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Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

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Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer

Edited by Lorraine Code (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). 424 pp. $85.00 cloth; $35.00 paper. ISBN: 0-271-02243-4.

Reviewed by Jamey Findling
Newman University, findlingj@newmanu.edu

In this volume, part of a series "Re-Reading the Canon," Lorraine Code has assembled a needed but somewhat uneven collection of fifteen essays that deal with Gadamer and feminism. The best of the contributions are certainly well worth reading, but many of the entries fail to engage in genuinely productive ways with Gadamer’s work. The intended audience seems to be feminists who wonder whether it is worthwhile, in a crowded intellectual marketplace, to read Gadamer seriously, and most of the contributions here take one side or the other of this question. However, judged from this perspective, the volume is only partially successful. To be sure, readers are exposed to a lively and at times productive debate about the value of Gadamer’s work for feminist theorists. But the Gadamer who appears on these pages is far too limited in scope. Readers of this volume who are unfamiliar with Gadamer’s work might well conclude that, outside of the second part of Truth and Method, he had little of importance to say, at least with respect to feminist concerns. In my opinion, this is a serious deficiency that renders this text far less interesting and relevant than it might have been.

The volume begins with a well-crafted introduction in which Code attempts to account for and respond to some of the reservations feminists may have about reading Gadamer. For the most part, these reservations stem from a perception of Gadamer that has its roots in the well-known debate that took place between Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas in the 1960s and 1970s, in which Habermas represented Gadamer as both conservative and naïve. The former charge was based on Gadamer’s attempt to "rehabilitate" the concepts of authority and tradition as repositories of legitimate, meaning-producing Vorurteile, or prejudices, while the latter charge held that Gadamer had ignored the irrational and oppressive role of power in the transmission of culture. While these concerns were and are legitimate, Gadamer’s replies were generally regarded as successfully showing that they did not substantially undermine the concept of tradition that he had elaborated. Nevertheless, the charges have persisted in various forms and, indeed, have become rather widely accepted. Referring to Gadamer as "conservative" is not likely to raise many eyebrows these days. Hence, a sizable portion of this volume is concerned with various considerations of whether Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory lacks adequate critical resources and, if so, how it might be supplemented. The most representative examples of this line of analysis are the contributions by Veronica Vasterling and by Robin Pappas and William Cowling.

One of the more noticeable aspects of this volume was how many of the authors focus on the question of Gadamer’s utility for feminist goals and theorizing. The central issue for these authors is, as Susan-Judith Hoffman puts it, Gadamer’s "usefulness…for feminist projects" (84). (For other examples of this type of language, see Fleming, 110; Hekman, 184; Alcoff, 232; Jantzen, 286; Steele, 335.) Without denying the possibility that this approach can be productive (Steele’s essay is an outstanding example in this regard), I would argue that adopting such a posture exposes the author to the risk of appropriating and even distorting Gadamer rather than interpreting him.

A clear example of the downside of this risk is the essay by Gemma Corradi Fiumara. In "The Development of Hermeneutic Prospects," Fiumara takes Gadamer to task for giving primacy to "the question," which she calls "one of the most coercive figures of language" (134). The problem with questioning, according to Fiumara, is that it decides in advance what sorts of things can and cannot be said by the one being questioned. She thus contrasts it with the more open and, hence, riskier regard of listening—which has, she says, been almost entirely neglected in the Western tradition. In this way, Gadamer is neatly situated within Fiumara’s pre-existing framework, made "useful" as yet another example of how the domineering and risk-averse tradition of Western philosophy has gone astray. Yet this reading itself manifestly fails to listen to Gadamer, inasmuch as Gadamer himself repeatedly warns against precisely the same sort of domineering posture (questioning as interrogation) that Fiumara attacks. In this connection, the essays by Marie Fleming and Robin May Schott also have considerable critical axes to grind but, in the process, unfortunately fail to give Gadamer’s work an adequate hearing.

