Continental Philosophy, 1960 to the Present

Philosophy 374

Paul Fairfield, Queen’s University

© Paul Fairfield 2024

Contents

Part 1: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science

Part 2: Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

Part 3: Jeff Mitscherling and Paul Fairfield, Artistic Creation: A Phenomenological Analysis

Why these three, you ask? For a number of reasons, but largely because Gadamer and Arendt are both second to none within the group of philosophers working in the continental tradition in this general time period, both in terms of their influence and more importantly their profundity, originality, and relevance to our contemporary world. Many others might have been included in this course: Ricoeur, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Habermas, and some others. I do change the philosophers and readings from time to time, but for this year we’ll go with these three. For the third text, I like to go with something more recent; there are many books and philosophers to choose from there, of course, but I think this book ties in well with the first two and will be of interest to you. It also has a lovely cover, which is the best way to judge a book.

PART ONE

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002)

Major works:

1931 - Plato’s Dialectical Ethics

1960 - Truth and Method

1971 - Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies

1976 - Reason in the Age of Science

1976 - Philosophical Hermeneutics

1977 - Philosophical Apprenticeships

1977 - The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays

1980 - Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato

1983 - Praise of Theory: Speeches and Essays

1986 - The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy

1993 - The Enigma of Health

1994 - Heidegger’s Ways

1996 - The Beginning of Philosophy

1997 - Gadamer on Celan

Gadamer’s magnum opus and most important book is Truth and Method (1960), so why have I asked you to read Reason in the Age of Science (1976) instead? Here’s a clue: Truth and Method is 550 pages long. Would you have taken this course if I had asked you to read a 550-page book for the first third of the course, and a book that is no easy read? Perhaps not, so Reason in the Age of Science it is. Plus, Reason in the Age of Science is also an important and major work of his. We can’t ignore Truth and Method though, so what I’m going to do is discuss several of the major themes in that book in what follows and get to Reason in the Age of Science later. If down the road you want to do a serious study of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, you’ll have to read Truth and Method, which is one of the most important texts in continental philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century.

I’m going to ask you to read chapter 1 and chapters 4–8 of Reason in the Age of Science, which comes to about 120 pages. I always begin my courses on continental philosophy by discussing the biography of the philosophers we’re studying because I think it sheds an important light on their thought. Remember that a philosopher isn’t a disembodied reasoning machine but a person who thinks from their experience as we all do. Who was Hans-Georg Gadamer? He was one of the most important philosophers—maybe the most important—of his generation, but who was he? I’m going to draw upon Jean Grondin’s excellent book, Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography.

Biography

Until Gadamer was well into his fifties, he was working very much in the shadow of his teacher, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had placed a large amount of importance on the idea that the human being is not only a rational animal but an understanding animal. He argued that understanding is fundamental to our experience of the world in general; essentially, we cope with the world by understanding it. Understanding is not just what we do but in a sense what we “are” in the sense that it defines our most fundamental mode or way of existing. We live and get by in the world by understanding what things mean for us, and we understand what things mean by means of interpretation. To know something means to have interpreted it—to see it “as” this or that kind of thing. This basic view is one that Heidegger appropriated from Friedrich Nietzsche and Wilhelm Dilthey, among others, and Gadamer would later pick it up from Heidegger and take it further.

It was not until Truth and Method appeared—finally, at the age of sixty—that Gadamer emerged from out of Heidegger’s shadow and showed himself to be a philosopher in his own right and not a disciple. Heidegger had done a great deal, especially in Being and Time, to reconceive hermeneutics—the theory of interpretive understanding—but by the time Truth and Method was published, Heidegger had more or less turned in another direction. Heidegger himself would say, “Hermeneutic philosophy, that is Gadamer’s business.” By this late point in Heidegger’s career (1960), he had gone in a somewhat different direction—more in the direction of a kind of poetic thinking—so Gadamer, in Truth and Method, was not just picking up where Heidegger left off in Being and Time. Instead he was drawing upon a large array of influences: Plato and Aristotle—about whom he was always writing and also teaching—as well as various philosophers in the German tradition: Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Nietzsche (not a lot), Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger.

These are Gadamer’s main influences and we will see repeated references to all of them (and some others) in Reason in the Age of Science and in all his books. This would be typical of Gadamer’s practice as a philosopher: he would never present his ideas as if he came up with them in a vacuum. As a rule, nearly every time he presents an idea or opinion, he attributes it to some (usually dead) philosopher, or his view is a response of some kind to some predecessor. This creates a bit of difficulty for the reader in that often one isn’t quite sure whether he is merely reporting on some dead philosopher’s views or presenting his own. As a rule, he’s doing both simultaneously. It’s terribly important that in thinking and writing, we don’t just argue for our views but trace their history or locate them in the tradition of philosophy. No one thinks in a vacuum. We borrow all our ideas and then transform them in an original way. Thinking itself is an act of borrowing—creative borrowing to be sure, but he’s going to put a strong emphasis on the role of tradition in all thinking. In fact, tradition would emerge as a major theme in Gadamer’s philosophy. We all stand within a tradition—within a perspective (as Nietzsche would say), a lifeworld (as Husserl would say) of language and culture. This tradition influences how we understand ourselves and the world—how we think in general—far more than we realize. The human being itself is what Heidegger called a “being-in-the-world,” and this includes the philosopher. The philosopher, in thinking and arguing, is always offering a new contribution to a tradition, and where tradition itself can be thought of on the model of a conversation that began long ago. Really it began with the Greeks, and especially with Plato and Aristotle, which is why Gadamer was always going back to them. Philosophers must always do this: think by responding to the tradition of philosophical thought, or to some figures within it. There’s no other way to think.

This also makes reading Gadamer rather difficult, first, because he doesn’t always make it obvious whether he’s presenting his own opinion or someone else’s and, second, because his knowledge of and references to the tradition of Western philosophy are vast. If you don’t have the kind of encyclopedic knowledge of this tradition that he had—and almost no one does—you will find reading him hard. Don’t worry too much: everyone who has ever read Gadamer finds him hard, including me. I’ve read all his books, most of them a few times, for quite a few years, and I still find it hard. In fact, Gadamer’s students at the University of Heidelberg came up with a unit of measurement that they called the “Gad,” which measured the degree to which a text is written with unnecessary complexity and ambiguity. Gadamer is complex—but don’t worry too much. You’ll have a good understanding of him by the time we’re through.

Let’s start with some biographical essentials. Who was this man? How did he come to be the philosopher he was? He was one of the most original, influential, and famous philosophers of his time. Undoubtedly, he was the most important German philosopher of his generation. He was well known in his lifetime, but not until he reached a relatively advanced age. His first real book didn’t appear until he was sixty, in 1960, and this is unusual. Normally, if a philosopher is ever going to amount to anything, they write their first book when they’re likely in their thirties, maybe their forties. Gadamer made it through his fifties without publishing much of any real significance—mostly some essays on Plato and Aristotle. When Truth and Method finally appeared—which is now widely regarded as the most important book of German philosophy since Heidegger’s Being and Time—his own colleagues and students at the University of Heidelberg were surprised; they thought he’d never amount to much. Philosophers are judged not by their teaching but by what they write—and especially by the books they write. Usually we don’t know anything at all, or care, about what kind of teacher a philosopher is, e.g., does anyone know what kind of a teacher Nietzsche was?

Gadamer shocked everyone when Truth and Method appeared. It was a book he had been writing through his mid to late fifties and it drew in large part on what he had been teaching at Heidelberg, which was not what you might expect, the basic elements of his own philosophy, or hermeneutic theory, but a lot of history of philosophy—especially the Greeks—and also courses with titles like “Introduction to Philosophy” and “Introduction to the Humanities.”

Gadamer was born in February of 1900, in Marburg, Germany. Two years later the family moved to Breslau—which today is Wroclaw, Poland (in the south-west of Poland). Breslau became part of Poland in 1945 as a result of border changes after World War II, but the city was part of Germany in his youth. 1900 was a pretty important year for hermeneutics: it was the year of Nietzsche’s death, and the year that saw the publication of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and Wilhelm Dilthey’s “The Rise of Hermeneutics.” Gadamer did not have a very happy childhood. He was raised by his father and stepmother. When a biographer asked him whether he had loved his father, Gadamer replied by citing a line in a poem by Rilke: “Does one love a father?” The implied answer is no. Gadamer would say this to his biographer (Jean Grondin): “The way I was raised when I was a child I would wish on no one today. No child would be likely to get through it without rebellion.” His mother, Emma Karolina Johanna Geweise (1869–1904), had died of diabetes when Gadamer was just four years old. Shortly after this his father, Johannes Gadamer (1867–1928), remarried, so Gadamer was raised by his father and, to some extent, by his step-mother. His biographer says almost nothing about his step-mother, so she doesn’t seem to have been a terribly important figure in Gadamer’s childhood.

Gadamer’s forefathers had come from the Franconian region of the Rohn, a range of hills near Wurzburg in central Germany. They were all Protestants. All of his grandparents came from Waldenburg—which today is part of Poland—and Gadamer himself was raised in the city of Breslau. Gadamer wrote a kind of autobiography in 1977 called Philosophical Apprenticeships, and in it he mentions his father as the only really important figure in his childhood. His mother he barely remembered. He also had an older brother, Willi, whom Gadamer almost never mentioned to his biographer. Willi suffered from chronic epilepsy from his early childhood and was often severely ill. He spent most of his life in an institution and died in 1944. A year after Gadamer was born his mother had a third child—a girl named Ilse. The baby died of diphtheria after five months. Gadamer never mentioned her either. Of his father, the impression that we get of him is that he was a rather stern authoritarian sort. He was also a scientist, a very accomplished pharmaceutical chemist. “In talking of his father, he always spoke of his father’s rigorous, Prussian discipline, and his continual attempts to persuade his gifted son to take up the rigors of the natural sciences. He was profoundly disappointed when his son finally opted for ‘twaddle’—that is, the humanities. When Gadamer read a biographical portrait occasioned by his 95^th birthday, where his choice of the arts and humanities was described as a kind of rebellion against his father’s dictates, he found this description to the point, while adding that it perhaps underestimated the absence of his mother” (Grondin, 20). I gather there was not a lot of human warmth in the Gadamer household—mostly discipline. But the image of his mother, at least, stayed with him. She had more of a religious and artistic nature, pretty much the opposite of his father. Gadamer would later say that he inherited her temperament far more than his father’s. Gadamer felt an attraction toward religion but was never quite a religious believer. He was baptized a Protestant and confirmed in 1914 but never practiced any faith. He was basically an agnostic his whole life, although it’s more complicated than this. When in 1993 he was asked in a newspaper interview whether he believed in an afterlife, he answered: ‘“Not personally, no. At least not in the sense the religions do.’ Here, however, he opened up a significant ambiguity, because he immediately added, ‘I believe that in our spiritual and personal world none of us can know our boundaries—neither what speaks to us before we came to be, nor what perhaps might still be said when we are no more. This beyond always exists as the future that we have not yet lived and the past that has already receded into the distance. We know nothing of either. The flicker of light that our consciousness traverses is not the whole of our existence’” (Grondin, 22–3). This is very typical of Gadamer: no, but ... and then a rather complex answer.

Gadamer’s father, then, was the only major influence in his early years, and he had rather definite ideas about his son’s future: he was to be a natural scientist, and he applied all the pressure he could to bring this about. He did not approve in the least of his son’s interest as a young man in philosophy. Johannes Gadamer was a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Breslau for seventeen years. In 1919 he was offered a better job at the University of Marburg, which he accepted. He was a very successful academic and a man who was used to getting his way, that is, until he died of cancer at the age of sixty, in 1928. As he was dying, he summoned his son’s teacher—Martin Heidegger—to his bedside to ask him whether philosophy was a proper profession for his son or for anyone. Heidegger told him that it is, and not to worry. At that point, Johannes seems to have reluctantly accepted his son’s career choice. Gadamer would say of his father, “of the inclination to literature and theater, and the pointless arts generally, he wholeheartedly disapproved.” It was therefore a natural choice for a rebellious son to go into philosophy and to develop a lifelong love of all the other “pointless arts.”

Gadamer grew up rather lonely and melancholy, although in some ways (economically and culturally) he was also living a privileged life. Johannes was quite well off financially, and he was given an apartment in the same building that housed the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Sometime later he was able to rent a rather nice villa outside the city, which came with a staff of servants. Gadamer’s first school was a very reputable one, the Holy Ghost School, which he entered in 1907. It was the only school he attended prior to university. The atmosphere of the school was harsh and authoritarian by the standards of today. There he received a classical elementary education that included Greek and Latin. He also became fluent in French from a young age. He would later become proficient in English and Italian. His teenage years included a very depressing World War I—which of course his side lost. The only good thing about it, from his point of view, was that he was too young to fight in it. At the outset of the war he was just fourteen and, like most Germans, very patriotic. For four years talk about the war and a spirit of nationalism dominated his school, like all German schools at the time. During the war, due to coal shortages, classrooms couldn’t be heated above 41 degrees Fahrenheit. He was devastated by the outcome of the war, not because he thought his side was in the right but simply because it was his side. Living conditions during the war were terrible—and then nothing whatsoever was achieved for Germany by it. The Gadamer family, like so many in Germany, suffered from malnutrition for a good part of the war. They had enough money to buy things on the black market, but Johannes refused to do so out of a sense of patriotism. The war was followed by the economic and political woes of the Weimar Republic, and then the Nazis took over.

To make matters worse, after the war he developed a life-threatening case of polio in 1922 and had to be isolated in his father’s house for several months. He survived it but could have easily died. He would later say that his bout with polio taught him a valuable lesson, which is the importance of learning your limitations and also the importance of losing. During these early years he also developed a love of poetry, and especially the poetry of Stefan George (1868–1933) who was a very fashionable German poet at the time. He described his experience of discovering George’s poetry as comparable to being struck by lightning. It changed him profoundly and offered a clear alternative to his father’s scientific worldview.

In 1918 he began his university studies in Breslau, where he continued living in his father’s house. By this time, his interests were taking him away from the sciences and toward the arts and humanities. His main subjects were art history and philosophy. His father let him study what he wanted to, but he wasn’t very happy about it: “My father let me do as I wished, but he was deeply disappointed with me his whole life long.” In 1918 his father opened a bank account for him and deposited 10,000 marks but told him he wasn’t allowed to buy books with it.

His first introduction to philosophy happened at this time, in a course on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which is bound to make anyone fall in love with philosophy. By the end of his first year at university he decided that philosophy was his calling in life. During his student days at the University of Breslau he often attended reading groups, and it was in one of these that he met his first wife, Frida Kratz, in 1922. They married the following year. She was two years older than him and had a much more gregarious personality. At this time he was quite naive, insecure, and very aesthetically inclined, the opposite temperament from his father who was a very strong personality and a hard-nosed scientist. Why he married Frida Kratz is a bit of a mystery. It seems that they were not very compatible personalities. Gadamer later said simply that he married “much too early.” His biographer thinks he married mostly because he wanted out of his father’s house and getting married seemed like the easiest way to do that. “Hartmann, and especially his wife, who had a great liking for Gadamer, had an idea how to see him through the difficulties of his convalescence. If he was to recover his health, Hans-Georg would have to move out of his parents’ house. The best way to bring this about was marriage. Frida Kratz, whom Gadamer already knew from Breslau, had lovingly taken care of him for the entire period of his illness. At twenty-five, she was of an age to marry. Hans-Georg, at twenty-three, was a little young for marriage, but it was for the good of his health. Hartmann first went to the doctors to explain his plan. They thought it a good idea, and so all that was left was to convince Gadamer’s father. Hartmann was a professor in high regard and with a good reputation, and after some initial hesitation Johannes Gadamer took his advice. His son had just finished his doctorate and thereby giving proof of his independence. Thus the father gave his permission. Hartmann arranged the marriage between Gadamer and Frida Kratz, which took place on 20 April, the anniversary of her own parents’ wedding. Gadamer seems to have gone along with the whole thing almost passively. He was probably touched that someone would care for him in this way, but for him it was perhaps escape from his parents’ house that was most important” (Grondin, 95). They would later have one child together, a girl named Jutta who was born in 1926. As an adult she would become an art teacher.

In his student days he was rather fortunate to have a number of very good philosophers as teachers. He transferred to the University of Marburg in 1919 when his father got a job there, which was a very good place for a philosophy student to be in those days. His teachers included not just Heidegger but the well-known Paul Natorp, Nicolai Hartmann, and Rudolph Bultmann, among others. They all had a deep influence on Gadamer—as did Karl Jaspers, whom he would meet somewhat later—and so deep in fact that when he eventually wrote his sort-of autobiography, Philosophical Apprenticeships in 1977, he spent most of that book talking about his teachers. But by 1922 or 23 he was coming very much under the influence of the not yet famous Heidegger; he would become famous after his Being and Time appeared in 1927. Gadamer went to study with Heidegger in 1923—sometimes in a classroom setting, where he took all of Heidegger’s courses, and sometimes at Heidegger’s hut in the Black Forest. He would learn from Heidegger something about the spirit of philosophy, or the kind of philosophy that he would always defend: as Grondin writes, “The young Gadamer would glimpse ‘the essence of the philosophical attitude’ not so much in finding a solution as in ‘maintaining the problem in its undecidability and open uncertainty’” (Grondin, 68).

He would also develop an interest in hermeneutics from studying with Heidegger, which is focused on the concept of human understanding: what is the nature of understanding, what makes it possible, and what are its limits? These questions would occupy Gadamer for the rest of his life. “For Heidegger understanding is the most primordial act of human Dasein. This means that human ‘being in the world’ includes a resoluteness that is directed toward Dasein’s being able or ‘being able to be.’ To understand something does not mean to know something in a theoretical manner but rather to ‘understand one’s way around,’ to be in the know, to be up to undertaking some task. The point of this, however, is that this understanding, which indicates a capacity of our self, is at the same time a nonunderstanding, and inability. We strive for understanding and ability precisely because we lack them on a fundamental level…. We never understand anything completely, never quite manage to cope with this world, every truth is only a half truth, all certainties are provisional, but in this twilight state all human understanding takes place. Understanding is, so to speak, a flickering wakefulness in a night that envelops us more completely than that momentary brightness. Between these two poles of wakefulness and night, Heidegger’s whole thought vacillates” (Grondin, 104).

At first, Heidegger was very impressed by Gadamer, but later he would be much less impressed. He seems to have regarded Gadamer as a bit of a spoiled, lazy kid from the city, more or less the opposite of Heidegger who was a rural man, did not come from a privileged background, and was anything but lazy. In fact when Gadamer was studying with Heidegger in 1924, Heidegger wrote him a letter warning him that he wasn’t working hard enough: “If you cannot summon sufficient toughness toward yourself, nothing will come of you.” Gadamer was crushed by this. He had completed his doctorate in 1923 (you could do that in those days), but in the German university system you needed to do postdoctoral work before you could get a job as a professor. He didn’t have a lot of confidence that he was ever going to amount to much as a philosopher. He learned a lot from Heidegger, but it didn’t do his confidence a lot of good. He started to get this when he stopped studying with Heidegger and jumped ship to the theologian Rudolph Bultmann with whom he studied the Greeks. He wanted to rise to Heidegger’s challenge but with somebody else for a couple of years.

It was at this time that he published his first couple of essays on Plato and Aristotle, and for the rest of his life he would always come back to Plato and Aristotle. A couple of years later he would study with Heidegger again, who was now becoming impressed with Gadamer’s work, and in 1928 Gadamer completed his Habilitation thesis (a kind of second Ph.D. thesis and a postdoctoral qualification to teach in a university) with Heidegger. It was a thesis on Plato, which was later (1931) published as a book, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. It would take almost thirty years until his second book appeared, partly because of Heidegger’s influence. Fr many years writing terrified him because he would always imagine Heidegger looking over his shoulder. That would indeed be paralyzing.

Throughout his early life Gadamer was very much a product of his time and place. His whole experience was limited to Germany. In his studies of philosophy, it was German philosophy—and Greek—that he was learning. He wasn’t exposed to very much English-language philosophy. It wasn’t until 1933 that Gadamer made his first trip outside Germany, to France. It’s important to bear in mind something about the spirit of the times in the Germany of this time and Europe generally. This was a time of crisis, and one crisis after another. World War I is an obvious example; the Weimar Republic is another. But there were other signs of the times that were ominous: Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was very popular; the great depression; the sinking of the Titanic (1912); the Hindenburg disaster (1937); and then after World War II there was the arms race and the Cold War. The sinking of the Titanic had a deep effect on Gadamer as a twelve-year-old boy. What it represented, along with all these other things, was a loss of optimism about science and technological progress. The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable—an absolute triumph of modern technology—and it sank like a stone on its first voyage. What could we compare this to today? Covid-19 maybe? September 11, 2001 maybe. How about this: imagine if Canada had lost to the Russians in the hockey tournament of 1972—and lost badly. We would have been devastated. That’s how the sinking of the Titanic was commonly experienced at the time, including by Gadamer. It seemed like all of Europe was on the brink of an abyss, and by 1933 Germany was.

Hitler assumed power in that year. Gadamer was now thirty-three years old—and no, he was never a Nazi. He despised the Nazis as much as you do, actually more because he lived through this period. At the time Hitler took over, Gadamer—who was not very interested in politics (although he always voted, for the German Democratic Party)—thought, as probably most in Germany did, that he’d be in power for a short time. The Weimar Republic had seen a number of political groups come and go rather quickly. He also assumed that all the talk about race—“blood and soil”—was just empty rhetoric, so he wasn’t very alarmed by the political events of 1933. He would soon change his mind. “Anti-Semitism was, of course, something to think about, but at the same time it was so primitive that many people, and indeed many Jews, considered it nothing more than an electioneering slogan in a time of economic hardship. This is what Gadamer thought too…. Like most people, he was genuinely afraid of the Communists, though there were Communist-minded intellectuals in his circle. The otherwise honorable Social Democrats could not be voted for because it was suspected that they would ally themselves with the Communists. In Gadamer’s circle the National Socialists were considered laughable” (Grondin, 153).

