiness, that it formally lacked.”[20] But because I want to dispel any impression that my argument is merely ad hominem, I want to devote the remainder of this prologue to der Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit. This is the axial point around which philosophical hermeneutics and the major exception to it are said by Gadamer to turn, and with which any interpretation of Nietzsche must settle accounts.
German Vollkommmen is “complete” or “absolute” in addition to “perfect”—whatever has “come-to-full.” Thus, for example, a philosopher is said to “perfect” the history of metaphysics. This word is easy enough to translate, but the phrase der Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit is not, and not only because of Vorgriff, to be considered presently. The phrase is a genitive metaphor and as such semantically duplicitous. There is no way to tell grammatically whether der Vollkommenheit is genitivus obiectivus or genitivus subiectivus.
Vor-griff is “pre-grip” (as Be-griffis “con-cept”—“a taking in” from Latin capere, “to take”). Gadamer depends for his term on section 32 of Sein und Zeit in which Heidegger famously articulates Vorgriff to Vorhabe (“intention,” also “what lies before us”) and Vorsicht (“foresight,” “circumspection,” also “caution” or “prudence”). All these significations can and do overlap and merge. Heideggerian Vorgriff had decisively resituated the age-old question of whether any interpretive act “draws from the entity itself” or instead “forces the entity into a concept to which it is opposed in its manner of being” because, as Heidegger concludes, “in either case the interpretation has already decided in favor of a definite way of conceiving the entity, be it with finality or with reservations.”[21] It is in this sense that “prejudice or prejudg-ment” (Vorurteil) is “philosophically vindicated” by Heideggerians and Gadamerians alike. But why stop at the philosophical? Does not its political vindication follow sooner or later? It is here that hermeneutics became “a subdivision of ethics,” to say the least.[22] A related problem is that even if we could determine degrees of prejudice (though it seems we cannot), then on what basis could that ever be, inasmuch as that, too, would be always already a function of prejudice—and so forth. Moreover, Heidegger's distinction between conceiving “with finality” and “with reservations” indeed becomes moot, but so do all others. There is no center to hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon a groundless world. If Gadamer's Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit has no answer to this problem (read also: is part and parcel of it), then Hans Albert would be correct in saying that, many appearances to the exact contrary, Gadamer's “urbanization of the Heideggerian province”—their shared “rehabilitation of prejudice”—“has the extreme consequence for textual interpretation of a sort of immunization of interpretation from all relevant criticism whatsoever.”[23]
Now, had Heidegger and Gadamer written in Greek (and effectively they did), Vorgriff would be prolepsis (pro + lambanein, “prior grasp” and “preconception” or “anticipation”—the latter two also derived from capere). In grammar, the proper name “X” in the phrase, “When he joined the National Socialist Teachers Union in August 1933, X was widely respected as …, ” is anticipated by the proleptic shifter “he,” its referent determined only retroactively. In rhetoric, prolepsis is the more or less sly anticipation or
Pace Gadamer's footnote, no external “exception” (“disguised or encrypted writing” being the only one admitted) is required to problematize
If at day's end Gadamer's work remains (in Hans Albert's phrase) “a continuation of Heidegger's thinking” or even im Banne Heideggers, then their only major difference (pace Albert) would not be that they began “with different premises.”[26] It would be that Heidegger and Gadamer differed on how to employ esotericism (the “unwritten” and the “unsaid”) to remarkably similar ideological and political-economic conclusions, which they shared a tout prendre with Nietzsche. And if Nietzsche's work can be read as the “completion” or “perfection” of metaphysics (or, more precisely, its “closure effect”), as Heidegger and as many Heideggerians assert (though perhaps not Gadamer), then this claim is valid only in the following reformulation. If Nietzsche does return to the purported “origin” or “primal fissure and leap” (Ursprung) of metaphysics, he does so only to its constitutive form, namely, the paradoxical fact that any most esoteric “first principle” can be exoterically expressed only as “unwritten doctrine.” Radio Nietzsche remains the most powerfully retrofitted response under modern (and postmodern) conditions to that origin. Its ultimate significance lies in the success of its Vorgriff der Vollkommenheit, that is, its proleptic strike against effective philosophical opposition to the globalizing tendency of liberal-parliamentarian free-market capitalism. Take it or attack it.
RADIO-ACTIVITY AS EXO/ESOTERICISM
The concept of dissimulation has to do with a practical problem. And the blurred outlines of the concept don't change anything about that.
WITTGENSTEIN, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology
Radio Nietzsche is a covert project of secular modern “oral” transmission by means of which Nietzsche intended to produce proleptic subliminal “radioactive”
By Nietzsche's design, the precise content or meaning of the resulting transmissions of Radio Nietzsche was to remain concealed or, more precisely, to appear to exist only in its subliminal effects within what he anticipated would be changing but largely hostile historical conjunctures. A single surplus content or center of his transmission nonetheless does exist in the form of what he called—appropriately only in private—“my centrum.”
On January 3, 1888, Nietzsche remarked in a letter to Paul Deussen (one of his oldest friends, with whom he had almost lost contact) that some German critics who had just begun to be interested in his work were given to characterize it in pejorative medical terms as “‘eccentric,’ ‘pathological,’ ‘psychiatric,’ et hoc genus omne.” But, Nietzsche continued, “These gentlemen, who have no clue as my centrum, as to the great passion in the service of which I live, will have difficulty casting a glance even where I previously have been outside of my center, where I was really ‘eccentric.’”[29] The last term has little to do with any pathological eccentricity, or with the well-known Romantic trope of “eccentric circle” as a figure of irony or poetic and conceptual rigor. It has far more to do with Nietzsche's principled refusal, in public or even private, fully to reveal his center of radio-active transmission.
But he concealed this center so well that it arguably cannot be identified. It is certainly premature to assign it any ideological value before its logical structure has been articulated. This is not to say that Nietzsche's center is
Critiquing the dependence of psychoanalytic theory and practice on the concept of negation (Verneinung) as the basic way to “transgress” ideology—when negation in fact is one of ideology's main ways of functioning—an Al-thusserian argument has recently been developed to suggest that “somebody who knows about the mechanisms of negation can instrumentalize them as a code of communication.”[31] Furthermore, “everything that negation says—even what it says at the level of its enunciation—belongs to its enunciated content. Only the fact that it is a negation remains on the level of enunciation. Everything that can be falsified or verified is a part of the constative level of the enunciated—not the performative level of enunciation, where the question of truth does not play any role.”[32] Translated into terms of Radio Nietzsche, this means that although any of us is free to falsify or verify the manifest content of Nietzsche's code of communication, to accept or reject it—in short, to read it as unconscious negation—it was Nietzsche's intent to instrumentalize the mechanisms of such negation so as to render the performative level of his enunciations concealed from view in inverse relation to their perlocutionary effectivity. So, to anticipate, when Nietzsche's enunciation explicitly defends, say, human slavery, we appear free to read him as saying the opposite, whereas the real slavery here is being transmitted not at the level of the enunciated but at the level of the enunciation itself—where it remains impervious to detection, let alone verification or falsification. Unless a new way of reading be developed—one which will necessarily be dictated proleptically by Nietzsche, to some extent, but which will explore the possibility of escape.
The effect of Radio Nietzsche's transmission was also designed to be mainly formal (as opposed to semantic) and prophylactic (as opposed to positive or constructive). In spite and because of his fervent and publicly expressed desire to produce, say, the “superman” in an age he diagnosed as increasingly democratic and permeated by “slave morality,” he was pessimistic, prudent, and practical enough not to limit himself to the superman's production, and certainly not to his immediate production. Nietzsche did
Now, the world has hardly needed Radio Nietzsche to produce or reproduce “order or rank.” But, for more than a century now, Nietzsche's effects have been particularly enervating. They constitute postmodernity's necessary, if not sufficient, logical condition. Radio Nietzsche was produced to be “radio-active” in both senses of the word: a transmission across distant space, and especially time, more or less subliminally received, and, as such, debilitating or even lethal for those unaware that this transmission indeed has a content and who persist in the mistaken belief that Nietzsche's thought must—somehow—be liberating. Responding to Radio Nietzsche, then, real philosophical struggle cannot occur at the level of “free debates” grounded in an unacknowledged consensus appealing always already to Nietzsche, but in as yet uncharted radio-active waves. And precisely these are what is exo/esoteric or “aesoteric.”[33]
FALLING SHORT OF PHILOSOPHY
Premises of the machine age. — Thepress, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw. NIETZSCHE, The Wanderer and His Shadow
By falling short of philosophy, I mean stating propositions as “conclusions without premises,” as Spinoza and Althusser would have put it.
BALIBAR, The Philosophy of Marx
The juxtaposition of these enthymematic epigraphs indicates that Nietzsche was not merely a philosopher sensu stricto, but also a philosopher of the indefinite technological future.
It is insufficiently recognized that Nietzsche was “Hegelian” not only in his concern with techniques of ideational incorporation (described in Hegel's
The philosophical problem whenever “reading” Nietzsche is always philological: we must grasp the conceptual peculiarity of his “love of words” as well as of his “love of wisdom.” Generally speaking, to paraphrase or translate him is not merely to say something slightly different from what he openly said—all paraphrase or translation unavoidably does this (traduttore, traditore)—but is also to incorporate unwittingly something else he said between or behind the lines, namely, his unstated, enthymemic premise. Actually, the last part of this notebook text breaks down, as Nietzsche's notebooks frequently do, under a certain pressure. In addition to contingent physiological pressures (Nietzsche's health) it is also the pressure of coming dangerously close to putting in print what ought never to be uttered explicitly
Basically, such postmodern post-Marxists trust Nietzsche, who gives them their root definition of philosophy as “the creation of concepts that are always new.” But why, returning to Nietzsche's elided words, is it “natural” that perhaps the “One” philosopher before Nietzsche would have “taught the opposite” of what that philosopher believed? Why should he have given off the appearance of skepticism with regard to all inherited concepts? Arguably, because Plato had some hidden agenda in mind that neither he nor Nietzsche states publicly because it would be illogical and counterproductive to do so. This agenda is shared elitism with regard to politics. In this context, Nietzsche's attack on Plato's metaphysics is too well known.[39] It has to do with the concomitant requirement to speak exo/esoterically at once to those both “in” and “out of the know.” This requirement—at once Platonic and Nietzschean—logically entails the subliminal incorporation of concepts. This thesis emerges between the lines (with Hegel's help) from Plato's depiction of the death of Socrates and its mortally transformative, bi-suicidal relation to society via the (Hegelian and Nietzschean) ruse of reason.
But then it would follow against Deleuze and Guattari that if we are philosophers in their Nietzschean sense (i.e., conceptually creative), then among the “newly” minted concepts we must most distrust are those created by Nietzsche. The dowry (German Mitgift) of this pharmakos is always already poison (Gift). So I argue that the trust Nietzsche most betrayed is ours, namely, our trust that the “object of philosophy”—its joy and its terror, as Deleuze and Guattari also say—is the “creation of concepts that are always new,” when in fact Nietzsche's concepts were created surreptitiously to serve ideological interests and agendas that are premodern, archaic in their commitment to social, conceptual, and rhetorical hierarchy of the kind that, paradoxically, Nietzsche affirms and that Deleuze and Guattari reject. Therefore, our task is to grasp the paradox of philosophy as being, at once, “the creation of concepts that are always new” (Deleuze and Guattari) and/ or “the possibility of univocal translation” (Derrida) and/or “struggle”—not least “class struggle in the specific element of theory” (Althusser) and not most the struggle not to fall short of philosophy.
ACTIO IN DISTANS
New Battles. —After Buddha was dead, his shadow was for centuries still exhibited in a cave—a gigantic, terrifying shadow. God is dead; but, as is the way with humans, there will perhaps be caves for millennia in which his shadow will still be exhibited.
NIETZSCHE, The Gay Science, 1882
The true formula of atheism is not God is dead … the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious.
LACAN, Seminar XI, 1964
Kleist wrote somewhere that what the poet would most like to be able to do would be to convey thoughts by themselves without words. (What a strange admission.) WITTGENSTEIN, Culture and Value, ca. 1931
To advance intercourse within the borders of the four corners of the earth, an electrical telegraph has recently been invented, a telegraph that by means of dynamo and electrical wire communicates information at the speed of thought, I mean to say in less time than any chronometric instrument can register. KLEIST, “Letter Bomb Project,” i8io[40]
Island down before One who does not yet exist [Ich trete vorEinem zuruch, der noch nicht da ist], and make my bow, a millennium in advance, before his spirit.
KLEIST, letter of 1803 (also cited by Heidegger in the documentary film Im Denken unterwegs, 1975)
Philosophy acts at a distance, in a void (mine!) ALTHUSSER, L'avenir dure longtemps, 1985
Obviously it is anachronistic to attribute to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900, and who effectively ceased writing in 1888) any serious thoughts-neutral, negative, or positive—about current “technoculture” (the tendency increasingly to fuse culture, in the broad and narrow sense, with digital technologies that can “freely” manipulate and synthesize images and sounds) and hence about his own technocultural afterlife as techno-Nietzscheanism. Nonetheless, speculative attempts linking Nietzsche to various forms of wireless communication are already underway, at least en passant.[41] But the deeper problem lies elsewhere. As parsed by Charles Grivel in his work on radio, “since God is dead the voice, without reservation, dissolves.”[42] And so it is that Nietzsche's parable of the ear in Thus Spoke Zara-thustra (also the central exhibit of Derrida's otobiographie) has been called “a parable of the effects of radiophonic art.”[43] But Grivel is simply wrong. God is not dead, is “not-dead.” We recall, with Lacan, that the most radical statement of atheism is not “God is dead” (any more than God is eternal), but rather “God is unconscious.”[44] This is what enables Radio Nietzsche to
Now, radio qua technology (as opposed to its concept or possibility, both of which came much earlier) was arguably created in 1913; and the first commercial radio broadcast was in 1920. Radium had been isolated chemically and radioactivity discovered in 1898 (by Marie and Pierre Curie). In the words of radio's historian and theorist Allen S. Weiss (whose Phantasmic Radio analyzes the way the medium disembodies and reembodies what I call corps/es), it was on January 31, 1913, that
Edwin H. Armstrong notarized his diagram of the first regenerative circuit, an invention which was to be the basis of radio transmission. His discovery was that the audion (vacuum tube) could be used not only as a detector of electrical waves but also, through regeneration or feedback, as a signal amplifier. Furthermore, as a generator of continuously oscillating electronic waves, it could be used as a transmitter. The very first demonstration of audio amplification, by Lee de Forest in November 1913, created the “crashing sounds” of a handkerchief dropping. Radio was created—and along with it, an unfortunate electronic side-effect was first heard, that of static.[46]
In 1898 Nietzsche was still alive but not receiving broadcasts of any kind from the outside world. And by 1913 and 1920 his physical corpse had naturally long decayed; the globe had fast turned toward its first technowar, which accelerated and was accelerated by radio technology; and the basic structure of Nietzsche's influence (i.e., “immanent” or “structural causality,” in the Spinozist and Althusserian senses) was firmly rooted in place qua corps/e. This was the Nietzsche who had written in Thus Spoke Zarathustra not of handkerchiefs dropping, it is true, but that it is the thoughts coming in our “most silent moments” and “with the feet of doves” that “guide the world.”[47] Nietzsche intended this particular thought, as his thought generally, to be exoterically beautiful, esoterically chilling, and ultimately concealed by, and transmitted through, static.
As a rule of thumb, it is worse to underestimate than overestimate Nietzsche, whose influence would be much less had he anticipated less. Certainly he had taken the pulse of the mass—or, as he called it, “philistine” and “decadent”—culture of his own, early capitalist time. And this was the same time for Germany as for the rest of Europe, the United States, Japan, and increasingly the globe. He had already done so by his 1873 essay on David Friedrich Strauss, and he continued to do it in his extensive critiques of Wagner's “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) and, most tellingly, in his
The discovery of radium aside, basic technological prerequisites for radio were well in place within Nietzsche's sane lifetime (though my argument resists technological determinism). On December 6, 1877, “Thomas A. Edison made the first recording of the human voice onto a tinfoil roll, singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’”[49] Weiss continues:
As never before voice is separated from body and eternalized in a technological mechanism—breeding the first of sundry techno-phantasies … where the fears, hopes, and phantasms of disembodiment are finally actualized. At the very moment that the invention of the typewriter and the practice of experimental psychophysics freed words from both their gestural significance and their meaning, and at the time that psychoanalysis dissociated meaning from consciousness, phonography transformed voice into object, marking an end to several millennia of pneumatological, ontotheological belief.[50]
To be sure, readers of the Bible accustomed to God speaking through burning bushes or prophets will find nothing new here, nor would anyone attuned to the other types of accousmatically disembodied voices. In any case, this was hardly the end, for Nietzsche, of the archaic need and desire to maintain all types of hierarchy and order of rank by the best technological means available. Rather, it was for him yet another new beginning within the great cycle of Eternal Recurrence of the Same informed by Will to Power.
Weiss suggests that “the paradox of radio” consists in the fact that “a universally public transmission is heard in the most private of circumstances; the thematic specificity of each individual broadcast, its imaginary scenario, is heard within an infinitely diverse set of nonspecific situations, different for each listener; the radio's putative shared solidarity of auditors in fact achieves their atomization as well as a reification of the imagination.”[51] So it is, too, that Radio Nietzsche cannibalistically, incorporatively feeds off this paradox to produce (“interpellate”) auditors receiving a universal esoteric message in the exoteric guise of maximum individuality. As pertinent for Radio Nietzsche is the fact that the omnidirectional “surround sound” of radio (in my extended, non-technologically reductive sense, and in any case unlike visually rooted, monodirectional technologies or concepts such as television) allows the consumer to do other things in the rest of the more or
The properly Nietzschean articulation of aesthetics, politics, and prophecy also consists of the desire to “write”—that is, to be “heard” before being read—so as to have maximum possible and subcutaneous effect in the future, after the death of one's material body, under the sign of the slogan, as Nietzsche put it in 1882 (as always bastardizing Spinoza), “sub specie trecento-rum annorum “ (under the aspect of three hundred years).[52] And a year later: “To be ignited in 300 years—that is my desire for fame.”[53] (Not fortuitously, Nietzsche's tercentennial timeframe was adapted by Heidegger for the pro-leptic dissemination of his own work.)[54] In 1881 Nietzsche spoke in social Darwinian terms of millennia, and had his own version of a millennial Reich: “The age of experiments [Experimente]! The claims of Darwin are to be tested—through experiments [Versuche]! As is the evolution of higher organisms out of the lowest. Experiments [Versuche] must be conducted for millennia! Raise apes into men!”[55] Raise them, that is, as work force, as the “trained gorillas” of Taylorism.[56] Now recall Nietzsche's 1880 aphorism “Premises of the machine age”: “The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.” And note the striking double homology: on the one hand the relationship between Nietzsche's desire to have an effect beginning in 300 years (or millennia), his desire for prestige and its required prestidigitations, and his need for social Darwinian experiments extended into the distant future; and, on the other hand, “postmodernist” Nietzsche's implication, “prediction,” or “self-fulfilling prophecy” that his effectivity would be conterminous and compossible with the development of whatever new information technologies might become available.
Lacking exposure or access to radio, film, video, HDTV, even telephones and phonographs, let alone the digital technologies of cyberspace and implant chips, and having barely discovered the typewriter, Nietzsche did know technoculture superbly well in its then most powerful mode. The Wagner-ian “total work of art” was the sublime and subliminal mode of communication that is today widely viewed as a crucial protoform of virtual reality (VR).[57] Yes, Nietzsche criticized “the music drama of the future” (Zukunfts-musik), but not in principle, only in kind: Wagner himself had betrayed its politico-philosophical, world-historical mission to transmit “order of rank” by selling out to such epiphenomenal and counterproductive aberrations as anti-Semitism, Christianity (“Platonism for the people”), and the Germans. Presumably Nietzsche would have had the same reservations mutatis mutandis about any future technology, including the internet, cyberspace, and so
It's deathly still in the room—the one sound is the pen scratching across the paper—for I love to think by writing, given that the machine that could imprint our thoughts into some material without their being spoken or written has yet to be invented. In front of me is an inkwell in which I can drown the sorrows of my black heart, a pair of scissors to accustom me to the idea of slitting my throat, manuscripts with which I can wipe myself, and a chamber pot.[59]
This text from 1862 outlines Nietzsche's subsequent project: to take advantage of the limited technology of writing to work proleptically on the “material” of the human race until more advanced techniques of subliminal and subcutaneous “imprint” might be found. And Nietzsche was to have remarkable success in sublimating and transforming the scatological, sadomasochistic, suicidal aspect of his juvenile project into a fully mature and more social process of euthanasia, one related specifically to music and to radio-active aural transmission generally. “Compared with music,” Nietzsche stressed, “all communication via words is shameless; the word dilutes and makes stupid; the word depersonalizes: the word makes the uncommon common.”[60] And music is one of Radio Nietzsche's transmissions inter alia inter pares.
As for the precisely scatological aspect of Nietzsche's precocious teen-aged fantasy of “influencing machines,” it can be linked directly to radio by reference to Artaud's famous failed attempt at radio broadcast. In philosophical “translation,” for Nietzsche, death is profoundly involved in the transactions between producing corpse, corpus, and receiving corps. On the one hand the mere biological contingencies of birthing and of the division of mammals into two basic (binary) sexes may all be replaced by a bio-engineering that Nietzsche's many affirmations of the necessity for the higher man's “breeding” (Zuchtung) give us no reason to believe he would reject.[61] On the other hand there seems to be, at least for Nietzsche, a direct homology between male birthing and the projective nature of “radio” transmission as a particular type of excrement: the expulsion of dead but potentially lethal matter. Weiss follows Freud, Bataille, and particularly Artaud to note that, like radio transmissions,
excrement, as a sign of death, is formless matter excluded from the organization of the symbolic order. It poses a threat to cultural formations both because it signifies a wasteful expenditure that circumvents societal modes of production and because it is an originary sign of autonomous production, of sovereign creativity bypassing societal structure of exchange. Excrement marks the body, and not the socius, as the center of production, whence comes the necessity, in the process of socializing the infant, of controlling anal functions and establishing the anus of possession and exclusion. This exclusion entails, in the major irony of human ontogenesis, the rejection of one's own body, a rejection which is the very origin of sublimation. Any desublimated return to anality in adult life marks a return of the repressed and serves as a contestation of the symbolic law.[62]
So it was in the case of young Nietzsche's prediction of imprinting technologies. But so it also was, at the outset of his academic teaching career, that Nietzsche's then closest friend (the classical philologist Erwin Rohde) and their harshest enemy (Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, an underclassman of Nietzsche's at Schulpforta and the dominant classical philologist of this and the next generation) were thus not wrong to set out the terms of debate about Nietzsche's philology in his first book The Birth of Tragedy—all according to the antinomy: Zukunftsphilologie versus Afterphilologie.[63] For the philology of Radio Nietzsche is precisely both a proleptic philology of and for the future and an anal philology, that is, anally aggressive to maximum effect, ex extremis.
Make no mistake, however. The adult Nietzsche—Radio Nietzsche—was never out to contest all “symbolic orders,” only those that threatened his own “order of rank.” Friedrich Kittler also cites the chamber pot passage from the teenaged Nietzsche, whom he places at the axial passage from the classical-romantic discourse network (“1800”) to the properly modern or postmodern (“1900”). Kittler describes this moment as “a primal scene, less well known but no less fraught with consequences than the despair of Faust in and over his study in the Republic of Scholars. This (the) scholar is replaced, however, by the very man of letters whom Faust made to appear magically as the redeemer from heaps of books.”[64] For Kittler, however, the representative Nietzschean technology remained the typewriter, the increasingly blind Nietzsche being the first major philosopher to use this new technology designed for, and indeed by, the blind.[65] With the typewriter and its “psychology” (as it came to be called in 1909), a certain epistemo-logical and ontological break arguably occurs within the discourse network: ‘“in place of the image of the word [in handwriting as somatic creation] there appears a geometrical figure created by the spatial arrangement of the letter keys.’ Indeed, a peculiar relationship to place defines the signi-fier: in contrast to everything in the Real, it can be and not be in its place.”[66]
Heidegger criticized the invention of the typewriter as part of the “increasing destruction of the word” insofar as “the typewriter grabs script away from the essential domain of the hand—and this means that the hand is removed from the essential domain of the word,” “degrading the word to a mere means for the traffic of communication.”[67] Nietzsche, too, had no use for “mere traffic in communication”—the very reason to invent the more properly prosthetic and oral transmission-reception system of Radio Nietzsche. It is not (just) radio in the literal sense, say, as the extension from the writing hand to the typewriter to the telegraph already known to Nietzsche. Rather, Radio Nietzsche is (also) radio in the sense of an authorial intent to communicate influence across space and time, as a probe into the future, as a mode of Spinozist immanent causality and actio in distans, just slightly beneath the surface of full cognition. As Kittler notes, the physical condition of Nietzsche (and, by extension, the paradigm shift from “1800” to “1900”), including his continually worsening eyesight, undoubtedly contributed less to his abandonment of Faustian books than to the production of a particular type of book, namely, the “first experiments with telegraphic style” in 1880 in The Wanderer and His Shadow[68] —that is, even before he purchased his maladroit typewriter in 1882. But the material form of these experiments, by hand or by typewriter, was immaterial to Nietzsche. At stake, I argue, is a transmissive structure or discursive network of corps/e/‘ing. InEcce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (1888), in the section “Why I Write Such Good Books,” Nietzsche claimed-in his now patented telegraph style—that “My eyes alone put an end to all book wormishness [Bucherwurmerei]: in plain language [auf deutsch]: philology: I was delivered from the ‘book,’ for years I read Nothing any more—the most charitable act I ever conferred upon myself!—That nethermost self [Jenes unterste Selbst] submerged, as it were, grown silent under the constant pressure of having to listen to other selves (—what reading means, after all!) awakened slowly, shyly, suspiciously,—but eventually it spoke again.”[69] And when it spoke it (id, (a) was radio-active.
Nietzsche's periodic and increasing near-blindness was more than a physical ailment, more than a reiterated theme in his correspondence during the last years of his sanity. In response to Nietzsche's painful near-blindness, his secretary, the musician and composer Heinrich Koselitz (known as Peter Cast), encouraged Nietzsche in September 1888: “You have dragged your artillery to the highest mountains, you have guns such as have
Much of Nietzsche's original genius and subsequent afterlife lies in his extraordinary ability to transform (“sublimate,” one might suppose) his painful near-blindness and other illnesses (which appear to have been more somatic than psychological, which is also to say psychosomatic) into concepts—concepts that were “new” and hence to have these (in fact exceedingly “old”) concepts incorporated by readers beneath the surface of cognition by his ruse of reason. For their part, Deleuze and Guattari follow Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Marx to say that “The concept is an incorporeal, even though it is incarnated or effectuated in bodies.”[73] Spinoza's principle of immanent causality, that the cause “indwells its effects,” eminently prefigures Marx's critique of leftist idealism: “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.”[74] As most succinctly defined already by Kant, “an argumentum ad hominem is an argument that obviously is not true for everyone, but still serves to reduce someone to silence.”[75] Nietzsche was a radical philosopher defined in just this sense; but his ideological and political commitment was the reverse of Marx's insofar as his centrum of radiographic transmission and incorporation was in principle esoteric and surreptitious, whereas the enlightenment commitment of Marx was to maximum possible exposure, rendering Marxism to date incapable of locating or even knowing about the Nietzschean centrum. In this regard Althusser was right to suggest that Nietzsche had
If I am on the right track, tracking Nietzsche correctly, whenever it speaks, Nietzsche's voice speaks “radio-actively.” Lacoue-Labarthe has suggested in his analysis of what he calls “the echo of the subject” that the modern subject has been formed—in a trajectory from Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche to Theodor Reik—not only visually, representationally, under the sign of Apollo, but also under the sign of Dionysus. Which is to say musically, aurally, willfully, and as an echo not of “signification” but of a “significance” that is sensu stricto not “of the order of language.”[77] Rather, in Lacoue-Labarthe's words, “it affects a language, and affects in the use of a language … its musical part, prosodic or melodic,” in order to produce a mode of communication and response “that is capable of offering infinitely greater material, according to Reik, than what is given to us by conscious perception.”[78] But this is also why what is crucially at stake far Nietzsche is the production of a constitutive problem in Nietzsche, that of Stimmung—of voice, fine tuning, and mood.[79] It remains here to illustrate how such a Nietzschean mood has been proleptically transmitted across space and time in and by Radio Nietzsche, in ways that “translators” and “creators” alike are unaware and that forge ostensibly rival “creations” and “translations” into the harmony of unacknowledged consensus. And when “class struggle in the specific element of theory” still today might be the more appropriate response, necessary though insufficient.
“THESE GOOD EUROPEANS”:
THE ADORNO-HORKHEIMER-GADAMER CONSENSUS
However far language might slip into a technical function, as language it holds the invariable things in our nature fast, those things which come to be spoken of in language again and again. And the language of philosophy, as long as it remains language, will remain a dialogue with that language of the world.
GADAMER, Hegel's Dialectic
Everything that is thought, written, painted, composed, even built and formed, belongs either to monologic art or to art before witnesses. Among the latter is to be taken into account even that apparently monologue-art which involves faith in God, the entire lyric of prayer: because for the pious there is as yet no solitude—this invention was made only by us, the godless. I know no more profound difference in the entire optic of an artist than this: whether he looks out from his work in progress (at “himself”) with the eye of a witness, or whether he has “forgotten the world,” which is the essence of all monologic art. It is based on forgetting, it is the music of forgetting.
NIETZSCHE, The Gay Science
Let us now turn back to the year 1950 as the symbolic and actual halfway point between the death of Nietzsche's corpse, the concomitant birth of his
Nineteen fifty marked the half century after Nietzsche's death with several public events. Above all, in retrospect, there was Bataille's remark that “Nietzsche's position is the only one outside of communism”[80]—a thought whose repercussions have only now begun to be played out in social as well as intellectual history, for we find ourselves in a situation in which, assuming “the death of communism,” Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism have become totalitarian, globally hegemonic. Nineteen fifty also saw the affirmation and reaffirmation of Nietzsche as an “existentialist” philosopher, albeit one working in basic solidarity within the antifoundational tradition of enlightenment critique. This interpretation was codified philosophically in the recent republication and discussion of the 1936 Nietzsche book by Karl Jaspers, and publicized in the English-speaking world by Walter Kaufmann's obsessive and influential rehabilitation of existentialism and especially of Nietzsche. Particularly in Germany, 1950 celebrated Nietzsche with several more public occurrences, including two major radio shows. The second of these remains relatively well known (at least in Germany), namely, Gottfried Benn's broadcast entitled “Nietzsche—nach fiinfzig Jahren” (Nietzsche—after fifty years). It was transmitted from Berlin on August 25, fifty years to the day after Nietzsche's death. Benn not only depicted Nietzsche hyper-bolically as “the most far reaching giant of the post-Goethean epoch” but also radiophonically as “die groBte Ausstrahlungsphanomen der Geistes-geschichte.”[81] Which we can now translate as “the greatest phenomenon of radiation, of radio and radioactivity, in the history of consciousness.” A year earlier Benn had celebrated what he called Radardenken (radar thinking).[82] He now turned, on radio, to Nietzsche. Benn not merely affirmatively constated Nietzsche's commitment to “monologic art,” he also reperformed it in his patented monotone, producing a hagiographic levitation rite around Nietzsche's corpse. The first radio show on Nietzsche had already taken place at the end of July, and is today almost wholly unknown or forgotten. Whereas Benn's broadcast was a self-conscious monologue about a monologue, the first broadcast was to have been a dialogue. In other terms, Benn's format was far closer to the spirit of Nietzsche than had been the first transmission; if the latter had been designed as a proleptic strike against Benn's position, it failed miserably. In this respect it has justly sunk into virtual oblivion.