However, even authors who are sympathetic to Gadamer’s thought sometimes seem to place their own political agendas ahead of the task of interpretation. In "The Ontology of Change," Susan Hekman draws attention to the ontological dimension of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, pointing out that for Gadamer understanding is an ontological event that takes place within the medium of language. Hekman also emphasizes that because the "conversation that we are" is constantly changing, Gadamer’s ontology avoids the modernist appeal to fixed, universal standards of truth. But she misses the mark when she says that Gadamer’s account "provides concrete strategies to effect change" (195). In the first place, the notion that understanding is an "event" reminds us that it is not the achievement of an individual subject, let alone a process that could be brought under any sort of discrete control. Furthermore, Gadamer himself repeatedly disavowed any notion that his hermeneutics could be read prescriptively as articulating any sort of definite method by which to achieve correct understanding. Finally, as Susan-Judith Hoffman rightly points out in her contribution, Gadamer acknowledges the finite, situated character of human understanding by affirming the "political incompetence" of philosophy. In his view it is a basic misconstrual of philosophy to assign it the task of proposing or promoting specific solutions to social and political problems.

One other issue that is prominent in this volume is Gadamer’s dialogical conception of understanding and the related question of the status of the other in hermeneutic theory (see, e.g., the contributions by Kathleen Roberts Wright, Georgia Warnke, Fleming, and Fiumara). This is an important issue and an obvious area for feminist reflection, but, like the discussions of tradition, authority, and prejudice that many of the authors in this volume frequently return to, this issue is also dealt with almost exclusively on the basis of part two of Truth and Method. This exclusivity is unfortunate, since Gadamer has much to say elsewhere that is relevant to these questions (as the work of James Risser clearly demonstrates).

As indicated above, there are a few contributions in this volume that are genuinely rewarding. In particular, Georgia Warnke, Meili Steele, and, to a certain extent, Linda Martín Alcoff find compelling ways to deploy Gadamer’s thought within the context of their own respective interests. While it remains slightly misleading to characterize these essays as "interpretations" of Gadamer, at least in the strict sense, these authors are able to "use" Gadamer in ways that not only avoid distorting his thought but, in some instances, even reflect light back on it. Also worthy of mention here is Kathleen Roberts Wright’s piece, which provides not only a careful response to a feminist critique of Gadamer by Julie Ellison but also a provocative and forward-thinking suggestion about Gadamer’s place in the postcolonial world of the twenty-first century. Finally, Grace M. Jantzen provides an interesting and well-written critique (following Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger) of Gadamer’s emphasis on mortality to the exclusion of natality in his conception of finitude and historicity.

As I have tried to make clear, the volume’s contributors tend to engage with a rather narrow construal of Gadamer and his work that is dominated by the concepts of tradition and alterity as advanced in part two of Truth and Method. To be sure, one can appreciate, for instance, the call for a more critical hermeneutics (even if this is not new; see, e.g., the work of Paul Ricoeur or, more recently, Hans-Herbert Kögler), but there is also some redundancy here that a broader discussion would have helped avoid. To mention only a few of the issues that could have been addressed, or addressed more thoroughly: First, the central position of language in Gadamer’s thought, and especially his profound engagement with poetry, would seem a promising avenue by which to approach questions of the concrete, embodied character of knowing, inasmuch as poetry for Gadamer expresses a truth that cannot be divorced from the particular form of its expression. Second, Gadamer’s extensive work in the history of philosophy provides a firm basis for discussing his conception of tradition. In particular, his radical and unconventional interpretations of Plato clearly show that his notion of tradition has nothing at all to do with dogmatic adherence to the past. Indeed, from this perspective, "re-reading the canon" is as much a Gadamerian concern as a feminist one. Finally, while the relationship between theory and practice in Gadamer’s work is complex and not without ambiguity, it is clearly of central importance there, as it is for feminist thought as well. Gadamer’s disclaimer about the political incompetence of philosophy needs to be questioned more incisively than it has been, and feminist thinkers, attuned as they are to the often covert practical commitments of theoretical claims, would seem to be among those best positioned for such an inquiry.

In conclusion, there is ample opportunity for future engagement on the part of feminist thinkers with Gadamer’s work. One hopes that this volume will be a first step toward an increasingly comprehensive and substantive effort to do just that.

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