At the time he was working as a Privatdozent—a junior and badly paid university professor, basically cheap labor which you have to do for a while if you want to become a real professor—at the University of Marburg. In fact, he got his first official teaching position at Marburg in 1933. Before that he had been living a rather precarious existence by living on government grants, sometimes working as a research assistant, and doing a bit of teaching. From then until the end of World War II he basically kept his head down and hoped it would all end quickly, which it didn’t. During these years he was teaching first at the University of Kiel then back to Marburg then on to Leipzig, publishing a little on Plato and Aristotle (which wouldn’t get him in trouble with the Nazis), being a family man, and trying to survive. Emigration is something he never really considered, although he wouldn’t have found it easy to get a comparable job outside of Germany at this point in his career since he hadn’t published very much yet. He had made a home for himself at the University of Leipzig, which he was very attached to not only because it was prestigious but because politically it was a very liberal institution. But under the Nazis a necessary condition of being a professor was that you had to join certain Nazi organizations, although you could choose which ones. Gadamer joined the most apolitical organizations he could find: the equivalent of the Red Cross and a tennis club (he was a tennis player). This allowed him to survive the Nazi period without compromising himself—which not too many German university professors managed to do, by the way.

He became (full) professor at the University of Leipzig in 1938 and this finally gave him some financial and employment security. But he was also the only philosophy professor there, so he had to teach all areas of philosophy rather than focus on the Greeks as he would have preferred to do. Gadamer’s marriage came to an end at this time. Shortly thereafter he became involved with a former student of his named Kate Lekebusch. She was rather outspoken about her opinion of the Nazis and was imprisoned for a short time because of it. Gadamer married Kate in 1950, and they would remain married until his death in 2002. They’d have one daughter together, Andrea (1956); apparently she’s a lawyer.

At the conclusion of the war, most of the buildings at the University of Leipzig had been destroyed, but the city was determined to get it back on its feet. Gadamer was appointed as a Dean for a time, then Rector (President) for a year and a half, which was the norm at the time. This was the period of de-nazification in the German universities and society generally. He was elected rector both because by this time he had very good scholarly credentials and because he had had no involvement with the Nazis. His star was on the rise at this point. Leipzig was a city in what was to become East Germany, so he had survived the Nazi regime only to find himself now living under communism and Gadamer was decidedly not a Marxist. The communists were not exactly big on academic freedom, any more than the Nazis had been. Gadamer therefore—like many professors in East German universities—began looking for a job in West Germany. In 1947 he took a job at the University of Frankfurt and two years later the University of Heidelberg (in south-west Germany) offered him a better position. He quickly accepted and would remain there until his retirement. At the University of Heidelburg he was appointed to be the successor to the well-known existentialist Karl Jaspers. Gadamer and Jaspers had been (sort of) friends for years, and Gadamer always had a high opinion of Jaspers’ writings.

In these years he was still publishing at a modest rate only. During the war he had an excuse for not writing much, but now he didn’t. He was settled at a good university, and he was free to do his work as he saw fit, but he still wasn’t in a hurry. As I mentioned, he was still worried about what Heidegger would think about anything he wrote. “Heidegger, too, was among those who at that time had to shake their head over Gadamer’s timidity: ‘Ultimately, Gadamer simply has to write a book,’ he often exclaimed to his students. Heidegger, however, was himself one reason for Gadamer’s self-doubt. As Gadamer admitted in his own self-portrait, ‘For a long time writing tormented me. I always had the damned feeling that Heidegger was looking over my shoulder.’ Given the power of Heidegger’s concrete phenomenological description, how was Gadamer supposed to write a work that could withstand the judgment of his teacher? Even long after Truth and Method had been published to wide acclaim, Gadamer still doubted his success” (Grondin, 268). At Heidelberg he also felt as if he had to fill Jaspers’ shoes, since he was hired to be Jaspers’ successor. It was time for him finally to get to work writing a proper book, and he began work on this in the mid-50s. The book, Truth and Method, was based in part on the courses he had been teaching for years. In that book he was bringing together a lifetime of thinking and a vast number of influences. He would recount the whole history of hermeneutics while also trying to take it further. I’ll discuss several of the main themes in this book a bit later.

The book finally appeared in 1960—Gadamer was now sixty years old—and at first it didn’t get noticed by many people in the philosophical world. Those who read it were impressed by it, but not many read it at first. In time it was noticed, and not just by philosophers or Germans. It was translated into English in 1975 and became quite influential in the English-speaking world beginning at this time. He would follow it up with a number of other books, but none of them are of the stature or length of Truth and Method. This is his magnum opus, and in the German philosophical world, you had to have a magnum opus if you wanted to be a major philosopher. There’s a long tradition of this in Germany going back to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. He didn’t enjoy writing the book either: “Creating this theory was difficult; writing it down, however, was sheer torture for him. Gadamer had not written a real book since 1931, and then it was just his Habilitation thesis. Gadamer never made a secret of the torment that writing always signified for this pupil of Socrates. As late as 1983 he wrote in [a newspaper]: ‘It is true that it is terribly painful for me to have to write. Where is my interlocutor, this silent and yet continually responding presence of the other with whom one tries to conduct a conversation, in order to carry on the conversation with oneself that is called thinking? … So I put off writing as long as I possibly can.’ In the fifties he could not afford to postpone it any longer. With the support of his wife, who pressured him to finish his opus, he sacrificed his whole vacation to writing” (Grondin, 279–80). It took him about a decade to write this book, and you can see why when you read it. It’s very long, very complex, and very difficult to read. As he wrote to a friend as he was finishing the book, “What is lacking in me is the capacity to simplify and constructively unify. I still can’t rid myself of the load of Gads, however sincerely I agonize over it.” His wife edited the manuscript and was always telling him it was too vague. He wanted to title the book Foundations of a Philosophical Hermeneutics, but the publisher (Siebeck) balked at this. It sounded too exotic; not many people at the time knew what hermeneutics is. Even Gadamer didn’t think he had created a classic, but the book stands as the most important work of German philosophy since Heidegger’s Being and Time. Nothing that has been written since it, by a German philosopher, quite compares to it in terms of importance and originality.

Gadamer lived another forty-two years after this book came out, but his story becomes a bit less interesting. From that point on he basically lived the life of a successful academic: teaching until his retirement in 1968—although he continued teaching after this, at Heidelberg and in North America. Interestingly, he never taught his own philosophy or writings, as many philosophers do. He always taught courses on the history of—Greek and German—philosophy. Through the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s he wrote several more books, most of them collections of shorter essays and he would continue writing until the end of his life.

Toward the end of the 1960s a young Jürgen Habermas wrote a review essay of Truth and Method which was basically favorable but also contained some criticisms; I’ll discuss this later. Gadamer responded to Habermas, and the two of them would carry on a very important debate over the next few years, with both of them writing essays back and forth. We still see Gadamer replying to Habermas in Reason in the Age of Science; I’ll point it out when we get there. He would later get involved in a debate with Jacques Derrida, at a conference in Paris in 1981. This was far less important; it didn’t really come off at all. Derrida didn’t want to debate him, and this was very obvious. But Gadamer’s way was always to want to engage with his critics. He was a natural conversationalist—and philosophers who met him always said that about him. Derrida was not, or so it seemed to Gadamer. Gadamer was actually very pissed off at Derrida about his behavior at this conference. It was billed as a historic confrontation between the chief representatives of hermeneutics and deconstruction. Gadamer prepared very carefully for the conference and delivered a lengthy paper. The following morning Derrida read a three-page reply, which he probably wrote in his hotel room the night before. Gadamer was amazed and not pleased.

After his official retirement in 1968 he’d go on lecturing at Heidelberg in the summer and in fall he’d teach in North America, first at Catholic University of Washington (1969), then Syracuse (1971), then McMaster (1972–5; he had a distant nephew there who was a mathematician), and then when McMaster chose not to renew his contract he went to Boston College (1974–86). When he was at McMaster, although he was by now one of the most important philosophers in the world, most of his analytic colleagues had no idea who he was. He put the philosophy department there on the map, and after four years there they decided not to renew his contract.

Anyway, for the first time in his life he was able to become a world traveler. He had led his whole life in Germany. Until his late 60s his whole experience was defined by German culture and tradition, and now he was doing a fair amount of globetrotting—teaching and giving talks—until his late 80s, when he had to cut down on traveling because of his age.

In his later years he received various awards and honors from various universities. On the occasions of his 90^th and 100^th birthdays he received tributes from Pope John Paul II, Habermas (by then the second most important philosopher in Germany), Paul Ricoeur, and various German politicians (including a couple of presidents), and various other prominent people. He died at long last in March of 2002, at the age of 102. He had a church funeral, although only psalms were read—no homily or Bible readings. He had made no real funeral arrangements and was buried in a cemetery very close to his house in Heidelberg.

Some major themes in Truth and Method: first, art and truth

Gadamer’s hypothesis is that there is truth in art. This had also been Heidegger’s view in his essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art.” In many ways Truth and Method picks up where this essay leaves off. There is a long tradition in the arts of speaking of a work of art as bearing a kind of truth. Art speaks, we say, and what it says is “true.” But what kind of truth is this? What do we mean by truth? The most common theory of truth in modern philosophy is the correspondence theory, according to which truth is a property of statements only: a statement is true if it corresponds to a fact. What could the truth of art mean? A work of art is not a proposition, and it doesn’t correspond to any facts. A painting is not a proposition, nor is a poem or a piece of music.

Gadamer will argue this way: let’s think about what the experience of art is like. Gadamer was a phenomenological philosopher, meaning his method is to describe the lived experience of listening to music, reading a novel, etc. What is happening when we have an aesthetic experience? A common view among modern philosophers is what he terms “aesthetic differentiation.” Gadamer would speak in very critical terms of aesthetic differentiation, which is the view that aesthetic experience is an experience not of truth but of something else: beauty, for example, and it’s an experience that is subjective. We say, for example, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. On this view, aesthetic experience is categorically different from other kinds of experience, e.g., empirical perception or philosophical argument, in which there is bona fide truth. Aesthetic experience must be regarded from a purely “artistic” point of view. He attributes this view to Kant in particular. On this view (which Gadamer is going to reject), what we are experiencing is not truth but beauty and it is category mistake to speak of truth in aesthetic experience. Gadamer’s reply: we are experiencing something more than beauty. There may be beauty in art and there may not be, but in the case of great art anyway, there is truth. But in what sense? It’s not in the sense of correspondence, to be sure, but in the sense of the ancient Greek word for truth: aletheia. Gadamer is following Heidegger here. Truth, in the sense of aletheia, means disclosure or showing. It suggests taking something that is to be understood out of a prior condition of obscurity or hiddenness and revealing it as what it is. Truth in this sense is not a matter of arguing or demonstrating but is a form of discovering or revealing.

Works of art reveal a world—what Husserl had termed a lifeworld. Heidegger’s favorite example of this was Vincent van Gogh’s painting(s) called the Shoes. Here it is (there were actually several):

This painting reveals a particular lifeworld; it opens up to us the world of the European countryside and the people who live there. All such revealing requires interpretation. This is what it means to say that there is truth in art, not in the sense that art provides an argument—demonstrating that some statement corresponds to the way the world is. Art doesn’t argue; it shows, reveals, opens up for us what something means, or how it is. This is what interpretation in general does: it shows what something means for us. This is how Gadamer uses the words true and truth. He didn’t exactly have a theory of truth, in the sense that he thought he could fill in the blank in the sentence “What makes a true statement (or anything else) true is_____.” We can’t fill in this blank. Truth doesn’t have an essence. Although the title of his magnum opus is Truth and Method, the point behind the title is not that the book is going to formulate a theory of truth but to defend the view that there is always more to truth than what any method can capture, and where exhibit A is art.

The limits of method

A pervasive view in modern epistemological theories—rationalism, empiricism, idealism, positivism—is that knowledge has a foundational structure and that the marks of knowledge are essentially two: 1. a foundation and 2. a method. An obvious example of the first is Descartes’ cogito: one proposition—I think—is the starting point, or the foundation, of all knowledge such that justifying any knowledge claim consists in grounding it in, or tracing it back to, this basic claim. The foundation of knowledge is beyond all possible doubt—not just beyond reasonable doubt. It is formally certain and it is also true outside of all context: outside of history, culture, and language. It is universally and unconditionally true. Even an evil deceiver couldn’t deceive me about this. Another example: in British empiricism (Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume) the foundation of knowledge is sense data or empirical perceptions. All knowledge must be traceable back to these, or else it is empty speculation. While the foundation of knowledge is different for empiricists and rationalists, both sides agree that knowledge needs a foundation that is indubitable and ahistorical.

On the second point, all knowledge needs a method on the foundationalist view. For rationalists it’s the method of reason while empiricists use empirical observation. Scientific knowledge must follow the scientific method; that’s what makes it scientific. Mathematical knowledge must follow the rules of math. Logical knowledge must follow the rules of logic. In every case, knowledge needs a set of formal rules. Where there is knowledge, there is a method that generates it. There is no truth without method. This, in short, is the foundationalist conception of knowledge, and it has taken several forms since its inception in the 17^th century. Gadamer is going to reject it, and not just him. All phenomenologists, existentialists, hermeneuticists, and poststructuralists—which is to say almost all continental philosophers after Nietzsche, and some others—reject the foundationalist model. On what basis?

Gadamer will say this: think of everything that we understand. I understand, e.g., who I am, who some people are, something about my time and my place, something about art, history, science, philosophy, morality, human nature, etc. I don’t possess exhaustive knowledge of any of these things, but I understand them more or less adequately. What made it possible for us to understand all this? How did we come to this? Was there a method that generated it, a foundation? Gadamer’s reply: a major portion of our thinking has no foundation, or it has no foundation in the sense that epistemological foundationalists speak of this. It also does not work with a formal method. One example is self-understanding. What is the foundation of this? Is there one? What method did you follow in arriving at, or coming up with, a basic sense of yourself? Gadamer’s view: you didn’t follow a method and there is no foundation of this. Your self-understanding is a social and cultural contingency. How so?

Recall G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831): in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel tried to theorize the meaning of human self-consciousness in a novel way, and he did it by telling a kind of story—an idealized narrative—of the origins of our sense of self, or our “self-consciousness.” This is not a historical account; it is a kind of idealization. His question was, what makes it possible for one to have a sense of oneself, or to be self-conscious? Where does this sense come from? Our sense of self is not a self-evident fact or a raw given. Something has happened to make it possible, but what? Hegel tried to explain in narrative form how our self-consciousness comes into being, and it is an explicitly social process. It is a kind of struggle; he described it as a life and death struggle between a master and a slave. This is the famous master/slave dialectic. His thesis is this: out of this conflict between the master and the slave, a higher kind of relation emerges. That relation requires the abolition of inequality between the two. His conclusion: a sense of self requires recognition or confirmation from another—and the other must be an equal. A sense of self or identity requires the confirmation of others. Other people must reflect back to me my own self-understanding, and if they do not, I am forced to call that self-concept into question in the same way that authority requires confirmation from others. What makes someone an authority? It’s not just the fact that they claim to be an authority. Others need to recognize our authority, or else one doesn’t have any. Recognition makes it so, and the same can be said of personal identity.

To show this, Hegel presented an allegory, or a symbolic representation. The narrative, in a bit more detail, goes this way: consider the relation that exists between a master and a slave. This is obviously a relation of inequality—as unequal as it gets. How does the master see himself? This person has a basic sense of self or self-consciousness. He exists as a property-owner, a slave-owner, the lord of the manor. The master exists for himself. How does he see the slave? As a mere means to an end. From the point of view of the slave: this person does not exist for himself. He serves the master’s will; he exists for another. He sees the master as an ogre, and a struggle ensues. The master has to struggle to get the slave to do his bidding and not to flee. The slave has to struggle for everything, even his life. This is a relationship of permanent conflict. Each wants something from the other that the other does not want to give. Also, both the master and the slave want the other to perceive oneself in a certain light, and not the light in which they currently see each other. Again: the slave sees the master as an ogre—a hated enemy—and the master sees the slave as a slave—a kind of object without dignity. This is an intolerable situation for both. Obviously, it is intolerable for the slave: no one wants to be perceived by another as an inhuman thing, a mere means to an end, but it is also intolerable for the master because the master doesn’t see himself as a hated enemy, an ogre. He sees himself in a more flattering light—as a decent human being. But it isn’t enough that he sees himself this way; he needs the other to reflect back to him his own sense of self. He needs this because he can’t maintain his sense of self without the other’s confirmation. What is reflected back to him is a view of himself that is a contradiction of how he sees himself, and this contradiction is intolerable. The master is forced to see himself from the point of view of the other. His self-understanding must be confirmed by the other, and no slave can do this. Recognition doesn’t count unless it is coming from an equal. Consider an analogy: suppose you are an artist. You see yourself as an artist, but this isn’t enough. You require others to recognize you as such, and if they don’t, you are forced to doubt your worth as an artist. You require recognition from specific others: other artists and maybe art critics, or people who know about art. If they don’t recognize you as an artist, but maybe your mother does, that doesn’t count either. You want the recognition of your equals or peers, your fellow artists. Back to the master: this person doesn’t want the recognition of a slave. He wants the recognition of an equal. In order for this to happen, and this life and death struggle to be resolved, the slave has to be elevated to an equal status with the master; he has to be emancipated, because only equals can recognize equals.

For Hegel, when two human beings meet a struggle for pre-eminence ensues in pretty much every case and that struggle can take various forms. Our basic condition is one of struggle for pre-eminence. If and when it is eventually resolved, it is resolved through the free recognition of equals, not by one triumphing over the other or destroying them. If the other is destroyed, there is no one to recognize myself. Neither the master nor the slave is fully self-conscious apart from the other. For there to be complete or adequate self-consciousness, there must be reciprocity between people. Reciprocity represents the higher synthesis that Hegel is pointing toward. The self cannot understand itself apart from others. It requires others merely to be who it is. Much of our social existence involves a pursuit of recognition from others, and when we are perceived by others in a diminished light, we are diminished by it.

Back to Gadamer: the foundation of our self-understanding is no foundation at all. It is the recognition of others, and there is no method that has generated it either. Understanding in general has no grounding in the sense of a foundation. I understand something specific—let’s say the meaning of a word—on the basis of a larger, prephilosophical, prereflective understanding of things. I understand anything at all on the basis of certain prejudices or prereflective judgments which have been passed down to me in my cultural tradition. More on this later.

Some examples of thinking without methods

Gadamer reminds us of “The Guiding Concepts of Humanism”: culture, judgment, common sense, and taste. He presents these important concepts as four examples of thinking and understanding that don’t involve the application of a method but as something decidedly informal. Let’s look at each of these.

1. Culture (Bildung). The humanist tradition extends from ancient Roman thought, through the middle ages, and into the modern age. Gadamer wants to describe and also rehabilitate some of the guiding concepts of that tradition including, first, the concept of culture: in German, Bildung. What does this ancient concept mean? First, Gadamer’s hypothesis: in order to understand any concept, we must understand it historically; there is no other way to clarify the meaning of a concept like this. The word contains a wealth of history, so let’s recall that history, or some of its main features. In the modern era, one of most important formulations of this concept appears in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder (18^th-century German philosopher and poet). Herder spoke of Bildung as a process of “rising up to humanity through culture.” Culture, and humanity itself, are something to which the individual must rise up, or take up as a kind of project or life process, especially through education but also through work, art, and the general development or cultivation of one’s natural talents. Culture is inseparable from the notion of cultivation in this sense of rising up—but rising up from what to what? From a condition of “nature,” in the sense of being undeveloped, uneducated, or unformed to some higher state of being such as development, education, formation, or sophistication. The Latin equivalent of Bildung is formatio. The kind of formation that we are talking about refers both to the process of becoming formed and also the result of that process. Importantly, this process is not a technical one—something that follows a certain technique. Instead it is a kind of inner process or it’s an informal life process that belongs to every human being, and one for which there is no method. The human being is characterized by a certain break from the natural, from what is merely given and immediate in our natures. What characterizes human beings is our ability to rise above the immediate conditions in which we find ourselves and especially the baser elements in our nature and to form, or re-form, ourselves in light of an idea or aspiration of some kind. Hegel described this as a rising up to the universal—an idea, an abstract concept, or an ideal.

For Hegel, it is a task of every human being to rise above their given circumstances and to pursue an idea or ideal of one kind or another, e.g., in the work that we do. Think about the meaning of work. In working on some object, I am not only forming the thing; I am forming myself or reforming myself. This is the nature and meaning of work. I am not just making something in order to sell it or consume it; I am forming myself. For example, in entering a profession I am not just acquiring information about how to perform a certain set of tasks but I am becoming a certain kind of human being. I am cultivating certain habits and talents while leaving others undeveloped. We should think carefully about what kind of work we are going to take up—especially what career we are going to pursue—because we become what we do. We are formed in a particular way and recognized by others in that light. This can be seen from the common habit of asking a person we meet what they do for a living. Why do we ask this? This is usually one of the first things we want to know about a person, as an intuitive matter. It’s not only because we want to know how much money they make. It’s because we want to know who they are—which means, in part, how they have been formed. When I hear that the person before me is a doctor, I see them differently than if they were a farmer—and more or less involuntarily. Even if I tell myself to avoid stereotypes, I still see them in a certain way in light of the work that they do or don’t do.

For Hegel, we are all of us engaged in this process of formation or Bildung, of “getting beyond our naturalness” and usually without being aware of it. This is what education and maturation essentially consist of. In this process I have to take up my culture, or some aspect of it, in such a way that I make it my own in the same way that in joining a profession I am not merely conforming to an established way of doing things but am adding my own originality to the old ways. Similarly, my culture or tradition is not something that I merely conform to or take up in essentially unaltered form. I appropriate my culture; I make it my own. I see myself in it, and I become myself in it. But I must also transform both myself and elements of the culture to which I belong. In the process I have to keep myself open not only to my own culture and what it passes down to me but to other cultures, because I always have something to learn from other cultures as well. While I am always formed and oriented by my own culture, I also remain open to the possibility of learning from all other cultures. For Gadamer, the true mark of the mind that is cultivated or educated in the sense of Bildung is precisely this openness to what is different. As he puts it, “the general characteristic of Bildung [is] keeping oneself open to what is other—to other, more universal points of view” (TM, 17). The cultivated or educated mind is not essentially the mind that possesses a great deal of information, or that possesses the credentials that are needed to get a job. It has more the character of a sense than mere information. He calls it a universal and common sense. It includes a sense of what it important, a sense of what is good, a sense of history, etc. It also includes common sense.

