The Gadamerian Imperative on Div

The Gadamerian Imperative on Diversity in Exchange

Donald E. Hall

West Virginia University

In my recent book The Academic Community: A Manual for Change, I draw on Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics to suggest that dialogue must be considered central to the work that we do as scholars, teachers, and academic community members (in and beyond the service that we perform). In this paper I wish to push that claim even farther. I suggest that without profound theoretical/identity political/epistemological differences in our departments and classroom exchanges all learning is inhibited if not wholly precluded. I speak to this issue from the perspective of someone who has now participated in department and college level administration for 15 years. Indeed, I want to suggest that the injunction to recruit and retain “diverse” faculty and students (recognizing the myriad of ways that “diversity” can manifest itself) falls heavily on those of us who lead departments and other units in universities. Practically, this means working always to complicate and actively challenge the homogenizing forces at work on hiring committees, in faculty review processes, and in student recruitment and retention plans. To my mind, diversity is an a priori for all intellectual work … for everything that we do in a university.

My argument here as elsewhere draws heavily on the work of the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. And by “work,” I mean not only that evinced in his best known philosophical treatises, such as Truth and Method (from 1960), but also his self-reflective pieces, such as his book-length treatment of his early years, Philosophical Apprenticeships (1977, trans. 1985) and “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” his introduction to the massive “Library of Living Philosophers” volume dedicated to his oeuvre, published in 1997. Indeed, by “work,” I mean finally all of the “work” he did as an academic, for what makes Gadamer of particular interest to me as a critic of academic culture is that in discussing his career choices and processes, he also offers implicitly a theory of professional selfhood and communal engagement that actually draws productively on his body of philosophical hermeneutic theory. In detailing dialogue-based processes and practices in his development as a teacher, scholar, and administrator (he served as department chair, dean, and university president), he puts a version of a “hermeneutic circle” into action within a university context, one that depends upon a diverse group of interlocutors.

I want to spend then a few minutes discussing Gadamer generally, as well as his notion of dialogue and critical agency. Gadamer’s life spanned the twentieth century (1900-2002) and while his scholarly output has been highly influential in philosophical circles, his work has been largely ignored in the fields of cultural studies and professional studies. Part of this, as Kathleen Wright argues in a recent volume of feminist interpretations of Gadamer, is attributable to the fact that Truth and Method, while published in Germany in 1960 was only translated into English in 1975, which was particularly unfortunate timing, because, in her words, it was “eclipsed right from the start by the intensity of the discussion about the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida” (40). Yet she and most of the other contributors to that volume argue that Gadamer’s work is long overdue for an assessment by cultural critics because of his core belief in dialogue as the lived functional process by which we gain knowledge of ourselves, our limitations, and our necessary ties of respect and responsibility to others in our social and, I would argue, professional lives. Dialogue—whether we use the term literally or metaphorically—takes us outside of ourselves and, ideally, allows us to return to those selves with a broader and altered vision. A commitment to dialogue allows us, in fact, to live a version of what Gadamer, following others, calls a “hermeneutic circle.” For Schleiermacher, Dilthey and other early hermeneutic theorists, this happens as a reading practice, of course, when we move imaginatively above or beyond the micro-level of the chapter or the passage and place what we are reading there into the context of a larger textual terrain. For Gadamer (following Heidegger), this occurs phenomenologically and as part of mundane existence as we gain knowledge of the limitations of our individual perspectives (or standpoint epistemologies) through encounters with others, either face-to-face or mediated, such as through a reading experience.