That an unacknowledged consensus with regard to Nietzsche cuts across virtually all ideological differences is succinctly illustrated by this second broadcast, “Uber Nietzsche und uns: Zum 50. Todestag des Philosophen”
Now, specifically German philosophy—as well as mutatis mutandis continental European philosophy in the last three-quarters of the twentieth century, its high-modernist moment—was defined by three texts published in a half-decade of the Weimar period: Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus in 1921; Lukacs's History and Class-Consciousness in 1923–24; and the never-completed torso of Heidegger's Being and Time in 1927. “These three works, the most influential philosophical writings of this century, originated from, and defined themselves in relation to, certain traditions which they themselves brought to an end.”[84] The effect of National Socialism, on at least German academic philosophy, was to eliminate or radically diminish—and not just temporarily between 1933 and 1946—the impact of two of these three seminal works, their traditions and legacies. Both the analytic, postpositivist, and latter common-language tendency and the Hegelian-Marxist tendency were both effectively terminated or deformed during the Third Reich and its immediate aftermath. All that remained more or less intact was the Nietzschean-Heideggerian tendency, most notably represented after World War II by Gadamer. When analytic philosophy and Marxism belatedly began to return, as the latter did in the work of Horkheimer and Adorno's Frankfurt School of Social Research, they were critically but indelibly effected by the Heideggerian—hence Ni-etzschean—tendency.[85] This, then, is the sociological explanation for the symptomatic and exemplary modern “virtual consensus” that I identify as Radio Nietzsche. But mere sociology is never adequate even to describe, let alone explain, such complex issues.
In the 1950 Frankfurt “conversation,” despite minor differences of opinion about Nietzsche (having to do, I would argue, with different views of Heidegger), there turned out to be remarkably few real bones of contention. In short, yet another consensus under capitalist hegemony. What was really at stake, in other words, was already the German complement to the
Now, remarkably, this is the philosophical version of the social “convergence theory” that has deep, and problematic, roots in nineteenth-century German conservative thought. As recently as the 1930-5, for Heidegger and (other) Nazis alike, this theory had held that the United States and the USSR had developed into an “in-essence-the-same” syndico-technical form of society.[86] This entailed the proposition that Germany, “the heart of Europe” (Holderlin), must seek its proper “third way” between and beyond the “pincers” of “Americanism and Bolshevism.” (Similar national and social self-legitimations were global, most visibly in Japan.) In this matter, there was also a difference. Our three German panelists concurred that “Americanism” (read: pragmatism, Fordism, Taylorism, pluralism, multiculturalism, liberal democracy, culture industry and mass culture, and so on) necessarily entails the instrumentalization of language and the latter's “reduction to statements and propositions” (as Horkheirner put it). By contrast, under Soviet communism, “every word is a thesis for which one can die, if taken at one's word.” But these “two cultures” have one tertium quid that Nietzsche is said by the consensus to expose, critique, and properly reject—definitively.
On the consensus view, the relentless, unreflecting tendency of both “rival” cultures is “to take language literally” (in Horkheimer's words), rendering it “simply impossible”—de facto et dejure—even to read a Nietzsche who, as Horkheirner, Adorno, and Gadamer all simply presuppose, used language in a “radically different” manner from the “American-Russian” paradigm. Gadamer prefers to say that Nietzsche was a “parodist,” while Adorno (and, years later, Rorty) favors “ironist,” but in the matter of celebrating Nietzsche it all amounted to the same thing.[87] And it may not have mattered much, ideologically, if others had been invited to the Frankfurt studio that evening in 1950. “When everyone is invited, it is not the hoped-for new science that is being invited (for it is never the result of a gathering of specialists who are ignorant of it), but a character no one has invited—and whom it is not necessary to invite, since it invites itself!—the common theoretical ideology that silently inhabits the ‘consciousness' of all these specialists: when
On this consensus assumption, Nietzsche never quite meant what he said, never could mean what he said. In short, a prohibition performatively becomes a constated impossibility. So it is, for the Frankfurt consensus, that both the Nazi “misappropriation” of Nietzsche and the “whitewashing” of his elitism by well-meaning liberal-existentialist philosophers (meaning Jaspers and especially Kaufmann) were equally misguided, equally literal, potentially “totalitarian” even. Such were the explicit terms employed in the Frankfurt studio. Paradoxically, however, this same ideological consensus holds that in one matter we can read Nietzsche literally, after all. That is, his own remarks ought never to be taken … literally. To be precise: Sometimes we can read Nietzsche literally, sometimes figuratively, or we can conflate the two, but in any case we don't need to get exercised about his intentions, because the one thing we can take at face value is his own claim to be a “free spirit,” “smasher of all idols,” “perspectivist,” “parodist,” “ironist,” “thinker on stage,” “enlightener,” “great emancipator of humankind,” and so forth, ad infinitum et nauseam.
This a priori “logic” with regard to reading Nietzsche is thus at root benevolent about what he intended to say, in spite of the subsequent “misrecog-nition” by all others who take him too literally in one literal direction or another. Yet this “logic” itself remains binary and dualist, rendering it impossible for Nietzsche ever to have said something different or more radical than the consensus can ever see and hear. And what it cannot see and hear is his One Aim, his ruse of reason. This “German consensus” “left,” “right,” and “center”—there are equivalent national variants everywhere, from the French Derrida and Deleuze to the North Atlantic Rorty and across the Pacific—tacitly embodies Nietzsche/anism, never worrying why “we” ought to take him literally only when he might ordain it. If by stating propositions as conclusions without premises we fall short of philosophy, then the Nietzschean consensus falls short o/Radio Nietzsche because it is already always informed and incorporated by Radio Nietzsche. This is not avant-garde radio but slapstick radio—philosophically speaking, speaking with the esoteric Nietzsche himself. He would have had as little use for Gadamer as he would have had for Adorno and Horkheimer (or Benn)—except insofar as he was effectively using all of them to prevent access to any alternative way of approaching him.
What matters most in Radio Nietzsche cannot be perceptible at the level of theme or dialogue. This includes even the fact that what he meant by “fateful” is the task to split future humanity in two by subliminal rhetorical means up to and including suicide and euthanasia. Rather, what matters are his illocutionary means to this end and their actual perlocutionary effect. In other terms, all auditors and speakers within Nietzscheanism—alongside capitalism
Here is Horkheimer introducing the radio broadcast “On Nietzsche and Us”:
Nietzsche predicted that in Germany one would erect monuments to him when he could no longer defend himself. Radio he could not have foreseen. What would he have indeed said if he had foreseen that we-you Mr. Gadamer, and you Mr. Adorno—would sit together and solemnly converse about him on the fiftieth anniversary of his death? Why are we really here?
These remarks at the half-century mark of Nietzsche's death were imprecise if not simply mistaken. The question remains, as we have passed the centenary of that death: Are we any less imprecise and mistaken about Mr. Nietzsche? In any case, the reason Horkheimer, Adorno, and Gadamer were “really here” was that they had gathered unconsciously to embody Nietzsche's corpse and voice. They all “overheard”—and hence reiterated—all the “punctuation marks” of Nietzsche's centrum.
If you listen to the finale of the 1950 broadcast you will hear-more or less unconsciously-not Hans-Georg Gadamer but Pastorsohn Friedrich Nietzsche ventriloquizing the voice of Gadamer, intoning platitudes about Nietzsche's place of birth and burial in the context, or “horizon,” of “world history.” Whereas Benn was simultaneously to perform and constate his embrace of Nietzschean monologue, Gadamer's voice performed precisely the monologue that his own philosophy explicitly rejected at the level of con-statation. This Nietzschean voice-not its message or content but its Stimmung—makes serious critical confrontation with Nietzsche as impossible as does the excited, sharper, and apparently more critical theoretical voices of Adorno and Horkheimer. All are modulations of Nietzsche's own voice. All Nietzscheans speak in his medium, Radio Nietzsche, as mediums for this near-blind living or dead man, and never fully in their own voice. This Adorno-Horkheimer-Gadamer broadcast in 1950 was not a “conversation” or “dialogue” about Nietzsche at all—except on an exoteric level handicapped in advance by Nietzsche exo/esoterically. And not by chance, this broadcast was yet another preliminary, performative celebration of “the death of communism.” The “only” difference between the way Gadamer on the one side and Adorno and Horkheimer on the other received Radio
So I agree with Kqjin Karatani's attempt to shift the drift of what he calls “secular criticism” (at the end of a twentieth century globally marked by the purported death of communism and the factual resurgence of religious fanaticism and theocratic states) away from literary criticism, much psychoanalysis, and cultural studies toward philosophy and proper psychoanalysis (a shift I find more properly informed by Althusser, Lacan, and Karatani than by Derrida or Deleuze). Alluding to Marx's critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, Karatani interprets Marx to be arguing “that it is impossible to dissolve any religion unless the ‘real suffering’ upon which every religion is based is dissolved. There is no reason to criticize religion theoretically, because it can only be dissolved practically.”[90]Pace Karatani, however, I do not regard Nietzsche as an immediate ally in any argument.[91] Nietzsche and his repercussions are a form of religion across the ideological spectrum. But this difference aside, I tend to concur with Karatani's thesis that, in our times, “religion, albeit as Schein, has a certain necessity inasmuch as man is an existence of passivity (pathos); it functions ‘regulatively’ as a protest against reality, if not a ‘constitution’ of reality.” Karatani continues:
Although communism as well is a mere Schein, to criticize its “illusion” means no more and no less than “to call on [people] to give up a condition that requires illusions.” And religion will be upheld so long as this state of affairs endures. We can never dissolve fundamentalism by the criticisms or dialogues motivated by enlightenment, precisely because to criticize the “illusion” of the latter is “to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.” The advocating of the collapse of Idee and the insistence on its realization are, in fact, intertwined and inseparable, and both are Schein that represent, each in its own way, the real (the thing-in-itself) of world capitalism, of which they themselves are members.[92]
It is this real that Nietzsche—and the consensus of all Nietzscheans—ultimately monologically has closed off from any “conversation” or “dialogue.” If, as I argue, Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism—Nietzsche's corps/e—constitute the radically unquestioned ideological support—the Idee—of the fundamentalism known as late capitalist hegemony, then this would also confirm per negationem Bataille's 1950 thesis that communism remains the only position outside of Nietzscheanism. For worse or for better.
Closer inspection of Nietzsche's writing than is normally granted it across the ideological spectrum would reveal that it is too simple to say that he was “against” socialism or communism, at least not in any easily identifiable sense. After all, Radio Nietzsche is programmed not to be part of any enlightenment problematic, except exoterically. Here what we consciously hear is incepted to appear different from what we unconsciously get. There
No matter how the public face of a text like Beyond Good and Evil might appear to anyone, the esoteric intent was crystal clear in Nietzsche's mind, the mind of this prototypical “good European.” In 1885 he wrote to himself in his now patented telegraphic mode:
These Good Europeans that we are: What distinguishes us from the Men of the Fatherland? First, we are atheists and immoralists, but for the time being [zunachst] we support the religions and morals of the herd instinct: for these prepare a type of human that must one day fall into our hands, that must desire our hands. Beyond Good and Evil, but we demand the unconditional maintenance of the herd morality. We hold in reserve many types of philosophy that need to be taught: Under some conditions the pessimistic type, as hammer; a European Buddhism might perhaps be indispensable. We probably support the development and maturing of democratic institutions: They enhance weakness of the will: We see in “Socialism” a goad that in the face of comfort ———Position toward nations [or peoples: Volhern]. Our preferences; we pay attention to the results of interbreeding …. By possessing a dis-ciplina voluntatis, we are in advance of our fellow men. All strength applied to the development of will power, an art that allows us to wear masks, an art of understanding beyond affects (also to think a “supra-European” manner on occasion).[94]
That Nietzsche wears illocutionary masks is hardly news.[95] What is at issue is the kind of mask he adapts as the occasion demands, the fact that he intended these masks to look like one thing and yet have another effect entirely, and the more or less unconscious effect—“beyond affect”—that his masks have on “readers” and “viewers”—but above all “listeners” who for him should better die than live. And not just listeners in Derrida's sense of otobiographie or “biography of the ear,” who still appeal to the considerable, but still merely rational, powers of deconstruction, and thus delude themselves into thinking that they can thereby deconstruct “Nietzsche's teaching” and “politics of the proper name.”[96] As our nom-du-pere, to speak La-canian, Nietzsche has no proper name.
Any broadcaster is not only Machiavellian but also ‘Jesuit” or ‘Jesuitical,” in the extended Gramscian sense, who declines, in principle or in practice, “to elaborate a modern ‘humanism’ able to reach right to the simplest and
FAIRE UN ENFANT DANS LE DOS
What seems to happen before their eyes happens, in reality, behind their backs.
ALTHUSSER, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists
I'm almost tempted to conclude my counter-transmission with that old line from Leonard Cohen: “You can say that I've grown bitter, but of one thing you can be sure, the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor.”[100] For so it is that we—all of us—always risk falling short of philosophy, falling on our collective face. And Nietzsche could be held responsible. But one final caveat about the problem of holding trickster Nietzsche responsible. Slapstick indeed!
The recently suicided Gilles Deleuze once turned a remarkable, untranslatable phrase to express how difficult it is to translate philosophy in general, and that of Nietzsche in specific. Deleuze remarked that, for him,
the history of philosophy is a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had actually to say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed.[101]
Now Deleuze turned to face the problem of Nietzsche. “It was Nietzsche, who … extricated me from all this. Because you can't deal with him in the same sort of way. He gets up to all sorts of things behind your back [Des enfants
NOTES
This essay is the second of a two-part essay on Radio Nietzsche originally written for this commemoration of Hans-Georg Gadamer and his repercussions. In the meantime, Yutaka Nagahara has translated part one in the Japanese journal Gendai shizo [Contemporary thought] 26, no. 14 (1998): 188–219. The two parts will be united in my forthcoming book, Traces of Communism in Capitalist Culture: Essays in the Pre-modern Postmodern. With the exception of what I now call its prologue (including notes) and unless otherwise remarked, the current essay is essentially the same as the one commented upon in this volume by Catherine H. Zuckert.
1. Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us [ca. 1962], trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 1999), 8. Le vide d'une distance prise is one of Althusser's several basic definitions of philosophy (which include the Platonic synoptihos). [BACK]
2. See Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). [BACK]
3. Although he refers several times to this differentiation, see especially Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Text und Interpretation” [1984] (GW2:330–60; here 334). For the original remark and context, see Gadamer and Leo Strauss, “Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit und Methode,” Independent Journal ofPhilosophy 2 (1978): 5–12. In his magnum opus Gadamer had analyzed Dilthey in detail and Nietzsche hardly at all, though he did make the following passing remark. “In raising the question of being and thus reversing the whole direction of Western metaphysics, the true predecessor of Heidegger was neither Dilthey nor Husserl … but rather Nietzsche. Heidegger may have realized this later; but in retrospect we can see that the aims already implicit in Being and Time were to raise Nietzsche's radical critique of ‘Platon-ism’ to the level of the tradition he criticizes, to confront Western metaphysics on its own level, and to recognize that transcendental inquiry is a consequence of modern subjectivity, and so overcome it.” Gadamer, TM 257–58. [BACK]
4. On Nietzsche as having been in effect Strauss's “point of critical orientation,” see the anti-Straussian account by Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), and the pro-Straussian account by Lawrence Lam-pert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). [BACK]
5. Scholarly discussion of the Dilthey-Nietzsche contretemps (originally mediated by their mutual acquaintance, Heinrich von Stein) began around 1939 but reached its first important stage a decade later in two essays. Jan Kamerbeek's essay, “Dilthey versus Nietzsche,” Studio philosophica 10 (1950): 52–84 (favoring Nietzsche), was followed by Georg Misch's attempted rebuttal (favoring Dilthey), “Dilthey versus Nietzsche: Eine Stimme aus den Niederlanden, Randbemerkungen,” Die Sammlung 7 (1952): 378–95. (Misch, Dilthey's son in law, intended his title to be dismissive.) Several important analyses have appeared in the meantime. See Antonio Negri, Saggi sullo storicismo tedesco: Dilthey e Meinecke (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1959), 124–29; Helmut Pfotenhauer, “Mythos, Natur und historische Hermeneutik: Niet-zsches Stellung zu Dilthey und einigen ‘lebensphilosophischen’ Konzeptionen um die Jahrhundertwende,” Literaturmagazin 12 (1980): 329–72; Johann Figl, “Nietzsche und die philosophischen Hermeneutik des 20. Jahrhunderts: Mil besonderer Beriicksichtigung Diltheys, Heideggers und Gadamer s,” Nietzsche-Studien 10 (1980–81): 408–41; Ernst Wolfgang Orth, “Phanomenologie und spekulative Ontologie bei Dilthey und Nietzsche,” in Dilthey und der Wandel des Philosophiebegriffs seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth (Freiburg im Breisgau: Karl Alber, 1984), 80–120; and Alfredo Marini, Alle origini dellafilosofia contemporanea: Wilhelm Dilthey (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1984), esp. 163–94. [BACK]
6. Heidegger, Beitrage zur Philosophic (Vom Ereignis) [1936–38], ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), 65: 253, and Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 2: 110. [BACK]
7. See Heidegger, “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit” [1930–31; first published 1942], in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), 109–44; here 109, and Nietzsche, i: 158. [BACK]
8. See Heidegger, Beitrdge zur Philosophic, in Gesamtausgabe, 65: 235. Heidegger was most explicit about Nietzsche and Holderlin in this regard in this self-described “esoteric” and “sigetic” text written during the Third Reich, but unpublished until 1989 (though some insiders had had prior access, including Otto Poggeler and perhaps Gadamer). But Heidegger had said much the same thing more publicly in his 1937–38 lecture course, Grundfragen derPhilosophie:Ausgewdhlte “Probleme” der “Logik” (Foundational questions of philosophy: selected “problems” of “logic”), first published in 1984 as volume 45 of the Gesamtausgabe. This publication must have put peculiar pressure on Heideggerians to practice their “damage control”—considerably before the scandal unleashed by Victor Farias and then Hugo Ott several years later. [BACK]
9. To take on Dilthey as your “point of critical orientation” hardly entails rejecting esotericism, even when done to distance yourself from more explicit esotericists like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss. As is well known and discussed at length in Wahrheit und Methode, a crucial text for Heidegger in developing the analytic of historicity in Sein und Zeit was the correspondence between Dilthey and Count Yorck von Wartenburg, then just recently published. Gadamer does not mention that the very first letter contains Yorck's stern caveat that he and Dilthey never divulge themselves
10. Gadamer, “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion” [1985] (GW2:36i-72; here 368, 372). For the original contretemps between Derrida and Gadamer, see Text und Interpretation: Deutsch-franzosische Debatte, ed. Philippe Forget (Munich: Fink, 1984). If I may be allowed a personal reminiscence, I was privy to some of the thoughts that went into “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion” (which I was later to translate). Gadamer told me that he considered it to be one of his most compressed and important interventions into current philosophical debates. [BACK]
11. See Gadamer, “Nietzsche—der Antipode” [1984] (GW4:448–62). On the importance of Zarathustra's animals, compare Heidegger, “Wer ist Nietzsches Zara-thustra?” [1953], in VortrdgeundAufsdtze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), i: 101–26. This is a compressed version of the argument in Was heijlt Denhen? [Freiburg winter semester 1951–52 and summer semester 1952] (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1954). [BACK]
12. Leo Strauss, On Plato's Symposium [Chicago fall semester 1959], ed. Seth Be-nardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8, 9. [BACK]
13. Jean Grondin, “Gadamer's Basic Understanding of Understanding,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 36–51, here 49. [BACK]
14. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 294. Compare Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (GWi: 300). [BACK]
15. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (GWi: 3OO, n. 224). Despite its revisions of the execrable first translation, the currently official English text often remains unusable, as it does here: “There is one exception to this anticipation of completeness, namely the case of writing that is presenting something in disguise, e.g., a roman a clef. This presents one of the most difficult hermeneutical problems.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 295–96, n. 22. [BACK]
16. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “General Hermeneutics” [1909], in Hermeneutics and Criticism, And Other Writings, ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 225–68; here 266; emphasis added. This dictum (no. 45) follows immediately from Schleiermacher's more familiar one (no. 44), a bone of contention between Strauss and Gadamer: “Complete understanding grasped in its highest form is an understanding of the utterer better than he understands himself” (ibid.). [BACK]
17. See especially Gadamer, “Hermeneutik und Historismus” [1961] (GW2: 386–424), as well as Ernest L. Fortin's interview with Gadamer in 1981, published as “Gadamer on Strauss: An Interview,”Interpretation 12, no. i (1984): 1–13. This interview is particularly disappointing (innocuous and mutually congratulatory), particularly given the venue in which it was eventually published. [BACK]
18. See Aristotle, Physics 209b14; also Plato, Second Letter 314b-c; Seventh Letter 34ib, 344c-d; and Phcedrus 264b-c, 275c-276b; also Leo Strauss, The City and Man [1962–64] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 52–62. In addition
19. Note the symptomatic tension—to the point of implosion—between the subject of the utterance (enonce) and the subject of the enunciation (enonciation) in the last sentence of Gadamer's postmortem (or postpartum) response to Derrida:
20. John Cage, Silence [ 1961] (Hanover, NH:Wesleyan University Press: 1973),xi. [BACK]
21. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [1927], 7th edition (Tubingen: Max Nie-meyer), 150. Recall Heidegger's later defense of interpretive “force”: because the great thought of great thinkers is “unsaid,” authentic “Auseinandersetzung with them operates on the ground of an interpretation that is already decided and removed from any debate.” (A lot of nonsense has been written about Heidegger's “turn” and thus about his student Gadamer's response to it and his own turn. For the violence required to read the unwritten there has never yet been a sufficiently radical turn. Communists take particular note.) In my next sentence, I have taken the notion of “vindicating the positive function of prejudice” from Vattimo, though he seems to assume that this is more unproblematic than I am convinced it is. See Gianni Vattimo, “Gadamer and the Problem of Ontology,” trans. Stefano Franchi, in Gadamer's Century, 299–306; here 303. [BACK]
22. Alasdair Maclntyre, “On Not Having the Last Word: Thoughts on Our Debts to Gadamer,” in Gadamer's Century, 157–72; here 169. [BACK]
23. Hans Albert, “Critical Rationalism and Universal Hermeneutics,” trans. Michael Isenberg, in Gadamer's Century, 15–24; here 18. The first of these apt phrases, “urbanization of the Heideggerian province,” was notoriously coined by Habermas. [BACK]
24. See Everett L. Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (Leiden: Brill, 1997). [BACK]
25. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 382. Indeed, one of the only readers of Sein und Zeit who has taken this kind of articulation seriously is Johannes Fritsche, “On Brinks and Bridges in Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 18, no. i (1995): 111–86, and Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), esp. 1–28. [BACK]
26. See Albert, Kritik der reinen Hermeneutik: Der Antirealismus und das Problem des Verstehens (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994), 36–77. This chapter on Gadamer is entitled “Im Banne Heideggers.” To be in somebody's Bonne is to be under his or her “spell” and thus “spellbound,” often with an effect that is “baneful” (Old Norse bani, “destruction” or “death”). If Heidegger and Gadamer and we all remain im Banne of any one thing, I suppose it to be Radio Nietzsche or some cognate. [BACK]
27. Let me stress, here at the outset, that there is little “new” about Nietzsche's project, as I understand it. Indeed, what I call “Radio Nietzsche” (as I think Nietzsche himself must have conceived it, given his social and psychological formation) is exceptionally “old”—in its intended aftereffect in our ostensibly “postmodern” or “postcontemporary” era. His intention was to keep alive the premodern concept of “order of rank” by employing an updated version of a principle of esoteric communication
28. Some readers will recognize that certain phrases and concepts in this sentence, as well as in the immediately following ones, have been appropriated-sometimes verbatim and without quotation marks—from a key passage in Leo Strauss, “Persecution and the Art of Writing” [1941], m Persecution and the Art of'Writing (New York: Free Press, 1952), 22–37; here 24 They may also notice that I am turning these phrases and concepts against the Straussian tradition, but not necessarily against its controversial methodology and deep insight into Nietzsche. [BACK]
29. Nietzsche to Paul Deussen, January 3, 1888, in Nietzsche, Kritische Gesam-tausgabe, Briefwechsel, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1975 ff), 3/5: 221–23; here 222; emphasis added. Henceforth I will cite this edition as KGB, followed by volume, section, and page numbers. (One year to the date of this letter Nietzsche was to suffer his irrevocable breakdown in Turin.) Deussen (1845–1919) had been a friend of Nietzsche's during their university days, going on to become one of the first preeminent scholars of so-called Eastern philosophy, in particular the Indie Vedanta. Deussen was a crucial source
30. Louis Althusser as cited in Olivier Corpet and Francois Matheron, “Presentation,” Ecrits sur la psychanalyse: Freud et Lacan, ed. Olivier Corpet and Francois Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1993), 7–14; here 12. [BACK]
31. Robert Pfaller, “Negation and Its Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology?” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 223–46; here 232. See further Pfaller's extended treatment of this problem in Althusser: Das Schweigen im Text; Epistemologie, Psychoanalyse und Nominal-ismus in Louis Althussers Theorie derLehture (Munich: Fink, 1997). [BACK]
32. Pfaller, “Negation and Its Reliabilities,” 233. [BACK]
33. Were my terminology not ungainly enough already, it would be more precise to replace the term “exo/esoteric” with “aesoteric” (a-esoteric). In mind is homol-ogy with Heidegger's seminal interpretive translation of Greek aletheia not (“positively”) as “truth” (Wahrheit) but (“negatively”) as “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit). In all cases (the epistemological and/or ontological and/or discursive), the alpha privative emphasizes that one can never access truth or the (in any case “unwritten”) esoteric except by various forms of indirection-not least (or most) by deception and encryption. And, I add, we must access Truth by our decisions. (N.B.: This note was not in the original version of my essay.) [BACK]
34. For a discussion of this concept and problem, see Geoff Waite, Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996). The overhasty, but very influential, depiction of Nietzsche as anti-Hegelian was classically established by Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche et la Philosophic (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). [BACK]
35. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967 ff), 7/3: 206. Henceforth I will cite this edition as KGW, followed by volume, section, and page numbers. [BACK]
36. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? [1991], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 6. If one wanted to put it this way, part of my project is to dislocate what I regard as Deleuze's superior earlier work from that produced after his association with Guattari (e.g., Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus). This is not to say, however, that I wish to denigrate all of Guattari's overwork, most notably his collaboration with Antonio Negri in their coauthored Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance [1985], with a “Postscript, 1990” by Toni Negri, trans. Michael Ryan et al. (New York: Semiotext[e], 1990). [BACK]
37. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 5–6. [BACK]
38. Nietzsche, KGW, 7/3: 207. [BACK]
39. That Nietzsche, and after him Heidegger, remains entangled to various degrees and at various times in a Platonic and post-Platonic philosophical problematic should hardly be news. I am thinking first and foremost of Stanley Rosen's ongoing reflections on the complex Platonism of Nietzsche and Heidegger (see especially The Mash of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995]). For another quasi-Straussian perspective on Nietzsche's Platonism, see Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), and Leo Strauss and Nietzsche
40. Kleist refers to the recent invention of the electrical telegraph by physician and physicist Samuel Thomas Sommering (1755–1830). See Heinrich von Kleist, “Entwurf einer Bombenpost” [181 o], in Sdmtliche Werhe und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sem-bdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 2: 385–86; here 385. I'm grateful to Rachel Magshamhrain for directing my attention to Kleist's extraordinary text-Wittgenstein's source, as the continuation of the passage I cite makes clearer. If there is an earlier reference in literature to the concept and even technology of the letter bomb, I don't know it. (N.B.: This epigraph and the following one from Kleist were not in the original version of my essay.) [BACK]
41. See, for instance, Christopher Schiff, “Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism,” and Frances Dyson, “The Ear that Would Hear Sounds in Themselves: John Cage 1935–1965,” both in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and theAvant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 139–89 and 373–407, respectively. [BACK]
42. Charles Grivel, “The Phonograph's Horned Mouth,” trans. Stephen Sarta-relli, in Wireless Imagination, 33–61; here 33. [BACK]
43. Allen S. Weiss, “Radio, Death, and the Devil: Artaud's Pour enfinir avec lejuge-ment deDieu,” in Wireless Imagination, 269–307; here 293. [BACK]
44. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Booh XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-Analysis 1964 [1973], ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W W Norton, 1981), 59. [BACK]
45. Le seminaire deJacques Lacan, Livre VII: L'ethique de la psychanalyse 7959–7960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: du Seuil, 1986), 212. [BACK]
46. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 5. [BACK]
47. Nietzsche, KGW, 6/1: 185. [BACK]
48. On Nietzsche and these issues, see Waite, “The Politics of Reading Formations: The Case of Nietzsche in Imperial Germany, 1870–1919,” New German Critique 29 (Spring/Summer 1983): 185–209, and “Nietzsche's Baudelaire, or, The Sublime Proleptic Spin of His Politico-Economic Thought,” Representations 50 (Spring 1995): 14–52. [BACK]
49. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio, 3. [BACK]
50. Ibid. [BACK]
51. Ibid., 6. [BACK]
52. Nietzsche, KGW, 7/1: 9. [BACK]
53. Ibid., 195. [BACK]
54. In his Spiegel interview, Heidegger remarked that his thinking is “not for everyone”; that “National Socialism had gone in the direction” (correctly, in his opinion still) of using thinking to “assist technology to find its proper limits,” even if individual Nazis “were much too inexpert in thinking” to succeed; that the intervening years following the Third Reich had “failed to convince” him about the value of “democracy” or of public access to thinking at its deepest levels; that true thinking can occur only in the German and Greek languages; and that “another thinking” can still “change the world,” but only through “indirect influence.” This, then, was the context in which he noted of his own work that “It can also be that the way of thinking today leads to silence in order to preserve it from being sold dirt cheap [ver-ramscht] within a year. It can also be that it needs 300 years to have its ‘effect.’” “Spiegel-Gesprach mil Martin Heidegger,” in Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gesprach, ed. Giinther Neske and Emil Kettering (Pfullingen: Neske, 1988), 81–114; here 96, 103, 105, 109, 107–8, and 101, respectively. The interview took place September 23, 1966, but was published posthumously, as per prior agreement with Heidegger, in Der Spiegel on May 31, 1976, under the heading “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten” (only a god can save us). Compare Heraclitus's Fragment B 92 (Diels-Kranz): “The Sibyl-who with raving voice [|amvo|a.evq> oTO|a.aTi] utters through the god what cannot be ridiculed, embellished, or beautified—reaches out over thousands of years [xiXtoov errov]. [BACK]
55. Nietzsche, KGW, 5/2: 406. [BACK]
56. Contrast Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 302. [BACK]
57. See Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124–28. [BACK]
58. By contrast, Nietzsche's objection—most thoroughly in David Friedrich Strauss as Confessor and Writer (1873)—that the great alternative kind of writing and thinking in his time, the newspaper, was necessarily democratizing may appear rather less prescient. Critics of the newspaper on the right, center, and left—including Karl Kraus, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin—have tended to conclude that its power is anything but democratic, that is, that it has rendered the newspaper reader “increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him by way of experience,” that “the linguistic usage of newspapers [has] paralyzed the imagination of their readers,” and that “the principles of journalistic information (freshness of the news, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items)” only serve “to isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader.” Walter Benjamin, “Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire” [1939], in GesammelteSchriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 1/2: 605–53; here 610–11. To give the critique another leftist spin, the newspaper prevents the formations of a geopolitical consciousness of the kind necessary to produce authentic communism and with which Nietzsche has been in competition. Similarly, all “experiential” criticisms of the newspaper, e-mail, and the ostensibly “interactive” internet, which often imagine themselves to be Nietzschean, can really appeal only to Nietzsche's many exoteric attacks on newsprint. From his esoteric perspective, all such baneful effects are actively desired by him for a huge slice of humanity, in order to increase
59. Nietzsche, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Karl Schlechta et al. (Munich: Beck, 1933–42), 2: 71. [BACK]
60. Nietzsche, KGW, 8/2: 159. [BACK]
61. Some of these remarks are conveniently assembled for the English-speaking reader as Book 4 (“Discipline and Breeding”) of Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968). [BACK]
62. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio, 22 [BACK]
63. The German title of Nietzsche's later workjenseits von Gut und Base: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future) plays aggressively both with Wagner's slogan of the “artwork of the future” (Zukunftsmusik) and with the classical philologist Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorff ‘s parodic ridicule of Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), as “philology of the future” (Zukunftsphilologie). Rohde in turn ridiculed Wilamowitz-Moellendorff's detailed and hostile criticisms as Afterphilologie: meaning not only post or pseudo-philology but also an ass-backwards philology of anality for assholes, “anal-philology” (German After, “anus,” “backwards,” “second-hand,” “fake”—with the homophobic and/or homosexual associations being rather more closeted than open). For the facsimile reprint of this entire confrontation, see Der Streit um Nietzsches “GeburtderTragodie”:DieSchriftenvonE. Rohde, R. Wagner, U. v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, ed. Karlfried Griinder (Hildesheim: Olms, 1969). The abusive term Afterphilosophie had enjoyed a rather long history in German thought, significantly predating the contretemps between Nietzsche and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. [BACK]
64. Friedrich A Kittler, Discourse Networks: i8oo/i<)oo [ 1985], trans. Michael Met-teer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 181. [BACK]
65. On Nietzsche's encounter with the typewriter in 1882, though not on the more sinister dimensions of Nietzschean logographia, see Kittler, Discourse Networks, 177–205. [BACK]
66. Ibid., 193; citing Friedrich Herbertz, “Zur Psychologic des Machinenschrei-bens,” Zeitschriftfur angewandtePsychologie 2 (1909): 551–61; here 560. [BACK]