2. Judgment. He uses this word in the sense of the ancient Greek word, phronesis. Phronesis is an important concept in the humanist tradition, and it is also the centerpiece of Aristotle’s ethics (Nicomachean Ethics Book 6). Gadamer regarded Aristotelian phronesis as a model not only of moral knowledge but of understanding—or what Gadamer called hermeneutical reflection—more generally. Aristotle and Gadamer regarded the concept of judgment as belonging at the center of the moral domain, but what is judgment, that is, practical judgment or good judgment? Judgment is not a formal technique, nor is it grounded in a foundation. Morality need not and shouldn’t appeal to the transcendent or to some unshakeable ground from which we may derive judgments. There is no eliminating contingency and uncertainty in ethics. There is no decision procedure that will allow us to rise above our own embeddedness in language and tradition even while we are trying to be critical of tradition. In ethics we are practicing a kind of immanent critique. This is not a critique that rises above its own historical community, by the power of reason alone. Reason itself is embedded in history, language, and culture. We don’t think about ethical questions in a social vacuum. Instead we are bound together in a common effort to judge what is good.

Following Aristotle, Gadamer’s position is that phronesis is a form of knowledge, but it differs in important ways from technical knowledge. How so? First, judgment has a dialogical and dialectical structure. To say it is dialectical means that to judge is to negotiate the distinction between universal and particular and in constant conversation with other moral judges. A clear contrast to this view is provided by ethical formalism; utilitarians, Kantians, and other formalists regard ethical judgment as a technical or rule-governed application of abstract moral requirements to particular cases. Principles, for formalists, are conceived as rules or decision procedures formulated in advance of a given case. A given principle functions as a major premise in a practical syllogism while the act of judging abstracts from the contingencies of a case and focuses on a single dominant consideration about it, such as whether an act is universalizable or maximizes the general utility.

Practical judgment is a matter of subsuming the case under a universal that is given or known in advance of the case: the categorical imperative, the principle of utility, etc. In judging, we follow procedures without any significant reliance on the inventiveness or personal responsibility of the judge. For Gadamer, the situation is reversed; phronesis is not governed by rules. Judging is not an act of derivation but is an interpretation of the case before us. It’s an interpretation that aims at revealing what a given case means and grasping the situation in its singularity. Phronesis is concerned with particulars, yet these are not known in isolation. There is a reciprocity here—or a dialectic, a two-way relation—between a universal and a particular, and it’s a reciprocity that is fundamentally unlike technical and scientific forms of knowledge (techne, episteme). It is not governed by a method. Technical knowledge begins with a clear grasp of the end it sets out to achieve and the method by which to achieve it. It applies rules in a more or less automatic way. By contrast, phronesis is responsive to the contingencies of a situation and involves a two-way illumination of the particular case and a moral concept (virtue, law, or what have you). In judging, we are not merely subsuming a case under a rule spelled out in advance or filing things in pigeonholes. We are interpreting the case in light of a universal, and where universal and particular are codetermining. Interpreting any particular thing requires the mediation of a universal, of which it is seen as an instance or in terms of which its meaning can be understood.

Phronesis, then, is directly comparable to textual interpretation in which we interpret an individual passage in light of the text as a whole. In ethical judgment as well, we regard a particular case in light of a moral concept of one kind or another. We interpret and judge it always in relational terms, by viewing a particular in connection with (from the perspective of) the relevant universal. Our grasp of the particular is mediated by the universal, and our grasp of the universal is mediated by the particular.

Importantly, no rule governs how we do this. A good judge is not a rule-follower. There are two reasons for this. First, even when we find a rule, we would need another rule to govern how we implement the first rule, so we end up in an infinite regress of rules governing rules governing rules. Second, what matters most in ethics is not the rules themselves—unless we are simply rule fetishists—but the particular case that is before us. A judgment that is properly responsive to particular cases is far too complex to be formalized in a set of procedures. For example, abstract moral rules allow exceptions that cannot be spelled out in advance. The formalist view would need either to forbid exceptions (thus opening itself to the charge of rule fetishism) or provide further rules governing what may count as an exception and what is to be done once it is recognized. The difficulty in formulating rules of this kind is that special cases do not come in types. Even the most complex rule is incapable of formalizing the intellectual virtue of phronesis. Judgment is more of a skill or an art than a technique; it’s the art of bringing a particular and a universal to bear upon each other in the absence of rules. It’s an art of mediation or of interpreting cases in light of the appropriate universal without criteria of appropriateness. Judgment is a skill in detecting the salient features of a case or in separating what is important from what is trivial and in subsuming particulars under universals.

Phronesis is the skillful exercise of looking back and forth, between universal and particular, and judging both the moral concept to be applied and the way it’s to be applied. It does not reach conclusions deductively but perceives a moral context in a way that is “fitting” or “suitable.” The vagueness of speaking with Aristotle of what is fitting, or what the situation requires, is inescapable because no rule tells us what the situation requires. There is also no common feature uniting all instances of good judgment. In many cases what is fitting is a more or less straightforward application of a value or norm, while on other occasions it requires that we recognize an exception in light of the circumstances surrounding a case or challenging the norm itself. Knowing how to make distinctions of this kind is the mark of a competent judge. A good judge does not obey rules unthinkingly or bureaucratically but tailors abstract moral requirements to cases in a flexible way. Like any art, judging is an ability to establish a fit between abstract requirements and concrete action without following rules. One who has mastered a skill is not forever consulting rules but has a developed sense of what the situation calls for and how to perform whatever action is required. This is a sensibility that, as Aristotle believed, is acquired through practice and habit. It is not only an ability to reason well but a virtue of mind that is inseparable from the rest of the ethical virtues and acquired together with them in the process of education. Phronesis is also a social matter because it is inseparable from dialogue; we have to justify our judgments to other people and don’t form them alone.

Phronesis is closely associated with equity (epieikeia), which Aristotle spoke of as the “correction of legal justice.” Normative requirements formulated in abstract terms have a certain deficiency. Their generality may lead us to overlook aspects of a case that are important. What calls for moral judgment is particular, and universals never catch up with their complexity. Some flexibility is required, as Aristotle said: “For when the thing is indefinite, the rule also is indefinite, like the leaden rule used in making the Lesbian moulding; the rule adapts itself to the shape of the stone and is not rigid.” Aristotle and Gadamer would both speak of flexibility and a sense of proportion as indicators of good judgment. In every case we must decide which standard to apply and how to apply it.

A related form of practical judgment is tact. Here is another form of knowledge that resists all attempts to formalize it. There is no method for showing tact. What is tact? It’s not only a virtue, but a form of knowledge. To show tact in a certain situation is to say the right thing in the circumstances or maybe to say nothing, to leave something unsaid. Often, to be tactful means to notice something but without mentioning it. For instance, imagine a teenager says something that is stupid. What they say reveals their ignorance about something. The tactless person might say: What you said is stupid—and then go on to tell them why it’s stupid. This is not the right thing to say because it leaves the person feeling insulted rather than instructing them. The tactful person might provide the instruction but without saying, You are stupid. Tact is a form of practical know-how. One knows how to do or say something in delicate situations, and again no rule tells us how to do this because there are too many contingencies and variables involved.

Phronesis, then, must be thought together with application. Gadamer argued that application is inseparable from judgment and it is also inseparable from understanding: “Understanding is a special case of applying something universal to a particular situation,” and so too is judging. Application here—in the case of moral knowledge and also the interpretation of texts—is different from application in the sciences in that it follows no method. It’s different also in that it works not only from the universal to the particular but vice versa. In perceiving a moral case, “moral concepts are never given as a whole or determined in a normatively univocal way. Rather, the ordering of life by the rules of law and morality is incomplete and needs productive supplementation. Judgment is necessary in order to make a correct evaluation of the concrete instance” (TM, 38). Application “can never signify a subsidiary operation appended as an afterthought to understanding: the object of our application determines from the beginning and in its totality the real and concrete content of hermeneutic understanding. Application is not a calibration of some generality given in advance in order to unravel afterwards a particular situation. In attending to a text, for example, the interpreter does not try to apply a general criterion to a particular case; on the contrary, he is interested in the fundamentally original significance of the writing under his consideration” (“The Problem of Historical Consciousness” in Interpretive Social Science, 125–6). In judging, we are not applying concepts in the sense that a known particular case is subsumed under a known universal, and according to a rule. Universals only come into being in being applied to particular contexts—so understanding and application must be seen “as comprising one unified process” (TM, 310).

We can say the same of judgment and application. Deciding what is good involves applying a value or principle to a case, yet not in the sense that we are standing at arm’s length from the case and attaching to it a principle that could be fully known in abstract form. Instead it is a kind of reading of the situation from within the situation itself. One is caught up, in an immediate way, in an effort to understand the case in light of some universal. Gadamer’s analysis, then, emphasizes the contrast between phronesis and techne: “For we can only apply something that we already have; but we do not possess moral knowledge in such a way that we already have it and then apply it to specific situations. The image that a man has of what ought to be—i.e., his ideas of right and wrong, of decency, courage, dignity, loyalty, and so forth (all concepts that have their equivalents in Aristotle’s catalogue of virtues)—are certainly in some sense images that he uses to guide his conduct. But there is still a basic difference between this and the guiding image the craftsman uses: the plan of the object he is going to make. What is right, for example, cannot be fully determined independently of the situation that requires a right action from me, whereas the eidos of what a craftsman wants to make is fully determined by the use for which it is intended” (TM, 317).

3. Common sense. What is common sense? Common sense is not just something the individual has—some information. This again is a form of knowledge; it’s a form of social knowledge. It is a kind of shared understanding—he calls it a “deep common accord”—that holds together the members of a culture. It’s a sense not only of how to do things but of what we have in common, as members of a particular historical community. For example, it’s common sense that we should all vote, because the act of voting belongs to a larger undertaking of creating a democratic society, which is a socially shared undertaking. Common sense is a sense of how to do things and how to form judgments of various kinds (ethical, political, social, etc.) and in ways that are not merely subjective or idiosyncratic.

4. Taste. Taste is not subjective either. It is a form of knowledge—of what is good, an ability to discern what is relatively good from what is not good. Taste is something like a sense. It doesn’t argue or produce reasons, or not exactly. Instead it is a way responding, with a kind of certainty, to the quality of a thing. It is not only an aesthetic sense but a moral one.

Next major theme: “historically effected consciousness”

During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, three concepts in particular came to have a very bad reputation: prejudice, authority, and tradition. Rationalists and empiricists agreed that we must reject all prejudices (which can only be false), authority (appealing to non-expert authority is a fallacy), and tradition (which is a false authority). Remember Descartes’ advice: think on the basis of clear and distinct ideas only. For empiricists, think on the basis of what you have perceived. Gadamer’s reply: is it actually possible to do this? Did Descartes actually succeed in wiping the slate of belief clean and starting over again in thought? This isn’t possible; it’s a false ideal, and a false model of knowledge.

Prejudices are sometimes true—not always, of course, but nor are they always false. They are sometimes true. They are also necessary conditions of understanding anything at all. There is no thinking without them. We think on their basis.

First, what is a prejudice? He defines it as a prereflective judgment—a judgment that is rendered before all the evidence is in. Any judgment—whether it is reflective or prereflective—can be true or false. All my new knowledge is based on my old knowledge. Is tradition always false, or unreliable? No; rather often what it has to say is true. What is tradition? Think of tradition as everything that has been passed down to us: the sum of artefacts, knowledge, beliefs, texts, works of art, practices, institutions, etc. that largely make up a culture. Any cultural product that you, or your generation, didn’t invent is tradition. Gadamer’s hypothesis is that understanding is always already situated within a tradition, that is, we always stand within a tradition. This is part of the human condition. More than that, we “belong” to tradition, as we belong to history and language, not only in the sense that we never exit outside them but in the sense that tradition constitutes us fundamentally as human beings of a particular kind. We participate in tradition in much the way that we participate in a conversation: we don’t merely listen, or passively wait to be formed by what we hear. We listen and respond. We appropriate a tradition while also transforming it.

Tradition normally exists in a constant state of transformation. It is not merely the dead weight of the past, something that is over and done with but is better thought of as what has been passed down to us from one generation or era to the next. So long as it is a living tradition—and a tradition is not always living—it is always being modified in the same way that a conversation is modified by what we say. We are always free to take the conversation in a different direction. This defines how we stand to our tradition and our culture: as participants. To participate in a culture means to select and critically appropriate ideas from the past, and again on the model of conversation. Our tradition or culture addresses us, and we reply, and our reply may take the form of either agreement or disagreement—usually partial agreement and partial disagreement. For example, artists don’t create works of art in a vacuum. They stand within the tradition of art, but this doesn’t deny their freedom. They can be as radical and as innovative as they want to be, but they still stand within the tradition of art. A radically innovative artist is still essentially borrowing and applying what they have learned by studying art and the history of art. Another example: scientists and philosophers can come up with radically new ideas, but they still stand within the tradition of science or philosophy. They are always borrowing ideas from their predecessors—while also criticizing them, refining and transforming them. Gadamer refers to the tradition of the West as the “Christian-humanist tradition” which he conceives very broadly to include the Western religions, Greek and Roman culture, modern science, philosophy, and art, and modern Western culture generally. All of this can be understood as one large conversation, which sometimes splits off into smaller conversations. It is in this conversation that the human being always stands.

Finally, authority: authority is sometimes a source of understanding in the same way that prejudice and authority are. Authority is sometimes right. It is also sometimes wrong—but we already knew that. What is an example of an authority today? Think of a physician: you usually defer to their knowledge—not uncritically, but you do recognize that they likely have a form of knowledge that you don’t. Otherwise you wouldn’t be their patient. Also, when I want to understand a certain philosopher, I might read a book by a scholar who is an authority on that philosopher. I don’t necessarily agree with everything they write, but I anticipate at the beginning that I am going to learn something that I don’t already know, that they have something to teach me. I might later change my mind, but if I do, I’m going to say this scholar is not the authority I thought they were.

What is “historically effected consciousness”? Gadamer’s hypothesis is that our consciousness—how we think and perceive, our most fundamental way of experiencing the world and everything in it—is an effect of history. How we think and perceive everything in our world is a kind of artefact; it assumed its present form gradually over the course of our cultural history. The basic structures of the mind are not eternal or universal truths; they are historical effects, effects of all the knowledge and ways of thinking that have come down to us in our tradition. One of the fundamental aims of philosophy and of education is to become aware of this fact—that our ways of thinking about everything didn’t have to be this way. We came to think this way as a matter of historical contingency, not necessity.

Historically effected consciousness is a consciousness that is an effect of history and that is aware of itself as such an effect rather than a mind that imagines that its way of thinking is natural or self-evident. In understanding or thinking, nothing is truly natural or self-evident. Genuine experience is an experience of our own historicity. The basic structure of consciousness or experience is openness. To be experienced means that we are open to having new experiences, not that we have had experiences that are over and done with, but that we are poised or prepared to have new ones. As he writes, “in all understanding, whether we are expressly aware of it or not, the efficacy of history is at work…. This, precisely, is the power of history over finite human consciousness, namely that it prevails even where faith in method leads one to deny one’s own historicity…. Consciousness of being affected by history is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation. To acquire an awareness of a situation is, however, always a task of peculiar difficulty. The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have any objective knowledge of it. We always find ourselves within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished. This is also true of the hermeneutic situation—i.e., the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to the tradition that we are trying to understand. The illumination of this situation—reflection on effective history—can never be completely achieved; yet the fact that it cannot be completed is due not to a deficiency in reflection but to the essence of the historical being that we are. To be historically means the knowledge of oneself can never be complete. All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pregiven” (TM, 301-2).

Language and dialogue

Our understanding of everything in our experience is mediated and shaped by language. Language preforms thought; this is what he terms the “linguisticality of consciousness.” When we understand something, it is language that has made it possible. I understand a thing when I have the words that allow me to speak of it. When I find the language that fits the thing—that allows me to speak of it—it has become in a sense illuminated; I understand it.

In Aristotle’s Politics, he defined the human being as the living creature that has the logos, and logos is translated as both reason and language, discourse, account—as in, give an account or explanation of something. The classical definition of the human being, which we get from Aristotle, is that we are the rational animal—the being that possesses the logos, but logos means not only reason (in the sense of a method or a faculty of the mind) but a kind of practice, the practice of speaking and listening together with another person. This is a social practice. It is not a private possession of the individual or a faculty of the mind, so to define the human being as a rational animal is immediately to locate the self within the practice of conversation. We are social beings, then, in the sense that we use language in common with others. Our basic nature draws us into association with others. When we think, we are saying something to ourselves; we are using language. Also, when we speak, we are speaking to someone; we are saying something to someone about something in the world. We are answering a question that someone has asked. In principle, every statement can and must be understood as an answer to a question. For example, “It is 10:30” answers “What time is it?” We can say the same of statements in general: they answer questions or respond to what another has asked or said.

Language is not a private matter at all. Language is not a thing of any kind, such as a tool for communicating wordless thoughts or a set of universal structures of the mind. It is fundamentally a social practice—the practice of dialogue, the back-and-forth of question and answer. It’s comparable to play in this way. Play gives us a model for dialogue: both have the same back-and-forth structure which is dominated by neither speaker. A genuine conversation—a rational one—is the one that no one altogether controls. It takes on a life of its own: “We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are less the leaders of it than the led. No one knows in advance what will ‘come out’ of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us. Thus we say that something was a good conversation or that it was ill fated. All this shows that a conversation has a spirit of its own, and that the language in which it is conducted bears its own truth within it—i.e., that it allows something to ‘emerge’ which henceforth exits” (TM, 383).

Language defines us both as rational beings—ones who are able to think and to give an account of this or that—and as social beings—ones who are drawn into the play of conversation and who are open to what the other person has to say, even if what the other person has to say is not what I was expecting to hear.

There are other major themes in Truth and Method, but I’ll leave it there.

Reason in the Age of Science (1976)

We are going to read chapters 1 and 4–8, which comes to about 120 pages. In this book Gadamer is going to develop further some themes he has already discussed in Truth and Method, but the focus is on reason, science, and the relation between theory and practice.

Chapter 1: “On the Philosophic Element in the Sciences and the Scientific Character of Philosophy”

Philosophy is not a science. Nor is it modelled on science or capable of becoming one. But it still makes sense to speak of the scientific character of philosophy in some sense, but how so? Philosophy shows a “binding proximity” to the sciences. Also, while philosophy is not exactly objective, it is not subjective either. The objective/subjective dichotomy doesn’t apply to philosophy; it’s a false dichotomy. Gadamer was as opposed to dichotomous thinking as Nietzsche was.

Historically speaking, for the Greeks, philosophy and science were one. Philosophy—in Greek, philosophia, which is a product of philia (love) and sophia (wisdom)—was a comprehensive term, which meant the love (in the sense of the pursuing, not possessing) of wisdom in a very broad sense. It referred to every kind of theoretical knowledge—about the world, about the human world, the good life, etc. Only in modern times would science become distinguished from philosophy, first the natural sciences then the social sciences. Each gradually branched off from the older discipline of philosophy, which is why to this day a Ph.D. is called a Ph.D.: the Ph. stands for philosophy, even if your field is physics or anthropology or whatever.

Over the last few centuries science and technology have assumed an ever more pervasive presence in our lives. By the time we get to the twentieth century modern science dominates not just how we think—how we see the world in general—but how we live. It is now an “age of science.” Our way of thinking about just about everything is now scientific-technological. A common view today is that only scientific knowledge makes a legitimate claim to knowledge. If it isn’t “evidence-based,” it’s worthless. Everything else is speculation, or subjective intuition, or something equally disreputable. One example of this is the kind of thinking that now prevails in university faculties of education. Look at the kind of research that professors in education departments do; it is overwhelmingly empirical or quasi-empirical. The whole vocabulary is scientific—or it tries to be scientific—even though education has been a topic of philosophical (humanistic) investigation since at least Plato and probably before. The contemporary view is that education is properly a science, or perhaps an applied science (a technology). Education is only one example. You could think of a thousand others. The consequence of this largely escapes our notice. Heidegger warned that the consequence of an age of science-technology is that we have effectively put blinkers on ourselves. We can now think, about anything, in precisely one way. Any time our capacity for thinking is so limited, we are in danger, and both Heidegger and Gadamer believed that ours is a dangerous time.

We now commonly believe, for example, that all aspects of society—our practices and laws and institutions—should be brought into conformity with the current state of scientific knowledge. Another example is economics. This is a science as well, and the best available scientific knowledge in this field should be brought to bear by governments in managing the economy. Even forests now need to be scientifically managed, and agriculture, and so on and so on. The examples are endless. One danger Gadamer sees with this is that we are losing our freedom in ways that we don’t see: “with the increasing mastery of nature, the domination of human beings over human beings is not eliminated but, counter to all expectation, becomes ever greater and threatens freedom from within. A result of technology is that it leads to such a manipulation of human society, of the formation of public opinion, of the life conduct of everyone, of the disposition of each individual’s time between job and family, and it takes our breath away. Metaphysics and religion seem to have provided a better support for the task of order in human society than the power packed into the modern sciences. But the answers that they claimed to give are for people of today answers to questions one really cannot ask and, as they suppose, do not really need to ask” (RAS, 3).

He mentions the example here of the manipulation, by politicians especially, of public opinion. Think about this: how does public opinion come to be formed? Take the example of multiculturalism. How many of you are in favor of multiculturalism as state policy? Probably all of you. Why so? It’s not likely a coincidence that it has been public policy in Canada since 1971; it’s been written into the public school curriculum and enforced by law for half a century. It’s now something of an orthodoxy. Try running for public office in Canada today on a platform of scrapping official multiculturalism. It wasn’t always so, and it isn’t so today in most countries, including the USA. Public opinion in this case is a consequence of fifty years of government planning. There are countless examples like this. Modern governments engage in various kinds of planning operations. They plan education, the economy, the workforce, public health, national security, and a thousand other things. Governments are basically judged by how well they plan: is unemployment low? inflation? interest rates? etc. Even though the general consequence of all this large-scale planning is that it takes away our freedom to decide things for ourselves. This kind of planning surrounds us; administration and bureaucracy surround us, and it’s not limited to governments: “But think, too, about the mounting automatism of all forms of social life; about the role of planning, say, for which it is essential to make long-range decisions, and that means removing from our disposal a great deal of our freedom to decide; or about the growing power of administration that delivers into the hand of bureaucrats a power not really intended by anyone but no less inevitable for all that. In this way ever more areas of our life fall under the compulsory structures of automatic processes, and ever less does humanity know itself and its spirit within these objectifications of the spirit” (RAS,14–15).