This should occur in academic settings as well. As an example, this figuratively circular process is manifest explicitly as a concrete practice in a specific venue that Gadamer, in both of his autobiographical works, notes was called a “home circle,” in which faculty would invite into their homes on a set evening every week colleagues, students, and visiting scholars to converse on a chosen topic. It was a dialogic mechanism that Gadamer participated in for many years as a student and then later adopted as a professor. In a conversational venue a form of hermeneutic circle is experienced when, as he discusses in Truth and Method, the interlocutor puts her or his “prejudices” or presuppositions at risk in seeking out others with whom to share ideas, test one’s notions of reality, and come, through an exchange of viewpoints, to some (even if always imperfect) expanded understanding of one’s own mistakes and misapprehensions (298-99). Risk-taking, especially in this way risking one’s core beliefs and sense of self-satisfaction, demands a certain conscious, even chosen, privileging of the communal over the solipsistic or self-serving . In a sense, Gadamer’s dialogic model represents an ethics of engagement with colleagues, neighbors, and fellow inhabitants of the planet, for as Jean Grondin, his biographer, notes, “As Gadamer often says … ‘The soul [of his philosophy] consists in recognizing that perhaps the other is right’” (Philosophy of Gadamer, 100) or as Gadamer himself states in Truth and Method, we must remain “fundamentally open to the possibility that the [other] is better informed than we are” (294).

In fact, Grondin isolates a key distinction in Gadamer’s later work wherein the philosopher chastises those academics whom he calls “pedants” and distinguishes them from true intellectuals whom he values as “cultivated,” specifically, for their chosen and continuing skepticism about their own opinions. In Gadamer’s words, “The cultured person is the one who is ready to admit as plausible (literally, to value) the thoughts of others…. The cultured person is not the one who displays superior knowledge, but only the one who, to take an expression from Socrates, has not forgotten the knowledge of his ignorance” (qtd Grondin, Philosophy, 25). Indeed, Gadamer goes to great length to demonstrate that he had much to learn from his colleagues throughout his career. As I discuss in The Academic Community, he devotes several chapters in Philosophical Apprenticeships to each of the major philosophers whom he encountered as a student and later academic-in-training, and pinpoints precisely what they taught him, focusing specifically on their dialogic style and eagerness to engage enthusiastically and openly with colleagues and students, seeking and welcoming challenge. Out of these and many other scripts of a teaching and intellectual life, Gadamer constructed what I call in my book a “life plan,” a term that is not actually Gadamerian, but one used by his friend and fellow hermeneutic theorist Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another. While never objectifying other human beings, he nevertheless examined them as texts of sorts, as complex conveyers of meaning whom he must interpret and from whom he could, indeed must, learn. This is a putting into lived practice his theory of philosophical hermeneutics, and which, to my mind, provided a coherence and honesty to a very successful and multi-faceted professional life.

Indeed, Gadamer as institutional citizen, not as world-famous philosopher, offers us also a text from which we might learn. In The Academic Community I look at his career (among others, such as Angela Davis’s and Paul Ricoeur’s) to trace out the central professional and theoretical commitments demonstrated therein. Gadamer was not a revolutionary. During the war, he simply taught his classes at the University of Leipzig under constant threat of imprisonment if he challenged the party more than implicitly in his lectures (he was denounced more than once by students but was never convicted of treasonous behavior). After the war, Gadamer, who had served already as a department chair, was singled out by occupying forces as someone particularly untainted by Nazi policies and beliefs: “The American occupation passed undramatically, and the preparation for the reorganization of the university fell for the most part to me” (PA 103). He soon learned, “I would be the rector [president] chosen to reopen the university. I was duly elected and now began the exhausting, interesting, illusion-rich, and disillusioning work of construction—or was it deconstruction?—of Leipzig University” (104). In the middle of an intellectual career of incredible, but still largely unrealized potential (his major works were published when he was in his sixties), Gadamer, in his mid-forties, chose to devote himself to the mundane and extraordinarily hard work of institutional reform and leadership. I suggest that Gadamer’s devotion to his community, at the temporary expense of his own research and writing, may make him a particularly compelling role model for some of us contemplating a department chairship, a university leadership role, or some other time-consuming assignment. He has already served that purpose for me, several times.