67. Heidegger, Parmenides [Freiburg winter semester 1942–43], ed. Manfred S. Frings, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), 54: 119–20. It is small surprise that current discussions of technologies like hypertext, virtual reality, and cyberspace take their point of departure from an appreciative embrace of such passages in Heidegger (see, e.g., Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, 55–72; here especially 63). [BACK]
68. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 191. [BACK]
69. Nietzsche, KGW, 6/3: 324; also Kittler, Discourse Networks, 191. [BACK]
70. Nietzsche, KGB, 3/6: 309–10. [BACK]
71. Nietzsche, KGB, 3/5:482–83. [BACK]
72. Nietzsche, KGB, 7/3: 363. [BACK]
73. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 21. [BACK]
74. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction” [1844], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International, 1976), 3: 175–87; here 182. [BACK]
75. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic [1 7705 and 17805], trans, and ed. J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 241. [BACK]
76. Althusser, “SurFeuerbach” [i()6>j],mEcritsphilosophiquesetpolitiques, TomeII, ed. Francois Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1995), 169–251; here 227. [BACK]
77. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject” [1979], trans. Barbar Harlow, in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 138–207; here 159. [BACK]
78. Ibid., 162. [BACK]
79. For an astute analysis of aesthetic aspects of “mood” in Nietzsche with some mention of the combative project, see Stanley Corngold, “Nietzsche's Moods,” Studies in Romanticism 29 (Spring 1990): 67–90; for a similar analysis of Heidegger, see Corngold, “Heidegger's Being and Time: Implications for Poetics” [1976], in The Fate of the Self, 197–218. Heidegger is most responsible for elevating mood into its properly philosophical dimension in Sein und Zeit but especially in his 1929–30 lecture course Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt-Endlichkeit-Einsamkeit, where philosophy itself is defined as nothing less than the capacity to create authentic mood. It was Nietzsche, however, who eventually gave Heidegger his mature notion of the concept of mood as physical embodiment. As Heidegger put it in his 1936–37 lectures on Nietzsche (punningly, in the untranslatable German), “every feeling is a bodying tuned in a certain way, a mood that bodies in a certain way.” Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), i: 119. There are worse formal descriptions of the desired effect of Radio Nietzsche on us “listeners.” (N.B.: This note augments one in the original version of my essay.) [BACK]
80. Georges Bataille, La part maudite [1950–54], in CEuvres completes, ed. Denis Hollieretal. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970–88), 8: 405. [BACK]
81. Gottfried Benn, “Nietzsche—nach funfzig Jahren” [1950], in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1968), 4: 1046–57; here 1048. [BACK]
82. See Benn, “Der Radardenker” [1949], in Gesammelte Werke, 6: 1435–51 [BACK]
83. The original program was first broadcast from Frankfurt am Main on July 31, 1950, and subsequently rebroadcast (after the unification of Germany) on the same Hessischer Rundfunk, September 19, 1991, as “Gesprach iiber Nietzsche” (Conversation about Nietzsche). Transcripts have subsequently been printed. See, for example, Max Horkheimer (with Theodor W. Adorno and Hans-Georg Gadamer), “Uber Nietzsche und uns: Zum 50. Todestag des Philosophen,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1989), 13: 111–20. Obviously what is crucial to radio is missing from the transcript: the modulations of voice and mood (what Adorno might call the “punctuation marks”), in short, the link to oral-aural tradition. I will cite in my translation from the original broadcast. [BACK]
84. Herbert Schnadelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933 [1982], trans. Eric Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), i. [BACK]
85. For preliminary remarks on the constitutive influence of Nietzsche on Horkheimer and Adorno, seejiirgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Rereading Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 26 (Spring/Summer 1982): 13–30. But on this issue Habermas places too exclusive a focus on their early Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) as their “blackest, most nihilistic book” (p. 13). I have argued elsewhere that Habermas himself, in whom the Frankfurt School is arguably
86. For a discussion of this powerful trope of German political thought with particular focus on Heidegger's updated variant, see Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 79–81 (though this is ultimately a superficial book on Heidegger himself, unaware as it is of even the question of exo/esotericism). [BACK]
87. In the broadcast Adorno also alludes to Hegel's first and most basic definition of Socratic irony, namely, as a subcategory of the dialectic, insofar as irony “grants force to what should be granted force, as if it had force, but only in order to allow it inherent destruction to develop itself: the universal irony of the world.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werhe in zwanzig Banden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 12: 460. But rather more to the point for Adorno's argument would be Hegel's technical definition elsewhere of “parody” as “the use of forms in the era of their impossibility” in order to “demonstrate this impossibility and thereby altering the forms.” Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 303. But note also that, for Hegel, “Hypocrisy is the truest irony,” since it allows us wantonly to contradict ourselves for subjective motives (Werhe, 12: 461). [BACK]
88. Althusser, “Philosophy,” in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, 97. [BACK]
89. In hermeneutic terms, developed by Gadamer through Heidegger, a main technique of exo/esotericism is “giving-to-understand” (Zu-verstehen-geben), and what in a different tradition Michel Pecheux, following Althusser and semiotic theory, calls transdiscours (see, e.g., Analyseautomatiquedu discours [Paris: Dunod, 1969]). Gadamer's 1934 lecture on Plato's Republic, and on the reason why the foundation of the State apparently requires the expulsion of poets, rigorously refused to give his audience what they most expected, namely, the connection between this detailed philosophical, historical question to the just recent instauration of the National Socialist state. Gadamer was thus employing a form of sigetics whereby the speaker tells his audience everything except what they fervently desire to hear, so that they are given the illusion of having produced this meaning themselves. Which in this case was the bridge between Plato to Hitler. For a discussion of Gadamer in this regard, see Orozco, Pla-tonische Gewalt, although Nietzsche is not a main exhibit in her argument. Orozco has made a good circumstantial case that Gadamer's philosophical writings and professional activities during the Third Reich suggest that he was working, quite selfconsciously, within the esoteric “oral” tradition of philosophy extending, or so he held, back to Plato, and that his success in concealing his own deepest political agenda (in tune with what I would call Heideggerian political ontology) explains Gadamer's speedy rehabilitation as a (if not indeed the) philosopher of postwar West Germany. Yet Orozco does not really tackle the problem of the perlocutionary implementation of Gadamer's project, nor does she grasp the full dimensions of philosophical esotericism. (Orozco is not alone in this regard; a similar problem informs
90. Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, ed. Michael Speaks, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995), 187. [BACK]
91. See ibid., xx, 8–9. In the Japanese version of this essay I go into this difference in detail. [BACK]
92. Ibid., 188. Note that in the German idealist tradition (in which Marx is to be included here), Idee (idea) is defined, roughly, as “an ideal that is realized, concretized,” and that Schein plays simultaneously with two senses, “appearance” and “illumination”; in other terms, it is phenomenal appearance of something thus rendered im /perceptible and exo/esoteric. [BACK]
93. Paul A Cantor, “Leo Strauss and Contemporary Hermeneutics,” in Leo Strauss's Thought: Toward a Critical Engagement, ed. Alan Udoff (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991), 267–314; here 277. [BACK]
94. Nietzsche, KGW, 7/3: 234–35. Again, the long dashes indicate illegibility. The passage then concludes: “Preparation for becoming Masters of the Earth: The Legislators of the Future. At least out of our children. Basic attention to marriages.” [BACK]
95. For by far the best account, see Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment. [BACK]
96. Contrast Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies: L'enseignement de Nietzsche et la poli-tique du nompropre (Paris: Galilee, 1984). [BACK]
97. Antonio Gramsci, “Concept of the ‘National Popular’” [1930], in Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 206–12; here 211. See further Gramsci's remarks entitled “Father Bresciani's Progeny,” including the editors' comments (pp. 298–341). “Brescianism”—from the Jesuit priest and novelist Antonio Bresciani—was one of Gramsci's code terms for ‘Jesuitism,” a tendency he tried to combat also within his own Communist Party. [BACK]
98. Nietzsche, KGW, 8/1: 116–17. [BACK]
99. “Zarathustra gliicklich dariiber, dass der Kampf der Stande voruber ist, und jetzt endlich Zeit ist fur sein Rangordnung der Individuen Hass auf das demokratis-che Nivellirungs-System ist nur im Vordergrund: eigentlich ist er sehr froh, dass dies so weit ist. Nun kann er seine Aufgabe losen.—” Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Fritz Koegel (Leipzig: Naumann, 1899), 12: 325. [BACK]
100. Leonard Cohen, “Tower of Song,” /‘TO Your Man, © 1988 CBS Records Inc. [BACK]
101. Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic” [1 973], in Negotiations [Pourparles, 1972–1990, 1990], trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 3–12; here 6. [BACK]
102. Ibid. See also the translator's note on page 184. [BACK]
11. The Art of Allusion
Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Interventions
under National Socialism
TERESA OROZCO, translated by Jason Gaiger
On February 11, 1995, Gadamer reached the age of ninety-five. The tributes that were paid to him were justifiably numerous; in the Frankfurter All-gemeine Zeitung he was celebrated as “the most successful philosopher of the Federal Republic,” placed even before Jurgen Habermas, to whom the title of philosopher was awarded only with certain reservations.[1] The worldwide influence of Gadamer's thinking is closely connected with the reception of his principal work, Truth and Method (1960). In 1979, Habermas characterized Gadamer's achievement as the “urbanization of the Heideggerian province.” The bridges that Gadamer has built consist above all in an elaboration of Heidegger's paradigm of understanding in its application to her-meneutics; these bridges connect philosophy with all those realms in which interpretative procedures are necessary, such as literary studies, jurisprudence, theology, and even medicine (see VG).
CONCILIATORY THINKING
What is striking in the present reception of Gadamer's work is the concentration on what Henning Ritter has described as “conciliatory thinking which knows how to conceal his hardness.”[2] The notion of conciliation is generally explicated through reference to the third section of Truth and Method. In what he terms the “on to logical turn of hermeneutics oriented by the guiding thread of language,” Gadamer develops a conception of language that comes close to the dictum of the later Heidegger: that, properly understood, it is not the individual subject but language itself that speaks[3]-with the difference, however, that Gadamer introduces the model of dialogue as a sort of counterbalance. In short, Gadamer's basic assumption is that truth is disclosed in dialogical speech. Decisive here is Gadamer's reinterpretation
In contrast, the conditions of hermeneutic understanding that first enable a successful accomplishment of understanding, as developed by Gada-mer in the second section of Truth and Method, have retreated into the background.[4] In this section Gadamer pursues a trenchant rehabilitation of a thinking that is grounded in prejudices [Vorurteilen]’, and affirms both the power of tradition (above all through the example of the classical) and the unlimited validity of authority and authorities. He defends this as a genuinely conservative undertaking that does not need to be argumentatively justified.[5] The subjective dispositions through which this project is to be sustained are “affirmation, appropriation and care” (WMs65 ff.). Because Gadamer regards “the self-reflection of the subject” as “only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life” (WMa65), “the prejudices of the individual, far more than his or her own judgments, constitute the historical reality of being” (WMsGi). Under these conditions, understanding “is less to be thought of as a subjective act” than, in a way that carries associations with military practices, “as conscription into an event of tradition” (WMa74 ff.; italics removed). In Gadamer's view, there is no “method” for acquiring this competence in understanding.
Finally, it is characteristic of the current reception of Gadamer's work that the emphasis has shifted away from a thinking grounded in prejudices toward a more comprehensive notion of pre-understanding that is prior to every act of understanding. Through selective and sometimes critical readings, Gadamer has been drawn into dialogue with the school of Anglo-American philosophy of language, theorists of intersubjectivity such as Hab-ermas and Karl-Otto Apel, Richard Rorty in the United States, and Jean Grondin in Canada, as well as left-oriented hermeneutic thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo in Italy and Emilio Lledo in Spain.
A LOOK INTO THE PAST
In what follows I seek to illuminate Gadamer's philosophical writings during the period of National Socialism by focusing on two important essays.[6] In light of the reception that has been awarded to Gadamer's thought there may seem something provocative about the goals of this enquiry. Gadamer himself has addressed the issue of his career under National Socialism, both in autobiographical writings and in recent interviews. The picture seems to be clear and the relevant facts already known. In contrast to his teacher and to various other colleagues, Gadamer is happy to present himself in this context as someone who was ready to accommodate himself to circumstances.
This external accommodation in turn gave Gadamer the opportunity to pursue philosophical work in a spirit of pure “scholarship” even under National Socialism. Unlike Karl Lowith, Gadamer argues for a strict division between the scientific and political domains. And this implies that there were both accommodationists and Nazis who were otherwise thoroughly responsible scholars, such as Martin Heidegger, Kurt Hildebrandt, Erich Rothacker, Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Felix Kriiger, Helmut Berve, Richard Harder, and Gerhard Fricke. The claim to “scientific excellence” provided the means by which the academic community could constitute itself internally and at the same time insulate itself from the influence of National Socialism externally. What this view fails to take into account is that this appeal to “scientific excellence” may well have been the very form in which the knowledge and skills of the human sciences could be employed in the service of National Socialism. Today, Gadamer also emphasizes his contacts with the “national conservative” resistance to Hitler. Together with other members of the Goerdeler circle, to which he belonged in the last phase of fascism during the war period, he shared an open opposition to the Weimar Republic as well as admiration for Hitler's foreign policies, which still seemed highly promising during the so-called “Blitzkrieg.” Gadamer was not a Nazi and for this reason he was elected rector of the University of Leipzig by the occupying Soviet powers in 1947. Later he transferred to the University of Frankfurt and finally, as successor to Karl Jaspers, to the University of Heidelberg.
Such clarity concerning the facts would seem to render the questions I am pursuing here superfluous. Nonetheless, the crucial problem from which I started out was to arrive at a more substantial and exact definition of the concept of “national conservatism” by focusing on those philosophers who belonged to the so-called “black faction.” Despite the fact that these philosophers entered into a clear and solid alliance with the Nazis that endured almost until the end of the Nazi period, it has long remained unclear exactly what contribution this faction made to the consolidation and perpetuation of National Socialism. The key to interpreting this contribution is not to be found in the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944. According to the self-understanding of the national conservative opposition, as articulated for example by Gadamer's friend Eduard Spranger in 1947, “it was not National Socialism that led us into catastrophe but
It was in this context that I began to investigate Gadamer's texts from the period 1933 to 1945. Amongst other things I came across interpretations of Plato in which Nazism was never explicitly referred to. Gadamer's articles were entirely in keeping with then current research and did not appear to represent anything unusual. His goals did not extend to such ambitious projects as the question of the meaning of being or revolutionizing the discipline of philosophy. As a young university lecturer he worked unassumingly on texts of ancient philosophy, above all on a reading of Plato's Republic. During the course of my research, however, I discovered that this reading was multilayered, and this in turn opened up a new way of looking at Gadamer's writings of the period.
My first concern was to reconstruct the connection between what was said and the context in which it was written, to document what for us has now fallen silent. Or, to put it in Gadamer's own language, I sought to establish the historical basis on which other hermeneutic approaches could be developed and to discover the fusions of horizon between past and present that were possible at that time. In the course of my investigations I was able to give more precision to the often overgeneralized and inexact use of the notion of “context” through employing the concept of “relations of response” to Plato. We can use this concept to describe how in the process of fascization various ideas were articulated through readings of Plato: National Socialism was identified as a task that had already been laid out in antiquity. These ideas resonated not only within the domain of academic discourse but also within other fields of practice such as the National Socialist Party's policies on health, justice, education, and art.[12]
Around 1933, despite differences in interpretation, there emerged a common point of convergence: the destruction of the self-understanding of universalist humanism. This expression signified the humanism of European modernity and of Weimar classicism; above all, that humanism that was articulated through the ideals of the French Revolution. Disqualified as “apolitical” under the cipher of aesthetic humanism and identified with the “age of liberalism,” it became the hegemonic critical target for the new reception of antiquity. At the basis of the denunciation of the Enlightenment as developed within the humanist camp itself, which was in opposition to the Weimar Republic, lay a new conception of law that aimed at strictly controlling society, and that attacked as “sophistic” the old human dream of a society based on self-determination and autonomy. The process of fascization supported an unparalleled project of bourgeois modernization, to
1933: RESPONSES TO PLATO'S REPUBLIC
Since we possess neither any systematic nor any definitive investigations of the influence of fascism on the interpretation of Plato in the German-speaking context,[13] a large part of my work consisted in studying the Plato scholarship of the period through the original sources.[14] Decisive for understanding Gadamer's work is the transformation of the humanist image of Plato that had already taken place during the Weimar Republic. The key features of this transformation can be summed up as follows:
- Classical philology stepped into line with National Socialist thinking, thereby bringing to an end the conflict that had raged in the Weimar Republic concerning the correct interpretation of Plato. Official justification was provided by the work of Werner Jaeger.[15] Whereas classical humanism had paradigmatically interpreted Plato as a poet and a metaphysician and considered him the founder of the doctrine of ideas, an association of philologists and philosophers now sought to propagate an alternative “political reading” of Plato. In the course of this conflict of interpretation new interpretative principles were developed.
- The relative importance of the various texts in the Platonic canon was subjected to a revaluation. Those dialogues, dialogue passages, and elements that are concerned with metaphysics and the theory of ideas—that is, those texts on which the traditional humanistic interpretation of Plato developed by Schleiermacher and neo-Kantianism was based—no longer stood at the center of philological research. Instead, attention was focused on the Republic, the Laws and the Seventh Letter. The epistemo-logical concerns that had informed earlier readings of Plato receded into the background. This shift of emphasis was justified philologically inasmuch as the Seventh Letter, Plato's so-called political biography whose authenticity is still disputed today, was declared to be an authentic textual source.[16]
- Advocates of this “politicized” reading of Plato made appeal to the so-called unwritten doctrine that, according to the Seventh Letter (341 a-e) and other sources, represents the essence of Plato's philosophy. Out of this secret doctrine they then sought to derive new rules for philological inquiry that went beyond what could be defended on the basis of the textual material itself, and one to which they believed they enjoyed access.[17]
In this new interpretation emphasis was no longer placed on the construction of a systematic conceptual system. The hermeneutic key to Plato's writings was provided by his involvement in Attic politics. Plato's supposed biography was interpreted with categories taken from Lebensphilosophie, with great emphasis being laid upon Plato's “decision” to reground the state.
The most noted Plato scholars (in the tradition of Ulrich von Wilam-owitz-Moellendorff) were Werner Jaeger, Julius Stenzel, Paul Friedlander, Heinrich Gompertz, and, from the George circle, Kurt Hildebrandt, Wil-helm Andrae, Kurt Singer, and Edgar Salin. It suited their purposes to depict Plato as a “philosopher of crisis.” Kurt Hildebrandt maintained that “for us Germans” Plato should be “a model of a savior in an age of dissolution and decay.” Plato's Republic, which was itself a response to the crisis of the Attic polls, offered material on the basis of which the crisis of the Weimar Republic could be projected back into antiquity. Plato's dream of restoring Attic aristocracy by reforming it in the form of an authoritarian educational state was elevated to the status of a “spiritual task.”
As can be seen from the example of Jaeger and Hildebrandt, the ground for the subsequent fascization of the interpretation of Plato had already been fully prepared during the period of the Weimar Republic. As the philological associations fell into line with National Socialist ideas this interpretation then became orthodox teaching: “Whereas our predecessors saw Plato as a Neo-Kantian system builder and the initiator of a highly revered philosophical tradition, for our generation he has become the founder of the state and the giver of laws.”[18]
THE EXPULSION OF THE POETS: A LECTURE AND ITS CONTEXT
On January 24, 1934, Gadamer gave a lecture entitled “Plato and the Poets” before the Society of Friends of the Humanistic Gymnasium in Marburg. In this lecture he set himself the task of “understanding the meaning and justification”[19] of Plato's critique of the poets in the Republic. For the members of the cultural elite who had gathered to hear him speak, this “represented the most difficult task confronting the German spirit in its efforts to assimilate the spirit of the ancient world” (5). The difficulty of this task resided in the fact that Plato's critique of the poets was carried out through
Gadamer starts out by recalling the harmonious character of this humanist ideal, in which Plato occupies a place. Plato is recognized as one of “the greatest representatives of the poetic genius of the Greeks,” “admired and loved like Homer and the tragedians, Pindar and Aristophanes” (5). By identifying Plato's eminent status within the humanistic ideal as envisaged by his audience, Gadamer finds a starting point from which he can begin to rebuild this ideal from within. Plato himself is represented as a “hostile critic of the art of classical antiquity” (5). The poetry he wrote in his youth, “he burnt… after he became a pupil of Socrates” (6) and he “condemned Homer and the great Attic dramatists … to be completely expelled from the state” (5). The tension generated by this conflict enables Gadamer to set the hermeneutic circle of his lecture in motion.
Following Socrates, Plato turns against the “much beloved Homer” (6). He censors Homer in accordance with the norms of a poetry that should work for the state and recomposes the opening of the Iliad so as to “purify it of all direct speech” (10). Plato thereby chooses “a deliberately provocative example” (10), since Socrates, through whom Plato speaks, must struggle against his own deep-rooted sentiments and attitudes. But Gadamer, too, thereby chooses a “deliberately provocative example,” for the “verses known to all” from the opening of the Iliad—learned by heart by entire generations of gymnasium students—were a symbol of classical education.
Gadamer may well have disturbed his hearers by demanding that they should bring this “monstrous attack” upon poetry and on Homer vividly to mind rather than “pushing it away from us … into the distant past of a unique historical period.” Gadamer is concerned with the fact “that this decision also has something to say to us” (10). Was his audience not suddenly confronted with the National Socialist present, with its burning of books, and the censorship, exile, and persecution of poets and writers?
At no point does Gadamer directly mention the fascist present. His lecture remains entirely on the terrain of an interpretation of Plato. Plato's measures against the poets are to be understood through an interpretation of the Republic.[20] In the first part of the lecture Gadamer discusses the status of Plato's critique. Its full significance is derived from the project of refounding the state. This new state is to be an educational state. At its center Gadamer places the Platonic paideia, the education of the youths to become its guardians. These are the youths who risked corruption by the poets because they lacked “the binding civil ethos which could secure that poetry would have its proper effect” (15). In the second part of the lecture poetry is rehabilitated in the service of patriotic ends. Here Gadamer discusses Plato's critique of imitation. Plato develops a conception of art whose purpose is not to give aesthetic pleasure but to strengthen the civil ethos, as
Despite the textual immanence of Gadamer's reading of Plato, his audience must have been all too aware of the fascist present with its censorship, persecution, exile, and expatriation. When this lecture was delivered in January 1934, the burning of books, the symbolic high point of the “action against the non-German spirit,” had taken place only six months before.
Taken as a whole, the lecture and its context are rich with interdiscursive implications and allusions. Together they provide a hermeneutic horizon that is congruent with the ideal self-understanding of National Socialism as a political decision to “renew” the state after the “decay” of the Weimar Republic. Drawing explicitly on the politicized reading of Plato that valued his thought as a “resolute expression of decision … directed against the entire political and spiritual culture of his age” (12), Gadamer chose to discuss the theme of the expulsion of the poets—a theme that seemed to be given in advance of the times—rather than emphasizing his status as a “metaphysician of the theory of ideas” (12).
When Gadamer demanded of his educated and cultured audience that they respect the expulsion of the poets as a decision made within the framework of the founding of the state, he indirectly attacked the reservation and skepticism about the burning of books that was widespread amongst the humanist elite. The burning of books was not only an action against the so-called enemies of the state, but it also affected authors who belonged to the cultural bourgeoisie itself. Alongside books by Marxists, pacifists, and left-wing intellectuals such as Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Tucholsky, Carl von Ossiet-zky, Erich Maria Remarque, and Franz Kafka, flames also consumed the works of writers like Thomas Mann, Friedrich Gundolf, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, and the Catholic pacifist Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster. Parallel with the attack against thinkers on the left there was also a second front of “action against the non-German spirit.” In Goebbels's language, the so-called aesthetic humanism of the enlightened liberal bourgeoisie revealed an attitude of “non-involvement” and “standing to one side.” In this respect, the burning of books could be understood as a warning against “inner emigration.”
In Alfred Baeumler's inaugural lecture, which was originally planned as a speech to accompany the burning of books, the critique of the ideal of a harmonious personality and of the “aesthetic attitude”[21] entertained by the highly educated took on a key role. Baeumler's critique of the personality ideal of the cultured reappears-in almost exactly the same words[22]—in Gadamer's lecture. His interpretation of Plato's notion of paideia is directed against the “humanist ideal of the ‘harmonious personality’” (18). Gadamer seeks to make this critique of aesthetic humanism plausible to his humanist audience by constructing it out of their most coveted cultural
As can be shown in greater detail, Gadamer constructed an interpretive framework for the contemporary situation in Germany that, at the same time, allowed Plato's critique of the poets to be understood in a manner that simultaneously articulated the self-understanding of the present. As a result, the passages in which Gadamer, together with Plato, argues for the unconditioned validity of authority over and against the sophistic conception of the laws of the state can be seen as a grave and unambiguous response to National Socialism in the period of its consolidation. Central here is the demand for a new paideia that was called upon to shape the youths into the guardians of the new state and to help them to resist the seductions of the sophistic spirit to which they may be exposed. In this way, a new form of subjectivity was to be developed that—without the recognition of basic human rights—was to bring the interior of the state into agreement with its external form. This achievement can be made visible, however, only when the meaning and scope of the topos of the sophists (or the sophistical), as well as the critique of the Enlightenment, is understood not only in terms of the history of ideas but also as a concrete and stigmatized way of representing the enemies of the state under National Socialism.
By drawing upon all the available material, in which Gadamer's voice is but one amongst many, we can establish the following points:
- The genesis of this multiform interpretation of Plato was not determined by extra-academic impulses or by some sort of Weltanschauung, but arose at the center of academic discourse itself and was unconditionally asserted as part of the scientific canon. Popular interpretations of Plato drew upon these approaches and sought to make them productive in their own way.
- At the same time, however, certain interpretations of Plato's Seventh Letter and of Plato's unwritten secret doctrine secured exclusive access to the truth for the academic elite under National Socialism. By identifying hidden “reserves of meaning” in the Platonic material, they were able to distinguish their own reading from the “simple message” contained in the popular image of Plato.[23]
- The topos of interpreting the Republic as an ideal task that is yet to be fulfilled allowed the possibility of conceiving new ways of actualizing this task under National Socialism as it developed through its various stages. This is something that can be shown in an exemplary way in the case of Gadamer. The traditional reading of the Seventh Letter as an expression of Plato's disappointment at the impossibility of realizing his project of a proper ordering of the state could be functionalized in a new way with
― 221 ―the occurrence of “processes of disappointment” over certain unwelcome developments under National Socialism.
THE CURE FOR THE UNHEALTHY CONDITION OF THE STATE:
GADAMER IN THE SS STATE
Gadamer's essay “Plato's Educational State” was published in 1942 as part of a collection of texts whose purpose was to document the contribution made by classical philology to the “human sciences as part of the war effort.” In the intervening period Gadamer had become firmly established as a professor in Leipzig. In 1977 he himself described this text as “a sort of alibi” (PL74) without providing any further explanation. In fact, Gadamer adopts an unexpected tone in this essay. He appears to resist becoming caught up in the general enthusiasm generated by the triumphal march of the German military forces. The posture of “German strength” that had informed the lecture on Herder, given in 1941 to imprisoned French officers, is no longer in evidence. Instead, Gadamer takes up a pensive attitude and appears to want to direct a word of warning to the “present” through a reading of Plato. The theme that is treated under the title of “Plato's Educational State” is the unsuspicious, familiar postulate of the “philosopher king”; that is, the idea that “the philosophers lead the rulers and the rulers are taught by the philosophers how to rule.”[24] This theme, however, harbors a certain explosive force.
Gadamer presents Plato here as someone who is disillusioned with the dictatorship that has taken over from Athenian democracy. He quotes whole passages from the Seventh Letter in which Plato raises impassioned complaints about the general moral decay under the rule of “tyranny.” In order to put an end to his decay Plato advocates “a reform of unheard of proportions” (GW5: 317). For Gadamer, it is the Plato who criticizes and admonishes the tyrants of Athens and, through Socrates, seeks to show them the way to reform who provides the guiding thread by which the Republic is to be interpreted.[25] The shift of emphasis involved in this image of Plato is remarkable. Gadamer's Plato of 1934 was someone who had made the expulsion of the poets and the education of the guardians into a condition of the founding of the state. The hermeneutic horizon within which Plato is now presented is “the decay of the state under tyranny.”
The contemporary horizon for this reading of Plato was given by the restructuring of the National Socialist ruling apparatus that took place at the start of the war. The apparatus of repression was built up and the SS state began to take shape. With the deterioration of the war situation this reorganization allowed the ideological forces of cohesion on the “inner front” to slacken and the ideological incorporation of the individual to break down.
The general change of mood was not restricted to the conservative and academic elites. Within the philosophical domain there was a proliferation of proposals for an inner reform of fascism based on readings of Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Frederick the Great. The cases of Eduard Spranger,[26] Hans Freyer,[27] and Carl Schmitt[28] belong here. Almost all the projects that became philosophically effective in 1933 sought to establish a normative foundation for developing various conceptions of an ideal fascism. Against the background of the destabilizing effects of the war, these projects consequently served to procure stability and order. This can be elucidated by looking at the model of society that Gadamer sought to distill from the Republic.
Under the heading of “dikaiosyne” (a term that is translated as “Gerechtig-keit, “or ‘justice”) Gadamer opposes, as he had in 1934, the idea of the Platonic state, the state as “an order of classes” (GW5:3a6), to the concept of tyranny and the sophistic conception of the state. Dikaiosyne is used to describe government in the form of the general interest. Ideally, the rulers should use their competence in planning and leadership unselfishly—that is, for the good of all, rather than in the service of their own interests. The military uses its weapons in defense of the whole. For the rulers and those that are ruled, however, the “state as a whole” (GW51327) presents itself in a different way. Because their special competence resides in leadership, the rulers have a position in the “division of labor” that binds them immediately to the “universal”: “Every form of work is indeed there for the use of all who need it. Nonetheless, the work of a political leader or a warrior is not merely a technical skill like any other but is immediately related to the interest of the state as a whole” (GW5:327). If in this way, in a formulation that Gadamer takes up from Hegel,[29] “the universal prevails” (GW5:32g), then the rulers can rely upon the “sophrosyne” or virtue of those who are ruled to guarantee that their decisions will meet with agreement. In opposition to real, “tyrannical” fascism, Gadamer describes an ideal fascism, a stratified community of the people brought about through the “reconciliation of the three classes to form a single unity” (GW5:328).
The system of government that Gadamer derives from Plato's ideas is only conceivable as an authoritarian state with a highly centralized concentration of power. He clearly rejects the conception of “democratically” formed decision-making procedures: “The disruption of this order of the classes is the real political misfortune, that is, the destruction of the structure of government as this became visible in the decay of the Attic democracy” (GW5:327). The concentration of power in the hands of the “governing classes” has its price: there is no guarantee, no internal power, that can prevent the “governing classes” from establishing a tyrannical government. There is a permanent danger that the governing class will succumb to the “temptations of power” and that the “order of the state will be destroyed”
My thesis is that this ideal of an authoritative government represents a reaction to the “tyrannical” transformations that fascism underwent during the war. Gadamer's call for “a cure for the unhealthy state” is closely related to the various proposals for providing the National Socialist system and its military policies with a “new” basis, as these were developed within the upper ranks of the government, military, and business. Proposals for an inner reorganization of the state were not limited to the Potsdam faction of National Socialism, whose plans for transforming the “Fuhrer” state into an “enlightened” monarchy resulted in the military putsch of July 20, 1944. An impetus for reform was also generated from within the National Socialist Party itself. Paradigmatic here is the critique that was openly articulated by Hans Frank, one of the foremost lawyers of the National Socialist Party.[30] From the example of Frank's attempt to curb the development toward tyranny we can see the range and variety of social forces that informed Gadamer's interpretation of Plato. In stark contrast is the option pursued by Carl Schmitt, who in 1938 sought to legitimate the establishment of a total police state through recourse to the work of Hobbes. While both the national conservative opposition and certain factions within the National Socialist Party sought to discover a way of securing the relationship between “the leadership and the people” by respecting the “emotional and psychological constitution of the individual,” Schmitt outdid these suggestions—among which Gadamer's is to be included—with his model of tyranny.
