ON THE POLITY OF EXPERIENCE: TOWARDS A HERMENEUTICS OF ATTENTIVENESS1

Attentive: 1. Concentrating; paying attention, observant awake, 2. assiduously polite. Courteous, courtly, gracious, accommodating, 3. mindful, carefully, alert, heedful, assiduous.

PHILOSOPHICAL hermeneutics is always full of surprises. The thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer invariably turns out on reflection to be more probing and exacting than its genial style might suggest. Indeed, what was said of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, can be said with equal justice of Gadamer: "a quiet, urbane, conservative revolutionary." In this vein, I shall argue that the most significant political element within Gadamer's thought concerns a critical re-invocation of the question of polity. The invocation is of strategic and tactical importance. Strategically speaking, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics aims at a philosophical re-articulation of the transcendental dimensions of polity. The tactical importance of this is that it clarifies what is at stake in the collision between the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of conversation. The hermeneutics of conversation relies upon a notion of a hermeneutic community (polity) and it is, precisely, the nature of this reliance that has been ostracized by the hermeneutics of suspicion. Political critics of philosophical hermeneutics invariably assume that the community in question is traditional and conservative by nature. This, it can be argued, is not necessarily the case at all. The implicit political value of Gadamer's thought ties in its ability not only to challenge conservative assumptions about the nature of a hermeneutic polity but also to articulate a plausible response to the cultural nihilism implicit with the deconstructive hermeneutics of suspicion.

One strength of our proposal is that it avoids entanglement in the customary snares, which beset discussion of the political dimensions of Gadamer's thought. Debate in this area is often hindered by Gadamer's rare and somewhat mandarin-like comments on the political. The political, he once remarked, is that sphere in which one has to choose "between two evils, between possibilities which are not the most appealing" (On Education 147). Genuine debate about the political dimension of philosophical hermeneutics is often difficult because of the intellectually lazy tendency to present Gadamer's thinking as traditionalist if not reactionary. Such loose thinking profoundly misunderstands the critical elements within the concept of tradition (Überlieferung).2 On the other hand, well-meaning liberal defenders of Gadamer's concept of hermeneutic openness often try to distill from it a laudable theory of political plurality, which is itself notoriously vulnerable to accusations of laissez-faire.3 The advantage of thinking about the relationship between Gadamer's thinking and the ancient notion of the polis is that it avoids these customary cul-de-sacs and opens a much richer theme for reflection.

In embarking upon our discussion, we should be clear about the fact that Gadamer's conception of the polis does not reflect any traditional conception of a consensus formed by social contract.4 The latter is, as Weinsheimer correctly notes, a modern subjectivist notion which philosophical hermeneutics strives to escape. Indeed, we shall argue that what is striking about the invocation of polis is that it is capable of surpassing the nihilistic demise of modern subjectivism. Indeed, this ability to surpass the nihilistic consequences of subjectivism contributes to the current political relevance of Gadamer's thought. Since the French Revolution, European political theory has conjured with conflicting views of the future. Whilst conservatism would return us to a lost order, radicalism would propel us into the redemption of a new age. As Gadamer is well aware, Nietzschean skepticism has proved adroit at unmasking the "wills to power" animating both perspectives, indeed, so much so that modern political consciousness tends to seek the hidden agenda in each and every political position. However, the weakness of such skepticism concerns its failure to escape the subjectivism it so ably exposes. It is here that philosophical hermeneutics finds its political purchase. Because Gadamer's philosophy stands on ontological grounds rather than upon the platform of epistemological critique, his thinking about the polis is able to move away from modern subjectivism.

Gadamer's political thinking can move away from modern subjectivism because it is transcendental in style. It pursues the question of how an individual subject is mediated by and can come to have a feeling for that which at the same time exists both within it and yet also reaches far beyond it, i.e. the polis. Philosophical hermeneutics insists that "our actions are situated within the horizon of the polis" and, as Weinsheimer points out, "being situated within" is how Gadamer is inclined to describe our relation to the transcendent, to a supra-individual being which, in the shape of the polis, is both near and far (Hermeneutics ix). In Truth and Method, Gadamer speaks of a substantiality which underlies the subjective and suggests that the task of philosophical hermeneutics is to recover a sense of that which transcends and yet is to be found within the subjective (302). It is our contention that this hermeneutical logic shapes Gadamer's re-invocation of the polis; more specifically, it is the transcendental dynamic of this style of thought which offers a powerful response to deconstructive skepticism. Before we turn to matters of detail, let us briefly outline the direction of our argument.