But this returns us also to Gadamer’s notion of dialogue and critical agency, and specifically, dialogue’s usefulness in a process of community-building and intellectual production within an academic institution. In Philosophical Apprenticeships, he discusses at some length the particular necessity that he perceived as an administrator of working to create dialogue-based community across and within academic departments, going on to note that “Today, in the face of the fragmentation of the giant universities, such interdisciplinary efforts have a new [even greater] significance” (122). Such efforts began early in his career and actually point to why he was, in fact, singled out as an effective administrator. He writes of his work at Marburg in the 1930s, at the beginning of his career, in organizing and participating in “one-hour lecture[s] on something of interest from one’s own discipline” “for listeners from all faculties” (122). After he left Leipzig, which he found increasingly uncomfortable when it was actually placed under Russian jurisdiction in what became East Germany (and which is why he mockingly referred to his eventual work there as “deconstructive” rather than “constructive”), he took a post as professor and dean at the University of Heidelberg, where he created his “home circle,” modeling it on his memories of the productive exchanges among faculty, students, and others, that he remembered from his own student years, and in which a dozen or so people would gather weekly to discuss texts of common interest, adding that “There was no ‘teacher’ among us; it was always a free exchange, and we all learned a good deal from it” (140). He notes that “Another feature that I introduced into … Heidelberg … was that of regular guest lecturers … because I wanted to give the philosophy students an opportunity to get to know other teachers, and the discussions that followed were good tests for both participants and listeners” (140). While these may seem rather unremarkable administrative moves to us today, they were revolutionary in the 1930, 40s, and 50s, and are always related implicitly to the theory base underlying his own research. Indeed, he did all of this while not only carrying on his administrative duties, and but also teaching and trying to pursue his own research. As he says, “This is in any case not easy for an academic teacher, and even in those times it demanded a consistent budgeting of personal time, although the number of students and the whole style of the university were not yet comparable with those of today’s mass universities” (139).

Obviously, we today, especially those of us teaching in mass universities, need even more active attention to that process of community building. And in Gadamer’s commentary I find a particularly instructive attention to the practical aspects of nurturing and maintaining a diverse academic community. Dialogue, driven by a sense of one’s own limitations, is indispensable to intellectual community and productivity. This does not mandate consensus. Community is not consensus, as I argue repeatedly in my book (a Gadamerian point also, and one that helps distinguish his work from that of his friend and colleague Habermas); it is, instead, a deep professional commitment to a learning process within our own institutions and to creating structures that nurture dialogue among diverse groups. Indeed, one of the easiest ways any one of us can build community in our departments and colleges is, following Gadamer, by creating venues and events to share our work with each other, work which is usually done in solitary fashion. This does not necessitate a “home circle,” but it does suggest other forms of research-sharing occasions in which we attend to and respond to each other’s work. Of course this happens at mass conferences such as this one and in smaller disciplinary gatherings, but still all too rarely within our home institutions. I’ve created faculty research groups of this sort—workshop groups focusing on imperfect or “rough” drafts of work in progress—at two universities now, and I can attest to their efficacy in creating and maintaining a sense of a living academic community. Such research circles become hermeneutic circles when we use them as chosen risk-taking occasions. The riskier the better, and that means the more diverse the better. Indeed, one objection I often hear from individuals at other universities who have contemplated developing such internal mechanisms for exchange is that they don’t “have enough people in Renaissance to create a Renaissance circle,” or a Medieval circle, or one in 19^th century American literature. That is precisely the wrong expectation and approach.

Such dissensual exchanges are only valuable if that are built on profound difference not sameness. Dissensus, as defined largely by Jean Francois Lyotard (with the help of Ewa Ziarek, Bill Readings, and J. Hillis Miller in various texts of the past decade) is the communal dynamic that produces critical, theoretical, and pedagogical innovation. For administrators, the challenge and imperative is to lay the groundwork for and enliven dissensual exchange while also creating and maintaining an institutional atmosphere wherein respect and civility are highly valued. Indeed, if we recognize that we need, in profound and fundamental ways, the viewpoint of the “other” in order to learn anything about our selves, our limitations, and our mistakes, then we are compelled to respect the “other” as the one who makes our intellectual life possible.