In summary, the results of this investigation reveal the way in which Gadamer was able to identify with the national conservative faction of National Socialism without, however, publicly declaring his opposition to its more popular forms. The contemporary relevance of his interpretations of Plato enabled him to construct bridges that allowed various connections to be drawn without the need to state them explicitly. The hermeneutic art of allusion that Gadamer invokes in his critique of Carl Schmitt's interpretation of Hamlet is also relevant to Gadamer's own work: “In fact, the reality of a play is constituted by leaving an indefinite space around its theme” (GW2:38o).[31]
In the end, we can agree with Jan Ross's evaluation that “Gadamer's virtuosity” consisted “in adapting the subject of thought to altered circumstances
NOTES
Translator's note: The two principal texts discussed by Orozco (“Plato and the Poets” and “Plato's Educational State”) are translated by P. Christopher Smith in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermmeutical Studies on Plato.
1. Ross accords philosophical predominance to Gadamer alone on the grounds that Habermas has “made too much of a mark in the social sciences and in political debates for him simply to be called a philosopher” (“Schmuggel. Gadamers Ge-heimnis,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Feb. 11, 1995). By this criterion, however, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, and Hobbes's Leviathan would all forfeit their status as philosophical texts. [BACK]
2. Henning Ritter, “Konziliantes Denken. ‘Der Philosoph Hans-Georg Gadamer wird neunzig,’” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Feb. 10, 1990, 27. [BACK]
3. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Kloster-mann, 1959), 243. [BACK]
4. “The goal of all attempts at reaching understanding is agreement concerning the subject matter. Hence the task of hermeneutics has always been to establish agreement where there was none or where it had been disturbed in some way” (WM276). [BACK]
5. It was Jiirgen Habermas who critically questioned this hermeneutic postulate, thereby initiating a debate that introduced the “claim to justification” as the inelim-inable foundation of a theory of interpretation. [BACK]
6. These case studies form part of a larger work, Platonische Gewalt. Gadamers poli-tischeHermeneutih derNS-Zeit (Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1995), in which I undertake an ideological analysis of Gadamer's philosophical interventions in important aspects of National Socialism. [BACK]
7. Research into the circumstances of Gadamer's call to Leipzig reveals that he was promoted in place of the university's preferred choice, the NSDAP candidate Theodor Haering, an ordinarius lecturer in Tubingen, on the insistence of Professor Heinrich Harmjanz, who was the minister responsible for the social sciences section (Department W6) in the Ministry of Education. Gadamer's name occupied second place on the list, even before that of the SS “echelon candidate” Hans Lipps. See
8. Cited in Peter Dudeck, “Kontinuitat und Wandel. Wissenschaftliche Pada-gogik im Nachkriegsdeutschland,” in Wissenschaft im geteilten Deutschland. Restaur-ation oder Neubeginn nach 1945? eds. W. H. Pehle and P. Sillem (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992), 68. Spranger was still able to identify “much that was irreproachable, indeed praiseworthy, in National Socialism” (ibid., 69), such as the “Reichsberufwettkampf,” the “Arbeitsdienstpflicht” and the “NS Landjahr.” [BACK]
9. See Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Nicolai Hartmanns Neuordnung von Wert und Sinn,” in Deutsche Philosophen 1933, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, 1989), 159–87. [BACK]
10. See Thomas Laugstien, “Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist von Potsdam’. Sprangers Rekonstruktion des Fiihrerstaats aus dem Prinzip personlicher Ve-rantwortung,” in Deutsche Philosophen 1933, 29–68. [BACK]
11. See Thomas Friederich, “Theodor Litts [?] Warnung von der ‘allzu direkten Methoden,’” in Deutsche Philosophen 1933, 99–124. [BACK]
12. Some of the results of this research are drawn together in my essay “Die Plato Rezeption in Deutschland um 1933,“in “Die besten Geister der Nation”. Philosophic und Nationahozialismus, ed. Use Korotin (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 1994). [BACK]
13. In the standard work on research into Plato in the German-speaking context, Ernst Moritz Manasse (Bucher uber Platan. Bd. I. Werke in deutscher Sprache [Tubingen: Mohr, 1957] reviews all the editions of the relevant literature after 1945 and yet more or less completely excludes consideration of the obvious relations that they bear to their historical context. [BACK]
14. This short outline is based upon accounts of the Plato scholarship of the period, which, studied in detail, reveal a more differentiated picture. For a fuller discussion, see Orozco, “Die Plato Rezeption in Deutschland um 1933.” [BACK]
15. Volker Losemann, Nationalsozialismus und Antihe: Studien zur Entwichlung des FachesAlte Geschichte 1933–1945 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1977), 86. [BACK]
16. It is not necessary here to go into the still undecided question as to whether this biography is genuine or fake. Of central interest, however, is the role this biography played in transforming the principles on which philological investigations into Plato were conducted. The volume Das Problem der ungeschriebene Lehre Platans (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), edited byjiirgen Wippern, contains a number of contributions in which the attempt to reconstruct Plato's unwritten doctrine draws upon a far more complex set of sources. [BACK]
17. HansL, eisegang, DiePlatondeutungderGegenwart (Karlsruhe: G. Braun, 1929), documents this through the example of Kurt Singer (a member of the George circle): “The conclusions to be drawn from demonstrating the authenticity of the Seventh Letter, the fact that Plato himself said that he did not write down his real doctrine, the attempt to discover this doctrine in the utterances of his pupils and by re-interpreting the later dialogues in light of these utterances—all this was simply
18. Werner Jaeger, “Die Erziehung des politischen Menschen und die An tike,” Volk im Werden 3 (1933): 4.6. [BACK]
19. Plato und die Dichter (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1934), 5; reprinted in GW5; subsequent page references (to the original) appear in parentheses in the text. [BACK]
20. It is this immanence that allows Gadamer to make recourse to this text again on other occasions; by interpreting Plato's work from an atemporal standpoint he is able to disregard its historical features. This is particularly clear in his polemic against Karl Popper (“Platos Denken in Utopien,” Gymansium. Zeitschrift fur Kultur derAntikeundhumanistischeBildunggo [1983]: 434–55). [BACK]
21. “Antrittsvorlesung in Berlin. Gehalten am 10. Mai 1933,” in Alfred Baeum-ler, Mdnnerbund und Wissenschaft (Berlin: Junker und Dunnhaupt, 1943), 131. [BACK]
22. This is not to say that Gadamer is quoting Baeumler directly. Nonetheless, this coincidence is not wholly contingent. It demarcates an identical critical front. The ideal of the harmonious personality was derived polemically from a formulation of Schiller's and was widely used under National Socialism as a cipher to criticize the “apolitical intellectual.” Gadamer's employment of this term represents a classic example of what Michel Pecheux has termed a “cross-discourse.” [BACK]
23. In the introduction to Platans Lehre von der Wahrheit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1931–32, 1940), 201, Martin Heidegger indicated his own approach to the question of Plato's secret doctrine: “The ‘doctrine’ of a thinker is that which remains unsaid in what is said, that to which man is exposed in order that he might expend himself on it.” Heidegger's modern interpretation of the analogy of the cave addresses the reader by mobilizing both the hermeneutic force of the esoteric and a notion of truth as something that can only be revealed. Manfred Frank (Stil in der Philosophic [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992], 64) has described this phenomenon in a very clear way: “What can be ‘shown’ in the utterances of philosophy but cannot be ‘said,’ that is, what remains silent can always remain silent profoundly.” Devoted disciples are attracted by the realm of the unspoken in that they imagine themselves to be among the select few who stand in the presence of a truth that can never be grasped discursively. See Andrew Bowie's translation of Frank's statement in Radical Philosophy 80 (Nov./Dec. 1996): 56. [BACK]
24. “Platos Staat der Erziehung,” in Das neue Bild der Antihe, ed. Helmut Berve (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1942), 317 (reprinted in GW5:24g-6i). [BACK]
25. Gadamer's various interpretations of the Seventh Letter reveal the variety of possible readings to which this letter is exposed. In the texts of 1934 and 1942 he discusses the first part of the letter, in which Plato provides a narrative account of his political and philosophical development. Gadamer's influential article “Dialectic and Sophism in Plato's Seventh Letter,” dating from 1964, contains a shift in emphasis insofar as he devotes his attention to that part of the letter in which Plato addresses the question concerning “the means by which knowledge comes about” (“Dialektik und Sophistik im siebten Platonischen Brief” [GW6:g2]). This essay is a meticulous philological treatise that is radically different from the pieces discussed above in its mode of presentation, style, and form of argument. It is also interesting
26. See Thomas Laugstien, “Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist von Potsdam,’” in Philosophieverhaltnisse im deutschen Faschismus (Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, 1990), 61 ff. [BACK]
27. See Miiller, The Other God that Failed, 267 ff. [BACK]
28. See Martin Janicke, “Die ‘Abgriindige Wissenschaft’ vom Leviathan. Zur Hobbes-Deutung Carl Schmitts im Dritten Reich,” Zeitschrift fur Politik 3: 401–15. [BACK]
29. It remains an open question whether Gadamer sought to indicate his proximity to the Kieler school with this discreet reference. According to Bernd Riithers (Entartetes Recht. Rechtslehren und Kronjuristen im Dritten Reich [Munich: Beck, 1994], 43), this school did not regard the state as “a mere instrument of power for the party or for a ‘movement’” (ibid.). In the tradition of Hegelian modes of thought, the state was “bound up with the incarnation of the idea of the ethical as a superpersonal form of ‘law’ whose central content they sought to define in a national and racist way. The very notions of general law, penal law and individual rights represented normative limits upon the holders of power because of their connection with objective and fundamental legal values (justice, ethical life). The idea of the state and of ‘right’ could not be instrumentalized at will. Nonetheless, the recourse to Hegel and to German Idealism could, theoretically, set limits to the misuse of the law and the state in the despotic arbitrariness of the administration of the law and the employment of the police” (ibid.). Laugstien has also drawn attention to the function-alizing of the Hegelian universal within this school: “the Hegelian discourse of the ‘universal’ in which everything individual knows itself to be sublated was ideally suited to consecrating as a higher necessity the removal of the basic rights of the individual” (Philosophieverhaltnisse im deutschen Faschismus, 175). [BACK]
30. Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers (Munich: DTV, 1983), 412 ff. This source documents a statement made to the minister of justice by Frank's representative in the National Socialist Juristenbund on August 22, 1935. There he expressed “serious concern about the state of legal protection in Germany” (ibid.). He referred to the fact “that the refusal of legal support in cases of preventative detention” by the Gestapo stood “in contradiction to the natural sense of law of the northern peoples” and “encouraged calumny.” Further, “the activities of the Gestapo—like the Russian Tscheka—w[ere] outside of the sphere of law” and “purely despotic.” Frank later took a leading role in the genocide of the Jews. He was condemned to death by the Nuremberg military tribunal. [BACK]
31. Gadamer criticizes Schmitt's discussion of the play's contemporary political relevance, arguing that Schmitt sought “to read Hamlet like a roman-à-clef (GW2: 379). Gadamer maintains programmatically that, “The more that remains open, the
32. Gadamer provided the introduction and commentary for a translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics that was published in 1948. [BACK]
12. On the Politics of Gadamerian Hermeneutics
A Response to Orozco and Waite
CATHERINE H. ZUCKERT
OROZCO
In “The Art of Allusion: Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Interventions under National Socialism,” Teresa Orozco accuses Gadamer of having written “Plato and the Poets” to justify Nazi suppression of liberal humanist education and “Plato's Educational State” to support national conservative efforts to reform the regime. Geoffrey Waite repeats her accusation in “Radio Nietzsche.” Whereas most twentieth-century readers of Nietzsche have unintentionally fostered his elitist politics by adopting a perspectivist reading, Waite charges, Orozco shows that Gadamer did so intentionally. In my view, there is little evidence to support either charge.
Gadamer never joined the National Socialist Party. “For this reason,” Orozco admits, “he was elected rector of the University of Leipzig by the occupying Soviet powers in 1947.” Although, as Gadamer has stated publicly, “there was no question of his joining one of the organizations of the National Socialist Party because of the importance of remaining loyal to his Jewish friends,” she argues he nevertheless was “obliged to make political concessions in order to advance his career.”[1] Orozco does not (and presumably cannot) cite any statement, vote, or action by which Gadamer explicitly supported National Socialism. Her argument depends completely upon associations she draws between the historical circumstances and things Gadamer said about Plato. “Gadamer's articles were entirely in keeping with then current research and did not appear to represent anything unusual,” she concedes. The goals of Gadamer, in implicit contrast to those of his teacher, Martin Heidegger, “did not extend to such ambitious projects as the question of the meaning of being or revolutionizing the discipline of philosophy.” Only by looking at the articles he wrote on Plato explicitly in the context of German politics under the Nazis did she discover the nefarious character of his apparently innocent scholarship.
One might have expected a critic examining Gadamer's scholarship during the Nazi period to have noted the explicit contrast between Gadamer's actions and statements, on the one hand, and those of his teacher, Heidegger, on the other. Orozco never makes this connection. Although Gadamer repeatedly acknowledged his philosophical debt to Heidegger both before and after the war, he did not follow Heidegger politically. Unlike Heidegger, he never joined the party or gave speeches defending its policies; nor did Gadamer assert the “essential truth” of National Socialism, as Heidegger did, after Germany was defeated and the party forcibly removed from power. Heidegger himself broke relatively early with the ruling authorities. If Gadamer wanted to reform the party from within, as Orozco goes on to argue, he might have tried to make some sort of “political” alliance with his mentor. He did nothing of the sort.[2]
Perhaps because Gadamer warned critics about dismissing Heidegger's thought solely on political grounds, Orozco claims that Gadamer “argues for a strict division between the scientific and political domains” (TM263, GW1:268). She does not offer any citations to support this claim, which flies in the face of Gadamer's insistence on the importance of breaking down such a strict line by asking what is the meaning of, or what is true in, historical texts for us living now. For example, in “Plato and the Poets,” he states, “it cannot be our purpose to dispose of Plato's decision [to expel the poets from the city] by saying that it is merely the function of some particular distant and irrelevant moment in history” (DD41). Gadamer later reiterates this point more generally and defends it at much greater length in his theoretical masterpiece, Truth and Method. We cannot learn the truth of any historical writing in a merely “scientific” manner by determining its meaning solely in its own time and place; in his famous teaching about the “fusing of horizons,” he argues that we must go on to ask what in the writing remains true for us here and now. Contrary to her own claims about Gadamer, that is what Orozco accuses Gadamer of doing when she criticizes him for implicitly justifying Nazi repression of intellectuals by giving an explication of Plato's expulsion of the poets in the Republic.
Orozco does not accuse Gadamer of believing in the truth of National Socialism. On the contrary, she charges him with a kind of political opportunism. In the two essays he wrote on Plato during the Nazi period, she suggests, Gadamer presented his teaching in a manner designed to foster his professional career by pleasing relevant groups or authorities. By demanding that “his educated and cultured audience … respect the expulsion of the poets [in Plato] as a decision made within the framework of the founding of the state,” in 1934 Gadamer “indirectly attacked the reservation and skepticism about the burning of books [by the Nazis in 1933] which was widespread among the humanist elite.” He thus demonstrated the utility or “meaning” of his particular form of Platonic scholarship to the authorities.
To see whether Orozco's charges are credible, we have to look at what Gadamer actually wrote in “Plato and the Poets” in 1934 and in “Plato's Educational State” in 1941. In his first essay he began by emphasizing the paradoxical character of Plato, an obviously poetic writer, turning against poetry. There was a problem here that needed explanation and explication. Although earlier philosophers and poets questioned both the truth and the morality of traditional myths, Plato attempted not merely to purify poetry of untrue mythology and bad moral examples, but also to abolish imitation entirely. Since Plato's own dialogues are imitative representations, we have to distinguish the character of Plato's own words and the effect he intended them to have from the law forbidding imitations he proposes in the Republic. “The meaning and intent of [Plato's] critique [of poetry],” Gadamer insisted, “can be established only by [taking account of] the place where it occurs. It is found in Plato's work on the state within a program of education for the guardians of that state, a state which is erected before our eyes in words alone” (0048). As he reports in the Seventh Letter, Plato had become convinced that political reform would not occur until rulers were educated differently. In other words, philosophers must become kings. But Gadamer cautioned,
One misses the full seriousness and importance of that requirement… if one takes the projected educational program and the ordering of the state literally. This state is a state in thought, not any state on earth. That is to say, its purpose is to bring something to light and not to provide an actual design for an improved order in real political life. (DD48)
What is brought to light in Plato's Republic is the natural conflict within the human being between the bestial and the peaceful and the consequent need to bring order to the soul through education. “Such a description seems reminiscent of the humanist ideal of the ‘harmonious personality’ which is to be formed by developing the whole range of one's human potential—an aesthetic ideal to be achieved by a proposed ‘aesthetic education of the human race,’” Gadamer observes. “But for Plato harmony means the tuning of a dissonance which is inherent in man (Republic 375 c)” (0054).
Orozco never mentions Gadamer's insistence, both in this essay and the next, that Plato's Republic does not constitute a blueprint for political reform or that the education described there is explicitly said to culminate in philosophy, that is, in the asking of questions. The end or goal of the “political” education Plato proposes is thus explicitly anti-authoritarian. According to Gadamer,
the exposition of this ideal state in the Republic serves in educating the political human being, but … [t]his education … is anything but a total manipulation of the soul…. [T]his education is not authoritative instruction based on an ideal organization at all; rather it lives by questioning alone. (DD52)
Neither Plato's Republic nor Gadamer's interpretation of it constitutes the rationalization for authoritarian rule that Orozco claims.
Orozco finds a “remarkable … shift of emphasis” in Gadamer's second essay, “Plato's Educational State,” to the need to resist tyranny only because she completely ignores Gadamer's emphasis on the reformist character of Plato's thought in the first. In both essays Gadamer argues that Plato saw a need to reform the traditional Greek education in music (poetry or the works of the “Muses”) and gymnastic because that education had been perverted by the sophists into a means of, if not a justification for, pursuing one's self-interest. Evils in cities would not cease, Plato thought, until rulers became philosophical, because philosophy alone would enable them to resist the temptations of wealth and fame. Gadamer himself emphasizes the continuity between the two essays when he begins the second by observing that “the concern here is not even with the right laws for the state but solely with the right education for it, education in citizenship. Ultimately, however, the latter is education in philosophy. This dialogue is a philosophical discussion in which an ideal state is constructed, a Utopia which lies far removed from any reality” (0073). Later Gadamer explicitly states that he “will not repeat the demonstration [provided in the earlier essay] that this state, constructed in words alone, only assumes a political character involving actual power and sovereignty once the discussion comes to the warrior class” (DD83). The warriors embody the tension between the violent drives that lead to tyranny and the gentle philosophical rationality that Plato found in the soul of every human being, the tension that made education necessary. As Gadamer states in his first essay, “It is the goal of paideia to bring about this unification … of the philosophical and martial natures in him … which keeps the human being from becoming either a tame herd animal (a slave) or a rapacious wolf (a tyrant).” Philosophy enables a man to resist the temptations of power by enabling him “to distinguish the true friend from the false one and what is truly just from flattering appearances. It is philosophy which makes such distinguishing possible, for philosophy is loving the true and resisting the false” (0056–57).
It is difficult to believe that the man who penned these words was seeking to justify Nazi book burning or concealing his opposition to the popular form of National Socialism.[3] With the (in) famous “myth of the metals,” Plato's Republic might well have been taken to provide a kind of justification for the eugenic policies of the Third Reich. Gadamer does not deign to mention it. Nor does he suggest that Plato's expulsion of the poets from
Convinced that the meaning of all statements is determined by their historical context, Orozco attends solely to the context—to the scholarship to which Gadamer explicitly responded and the political events and divisions of the times at which he wrote. She does not appear to have bothered to read what he actually argued in his own name. As a result, she emphasizes the political readings of Plato to which Gadamer refers early in both his essays; she does not note the way in which he explicitly distances his own understanding of Plato from them. Likewise, she concludes that because both Gadamer and Alfred Baeumler criticized “the ideal of a harmonious personality and of the ‘aesthetic attitude,’” they must have criticized the scholars who advocated such on the same grounds and have drawn the same conclusions from their criticisms. Nothing of the kind follows, either logically or factually.
To support her “opportunistic” reading of Gadamer, Orozco should have attempted to show that Gadamer's reading of Plato changed when the Nazis came into power. That is, she ought to have documented changes from the Habilitationschrift Gadamer wrote under the direction of Heidegger in the late igaos and his essay “Plato and the Poets.” Likewise, she should have pointed out the way he modified his understanding of Plato in the Idea of the Good, after the Nazis had been defeated. If he made “political concessions” in his work in order to further his career, there should be evidence of such “concessions” or changes. Orozco does not provide it.[4]
Since Gadamer never explicitly mentioned National Socialism in either of the essays he wrote under the regime, one might conclude that the relation between what he wrote and the political context necessarily remains a matter of “interpretation.” But are there no canons or standards of interpretation? That would be truly ironic, and perhaps even more devastating to Gadamer than the charge that he collaborated with an immoral regime in order to advance his own scholarly career, since he devoted his major work to articulating just such standards. According to Gadamer, interpretation must begin with an attempt to understand the act, text, or author in its own terms. If no such attempt is made, critics remain confined within their own current understanding, unable to expand their horizon by encompassing or incorporating another. The first step in the case of a literary text is obviously to read what it says. But, if one actually reads what Gadamer contends that Plato advocated—namely, the replacement of traditional “poetic” education by philosophy as the only means of freeing rulers from the temptations of power—one cannot conclude, as Orozco does, that Gadamer was explicating Plato to justify political persecution of intellectuals in Nazi Germany. Gadamer's advocacy for the need for a new education in philosophy in the context of Nazi Germany brings Gadamer closer to his
In a footnote to his essay, Waite suggests that Gadamer may have had a rhetorical reason for remaining silent about the relation between his interpretation of Plato's Republic and the political circumstances in which he found himself. (Waite concedes that Orozco's case is purely circumstantial.) Arguments often persuade readers more effectively, Waite observes, if the author leaves them to draw the conclusion from the stated premises on their own.[5] The question, however, is what are the “premises”? Is the “argument” that Gadamer says that Plato recommended the expulsion of the poets and Gadamer thinks that Plato's proposals are both wise and relevant to the present, that the Nazis repressed (which is not even the same as expelling [with honor! cf. Republic 3g8a]) intellectuals, so that we conclude therefore that Gadamer thinks Nazi policy was not merely justifiable, but wise as well? Or, is the argument that, according to Gadamer, Plato “expelled” the poets as part of his argument that the founding of a just regime required that rulers be philosophically educated, that such philosophical education is necessary to free rulers from the temptations of power politics, so that Plato's argument is still relevant to us now, because (implicitly) the heads of the government are obviously neither philosophically educated nor immune to the temptations of power? In that case, the government is and will remain unjust until both magistrates and citizens begin questioning what they now think is good.[6]
The aspect or element of Gadamer's understanding of both Plato in particular and philosophy in general that most distinguished him from his mentor was his insistence on its ethical character. (Whereas Heidegger dismissed “ethics” as a subject of the hoary “metaphysical” tradition he was attempting to “destruct,” Gadamer entitled the Habilitationschrift he wrote under Heidegger's direction Plato's Dialectical Ethics.) Philosophical dialogue and textual hermeneutics are essentially ethical, Gadamer argued from the beginning until the end of his career, because they entail respect for the integrity
By insisting on reading Gadamer solely in terms of the historical context—academic as well as political—Orozco not merely ignores the explicit contrast Gadamer draws between his own reading of Plato's Republic, which he insists is not a blueprint for actual reform or action, and that of previous political interpreters. Because he was known to associate with members of the Stephen George circle, she also suggests that Gadamer shared their opposition to the Weimar regime. He may well have sympathized with the critics. There were many reasons for Germans to be unhappy with the Weimar government; it was imposed by the allies, and it proved to be weak and ineffective. Being critical of Weimar did not necessarily make someone a Nazi sympathizer.[8]
At the beginning of her essay, Orozco complains that Gadamer rather than Jurgen Habermas was named the “most successful philosopher” in the federal republic because the latter was concerned more with social science than philosophy. The difference between Gadamer and Habermas does not appear to lie in their concern with social science, however. In Truth and Method Gadamer presents his own “hermeneutics” or method of interpretation as a critique of and alternative to what he argued were futile attempts to construct a “science” of man on the model of natural science. Moreover, Habermas and Gadamer agree on the nature and utility of interpretation. Habermas not merely concedes but positively urges that the kind of herme-neutical appropriation of the intellectual tradition Gadamer advocates is a necessary and useful component of any social order (and the study of it). But, Habermas contends, such an attempt to preserve the inheritance of the past by adapting it to changing circumstances is inherently conservative. It must, therefore, be supplemented both with technical knowledge of how to control the material foundations and with critical exposure of the cultural myths that develop over time as such.[9] Like his teacher Heidegger, Gadamer argues that such technical approaches tend to transform and thus threaten to destroy what is distinctively human. The difference between Gadamer and Habermas does not lie in the extent of their concern with social
Gadamer may be criticized for not publicly opposing the rise and rule of National Socialism in Germany in word or deed. If that is the objection Orozco and Waite wish to make, they should say so. The question then would be whether “political correctness” or plain old morality requires a man to become a martyr (like Bonhoeffer). Is it not possible for a person to conclude “prudently” (in the Aristotelian and not the Kantian sense) that it would be better to preserve not merely one's own life and career, but also the lives and livelihood of one's family, friends, and students, by trying to foster change from within, gradually, by means of persuasion rather than force? Such a prudent course of action might require one to remain silent at times or to deliver criticisms indirectly in a veiled manner. In his Philosophical Apprenticeships, Gadamer describes his own behavior during the Nazi regime very much in these terms.[10]
WAITE
Gadamer does not appear to be an appropriate focus or even secondary target of Waite's dis-covery of “Radio Nietzsche.” In the volumes of Gadamer's Collected Works, there is only one piece on Nietzsche, a brief explication of the literary character of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Waite does not even mention it.
Stated in less “figurative” terms than Waite himself employs, the paradox Waite promises to illumine is how Nietzsche, initially embraced by right-wing critics of egalitarian politics, could become the major, indeed virtually the sole, philosophical source of left intellectuals in the late twentieth century. Waite attributes this apparently surprising turn of events to Nietzsche's exo/esoteric form of writing. Although he explicitly called for the emergence of a new race of “supermen” and the end of “herd” or “slave” morality, Nietzsche also gave his readers reason to dismiss such calls for radical inegalitarian political reforms. The “will to power” is only interpretation, Nietzsche declares in Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 22; and in that “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,” Nietzsche seems to describe himself more as a “free spirit” who seeks to demolish old “idols” or illusions than as a “prophet” (cf. The Gay Science, aphorism i) striving to establish new gods,
Waite attributes Nietzsche's insidious influence to his use of suppressed premises—in the rhetorical form of argument known as the enthymeme.[13] But it is difficult to see what “premises” Waite thinks Nietzsche suppressed. Nietzsche was perfectly open about his desire to see the emergence of “sovereign individuals” (Genealogy of Morals II. 2) and the possible utility of modern mass political movements for establishing the right conditions (Gay Science 1. 1 1). The example of the effect of Nietzschean rhetoric Waite gives is more illuminating. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari take Nietzsche’ remark that philosophers “must no longer merely permit themselves to accept concepts as gifts … but rather first of all make them, create them, and present them persuasively to others” as their thesis. In adopting a thought of Nietzsche's, Waite implies, they contradict both his and their own words in practice. The saying itself seems to be circular insofar as the persuading of others must render those others nonphilosophers.[14] But that is Waite's point. Apparently seeking to engage others for the sake of educating or even freeing them, the philosopher in fact dominates. Plato is the example par excellence—even though he taught the opposite. Presenting philosophy as contemplation or dialogue, he was actually seeking to forward and support a “social, conceptual, and rhetorical” hierarchy of “spiritual” or “intellectual” leaders (philosopher-kings). His project was rather self-consciously taken up and “incorporated” by Nietzsche, who passed it on
According to George Bataille, “Nietzsche's position is the only one outside of communism.” At the end of the cold war and the apparent “death of communism,” Waite observes in this volume, “Nietzsche and Nietzschean-ism have become totalitarian, globally hegemonic” (20). By exposing the ineradicably intellectualist, and hence elitist, core of Nietzsche's thought, Waite hopes to reverse the outcome by de-structing the only position outside communism, so leaving the latter dominant and unchallenged.
There are several difficulties with Waite's project, however. First, there is the presumed method of analysis. Toward the beginning of his essay Waite claims to be employing a “Straussian” mode of reading “between the lines” for non-Straussian political ends (see note 5). In Persecution and the Art of Writing Leo Strauss argued that past philosophers did not always state their own position and arguments straightforwardly in public; from fear of political and religious persecution for their unorthodox views, they have (like the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides) engaged in a kind of secret writing. But, Strauss warns:
Reading between the lines is strictly prohibited in all cases where it would be less exact than not doing so. Only such reading between the lines as starts from an exact consideration of the explicit statements of the author is legitimate. The context in which a statement occurs, and the literary character of the whole work as well as its plan, must be perfectly understood before an interpretation of the statement can reasonably claim to be adequate or even correct.[16]
Waite rests his argument on relatively few statements by Nietzsche, taken more from letters and the Nachlass than from published works. He does not consider “the literary character of [any] whole work,” much less its plan. The elitist politics and project he claims to find by reading between the lines can be found very explicitly on the surface.[17]
Waite does not want to determine Nietzsche's intention or meaning so much as to trace the heretofore unrecognized character of Nietzsche's influence. But in this case his argument appears to be distorted by a political agenda. By slighting Jacques Derrida and neglecting even to mention Derrida's
What then of the Germans who Waite believes are philosophically superior to the French? The leaders of the Frankfurt School claimed that they were “deontologizing Marxian critical theory” in opposition to the fundamental ontology of Heidegger. But in the 1950 radio broadcast commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Nietzsche's death, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno chose to follow the “Gadamerian doctrine that true philosophy is in essence dialogical…. [D]espite minor differences of opinion about Nietzsche (having to do, [Waite] would argue, with different views of Heidegger),” there was remarkably little contention. All three easily agreed that Nietzsche could not be read “literally” in a Russo-American fashion.[18]
According to Waite, both the agreements and the disagreements between the “rival wings of German philosophy” had their roots in Heidegger.[19] But Waite has remarkably little to say about Heidegger, either about his powerful influence on twentieth-century interpretations and the consequent dissemination of Nietzsche's thought or about his analysis of the meaning and effects of modern technology. He does not contrast his own account of Nietzsche's “radio-active” form of writing with Heidegger's claim that Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power expresses the truth of the technological age. For Waite, as for Nietzsche, technology simply represents a form of power. Turning Derrida on his head (or ear), Waite suggests that the radio succeeds in separating the voice from the body even more than the written word or typewriter.[20] Rather than disclose the truth, “radio-active” technology perpetuates the traditional belief in the direct communicability of thought by imperceptibly bringing a universal message into the privacy of one's own house (and head).
If Waite had paid any attention to Heidegger, he might have discovered what distinguishes Gadamer from most, if not all, of his contemporaries. Heavily and explicitly indebted to his teacher, Gadamer shows little interest in, or influence of, Nietzsche.
In fact, Waite's essay has little to do with Gadamer except at a very general and antagonistic level. Whereas Gadamer argues that philosophy is inherently dialogical and explicitly tries to bring out the meaning of Plato's text, Waite insists that “philosophy” actually consists in a monologue designed
Gadamer explicitly seeks to mediate. Neither Orozco nor Waite recognizes any center or middle in politics; they see only either/or's. As a result they not only fail to understand the essential character of Gadamer's her-meneutics; their writings also demonstrably lack one of the two primary political virtues—moderation.