When something like public opinion—those beliefs and attitudes that you thought were yours—are planned and in a sense manufactured, and when science and technology (today including “big tech”) are doing the manufacturing, we have cause for worry. He returns to the topic of public opinion in Chapter 4: “Still more perilous is the effect of the technical penetration of society by means of the technologizing of the formation of public opinion. Today this is perhaps the strongest new factor in the play of social forces. The modern technology of information has made available possibilities that make necessary the selection of information to a heretofore unimaginable extent. Any selection, however, means acting in the name of everyone else; that cannot be otherwise. Whoever does the selecting withholds something. If he were not to make a selection, things would be worse still. Then one would lose the last remnant of understanding to the relentless stream of information by which one is flooded. It is inevitable, then, that the modern technology of communication leads to a more powerful manipulation of our minds. One can intentionally steer public opinion in certain directions and exercise influence on behalf of certain decisions” (RAS, 73). It’s not an accident that authoritarian governments strictly control the people’s access to information, or try to—access to the internet, for example, or TV. It is commonplace for authoritarian governments to have a state-run TV station and to report the news in a way that is slanted in the government’s favor. Public opinion can be controlled with remarkable efficiency, and we don’t need to look at China or North Korea to see it happening. It happens here too, but in different and subtler ways.

Another cause for worry is when the questions that philosophy asks become restricted to those that have some kind of relevance for science, e.g., when metaphysical or theological questions come to be seen as either impossibly speculative or simply irrelevant. Gadamer reminds us a couple of times in this book that already in the early part of the nineteenth century—two hundred years ago—Hegel was warning us that a people without a metaphysics, or without a philosophical worldview, would be like a temple without a sanctuary; it is spiritually and existentially empty. For Gadamer, a people without a metaphysics is what modern Western culture is. What Hegel called metaphysics in a large sense of the word has been replaced by science and technology. Gadamer does not have a problem with science or technology themselves—nor did Heidegger. They certainly didn’t take the view that we ought to get rid of them. Their point is about the limits of science and technology. Presently, they don’t seem to have any limits. This is the problem.

It’s a problem that can be compared to the way of thinking that prevailed in medieval Europe. Then it was religion that dominated all aspects of our thinking—about everything. Religious thinking had no limits and no alternative. It is easy for us today to see that as a problem. What is not so easy to see is that we face a very similar problem today. He cites Heidegger: science does not think—that is, in the pre-eminent sense of the word. That is, it thinks, but in a limited capacity. It is one way of thinking which is now taken to be the only respectable way of thinking about anything. Gadamer writes, science “also does not really speak a language in the proper sense.” What does he mean by this? There is obviously a language of science, but it’s a technical vocabulary only, like math or logic. A technical vocabulary is not a natural language, in a larger sense, that is, a language that allows us to express everything we have to express. What is a language? It is a social and cultural medium. It’s the medium in which we live and think and feel. Our experience is linguistic through and through; language preforms thought. It gives our thought a fundamental orientation or a basic trajectory and form. We understand something precisely when we are able to speak about it, and in ways that others can also understand: “In this context language is not a mere instrument or special capacity with which humanity is endowed; rather it is the medium in which we live from the outset as social natures and which holds open the totality within which we live our lives. Orientation toward the whole: some such reality resides in language but not as long as one is dealing with the monological modes of speech of scientific sign systems, which are exhaustively determined by the research area being designated in any given case. But language as orientation to the whole comes into play wherever real conversation occurs and that means wherever the reciprocity of two speakers who have entered into conversation circles about the subject matter” (RAS, 4).

Scientific modernity is now defined “quite univocally [in one voice, in one way] by the emergence of a new notion of science and method” (RAS, 6). There is no truth without method, we now believe. In this situation, philosophy is in a precarious condition of having to mimic science in order to have any legitimacy. In the philosophical tradition that Gadamer is a part of—phenomenology, hermeneutics— philosophy does not work with a scientific self-image. It doesn’t apologize for being unscientific or think itself in any way inferior to science. It does hold onto a claim of rationality; philosophy is, or can and should be, rational. It is not scientifically rational, but it’s rational in a different way.

He mentions as an example of such rationality Hegel’s philosophy of history—a curious example, and also a long and complex story. Gadamer makes frequent mention of Hegel throughout this book. I’ll keep this short: in Hegel’s philosophy of history, there is reason in history, or in other words history itself can be understood to be moving in a discernible direction, or toward a telos (end, goal, or purpose). History is advancing toward the progressive realization of universal freedom. According to Hegel’s formula: in the ancient Eastern world, one was free (the ruler); in ancient Greece and Rome, some were free (the aristocracy); in the modern Christian West (and into the future), all are free by nature, and all will be free in fact. The telos of history is the attainment of universal freedom.

Gadamer is of two minds about Hegel’s view. Empirically speaking, it looks like empty speculation, but rationally or philosophically speaking, there is something in Hegel’s view. Hegel’s story about the gradual realization of freedom is unsupported by the facts. It is bad history—empirically speaking—but morally and politically speaking, it is a story that rings true. That is, freedom is an extremely important political value. It is not only a value but an aspiration, a kind of shared project, a moral-political undertaking that goes to the heart of who we are as a culture. It’s from the point of view of this project especially that we understand our own history, that is, its meaning. How, for instance, do we understand the larger meaning or point of Canadian history but as a kind of collective project to build a certain kind of society—a free, democratic society? Obviously, there’s a lot of other stuff in our national history—or the history of the West, let’s say—than this. But just as we understand a story when we come to understand its moral—that which the story is about or what gives the story its meaning or point—we understand history in a similar way: “The need of reason means something else, and Hegel’s philosophy of world history is a good illustration of this. The aprioristic thought that resides in the essence of humankind and that he comes to know in history is the thought of freedom…. That is the rational intent of world history. This does not mean to say that world history is intelligible in all the factual details of its historical unfolding. The full scope of phenomena that one can call accidental remains infinite…. This all falls within the realm of the contingency of human affairs, which nonetheless does not hold good against the principle, for there is no higher principle of reason than that of freedom. Thus the opinion of Hegel and thus our own opinion as well. No higher principle is thinkable than that of the freedom of all, and we understand actual history from the perspective of this principle: as the ever-to-be-renewed and the never-ending struggle for this freedom” (RAS, 9). Again, this is not empirical history. No historian today is going to say that this is what history is the history of. This is philosophical history. Hegel himself was not a historian; he was a philosopher of history, that is, he was trying to discern what, if anything, the history of the world can be understood to mean.

Hegel’s view here makes sense philosophically or rationally, even while it is empirically groundless. Empirically, the only “law” of history is probably chance or contingency. There need be no conflict between what historians say about history and what philosophers say about it, because they are asking different questions about history and they are speaking on different levels. It’s important that there be different levels—not one only. If we insist on speaking on one level only about history—the empirical level—then we will never see any meaning or point in any of it. This is one example Gadamer points to of the limits of scientific knowledge. The larger point is that science doesn’t give us a comprehensive knowledge of history or of anything in the world, but this doesn’t negate its value. All knowledge has limits. No knowledge is totalizing or comprehensive—including philosophical knowledge. Understanding in general has limits—which is Gadamer’s constant theme.

Clearly, we owe an enormous amount to modern science. We owe nothing less than “the progress of industrial civilization” in general (RAS, 14). It has been remarkably successful in making it possible for us to control nature. It now makes it possible to control the world of human beings, and this is where the cause for worry begins. The temptation to misuse this knowledge is enormous. Scientific warfare has killed far more people than warfare in its older forms. Scientific production has made environmental destruction possible on a massive scale, and one can point to many other examples. Technology demands to be used. There is a kind of inevitability that it will be used, whether it serves our interests or not. This is what existentialists earlier in the twentieth century called the technological imperative.

More than this, there is a kind of “self-aggrandisement” that is at the heart of “modern self-consciousness.” We moderns tend to think very well of ourselves, and especially we think very well of the state of our knowledge and of the technology that our scientific knowledge makes possible. We tend to be very self-congratulatory about our scientific age, that is, in comparison to other historical periods which probably always prided themselves on some cultural achievements or other, but not like we do. Our collective ego is inflated, and when this happens we need to be reminded of our limits, and that means the limits of our knowledge. The ancient Greeks, Gadamer believes, had a better sense than we do of human finitude. What the Greeks, and later the Romans, dreaded above everything was hubris, a kind of over-the-top pride or arrogance. Pride goes before a fall—the ancients warned; we are not gods, and when we think that we are, we pay a terrible price. The Greeks tended to view the human being as a “fragile and subordinate phenomenon in the universe” (RAS, 17). It was subordinate, of course, to the gods—and we don’t believe in gods. We might believe in a God, but not like we used to.

A final and related point he makes in this chapter concerns the concept of theory, which is a topic he’s going to return to in later chapters. Since the Enlightenment, there has been a profound transformation in the meaning of the word theory. Today we say that we “construct” theories; we invent them, a scientific theory, let’s say. The Greeks didn’t see themselves as inventors in this sense: “What a transformation of meaning of the word theory is manifest here! What lies at the root of this change? The word theory, theoria, is Greek. It exhibits the distinctive characteristic of the human being—this fragile and somewhat subordinate phenomenon in the universe—that in spite of his slight and finite measure he is capable of pure contemplation of the universe. But from the Greek standpoint, it would be impossible to construct theories. That sounds as if we made them. The word does not mean, as it does from the vantage of a theoretic construct based upon self-consciousness, the distance from beings that allows what is to be known in an unbiased fashion and thereby subjects it to anonymous domination. Instead the distance proper to theoria is that of proximity and affinity. The primitive meaning of theoria is participation in the delegation sent to a festival for the sake of honoring the gods. The viewing of the divine proceedings is no participationless establishing of some neutral state of affairs or observation of some splendid demonstration or show. Rather it is a genuine sharing in an event, a real being present. Correspondingly the rationality of being, this grand hypothesis of Greek philosophy, is not first and foremost a property of human self-consciousness but of being itself, which is the whole in such a way and appears as the whole in such a way that human reason is far more appropriately thought of as part of this rationality instead of as the self-consciousness that knows itself over against an external totality” (RAS, 17-18). Greeks theorists thought of themselves as observers, not inventors. They didn’t stand outside—at an objective distance from—the thing they were theorizing about. Instead they had a much more immediate relation to the thing. They saw themselves as participating in the object of their theorizing, not standing at arm’s length from it in the way of modern science.

The relation between science and philosophy is not antithetical or hierarchical. Science does not stand above philosophy, nor should philosophy try to model itself on science. There is a separation between the two that is here to stay. There should not be any kind of tension between the two. Rather we should try to bring science and philosophy into some kind of reconciliation. It is the very nature of reason—as Karl Jaspers had said—to try to unify our ways of thinking about things, but without imagining that we are ever going to unify our knowledge completely. We aim for a unity that we are never going to realize in any way that is complete.

Chapter 4: “What Is Practice? The Conditions of Social Reason”

We left off in the last chapter with the question, what is theory? Now the question is, what is practice? Also, what is the relation between theory and practice—an ancient question in philosophy? Like so many philosophical questions, it goes back to the Greeks, for whom there was something god-like about theory. When we theorize we are using our reason, which for the Greeks (Aristotle in particular) is our human essence; the philosopher/theorist is the most properly human being because they are cultivating the faculty of mind that makes us human. Theory has a kind of nobility, therefore, that practical activity doesn’t have. There is therefore a hierarchy between theory and practice. Practice is for anyone, while theory is for the properly human—the rational—and most god-like. Theory pursues wisdom—it doesn’t possess it (only the gods possess it), but it loves and pursues it.

This basic idea—that theory has a kind of priority over practice—has come down to us in the philosophical tradition and it’s an idea that is alive and well today. Gadamer is going to reject this idea and ask a few related questions about the nature of practice and its relation to theoretical reason. There is also practical reason, he’s going to argue, and social reason. Reason is not, he’ll argue, a private or altogether “inner” faculty of the mind. At the most fundamental level of analysis, reason is itself a social practice. Let’s look at how he crafts this argument.

He begins by pointing out that today we tend to define practice in opposition to theory and that this opposition is not unique to modernity. It goes back to the Greeks. What does the concept of practice mean for us today? Essentially, it means applied science. Theory is primarily scientific theory, and practice is the application of scientific theory to the field of human action. Practice now means technology, primarily anyway. Modern science has given new life to the theory/practice hierarchy that the Greeks originated. Today our ideal is the mastery of nature, and also the mastery of the human world. Our ideal is “of a nature artificially produced in accord with an idea” (RAS, 70). We don’t, as Heidegger would say, “let it be” (“let beings be”). Our attitude is not to let things be. It’s to let them be what we decide they ought to be. It’s to re-make things—that is, everything—in accordance with our own ideas and purposes, and it’s theory that makes possible this kind of mastery over the world: “The old relationship of the products of the arts and crafts with the models furnished by nature has thus been transformed into an ideal of construction, into the ideal of a nature artificially produced in accord with an idea. That is what has ultimately brought about the civilizational pattern of modernity in which we live. The ideal of construction implicit in the scientific concept of mechanics has become an arm prolonged to monstrous proportions. This is made possible the nature of our machines, our transformation of nature, and our outreach into space” (RAS, 70–1).

This has produced a new relation to technology. Prior to modern times, technology served its users strictly. A person would first have a purpose—such as getting from point A to point B—and then a piece of technology would be devised to serve it. Today it’s not so straightforward. Today, “what has been artificially produced sets the new terms” (RAS, 71), that is, new needs are stimulated in us by the technology. We live in an ever more artificial world where technology takes on a life of its own and gets away from us. Does it still serve us, or do we serve it? It’s very hard to say. It seems to be a mixture of both.

A further consequence of this is “the loss of flexibility in our interchange with the world” (RAS, 71). What loss of flexibility is this? Technology demands to be used in a specific way; it doesn’t allow a lot of flexibility, in comparison to pre-modern technology. Older technology often had multiple purposes and it called for some skill and flexibility in order to use it properly. Think of an axe, or a knife, or a pen in contrast to a washing machine or a car. Today you use the thing in the way the instructions tell you. You don’t need a lot of knowledge or skill; you need to follow instructions. What we gain in convenience and comfort we lose in freedom and knowledge.

In this condition, to what extent does our technology actually serve life? In the ancient and medieval world, the answer was obvious: their technology—although it was primitive by our standards—served them. Our technology far surpasses theirs, but does it still serve us? How much of our freedom have we renounced, and how big of a problem is this? Is this just a small price to pay in exchange for convenience and efficiency? For Gadamer, these questions are very hard to answer. It’s much harder to answer them than we might think. All of this progress in science and technology marches under the banner of reason or rationalization, demystification, and demythologization. What is called reason is transforming everything in our world. The old-world craftsman has been replaced by the expert: “Now the expert is an indispensable figure in the technical mastery of processes. He has replaced the old-time craftsman. But this expert is also supposed to substitute for practical and political experience. That is the expectation the society places on him in which he, in the light of a sober and methodical self-appraisal and an honest heightening of awareness, cannot fulfill” (RAS, 72).

Are we—or is our society—becoming more rational? We commonly believe so. Gadamer asks, what is becoming of our “social reason,” that is, our ability to reason together about anything and everything? We might say: our social reason is improving because of our increased access to information. This much is clear: we have far more access to information than any culture has ever had. However, “increase in the degree of information does not necessarily mean a strengthening of social reason” (RAS, 73).

A technologically rational society calls for us to cultivate certain capacities of mind and not others. What capacities does it call for? Adaptation, and lots of it, not individual creativity. It requires that we know how to use the technology and how to access information. But what are we to do with all this information? We have infinite information at our fingertips, and ever more so, but are we able to do anything creative with it, think critically about it, exercise our freedom over it? Is it even possible to get free over all of that? His worry is that the mind is becoming drowned in all this information. There’s simply too much of it for us to do anything with or turn toward our purposes. What is happening, he believes, is a “threatening loss of identity by people today” (RAS, 73). That is, we are losing our bearings, becoming overwhelmed and bewildered by the mass of information and technology that is coming at us every day. We are becoming increasingly dependent on technology, and we’re adapting to it rather than using it. This, Gadamer thinks, is “the greatest danger under which our civilization stands: the elevation of adaptive qualities to privileged status” (RAS, 73). This is quite inevitable. Technology requires adaptation. For example, think of how the behavior of consumers has changed in just a single generation: the old norm was that when you wanted some good or service, you’d go to a store or some institution, talk to a person, and get what you need. You can still do this to some extent, but the new norm is to get it on-line where you don’t talk to a person or get help. You do it yourself. Customer service disappears, and it’s not just stores. Public institutions work this way now too. Try phoning a government office, or any institution, and getting a person on the line who can actually help you. You have to run through a maze, and we run through these mazes every day. We have become highly adapted to running through mazes. This is what much of our lives now consists of, and we don’t see it as much of a problem either—a minor inconvenience maybe, which we accept because it makes possible a larger convenience.

Gadamer will say this: there is a kind of alienation that’s happening here that largely escapes our notice. We are becoming functionaries and nothing more. We are serving the apparatus, and without quite realizing it. Practice is degenerating into technique. The experience of practice—of practical social life—should not be limited to adapting to technical and externally imposed requirements. It should call forth our freedom and creativity. There ought to be an experience of meaning in social life. He mentions as an example of a meaningful social practice the ritual of burying the dead as a practice that has been with us for millennia. Death rituals hold meaning for us, and we have always had them. There’s something very human about these rituals, Gadamer thinks. This is why we bury the dead: so that death doesn’t have the last word. Life does; meaning does. This is just one example of a practice that is non-technological and profoundly human.

What other specifically human practices are there? One is labor. Hegel said that the meaning of work is not defined in terms of the satisfaction of human needs, or not essentially. Work bears a meaning within it. Something happens to us when we engage in a particular form of work. We become what we do. In working on a thing, we are working on ourselves. We are becoming a certain kind of human being. Work is not just functional adaptation, or manning the apparatus, that is, if it is a properly human act or if it is to have any meaning. More than this, to work is to participate in a shared social reality. The work that we do—our practices in general—should try to bring about some kind of solidarity with other human beings. It is the nature of practice to try to bring about solidarity. We see this, for example, in the practice of language, or dialogue. This is a social practice in which we come together in a cooperative spirit to try to understand what is true, what is good, or what something means.

At this point in the chapter, Gadamer returns to his debate with Habermas. This is a long and complicated story, but in short: Habermas argued in his critique of Truth and Method that Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice, authority, and especially tradition amounts to a kind of traditionalism or intellectual conservatism. Gadamer’s claim that tradition is a source of understanding—that it’s sometimes right—overlooks, Habermas thinks, that tradition is sometimes wrong or that we must subject what tradition hands down to us to rational criticism. When we engage in rational criticism—social/political critique, for instance—we need to go beyond interpretation and speak in the name of scientific knowledge, Habermas believes. The social critic should play the same role toward their society that the Freudian psychoanalyst plays toward their patient, which is the role of an expert—the one who knows the truth about the patient’s condition. In psychoanalysis, the patient is in the dark about their psychological condition. All they know is that they are unhappy. What they don’t know is what is causing their suffering. This is what the analyst knows: this person has theoretical/scientific knowledge. Freud always insisted that psychoanalysis is a bona fide science, an interpretive science but a science all the same. The analyst is able, in light of this knowledge, to pronounce a diagnosis of the patient and to treat them. The social critic needs to do the same—and not merely engage in interpretation, or so Habermas believes.

Interpretation, as Gadamer conceives of it, is essentially the practice of hermeneutical dialogue which is strictly (epistemologically) egalitarian. There is no expert in hermeneutical dialogue. Sometimes there are authorities, but there are no experts. Habermas: we need an expert, especially when our very language is infected with “ideology” in a Marxian sense, or “systematically distorted communication,” when the wool has been pulled down over our eyes. Gadamer writes, in reply to Habermas: yes of course, we need to criticize tradition. Tradition isn’t always right; his point is that it’s sometimes right. But from what standpoint do we criticize tradition, or anything? In order for the critic of tradition to pronounce a rational, scientific diagnosis of our practices or our language, they would need to occupy a point of view that is outside of that tradition. They would have to have a kind of knowledge that allows them to jump outside of their very language, their culture, and their history. This can’t be done. This is an overestimation of what reason and theory can accomplish. Rational criticism is a form of interpretation, or hermeneutical reflection, and is not opposed to it. The role of critic belongs to us all. There is no distinction to be made between interpretation—an intellectual act that everyone who speaks a language is capable of—and criticism. Criticism is a form of interpretation, and it is situated in the very tradition that it is criticizing. This doesn’t mean that rational critique is impossible. It means that it is conditioned and limited.

All criticism is immanent. We criticize our tradition from within the tradition. Our tradition gives us the resources with which to criticize it. We don’t need to jump outside it and we’re not able to. Criticism is always possible, however, it’s not possible from some kind of god’s-eye standpoint. The basic difference between Gadamer’s and Habermas’ positions here is not that Habermas thinks we need to criticize tradition and Gadamer doesn’t. The difference bears on the conditions that make criticism possible. For Habermas, we need to stand outside of tradition—at an objective distance from it—and theoretical knowledge makes this possible. Gadamer’s reply: that’s not possible; all criticism is immanent, and this isn’t a problem. Theoretical reason doesn’t soar above our practices. It’s an attempt to clarify them from within.

Gadamer’s constant theme is the finitude of thought, and his reply to Habermas is that he has overlooked this fact of intellectual finitude. Criticism is a form of participation in tradition. Theoretical reason in general is a form of participation in the realm of practice. It’s an attempt to clarify our practices from within—not get an objective view of them from without. Theory doesn’t stand above the realm of practice and there is no real opposition between theory and practice.

His conclusion, at the end of the chapter: “And so, as a kind of answer to the question, What is practice? I would like to summarize: Practice is conducting oneself and acting in solidarity. Solidarity, however, is the decisive condition and basis of all social reason. There is a saying of Heraclitus, the ‘weeping’ philosopher: The logos is common to all, but people behave as if each had a private reason. Does this have to remain this way?” (RAS, 87).

Chapter 5: “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy”

His topic in this chapter is the nature of hermeneutical philosophy, and his basic hypothesis is that it’s a form of practical philosophy. There is a tradition of practical philosophy that goes back to Aristotle, and specifically his ethics. When Aristotle spoke of practical philosophy, he meant philosophy is a very general sense, and a sense that included what we now call science. It’s not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that science would gradually branch off from philosophy. Hermeneutics itself refers to the practice of interpretation, but it’s also a theoretical discipline; it’s “the theory or art of explication, of interpretation” (RAS, 88). It’s an attempt to gain an explicit, theoretical understanding of the practice of interpretative understanding and the conditions that make it possible, as well as its limits. It’s closely related to the arts of grammar and rhetoric; Aristotle defined the latter as the art of persuasion, which is not to be confused with sophistry.

