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.)
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.
4. Cited from Betty Ramsey, ed., The Little Book of Famous Insults (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper, 1964), 49.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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-
18. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 234.
19. Rzdiou, L'etre et I'evenement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 312.
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.
23. Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 103.
24. See Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky [1918], Collected Works, various translators (Moscow: Progress, 1972), 28: 227–326; here 235.
25. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 276.
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.
27. Gadamer, “Reply to Karl-Otto Apel” (PHGGg4-g7; here 97).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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).
37. Ibid., 40
38. Ibid., 40, 105.
39. Ibid., 105.
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.
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.
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.
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.
45. Laugstien, Philosophieverhdltnisse im deutschen Faschismus, 186.
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).
47. Gadamer, “Reply to Herta Nagl-Docekal” (PHGG2O5–6; here 206).
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.
49. Gadamer, “Reply to Robin May Schott” (PHGGsoS).
50. Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 4.
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.
52. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 42.
53. See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy [1970], trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 125.
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.
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.
56. See Gadamer, “Wertethik und praktische Philosophic” [1982] (GW4: 203–15).
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.
58. Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 228.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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]).
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).
65. Cited from The Little Book of Famous Insults, 5 1.
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).
68. Gadamer, “Die Erfahrung des Todes” [1983] (GW4:288-94; here 294).
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?
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.
71. See, again, Gadamer, “Reply to Robin May Schott” (PHGGsoS).
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.
73. Badiou, Ethics, 25, 20, 21.
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.”
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.
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).
77. Freud, “ZeitgemaBes iiber Krieg und Tod,” 355.
78. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis [1970], trans. Jeffrey Mehl-man (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 6.
79. Ibid.
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).
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.)