NOTES
1. As evidence she quotes Gadamer's own statement (PAyg; PL57) that his call to a chair at Leipzig was a consequence of “high politics.” She does not explain, as Gadamer does in the following sentence, that the “high politics” consisted of a decision by the Nazis to cease imposing political criteria for academic appointments because they needed the work of the best scientists in the universities to win the war. Gadamer had enrolled earlier in a “rehabilitation” camp in order to keep his position as a dozent; he did not exhibit sufficient loyalty to or enthusiasm for the regime to obtain a higher position so long as there were political criteria. [BACK]
2. As he himself reports in “Heidegger's Later Philosophy,” Gadamer was surprised by the “turn” Heidegger's thought had taken in The Origin of the Work of Art (which circulated in manuscript form in Germany during the 1930-5, well before its official publication in 1954 [PHa 16; GW6:252]). Gadamer subsequently spent a great deal of time and effort coming to terms with the new direction Heidegger's thought had taken, an effort that culminated in the publication of Gadamer's masterwork,
3. Cf. Fred Dallmayr, “Hermeneutics and Justice,” in Festivals of Interpretation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 95–105, and Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 78–82, for an argument to the contrary. “Gadamer did not explicitly say anything about the relevance of his analysis of Plato's Republic to the Nazi regime in which he wrote,” I observe. “It is not too difficult, however, to see the implicit critique. If philosophical inquiry constitutes the only basis of a true community, the regime then in power in Germany was clearly unjust” (82). [BACK]
4. In fact, there is a great deal of continuity in Gadamer's thought from beginning to end. In my chapter “Gadamer's Path,” in Postmodern Platos, 70–103, I have argued that he gradually, but only gradually, indicated the ways in which he came to disagree with his teacher Heidegger. [BACK]
5. Leo Strauss makes a similar argument about the insidious character of Machi-avelli's blasphemous suggestions in Thoughts on Machiavelli; Waite claims to be employing Strauss method (against Strauss's political commitments or ends). [BACK]
6. In his Philosophical Apprenticeships Gadamer reports that his piece on Plato and the poets had “been printed under the motto: ‘He who philosophizes is not at one with the premises of his time.’ This was well camouflaged as a quote from Goethe and thus not quite a heroic act. But it was also not an accommodation” [BACK]
7. Cf. Eric A. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1 957), and the acerbic critique of the same by Leo Strauss, reprinted in Liberalism: Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 26–34. Gadamer indicates the source of the association between the sophists and “democratic” (although not, strictly speaking, “liberal”) politics when he observes that, as Glaucon makes clear at the beginning of Book II of the Republic in his restatement of Thrasymachus's contention that “justice” consists merely in the “advantage of the stronger,” “justice” in the form of law (or convention, nomos) merely represents the agreement of weak individuals to band together to protect themselves from depredations by the strong. The person who knows (or, like the sophists, can teach someone) how to persuade the many (majority) to enact what he wants as law is, therefore, most powerful. Although Glaucon's argument has often been compared to social contract theory, it is fundamentally different, inasmuch as it does not ground the justice or “right” of the government in the natural rights of each individual party to the contract, but makes law merely a matter of conventional right based effectively on the superior power of the greatest number. [BACK]
8. One could, for example, also have been a communist. [BACK]
9. Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); “A Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method,” in Zur Logih der Sozialwissenschafter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1 970), 25 1–90, reprinted in Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy, ed., Understanding and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 335–63. Likewise, in The Philosophy of Hans Georg Gadamer, Stanley Rosen argues that Gadamer's hermeneutics ultimately fail to preserve the respect for the other, the integrity of individual texts or of the understandings
10. “Certainly it remained difficult to keep the right balance, not to compromise oneself so far that one would be dismissed and yet still to remain recognizable to colleagues and students. That we somehow found the right balance was confirmed for us one day when it was said of us that we had only ‘loose sympathy’ with the new awakening. … I exposed myself a good deal, and when the new National Socialist Kampf organization replaced our self-serving union, I was severely slandered. … So it was that the objections of the Dozentenbund prevented the sought-after title of professor from being bestowed on me. … Of course I wanted to save my academic existence in Germany, but without making political concessions that could cost me the trust of my friends in the outer or inner emigration…. Finally I found a way. … I registered for my ‘rehabilitation’ voluntarily” (PAyG-yg). [BACK]
11. The examples are mine, not Waite's. [BACK]
12. Cf. The New Nietzsche, trans. David Allison (New York: Dell, 1977) for a representative selection of essays and authors arguing for the new, more egalitarian interpretation. [BACK]
13. Waite refers to Leibniz, but it was Aristotle in Rhetoric (13543) who first defined the enthymeme as a form of argumentation especially suited to popular or political (as opposed to scientific) reasoning. However, in the section entitled “Why I Am a Destiny” in Ecce Homo Nietzsche denies that he ever spoke to the “rabble.” [BACK]
14. This is the problem Zarathustra faces in his relations with potential followers: how can a teacher exercise influence without corrupting his students? Gadamer treats the question in the essay on Zarathustra that Waite ignores. [BACK]
15. In Postmodern Platos, 10–32, 1 trace the ambiguous stance Nietzsche took toward Plato throughout his career. Sometimes Nietzsche claims to be overturning Plato; sometimes he suspects that Plato understood everything that Nietzsche himself was arguing. [BACK]
16. Persecution and the Art of Writing (New York: Free Press, 1952), 30. [BACK]
17. In a letter he wrote to Karl Loewith in 1935 (translated and reprinted in The Independent Journal of Philosophy 5/6 [1988]: 183), Strauss explained that he thought Nietzsche wanted “to repeat antiquity … at the peak of modernity.” Strauss shared Nietzsche's desire; but Strauss had come to believe that the polemical character of Nietzsche's critique of modernity on the basis of probity (a scripturally based virtue) prevented him from realizing his intention. (Strauss explains the reasons Nietzsche's attempt is self-contradictory [and hence necessarily fails] in “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil,” reprinted in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983], 175–91.) Waite believes that Nietzsche is succeeding surreptitiously, because, in contrast to Strauss, Waite objects to all forms of inequality or “elitism.” He does not concern himself with the character of the promised “Ubermensch.” [BACK]
18. Waite gives a rather inaccurate account of the conversation in which he seems to mistake the polite presentation of different views for agreement. Hork-heimer, Adorno, and Gadamer do agree that Nietzsche was a poetic writer. Adorno introduces the problem of the apparently contradictory reception of Nietzsche as a
19. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), Heidegger argued that Germany was caught between the “pincers” of the two technological superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. [BACK]
20. In Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 74–87, Derrida argues that the classical belief in the pure, undistorted communicability of ideas is based on the experience of hearing ourselves say what we think and concluding, therefore, that the expression and the thought occur simultaneously, in us as well as in the receiver. He begins Otobiogra-phies: L'enseignement de Nietzsche et lapolitique du nompropre (Paris: Galilee, 1984) (The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie V McDonald [New York: Schocken Books, 1985]) by quoting the section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra “On Redemption” in which Zarathus-tra describes the fragmented, specialized human beings in whom one organ or talent has grown so disproportionately to all others that it almost overwhelms them, e.g., the little man attached to a huge ear, in arguing that Nietzsche was implicated in Nazi politics, partly because he could not posthumously control the use of his name or writings (especially by his sister). Authors leave a “trace” that acquires new meaning, a meaning they cannot control (although they try by means of their name—hence the “politics” or attempt to exercise power on subsequent generations of readers). [BACK]
13. The Protection of
the Philosophical Form
A Response to Zuckert
TERESA OROZCO, translated by Paul Malone
Although I do not share all the premises of the Gadamerian conception of dialogue, I am convinced that an examination of some of Catherine H. Zuckert's objections to my article can contribute to a better understanding of Gadamer's philosophical interventions under National Socialism. Her commentary gives me the opportunity to clarify some misunderstandings.[1] It is both striking and paradoxical that in Zuckert's polemic, the hermeneu-tic postulate of openness to the opinions of others and the paradigm of understanding summon up less tolerance and moderation whenever a critical examination of the stock of tradition leads to undesirable results. It should be borne in mind that between truth and method there are various branches of inquiry—and even other theories of interpretation—which, by means of methodical reflection, have rightfully won their place on the field of philosophy and science. These theories grant no validity to the logic: that cannot be, which may not be.[2] It might seem plausible that Gadamerian herme-neutics can be applied to their own prehistory with only partial success. The dogmatic authority of tradition and the uncontested continuance of authority exclude any question of their legitimacy. Since the intersection of intellectual traditions with domination and power is fundamental to the act of transmission, we are well advised not to give up critical reflection.
In this short article I refer to my book Platonische Gewalt, in which my thesis is supported by considerable evidence and a sentence-by-sentence interpretation. Much of what I formulate here in outline is considered there in its complexity. Since I have concentrated on Gadamer's interpretation of Plato, and have only peripherally treated the details and information that contradict Gadamer's depiction of these years in his autobiographical writings,[3] one should recall the following: in November 1933 Gadamer signed the Bekenntnis derProfessoren an den deutschen Universitaten und Hochschulen zu
My work nowhere brings moral charges, nor does it demand an absurd martyrdom or a hidden resistance. My criticism is directed at the one-sided picture Gadamer gives after 1945 of the relationships at the earlier time. The results of my investigation revise decisively Gadamer's self-image as a “internal emigrant,” who of course had to make outward concessions for career reasons, but who remained philosophically and academically at a distance. It is not concerned with exposing Gadamer as a disguised Nazi, but rather with investigating the positions of nationalist conservatism that he then maintained in his philosophical production as well. One of the questions posed by my research was: What does it mean to represent conservative and antidemocratic positions in peacetime under parliamentary democracies, and what does it mean under a dictatorship? What form does the difference take? The interest of my work lay in comprehending the specifics of such forms of intellectual accommodation and in exploring them—not morally, but on the basis of their structural conditions. It was essential to work out how they became possible in the normality of the academy and through the medium of interpretation of the classics, without declaring such interpretation irrelevant and void from the outset in view of the cruder and violent forms of the volkisch fascist movement.
The fact that Heidegger appeared as a representative of the volkisch movement in party uniform while Gadamer was not a party member is no argument for an opposition to Nazism in the character of the nationalist conservative wing. This is a widespread misreading of the history of fascism, and one that has far-reaching consequences for Zuckert's interpretation of
Zuckert pleads for the recovery of quotations in which Gadamer declares the separation of the political from the scientific. Although it openly contradicts postulates in Truth and Method, Gadamer tries to mitigate his teacher Heidegger's entanglement by appealing to the “political incompetence of philosophy.”[14] In addition I refer to an interview of 1990, in which he unmistakably stands by his contention that there were also Nazis who pursued ‘Very good science.”[15] Gadamer tells us there how it was possible to philosophize undisturbed and scientifically under National Socialism. In fact, the Platonic claim “to lead the leader” released a tremendous philosophical
My reading does not assume Gadamer to be an opportunist; rather, it documents the astonishing coherence of his position. In the Plato interpretation of 1934, it becomes clear that Gadamer, through the medium of Plato's world of ideas and its hermeneutic renewal, collaborated in consummating the union into which the nationalist conservative middle class (which as “spirit of Potsdam” brought the Reichswehr into National Socialism) entered with the Nazis. I show that in his contribution to the Kriegsein-satz der Geisteswissenschaften (mobilization of the humanities) of 1942 the same Prussian group, with the debacle of Stalingrad at hand, loosened this union and strove toward an authoritarian reform of the state. This faction's method of movement is expressed in both texts.[17]
The fact that Gadamer in his lecture “Plato and the Poets” (1934) positively articulates some of the most prominent topoi of the speeches in support of book burning and Gkichschaltung (accommodation to National Socialist doctrine), that is, the criticism of liberal humanist education, is by no means the only reason that this text can be read as a justification of Nazism in its incipient phase. The “historical context” is more complex and many-layered than Zuckert assumes. The venue in which this lecture was delivered, namely the Gesellschaft der Freunde des Humanistischen Gymnasiums (Society of Friends of the Classical High School), as well as the self-accommodation of classical philology and the transformation of the humanist canon of Platonic interpretation, stand in the context of fasciza-tion, which has left clear traces behind in Gadamer's text. The astonishing effect that the National Socialist present is not directly named, yet is tacitly present, rests on a hermeneutics of allusion: the text is laid out so that in the historical horizon of understanding of the classically educated milieu, it becomes charged with fascist meanings. As a result the perception of the fascist present in the text seems to be achieved by the listener. The records of this course of lectures, which were published regularly in the magazine Das Hwnanistische Gymnasium (The Classical High School),[18] give an impression of this. In the closing commentary to Gadamer's lecture—in accordance with the fascist rhetoric of the new man—one reads: “The new man is created for the new state and from nothing. … It is the welfare of the entire state that matters…. Plato's mythic literature, as much as his dialogic literature, shows true poetic ability, which puts itself in the service of the new idea of man.” Zuckert's reproach of “guilt by association” is therefore already untenable, because Gadamer and his audience at the time manufactured these “associations” themselves. The further remarks of the secretary by no means arose by chance; rather, they were guided by connotational elements. The lecture is in its very text shot through with a network of interdiscursive
I have not maintained, as Zuckert assumes, that Gadamer's interpretation of Plato consists of direct instructions for the persecution of intellectuals. His philosophical Anschluss was skillful and unconstrained. I wrote: “Gadamer constructed an interpretive framework for the contemporary situation in Germany that, at the same time, allowed Plato's critique of the poets to be understood in a manner that simultaneously articulated the self-understanding of the present.” This projection of the new backwards into the Platonic order showed itself capable of constructing a kind of deja-vu experience, bestowing a trace of heroic greatness upon the violent National Socialist circumstances through the medium of classical philosophy. What is remarkable here is that such processes as the suppression of enemies of the state, the driving of poets into exile, and the “cleansing” of poetry (i.e., censorship) are placed in charge of the power of the state and not of the hermeneutic dialogue. So it is evident that here the framework of state power forms the conditio sine qua non of the dialogue.
Zuckert's argument that in both essays Plato's Politeia “does not constitute a blueprint for political reform,” and that he backs the philosophical upbringing of the guardians of the state, is philologically a mere half-truth. The theme in the text of 1934 is the “foundation of the state” and “the radical rejection of the existing state,”[20] as well as the philosophical upbringing of youth to become guardians of the state. The defense is directed at the sophistic spirit, which “attacked” and “dissolved” the substance of the state. In 1942 the main idea is that of the “decline of the state under tyranny” and the philosophical upbringing of the guardians with particular consideration given to the state-supporting leaders. Gadamer stresses the seduction of those who govern by their power (“tyrants have no friends”), and the injury to the corporative order of the Platonic state. Both interpretations are transposed into the words of philosophy and thus also into their normative function. The philosophical form is a protection from any crude topical relevance, for the Gadamerian art of allusion lies in the continual working out of the character of the Platonic state as a philosophical model, and to this end it is necessary that Plato's Politeia remain a state in thought alone. This exemplary quality is what first sets in motion the hermeneutic effect on the listeners and/or readers. Zuckert pays no heed to the sentence in which this inaccessible model, as “exclusive determination” (Plato und dieDichter 14), is assigned an ordering function for the subject of the state: “It is an ‘origi-nary image in heaven’ for whoever wishes to organize himself and his internal constitution” (ibid.). Contemplating this “originary image in heaven,” individuals recognize in themselves the “reality of the state.”[21] The frequently appearing motif of “care for the internal state” (Plato und dieDichter 29) is addressed to the audience and/or readership. On this model the interior
One must visualize how Nazism articulated itself as an “educational state” around 1933 in order to be able to estimate the resonance of the following sentence in the Platonic imaginary: “Although it appears to be a state resting completely on the power of an educational organization, an ahistorical new beginning from nothing through the force of a new habituation, it is in truth a picture, in whose delineation the soul should recognize justice” (Plato und dieDichter 17). The “true state of justice” (Plato und die Dichter 28) has nothing to do, however, with democratic ideas of participation and justice. Gadamer discreetly makes this clear in a footnote, according to which the Platonic state is a state of “masters and servants” and a state for war (Plato und die Dichter note 36; 0054).
Gadamer by no means stands alone in his interpretation of the Platonic paideia. The topos of the education of the guardians forms the kernel of most of the interpretations of Plato at the time. Here the National Socialist discourses of domination, beauty, health, and race found their ideal expression. The successful paideia stands not only for eugenic discourses but also for the development of the internal state that constitutes itself in the mirror of the state order.[23] In opposition to an enlightened educational model, the contemporary elaborations of the Platonic education of the guardians emphasize the manly virtues of military fitness, heroic lifestyle, readiness for death, decisionistic choice, the struggle against the “sophistic” enemy, and the affirmation of the “unwritten law” of the state (Orozco, “Die Platon-Rezeption” 156 ff). Gadamer articulated these individual aspects in his interpretation. The “ethical” component, which Zuckert claims is bound in this text with the anchoring of state domination in the plane of elementary socialization, is the world of the customs and traditions of a community. The “upbringing into a state” (Plato und dieDichter 17) is a process that happens essentially inexpressibly and without a determining and planning subject. “The most important educational effect never reaches the explicit instruction, but rather the ‘laws of the state,’ particularly the unwritten, the ruling ethic in the state community, in which safe human formation happens in seclusion” (ibid., 14). In this view, those ethical forms that are not prevalent
In Zuckert's representation of the Platonic paideia, its militarization is not in evidence. Gadamer declares the status of guardian to be the “real status of human being” (Plato und die Dichter ig).[26] We have here no autonomous individuals who can distinguish the true from the false independently of the state will. The real human is reduced to readiness for war and to subjection under the state. The warrior's self-discipline is not an end in itself: it is necessary to prevent the force of the guardians from turning into power against the domination of the state. The knowledge of the guardian (in accordance with Carl Schmitt) consists of an elementary power of differentiation: “he must be able to distinguish friend from enemy” (ibid., 19). It is in the education of this decisionistic love—and-hate competence that Gadamer in 1934 locates the task of philosophy. In return, any power of differentiation that is based on elementary humanity and that can be mobilized against illegitimate demands of the state has no place, for the decisionistic principle remains in force: “to love the friend just because he is a friend—and not because and as far as he does one good but also, if he does one harm: and to hate the enemy, just because he is the enemy, even if he does one good” (Plato und die Dichter 20). That this explanation found resonance is demonstrated by an expert opinion in connection with Gadamer's summons to Leipzig. His text “Plato and the Poets,” it is said, provides “a thoroughly original explanation of the Platonic doctrine of the state and gains a completely new relevance through the knowledge that the status of the warrior and guardian in the Platonic state is the status of human being” (Gadamer's personal file in the Leipzig University archive, Doc. 41).
I do not contest the fact that the reception and history of the effect of Gadamer's texts under Nazism attest a plurality of interpretations. A reading, however, that is obligated to the historicity of the interpretation must continue the attempt at reconstruction provided here in its infancy, and
The enlightenment knew what hermeneutics forgets: That the “dialogue” that we “are” according to Gadamer is also a forced connection and exactly for that reason is no conversation.… The universal claim of the hermeneutic attempt [can] only then [be maintained] if one proceeds on the assumption that the context of transmission, as the locus of possible truth and factual communication, is at the same time also the locus of factual untruth and continuing power.[27]
Perhaps the uncomfortable aspect of my research lies in the disclosure of that which Isabelle Kalinowski calls “the decisive pledge,” which accrued to the Hitler regime from the combination of the conservative discourse with the National Socialist discourse: “The hatred for the Weimar constitutional state has no doubt found a deeper form of efficacy in Gadamer's commentaries on Plato than in the direct engagement of Heidegger, which perhaps paradoxically proves a greater political naivete.”[28] Zuckert agrees with Gadamer's negative attitude toward the Weimar Republic, but does not want to acknowledge its consequences: the authorization of Nazism, whose astonishing stability was not least the result of a legitimation pursued by many voices in the eternal space of philosophy.
NOTES
1. In the first paragraph of my chapter “The Art of Allusion” I cite a newspaper article. I criticize the statement that Jurgen Habermas is undeserving of the title of philosopher because he has “made too much of a mark in the social sciences and in political debates” (Ross, “Schmuggel: Gadamers Geheimnis” Frankfurter All-gemeine Zeitung, vol. 11, no. 2 [Feb. 11, 1995]). Zuckert attributes to me the very opinion criticized by me. [BACK]
2. An example for this logic is the commentary on my work by Richard Palmer (PHGG588 ff). Without entering into my research, Palmer contents himself with a
3. Moreover, if one wishes to use Gadamer's memoirs as an authentic source, it would make sense to demand at least their examination of and their comparison with other sources. [BACK]
4. The political significance of this document has been described by George Leamann, Heidegger im Kontext: Gesamtuberblich zum NS-Engagement der Universitdt-sphilosophen (Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, 1993), 100, and Thomas Laugstien, Philosophieverhdltnisse im deutschen Faschismus (Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, 1990), 29 ff. [BACK]
5. This membership (number 254, 387) is substantiated by the files of the former Berlin Document Center. In 1934 Gadamer became a member of the National Socialist People's Welfare Organization (NSV) and in 1938 he joined the German Reich Union for Physical Education (DRL) (Leaman 40). [BACK]
6. Gadamer published a text in 1967 with the title Herder und die geschichtliche Welt (Herder and the historical world). It appears as an epilogue to the edition of J. G. Herder's early writings, Audi eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Men-schheit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967). A comprehensive examination of this text and of the lecture underlying it, “Volh and History in Herder's Thought” (Frankfurt: Vit-torio Klostermann, 1942), is likewise found in my book. There I reconstruct the official context of this enterprise and analyze the characteristics of National Socialist occupation policy in France, as well as the importance attached to German cultural policy and to the German Institute in Paris. [BACK]
7. Here it should be mentioned that Gadamer has also shown courage. In 1942, when the Marburg Romanist Werner Krauss was arrested by the Gestapo in their action against the Schulze-Boysen-Harnack resistance group and was condemned to death, an intensive rescue operation was set in motion by Krauss's university colleagues. Among them was Gadamer, who sent a plea for clemency to the Reich court-martial. Cf. Peter Jehle, Werner Krauss und die Romanistik im NS-Staat (Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, 1996), 141–50. [BACK]
8. Habermas attributes the solidarity of the faction of Young Conservatives to their collective convictions: “It is precisely the specifically German offshoots of the lost First World War—which was also lost mentally—who appear as the true guardians of an unbroken national tradition According to what they themselves profess, they had nothing to regret in 1945, for they felt that the movement they had supported in 1933 had let them down. They had seen National Socialism in the light of their own ideas, at least as a variation on what was’ their own’” (Jiirgen Habermas, “Carl Schmitt in the Political Intellectual History of the Federal Republic,” in A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. Steven Rendall [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997], 116–17). [BACK]
9. Martin Broszat and Horst Moller, eds., Das Dritte Reich: Herrschaftsstruhtur und Geschichte (Munich: Beck, 1986). Eberhardjackel, Hitlers Herrschaft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1986); Martin Broszat and Klaus Schwabe, eds., Die deutschen Eliten und der Wegin den Zweiten Welthrieg (Munich: Beck, 1989); Hans Momm-sen, “Zur Verschrankung traditioneller und faschistischer Fuhrungsgruppen in Deutschland beim Ubergang von der Bewegung zur Systemphase,” in DerNational-sozialismus und die deutsche Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rowohlt-Verlag, 1991), 39–66. [BACK]
10. Hans Mommsen, “Gesellschaftsbild und Verfassungsplane des deutschen Widerstands,” in Der Nationalsozialismus und die deutsche Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Ro-wohlt-Verlag, 1991), 233–337. [BACK]
11. “Unlike after the Second World War, after the first World War in Germany the national dreams of greatness and world power were still by no means dreamed out…. An especially fateful effect of the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles was that it prevented the self-critical examination of Wilhelmine imperialist pre-war policies” (Mommsen, “Zur Verschrankung,” 36). [BACK]
12. “The real Nazis, however, had no interest in us at all.” Hans-Georg Gadamer in conversation with Dorte von Westernhagen, Das Argument 182, 32.4 (July-Aug. 1990): 543–55; here 549. [BACK]
13. Teresa Orozco, “Die Platon-Rezeption in Deutschland um 1933,” in “Die besten Geister der Nation.“Philosophie und Nationalsozialismus, ed. Use Korotin (Vienna: PicusVerlag, 1994), 141–85. [BACK]
14. Gadamer, “Uber die politische Inkompetenz der Philosophie,” Sinn und Form 45.1:5–12. [BACK]
15. Hans-Georg Gadamer in conversation with Dorte von Westernhagen, Das Argument 182, 32.4 (July-Aug. 1990), 543–555; here 549. [BACK]
16. In terms of the society as a whole, this is also substantiated in the new Hitler biography by Ian Kershaw, particularly in the chapter “Dem Fiihrer entgegen ar-beiten.” Hitler 1889–1936 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998), 663–744. [BACK]
17. The remarks that Zuckert misses with regard to the differences between Gadamer's philosophical texts before 1933 and after 1945 are found in my book (15, 65 ff) and also in my essay in this volume. [BACK]
18. Fritz Bucherer and Herman Easters, eds., Das Humanistische Gymnasium (Berlin and Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1934), 100. [BACK]
19. My attempt to reconstruct these resonances is prompted by the French linguist Michel Pecheux's concept of interdiscourse and/or cross-discourse. Pech-eux's discourse analysis takes as its task the analysis of the effect of interdiscourse, “which bursts into the organization of what can be said, in the form of the unsaid or the said-elsewhere.” Michel Pecheux, “Uber die Rolle des Gedachtnisses als interdiskursives Material: Ein Forschungsprojekt im Rahmen der Diskursanalyse und Archivlektiire,” in Das Subjeht des Dishurses: Beitrdge zur sprachlichen Bildung von Subjektivitdt und Intersubjektivitdt, ed. Manfred Geier and Harold Woetzel (Berlin: Argument-Verlag, 1983), 54. The cross-discourse functions “as a kind of axiom of meaning, stabilized in the discursive memory, which seems to make possible evident intradiscursive links.” It is a kind of reading “in which the reading subject at the same time is responsible for and is expropriated by the meaning that he deciphers. For the interpretation follows the interdiscursive tracks, which are preconstructed and transversal as such” (54). To this end, discourse analysis describes processes “that expose to the reader those levels of the discourse which are opaque relative to the strategic actions of an information-processing epistemic subject” (54) as presupposed by the cognitivistic variants of discourse analysis. In this sense discourse analysis shares a point of view with Gadamerian hermeneutics, since both oppose the logicistic or cognitivistic theories of meaning. The crucial difference from the hermeneutic position, however, is that concepts like the preconstructed (preconstruit), the interdiscourse (discours transverse), and indirect or reported discourse
20. “Only in the context of this founding of the state, and from the motive of a radical rejection of the existing state and its establishment in the words of philosophy, can the critique of poets be understood.” Plato und die Dichter (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1934), 13. [BACK]
21. “He who recognizes himself in it certainly does not, indeed, recognize himself as a stateless, isolated being: he recognizes in himself the ground on which the reality of the state is built, however, and in whatever degenerate form the real state may exist” (Plato und die Dichter 14). [BACK]
22. The linguistic difficulty of the usual rendering of German staatlich in English as “political” must be considered here in its distorting consequences. The concept of the political does not have to be imagined in conjunction with the attributes of the state, as is generally the case in these texts. [BACK]
23. As Kurt Hildebrandt, a member of the George circle, sums it up, Plato's state “rests on the human soul, it is a mental construct. For that which we call the total state today, there is no more perfect portrait than Plato's Politeia.” Kurt Hildebrandt, Einleitung zur Platan: Der Staat, trans. A. Horneffer (Leipzig: Alfred Kroner-Verlag, 1933), 364. Alfred Baeumler believes that Plato encourages artistic and gymnastic upbringing, “not because he considers art to be an educational material,” but as “a necessary device for rearing children.” By such means a youth would learn “to love and to hate correctly, without first of all being able to indicate the reason.” Alfred Baeumler, “Asthetik,” in Handbuch der Philosophie. Die Grunddisziplinen (Munich and Berlin: Oldenburg, 1934), 6. Regarding the adoption of Platonic principles in a broad spectrum of National Socialist organizations, the Nazi educational theorist Ernst Krieck writes, “No one, however, has had as profound an understanding of the power of the artistic as Plato, who in this regard can become our teacher yet again. For education in the youth leagues; in the state youth groups; in the army; and in the defense units of the SA, the SS, and the Stahlhelm, artistic education has become a necessity.” Ernst Krieck, Musische Erziehung (Leipzig: Arma-nen, 1933), i. [BACK]
24. Rolf Nemitz, “Die Erziehung des faschistischen Subjekts,” in Faschismus und Ideologic (Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, 1980), 141–75. [BACK]
25. Ernst Krieck, “Erziehungsphilosophie,” in Handbuch der Philosophie, ed. A. Baeumler and M. Schroter (Munich and Berlin: 1931). See section III, “Mensch und Charakter,” pp. 68 and 48. [BACK]
26. This allotment of status is explicitly contrary to Plato's Politeia, in which the guardians constitute a profession between the workmen and the philosopher-kings. More important than the accuracy of this interpretation, however, is the harmony of this reading with the political constellation to which this text speaks, for example,
27. Albrecht Wellmer, quoted in Jiirgen Habermas, “Der Universalitatsan-pruch der Hermeneutik,” in ZurLogik der Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, [BACK]
28. Isabelle Kalinowsky, “Les ambiguites de Gadamer,” Liber: Revue Internationale des livres 30 (Mar. 1997): 14. [BACK]
14. Salutations
A Response to Zuckert
GEOFF WAITE
There's the old panegyric, the festive convention where the one to be lauded finally gets his public praise…. Being born was being born into the praxis of politics.
GADAMER, “Praise of Theory”
Ave, imperator, morituri te salutant!
Cited in Suetonius, De vita Caesarum
Debaxo de mi manto, al rey mato.
CERVANTES, Don Quixote
Si campu t'allampu. Si moru tipirdugnu.
Sicilian saying
“SI QUID NOVISTI RECTIUS ISTIS”
With her promotion of “mediation,” “dialogue,” and “moderation,” Catherine H. Zuckert is to be saluted for her triumphant response to the essays of Orozco and Waite, a response that could be used as a textbook case for careful study, not necessarily for its specific object of analysis (needless to say), but for its overall and well-nigh seamless hermeneutic approach and rhetorical technique. Any momentary appearance to the contrary, this concession is ultimately not meant ironically. Certainly Zuckert's response has the virtue of exemplifying the temper of our times. This is to say that it not only could be read with profit by anyone interested in grasping the hegemonic theory (theoria) of the “discursive practice”[1] of the “postmodern,” “postindus-trial,” “postcommunist” present, and likely some years ahead (as de Gaulle used to say, “the future lasts a long time”), but it also could be emulated in practical wisdom and (nota bene) prudence (phronesis) by anyone in the reserve labor army seeking gainful employment or institutional mobility in today's academy, whether in the social or human sciences—even, or especially, in its currently depressed job market. (As a parenthetical aside, we might note that the attempt to produce “discursive practices” that are an alternative to business as usual could be expected to have a rather different significance for, say, a tenured professor at a financially solvent academic
Before proceeding any further in this salute, however, Waite also emphatically stresses that there would be something quite unseemly in any entretien preliminaire (Lacan) between Zuckert and Waite (Orozco will respond in her own way) in a festschrift saluting Hans-Georg Gadamer and his century. Any interest in this entretien must be minimal compared to Gadamer's influence as one of “his century's” leading philosophers—the leading philosopher, in the opinion of many serious people. And this influence is a remarkable achievement, one might add, for someone who entered into extended or profound dialogue with neither Freud nor Marx nor their legacies, and hence with neither the unconscious nor with the political economy and capitalism, nor with anything more than one limited aspect of Spinozism—arguably a related lacuna.[2] Nor did Gadamer really heed the advice given to all professional philosophers by Bachelard: “Se mettre a I'ecok des sciences” (to go to school with the sciences).[3] And Gadamer did not engage so-called mass or popular culture (where the ancient philosophical problems are often more vital and effectual than in academic institutions) or problematize the Eurocentric and phallogocentric structures and ideology of classical and modern philosophy. One can't do everything and many continue to expand what they think of as philosophical hermeneutics into areas unoccupied by Gadamer, if not always with his approval. Be all this as it may, “Gadamer” will outlive Gadamer, and certainly “us.” So readers may be reminded, when reading the Zuckert-Waite logomachy, of Samuel Johnson's retort when asked to compare the talents of two of his own contemporaries: “Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.”[4] Or, as the unseemly folk wisdom put it around where Waite was growing up, “It takes a big flea to run with a big dog.”