Hermeneutics has at once a theoretical and practical orientation. It doesn’t set up any kind of opposition between theory and practice, like our modern opposition between science and its application. As Gadamer writes, “Theoria itself is a practice” (RAS, 90). He attributes this view to Aristotle, but it’s Gadamer’s position too. It’s a statement that sounds strange to modern ears because we are so used to contrasting theory (i.e., scientific reason) with practice (applied science). Practice is not always the application of theory. The Greek word praxis had a very broad meaning. In Plato’s philosophy it took on a connotation of impurity and haphazardness. It was a second-rate kind of thing compared to the ideal realm of the Forms—the realm of pure, rational thought. Plato set up a strong separation between the realm of theoretical reason (which is the true home of philosophy, which contemplates the Forms) and practical life (the world of the cave). But elsewhere in Greek thought praxis meant the whole realm of free activity, which was not contrasted with theory at all. On the contrary: theory was one form of practical activity. It was essentially thinking—an attempt to get clear—about something or other. Practical philosophy has to do with “what is each individual’s due as a citizen and what constitutes his virtue or excellence” (RAS, 92), so it has a social and ethical orientation. It doesn’t have a practical orientation in the sense that it bears on all the practical arts and crafts but toward the question what is the good life for human beings.

Theoretical knowledge was supposed to give direction to action; it was not theory for theory’s sake as it would become in modern times. The purpose of theory was practical. Theory arises from practice—it tries to gain an explicit grasp of some form of activity—and also returns to practice—to guide our behavior in light of some conception of excellence (good practice). The same is true of hermeneutical theory: it’s a theoretical attempt to clarify the nature of the practice of understanding. But it should also be of some help in guiding our interpretations, e.g., in the form of the theoretical idea of the hermeneutical circle, that is, we understand the meaning of a particular passage in light of the meaning of the text as a whole and vice versa. This is an abstract, theoretical principle, and it arises as an observation of how we interpret texts, as a matter of phenomenological fact. It is a description of how we think, but it also has prescriptive value: when in doubt about the meaning of a passage, try to read it in light of a larger context, which is the meaning of the book as a whole. In fact the original meaning of hermeneutics was entirely practical. It was a discipline that tried to give practical assistance in helping us interpret—especially religious—texts. It arose in modern times shortly after the Protestant Reformation to help ministers interpret Biblical passages for their congregations. Much later—beginning in the nineteenth century—hermeneutics became more explicitly theoretical, so “philosophical hermeneutics” was born. Today “philosophical hermeneutics” essentially refers to the philosophy of Gadamer and some like-minded philosophers. Gadamer himself, being a somewhat modest man, never thought of hermeneutics as “his” philosophy. It’s a field that asks a series of philosophical-theoretical questions about the nature of human understanding, a theory about the life of the mind in a large sense: “Thus the earlier hermeneutics was primarily a practical component in the activity of understanding and interpreting. It was far less frequently a theoretical textbook—which is practically what techne meant in antiquity—than a practical manual. Books bearing the title ‘Hermeneutics’ usually had a purely pragmatic and occasional bent and were helpful for the understanding of difficult texts by explaining hard-to-understand passages. However, precisely in fields in which difficult texts have to be understood and interpreted, reflection upon the nature of such activity first evolved, and with this development something like hermeneutics in our contemporary sense was brought forth. This happened especially in the field of theology” (RAS, 94). Further: “The hermeneutics that I characterize as philosophic is not introduced as a new procedure of interpretation or explication. Basically it only describes what always happens wherever an interpretation is convincing and successful. It is not at all a matter of a doctrine about a technical skill that would state how understanding ought to be. We have to acknowledge what is, and so we cannot change the fact that unacknowledged presuppositions are always at work in our understanding. Probably we should not want to change this at all, even if we could. It always harvests a broadened and deepened self-understanding. But that means hermeneutics is philosophy, and as philosophy it is practical philosophy” (RAS, 111).

To this day hermeneutics has a very close association with theology, and in the contemporary university a department of religious studies is as likely to offer courses on hermeneutics as a philosophy department is. Jurisprudence is another field that hermeneutics has a long association with, and there again it was a practical matter: how should judges interpret particular laws, what principles properly guide the act of legal interpretation? In the 19^th century it was especially Nietzsche who brought to the attention of philosophers the radical importance of interpretation or the idea that finite, situated interpretation underlies our entire existence. It was Nietzsche who exposed the false ideals of modern philosophy, and epistemology in particular. He demolished the ideal of objective knowledge, and his influence has been felt throughout the intellectual culture of the 20^th century. Nietzsche, Gadamer writes, has had far more influence than we usually realize.

Then Heidegger appeared, who further refined Nietzsche’s views on interpretation and revealed that interpretation is not just something we do but something that we “are.” Hermeneutics becomes “philosophical,” really, with Heidegger. For him, our very way of being is to search constantly for an understanding of what things in our world mean. Hermeneutics now becomes ontological: a hypothesis about our very (way of) being. Also in the twentieth century the notion of interpretation would be taken up in psychoanalysis and then the critique of ideology, both of which branch quite far away from Heidegger. In Freudian psychoanalysis—and then critical theory which wanted to combine Marxian social criticism with the theory of psychoanalysis—we get a model of knowledge as progressing. For Marx (following Hegel), history itself is progressing; it’s advancing teleologically and knowledge is progressing with it. This had become a very common view by the nineteenth century, and Gadamer doesn’t buy it.

Gadamer’s view, and Heidegger’s, is that what we see in the course of history is not the constant progression from the unknown to the known—from ignorance to enlightenment—but instead a “relentless inner tension between illumination and concealment.” Progress is an ideal of modern science. Maybe science is progressing, but we ourselves are not. Our knowledge is not definitive and it’s never going to be. We are not moving toward a state in which knowledge in general is objective, exhaustive, or definitive. Our knowledge is limited, historically conditioned, prejudiced, partial, and it’s never more than some combination of illumination and concealment. We light a candle in the dark, but the darkness surrounds us. This is our existential condition. We can and should ask, what prejudices incline our thinking this way or that, and are these prejudices true or false, are they helping us or are they getting in the way? But this is an endless task. We will never get rid of all prejudice, nor should we hold this out as an ideal. We can replace one set of prejudices with another set, but that’s it, and this is not such a terrible thing. While prejudices are sometimes false—are sometimes obstacles to knowledge—they also make thinking itself possible. They are biases, but they are “biases of our openness to the world,” and without them, we couldn’t think at all. We should try to become as aware as we can of what our prejudices are. This is exactly what Gadamer means by historically effected consciousness, and it’s a kind of philosophical and educational ideal: to become aware of the extent to which our consciousness—how we think and perceive, our most fundamental way of experiencing the world—is an effect of history. We think this way not because it’s “natural” or “self-evident” or because we’re hard-wired to think this way but because we stand in a tradition that has us think this way—that constitutes our experience or consciousness in a certain way. It’s when we see this that we realize that we also don’t need to continue to think this way.

Chapter 6: “Hermeneutics as a Theoretical and Practical Task”

Gadamer concludes Chapter 5 by claiming that the relation between theory and practice is reciprocal or dialectical in the sense of a back-and-forth movement between the two rather than anything hierarchical. Aristotle’s ethics gave us a model of this kind of theory/practice reciprocity. Hermeneutics is a form of practical philosophy, in the tradition of Aristotle, but it is at the same time a theory. The word hermeneutics itself, as well as “the reality designated by the word”—that is, the practice of interpreting texts—are of ancient origin, but as a theoretical discipline it arose really in the late eighteenth century and especially the nineteenth century. Gadamer writes that he discovered the word hermeneutics in the German author Heinrich Seume and in Johann Peter Hebel (both minor figures), but it didn’t really become a philosophical theory until the writings of Schleiermacher and then Dilthey in the nineteenth century.

The “practical task” of hermeneutics, then, goes back to the ancient world while the theoretical task is modern. The same can be said of the term rhetoric: the practical task goes back to the ancients. The theory arose first with Aristotle, and we see the same kind of oscillation between the theoretical and practical task of rhetoric as with hermeneutics. These two fields are very closely related because in interpreting something in a certain way I am always having to persuade someone of the legitimacy of my interpretation. I don’t understand things, or think, in a social vacuum. We are all constantly trying to understand what’s going on and what things mean along with others, and persuading each other that this is a good way to think about things. Philosophy itself is a rhetorical discipline in the sense that philosophers do not search for the truth in isolation but are constantly trying to change one another’s minds about our ideas. No sooner do I have an idea, or decide something is true, than I try to persuade you that you should accept it.

The tradition of practical philosophy that Aristotle began came more or less to an end in the nineteenth century when it was dissolved into the discipline of political science. The whole realm of the social-political became absorbed into science. This would not have sat well with Aristotle. At the heart of his ethics is the notion of practical judgment (phronesis), which I’ve already talked about. It was very important to Aristotle to separate practical philosophy from Plato’s more formal idea of dialectics, which is more of a theoretic science. Phronesis is a practical task in the sense that reasonableness—the art of judgment—is not governed by a science or method. Aristotle warned his students at the Lyceum, at the very outset of the Nicomachean Ethics, not to expect more clarity and precision in the study of ethics than the topic allows. Ethics is not math. Gadamer adds: interpretation is not a formal procedure either. It is more of an art or a skill. Aristotle gave us a general methodological principle, which Gadamer reminds us of: in all intellectual inquiry, “method must always be directed toward its object and what is relevant to its objects” (RAS, 116). That is, if we want to know about X, we don’t use a one-size-fits-all method to investigate it. We adopt the method that goes with the object. If you want to know why something in nature is the way it is, then use the scientific method, but if you want to know what the good life for human beings is, then use a less formal method. One size does not fit all, but modern political science tries to account for the whole domain of the political by subjecting it all to empirical inquiry. Politics is a science, we commonly think. Aristotle would have thought this an absurd claim because “the decisive problem is that this practical science is involved with the all-embracing problem of the good in human life, which is not confined to a determinate area like the other modes of technical knowledge” (RAS, 117). There is a bigger picture to politics. Politics is an art of trying to create a more just society. It belongs to the “all-embracing problem” of the good life and no science could ever encompass all of that. Nor could it encompass something like education—for which again there is a bigger picture. Education also needs to be understood as part of the all-embracing problem of how minds or human beings are formed. It’s not just a matter of a technical procedure although there is a technical dimension of it. Politics has a technical dimension, but there is also more to it than that.

What Gadamer is trying to do here is rehabilitate the tradition of practical philosophy in the face of the excessive rationalism of modernity: “Practical philosophy functions in our context only as an example of the tradition of this kind of knowing that does not correspond to the modern notion of method” (RAS, 118). Practical activity includes a “kind of knowing.” Knowing is not always theoretical, methodological, or scientific. What does he mean by practice as a way of knowing? Practical activity is not unreflective or unthinking. We act with an understanding of what we are doing—what our actions mean, how they should be performed, In taking up a practice, we are not just following rules but are creatively tailoring the rules—when there are any—to the problem that’s before us. He mentions the example of the judge in a legal case: how does a good judge arrive at a just verdict in a legal trial? There are laws that the judge needs to apply, so in a sense the judge is following a rule, but they are doing something more creative than this. They are applying it, and application is a form of interpretation. The law that the judge is applying gains meaning precisely in being applied to the case. The meaning of a law is nothing separate and apart from how it comes to bear on cases. Its meaning just is its applications. There is a sense in which judges make the law, because all applying is a making. Laws don’t apply themselves. The judge has to decide how exactly a particular law applies to the case before them, or how it produces a legal remedy to an injustice: “each application of a law goes beyond the mere understanding of its legal sense and fashions a new reality” (RAS, 126).

Aristotle gave us a metaphor for understanding the nature of practical judgment (which Gadamer now reminds us of): the archer. The archer has a kind of knowledge, and it’s both theoretical and practical. You need abstract, theoretical knowledge, that is, you need a clear view of the target, as in ethics you need to have a theoretical understanding of what the good is. But this isn’t enough. You also need practical knowledge: you need to know how to handle the bow. You need to know “that” (something is the case) and also “how” (to execute some practical task). If you know only one of these things, you won’t be a good archer. A judge needs to know both what the law is and how to make it fit the case before them. The moral judge needs to know what the good life is—or some set of ethical principles—and how to tailor them to the situations of real life. The art of judgment has both a theoretical and a practical dimension. Theory and practice are not opposed.

Chapter 7: “On the Natural Inclination of Human Beings Toward Philosophy”

He begins this chapter by asking about the condition of philosophy in our times. How is it viewed by the general public? Not very well. It’s usually seen as irrelevant to anything that really matters. Philosophy is very often seen as a relic of a bygone age. Can we really say, as philosophers long have, that there is a natural inclination toward philosophy, that the interest in philosophy is fundamental to our humanity? He thinks so, but today we tend to view this claim with skepticism. Is the skepticism justified, and is science capable of replacing it? He reminds us of Hegel’s claim: a people without a metaphysics is like a temple without “the holy of holies.” Philosophy is—or was—the sanctuary, now it’s science. Hegel said this two centuries ago; his sentiment seems behind the times today. For instance, for a long time it was thought that a university education should include at least some introduction to philosophy—usually a mandatory first-year course that would survey the history of this discipline. Today this is decidedly optional, and most students never take even a single course in this or see the point of doing so. Most people today have no idea what philosophy is. How can we say that it’s “natural” to take an interest in something that most people find so irrelevant to their lives? Is the interest in philosophy just a reflection of an immature stage in our development as a species?

The idea that there is something fundamentally human about the interest in philosophy, of course, goes back to the Greeks and especially to Plato, and Gadamer traces some of this history in his usual way. Every time Gadamer proposes or defends an idea, he begins by reminding us of the history of that idea, rather than presenting it as his own invention. Where, then, did this interest in philosophy begin? With Plato—surprise, surprise: “According to Plato, the beginning of philosophy, the desire for knowledge, is wonder (thaumazein). It always intervenes at a point where something strikes us as alien because it runs counter to habitual expectations…. Wonder, however, is not only being astonished but also admiration, which means constantly looking up to what is exemplary. The Platonic ascent to the good is the only thing that gives wonder its fulfillment. To Plato, not only mathematics seemed to be in need of foundations but all our knowledge, expert or general, on the basis of which we make our practical decisions. All that requires knowledge of the good” (RAS, 143–4). Philosophy begins with the experience of wonder—about the nature of our world in general and about the good life. Philosophy itself was a search for an answer to these questions that is comprehensive. Science today doesn’t have this kind of comprehensiveness—and tends to regard this comprehensiveness as naïve. For Socrates and Plato, and for Gadamer too, the search for knowledge begins with the perception of our own ignorance. Remember Socrates’ docta ignorantia—the doctrine of ignorance: I don’t know what I need to know. It is the gods who have knowledge; human beings at most pursue it, but we must pursue it. Our sense of wonder must lead us to take up philosophical questions. This sense of wonder is fundamental to the kind of beings that we are. It defines us, but how does wonder arise? Doesn’t it come to us when we encounter something that is alien to us—the mysterious, the foreign? Science hasn’t replaced this exactly; the sense of wonder at what is other hasn’t disappeared, but Gadamer believes that the primary outlet that we now have for this is no longer philosophy but art. The great novelists of the last two centuries have done much of the work that philosophy used to do. Art is now “the custodian of philosophy’s great heritage” (RAS, 146). This heritage isn’t going to go away, and science is not about to make it obsolete: “Would it be possible to conceive and to will such a completely scientific control of the life of the individual as well as of the life of the society that every personal and political decision would be decided objectively—not by ourselves but by science? Or is our desire to know the sort that constantly needs to be nourished from other sources than those of a research making ever further progress? Is it not crucial to man’s knowledge of himself that he, like Socrates, knows what he does not know, and never shall know? Should the questions to which science does not know the answer be shunted aside even though they still concern the human mind and have called forth the grand answers of the religions, the mythologies, artistic creations like the tragedies, and intellectual works like the Platonic dialogues?” (RAS, 148-9).

The natural inclination to philosophize—in the original sense of the word—remains. What we especially need today is a new form of self-knowledge. Science doesn’t deliver self-knowledge. What we need to achieve today is “a new self-understanding of humanity” (RAS, 149). We need this rather badly, Gadamer believes, because we are becoming so alienated from ourselves (as he has already said). Philosophy has always tried to fulfill this task of helping us to know ourselves. There is a profound connection, he thinks, between understanding and self-understanding—or knowledge and self-knowledge. They are two sides of the same coin, but scientific knowledge doesn’t really deliver this. Philosophy has always sought to do this, however imperfectly. In the end, Plato and the other Greeks are right: “The Delphic demand ‘Know thyself’ meant, ‘Know that you are a man and no god.’ It holds true as well for human beings in the age of the sciences, for it stands as a warning before all illusions of mastery and domination. Self-knowledge alone is capable of saving a freedom threatened not only by all rulers but much more by the domination and dependence that issue from everything we think we control” (RAS, 150).

Chapter 8: “Philosophy or Theory of Science?”

The question he takes up in this final chapter is whether there can still be such a thing as philosophy—that is, a philosophy that is not just a theory of science. In an age of science can philosophy take any other form than philosophy of science? Is there any need for it? Of course, his answer will be yes. Philosophy is not over and done with, although it can often seem like it is. He spends some time at the beginning of the chapter talking about the situation in German philosophy at around the turn of the twentieth century. Positivism was still fashionable—the view that philosophy is itself a science or that it must be modelled on science, that philosophy of science is all the philosophy we need. Philosophy in the classical sense seemed to be dying out. Now we seem to be in a situation where philosophy is in some kind of competition with science and science has the advantage. How did this come about?

This began in the seventeenth century when science was placed on a foundation that was mathematical and no longer metaphysical. It was at this time that the scientific method as we now know it—“securing the path of knowledge in accord with the guiding ideal of certainty”—came into being (RAS, 156). In time knowledge in all fields came to be drawn to this ideal. In philosophy this began in the seventeenth century as well. Modern rationalism (Descartes) and empiricism (Hobbes) were both products of the seventeenth century, which led to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century when it became more firmly entrenched. Philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has for the most part continued to follow a trajectory that began in the seventeenth century. This is the situation we now find ourselves in, where philosophy as the “love of wisdom” or as Aristotelian “practical philosophy” looks like an anachronism. Again, Gadamer has no problem with science. His problem is that he is thinking about the whole heritage of knowledge that has been passed down to us over about 3000 years, and most of this is not scientific knowledge. What is to become of it? There is a whole tradition not just of philosophy but art, history, religion, and everything that is studied in the arts and humanities. An age of science—that is, science alone—is not “capable of fully encompassing in itself the heritage of this tradition” (RAS, 159). This tradition needs not just to be conserved but taken up and continued, but the prospect of this happening is looking unlikely, that is, if the legitimacy of this entire tradition is evaporating.

The existentialists gave philosophy new life. However, it’s significant that some of these thinkers (like Nietzsche) were outsiders to mainstream philosophy and existentialism itself, in its different forms, has always been somewhat on the margins of philosophy. Even in its heyday it was never exactly mainstream. It is philosophy “pushed into the light of the private sphere” (RAS, 60), that is, it is of limited relevance to our public existence. Its focus is on the existing individual and their private search for the meaning of their existence. Must philosophy retreat into the private? The Greeks didn’t think of philosophy this way. Philosophy, for the Greeks, was an attempt to understand our social existence no less—probably more—than our private existence, but social existence has been conceded to science, or the social sciences. If you want to study any aspect of our social existence, you now go into one of the social sciences. Even private life—the world of the psyche—is also now scientific.

Philosophy is being squeezed ever more out of the whole realm of human existence. Its questions seem to be beside the point. A consequence of this is that as science becomes entirely independent of philosophy it becomes in a sense irresponsible, not primarily in the moral sense “but in the sense of its incapacity and its lack of any perceived need to give an account of what it itself means within the totality of human existence” (RAS, 161). Especially important is that science doesn’t see any need to account for its increasing domination of social life. Science has effectively colonized the whole realm of social life and more or less every aspect of our existence and it doesn’t see any need to justify this. It is irresponsible in this sense: it doesn’t respond or answer for itself, and it doesn’t have the resources to do so. It doesn’t think it has to. This is not the task of the theory of science. Suppose we ask, what is the value of science? What answer do we hear? It is an answer that is immanent to scientific rationality: it promotes efficiency or utility; it solves problems. Science can justify itself in its own terms—so can any way of thinking—but it can’t account for itself in a larger sense or become critical of itself or look up in the way that philosophy has always tried to look up. Science looks down, at the evidence. Human beings need to have a way of looking up—of experiencing wonder and of thinking in a larger sense, of making sense of our existence, of understanding the world and ourselves in the world. It is the nature of science, Gadamer believes, to be both irresponsible in this sense and also dogmatic or to recognize no limit to its application. This is the basic problem that both Heidegger and Gadamer always saw with modern science, and it has no solution—except to assert, from the side of philosophy (practical philosophy), that there is more under the sun than what science knows. There are experiences of truth that are not generated by the scientific, or any, method: “That is what we should have learned from Heidegger’s violent thought experiment of thinking being as time and of opposing the ‘hermeneutics of facticity’ to the idealism of a sheer understanding of a meaningful tradition: that the traditions within which we stand—and every tradition that we creatively or appropriatingly pass on—offer less an objective field for the scientific mastery of a subject matter or for the extension of our domination by knowledge of the unknown than a mediation of ourselves with our real possibilities engulfing us—with what can be and what is capable of happening to and becoming of us” (RAS, 166-7).

Works Cited

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. MIT Press, 1983.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, second revised edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer. Bloomsbury, 2004.

Grondin, Jean. Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography. Yale University Press, 2003.

PART TWO

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

Major works:

1951 – The Origins of Totalitarianism

1958 – The Human Condition

1961 – Between Past and Future

1963 – On Revolution

1963 – Eichmann in Jerusalem

1970 – Men in Dark Times

1970 – On Violence

1972 – Crises of the Republic

1977-78 – The Life of the Mind

I’m going to ask you to read the Preface and chapters 1–5 of Between Past and Future, which comes to a little under 200 pages. This book was first published in 1961, and a second edition appeared seven years later with two additional chapters.