This profound need for the perspective of the other should then drive decisions about recruitment and retention of a highly diverse faculty and student population. And this is my culminating point here. One of the worst implicit criteria involved in faculty hiring processes (and I have led searches now for 30 faculty at two institutions) is the belief that “fit,” narrowly defined, is essential. “Fit” often means evaluating potential faculty members on their ability to mesh seamlessly into a department because they share the same ideological, racial, gender, ethnic, national, cultural, and class background. “Fit” has its place—but only in the sense that one should seek faculty who “fit” comfortably into a diverse and intellectually eclectic and tolerant community. One must seek out and hire faculty who fit into a dynamic of intellectual exchange, non-dogmatic (if nevertheless deeply held) intellectual commitments, and respect for a dynamic in which my intellectual growth is made possible through your challenge, and yours is similarly dependent upon mine.

Furthermore, students are never well-served when their classroom community is made up solely of others “just like them.” Differences in race, sexual orientation, class background, and geographical or national origin can make for very uncomfortable challenges and encounters in the classroom; however, intellectual discomfort is the only well-spring of learning and growth. The most comfortable position to be in is one in which one’s assumptions are reinforced and one’s core beliefs simply validated. That is not learning; that is intellectual stasis. As someone who teaches an introduction to gay and lesbian studies course to sophomores at West Virginia University, which draws 50% of its students from poor in-state communities and 50% from wealthy suburbs of New York and Washington DC, I can attest that my best experiences as a teacher have been when the rural kid challenges the suburban kid on what the thinks he “knows” about queer life, and vice-versa.

Yet all of this begs the question, of course, of how we negotiate disagreements and differences in a civil manner. This again necessitates a communal validation of dissensual engagement as a singular and necessary “good.” If we come to understand and if we can strive to remember that only through encounters with difference can we ever learn anything, then we can (I hope) value difference as the most important single characteristic of a healthy and thriving intellectual community. We must love “the other” for the very reason that she or he challenges us. Without the other, we are trapped in solipsism and paralyzed in and through intellectual isolation. This is what, to my mind, makes Stanley Fish’s recent polemic Save the World on Your Own Time so misguided and even destructive. In loudly demanding a return to transmitting “knowledge” and “skills” in the university classroom (12-13), he defines those terms so narrowly that most students would simply be delivered a variant of the actual example he gives of what happens in his own writing class: grammar instruction (40-49). What Fish has never grasped in any of his writings over the past 30+ years is that dialogic engagement is a necessary skill that is precisely within the purview of what happens in an English department. It is a skill demanding careful listening, consideration of divergent opinions, the weighing of interpretive options, and the displacement of the dogmatic in the search for a notion of “truth” that befits a complicated world. Indeed, Fish should read Gadamer for a more supple understanding of “truth” as wholly dependent upon idiosyncratic and highly variable “method.”

So as we muse on the “future of critical exchange in the academy” in our session, I want us to grapple with the fact that “exchange” can only occur when the parties involved possess different opinions, perspectives, knowledge, and methodological practices. Exchange cannot occur if we are all substantially the same, unless an exchange of compliments is what one seeks. The lesson with which Gadamer leaves us and with which I wish to conclude today is that the foremost rule of the functioning dissensual community (which is again the only definition I would accept of a functioning intellectual community) is that we must embrace the fact that only the other can save us from ourselves.

Works Cited

Fish, Stanley. Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey.” In The Philosophy

of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn. Chicago: Open Court Press,

1997. 3-63.

---. Truth and Method. 2^nd rev. ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall.

New York: Continuum, 2003.

Grondin, Jean. The Philosophy of Gadamer. Trans. Kathryn Plant. Montreal: McGill-

Queens UP, 2003.

Hall, Donald E. The Academic Community: A Manual for Change. Columbus:

Ohio State UP, 2007.

Wright, Kathleen. “(En)gendering Dialogue Between Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and

Feminist Thought.” In Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Ed.

Lorraine Code. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 2003. 39-55.

Donald E. Hall is Jackson Distinguished Professor and Chair of English at West Virginia University. He is the author or editor of 10 books, including Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies, published by Routledge in 2009.