As for an appropriate solution to this problem of unseemliness—that is, the inappropriateness on this occasion of any entretien preliminaire between Zuckert and Waite—the latter is of the following mind. With regard perhaps to any celebration, critique, or criticism of Gadamer, but in any case with regard to the internecine exchange between Zuckert and Waite, the latter two are especially well advised to heed the Horatian dictum and say, each to the other, “Si quid novisti rectius istis, / Candidus imperti; si non, his utere necum” (Epist. i:6, 67); which for our purposes might be loosely rendered “If you know something that is more correct than the matter here under dispute, then tell me frankly; if not, then stick with me to this matter only.” No matter how this matter be defined, the current entretien
Before proceeding along these lines, however, we could note that a reader (assuming the existence of someone at all interested in the Zuckert-Waite entretien preliminaire) might remark that there is an unfair quantitative imbalance built into the structure of this festschrift: Waite (like Orozco) has been given two chances to speak, Zuckert only one. (As for Gadamer himself, the general template of how he enters into dialogue with critics may be found in his responses to the essays on his work in The Library of Living Philosophers volume, and it is not overly difficult to extrapolate from his responses there to what he might have said and not said about this festschrift.)[6] So we will not discover, at least not here, what Zuckert's response is to the response of Waite (or Orozco)—nor for that matter, and more mercifully, Waite's (or Orozco's) response to that hypothetical second Zuck-ertian response, and so on ad infinitum et absurdum. But this would not really be a fair objection to the structure of this anthology insofar as Waite (for one) accepts Zuckert's response as triumphant, and to be saluted as such. This is not to mention the impression Zuckert gives, at the conclusion of her (first and here only) response, “On the Politics of Gadamerian Herme-neutics,” that, in this one case at least, there is no point in further discussion or dialogue, that these have been effectively terminated—notwithstanding her prior commitment to “dialogue” and to “moderation.” (Zuckert's ethical ideology in nuce is that of many a conquering civilization or system throughout history, which is only currently parliamentary-democratic, free-market capitalism. “I respect differences, but only, of course, in so far as that which differs also respects, just as I do, the said differences…. Become like me and I will respect your difference.”)[7] This paradox to one side for now, however, Waite much prefers to salute Zuckert's victory and to analyze how it is hermeneutically and rhetorically achieved, in the aforementioned attempt to address issues less restricted than the merely intestine. Compare the Platonic Socrates: ‘“that is what we said, was it not?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘But that is only half the story. Let us look at it more fully’” (Republic 6oib-c). Only in that spirit (and any appearance to the contrary again aside) let us continue—and continue to engage as dispassionately (and, yes, as objectively) as possible, “the politics of Gadamerian hermeneutics.”
TU QUOQUE!
“Incapable of having a conversation” seems to me to be more the accusation one makes against someone who doesn't want to follow his thoughts than a deficiency actually possessed by the other.
GADAMER, “The Incapacity to Converse”
It is perhaps symbolic that Plato initiated his Dialogues with the murder of Socrates. In subsequent works Socrates assumes various guises, yet even as he does so, we are reminded that he has already been killed. Plato obsessively recounts that Socrates dared to commit suicide to prove the immortality of the law…. What Plato (Socrates) proposed was not the idea that reason resides immanently in the world or self but the idea that only those propositions that pass through the dialogue can be acknowledged as rational. Those who reject the dialogue are considered irrational, no matter how profound or how vigorously argued their truth. KARATANI, Architecture as Metaphor
Zuckert's response is particularly successful in conveying to her readers a sense of surprise, indignation even, about a situation that the naive reader of philosophy might well have thought to be a simple donnee: Gadamer (like any philosopher or anyone else) is opposed to certain philosophical and political positions; and proponents of these or other positions are, in turn, opposed to Gadamer. Concomitantly, Zuckert is successful in downplaying any reservations about Gadamer's position that she herself might have (though some might be inferred even in her brief response here, and more extensive ones have been published elsewhere) and in embracing the aforementioned principle, which she basically attributes to Gadamer and which she conclusively calls “one of the two primary political virtues—moderation.” By not explicitly constating what the second primary political virtue might be, she leaves the reader to assume that it has been integrated into her response.[8] In this (what might be called “art of allusion”), Zuckert would appear to follow the time-honored principle that it is generally more effective to perform basic virtues than it is (only) to give them names. Presumably we are to infer that Zuckert's entire response is informed by that unstated virtue in addition to moderation—not the least reason why her response is exemplary. In any event, this is her response's culmination:
Gadamer explicitly seeks to mediate. Neither Orozco nor Waite recognizes any center or middle in politics; they see only either/or's. As a result they not only fail to understand the essential character of Gadamer's hermeneutics; their writings also demonstrably lack one of the two primary political virtues—moderation.
Now, any question of the failure of Orozco's or of Waite's specific understanding of Gadamer aside, their falling short of (a) philosophy, the general
- One could attempt to argue that the post-Platonic Gadamerian “moderation” in question has certain internal inconsistencies and/or that it allows only some kinds of dialogue, on its own terms, but refuses others. This first, possibly double, tack has long existed in the reception history of Gadamer's work, not to mention Plato's, and more about that later. But the more immediate problem, of course, is that Gadamer and his (non) interlocutors have then all ended up engaging in a more or less sophisticated form of tu quoque (thou, too!) argument that always eventually leads to an impasse: not to the aporia (a-poros) that the Greeks saw as the beginning of dialogue and philosophical wisdom (philo-sophia), but to a simple dead end and point of termination —in the colloquial senses of the words.[10] The one side is accused by the other of failing to participate in a dialogue that the other claims is a dialogue in name only—and so on. And thus it is that we all find ourselves singing a skewed version of an old ditty: “You say ‘dialogue,’ I say ‘dialogos' (but read, perhaps, ‘monologue’)—let's call the whole thing off.” But the whole thing is precisely not called off, and the vaudeville act drones on disguised as philosophy. So it appears that this first tack is at best necessary but at worst wholly insufficient. Because (demonstrably) little or nothing has ever been achieved by attempting to point out inherent contradictions (let alone ideological interference) either in Gadamer's (and perhaps Plato's) theory of dialogue or (a rather different thing) in his use of it, and because (demonstrably) there is little or nothing to be achieved in logic by tu quoque arguments, another tack becomes possible, necessary even.
- One can shift exclusive emphasis away from logic, including the dialogic, and attempt to show that the philosophical system here in dispute—philosophical hermeneutics and its obsessive affirmation of “dialogue” (which tends to be chanted as a conclusive mantra at the end of all encounters with both friends and enemies)—can best be understood as part of the long tradition of quasi-logical, quasi-dialogic Western (and not only Western) philosophy. This tradition can be given various names, say, “the art of allusion,” “exo/esotericism,” or some more common cognate (e.g., the “holy” or “noble lie,” the “double rhetoric”).[11] On this second tack, apparent contradiction—both within the theoretical description of dialogue and
― 261 ―between this theory and its applicative practice—is understood as being, in essence, not contradictory at all, but rather as precisely apparent: namely, as “paradox” (para-doxa) and as “paranoia” in the strict philosophical and etymological sense (para-nous). Which is to say that any exoteric contradiction (communism exceptionally) in the system is now understood as an epiphe-nomenal manifestation of an unstated tertium quid (“God” or “Capital,” traditionally), as part of a parallel or supplemental “para-system” that is necessarily (systematically or intentionally) concealed from logical and dialogical purview. To be sure, taking this second basic tack, making this hypothesis, we can still not assume that we can enter into a dialogue with the dominant philosophical and rhetorical system of “mediation” and “moderation.” And, inversely, neither can that bourgeois system enter into dialogue with its new (communist) opponent. Indeed, according to this argumentative tack, both sides can never enter into such dialogue—not only because exo/esotericism would per definitionem refuse to expose itself fully to view but also, more generally, because there is no such thing as a metalanguage, hence no metadi-alogue, that covers all empirical or theoretical cases.[12] What each side still can and must do, instead, is stake out its own philosophical, rhetorical, and political position, and let the chips fall where they may. Yet the problem persists that to say this amounts to ceding to the problem-as ancient as it always appears new—of relativism and to a view of philosophy as an antinomic Kampfplatz (Kant or Carl Schmitt) or differend and “phrase in dispute” (Lyotard) without the possibility of dialogue between the warring parties.
The argument thus far can be summed up in five points and one question, i) The question of whether or not Orozco or Waite have themselves failed or succeeded “to understand the essential character of Gadamer's hermeneutics” may be a related question but in any case is a different question from whether or not “their writings also demonstrably lack one of the two primary political virtues—moderation.” These are distinct questions because the essential characters of both Gadamer's hermeneutics and Zuck-ert's version of it are—arguably—also lacking in precisely this one virtue (if not the second virtue or some other unspecified virtue as well). 2) This tu quoque argument gets none of us anywhere beyond where we all already are, which is in a state of relativism and Mafia-like combat without appeal to a subtending metadiscourse. 3) This perceived lack of at least one primary virtue can be interpreted not as an inherent failing of the philosophical system under dispute but as being due to its concealed exo/esoteric design. 4) Nonetheless, both of Zuckert's questions (i.e., “the essential character of Gadamer's hermeneutics” and the nature and number of the “primary political virtues”) persist independently of the ability of an Orozco or a Waite (or a Zuckert) to identify and understand them—or to construct a set of questions that would provide an alternative to this dead end. 5) Zuckert is to be saluted for having constructed such a triumphant response to Orozco
PHRASE IN DISPUTE:
“THE PERHAPS EVEN MORE DEVASTATING CHARGE”
At one crucial juncture in her response to Orozco and Waite, Zuckert writes:
Since Gadamer never explicitly mentioned National Socialism in either of the essays he wrote under the regime, one might conclude that the relation between what he wrote and the political context necessarily remains a matter of “interpretation.” But are there no canons or standards of interpretation? That would be truly ironic, and perhaps even more devastating to Gadamer than the charge that he collaborated with an immoral regime in order to advance his own scholarly career, since he devoted his major work to articulating just such standards, [emphases added]
This is a remarkable statement because effective on several levels. It will be necessary to return to Gadamer's relationship to “National Socialism” in a moment, but first note that the argument Zuckert is contesting suggests that there is a standard and canon of mentioning without explicitly mentioning. This is what “allusion” in the phrase “art of allusion” means, and what the virgule in “exo/esotericism” also indicates (as does the concept “Radio Nietzsche” or “Nietzsche's corps/e”).[13] Of course, one might conclude from this “art of allusion” (or its cognates) that a text's relation to the context in which it appears is therefore “a matter of ‘interpretation’”; obviously, if it is all “a matter of ‘interpretation,’” one can indeed conclude anything about anything—a particularly vexing problem if there is no metadiscursive system to which all sides can appeal for adjudication of their disputes. But this is not necessarily or only what the canon and standard of interpretation called, say, “the art of allusion” concludes. That there are canons and standards of interpretation goes without saying; this is something we know from, and as, the history of philosophy. And, of course, Gadamer has articulated one standard of interpretation and is part of one canon of interpretation. But, as already intimated, the problems here are these: i) rival standards and canons eventually come into collision with one another; 2) there is, according to relativism and historicism, no metacanon or metastandard to adjudicate between them; and 3) at least one other standard and canon attacks relativism and historicism on the grounds that something like a metastandard does exist and it certainly has existed. For example, Straussians—at least exoterically—mount their attack on this basis. Readers of this festschrift
In one view, relativism and historicism (and pluralism) conclude that relativism and historicism are true, hence the only truth. But what they cannot then account for is the fact that since, according to their own argument, they themselves have come into existence historically, there was a position that was nonrelativist and nonhistoricist that preceded them, and since everything is here argued to be historical, hence fated not only to be born but to die, historicism and relativism, having been born at a specific historical moment, will also die, and be replaced again by, say, the nonrelativist and nonhistoricist.[17] Actually, however, these ideological terms are simplistic and misleading, even in historical terms, insofar as in each period there is not only overlap between relativist and nonrelativist arguments, but also even within all arguments, whether they present themselves as relativist or as nonrelativist. The basic question remains, however: To which canon do we adhere, and which do we choose to combat, or are we forced to combat? (“The truth is that one cannot always choose the form of war one wants.”)[18] Let us be clear: appeal to moderation and dialogue is part of {he problem, not the solution, z/‘that appeal is precisely what is being challenged. In a sense, viewed historically, no matter which position one adapts, it is all “a matter of
Returning, however, to another part of Zuckert's statement, even if Gadamer has not convinced everyone that his standards are internally coherent and appropriate, this can hardly be a “devastating charge” to Gadamer specifically. It would hold true of everyone in the history of philosophy to date, assuming that no one can appeal to a metadiscourse able to adjudicate between contesting opinions. Nor would this fact either be “more devastating” or be “perhaps more devastating” than the “charge” that Gadamer “collaborated with an immoral regime in order to advance his own scholarly career.” Gadamer himself has admitted (though not quite in so many words) that he collaborated with arguably the most immoral regime in human history. (Though we need not argue in absolute or quantitative terms. Any immoral regime will do nicely, and which “regime” is not in some sense immoral, not least capitalism? Questions like this prompt Waite with the communist philosopher and self-described Platonist Alain Badiou to define “thought” sensu stricto as “nothing other than the desire to finish with the exorbitant excess of the State.”)[19] Gadamer has also implied (as Zuckert will also note) that his motivations for this collaboration were opportunist in that they included not only the preservation of his own life and that of his “family, students, and friends,” but (as Zuckert ventriloquizes him) also the salvation of philosophy (both as institution and as philosophical hermeneutics) in for him profoundly antiphilosophical times. With regard to opportunism more generally, Gadamer turned an interesting phrase in his 1988 response to the attacks on Heidegger in Victor Farias's book (French from the Spanish in 1987; German from the French in 1989): ‘Yet he was no mere opportunist” (Er war dock kein blqfler Opportunist).[20] Which is not to say, however, that either Heidegger or mutatis mutandis Gadamer were not opportunists—only that they were not mere opportunists.[21] Moreover, Heidegger was arguably far less an opportunist or collaborator than Gadamer, if Heidegger was indeed a true believer in what Gadamer calls Heidegger's “political illusion.”[22] True believers are sensu stricto neither opportunists nor collaborators. And, by his own admission, Gadamer was both (at least to some degree, which still needs to be specified).
But the point so far is that neither Gadamer's acts of collaboration and opportunism nor their admission has proven “devastating” to him. Nor were Heidegger's acts ultimately devastating to Gadamer's greatest teacher, who did lose his academic teaching position after the war, but who has also become incomparably more influential than his at times quite critical student, who did not. Certainly the charge of collaboration can be devastating. Some collaborators are tried and executed or incarcerated; some are beaten to death by outraged compatriots before they can stand before the victor's trial. But this is not what happened to these two philosophers. Quite to the contrary: sooner or later they were both quite lavishly rewarded. Let us leave Heidegger aside to return to Zuckert's argument: Gadamer is not, and apparently cannot be, devastated either by the charge that he has not developed universally binding, or even internally coherent, standards of interpretation, or by the charge that he collaborated with an immoral regime, or that he practiced (or practices) the art of allusion or exo/esotericism.
If by “devastation” one means, at least in part, physical death or some form of psychological death (trauma), or even simply loss of influence, prestige, and honor, those people who have been really devastated include those from early 1934 on who were (legally) incarcerated and murdered by the “immoral regime” (which had its own kind of morality and laws) with which many others alongside Gadamer collaborated. One can even say that Hitler himself and all the true believers and collaborators tried at Nuremberg after the war were devastated in this sense; as were their victims, including Jews, communists, and many others both inside and outside Germany, in the Grojideutsches Reich and its imperialist and capitalist war. But Gadamer was not, is not, and apparently cannot be devastated in this sense, either.
Furthermore, Gadamer cannot be devastated for the reasons of his collaboration and opportunism, which (as he himself says, and as Zuckert reminds us) were precisely to save himself and his friends and family, to save his academic career, and to save philosophy itself—one version of philosophy, it should go without saying. This philosophy survived the Third Reich to live on in postwar divided Germany and now in once-again unified Germany, where it has as many friends as it does abroad. Not only has this philosophy not been devastated, and apparently cannot be, but it has survived both by means of collaboration with Hitlerian Germany, obviously, and subsequently it has survived the admission that it was collaboratory and opportunistic. Other questions doubtless remain as to whether this version of philosophy has been devastating to some people (who, say, cannot find academic employment because they attack it), or whether it can and should be devastated by others. But in any case, Zuckert is to be saluted for having opened up this can of worms, too, and for her agility in wriggling out of it by so successfully not taking her own clear stand in the matter beyond appealing
The (hermeneutic or, better, transferential) question remains as to what Zuckert's own position in all this “aporia” might be, both as objective political scientist and as prescriber of political virtues. Surely part of the success of her approach depends on keeping the precise nature of this position (her “site of enunciation”) as concealed, implicit, and allusive as possible. What, then (for her or for others), would constitute the most “devastating charge”—against Gadamer or anyone? In her response to Orozco and Waite, Zuckert appears to take Gadamer's position grosso modo by defending and promoting “moderation” on both objective and prescriptive grounds, as we have begun to see. In her book Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (1996), however, one may find a related but at the same time rather different position. Her chapter on Gadamer concludes with this remark: “Gadamer is fundamentally a liberal. Arguing that history has no necessary direction and that it may even be reversed, both Strauss and Derrida raise questions about the character of human freedom as well.”[23]
Interrupting the slyly vacuous Zuckert briefly, one might note that if it is true that Gadamer is “fundamentally a liberal,” his foundation, or at least his conceptual edifice and hermeneutic practice, seems to be rather different from other kinds of liberalism, including that of Strauss; and it is perhaps not too much to infer that Zuckert herself would define herself as some sort of liberal, and certainly she presents herself as an advocate of moderation and dialogue. Be this as it may, Zuckert is correct to imply that the position of Waite, in its immoderation, is that of neither a liberal nor a humanist insofar as humanism is defined as practicing the virtue of moderation, in her sense, or rather what Lenin might call the “illusion of moderation,” and insofar as Waite would attack any merely formal democracy in which de facto powerless individual subjects “possess” theoretical, de jure rights that “thousands of obstacles” (Lenin) prohibit them from ever putting into practice.[24] As Spinoza showed in his Political Treatise, rights can have meaning only when they are coextensive with actual power; and when rights are coextensive with power, then the individual (the Cartesian imperium in imperio) cannot form the basis for analysis or practice insofar as isolated (“liberal-humanist”) individuals in fact never have more than a little actual power. As succinctly put by folk wisdom, “dui sunnu li putenti: Cu’ havi assai e cu’ nun havi nenti” (the powerful are two: those with much and those with nothing). Only what Spinoza called the multitudo can be the true bearer of reason against the destructive passions of individual subjects and small groups of individual subjects. It is “natural” (to paraphrase both Lenin and Spinoza) for a liberal to speak of “moderation,” “dialogue,” or “democracy” in general; but then the question always is: On behalf of what interest, indeed of what class?
Now, whether one might agree or disagree with Zuckert's depiction in her book either of Gadamer as “fundamentally a liberal” or with her ensuing analysis of Strauss and Derrida, including their different critiques of teleology and human freedom, one recognizes that the voice speaking in the just-cited statement from her book is that of a (dare one say, relatively 1?) neutral observer, whose observations, as such, are presumably open to dispute, acceptance, or dialogue. This political-scientific voice does not necessarily endorse or reject Gadamer, nor anyone else, though obviously one might well assume that the spirit of this neutral voice does not preclude taking sides with a version of Gadamerian dialogue and moderation (though, of course, whether such neutrality is compatible with Gadamer's notion of the constitutive role of prejudgment and prejudice in all hermeneutic acts may pose an insuperable problem here), even in response to the different (prima facie opposed) criticisms of Gadamer by Strauss and by Derrida. The reader might infer the existence of this Gadamerian Zuckert from the aforementioned conclusion to her response to Orozco and Waite—a conclusion immediately prefaced by the emphatic statement that “The twentieth-century philosopher who opposes such ‘spiritual’ warfare [sc. that of Nietzsche and mutatis mutandis Waite] is Hans-Georg Gadamer.” And we recall that Orozco and Waite are being charged with two things: i) that they have understood neither Gadamer's supreme import in our century nor “the essential character of Gadamer's hermeneutics,” incapable or unwilling as they are to attend to what Gadamer “actually says”; and 2) that this essential character lies in the principle of moderation, in opposition to all “ei-ther/or's,” and that we all should or must adapt this principle. However, in her book Postmodern Platos, having proceeded to discuss both Strauss and Derrida (and much else besides), Zuckert concludes her entire argument by an apparent embrace not of Gadamer (nor of Derrida) but of Strauss. Here are her book's final sentences:
By challenging his readers to reread the history of philosophy in terms of a strict disjunction between reason and revelation, Strauss asks them to study that history in a most untraditional way. All his own readings of individual philosophers, including preeminently his reading of Plato, have proven to be extremely controversial. That is, they invite debate and rebuttal. But if the purpose of the contemporary return to Plato is to show that philosophy has a future, he may have succeeded in fulfilling that purpose by demonstrating the need for an untraditional reading of the tradition better than anyone else.[25]
So, although Gadamer is “the twentieth-century philosopher” of “moderation,” Strauss may have done something else: namely, “to show that philosophy has a future … by demonstrating the need for an untraditional reading
In sum, Zuckert's own position in all this thus appears to be twofold. i) Unlike Zuckert's Gadamer, who “explicitly seeks to mediate,” “neither Orozco nor Waite recognizes any center or middle in politics; they see only either/or's.” And this, for Zuckert, is both objectively true and lamentable. By contrast, for her, Gadamer's position against “either/or” positions is both objectively true and laudable. And yet 2) Strauss is also right to suggest that there is, and should be, at least one very basic and primary “strict disjunction” (i.e., “between reason and revelation” or “Athens and Jerusalem”): in other words, a very strict “either/or” position that—ultimately—can not and should not be mediated (although Strauss, in one of his moods, certainly did mediate between them in some respects). In yet other words, it is by taking sides with these two—themselves incompatible—positions that Zuckert can triumph over any opponent who is in search of alternatives.[26] In this, Strauss himself might say that Zuckert is Gadamerian, not Straussian, due to her own brand of eclecticism and relativism—her appeal to him at the end of her book notwithstanding. For Zuckert appears here to follow one of Gadamer's dictums, given in response to another collection of essays on or about him, which is at once historicist and relativist: “Can one create a solidarity which rests solely upon communal interests? In light of what humanity is and has become, it seems to me more sensible for us to take the advice that Aristotle is said to have given Alexander the Great: ‘To be a Greek to the Greeks, a Persian to the Persians.’”[27] Or, in Zuckert's case, “When writing in a festschrift on Gadamer, do like Gadamer; when writing a book appealing to Straussians, do like Strauss.” Or, if you prefer, “When in Rome, do like a Roman; or, when in Syracuse, do like a Syracusian.” What can one do but salute such a powerful and mobile theoria, such a phronesis? That is the question.
WHAT ANYONE “ACTUALLY SAYS”
The scenario here is of a philosophy presenting itself, like all idealist philosophies, as being “without any exterior” (Althusser)—as a theoretical system which if it even acknowledges the external world does so only for the purpose of completely absorbing and dominating it by claiming the truth of everything past, present and future in advance.
LECOURT, Lespietrespenseurs
Before entering into more details of Zuckert's response (i.e., the entretien preliminairewtfh Waite), one general comment about her technique of reading may be helpful. A particularly intriguing feature of Zuckert's technique is her remarkably firm commitment to what she repeatedly calls reading what an author, in her words, “actually said” (or “wrote,” or “argued”) about a given topic. So while Orozco is explicitly charged with not reading what one author, Gadamer, “actually argued,” Waite is implicitly charged with not trying to understand, analyze, or respond to what any author “actually wrote.” In each case, what an author “actually said” remains the bedrock (though one might also suspect, Procrustean bed) on which Zuckert builds the edifice of her triumphant argument, her “will to architecture” (Kara-tani) qua moderation. Defeated in advance by Zuckert's ploy would be the objection that her appeal to the “actually said” in defense of Gadamer jibes ill with: i) Gadamer's (Heideggerian) opposition to positivism and empiricism (and, for related but different reasons, to the Husserlian epoche), let alone a basic principle of some history of science, which is that its concepts are not just lying around to be picked up and applied to facts but instead have to be produced; 2) Gadamer's insistence that we approach the “actual” through an elaborate matrix (alluded to by Orozco as one part of his argument) of prejudgments or prejudices (Vorurteile, Vorverstandnisse, Vorgreiflich-keiten); and 3) what a Marxist might simply call “ideology.” To paraphrase Nelson Goodman, we “always come ancient to our work”—but then to paraphrase Kafka, we all “knew that already,” so Zuckert's position here is presumably much more complex.
Be this as it may, Waite's “horizon” now suitably “expanded” by Zuckert's triumph, and since he had thought all along (wrongly, it turns out) that he was not just out to “discredit the opposition” but was attempting to “analyze or respond to the arguments of others,” and since he refuses to engage in the tu quoque and must here abandon discussion of the exo/esoteric, Waite has no recourse but return to look at the reasons for Zuckert's victory more fully. Surely the key must lie in, or somewhere in close proximity to, atten-tiveness to the specifically Zuckertian principle of attending to what any author “actually said,” purportedly free of any ideological prejudice, contamination, or agenda, including what we find Zuckert, claiming to read what Waite “actually wrote,” calls “ideological class warfare” and what Waite, following
“GADAMER AND NAZISM”
When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (John Ford, 1962)
These preliminaries behind us, here is the first sample on the plate of what Zuckert herself “actually writes” that Orozco and Waite “actually write.”
Teresa Orozco accuses Gadamer of having written “Plato and the Poets” to justify Nazi suppression of liberal humanist education and “Plato's Educational State” to support national conservative efforts to reform the regime. Geoffrey Waite repeats her accusation in “Radio Nietzsche.” Whereas most twentieth-century readers of Nietzsche have unintentionally fostered his elitist politics by adopting a perspectivist reading, Waite charges, Orozco shows that Gadamer did so intentionally. In my view, there is little evidence to support either charge.
Leaving to one side what Orozco actually wrote, for her to repeat if she wishes, we are here condemned to remain with Waite. But perhaps some of us can take slight hope in the fact that the statement that “there is little evidence” (also with regard to what we will soon hear Zuckert calling the question of whether it is possible to “cite any statement, vote, or action by which Gadamer explicitly supported National Socialism”) does not actually say that there is “no evidence” or even that there is not “big evidence.” But before we become too hopeful, let us first turn to Zuckert's second mention of Waite in her response, since this provides the evidence for her just-cited statement that “Geoffrey Waite repeats her [Orozco's] accusation in ‘Radio Nietzsche.’”
In a footnote to his essay, Waite suggests that Gadamer may have had a rhetorical reason for remaining silent about the relation between his interpretation of Plato's Republic and the political circumstances in which he found himself. (Waite concedes that Orozco's case ispurely circumstantial.) [emphasis added]
Now here is part of what Waite “actually wrote” in his footnote (emphasis again added):
“Orozco has made a good circumstantial case …”
So it is that, for Zuckert, “a good circumstantial case” becomes “purely circumstantial.” What that Waite does indeed “concede,” however, as the same footnote continues, is that there is a partial problem with “the art of allusion” as defined by Orozco, and that Zuckert herself is implicated in it.[29] Because of this very implication the reader may wish to consult that footnote in full, a footnote to which Zuckert evidently and “presumably”—to use one of her own key terms, as we will see—has no response (much as Gadamer “presumably” had no response to Strauss's charge of radical historicism and relativism).
Does Waite “actually write” anything to indicate that he “repeats” Orozco's specific accusations about why Gadamer wrote what he did in the Third Reich, namely, “to justify Nazi suppression of liberal humanist education and … to support national conservative efforts to reform the regime”? On the face of it, the important bone of contention (with Orozco and Waite gnarling noisily on one side, Zuckert silently on the other) is a methodological principle (i.e., not “truth,” necessarily, but in any case “method”): Was (and is) Gadamer some form of esoteric writer? There is evidence for this that is circumstantial (and, on the strong self-definition of esotericism, evidence here can be circumstantial only); whether this is good or bad evidence, it exists, and it is not purely circumstantial. One cannot ask this question (cf. “the piety of thinking,” ostensibly for Heidegger and for Gadamer) if one does not acknowledge even the existence of the great tradition of exo/esoteric thought leading from Plato to the post-Platonists, who most notably include, in Zuckert's view, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, and Derrida. Obviously space does not permit a full discussion of this tradition here, nor is such discussion required to get at its basic structure.[30] But Zuckert has successfully occluded access to precisely this question. Why?
Although Zuckert does not appeal to what Waite “actually said” about the charge that “Gadamer was a Nazi” (to put it in the vernacular), if for no other reason than Waite does not “actually say” this, Zuckert successfully links Waite to Orozco here, nonetheless. Specifically, Zuckert writes, “Orozco does not (and presumably cannot) cite any statement, vote, or action by which Gadamer explicitly supported National Socialism.” One might ask what “presumably” means here. If Orozco could cite such evidence, then she would have? Or, that such evidence for explicit support does not exist and/or never existed, quite simply because Gadamer did not in fact “support National Socialism” by “any statement, vote, or action”? Again leaving Orozco's response to this problem aside (both that in her book, to which Zuckert does not allude, and in her current response to this specific charge), and because he is linked to this position, Waite will respond with six major, interrelated theses.
i) Whether or not Gadamer “was a Nazi,” is not the central issue. (The same goes for Heidegger, incidentally.) By his own not quite explicit admission,
In other words, Waite does not align himself with all of Orozco's argument and project. He does, however, align himself strongly not only with her right to be heard (which does not appear to be a given to at least some of the Gadamer industry; this festschrift is a major exception because of its willingness to let Orozco speak), but also, and more important, with the methodology Orozco is attempting to develop to analyze Gadamer and the history of philosophy generally (even though, again, Waite does not agree fully with her specific theorization and application of this methodology to the issue of National Socialism). In any case, however, let us be clear about one thing: It is Zuckert (even more than Orozco and certainly more than Waite) who has most explicitly broached the question of “Gadamer and Nazism.” So we have no choice but to take it seriously in this entretien.
“Was Gadamer a Nazi?” Well, the answer to this question, as is appropriate in the relativist system, is precisely “a matter of ‘interpretation,’” or, more simply put, of definition. If, for example, formal membership in the Nazi Party is one (partial or sole) definition, then the answer is both no and yes. “But that is only half the story. Let us look at it more fully,” as we heard Socrates saying—beginning with the “actually said,” or rather done.
Gadamer was not a member of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party), he was a member of the NSLB (National Socialist Teachers Union). Founded in 1927, the NSLB was officially classified by the NSDAP as its “connected organization” (angeschlossener Verband).[32] Membership in both the NSDAP and the NSLB was voluntary, and the party leadership of
Membership in the NSLB was by charter open and limited to ‘jeder un-bescholtene Lehrer und sonstige Erzieher, der das 18. Lebensjahr vol-lendet hat und arischer Abstammung [ist]” (every respectable teacher and other educator who has completed the eighteenth year of his life and is of Aryan decent).[35] In other words, the basic criterion was racialist and racist. By his own free choice (but not subsequent admission after the war), Gada-mer was a member of NSLB in “Fachschaft i: Lehrer an Hochschulen” (Professional Association i: Teachers at Universities). Too, Gadamer had previously been a supporter or adherent (Anhanger) of the ultra-right-wing, and racist, German National People's Party (DNVP).[36] Hans-Georg Gadamer's NSLB card number was 254–387.[37]
Gadamer joined the NSLB on August i, 1933, as did at least two other philosophers who later became famous.[38] (In March the first concentration camp had been built at Dachau near Munich, initially for communist and socialist political prisoners, as was reported in the press.) For the philosophical cadre, August 1933 was an early date to join. Gadamer's teacher and mentor Heidegger waited until December i, 1933, though, unlike Gadamer, he was additionally to join the NSDAP (publicly on May i or 3, 1933, though having committed himself in secret several years earlier). But most philosophers waited until 1934 to join either organization.[39] The other two philosophers joining the NSLB on the same date as Gadamer were Hugo Fischer and Arnold Gehlen. Fischer left the NSLB two years later to the day (August i, 1935) and eventually emigrated over Norway to England; after the war he returned to take a professorship at Munich. Like Heidegger, Gehlen joined the NSDAP, and, like Gadamer and Heidegger, remained
In response, then, to one part of Zuckert's statement, if membership in a political party can be construed as its “explicit support,” and surely this is one plausible definition, then Gadamer's membership in the explicitly racist NSLB, officially affiliated with the NSDAP, certainly can qualify as at least one “action by which Gadamer explicitly supported National Socialism.” To be sure, to say this is not yet to say anything about what this support means, either for Gadamer or for philosophical hermeneutics, nor even whether this support can be deemed a good thing or a bad thing ethically or morally. So far we remain exclusively at the level of what Zuckert likes to call the “actual.”