Biography

I’m going to be drawing in this section mainly from Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s excellent biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. This is a lengthy and very thorough book; highly recommended to anyone interested in this important philosopher and political theorist.

Hannah Arendt is among the best-known German thinkers of her generation, and her writings stand up rather well today, nearly a half-century since her death in 1975. For many years she was reluctant to call herself a philosopher but instead a political theorist and historian of ideas. Toward the end of her life, it could no longer be denied that she was not only a philosopher but one of the most notable philosophers in the world, and her writings have continued to find a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic. She managed to generate a fair bit of controversy in her lifetime, most especially as a result of her much-read book of 1963, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which was her journalistic/philosophical account of the trial in Jerusalem of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann which took place in 1961. More on this later.

By temperament Arendt is said to have been rather reticent and wary of appearing in front of a public audience, which she reluctantly came to do in the later decades of her life after becoming well known in her adopted home of New York City, where she was forced to flee on account of the Nazis. Arendt was Jewish and was also politically very astute, and recognized the threat that Hitler represented already prior to 1933, when many others did not take him seriously. She did, and together with her mother left the country while it was still possible (albeit illegal), fleeing first to France and subsequently to America.

Married twice, she had no children but maintained a wide and close circle of friends both before and after migrating to the USA. Among her philosopher friends were Karl Jaspers and his wife Gertrud, Heidegger, and Paul Tillich, although after migrating to America most of her friendships were with more literary and political actors than philosophers. Young-Bruehl’s biography makes no reference to Gadamer, so apparently they were not friends although they would have surely crossed paths during their student days. Both were students of Heidegger at around the same time in the 1920s, and Arendt and Heidegger would also become romantically involved prior to her leaving Germany, despite the fact that he was married. Anyway, they would remain on friendly terms, sort of, throughout their lives despite some setbacks in their friendship, most obviously Heidegger’s involvement in 1933 with the Nazis while she was busy fleeing the country. Years after moving to the USA, she would continue to regard German as her preferred language, although she would speak and also write in English. Many of her friends were people Arendt regarded, her biographer states, as “outsiders, sometimes by choice and sometimes by destiny. In the broadest sense, they were unassimilated. ‘Social nonconformism,’ she once said bluntly, ‘is the sine qua non of intellectual achievement.’ And, she might well have added, also of human dignity” (Young-Bruehl, xliii).

Hannah (born Johanna) Arendt was born in October 1906 in the small city of Linden, which today is a borough, with a current population of 45,000, of Hanover in Lower Saxony. Her grandparents on both sides were from Konigsberg, hometown of Immanuel Kant, and it is here that the Arendt family moved three years after her birth. The Arendts were a Jewish family of Russian descent, and Hannah grew up in a tight-knit Jewish community, although her family was not religious and Hannah herself would never profess any faith. Her father Paul Arendt was an engineer by profession and died when Hannah was just seven years old, leaving her, an only child, to be raised by her mother Martha Cohn, a musician. They would now live with Martha’s parents in a Jewish neighborhood in Konigsberg, and Hannah would attend school from the age of four. The family was not affluent but middle-class and their social circle included mainly professionals rather than merchants. Education was highly valued in the Arendt family, and young Hannah excelled at school from a young age. Toward the end of her life, she would remark in an interview on the anti-Semitism she witnessed during her childhood as follows: “You see, all Jewish children encountered anti-Semitism. And the souls of many children were poisoned by it. The difference with me lay in the fact that my mother always insisted that I not humble myself. One must defend oneself! When my teachers made anti-Semitic remarks … I was instructed to stand up immediately, to leave the class, go home, and leave the rest to school protocol. My mother would write one of her many letters, and, with that, my involvement in the matter ended completely. I had a day off from school, and that was, of course, very nice. But if remarks came at me from other children, I was not allowed to go home and tell. That did not count. One had to defend oneself against remarks from other children. And, so, these things did not become really problematic for me” (Young-Bruehl, 11-12).

Much to her mother’s disappointment, Hannah as a girl displayed no musical talent but did excel at school in more intellectual pursuits, especially math and literature. As Martha recorded in her journal at the time, “There does not seem to be any artistic ability in her of any sort, nor any manual dexterity; there seems to be some intellectual precocity, however, and perhaps even some real talent. There is, for example, a sense of place, memory, an acute capacity for observation. Above all, a burning interest in books and letters. She already reads now … all the letters and numbers without any instruction, simply through asking questions in the streets and elsewhere” (Young-Bruehl, 16). Storytelling was one of her great loves, which likely began when after her father’s death her paternal grandfather Max Arendt would take her on walks while telling lively stories. Literature would become a lifelong passion, and in later years friends would report that there was an element of the actress in Arendt which she would call upon when having to speak and debate in academic settings. “She had learned, slowly, to control—though never to conquer—her great stage fright by yielding to her story, to what she had to say. Throughout her life she admired, venerated, storytellers—for their stories, but even more for their reverent subservience to the perfectly crafted tale” (Young-Bruehl, 18).

At the outset of World War I, fearing the approach of the Russian army, Hannah and her mother fled Konigsberg for Berlin where Martha’s sister lived, returning to Konigsberg after ten weeks. She resumed her schooling at this time and the family tried to settle back into normal life despite the wartime conditions. For about a year, in 1915-16, Hannah would often be sick with a series of fevers, headaches, and throat infections, likely compounded by anxiety regarding the war. Her frequent absence from school didn’t slow her academic progress, however, as she was always among the top of her class. The Arendt family managed well enough financially through the war years, but toward the end Martha’s family business was failing and food was in short supply.

Hannah and her mother would always retain a close relationship despite having somewhat different temperaments. Hannah, her biographer states, “was a mixture of the sort of femininity her mother fostered—warm and sentimental—and the sort of assertiveness her own intellectual gifts and intense desire for independence called for. Hannah Arendt found her mother’s notions about normal development and normal femininity confining, particularly after she began her university studies” (Young-Bruehl, 25-6). In 1920 Martha would become remarried to a man named Martin Beerwald, a widower with two adult daughters, and for a time the combined families would share a home together, still in Konigsberg. Hannah was now fourteen, and the new arrangement provided some much-needed financial security for her and her mother. “To Martin Beerwald, his stepdaughter Hannah was a complete mystery; compared with his own quiet, reserved, homely daughters, she was headstrong, frighteningly intelligent, and far too independent. He could not provide her with either intellectual guidance or the fatherly authority she lacked in her family of widowed women…. [H]e remained aloof and left her to her mother’s care” (Young-Bruehl, 29). His successful ironmongery business allowed them to live in relative comfort through the years of high inflation in the early 1920s.

Hannah at this time had become part of a large circle of friends, mostly sons and daughters of professional Jewish families, most of whom were a few years older than herself and were studying at German universities. It was also at this time that she first heard of Heidegger from friends who were students of his. By this point she had become a voracious reader of modern literature, poetry (especially Goethe), and philosophy and would remain so throughout her life, while she had also inherited her mother’s fondness for political activism. Her favorite philosopher/theologian at the time was Kierkegaard, and reading his work inspired her to major in theology when she began studying at the University of Marburg in 1924. Heidegger was teaching at Marburg at this time, and she would begin to read his work with much admiration as well as the writings of Jaspers. The two main trends in German philosophical circles in those days were neo-Kantianism (formalism) and various kinds of scientism (positivism, empiricism, materialism, psychologism), but it would be the phenomenology of Husserl and especially Heidegger that caught her interest. She would spend a year at Marburg, followed by a semester at Freiburg to study with Husserl before moving on to Heidelberg to study with Jaspers, who became her doctoral supervisor and in time a lifelong friend. Her affair with Heidegger ended in 1933 with her departure from Germany, and the two didn’t communicate for seventeen years until after the conclusion of the Second World War, at which time the two met again and she forgave him for his involvement in 1933 with the Nazis.

Arendt would write her doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine’s conception of love, and a revised version of it was published in 1929. In the same year she married Günther Stern, whom she had been living with for nine months amid a series of other romantic relationships. The two had much in common: “they were both Jews of middle-class, assimilated families; they had had similar philosophical training and shared an intellectual stance, a dedication to the revolution in philosophy Heidegger and Jaspers promoted; both were seen as outstanding students with brilliant prospects” (Young-Bruehl, 79). Stern did not enjoy the degree of academic success that Arendt did, however, and did not pursue it professionally. The couple would move on to Berlin where he would find work as a journalist while her next project was a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish writer who had died in 1833 and with whom Arendt felt a deep affinity. By the early 1930s she was becoming increasingly interested in politics and history, while she and her husband were continuing to move in Jewish circles in which political questions were becoming an urgent matter.

Politically, Arendt was not attracted by the Marxism that had become fashionable in her social circle, nor would she turn to the far left in her later years or become a proponent of the women’s movement or feminism. She didn’t lack interest in women’s issues but insisted throughout her life that such matters should be pursued not in isolation but in combination with other political issues. Political movements and ideologies she would always be skeptical of, while political theory and the history of political thought would become the main focus of her writings. Current issues always occupied her somewhat more than abstract questions of political philosophy, and when she would write on political philosophy her concern with topical issues would always be paramount.

Always politically astute, by 1931 and 1932 Arendt could sense a rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany and began to think about emigrating. When Hitler came into power in 1933, she needed to act and she left her country for good with her mother Martha and husband Günther Stern while this was still possible. For the following eighteen years she was legally stateless, moving first briefly to Prague, then Geneva, then joining her husband in Paris, where the three of them would remain until that city too became uninhabitable for Jews. In 1951 she would become an American citizen.

During her time in Paris, Arendt worked for a few different organizations, including one that assisted refugees like herself in resettling in what would become the modern state of Israel. She also became part of a network of German friends, both Jewish and non-Jewish, friendship always ranking high in her system of values. Her marriage was failing by this time, and when Stern left Paris for New York in 1936 Arendt stayed behind and they divorced the following year. She would meet her eventual second husband, Heinrich Blücher, in the social circle just mentioned. Blücher had fled to Paris from Berlin in 1934 and was a communist in his politics, although he would renounce this stance in later years. He and Arendt shared a deep interest in politics and many of the ideas she would write about in her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, arose from their conversations. Blücher was an intellectual but had no particular inclinations for a career at this time and worked sporadically in the early years of their marriage, which did not please Martha. Hannah Arendt’s mother and husband did not get along particularly well, and when the three of them would share an apartment in New York, these two would often clash.

Arendt was fortunate to receive an emergency visa to leave France in 1940 by which time German Jews in France were being sent to German death camps. Martha had remained in Konigsberg until fleeing in 1939, joining her daughter and soon-to-be son in law in Paris. Hannah and Heinrich Blücher were married in 1940. France would fall to the Germans in the fall of that year, and the three immediately tried to obtain visas for America. These visas were hard to get, and in the fall of 1940 only about a quarter of applicants were successful. Their narrow escape to New York was very fortunate, as in addition to the emergency exist visas from France they had to obtain permission from the American State Department to enter the US, which was also not easy. They arrived in New York in 1941 and this city would remain Hannah’s home for the rest of her life. She would learn to speak English at this time, although the language at home would always be German. Despite her admiration for political life in America, Arendt disliked much about the culture, including what she considered its excessive social conformity.

Arendt didn’t seek employment as a university professor at this time but preferred to become involved once again in a series of politically minded organizations, beginning in the fall of 1941 when she began writing a column for a German-language periodical and combined this with part-time teaching at Brooklyn College. Among the political issues she was writing about at this time was the question of the possible creation of a Jewish army, which she advocated, and the issue of whether the new state of Israel should become a sovereign nation-state or, as she preferred, a part of the British Commonwealth. Blücher at this time found occasional teaching employment, but his wife had become the primary income earner. Among the various positions she held in New York was the directorship of an organization called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, a job she held for four years and which called upon her to return to Europe for several months of 1949-50. She also found employment as an editor with Schocken Books, which brought her into contact with a great many authors in different fields.

The Origins of Totalitarianism was Arendt’s first major work of philosophy and political theory, and the occasion of it was the news in 1943 of the full extent of Hitler’s Final Solution. Years later she would write: “At first we did not believe it. Even though my husband had always said we should put nothing past [the Nazis]. This, however, we did not believe because it was militarily unnecessary and uncalled for. My husband was a kind of military historian at one time, and he knew something about these things. He said, ‘Don’t listen to any of these fairy tales, they couldn’t do that.’ A half a year later, when it was proven to us, we finally believed it. Before that, one would say to one’s self—so, we all have enemies. That’s quite natural. Why should a people have no enemies? But this was different. This was really as though the abyss had opened. Because one always has the hope that everything else might someday be rectified, politically—that everything might be put right again. This couldn’t be” (Young-Bruehl, 184-5). The aim of this book was, as its title suggests, to document the history of ideas that led to the rise of twentieth-century totalitarianism, most especially in the form of German National Socialism and Russian Marxism. Anti-Semitism was a major theme in the book and would remain a lifelong major interest of hers for obvious reasons.

New York City had become home to a large community of Jewish exiles from Germany and elsewhere in Europe, and Arendt immersed herself in this community, particularly within intellectual and political circles. An individual with a very strong work ethic, she was forever writing or otherwise working with one organization or another, in addition to writing books which started to appear regularly after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. Her major works, with publication dates, are listed above, and throughout her body of academic work we find a common set of themes, mostly political or political/historical. Her conviction was always that in order to get a properly critical and philosophical take on a given political question, we must trace the history of that question and see what philosophers and others have had to say about it. She was never a strident ideologue of either the left or the right but more closely resembled an historian of ideas who would weigh in on a given issue only after tracing the historically unfolding conversation that surrounded it, as many philosophers in the continental European tradition (including Gadamer) would also do.

Her book on totalitarianism generated a good deal of attention upon its publication and still stands as one of her foremost works. She described in this book the “total moral collapse” of Germany under Nazism and argued that totalitarianism is not a particular form of politics but the total destruction of politics, and it is not unique to Germany under Hitler. She emphasized the affinities between Nazi Germany and Soviet communism, “race-thinking,” imperialism, and certain social developments in the modern world as a whole.

Her best-known book is undoubtedly Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt covered the trial of this Nazi war criminal for The New Yorker magazine in 1961 and the complete account appeared in book form two years later. Her interpretation of Eichmann is suggested in the book’s subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil,” and it is that this major war criminal, while unquestionably evil, was no bloodthirsty monster but was essentially an ordinary man “just following orders” without giving much thought at all to what he was doing, even when his job was to arrange the transportation of masses of human beings to their deaths. The salient feature of this man, as she saw him, was his utter lack of reflection. The man didn’t think, and while this is a description that can apply to most anyone in most any position in society, the consequences were monumental for him given the situation in which he found himself. His daily preoccupation of making sure the trains ran on time was not dissimilar to our own preoccupations, and his psychology and motivations, while evil, resemble our own in rather disturbing ways. This would be the only journalistic book that she would ever write; it is not a theoretical treatise as her other works would be.

The book generated a great deal of controversy, with some criticizing her for “blaming the victim.” She had drawn attention in the book to the part played by the Jewish councils during the Holocaust, who, she believed, made it easier for the Nazis to perpetrate their crimes. The Jewish councils were often given the job of organizing for the deportation of Jews, in effect handing them over to their killers, and Arendt details how these councils in effect collaborated with the Nazis in exchange for personal protection. Arendt denied that she was accusing the councils of outright collaboration; her point was that perhaps they could have done something more than they did. She also received flack for criticizing the prosecutor for his efforts to portray Eichmann at the trial as a criminal mastermind of the Holocaust. He was no such thing, she argued—and this was precisely what was so interesting about him. He was an ordinary, average man—a bureaucrat, remarkable in no way. He was neither a bloodthirsty ghoul nor anything like Hitler. He didn’t hate Jews and was neither an Aryan nationalist nor a believer in National Socialism but a man doing his job. Had he lived in ordinary times and circumstances he would likely be no different from most of us. For the most part, he was a mid-level bureaucrat doing his job and trying to climb the ladder—except that his job happened to be arranging for the transportation of masses of people to their deaths, with full knowledge of what he was doing and of where they were going. He was even good at his job, a regular model of efficiency. He was not a psychopath but a sign of the times. His chief crime was a certain thoughtlessness, a willful obliviousness to what was going on around him and to his part in it. Evil is actually banal or commonplace and consists neither of bloodthirsty malevolence nor utter madness but of ordinary thoughtlessness and inauthenticity. It is, or can be, ordinary people doing their jobs and going about their lives unthinkingly. It is a failure of imagination, an absence of sympathy or simple attention.

A few other political themes that would emerge in her philosophical writings are pluralism and “the social.” She advocated a conception of democracy in which citizenship and ethnicity are completely independent of each other, as in her view the twentieth century had witnessed enough racially and ethnically inspired politics, including nationalism in its various forms and also anti-Semitism. It is preferable, she maintained, to eliminate ethnicity and race as political categories, and her plea for plurality was a frequent theme. By “the social” she meant the shared public sphere; it is here that we exercise our freedom and create our identities, in the realm less of private life than of political life and social interaction. If we have lost this public sphere in the modern world, we can and must rehabilitate it if our democracies are to remain vibrant. We have become preoccupied with private concerns—our jobs, money, possessions, individual interests—and have too weak a commitment to the common good. We shall return to this in the sections that follow.

Back to Arendt’s life in post-war New York: Hannah and her husband and mother shared an apartment for seven years before Martha relocated to England, where she spent her remaining years. Martha and Heinrich never got on especially well. Heinrich was often unemployed or underemployed, and Martha thought him lazy. He wouldn’t find regular employment until some time after her departure, teaching at Bard College. Arendt and Blücher would always have a somewhat unconventional marriage; they were quite independent of each other, had no children, and both had extramarital affairs at one time or another. They continued to move in the same social circle of mostly Jewish emigrants and intellectuals. She continued her friendships with Karl and Gertrud Jaspers, Heidegger, and Paul Tillich, among other philosophers. She would travel to Europe both in 1949-50 and again in 1952 while in her adopted country she would focus on various writing projects, producing four books between 1958 and 1963: The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), On Revolution (1963), and in the same year Eichmann in Jerusalem.

For the remainder of her life she would divide her time between writing books, teaching at a couple of American universities, giving public talks, and regular vacations and travel. Politically, she was always inclined toward activism, but “[n]ot until the 1960s was she an active supporter of political candidates. She voted as an independent, though usually for Democratic candidates, with no enthusiasm whatsoever for parties…. Arendt distrusted parties because they so quickly left the grass roots of citizen action behind” (Young-Bruehl, 293). In 1955 she would begin to teach full-time at Berkeley, where she was not at all impressed by the new movement toward analytic philosophy that had taken hold there and more or less everywhere in the English-speaking world after the war. ‘“Philosophy,’ she told Jaspers, ‘has fallen into semantics—and third-rate semantics at that’” (Young-Bruehl, 295). As her biographer reports, “Despite the good relationships she formed with a few faculty members and students at Berkeley, Hannah Arendt left at the end of the semester with a firm resolution, which she never abandoned, not to become a full-time academic. ‘I never really wanted to be a professor,’ she told everyone who would listen. For the rest of her life, Arendt did manage to secure, by many complex negotiations, a variety of special arrangements, half-time appointments, visiting lectureships; at least half of every year was left free for work and travel to Europe. The demands of teaching and colleagues and community social life were not something she could comfortably meet” (Young-Bruehl, 297).

As a political theorist and philosopher, she was becoming well known, not only due to the controversy that followed Eichmann in Jerusalem. Her critics on the left disliked what they saw as a conservative streak in her writings while those on the right had an equal dislike of her revolutionary spirit. An interviewer asked her, “What are you? Are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? Where is your position within the contemporary possibilities?” Her answer: “I don’t know. I really don’t know and I’ve never known. And I suppose I never had any such position. You know the left think I am conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left or a maverick or God knows what. And I must say I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century will get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing” (Young-Bruehl 451). Always an independent-minded thinker, she would be difficult to classify. She was a phenomenologist in method and, as most who fit this description, historically oriented in her approach to any philosophical question. To cite the same biographer, “she was often taken for a cold and abstract thinker, when in fact she was dedicated to a certain kind of concreteness. She called her philosophical method ‘conceptual analysis’; her task was to find ‘where concepts come from.’ With the aid of philology or linguistic analysis, she traced political concepts back to the concrete historical and generally political experiences which gave rise to those concepts. She was then able to gauge how far a concept had moved from its origins and to chart the intermingling of concepts over the course of time, marking points of linguistic and conceptual confusion. To put the matter another way: she practiced a sort of phenomenology” (Young-Bruehl, 318). This would remain so through her final writings, including her last major work, The Life of the Mind of 1977-78. This was planned as a three-part book but contains only the first two. She had begun work on the third part at the time of her death.

Through the last decade of her life she would teach part-time at the University of Chicago and subsequently the New School for Social Research in New York while continuing to write books and essays. She was often attending conferences, giving public talks, and doing editorial work while in her private life she would remain married to Heinrich Blücher until his death in 1970. She received numerous academic honors toward the end of her life, including honorary degrees from three American universities and she was also invited to deliver the prestigious Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen, which she accepted. In the emerging age of radio and television, she was very reluctant to appear in either medium owing to her intensely private personality, but if you look her up on YouTube you will find a couple of interviews that she did latterly and which are well worth watching. A movie was made about her coverage of the Eichmann trial and the aftermath; I can’t say I’ve seen it, but it’s likely worth watching. The film is titled “Hannah Arendt” and it appeared in 2013.

She died of a heart attack in December of 1975 at the age of sixty-nine and would be buried with her husband at Bard College.

Between Past and Future (1961; new and enlarged edition 1968)

We are going to read the Preface and chapters 1–5. The chapters of this book are essays that are each capable of being read on their own, as is suggested in the book’s subtitle: “Eight Exercises in Political Thought.” Chapters 7 and 8 did not appear in the 1961 edition. She once said that this is the best book she ever wrote.

