Gadamer's Repercussions "ss2.16"

ON THE PROXIMITY OF THE GOOD

Gadamer is a classicist who follows Plato in conceiving the ethical as the desire for the good, but his classicism is (like Levinas's) a return to Plato rather than a continuation of a certain reception of Plato within the history of philosophy. (Tradition is not repetition.) Thus in The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy Gadamer reads Plato against Aristotle's charge that Plato's conception of the good is a supreme but empty Gsropia divorced from human life. It is true that in the Republic (5086) the good is the sun that radiates throughout the world but is inaccessible in itself. But in the later dialogues Plato's concern shifts away from the good as such. What matters to Plato in the Phikbus, Gadamer says, “is not the idea of the good but the good in human life” (GW7:144/1630). The desire for the good is not meant to take us out of the world but to enable us to inhabit it in the right way. The good is not a “supreme mathema” indifferent to human concerns; on the contrary, it is the human “turning away from the realm of the ideal to what is best in reality” (GW7:144/1630). The good is thus not an object of |j,a6s|j,a. “In the Philebus,” Gadamer says, “the good has precisely the function of providing practical orientation for the right and just life as this life is a mixture of pleasure and knowing” (GW7:145/1631). “Knowledge of the good,” Gadamer says, “is always with us in our practical life” (GW7:159/1657). In this respect the good as Plato (and Gadamer with him) conceives it is very close to Levinas's notion of a sens beyond being, which is likewise an orientation or movement rather than an idea.

For Levinas the good is also always with us, but it is so specifically and exclusively in the face of the other, which inspires in us the movement of one-for-the-other, that Levinas, citing the Philebus (506), characterizes as a desire “that is conditioned by no prior lack” (HAH48/CPPg5). In other

― 48 ―

words, Levinas translates Plato's ethical desire for the good into the gratuitous desire for the other—gratuitous because it is not an expression of need but a transcendence of self-interest, a disinterestedness, a generosity, and, pointedly, not an appetite (HAH49/CPPg4/Tel21-237x132-35). For Levinas, as for Gadamer, the good is not inhuman; on the contrary, to be human, says Levinas, is to be “elected by the good,” that is, summoned to a responsibility beyond being, that is, a responsibility prior to (and founda-tional for) every norm of conduct (AE 194-95/0x15122). Levinas thus thinks of himself as reversing the “antiplatonism”—that is, the histori—cism-of Heideggerian phenomenology and of much of poststructuralist thinking, with its Nietzschean emphasis on the social construction of the subject and the corresponding discovery of local interests underlying objective norms. Ethics as “non-indifference to the other” (AEi42/OTB89), Levinas says, “marks a return to Greek wisdom” (AE6o/OTBioi). The other who confronts me is “beyond being” (STTSXSWCI i&C, ouaiac;), that is, irreducible to representation, on the hither side of the history of being and the dissemination of moralities: “the beyond [au-deld] … is not ‘another world’ behind the world…. The beyond is precisely beyond the ‘world,’ that is, beyond every disclosure, like the One of the first hypothesis of the Par-menides, transcending all cognition, be it symbolic or signified” (HAH62/ CPPiO2). But now the One is no longer remote, supersensible, or inaccessible to the human; on the contrary, the One—the Good—is that which touches me at the level of sensibility, that is, as “an event of proximity rather than of knowledge” (DEHH225/CPPi 16). The “beyond” is, for Levinas, beneath or on the “hither side” of the world as a theme of disclosure. This is what the phrase “otherwise than being” means.

Would Gadamer think this good? I think in the end he might fault Levinas for setting the ethical relation too sharply against hermeneutics—for having, finally, too abstract a conception of the ethical or, indeed, what amounts to the same thing, for having an impoverished conception of hermeneutics, reducing hermeneutics to the purely logical procedure of con-textualization. For Gadamer, understanding constitutes the historical and practical condition for all human relations, social and political as well as ethical. The universal scope of hermeneutics moves from the ground up (rather the way, for Levinas, the ethical relation of proximity and singularity constitutes “the condition for all solidarity” and provides, moreover, for the possibility of justice that makes human life livable after all, even in the aftermath of the Holocaust and in the midst of modernity as “the era of “man-made mass death” (AEiSG/OTBuy).^[31] However, an account that would clarify the ethical as the condition of solidarity would, a Gadamerian might argue, require something very like a detour into hermeneutics.

For example, one might say that from Gadamer's perspective Levinas's conception of the ethical is too purely ethical, not sufficiently social (not

― 49 ―

sufficiently historicized)—a possibility, in fact, to which Levinas himself is clearly responding in those sections of his work where he emphasizes that the ethical relation of one-for-another is not an exclusive or exclusionary “I-Thou” relation (a relation of love, for example). Rather, in the face of the other I always encounter what Levinas calls “the third party,” that is, all the others in the world whose nakedness and destitution constitute a call for justice:

Language as the presence of the face does not invite complicity with the preferred being, the self-sufficient ‘I-Thou’ forgetful of the universe; in its frankness it refuses the clandestinity of love, where it loses its frankness and meaning and turns into laughter and cooing. The third party looks at me in the eyes of the Other—language is justice. It is not that there first would be the face, and then the being it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.” (Tel234/ TI213)^[32]

So (this would be Gadamer's point) the ethical does not and cannot stand by itself, outside of every context, because my responsibility to and for the other cannot stop with the other but opens onto (among other things) politics, where responsibility entails responsiveness to the here-and-now exigencies of social action.

At all events Gadamer glosses the formula “beyond being” (en&x&iva i&C, ouaiac;) by locating it precisely within the here and now. For Gadamer (in contrast to Levinas), “The good is no longer the one” (GW'j: iga/IGi 15). The good belongs to the hermeneutical domain of the “between” where ethics and aesthetics (or, for all of that, cognition and action, theory and practice, the transcendent and the everyday, and so on through whatever list of oppositions one might devise) constitute a mixture that cannot be distilled into distinct orders of reality, much less into separate categories of experience. Here is where Gadamer differs most completely from Habermas, who divides the human life-world into separate cultural districts of science, social practice, and art, over which philosophy is then installed as a quasi-transcendental “guardian of rationality.”^[33] In the context of the Philebus, Gadamer says, ‘“the good,’ which is at the same time ‘the beautiful,’ does not exist somewhere apart for itself and in itself, somewhere ‘beyond.’ Rather, it exists in everything that we recognize as a beautiful mixture. What is viewed from the perspective of the Republic (or the Symposium) is here determined to be the structure of the ‘mixed’ itself. In each case it would seem to be found only in what is concretely good and beautiful” (GW'j: 192-937 IGi 15). This means that the good cannot be conceptualized apart from the question of how one should live within the contingencies in which one finds oneself. Or, in other words, at the end of the day, the question of the good is the question of cpgovrjatc;”.