Turning to another part of Zuckert's statement—the matter of voting—one can note that in November 1933, Gadamer joined other philosophers who were members of the NSLB, some of whom were also members of the NSDAP, to sign the “Bekenntnis der Professoren an den deutschen Univer-sitaten und Hochschullen zu Adolf Hitler und dem nationalsozialistischen Staat” (Declaration of faith of professors in the German universities and colleges in Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist state).[41] This declaration explicitly supported a single list of NSDAP candidates (Einheitsliste) for the immediately upcoming elections to Parliament (Reichstag), as well as Germany's definitive withdrawal from the League of Nations and all its internationally binding principles. This declaration was signed on the eve of the plebiscite on November 12, 1933, which granted carte blanche to, and established the legality of, each and every decision made by Adolf Hitler. Again pace Zuckert, Gadamer thus voted to disallow any one else from voting in Germany except for NSDAP candidates. In this way of voting, too, Gadamer explicitly supported and legitimated Hitler's one-man rule and its decisionistic legality.[42]
In further response to Zuckert's request to know about any “statement, vote, or action by which Gadamer explicitly supported National Socialism,” at least one case is freely admitted by Gadamer himself. Gadamer was one of a small handful of philosophers allowed to travel abroad during the Third Reich, including during World War II: he gave lectures in Florence (January 1940), Paris (May 1941), Prague (June 1943), and Lisbon (March-April 1944). The other philosophers given this relatively rare privilege and sign of trust included fellow members of the NSLB, some of whom were also in the NSDAP, but also some who were in neither organization.[43] Of these trips, Gadamer has stated: “I did not fail to recognize that one was thereby being misused for foreign propaganda,” adding, “for which often someone politically innocent [ein politisch Unbescholtener—that word again] was precisely the right man” (PLi 18). Although Gadamer does not explicitly say
Gadamer is also on record as having said in 1990, “whoever went into the Party [NSDAP], in order to keep his position or to gain one, and then as a teacher of philosophy practiced reasonable philosophy, is ten times preferable to me than, say, people like [Oskar] Becher or [Hans] Freyer, who were not in the Party but who talked like the Nazis.”[44] Ten times can be quite a lot (more than zero but less than, say, a thousand); but is then a collaborator X times worse than a “true believer”? This is an old question and, as they say, the jury is still out on it. But why Gadamer's quantitative distinction in the first place? Is vociferous “symbolic” support of NSDAP any better or worse (and how many times?), in principle or effect, than actual support of the racist DNVP or actual membership in the officially affiliated and also racist NSLB or other forms of collaboration with the NSDAP? As Gadamer himself states, some of the most heinous and vocal advocates of National Socialist principles were not members of the NSDAP, of which he was not a member; nor, presumably, as he does not suggest, of the NSLB, of which he was a member.
The equally, if not more, important issue, however, is whether Gadamer's teaching—qua his statements and actions, including the preservation and development of philosophical hermeneutics during the Third Reich-qualifies as what he calls “reasonable philosophy.” Teaching (and only “after all else is said and done”) is what matters most in Gadamer's oral/aural tradition, in which “it is impossible for what is written not to be disclosed. That is the reason why I have never written anything about these things, and why there is not and will not be any written work by Plato…. As soon as you have read and reread this letter, burn it” (Plato, Second Letter 3i4b-c). But this, too, in his own terms and in Zuckert's, is “a matter of ‘interpretation,’” as we will see. Though apparently this cannot be a matter for “dialogue” with Gadamer himself (or with Zuckert), but only a matter of contestation. But before addressing this pedagogic question (“teaching as resistance”) at the appropriate time later, a brief excursus is necessary for historical and theoretical perspective.
An appropriate epitaph (by Thomas Laugstien) has been given to the attempt of all German philosophers in ‘“inner emigration’: during the Third Reich to preserve ‘authentic philosophy’”: “It reproduced itself in the consciousness that, in the philosophical sphere, one was permitted to do what one wanted. But what one wanted above all was what one was permitted to do.”[45] But it should also be stressed that the same can be said for the situation of philosophers (and others) living under all forms of capitalism, two
In conclusion to his reply to a would-be—only somewhat aggressive—interlocutor in the Library of Living Philosophers volume, Gadamer writes:
I thank the author for her intensive dedication to the problems she takes up. But I would like to add the request that one should first presume that one did not understand the other properly when one believes that one can find contradictions everywhere in the opinion of the other.[47]
The soundness of this advice aside (which seems to follow one basic Strauss-ian heuristic, though not necessarily the Zuckertian principle of the “actually said”), and aside also the way the qualifiers “first” and “properly” beg important hermeneutic questions, we can at least note that this response is at once descriptive, if one assumes that the critic in question has in fact done what Gadamer says she has done, and prescriptive, insofar as it tells that critic what to do. “Properly,” posits as its precondition the distinction between “proper” and “improper”—a distinction that relativism cannot draw. (This may mean, of course, that Gadamer, in this one case at least, was not a relativist; but it may also mean that he was an exo/esotericist.) This simultaneously constative and performative response establishes what the limits of any dialogue for Gadamer have been, are, and will be. It produces a hermeneutic circle, or tautology, in which no alternative, exterior position is
And in his reply to another would-be—and much more aggressive—critic writing in the same Library of Living Philosophers volume, Gadamer tells her, in effect, that she should not have analyzed one of his texts (Philosophical Apprenticeships), which she analyzes from a feminist perspective that emphasizes the way Gadamer and philosophical hermeneutics refer to women, as well as to the way both might relate to “Nazism.” Gadamer recommends that this critic should have analyzed two other texts instead: his autobiographical sketch in the Library of Living Philosophers volume, and his essay “Die politische Inkompetenz der Philosophic” (The political incompetence of philosophy). Gadamer goes on to indicate how the latter text should, indeed must, be “actually read.” “In the essay ‘Uber die politische Inkompetenz der Philosophic,’” Gadamer states, “I illustrated with Plato and Heidegger what I myself think about the relation between philosophy and politics. With modesty, I lay claim to the same incompetence.”[49] In other words, we should accept an author's word about a subject when that author proclaims that he (in this case) is incompetent about that subject and we should not attempt to analyze it ourselves—the subject here being the Gadamerian relation between philosophy and politics. Now if, as Zuckert writes in “On the Politics of Gadamerian Hermeneutics, “philosophical dialogue and textual hermeneutics are essentially ethical,” as “Gadamer argued from the beginning until the end of his career, because they entail respect for the integrity and independence of the other, not only in the initial attempt to understand but also in the peaceful, nonviolent character of the accord or agreement at which the dialogue aims,” and if the ethical has to do with the political (as the naive reader may have thought, and as not a few philosophers have argued over the centuries), then to declare oneself “incompetent” in the political is simultaneously to declare oneself incompetent in the ethical (as many have also thought and argued). For example, from a neo-Spinozist, neo-communist perspective, not only is it the case “that the relationship between philosophy and politics is such that each implies the other,” but also that “the dilemma which would lead us to distinguish between ‘speculative’ philosophy, on the one hand, and philosophy ‘applied’ to politics, on the other, is not simply meaningless, it is the principle obstacle to achieving wisdom.”[50] If this is true, the very basis of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics—notably, its self-admitted “incompetence” in politics, and its entailed, ostensible respect for the other and nonviolence—would all be undermined radically. But, again, so far this is only potentially a truly “devastating charge” against Gadamer and his entire philosophical position.
But one thing should be crystal clear to anyone attempting to enter into a dialogue, and in that sense an ethical or political encounter, with Gadamer
With regard to ethics specifically, as Zuckert correctly notes, even the most cursory reader of the self-described politically “incompetent” Gadamer's extensive oeuvre will encounter an extensive, lifelong preoccupation with the subject—in terms of both interpreting the history of philosophy from at least Plato on, and the application of this preoccupation to current topics, including his aforementioned way of responding to critics who attempt to penetrate into his Horizontverschmelzung from some imagined exterior. What, then, about the ethics of “the politics of Gadamerian hermeneutics”?
In terms of an ethics that is nonprescriptive, and as such more properly described as “ethology,”[53] Gadamer in his (part collaborative, part critical) relationship to “Nazism” was simply refusing “to cede to his desire,” understood as the only cogent ethical imperative.[54] And there is not a damn thing anyone can do about this fact, including hopelessly attempting to enter into dialogue with it. Which is not to say, however, that Gadamer's position cannot, should not, be combated. In Marx's terms, this is the very definition of “criticism” when confronting an objectionable “content.” “Criticism dealing with this content is criticism in hand-to-hand combat, and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike him.”[55] But the problem, here, is this: whether or not Gadamer is “noble” or “equal” is hardly at issue; philosophical hermeneutics remains obviously “interesting”—but interesting also in the sense
As paraphrased by no less an authority than Zuckert, in her response to Orozco and Waite, “Gadamer had obvious practical reasons to mute his criticism of the brutal power politics of the party in power; he had no ‘practical’ reason (beyond the ethical imperatives of friendship and decency) to mute his support.” Much is at stake in the parenthetical remark. But in any case Gadamer refuses to, cannot, and arguably should not, practice friendship and moderation with those who are his enemies. Like Kant's categorical imperative and Spinoza's attempt to elicit the rational core of ethics from Jewish-Christian Scripture, the Christian injunction “Love your neighbor as thyself” is radically problematized, not merely by who “thyself” often in fact is (psychologically, one is often one's own worst enemy), but also by the fact that this option is simply unavailable to oneself if it transpires, as it often does in history, that the same neighbor is about to kill you (excepting the case of consistent pacifists) or has killed you (in all cases).
So it is, then, to leap backward and forward in the argument, that Zuckert and Gadamer demand dialogue and moderation but i) refuse it in some cases, and 2) encounter those who refuse dialogue and moderation, at least on Gadamerian terms. All of which, however, only disproves that dialogue and moderation are universal principles in fact, and only suggests that, perhaps, they should be—but not necessarily in our current world. Again, we reach only the level of the tu quoque and an “aporia”—not as the beginning of complex inquiry but as its simple termination.
Gadamer's theory of the relationship between ethics and friendship,[56] and mutatis mutandis of the relationship between philosophy and politics (disingenuous disclaimer of “incompetence” aside), seems to run aground or adrift on his collaboration-cum-resistance with what has been, and what announced itself from its inception to be, what is arguably—alongside fascism—the most successful, least friendly and philosophico-political regime in human history (as Zuckert affirms). But that regime (Waite would argue) is not merely what we call “The Third Reich,” or “Nazi Germany.” For it is also that regime's subtending “discursive practice” (at once philosophical, political, ethical, cultural, and psychological, as well as economic) that is capitalism. Which assertion, however, certainly does not, or should not, entail that the historically longest sustained attempt to oppose capitalism, namely a more or less Stalinist socialism in one country (the former Soviet Union and its satellites), was itself either fully friendly or fully anticapitalist. Focusing here only on the former point, to say that millions of inmates of the Gulag were the victims of a system that differed from Nazi Germany and the millions of its inmates and that in the former their incarceration was sensu stricto illegal and in the latter legal—this is a pathetically weak argument to make either to all those inmates and corpses (and who, in both systems, ineluded
“ALTHUSSERIAN POLITICAL COMMITMENTS”
In turn, however, this is not to say that all distinctions in this terrible matter (i.e., that fascism and National Socialism are forms of capitalism; and that to date communism has not been fully anticapitalist and has been willing to murder many people) are wholly insignificant. Since Waite's “political commitments,” as Zuckert puts it, are “Althusserian,” in some sense, and since, in her view, these are what have prevented him from understanding Gada-mer, and much else besides, Waite is required to say something in this regard. Althusser has been used to justify absolute quietism in the face of pressing political exigencies; on the other hand, he has done the opposite; and he continues to inspire urban and rural guerrilla fighters in the “third world” as well as cyberpunk hackers everywhere. Neither last nor least, Althusserians in blood-drenched former Yugoslavia found themselves, in friendship with Lacanians, being attacked and ultimately defeated by the two dominant parties who shared little else in common but this very antipathy: “Heideggerians among the opposition and Frankfurt school Marxists among the ‘official’ Party circles.”[58] And for “Heideggerians” read here also: Gadamerians.
Implying that Waite's “political commitments” are not only “Althusserian” but Nietzschean (pace Waite himself, according to Zuckert, and in opposition to her own Nietzsche, one may assume),[59] Zuckert herself (fighting for the moment alongside her Gadamer) offers the following description-cum-prescription: “rather than merely criticize (or attack) others from our own vantage point, Gadamer insists, we must first try to see things their way.” Rudely interrupting Zuckert again, one might ask what should we do after we have tried to see things in the other's way, and we discover that the other either will not enter into dialogue with us and/or is irrevocably committed to combating our position? If we assume what should not necessarily be assumed (this is one of the things that readers of the entretien preliminaire must decide for themselves), namely that Waite (and Orozco) has made an attempt to see beyond his own vantage point (though clearly not nearly to the satisfaction of Zuckert), it is at moments such as these that Waite recalls the recommendation once given by Gramsci, anno 1917 (a few years
When debating with an opponent, try to put yourself in his shoes: you will understand him better, and may end by recognizing that there is some truth in what he says, and perhaps a lot. For some time I myself followed this sage advice. But my adversaries' shoes got so filthy that I was forced to conclude it's better to be unfair than risk fainting from the stink they give off.[60]
At this point, quite unseemly insults aside, however, Waite stresses that he does not really know what he would have done in circumstances the same as faced by Gadamer in the Third Reich. (He can at best know what he is doing now, in the United States of America, or rather in transnational capitalism.) Zuckert does not tell us what she (thinks she) would have done back then, either, though someone reading her response to Orozco and Waite, and her own (at least partial) defense of Gadamer, may surmise that she implies that she might well have done what Gadamer did (were she permitted by the regime, of course), or at least that, today, she finds his behavior legitimate and defensible insofar as he was defending his own life and that of his family and friends (“the ethical imperatives of friendship and decency”).
Not speaking for Orozco (never to mention Zuckert), Waite would say that none of us can know what we would have done before, during, or immediately after the events that propelled Hitler into power in 1933–34. If> however, in those years Waite was what he is now (namely, a member of a Communist Party [CPUSA], albeit with certain tendencies officially rejected by that party—including not only Althusserianism, but Trotskyism, Grams-cianism, and Maoism, and writing about topics anathema to the party, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Strauss, and Gadamer), then Waite does know exactly what would have happened to him: incarceration on May i, 1933, or thereafter. But, to repeat, he does not know for certain if he would have also been a communist (or whatever) in those years. Since Waite's current form of internationalist identity (“cosmopolitan rootlessness” in the National Socialist and fascist terminology, “nicht unbescholten” in that of the NSLB) is neither Jewish, Romani, nor any racial type or sexual orientation proscribed or punished by the NSDAP and NSLB, he would not have been arrested at that time for that reason—unlike what would have happened, undoubtedly, for one or more reasons (taking not arbitrary examples) to Strauss, Rosen, Derrida, and Trotsky. But not have happened, for that reason, to Heidegger or to Gadamer.
Nor does Waite know what he would have done in the Stalinist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or its satellites, say, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). His current adherence to a quasi-Stalinist party leads him to think that were he a communist in the latter regime he might
As a member of the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF), and hence also a collaborator with the Stalinist Soviet Union, Althusser tried to reform the party from within, combating Stalinism.[61] But is this not exactly-or more or less—the same thing that Gadamer was doing within the NSLB as official affiliate of the NSDAP and in Nazi Germany generally? And does not Waite here have a double standard: affirming Althusser and attacking Gadamer, to adopt Zuckert's way of thinking? Here the answer is more complex on both accounts: yes and no. But first we must stress that the penalties for criticizing a party (in Althusser's case) and a party and a regime (in Gada-mer's case) are not strictly comparable in terms of risk. In Gadamer's case the risk, if we believe him, was physical removal from his teaching position, danger to family and friends, and possible incarceration and even death. In Althusser's case the comparable risk was “merely” expulsion from the PCF—not physical death. To be precise, however, this would have been, for Althusser, a kind of philosophical, political, and psychological death. And, in the event, the latter “death” Althusser in fact suffered, though for overde-termined reasons. (He was irrevocably expelled from his party when he killed his wife, and fellow communist, Helene Rytman.) Too, Althusser developed his strongest alternative to Stalinism, even most Marxism, mainly in private, esoterically if one will. His “aleatory materialism” was designed to complement, at the level of textual production (based on principles derived not only from Spinoza but from Nietzsche, inter alia), the technique of reading the “symptomatic silences” not only of texts, notably Marx's Capital, but also, as in the case of the USSR and the PCF, political movements, as well as, and most especially, of capitalism itself.[62] But, yes, Althusser did all this, including his public attacks against the PCF, from within his party; and it remained Stalinist despite his efforts—largely, if not even wholly, quixotic—to transform it radically “from within.” But, once again, to accept one kind of collaboration is not to defend all kinds. And this includes defending, as Althusser notably did not, collaboration with capitalism tout court, including its fascist or National Socialist variants.
But the specific question in this festschrift being asked by Waite (and by Orozco, albeit in a rather different way that Waite does not fully share but shares generally) is about Gadamer's silences, including those of his supporters and insufficiently savvy readers. Gadamer demonstrably (in his responses in the Library of Living Philosophers volume, for example) tries to reduce his more vigorous attackers to silence, and (unwittingly or not) Zuckert appears to be collaborating with him in this effort-victoriously.
“IF THAT IS THE OBJECTION …, THEY SHOULD SAY SO”
Zuckert writes:
Gadamer may be criticized for not publicly opposing the rise and rule of National Socialism in Germany in word or deed. If that is the objection Orozco and Waite wish to make, they should say so. The question then would be whether “political correctness” or plain old morality requires a man [or woman, we should add] to become a martyr (like Eric Bonhoeffer). Is it not possible for a person to conclude “prudently” (in the Aristotelian and not the Kantian sense) that it would be better to preserve not merely one's life and career, but also the lives and livelihood of one's family, friends and students, by trying to foster change from within, gradually, by means of persuasion rather than force? Such a prudent course of action might require one to remain silent at times or to deliver criticisms indirectly in a veiled manner. In his Philosophical Apprenticeships, Gadamer describes his own behavior during the Nazi regime very much in these terms, [emphasis added]
Ipse dixit appeal to Gadamer aside,[63] as well as Gadamer's own disclaimers about Philosophical Apprenticeships, Zuckert is quite correct to demand, pre-scriptively, clarity about “the objection Orozco and Waite wish to make” and that they “should say so.” Leaving Orozco's response to her, of course, Waite says the following. His objection to Gadamer in this regard (keeping in mind the aforementioned caveats about not knowing apodeictically what he himself would have done) is this: The only acceptable ethical position with regard to National Socialism—before, during, and after 1933-was not accommodation and collaboration, no matter how critical from within it. The only acceptable ethical position was resistance at the risk of being killed.
Resistance does not necessarily lead to martyrdom, if one is not apprehended, or, in other situations, if one does not take it upon oneself (unlike Socrates or Jesus, who did). Being apprehended in Nazi Germany (or Stalinist Russia) was more dangerous than, say, in Fascist Italy or Spain, or in occupied France and elsewhere in Europe—where, however, it was sufficiently dangerous. And resistance in Nazi Germany was similarly more dangerous than in Stalinist Soviet Union or its satellites—though it was certainly dangerous enough there, too. Resistance against capitalism can be similarly dangerous today, particularly in “third-world” countries, but even hie et nunc. This is a very old and universal problem: “Cu’ dici la virita va ‘mpisu” (speaking the truth will get you hanged). We will return to Gadamer's position on martyrdom, but with all due respect to Zuckert's reference to the “martyrdom” of Eric Bonhoeffer (with whom Gadamer apparently associated), this is perhaps the worst example of resistance for her to mention in this context, common currency though it is.
In addition to other reasons why he is a very bad example,[64] Bonhoeffer is best known today for the quotation that appears on T-shirts available in “alternative shops” in different versions, one of which begins: “They came for the communists [more commonly replaced by ‘socialists'], and I did nothing; they came for the trade unionists, and I did nothing; they came for the Jehovah's Witnesses, and I did nothing; they came for the homosexuals, and I did nothing,” and so forth. This series concludes with Bonhoeffer's own quite fitting epitaph: “Then they came for me, and there was no one left to protect me.” And so Bonhoeffer was murdered, but hardly as a legitimate “martyr”: by his own final admission, he was murdered as much for his (initial) collaboration as for his (too tardy) resistance. Too, returning to Zuckert and Gadamer, and to repeat, there are many/orws of death: there is physical death, as absolute physiological “limit condition” (at least for the atheists among us); but this is not (for some of us), the worst form of death, which might be psychological death (trauma), ethical and moral death (the secular version of Hell, no doubt), and so on. True philosophy, however else it is defined, is a matter of life and/or of death. Ethically, in philosophy as in politics, death (in all its forms) often has been and remains the only risk worth taking—both in those National Socialist circumstances and in these capitalist times. “Homo liber de nulla re minus, quam de morte cogitat, & ejus sapi-entia non mortis, sed vitae meditatio est” (The free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death, but on life) (Spinoza, Ethica, IVPGy).
To summarize and to speak even more bluntly, Waite's requested “objection” to Gadamer's relationship to “the rise and rule of National Socialism in Germany” is that Gadamer did not risk death and, if required, did not die. And, yes, this might well have meant taking both family and friends and all of philosophical hermeneutics, at least as we know it from Gadamer, with
Unseemly witticisms again to one side, however, it is immediately necessary to add that Waite's “objection” is made on extremely tenuous grounds, if indeed on any ultimate grounds at all, insofar as Waite has no certain way of knowing if this, his objection or consequent course of action, are, in fact, what he himself would have made or done at that time. In that sense his objection has no prescriptive force. In Lacanian terms, to repeat, Gadamer
And so it also is that Waite simply refuses to accept Zuckert's premise (itself part collaboratory, part resisting) that “Gadamer may be criticized for not publicly opposing the rise and rule of National Socialism in Germany in word or deed.” To which Waite emphatically responds: No, Gadamer may not be criticized on these grounds. “Criticism” in this case is surely irrelevant; what may be demanded, however, is opposition.
Quite apart from the fact that Gadamer himself not only did not “oppose” the “rise and rule of National Socialism in Germany in word or deed,” but instead, as one significant part of his response (his “dialogue” with National Socialism, as it were), explicitly embraced it, the fact is that no one can ethically “criticize” the past actions of another unless he or she knows what she or he would have done in similar circumstances, and this one simply cannot know, at least not apodeictically for times past. One can sometimes know, often with great difficulty, what one is doing in the present. And Zuckert is silent, in her response in this entretien preliminaire, about her own “criticism” of Gadamer in this matter. She is silent about what (she thinks) she might have done. Whatever she herself may think, however, her argument can be read to suggest that she thinks she may have done grosso modo what Gadamer did inasmuch as, for Zuckert,
The twentieth-century philosopher who opposes such “spiritual” warfare [sc. of the type “fostered” by Waite] is Hans-Georg Gadamer. Rather than merely criticize (or attack) others from our own vantage point, Gadamer insists, we must first try to see things their way. Rather than impose our interpretation or view, we must engage in a dialogue, the form of thought Nietzsche said was decadent and democratic, like Socrates, that philosopher of the “rabble.”
But let us not overlook one thing: Socrates was physically killed for his troubles, and Gadamer was neither physically killed nor otherwise “devastated.” And if neither Waite nor Zuckert can know what they themselves would have done in Hitler's Germany, then they can at least attempt to know, or they can refuse to know, what Gadamer did; they can deem this knowledge relevant, or irrelevant, to understanding his philosophy; and, on this basis, they can accept or reject the “reasonable philosophy” that Gadamer saved for its current posterity, its afterlife, its corps/es.
For his own part, Gadamer has spoken eloquently about death, to the extent that one can speak eloquently about what has been defined a priori as incomprehensible and unspeakable.[66] Gadamer writes that “the incomprehensibility
ON “PEDAGOGICAL RESISTANCE” AND “CHANGE FROM WITHIN”
But it is high time for us look more closely at what Zuckert depicts as Gadamer's attempt “to foster change from within, gradually, by means of persuasion rather than force.” This assumes, of course, that Nazi society could be changed by persuasion, not force—a mechanism that Goebbels anticipated and built into his propaganda machine.[70] To repeat, only massive politico-philosophical Unbescholtenheit or “incompetence” could ever have thought that National Socialism (or fascism and capitalism) were radically alterable in this way. But this point aside, there are only two main examples given by Gadamer himself for how he attempted to “foster change from within,” and with what results. “Presumably” if there were others we would know about them.
What Gadamer “actually wrote” in Philosophical Apprenticeships (which he has chided one reader for even having read, let alone attempting to interpret critically):[71]
Just how in solidarity one was [“one”—German man—appears to refer to oppositional philosophers and their interpellated listeners in seminars] may be shown by the following anecdote, which I forgot and which was related to me later by its originator [Urheber]. I gave a Plato lecture. In the discussion a soldier, who found himself on leave, asked what Plato would have said if a criminal tyrant were to stand as the leader [Fuhrer] of a state. I answered: Obviously [Selbstverstandlich] he would have approved of the murder of the tyrant.—There was no repercussion [or consequence: Es erfolgte heine Weiter-ung]. (PLn6)
When did the soldier relate this story to jog Gadamer's memory: during the Third Reich or after the war (if the soldier survived with Gadamer)? What
So, with regard to repercussions and consequences, we need to turn to the second of the two main anecdotes illustrating Gadamer's simultaneous “pedagogical resistance” to National Socialism and his collaboration with it.
Once there was a dangerous repercussion [Weiterung]. In a seminar I had used an example in logic: All donkeys are brown. Great laughter—and a female student enthusiastically told a girlfriend. The letter was read by her parents. A denunciation followed. The poor girl had to go into factory work. I was ordered before the clever and well-meaning rector, who allowed himself to be satisfied with the acknowledgment that I had indeed used an example in logic. (PLn6)
“Presumably,” as we say, “brown” could be taken to refer to the “brown shirts” (the Sturmabteilung or SA), whereas, say, “black” would refer to the Schutz-staffel or SS. And “pink,” in the concentration camp semiotic system, would have designated homosexuals, “yellow” the Jews, “green” the Jehovah's Witnesses, “red” the communists, and so forth. This time, however, the repercussions of Gadamer's actions were indeed dangerous to someone (“the poor girl”), though once again not ultimately to him. (Sometimes mere logic does
EPITAPH ON MARTYRDOM
He [Socrates]—despite all the preparations and political justifications that Critias offers for himself—refuses flight from prison to avoid execution. The Platonic question thus ashed through Socrates was this. How is it possible that a man can so detach himself from everything in his environment, that he comport himself so differently, when our own comportment, as we generally see, consists precisely in conforming ourselves to the natural and social conditions of the life in which we stand? That a man goes so far out of bounds as Socrates, and, unaffected by what
― 290 ―everyone does and by what everyone says, holds fast to the Idea of what is Right? What must this Idea be? It must be obvious, visible and incontestable, for him who lives accordingly and thus unwaveringly makes his decision.GADAMER, “Amicus Plato”
“Whoever philosophizes will not be in agreement with the conceptions of the times.” As a quotation from Goethe it was indeed well mashed, as it was in continuity with Goethe's characterization of the Platonic writings. But if one does not want to make a martyr of oneself or voluntarily choose emigration, such a motto can nevertheless convey a certain emphasis to the understanding reader in a time of enforced conformity, and affirmation of one's identity.
HANS-GEORG GADAMER, Reflections on my Philosophical Journey
Pairing these two epigraphs from Gadamer (even without our previous discussion of “Gadamer and Nazism” in mind) may raise uncanny questions. Do Gadamer and philosophical hermeneutics more or less tacitly concede that they can only always fail to understand or interpret (never mind live up to, meaning die for) the seminal Socratic definition of philosophy and its one ultimate test? Does what Gadamer ultimately meant by his obsessive recurrence tophronesis amount to nothing more or less than this abject falling short of philosophy? Perhaps this is why Gadamer (said that he) turned in the one direction away from Socrates and the pre-Socratics ahead to Plato and Aristotle, and in the other direction away from Nietzsche and Heidegger through Dilthey back to Plato. The uncanny sensation lingers as it does at all Janus-faced portals. According to our two epigraphs read together, Gadamer and philosophical hermeneutics could never have understood or interpreted the Platonic Socrates who defined himself in terms of his willingness to be a martyr for his greatest Idea, his Idea of Right. Any full understanding or interpretation of this Socrates is simply impossible if Gadamer himself was unwilling—even in theory let alone in practice—either to “make a martyr” of himself “or” to “voluntarily choose emigration.” This is an uncanny “or” (inasmuch as Socrates precisely rejected the option of emigration, in favor of martyrdom), its meaning obscure. But what should remain plain as day is that there is nothing whatsoever uncanny in Gadamer's decision to live for whatever reason and cause (including theoretically endless interpretations of Aristotle's relationship to Plato). This decision can be ultimately no more or less uncanny than any of our own decisions. Instead, what lingers so uncannily in the Gadamer Industry is the unanalyzed aura around what Gadamer in our second epigraph (mediated by reference to the quintessential mediator, Goethe) states is his own “masking.” Due to this lack of clarity, what will remain at the end of the day is the question mark after just how far Gadamer's own canniness extended. If Waite has his way, this question mark will always adhere to philosophical hermeneutics as to all other philosophy (if only as one flea the dog can't quite scratch).
But let us not get too personal. If, as Gadamer suggests in his essay “Am-icus Plato magis arnica veritas” (1968), the Socratic refusal to avoid death is the very ground and inception of the philosophical and ethical project, and if the philosopher (nearly per definitionem) is willing to die for what is Right, even for the Idea of the Right, then in what sense was Hans-Georg Gadamer a philosopher? According to this definition, he could not have been a philosopher (at best a great historian of hermeneutics)—unless we have misunderstood all along what Gadamer really thought philosophy and the Idea of Right to be. If Gadamer were to return this question to us, by saying that the point of philosophical hermeneutics is not (only) what Gadamer thinks but (also) what we think, he would seem justified. For what about us, what do we think philosophy and the Right are, and do we act accordingly? But there would persist the huge problem with this imagined response by Gadamer. If it is informed by unacknowledged esotericism, philosophical hermeneutics may be more of the problem than the solution to even formulating ultimate questions, let alone helping us answer them.
Actually, the official English translation of Gadamer's now famous quotation from Goethe, as recited in “Reflections on my Philosophical Journey,” is typically inaccurate and misleading (whether the fault here be Gadamer's or his acolyte translator's is unclear). As cited by Gadamer in his original 1934 text, Plato und dieDichter (Plato and the poets), the quotation could sooner be translated: “Whoever philosophizes is not one with the modes of the conception of his times or with his preceding ones” (Wer philosophiert, ist mit den Vorstellungsarten seiner Vor-undMitwelt uneins).[72] At strict issue therefore is not (contemporary) conceptions but rather (transhistorical) types or modes of conception. And these include, in Plato's case just to begin, exo/ esoteric transmission. In any event, Gadamer's (new) remark emphatically rejects martyrdom as an option, at least for himself; and apparently this issue is simply closed to what Gadamer means and practices as “open dialogue,” Zuckert as “moderation.”
In our contemporary or “postcontemporary” world, however, such so-called ethical appeals to “dialogue,” “moderation,” and their cognates are simply redundant insofar as they are always already part and parcel of precisely that hegemonic ideology and discourse of parliamentary-democratic, free-market capitalism which they (wittingly or unwittingly) reproduce. In this conjuncture, these appeals certainly can have nothing important or even interesting to do with philosophy, and are at most the quintessen-tially bourgeois “commonsense” or sensus communis, which for communists (to paraphrase Gramsci) can never be “good sense.” In properly political ontological terms, “infinite alterity is quite simply what there is” and the “commonsense discourse” of “toleration” (like that of all relativism or his-toricism) possesses “neither force nor truth,” not least because “we need … to make explicit the axioms of thought that decide such an orientation.”[73]
In one sense, then, Zuckert is quite right to infer (though she cannot cite anything “actually said” on this score) that Waite doesn't accept dialogue (or the dialectic, for that matter) and moderation as the basis of philosophy and of criticism, or as “one of the two primary political virtues.” This is not to say that dialogue and moderation are not virtues or should not be practiced, in some sense.[74] The problem remains that true dialogue and moderation have long been co-opted not only by exo/esotericism but also by capitalism, in its various political modes, just as it has co-opted virtually everything else. Communism, or other alternative practices to capitalism, must thus be leery of prophets crying “dialogue, dialogue, dialogue!” (or “peace, peace, peace!”) when there precisely is no dialogue (or peace). And, what is more, there should be none—if and when the only dialogue (or peace) is the one controlled and manipulated by transnational capitalist hegemony (Gram-sci's “non-coercive coercion”), when the discrepancy between the hyperrich and hyperpoor grows by the nanosecond, and when all of us (meaning by “all of us,” all of us) run the risk of collaborating with it and of ignoring or concealing this simple fact.