Preface: “The Gap between Past and Future”

She opens the book by asking where were the European intellectuals when a good part of the continent fell to the Nazis. European intellectuals, she says, had “lost their treasure,” but what exactly had they lost (BPF, 4)? Those who joined “the Resistance” in France and elsewhere in Europe rediscovered this treasure, or part of it, but what did they rediscover? They “had begun,” Arendt says, “to create that public space between themselves where freedom could appear,” but what does this mean (BPF, 4)? What “public space” is she referring to, and how did its disappearance relate to the moral collapse that Nazism represented? The triumph of Hitler was more than a simple matter of electoral politics but a wholesale collapse. What made this kind of calamity possible, beyond the usual machinations of politicians and parties? If “[t]hey had lost their treasure” then “What was this treasure” and might it be possible to get it back (BPF, 4)? Political trends do not come out of nowhere but emerge from out of a cultural environment, and to get a critical handle on recent political events in the western world we must look at the culture that generated those events.

Arendt is going to appeal to a revolutionary tradition that includes the American and French Revolutions in the late eighteenth century and also the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, among other modern political revolutions. These revolutions constitute what she calls “the innermost story of the modern age,” at least politically (BPF, 5). It is “the lost treasure of the revolutions” that needs to be identified, historically narrated, and politically reinvigorated if our politics, and to a large extent our culture, is to have much hope (BPF, 5). It’s important to note that Arendt didn’t hold a rosy view of either post-war western politics (German, French, American, etc.) or culture, even while she didn’t idealize the past or advocate that we attempt some kind of return to old ways. We will see her speaking often of tradition, but this doesn’t amount to being a “traditionalist” or conservative exactly. Jettisoning the past and making some new start in history is a recipe for disaster, and the kind of revolutionary spirit she prizes doesn’t amount to this. A (good) revolution (and not all revolutions are good, by any means) is a partial rejection but not a total one. She will come back to this theme in the chapters to follow.

At the heart of this revolutionary spirit and tradition is the value of “the public,” whether the phrase was “public happiness” or “public freedom.” A strong accent was placed not on what we increasingly value in the twentieth century, which is the private sphere of life, but on what is socially shared. As this tradition has gone into eclipse, “there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal [eternal] change of the world and the biological cycle of living creatures in it” (BPF, 5). At the heart of our times is a “failure of memory” (BPF, 6). Remembrance may not be a faculty of mind that we moderns tend to value especially highly—particularly relative to prior eras—but, for Arendt, it’s one of the most important mental capacities that we have, for without it we are essentially adrift. Remembrance especially of a socially shared past, in a nation let’s say, occurs within what she calls a “pre-established framework of reference” (BPF, 6), not unlike how a person operates within such a framework and is oriented by means of remembering a past. Otherwise we are at a loss, disoriented, and confused, and the kind of moral collapse that Nazism represented becomes possible in this atmosphere of confusion.

The human being, whoever one is, “always lives in the interval between past and future” (BPF, 11). As temporal-historical beings we live in a present moment that itself reaches simultaneously back in time (remembrance) and forward (anticipation), suspended between two temporal points, and we get our bearings by reaching back and forward in this way. The past is always with us in some sense, and we lose connection with it at our peril. We often say of the past either that it is dead and irrelevant or that it holds us back, while she is going to prefer to think of the past as a “force” that “presses forward” into the present (BPF, 10). It falls to every generation and every person to “settl[e] down in the gap between past and future,” (BPF, 13) and we do this by thinking. The problem of our times, she believes, is that this has become all but impossible when any memory of the past is going by the wayside. What do any of us know of our past, that is, our socially shared, cultural past? Her answer is not much, and if we don’t see this as a problem (and we largely don’t) then we have an even larger problem: “For very long times in our history, actually throughout the thousands of years that followed upon the foundation of Rome and were determined by Roman concepts, this gap [between past and future] was bridged over by what, since the Romans, we have called tradition. That this tradition has worn thinner and thinner as the modern age progressed is a secret to nobody. When the thread of tradition finally broke, the gap between past and future ceased to be a condition peculiar only to the activity of thought and restricted as an experience to those few who made thinking their primary business. It became a tangible reality and perplexity for all” (BPF, 13-14).

What the activity of thinking requires is that we mind this gap and so re-learn how to think, for as things currently stand the conditions that make thinking possible are perilous. The following chapters are essays that try to model the kind of thinking that she is calling for, and we will notice in each chapter how she repeatedly poses a political-philosophical question and immediately proceeds to recall and trace the history of the question and the concepts that are at stake within it. The chapters serve, then, as models of the kind of “thinking” that she is calling for, in addition of course to presenting an argument. While they are “eight exercises in political thought,” they don’t resemble the kind of political thought that goes right away to the prescriptive but linger over the historical.

Chapter 1: “Tradition and the Modern Age”

Arendt begins the chapter with the claim that the western tradition of political thought, to make a long and exceedingly complex story short, began in ancient Greece in the writings of Plato and Aristotle and ended in the modern era in the writings of Karl Marx. Recalling Plato’s allegory of the cave in the Republic, Plato regarded truth as something that transcends or exists above the cave or the domain of ordinary social life and its politics, an idea that remained more or less in place until Marx’ “decision (in itself philosophical) to abjure philosophy, and … intention to ‘change the world’ and thereby the philosophizing minds, the ‘consciousness’ of men” (BPF, 18). Marx—and bear in mind that Arendt was very much not a Marxist—essentially reversed the hierarchy, which we can trace back to Plato, of knowledge and action and also of philosophy and politics. Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideal was to live a contemplative life that was somewhat removed from or above the realm of practical and political affairs, while for Marx and a great many modern thinkers who would follow him there is essentially nothing above or even outside of politics and “labor.” We are a laboring animal, Marx held, and all our philosophical speculation is but a kind of veneer behind which lies the real truth of human life: that we are economically driven laborers belonging to a class within a capitalist order which, of course, he regarded as alienating and oppressive. The aim of communist revolution is to overthrow all of that and ultimately to create the conditions that in time will bring about what he famously called a classless society. Marx’s utopian vision assumed many forms through the course of the twentieth century, and it is an idea that remains pervasive in our own time. Time and again the idea, which she traces back to Marx, is that the western political tradition as a whole should be rebelled against, violently if necessary, and replaced with a wholly new set of political arrangements and societal institutions.

Arendt points out that each of Marx’s key claims can be best understood as intentional reversals of ideas that stem from both the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions. For example, his conception of human beings as “animal laborans” is a purposeful departure from Aristotle’s definition of the “animal rationale.” A closely related example: ‘“Labor created man’ means first that labor and not God created man; second, it means that man, insofar as he is human, creates himself, that his humanity is the result of his own activity.” In a single stroke, “Marx challenges the traditional God, the traditional estimate of labor, and the traditional glorification of reason” (BPF, 22). This represented a monumental shift in our modern thinking not of politics alone but of human existence in its entirety. There is no transcendent world outside of Plato’s cave, Marx and a great many thinkers who followed him maintain, no truth apart from a history that itself revolves around dynamics of economic activity, production and consumption, exploitation and occasional resistance, and especially power. What Arendt calls “the midwife of history,” for Marx and those who would follow him, is violence (BPF, 22). If the onward march of history and progress requires the violent overthrow of our institutions, so be it, and it was such revolutions that generations of Marxists have demanded and sometimes carried out.

An abiding tendency of modern thought is to reject tradition more or less in its entirety, and the writings of Marx afford but one example of this. Especially important in his work is the new and distinctively modern idea that violence or the means of carrying it out is what she calls “the constituent element of all forms of government,” while “the whole sphere of political action is characterized [by Marx and many who would follow] by the use of violence. The Marxian identification of action with violence” turns essentially two millennia of tradition on its head (BPF, 22). What Marx was reversing, she points out, is the Aristotelian idea that what distinguishes human action and human life generally is not violence but rather its capacity for reasoned discourse. It was an important ideal for the Greeks that their common life in the city-state is properly carried out precisely not by means of violence and war but through rational speech. The Greek city-state (some of them), of course, was the birthplace of democracy, at the heart of which was the renunciation of violence and the activity of reasoned persuasion. “Marx’s glorification of violence therefore contains the more specific denial of logos, of speech, the diametrically opposite and traditionally most human form of intercourse. Marx’s theory of ideological superstructures ultimately rests on this anti-traditional hostility to speech and the concomitant glorification of violence” (BPF, 23). For the tradition that Marx was rejecting, the mode of action—a concept that will always be very important for Arendt—that is distinctively or characteristically human crucially bears upon the logos—word, speech, or reason. His replacement of this with labor or economic activity should not be regarded merely as the suggestion that work in this sense is an important part of human life but is essentially an ontological claim, or one pertaining to our mode of being as humans. Marx’s elevation of labor in this way also contains a paradox or outright contradiction, which is that the utopian future that Marx envisioned, the classless society, is one in which labor is almost abolished with his ideal of a stateless society in which one engages in some kind of economic activity for part of the day and writes books or creates works of art in another. The tradition stemming from Plato holds “that it is somehow inherent in the philosophical experience to turn away from the common world of human affairs,” while for we moderns who follow in Marx’s footsteps “nothing was left of this experience but the opposition of thinking and acting, which, depriving thought of reality and action of sense, makes both meaningless” (BPF, 25).

At only two points in western history, Arendt writes, would tradition be commonly regarded as an authority: during the period in early Roman times when the preceding tradition of Greek culture was adopted more or less wholesale and again in nineteenth-century romanticism. We moderns tend not to esteem tradition very highly, and Marx is only one instance of this but a very important one on account of the massive influence he has had on the thought of the twentieth century. Arendt points out that tradition doesn’t lose its hold on us when we set out to abolish it but, on the contrary, retains and even increases its hold on our minds under this condition, but without our awareness. The tradition that is tyrannical is precisely the one that is lost sight of, and we are losing sight of it, she very much believes. Along with Marx, she mentions Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as characteristically modern in that they too were trying to throw off the authority of the past altogether and make a new start in thinking, even while remaining very much within the orbit of the past. Kierkegaard most obviously remained very much within the tradition of Christianity while Nietzsche’s affinities with and borrowings from the ancient Greeks are equally unmistakeable.

All three of these thinkers, Arendt maintains, were attempting a kind of leap: for Kierkegaard a leap from doubt to belief, which “was a reversal and a distortion of the traditional relationship between reason and faith”; for Marx a leap “from theory into action, and from contemplation into labor”; for Nietzsche “from the non-sensuous transcendent realm of ideas and measurements into the sensuousness of life” (BPF, 29). The “ominous similarity” that she finds in all three rejections of tradition is that each of them only increased the doubtfulness of what they were endeavoring to put forward and to champion. Kierkegaard’s Christian belief looks more rationally dubious than hitherto, as it sets up an opposition of objective versus subjective in which faith can only be a matter of the latter. Marx’s rejection of philosophical contemplation for revolutionary action succeeded only in transforming political action into something ideological and theoretically baseless. Prior political revolutions, such as the American and the French, had been neither aphilosophical nor antiphilosophical; on the contrary. Nietzsche’s embrace of “the sensuousness of life” looks to Arendt like an irrationalist glorification of the instincts. His philosophical project is to overcome nihilism, but his rejection of tradition allowed him no escape from the nihilism he regarded as ubiquitous in the modern world. As Arendt notes, “What he discovered in his attempt at ‘trans-valuation’ was that within this categorical framework the sensuous loses its very raison d’etre when it is deprived of its background of the suprasensuous and transcendent” (BPF, 30). The ideals that all three thinkers were championing lacked intellectual underpinnings which an earlier tradition might have afforded and which all three dismissed and defeated themselves thereby.

The three nineteenth-century thinkers upon whom Arendt focuses in this chapter—Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche—undertook a conscious rebellion against tradition, but each of their projects in the end was self-defeating, merely turning received ideas upside down rather than proffering better or more innovative ideas. In their own way, all three rejected the classical view of the human being as a rational animal, and inverted this notion into something for which they were unable to provide appropriate theoretical grounding. As a consequence, a great deal of modern thought amounts to a mere reversal of old ideas for its own sake, with new and “weird oppositions between sensualism and idealism, materialism and spiritualism, and even immanentism and transcendentalism” (BPF, 38).

What she calls “the conceptual framework of the tradition” that stems from the Greeks in particular has been insecure since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the scientific revolution and philosophical enlightenment collaborated in undermining that framework without replacing it with one that is rationally to be preferred (BPF, 39). Mistrust of our rational faculties, of our senses, of authority and tradition reigns, and the nihilism Nietzsche was successful in detecting reigns with it. We moderns have opted to remain in Plato’s cave of mundane affairs and unreasoning political action while thinking ourselves beyond the reach of a tradition that we imagine as backward.

Chapter 2: “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern”

This lengthy essay finds Arendt addressing the question of what purpose historical inquiry ultimately serves. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century BC) has for centuries been regarded as the father of history, and his view as she states at the outset of the chapter was that historical knowledge preserves the great undertakings and events of the past in living memory. Remembrance, as Arendt puts it, rescues “human deeds from the futility that comes from oblivion” (BPF, 41). For ancient historians who followed Herodotus, it is noble deeds especially that rightly claim the historian’s attention, not events in general but those that exhibit human nobility and the achievements of the powerful or great. No encompassing structure or narrative, such as the modern notion of progress, is to be found in the writings of ancient historians but a concentration on those particular events and individual actions that stand out in the historian’s mind as especially worthy of remembrance for the benefit of future generations. Not the ordinary but the extraordinary would be the historian’s proper concern throughout the ancient Greek and then Roman eras, until a major shift occurred in the period of late antiquity, in the transition into what would later be called “the middle ages,” when the notion of an encompassing historical process appeared, most notably in the writings of Augustine and his Christian idea of historical development or teleology. To that point, the basic model of historical change was biological life: just as an organism is born and dies and is replaced by another in a basically circular and repetitive pattern, so do empires and civilizations rise and fall in a pattern that repeats itself endlessly through the centuries.

Remembrance was the decisive value here, whether history itself is circular or teleological. If human “works, deeds and words” are contingent and ultimately fleeting, the historian takes up the task of investing them with “some permanence and … arresting their perishability” (BPF, 43). Human action is fleeting, but when it’s translated into the written word it takes on a permanence that can inform and inspire later generations. It can assume an immortality, just as Plato and Aristotle taught that the highest things are immortal and unchanging. As she writes, “to ‘immortalize’ meant for the philosopher to dwell in the neighborhood of those things which are forever, to be there and present in a state of active attention, but without doing anything, without performance of deeds or achievement of works. Thus the proper attitude of mortals, once they had reached the neighborhood of the immortal, was actionless and even speechless contemplation” (BPF, 47). Greek and Roman philosophers and historians alike paid much attention to the idea of greatness, where one of its more essential characteristics is permanence. As Plato’s Forms are unchanging in contrast to the constant change that characterizes the world that the senses put us in touch with, so the kind of noble deeds that ancient historians were writing about become like the Forms by becoming immortalized in the writings of historians. The purpose of such works is to behold and remember such actions, as the philosopher beholds the truth for its own sake.

Our modern concepts of history and also historical objectivity are fundamentally unlike what they were for the ancients. A major preoccupation of modern historians would become the notion of objectivity, where this idea was essentially based on the model of modern science. As she points out, “Before the rise of the modern age it was a matter of course that quiet, actionless, and selfless contemplation of the miracle of being, or of the wonder of God’s creation, should also be the proper attitude for the scientist, whose curiosity about the particular had not yet parted company with the wonder before the general from which, according to the ancients, sprang philosophy” (BPF, 50). The modern historian, following the modern scientist, does not wonder at the general but rather exhibits a new attitude of objectivity and skepticism that was decidedly less pronounced prior to the scientific revolution. Premodern historians, scientists, and philosophers were not credulous, but they would begin to appear so from the standpoint of modern scholars whose epistemological orientation was an innovation particularly of the seventeenth century. Historical inquiry needed to be objective in a new and ostensibly scientific sense of the term, rather than behold the past in a spirit of wonder and remembrance. The ancient Greek sense of greatness was now passé, as was the sense of objectivity that we find in ancient historians like Herodotus and Thucydides. For Herodotus, objectivity essentially meant impartiality in the sense that the job of the historian was to record the great deeds not only of one’s fellow Greeks but of foreigners as well. The historian was not to be partial or to play favorites but to record for posterity the deeds of the great, regardless of who the great were or how they stood in relation to the historian. Objectivity in the modern connotation of the term now required a similar kind of alienation from the world as what Descartes was speaking of. Descartes’ thinker, proceeding objectively and methodologically, had to heed an advanced if not hyperbolic kind of skepticism where the very existence of the world is called into question. The senses themselves must be doubted along with the faculties of the mind generally. Objectivity in the modern sense of the word followed the example of natural science, whether the discipline in which one is working falls under the natural or historical sciences. After the scientific revolution, what she calls “the world-alienation of man” would become “a basic condition of our whole life because out of it, … did arise the tremendous structure of the human artifice we inhabit today” (BPF, 53-4). Mistrust both of the world and of the human capacity for knowing it is fundamental here, and the principle was not limited to historical investigation. “Reality no longer was disclosed as an outer phenomenon to human sensation, but had withdrawn, so to speak, into the sensing of the sensation itself” (BPF, 54).

Skepticism, from Descartes to Hume to Nietzsche and their intellectual heirs, would define a good part of the modern age and fundamentally influence our understanding of history and historical knowledge. History “was no longer composed of the deeds and sufferings of men…; it became a man-made process, the only all-comprehending process which owed its existence exclusively to the human race” (BPF, 58). If history bears upon human actions, the concept of action itself would become translated in the modern era into the scientific and technological-industrial notion of fabrication. Fabrication in this new sense “is distinguished from action in that it has a definite beginning and a predictable end: it comes to an end with its end product…. Action, … as the Greeks were the first to discover it, is in and by itself utterly futile; it never leaves an end product behind itself. If it has any consequences at all, they consist in principle in an endless new chain of happenings whose eventual outcome the actor is utterly incapable of knowing or controlling beforehand” (BPF, 59-60). The Greek conception of action has an affinity with political plurality in that both ideas are suggestive of that which is unforeseeable and uncontrollable. Our modern notion of fabrication, by contrast, belongs to a conceptuality that speaks of instrumentality, utility, predictability, and control.

Another factor that would distinguish modern history from its predecessor is the modern notion of an historical process that mirrors that of nature itself. For the modern historian and scientist alike, what matters most is less the particular than the universal or the larger process or law into which particular items may be classified. As the scientist is interested in particular objects or experiences only insofar as they shed light on what is general, so the modern historian takes interest in individual events for what they reveal about a larger process, pattern, or law, such as the law of progress. “Invisible processes have engulfed every tangible thing, every individual entity that is visible to us, degrading them into functions of an over-all process. The enormity of this change is likely to escape us if we allow ourselves to be misled by such generalities as the disenchantment of the world or the alienation of man” (BPF, 63). Arendt’s skepticism of such generalities comes through here. The belief in a unifying historical process, with reference to which particular occurrences must be understood or explained, was foreign to the ancients, and Arendt herself finds such a notion dubious. She sides with Herodotus in regarding the meaning of an historical action as in a sense self-contained or self-sufficient, requiring only the written word in order to be understood and memorialized rather than taken up into an overarching process. As she points out, some have taken the view that the notion of a historical process, including progress, is a modern appropriation of Augustine’s Christian concept of historical teleology where history is regarded in a religious light as the story of the gradual salvation of humanity. Augustine separated “salvation history” from “profane” or “secular” history (what we would call history proper), and attributed teleology only to the former. He was little interested in the latter and concurred with Greek and Roman historians that history repeats itself continually and does not exhibit directionality. Modern history is directional and meaningful only insofar as this is so.

By the late eighteenth century, Hegel would place the notion of historical process at the very center of his concerns, in direct contrast to an ancient thinker like Plato or Aristotle for whom history was not philosophically interesting for the reason that there is nothing permanent within it. For Hegel, Marx, and many others, the historical process is indeed permanent and, for many, also predictable. Marx was far from alone in regarding this process not only as real but as scientifically identifiable and politically realizable. Revolutionary action served precisely the purpose of accelerating this process, hastening our way to the classless society and withering away of the state. The new attitude toward the past is that it’s to be neither glorified nor even remembered but left decisively behind. What is to be glorified lies in the future, while the past weighs upon us like an anchor. The goal is to “make history,” not to remember it, and it’s made by bringing the larger historical process to its logical conclusion, by violent means when necessary. As Arendt notes, “Whenever we hear of grandiose aims in politics, such as establishing a new society in which justice will be guaranteed forever, or fighting a war to end all wars or to make the whole world safe for democracy, we are moving in the realm of this kind of thinking” (BPF, 79).

An idea that begins with Hegel at the end of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, the modern “way of becoming reconciled to reality through understanding the innermost meaning of the entire historical process” does not withstand scrutiny, Arendt believes, nor does the idea of “making history” (BPF, 86). Her philosophical sympathies clearly lie with ancient historians over modern philosophers of history, of whose flights of speculation she takes a dim view not least on account of the political consequences that have followed from them in the twentieth century. Soviet totalitarianism is the most obvious, but not the only, example of talk of the onward march of history and the necessity for violence in reaching its goals. The “action” that such a politics promises severs any connection with truth and becomes arbitrary and self-serving. “The modern age,” she writes in the final paragraph of this chapter, “with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself” or the concepts we ourselves have created and imposed on history rather than found within it (BPF, 89).

Chapter 3: “What is Authority?”

Arendt begins this essay with the claim that “authority has vanished from the modern world,” and it’s an observation that at the present time would be difficult to contest (BPF, 91). She modifies the question, then, into “what was authority”? Much confusion today surrounds this term, but it used to be a central concept in a good deal of political theory. Arendt clearly holds it to be an important value which we need to rehabilitate in some fashion, but we must first understand what the word means or used to mean. In the modern era, authority—more or less all of it or every form of it—has come under a great deal of criticism, mostly for political reasons. The idea we hear time and again throughout the last century is that authority is a source of oppression and must be thrown off in the interests of human emancipation. The implications of this basic claim vary widely, but the claim itself is commonplace and remains probably more so today than when Arendt wrote this chapter. What we have witnessed, she writes, is “a more or less general, more or less dramatic breakdown of all traditional authorities” (BPF, 91). Totalitarianism in its different forms always requires the sweeping aside of such authorities, particularly that of government or whatever established form of government a given totalitarian movement wishes to replace.

This sweeping away of traditional authorities has not been limited to government but applies to social practices and institutions quite broadly, including education and the raising of children. In these last two areas in particular, she points out, authority has from time immemorial been regarded as indispensable in one form or another, yet today a crisis of authority is evident here as well, raising innumerable questions as to how we are to raise and educate the young in an authority-free environment.