“Gripped as we are by the vortex of this war-time, our information onesided, without distance from the mighty transformations which have already occurred or are beginning to occur, and without a sense of the future that is formation,”[75] Freud opened his 1915 “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” as one might today open a reflection on the struggle against capitalist hegemony.[76] And Freud concluded his remarks on “our attitude towards death” with these words:
We remember the old saying: si vispacem, para helium. If you want to obtain [er-halten] peace, prepare for war. It would be timely thus to paraphrase it: Si vis vitam, para mortem. If you want to endure [aushalten] life, be prepared for death.[77]
“Thus: for your death, “Jean Laplanche adds, echoing Heidegger.[78] Yet, he continues,
In the unconscious, death would be always the death of the other, a destruction or a loss we provoke, and we would accede to some intuition of our own mortality only through and ambivalent identification with a loved person whose death we simultaneously fear and desire. … So that, more modestly perhaps in relation to the temptations of the heroic formulation, “If you want life, prepare for death” might be translated as “If you want life, prepare for the
So it is, in conclusion and Waite's own voice, that I salute Zuckert and (her) Gadamer and their discursive practice as triumphant, as currently far more successful than the one I present or represent. God knows, as one used to say, Zuckertian and Gadamerian moderation serves well the unconscious God that is Capital. “Le mart,” as Marx wrote in Capital, “saisit le vif!”[80] And today capitalism remains nothing if not Death Triumphant. Yet I salute, as I began, with the salute of the gladiators: “Those [or we: te salutamus—another variant] who are about to die salute you!” Some among us will take far more solace than others in the fact that among the first required to utter this salute (until one very fine day in 73 B.C.E.) was a person named Spartacus, “the most splendid bloke the entire history of antiquity has to show for itself”[81]—among the many immoderate blokes with whom Hans-Georg Gadamer and his repercussions have not tried to enter into dialogue. Or is this just strategic, more or less eloquent, silence?
NOTES
I would like to thank Bruce Krajewski for his true Gadamerian generositas.
1. Following Foucault's most succinct definition, “Discursive practices are not purely and simply ways of producing discourse. They are embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms for transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them.” Michel Foucault, “History of Systems of Thought” [1970–71], Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 199–204; here 200. In terms more familiar to some, a discursive practice is at once theoria and phronesis. But then note the necessity on our occasion to violate Strauss's great (public) dictum. “In practical matters there is a right of the first occupant: what is established must be respected. In theoretical matters this cannot be. Differently stated: The rule of practice is ‘let sleeping dogs lie,’ do not disturb the established. In theoretical matters the rule is ‘do not let sleeping dogs lie.’” Leo Strauss, On Plato's Symposium [Chicago, fall semester 1959], ed. Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), i. An authentically critical memorial of Gadamer requires thztphronesisbe treated exactly like theoria. Prod all the dogs and dare the consequences. (Memorialized communists should be so lucky.) [BACK]
2. I am thinking here specifically of the work of Balibar and Negri on the imbrication of philosophy and politics in Spinoza, but also more generally of what today is called “the new Spinoza.” See Etienne Balibar, “Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses” [1982], in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before
3. Cited in Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem andFoucault [1969–72], trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1975), 34. Whatever Gadamer does discuss he illuminates. But, of course, as he is the first to acknowledge, he does not illuminate it fully, and to illuminate one thing is necessarily to obscure another. And there is much that Gadamer does not discuss, and hence does not illuminate and so obscures in another way. But all this is true grosso modo of any philosopher. More specifically, as put by Stanley Rosen: “At his best, namely, in presenting his textual analyses, Gadamer demonstrates that the gift of understanding is indeed superior to method, and even, thanks to his own phronesis or prudentia, to an internally incoherent theoretical foundation. When Gadamer is illuminating about Plato, Dilthey, or Heidegger, it is because the doctrine oi Horizontverschmehungis, erroneous, just as its philological equivalent, the relativity of historical perspectives, is erroneous. Both fall short of the ontological complexity of history, which is intelligible despite its multiplicity of perspectives.” Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 165. For the further development of this argument, see Rosen, “Horizontverschmelzung,” in PHGG2O7-i8. [BACK]
4. Cited from Betty Ramsey, ed., The Little Book of Famous Insults (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper, 1964), 49. [BACK]
5. Compare “Amicus Plato, sed magis arnica veritas” (I am a friend of Plato, but a greater friend of truth) (Cervantes, Don Quixote, pt. 2, ch. 48); and “Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed praehonoranda veritas” (I am a friend of Plato, and a friend of Socrates, but still higher to be honored is the truth) (Luther, “De servo arbitrio,” i). This phrase had passed (via Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics) to Cervantes and to Luther (and to Nietzsche's Zarathustra) from the Platonic Socrates himself: “u|o.ei |o.evToi, av e|a.oi Tiet9r|a9e, a|a.ixgov cpgovftaavTe Zooxgafoui;, jir\q Se ctXr|9eiai; TTOU |a.aXXov” (But you, when you follow me, concern yourselves far less about Socrates, and much more about the truth) (Phaedo gic). Another explicit adherent to this principle was the communist Louis Althusser. See “Portrait du philosophe material-iste” [i()82],mEcritsphilosophiquesetpoKtiques, Tomel, ed. Francois Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994), 581–82; here 582. Gadamer's eponymous essay on what we can now call the “amicus sed principle” is one of his many reconstructions of Aristotle's responses to Plato. Because “the authentic Platonic philosophy [was] never fixed in writing” it must be reconstructed “not only qua Plato's dialogic form but also through his student Aristotle's written interpretations.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Amicus Plato magis arnica veritas” [1968] (GW6: 71–89; here 74). But what Gadamer does not address are the consequences for his own truth, his own discourse. For a powerful, albeit brief and indirect, critique of Gadamer's definition of the political in Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteks (1978), see Reiner Schiirmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy [1982], trans. Christine-Marie Gros and the author (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 328, n. 30. Finally,
6. Too, as pleased as Waite imagines Gadamer might have been at receiving a festschrift in his honor, Waite also imagines a certain unease on Gadamer's part, given the ancient (not to mention psychoanalytic) tradition that to honor a living person is also in effect to produce that person's epitaph. Furthermore, presented with any essay containing uncritical celebrations of his work, Gadamer (still in Waite's imagination) would find himself in the position of the fourth-century B.C.E. Athenian general and statesman Phocion, who, upon hearing the applause of the crowd he was addressing, famously is said to have muttered to one side, “What asininity could I have uttered that they applaud me thus?” (In his case, however, Phocion was later sentenced, like Socrates, to die by hemlock and was buried outside Athenian walls). Gadamer has earned a certain right not to suffer fools gladly, be they adversaries or friends. Finally, whatever one might think of it theoretically or practically, what Gadamer intends by “dialogue” is a very specific, rigorously argued philosophical principle that has little or nothing to do with the touchy-feely, New Age “Let's dialogue!”—even though the latter can, and sometimes does, appeal to Gadamer for philosophical legitimation. For an apposite (if necessarily schematic) depiction of the tension in Gadamer's writing and personal demeanor between boldness and modesty, combativeness and the desire to please “all possible audiences,” as well as a fair but tough-minded analysis of his “detached opportunism,” see George Steiner, “But Is That Enough? Hans-Georg Gadamer and the ‘Summons to Astonishment,’” Times Literary Supplement (January 12, 2001): 11–12; here 12. Gadamer's “opportunism” may not have been as “detached” as Steiner makes it out to be, however. (He sure was wrong about Heidegger in that regard.) [BACK]
7. Alan Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil [1998], trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 24–25. For more on the theoretical and practical consequence of this Denh und Berufsverbot, see Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis) use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001) and Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September n and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002). [BACK]
8. Of course, the history of philosophy provides many versions of what this second virtue (virtus) might be. In the case of Gadamer, for example, a Machiavellian cynic might define it, in part, as the willingness to practice also a certain degree of immoderation when the case demands, as occurred during the Third Reich with which Gadamer, by his own admission, voluntarily collaborated, at least initially-but let us all strive not to be just cynical Machiavellians. [BACK]
9. It is important to add that most of the following argument applies equally well to what remains today of the Frankfurt School's “critical theory” (e.g.,Jiirgen Haber-mas and Axel Honneth) and to its current “debate” with Anglo-Saxon “Left Rawl-sianism.” For a useful short critique of their unacknowledged common ground, see Alessandro Ferrara, “Left Rawlsianism and Social Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy 91 (Sept./Oct. 1998): 30–32—even though the author ultimately falls into the same
10. Aporia is intimately related to the dialectic (dialektike) and therefore also to the (Platonic) Socrates' technique of interlocutory dialogue (dialogos) (Meno, Sod; Sophist, 2443; Theaetetus, 2iob-c). For Aristotle, this entire process both defines the philosophical project proper and is its heaviest burden and responsibility (Metaphysics, gg6a). By contrast, as it is commonly used in much contemporary decon-structive discourse (e.g., de Man and his uncritical followers—unlike Jacques Der-rida, who has written explicitly on some of the term's complexity in Aporias: Crossing Aesthetics [1993], trans. Thomas Dutoit [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993]), “aporia” today widely means simply “insurmountable impasse.” And so it is that the (ancient Greek) terminus a quo or birth of philosophy has become philosophy's (postmodern) terminus ad quern or death. If there be any “epistemological break” in history, this is it. [BACK]
11. That Gadamer is aware of the problem of esotericism should go without saying (see, e.g., Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Dialektik und Sophistik im siebenten Platon-ischen Brief” [1964]; GW6:90–115). The question however, remains: did Gadamer also use esotericism? [BACK]
12. The Lacanian thesis that “there is no metalanguage” is shared by both Der-ridean poststructuralism and Gadamerian hermeneutics, albeit, in Lacan's own case, “in a way that is completely incompatible with post-structuralism, as well as hermeneutics.” Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 153. [BACK]
13. One might say that one of the most basic impulsions of Waite's engagement with Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism is derived from a single remark by Trotsky: “How can a corpse be entrusted with deciding whether Marxism is a living force? No, I categorically refuse to participate in that kind of endeavor.” Leon Trotsky, “The Future of Partisan Review: A Letter to Dwight MacDonald” [1938; first published 1950], in Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, ed. Paul N. Siegel (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 101–3; here 103. [BACK]
14. See DDe here, esp. 52–54, and Lawrence K. Schmidt, “Introduction: Between Certainty and Relativism” (SRi-ig, esp. 12–13). Incidentally, the reason Waite normally puts the terms “right” and “left” in scare quotes is in the attempt (failed it appears) to preclude a Zuckert from removing them to assert, say, that “Waite locates Gadamer on the right on the basis of Orozco's article [but also her book].” The scare quotes are intended by Waite to indicate that in certain cases, like the case of Nietzsche, the “right” and the “left” are part of an unacknowledged consensus in important respects, hence that there is no distinction between them, hence no real left, though perhaps therefore a real right. (“Vulgar Marxists,” in this view, are not merely economistic reductivists but also include those who ignore even the existence of the right's exo/esotericism.) One could add to this reason for the scare quotes that to be “left” or “right” in philosophy is not necessarily to be “right” or “left” elsewhere, say, in politics. [BACK]
15. See the hostile account of Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), but also the sympathetic account of Lawrence Lam-pert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). [BACK]
16. Leo Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit
17. See, for example, Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy? [1955], in What Is Political Philosophy 1? and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 9–55- [BACK]
18. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 234. [BACK]
19. Rzdiou, L'etre et I'evenement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 312. [BACK]
20. Gadamer, “Oberflachlichkeit und Unkenntnis: Zur Veroffentlichung von Victor Farias,” in Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gesprdch, ed. Giinther Neske and Emil Kettering (Pfullingen: Neske, 1988), 152–55; here 153. See, further, Victor Farias, Heidegger und der Nazionalsozialismus, trans, (from the Spanish and French) Klaus Laermann, introduction byJiirgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1987). It was of course the publication of Farias's book that launched the most recent, ongoing version of I'affaire Heidegger. Because Gadamer has been subsequently implicated, it is important to say something about this affair and his reaction. The main title of Gadamer's indignant response in Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gesprdch translates as “superficiality and ignorance,” which would likely be his retort to attempts to embroil him in the same controversy. In any event, Gadamer joined in the outright rejection of Farias that cut across the ideological spectrum, forming a united front of Gadamerians, Derridians, and Levinasians, among others. Two claims made by this consensus are noteworthy, i) Farias's work was nothing more than an opportunist succes de scandale. Arguing guilt by association, when not based on factual errors, it contributed “nothing new” to what had long been “common knowledge” about Heidegger's “brief” political involvement in National Socialism. 2) Farias's work lacked any conceptual merit, and thus was unable to articulate the political to the philosophical in any convincing way. In particular, Heidegger's masterpiece, Being and Time, remains wholly unsullied by the (merely alleged) political
21. Compare also this remark: “Where Heidegger's startlingly nihilistic thinking places no barrier in his way toward Nazism and may even encourage him, Gadamer's thinking most certainly places a barrier in his way. Everything in Gadamer's thinking points him away from Nazism, not in the direction of mass popular democracy certainly, but surely in the direction of the well-integrated political community. If Gadamer did have a flirt with Nazism, it can only be accounted for in terms of the career ambitions of a young German academic.” Robert R. Sullivan, Political Hermeneutics: The Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 180–81. Of course, the contradiction in this judicious-sounding remark is that if someone “flirts” with something, then it cannot be—logically or psychoanalytically—that “everything” in that person points away from that object of flirtation; too, “career ambitions” cannot be so neatly severed from “thinking” if it is to more than a merely academic pursuit, and if “the well-integrated political community” in question is to exclude “mass popular democracy.” Similarly, what evidence is there, exactly, that the Gadamer who, in Sullivan's words, “wrote in an Aesopian political language similar to Bakhtin … until the collapse of the German state in 1945” (p. 187), did not persist in writing in such a language after 1945? This question is aside from the notorious problem haunting current
22. Gadamer, “Oberflachlichkeit und Unkenntnis,” 153. [BACK]
23. Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 103. [BACK]
24. See Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky [1918], Collected Works, various translators (Moscow: Progress, 1972), 28: 227–326; here 235. [BACK]
25. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 276. [BACK]
26. Contrast Zuckert's own position with a thesis from the recent history of science: “There is no idea, however ancient and absurd that is not capable of improving our knowledge. The whole history of thought is absorbed into science and is used for improving every single theory. Nor is political interference rejected. It may be needed to overcome the chauvinism of science that resists alternatives to the status quo.” Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge [1975] (Verso: London, 1978), 47. [BACK]
27. Gadamer, “Reply to Karl-Otto Apel” (PHGGg4-g7; here 97). [BACK]
28. For a recent discussion of this distinction and its import, see Zizek, “Multi-culturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (Sept./Oct. 1997): 28–51; esp. the conclusion. [BACK]
29. If Waite can be forgiven his momentary lapse, in the footnote alluded to, into humanism (with regard to the question of his “sadness” concerning the Gadamer case), we can continue with the structural problem at hand. Undoubtedly Waite could and certainly should have been more clear: Orozco's suggestion that Gada-mer's writings in the Third Reich constituted an “art of allusion” would, Waite believes, have been strengthened by more attentiveness to the long tradition of philosophy in which Gadamer was arguably working, and by more consideration both of how Gadamer and this tradition strive to implement this “art” rhetorically (the illocutionary level) and also of how this implementation is successful (the perlocu-tionary level). By distinct contrast, the use-value of Zuckert's discussion of “postmodern Platos” is almost obviated by her failure to take adequate stock of this tradition. In other words, generally and specifically, Orozco's argument would be strengthened by attentiveness to the Straussian technique of reading, which is not the Strauss Zuckert appears to know. In short, Waite is in basic solidarity with Orozco's attempt to develop a methodology adequate to grasp the exo/esoteric tradition, though he thinks it could be elaborated; he is not in solidarity with Zuckert's apparent lack of interest in this entire problematic. Certainly, Zuckert nowhere follows Strauss's great dictum, articulated with regard to Plato but also more generally binding, that “One cannot separate the understanding of Plato's teaching from the understanding of the form in which it is presented. One must pay as much attention to the How as to the What. At any rate to begin with one must even pay greater attention to the ‘form’ than to the ‘substance,’ since the meaning of the ‘substance’ depends on the ‘form.’” Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 52. [BACK]
30. For a preliminary attempt to identify, analyze, and criticize Heidegger's version exo/esotericism, near its public inception, see Geoff Waite, “On Esotericism: Heidegger and/or Cassirer at Davos,” Political Theory 26, no. 5 (Oct. 1998): 603–51. [BACK]
31. On the fascists' self-definition as “relativists” (explicitly opposed to National Socialist racist essentialism), see Waite, Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 211–12; on the link of both to what he calls “the fascoid” and “the fas-coid liberal,” see 71–76. For his part, Waite adheres to what Zizek, developing a point argued by Badiou, calls “Lenin's premise—which today, in our era of postmodern relativism, is more pertinent that ever,” namely, “that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: the universal truth of a concrete situation can be articulated only from a thoroughly partisan position; truth is, by definition, one-sided.” Zizek, “Afterword: Lenin's Choice,” 177. (To be sure, the undergirding thesis here is little more than a plausible interpretation of Heraclitus's fragment 641 [Diels-Kranz] when we include its site of enunciation: “Listening to the Logos, and not to me, it is wise to agree that all things are one.”) Yes, this position is mutatis mutandis—that is., formally—similar to the position against relativism in adamant favor of “standpoints,” as taken by Heidegger in the Third Reich. See, especially, Heidegger, Logik alsdieFragenachdem Wesen der Sprache [Freiburg winter semester 1934], ed. Wilhelm Hallwachs, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), 38: 79–80. On the other hand, as is clear from public lectures delivered by Heidegger in 1934 (first published only in 2000), he understood the content of National Socialism—indeed its very “essence”—to be the reproduction and preservation of (pro-Nietzschean and anticommunist) “order of rank” (Rangordnung). Heidegger, “25. Jahre nach unserem Abirturium” [May 26–27, 1934] and “Die deutsche Uni-versitat” [August 15–16, 1934], both in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 1910–1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 16: 279–84 (here 282) and 285–307 (here 304), respectively. It would have been interesting to know what Gadamer's own position in 1934 on this problem was in detail, since he cannot not have had one. If the following remark is true of political theory it is mutatis mutandis true of all theory. “The theoretician of the political must be a political theoretician. A treatise about the political can only be … a political treatise, determined by enmity and exposing itself to enmity.” Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue [1988], trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4. [BACK]
32. Fully two-thirds (66 percent) of German philosophy professors were members of the combined NSDAP, NSLB, and NSDDB (National Socialist Lecturers Union). Breaking down the Thousand Year Reich into three periods (1933–37, con ~ solidation of power; 1933–42, stabilization; and 1943–45, collapse), it has been noted that between May 1933 and May 1937 new membership in the NSDAP was practically closed. Anyone joining after May 1937 had had to petition several years earlier; anyone joining between January 1933 and May i, 1933, had to have undergone two years of trial membership in order to be admitted (otherwise one's political commitment was held suspect). See George Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext: Ge-samtuberblich zum NS-Engagement der Universitdtsphilosophen, trans. Rainer Alisch and Thomas Laugstien (Hamburg: Argument, 1993), 17–27; on Gadamer specifically, see 40–41. Other useful historical surveys of the situation and activities of German philosophers during the Third Reich include: the anthology Deutsche Philosophen 1933, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Hamburg: Argument, 1989), esp. Haug's introductory
33. See Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext, 20–22. [BACK]
34. Johannes Maria Verweyen, a professor of medieval philosophy at Bonn, joined the NSLB in June 1933. He had fought on the front in World War I, had publicly supported the German Socialist Party (SPD) (though was not a party member), and had remained a Freemason and a Catholic. After he was expelled from the NSLB in 1935, largely for the latter reason, his response was to give a public speech against Nazi racist ideology in Dresden. After several warnings and restrictions, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941. First interred in Sachsenhausen, Verweyen died in Bergen-Belsen shortly before the liberation, in March 1945. [BACK]
35. Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext, 105 n. i. Unbescholten, translated here as “respectable,” also signifies several senses of “guiltless” and “innocent.” In German legal discourse, unbescholten sein is “to be free of any prior conviction”; in sexual discourse, ein unbescholtenes Mddchen is “a chaste or pure girl.” (Though of course the NSLB charter referred to masculine teachers and educators only.) Thus one might say that the Nazis and their affiliates combined legal with sexual terminology to arrive at what in such charters was meant primarily and specifically as racial innocence, purity, or “respectability.” Presently we will hear Gadamer retroactively describing himself in the Third Reich as “ein politisch Unbescholtener.” [BACK]
36. Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext, 40. The DNVP had been instrumental in bringing Hitler into legal power on January 30, 1933. Indeed, initially the NSDAP and the DNVP held power jointly, until the latter was deemed redundant, dissolved, and absorbed into the NSDAP in the spring of 1933. In the words of Leaman, “The DNVP was a conservative, anti-communist, and anti-parliamentarian oriented party, which had many objectives in common with the Nazis: the revocation of the Treaty of Versailles, the rejection of the Weimar Constitution, and the founding of authoritarian central rule. It was a militant National Socialist organization, which just like the Nazis was convinced that Germany had only lost the first world war because liberals, socialists, and Jews had ‘ambushed’ the Imperial regime and its army … ; it supported the building of concentration camps for domestic opponents of the regime and the laws against the German Jews” (Heidegger im Kontext, 18). [BACK]
37. Ibid., 40 [BACK]
38. Ibid., 40, 105. [BACK]
39. Ibid., 105. [BACK]
40. In 1938 Gadamer, who tells only part of this story himself in Philosophische Lehrjahre (Philosophical apprenticeships) and elsewhere, became visiting professor at Leipzig, replacing Gehlen (who became section head of the Amt Rosenberg, and was later chair of the German Philosophical Society). With Gehlen's approval, in
41. For the complete list of signatories from the philosophy profession, see Lea-man, Heidegger im Kontext, 100. [BACK]
42. Hugo Ott has argued that Heidegger's signature on this declaration, combined with his speech on its behalf (Gadamer did not go this far), was “the worst publicly expressed aberration of the philosopher.” Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographic (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1988), 196; emphasis added. [BACK]
43. In addition to Gadamer, other professors granted the much-desired and difficult-to-obtain privilege of foreign travel included Hans Freyer (who was not officially in either the NSDAP or the NSLB, but, as Gadamer also notes, was an avid supporter of the regime), Nicolai Hartmann (a member of neither organization), Hans Heyse (a member of both organizations), and Erich Rothacker (also in both organizations). Gadamer was also granted the privilege of publishing during the Third Reich: between 1934 and 1944 he published two books and some eleven articles. [BACK]
44. Gadamer, as cited in the interview “’ … die wirklichen Nazis hatten doch iiberhaupt kein Interesse an uns': Hans-Georg Gadamer im Gesprach mit Dorte von Westernhagen,” Das Argument 182 (July-Aug. 1990): 543–55; here 551. [BACK]
45. Laugstien, Philosophieverhdltnisse im deutschen Faschismus, 186. [BACK]
46. Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 125. It should go without saying that for now this question must remain unanswered (hard enough to pose it). [BACK]
47. Gadamer, “Reply to Herta Nagl-Docekal” (PHGG2O5–6; here 206). [BACK]
48. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 70. But also consider the popular adage, “Cunsigghia siminari, ma tu nun siminari” (recommend sowing but don't you sow); or, more germanely translated, “recommend dialogue, but don't enter into real dialogue, and thus sow your monologue surreptitiously.” Which in turn follows another adage (the thought is at least as “old” as Sun Tsu and at least as “new” as Nietzsche and Heidegger): “Cui nun sapi finciri nun sapi vinciri” (he who doesn't know how to feign, doesn't know how to win). Finally, note that when Zuckert attributes to Waite the “[insistence] that ‘philosophy’ consists in a monologue designed to form the thoughts and deeds of others, by any means available,” he should modestly decline the attribution of this position to himself and a fortiori decline any claim of having invented it—out of deference to Plato, just for starters. [BACK]
49. Gadamer, “Reply to Robin May Schott” (PHGGsoS). [BACK]
50. Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 4. [BACK]
51. Compare Paul Celan, “Schibboleth” [1954], in Von Schwelk zu Schwelk (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1955), 55–56. Originally the shibboleth of French soldiers at Verdun in World War I, Nopasaran! was adapted as battle cry in the Spanish Civil War by the Spanish Communist leader Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria) and subsequently by the Republicans and the International Brigade (see further Peter Horst Neumann, ZurLyrikPaul Celans [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968], 59). Gadamer does not mention this line in his commentaries on Celan. [BACK]
52. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 42. [BACK]
53. See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy [1970], trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 125. [BACK]
54. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960 [1986], trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 31 1–25. [BACK]
55. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction” [1 844], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, various translators (New York: International, 1976), 3: 175–87; here 178. [BACK]
56. See Gadamer, “Wertethik und praktische Philosophic” [1982] (GW4: 203–15). [BACK]
57. As Zizek has correctly noted in related regard, “precisely as Marxists, we should have no fear in acknowledging that the purges under Stalin were in a way more ‘irrational’ than Fascist violence: paradoxically, this very excess is an unmistakable sign that Stalinism, in contrast to Fascism, was the case of a perverted authentic revolution.” Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism’? 127–28. [BACK]
58. Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 228. [BACK]
59. Althusser's relationship to Nietzsche is very complex, as is being revealed by the publication of his aeuvre posthume, and is part of his version of exo/esotericism (see note 62). Much needs to be said about this, on another occasion; suffice it here to say that this relationship should not be trivialized by ad hominem and self-serving anecdotes, as occurs in Derrida, “Text Read at Louis Althusser's Funeral” [1990], trans. Robert Harvey, in The Althusserian Legacy, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993), 241–45; here 244. [BACK]
60. From an article by Gramsci in La Cittd Futura, 1917; as cited in Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary [1965], trans. Tom Nairn (London: NLB, 1970), 107. [BACK]
61. For one of many of Althusser's published criticisms of Stalinism, much the most succinct, see his introduction, “Unfinished History,” in Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science 1? The Case ofLysenko [1976], trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, [BACK]
62. See, for example, Althusser, “Le courant souterrain du materialisme de la rencontre” [1982], in Ecrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome I, 539–79, and Sur la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). When one is aware of Althusser's “esoteric” commitment to the aleatory, however, all his published “exoteric” work takes on new meaning, since “aleatory” indications infuse it everywhere. [BACK]
63. According to Gadamer, “The stubborn clinging to prejudices or even the blind appeal to authority is nothing but the laziness to think. Nobody who thinks for himself will deceive himself about this” (“Reply to David Detmer” [PHGG287]). [BACK]
64. As even his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge acknowledged, not the least reason for Bonhoeffer's delay in resisting National Socialism was what Bethge calls the “theoretical anti-Judaism” that so deeply informed his thought (cited and discussed in Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. i: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 [New York: Harper Collins, 1997], 45–46). [BACK]
65. Cited from The Little Book of Famous Insults, 5 1. [BACK]
66. Compare also Gillian Rose's remark that “if the nothingness of death is presented in Heidegger as the ‘possibility of impossibility,’ and in Levinas as ‘the impossibility of possibility,’ and in Blanchot as two deaths, one possible, one impossible,
67. Gadamer, “Der Tod als Frage” [1975] (GW4:161–72; here 172). [BACK]
68. Gadamer, “Die Erfahrung des Todes” [1983] (GW4:288-94; here 294). [BACK]
69. See, for instance, Alfred Hitchcock's most explicitly “Nietzschean” film, Rope (1948). And most of the history of Western philosophy is haunted by the question of the precise nature of the relationship of Socrates to Alcibiades—was the “tyrant” exo/esoterically/oHowmg and/or betraying his teacher? Was he not, in either case, a corps/e—like all of Nietzsche's own corps/es centuries later? [BACK]
70. As the master of propaganda, Goebbels, memorably put it in March 1933, the strong state does not need overt propaganda, which indeed is a sign of weakness: “The best propaganda is not that which is always openly revealing itself; the best propaganda is that which as it were works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge at all of the propagandistic initiative.” Cited in Julian Petley, Capital and Culture: German Cinema 1933–45 (London: BFI, 1979), 101 Note that Zuckert, in her response to Orozco and Waite, tends to reduce the historical phenomenon of Nazism to “brutal power politics” (to which Gadamer was quite obviously opposed, and certainly did not explicitly support)—a reduction that effectively conceals the complexity and success of National Socialist and fascist “hegemony,” or what Gramsci also called “non-coercive coercion,” and which enabled at least fascism to survive its defeat in war, within other forms of capitalism. [BACK]
71. See, again, Gadamer, “Reply to Robin May Schott” (PHGGsoS). [BACK]
72. Gadamer, Plato und die Dichter [1934] (GWs: 187–211; here 187). This monograph is of course one of Orozco's main exhibits, both in her essay in this anthology and in her book, Platonische Gewalt. [BACK]
73. Badiou, Ethics, 25, 20, 21. [BACK]
74. Is there a solution or an alternative to relativism? Is there any beyond the reversion to essentialism, fundamentalism, or totalitarianism? It helps to begin by reformulating the question in Althusserian terms. Referring to the apparent disjunction between the fact and the effect of Spinoza's ruthlessly deductive more geometrico, Althusser asks, “How then could dogmatism not only result in the exaltation of freedom but also ‘produce’ it?” (“The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza” [ca. 1985], in The New Spinoza, 3–19; here 4). The suggestion here would be that true philosophy (like the best science and mathematics) does not, and should not, begin and end with more or less vapid appeals to “dialogue” that conceal class and other interests, and thus are not genuine dialogues at all; rather, true philosophy begins dogmatically—but it is a dogmatism that is not, in principle, exo/esoterically disguised as “dialogue,” and only in order to prepare for more genuine, maximally free and accessible dialogues. For a very preliminary attempt to distinguish Marxist and communist “relativism,” “constructivism,” and “exo/esotericism” from other types, see Waite, “On Esotericism.” [BACK]
75. Sigmund Freud, “ZeitgemaBes iiber Krieg und Tod” [1915], in Gesammelte Werhe [1946], ed. Anna Freud et al. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1981), 10: 323–55; here 324. [BACK]
76. Note, in this context, the tightly linked trajectory formed in communist discourse: from Gramsci's vision from his fascist prison cell in 1930 that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 276); through Althusser's 1977 thesis, describing and appropriating Gramsci's Machiavelli, that what is necessary is not to “think the accomplished fact … but rather … the fact to be accomplished … and under extraordinary circumstances, since these are the conditions of the absence of any political form appropriate to the production of this result” (Althusser, “Machiavelli's Solitude” [1977], trans. Ben Brewster, Economy and Society 17, no. 4 [Nov. 1988]: 468–79; here 472–73); and, finally, to Antonio Negri's depiction of “the scandal of pretending to enact a revolution in the absence of all its conditions and the provocation of always telling a revolutionary truth that is unacceptable to the given conditions” (“Notes on the Evolution of the Last Althusser,” trans. Olga Vasile, in Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition, ed. Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio [Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996], 51–68; here 54). [BACK]
77. Freud, “ZeitgemaBes iiber Krieg und Tod,” 355. [BACK]
78. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis [1970], trans. Jeffrey Mehl-man (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 6. [BACK]
79. Ibid. [BACK]
80. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, preface to the first German edition [1867], ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1967), i: 7–11; here 9. Marx concludes this preface by citing Dante (Inferno 5: 17): “Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti” (Go your way, and let people talk). [BACK]
81. “In the evening for relaxation Appian's Roman Civil Wars in the original Greek. Very valuable book…. Spartacus emerges as the most splendid bloke [der famoseste Kerl] the entire history of antiquity has to show for itself. Great general (no Garibaldi), noble character, true representative of the ancient proletariat.” Marx to Engels, February 27, 1861, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Der Briefwechsel, ed. D. Rjazanov (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), 3: 14–16; here 15. (Alas, Garibaldi succeeded where Spartacus had not, to invade and conquer Sicily.) [BACK]