Her question is, what in former times was authority thought to be and on what was it based? Authority is too often thought to be mere power or, worse, violence, some morally tainted phenomenon which is very tempting to abandon for this reason. If authority is inherently “authoritarian,” what good is it? Once again her question is historical: what was authority? It has long been regarded as closely related to tradition and also to religion, but without being identical to either. These last two values have also been in decline in the modern era. The loss of tradition means that, in her words, “We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion … would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence. For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance. It is similar with the loss of religion” (BPF, 94). The decline of authority, tradition, and religion in combination “is tantamount to the loss of the groundwork of the world, … as though we were living and struggling with a Protean universe where everything at any moment can become almost anything else” (BPF, 95). In this condition, we no longer inhabit a shared world where meanings, knowledge, and practices are had on a common basis. The world becomes increasingly foundationless and Hobbesian. This is the world, she believes, that has come about in the twentieth century, where the individual withdraws into empty subjectivism and egoism.

In modern political philosophy, she writes, liberalism and conservatism both exemplify this trend. While conservatives worry about the decline of authority and tradition, liberals worry about the decline of freedom. Liberals often speak of progress and claim to find this in the jettisoning of a tyranny which it does not distinguish from authority, or authoritarianism. For Arendt, the distinction between authority and tyranny (also power) must be preserved but typically is not, where the assumption time and again is that authority is violent by its nature. She draws the distinction as follows: authoritarian government may be thought of as a pyramid at the top of which is a figure the source of whose authority lies above the pyramid itself, while authority cascades down from the top of the structure. Tyranny, by contrast, is premised upon egalitarianism; power on this model flows in the opposite direction, from the bottom up: “the tyrant is the ruler who rules as one against all, and the ‘all’ he oppresses are all equal, namely equally powerless” (BPF, 99). Arendt, while endorsing neither liberalism nor conservatism, shares the worries of both regarding receding authority and freedom. The mistake both make, she believes, is to suppose that some kind of knowable historical process does exist and is leading the modern world either toward progress or off a cliff.

Also exemplifying the trend just noted toward a subjectivism or relativism in which there are no stable meanings or truths is the kind of functionalism that is especially visible in the social sciences. Here all concepts are defined in terms of their functions, so for example a “religion” is anything that fulfils a particular social or psychological function. Communism, for example, is sometimes defined as a religion for the reason that it fulfills the function, whatever that consists in, that is traditionally met by one of the great world religions.

What was authority? The notion does presuppose some kind of hierarchy. To acknowledge something or someone as an authority is to see it or them as in some sense standing above me. One obeys authority not because one is simply forced to—or if one does, this is a sign of authority’s failure—but because one recognizes its legitimacy. “Authority,” she writes, “is incompatible with persuasion” in the sense that when you persuade someone of something, there is an implicit recognition that the two parties are equals who must persuade one another by means of arguments or evidence (BPF, 93). When I defer to an authority, let’s say my doctor, it’s not because my doctor has persuaded me of anything but rather that I trust my doctor; I know that this person has knowledge that I lack, and I trust that they will use their knowledge for my benefit. It is properly a hierarchy of knowledge, not power.

The concept of authority, she goes on to explain, stems historically from certain political experiences during Roman times. Important traces of this concept and these experiences are to be found in earlier Greek sources, such as Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king. The source of such authority, of course, was the philosopher’s knowledge of the Forms. Plato’s philosopher was capable of grasping the truth independently of those occupants of the cave to whom the philosopher stood at a distance, and this “dichotomy between seeing the truth in solitude and remoteness and being caught in the relationships and relativities of human affairs became authoritative for the tradition of political thought” prior to modernity (BPF, 115).

But it was in Roman times that the idea of authority became firmly implanted in our political tradition. The central political experience from the inception of the Roman republic through until late antiquity was the founding of Rome itself. The foundation of the city took on an almost sacred quality through the several centuries that followed, and it was this seminal event that was the basis of all political authority. The foundation of Rome remained uppermost in the memories of Roman citizens throughout the republican and imperial eras, and in this way isn’t unlike the manner in which many Americans continue to regard the revolutionary era and the founding fathers as decisive to the character of that nation. Every Roman emperor had to pay due heed to the foundation of this city, as it was upon that foundation that the emperor’s authority rested, as did that of the senate. Along with political authority, religion itself for the Romans “literally meant re-ligare: to be tied back, obligated, to the enormous, almost superhuman and hence always legendary effort to lay the foundations, to build the cornerstone, to found for eternity. To be religious meant to be tied to the past” (BPF, 121). She points out that the word authority itself, “auctoritas derives from the verb augere, ‘augment,’ and what authority or those in authority constantly augment is the foundation” (BPF, 121-2). It was the founders of Rome who enjoyed ultimate authority, and it was this authority that was passed down through the generations. Power (potestas), by contrast, did not lie with either the emperor or the senate but with the Roman people. Old people would also be endowed with authority of a kind, and again on grounds of their being closer to the past than the young and retaining it in memory. This Roman political experience would later have a religious offshoot, as the church fathers would assume an authority that stemmed from the past in the form of a divine savior and his apostles; authority here was again importantly distinct from power. The Roman Catholic Church would in principle leave worldly power to the state while claiming for itself an authority that was not essentially political but spiritual.

Toward the end of the chapter she notes that “while all the models, prototypes, and examples for authoritarian relationships … have been faithfully preserved” in our time, “the one political experience which brought authority as word, concept, and reality into our history—the Roman experience of foundation—seems to have been entirely lost and forgotten” (BPF, 136). Modernity has no counterpart to the foundation of Rome, and without something like this—some source above the pyramidal structure—the concept of authority will continue to have no real place in our modern culture. The only exception to this, she maintains, is the experience of political revolution. In the west, the political revolutions of the enlightenment era are the closest we come to the kind of value of which she is speaking, yet the constant tendency of such events after the French Revolution is to end in failure and tyranny as all connection with the past is severed. If we are to continue to speak of the western world as in decline, such a decline is essentially political and “consists primarily in the decline of the Roman trinity of religion, tradition, and authority” (BPF, 140). Arendt isn’t directly calling for a revolution that would restore some counterpart to the foundation of Rome, although her implication seems to be that should something like this not come to pass then the crisis she has been speaking of will continue.

Chapter 4: “What is Freedom?”

A rather large question, and a seemingly hopeless one as she points out at the outset of this chapter. Is this a political question or a metaphysical one, or somehow both? She will take the view that freedom is in the first instance a political phenomenon, which later becomes an issue of the human will—free will versus determinism—and that we would do well to conceive of freedom as essentially a social-political matter. Ancient philosophers didn’t concern themselves with freedom as a metaphysical question; she locates the origin of the free will problem in the writings of Saint Paul rather than among any of the Greek and Roman philosophers. For the latter group, the question “what is freedom?” was a question that was properly at home in the realm of social life, not the inner state of the will. In social-political affairs, she writes, “freedom … is actually the reason that men live together in political organization at all. Without it, political life as such would be meaningless. The raison d’etre of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action” (BPF, 146). The metaphysical question of whether the human will is free or unfree is derivative from the political question, and Arendt’s main interest is not in the freedom versus determinism debate.

The question of freedom is in the first instance political rather than metaphysical in the sense that any experience we have regarding the freedom of the will seems to be derivative from a more basic experience of freedom in the realm of action and social life. In the latter sphere we are familiar with experiences being variously free and unfree; comparable experience involving one’s inner life is more elusive. In ancient times to say that one was free meant that one possessed a certain legal status and that in virtue of that status one was able to carry out certain actions that were denied to others bearing a different status. A free person was not a slave but the veritable opposite, where what this meant in practical terms is that the former was able to act voluntarily across a far broader domain than the latter. A free person had risen above the order of mere necessity—looking after one’s basic, material needs—and was able to leave the household and participate in public life along with one’s peers and fellow citizens, such as in a democracy or in other forms of public participation or deliberation.

Freedom was by nature a public phenomenon and involved the company of other free persons within an appropriate social context, what she calls “a common public space,” “a politically organized world … into which each of the free men could insert himself by word and deed” (BPF, 148). One couldn’t be free by oneself but only in the company of other free men. Women and children in ancient times were not free in the proper sense, their domain being that of private life or the household. The latter was commonly understood as a domain of necessity, not freedom, and where the distinction between private and public life was categorical. One was free in public life only, and since this was a male domain, women could not be free in the true sense of the word.

What freedom required was a certain kind of social-political order. That of the household or of tribal societies was insufficient for human freedom in a full sense for the reason that life in such settings is governed by “the necessities of life and concern for its preservation”—securing food, creating at home, raising children, and so on (BPF, 148). A necessary condition of freedom is a transcendence above the order of necessity, and again this is only realized after the basic needs of life have been seen to and one is able to participate in common with others of the same free status as oneself. A paradigm example, of course, is leaving the house and participating in political deliberation with one’s fellow citizens; another is engaging in intellectual conversation with one’s peers in some public setting. Freedom, then, is properly experienced in the domain of action and public life, neither in the private realm nor in the inner confines of the mind. The metaphysical concept of a free will would be a later extrapolation from this basic political experience.

Free action springs from what she calls a principle, where a principle is not the same as a motive which arises from within the self but rather is “inspire[d], as it were, from without” (BPF, 152). Actions are specific while principles are broad. Examples of principles that she mentions are honor, love of equality, and love of excellence. Each of these principles in the abstract is not much of anything, but rather becomes what it is in our actions. A particular action is honorable or dishonorable, excellent or mediocre. One could not legitimately claim to be honorable if one’s actions were not. A free act, then, is a particular act that partakes of or is inspired by a principle of some kind, while freedom itself is “inherent in action” and not something outside of it or prior to it (BPF, 153). One is not free by nature or “in the beginning,” as it were, and subsequently expresses this freedom in an outward or public action. Rather, one becomes free in the act, and where the act itself is animated by a principle and not merely a motive or goal. Were one not to act at all, in the sense of “action” that she intends, it would be meaningless to say that one is free.

The decisive turn in the history of the concept of freedom occurred in the thought of Christian figures such as Paul and Augustine. There for the first time occurs an experience of a kind of inward deliberation, where the self is at odds with itself and must make a decision to resolve this inner conflict. Prior to this, in Greek and Roman thought freedom was a central notion to the political tradition only. Arendt isn’t advocating any simple return to tradition, something that is likely impossible in any case. If philosophers today regard the question of freedom as in the first instance a metaphysical one, it is owing to the Christian tradition far more than the Greek one. The “faculty” of free will, she points out, was virtually unknown to the Greeks, and in modern times we have largely continued along the trajectory that was initiated in early Christian thought. On modern views, “freedom begins where men have left the realm of political life inhabited by the many, and … it is not experienced in association with others but in intercourse with one’s self,” in the forms of thought and deliberation (BPF, 157). The philosophical way of life, since Plato, has been contrasted with the political way of life and the freedom that is proper to it, so it is little wonder that freedom in the Greek philosophical tradition did not become the major concept it would become in Christian and then modern thought. “Only when the early Christians, and especially Paul, discovered a kind of freedom which had no relation to politics, could the concept of freedom enter the history of philosophy. Freedom became one of the chief problems of philosophy when it was experienced as something occurring in the intercourse between me and myself, and outside of the intercourse between men. Free will and freedom became synonymous notions,” and remain so in the modern philosophical tradition (BPF, 158). The decisive experience regarding freedom for these early Christian thinkers was not political but metaphysical or existential: it is possible for one to will and not to do. One can know the good and yet not do it; one can know an act to be evil and yet commit it. Plato had maintained the opposite: to know the good is to pursue it, while evil can only be done in ignorance. Not so, was the reply of these early Christian thinkers, and this basic experience gave rise to a tradition that remains very much with us. “Historically,” as she states, “men first discovered the will when they experienced its impotence and not its power, when they said with Paul: ‘For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not’” (BPF, 161). Following this, the modern philosophical tradition would continue to regard “the problem of freedom” as a metaphysical matter concerning the will and only secondarily as a political issue.

Early Christian thought, she reminds us, was essentially apolitical or even anti-political, so it is somewhat paradoxical that the idea of freedom, originally a political concept alone, should first enter philosophical discourse in the writings of a theologian like Augustine. We ought to remember, however, as she also points out, that Augustine was both a Christian and a Roman and stood within both traditions. Identifying many of the philosophical implications of biblical ideas was at the heart of Augustine’s project. The religious idea of a miracle, for instance, is understandable philosophically as a new and unexpected beginning rather than a violation of the laws of nature, and in this sense “[e]very act … is a ‘miracle’—that is, something which could not be expected…. [A]ction and beginning are essentially the same” (BPF, 169). There is a miraculous quality to everything in our world in the sense that everything that happens breaks in upon us in an improbable and surprising way, while every action is a new beginning and stranger than fiction. It is neither superstitious nor unrealistic “to look for the unforeseeable and unpredictable, to be prepared for and to expect ‘miracles’ in the political realm” (BPF, 170).

Chapter 5: “The Crisis in Education”

The next two chapters go on to provide an analysis of a couple of rather serious crises that Arendt believed she was witnessing in the spheres of education and culture more generally. At the outset of Chapter 5 she speaks of a “general crisis that has overtaken the modern world everywhere and in almost every sphere of life” (BPF, 173). Many phenomenological and existential philosophers had made a similar claim; Arendt would now provide her interpretation of what has happened in western culture through the course of the twentieth century and focuses on what has happened in America both overall and in a few key respects which pertain to social and political life. The general phenomenon that many were calling nihilism manifests itself, Arendt points out, in different ways in different countries while remaining at bottom a single phenomenon. Her focus in this chapter is what has happened in American education over the last several decades. Bear in mind that educational trends in America and Canada, then and now, run parallel.

The problems in education that she’s going to describe have serious political consequences, she believes, and it’s for this reason that the chapter appears in this book. The problem as she sees it goes beyond what she calls “a constantly progressing decline of elementary standards throughout the entire school system,” which occurred through the middle part of the last century despite constant efforts on the part of the educational profession to raise standards or at least to prevent them from deteriorating. By the time she wrote this essay, many were complaining of a deterioration that had become widespread throughout the educational system, including the universities, with many taking different views as to what, if anything, had gone wrong. Arendt’s own educational experiences in Germany lie in the background of her analysis.

Is the crisis of education, exhibited in the decline of standards just noted, merely a symptom of local mismanagement on the part of school boards, teaching colleges, and so on? Her answer is decidedly in the negative for the reason that what has happened in education must be regarded within a larger context as part of a larger crisis in American social and political life. By the time she writes this essay, many were beginning to point out that “Johnny can’t read” and asking how this had come to pass. This might look like an easily solvable problem, yet it continues to this day, over half a century later. In part, to be sure, this is a consequence of bad educational policy, but it is also more than this. What is philosophically interesting about the problem is that it is a symptom of what has taken place in the culture more broadly, it is this that she will attempt to diagnose.

The educational problem, she states, is an international phenomenon observable throughout the western world, but it is most acute in America and has produced its most serious consequences there. Why should this be so? What is it about America that has made the crisis quite so serious? Her hypothesis will be that education in America serves a somewhat different function than it does in Europe, both socially and politically, owing to the fact that America has long been a nation of immigrants. In such a nation, a far larger percentage of students in public schools are first-generation Americans and the role of the school then becomes to “Americanize” the young and not only to educate them in a more traditional sense. How does an institution like a school go about “Americanizing” or “Canadianizing” a generation? There is no widely agreed upon method for accomplishing this, whatever exactly this goal amounts to. As she states, “the essence of education is natality, the fact that human beings are born into the world” (BPF, 174). Being a student is in a way to be born not only into a certain body of information (the curriculum) but into a nation and its culture, and not in a social vacuum but in an institution filled with others who are also being born in this way. The English language, for example, must often be learned by children in public school rather than at home, and many similar examples could be mentioned. How all of this is to be achieved is more difficult than it may appear. What is being born is not only students but citizens, and the business of “melting together … the most diverse ethnic groups” into the melting pot of American life is, by the nature of the thing, “enormously difficult” (BPF, 175). The idea of America as a melting pot is an old one—one that has never caught on in Canada and most often has been explicitly rejected at an institutional level—and it amounts to the idea, originating in the eighteenth century, that people coming to this nation from all parts of the world ought to adapt themselves to a common American culture. Social harmony, on this view, requires a kind of blending of cultural elements into some kind of unity, and much of the work of achieving this unity happens or ought to happen in schools, over and above the school’s usual mission of imparting knowledge.

Compounding the crisis is the movement of “progressive education” of which Arendt is clearly not a fan. By mid-century, this movement had caught on in various European countries on a relatively small scale but in America (Canada too) had achieved an educational revolution that “completely overthrew, as though from one day to the next, all traditions and all the established methods of teaching and learning” (BPF, 178). What progressive education is, is a long and complicated story, but in short what it aimed to achieve was the replacement of traditional educational methods such as whole-class instruction, learning by rote, and a standardized curriculum with an emphasis on traditional subjects (math, science, history, language, etc.) with a student-centered approach which placed the psychology of the student at the center formerly occupied by the curriculum. The term “progressive education” is somewhat passé currently, but many of the ideas that arose from this movement remain very much with us today. Its critics have long criticized it as a recipe for lowering educational standards, and Arendt is among this group. Johnny can’t read because he hasn’t been taught to by his teachers, nor can he spell and various other things that students used to be able to do because they were taught this directly in schools. Arendt does not go into the details of this, but her opposition is clear. The now common approach to education, under the influence of progressivism, sacrifices common sense along with any notion of a common culture, and the political consequences of this are far-reaching.

A polity cannot do without common sense. Common sense, or a sense of what the members of a given society have in common (a shared culture, shared values, beliefs, and so on), is a vital ingredient in any well-functioning democracy, given that the role of citizens in a political order in which power belongs in principle to the people is to participate publicly in the business of debating ideas that will issue in policy. Such participation in common presupposes a sense of what we have in common, as it is this that forms the basis on which ideas are debated. Common sense doesn’t fall from the sky but, like tradition, is handed down from one generation to the next, including in educational institutions. Progressive education was not fulfilling this role, or not to Arendt’s satisfaction. “The disappearance of common sense in the present day is the surest sign of the present-day crisis. In every crisis a piece of the world, something common to us all, is destroyed” (BPF, 178). Note that her emphasis here, as it would so often be in her political analyses, is less on the individual than on the shared or public world that we are either creating or failing to create. American, or any, democracy requires a strong social fabric, or one in which there is a measure of unity amid the diversity. She isn’t an opponent of diversity (remember that she herself was an immigrant), but a society that is without common sense and that is rapidly becoming a “mass society” is in crisis.

She also is no opponent of equality, however she points out that one important factor in the educational and cultural crisis of the times is “the unique role the concept of equality plays and always has played in American life” (BPF, 179). By equality she is referring not to the basic principles of equal rights and equal opportunity but to a kind of educational egalitarianism that is the antithesis of meritocracy. Meritocracy in education—the idea that relative success in learning warrants reward and relative failure does not—is increasingly thought incompatible with the principle of equality and, beyond this, with democracy itself. What she calls “the political temper of the country … struggles to equalize or to erase as far as possible the difference between young and old, between the gifted and the ungifted, finally between children and adults, particularly between pupils and teachers” (BPF, 180). The idea of the teacher or the curriculum as having authority had gone out of fashion, partly under the influence of educational progressivism and partly as a more general cultural phenomenon.

Three basic ideas, in Arendt’s view, have created a crisis in education. The first idea is that there is such a thing as the world of the child, or of children, which adults ought to respect and leave largely to run itself. Children are properly autonomous in this realm and require minimal adult supervision. In educational settings, this creates the phenomenon of the teacher who is something of a bystander in the classroom as the students themselves make the decisions. The consequences for the individual child, as she sees it, are negative and often oppressive as authority now belongs to the group of children as a whole, and “the authority of a group, even a child group, is always considerably stronger and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person can ever be” (BPF, 181). The authoritarian teacher, so reviled by progressive educators, is replaced by the even more authoritarian group or a majority within it. The second idea is that teaching is a science that is independent of the subject matter, such that one who is entering the teaching profession need only master this technique rather than have any advanced knowledge of the subjects they will need to teach. The consequence of this is that teachers don’t know much, as their aim becomes that of merely staying one step ahead of the students. There is no such thing, on her view, as a teacher who can teach in any and all fields once they have mastered the science of teaching. She’s very skeptical that any such science, which the teaching colleges were claiming to impart, exists. Finally, the third idea is that we learn by doing rather than by learning about what knowledge has been attained in a given field. This third idea lies at the heart of progressive education, and while she doesn’t reject it in its entirety she laments that what passes for educational “doing” often amounts to idle amusement from which little or nothing is learned. The progressive teacher’s opposition to “dead knowledge” typically leads to no knowledge being either taught or learned.

What is young and vulnerable requires protection in order to grow, Arendt writes, and it is this kind of protection from the adult world that the home and family have traditionally sought to provide. Childhood is preparatory, and so is education; neither, in her view, is properly regarded as an autonomous realm. Both require the constant supervision and protection of authoritative adults in order for growth to occur. Modern education and culture increasingly disregard the vital distinction between public and private life, and the more these two spheres become indistinguishable, the harder childhood and education become. What the child requires is slow and gradual introduction into adult life, neither confinement in a supposedly autonomous and ultimately tyrannical children’s realm nor premature entry into the world of the adult and the public.

Education can’t do without either authority or tradition, nor without the public/private distinction. Education must stand at a distance from “the realm of public, political life,” and part of what makes for the crisis in education is the fact that it no longer does (BPF, 195). As she suggests toward the end of the chapter, “the function of the school is to teach children what the world is like and not to instruct them in the art of living,” that is, to teach them about various fields of knowledge and not, for example, what their political ideology or moral values ought to be (BPF, 195).

She goes on to supplement this argument in Chapter 6, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and its Political Significance.” I haven’t asked you to read this chapter, and I’ll keep my remarks brief. But in short, she points out that by the middle of the twentieth century “culture” has come to mean mass culture, or the culture of a mass society which has grown to extremely large proportions, and this fact raises some questions about culture itself and its relation to society. The idea of mass culture used to be considered a contradiction in terms, but no longer. “Our concern is with culture, or rather with what happens to culture under the different conditions of society and of mass society” (BPF, 200). It is apparent in this essay that Arendt is not a fan of mass society, which might strike us as slightly odd given her fondness for living in New York City. Anyway, she points out that not long ago, cultural objects such as works of art were often placed in opposition to society, as were many artists themselves. The artist, also the philosopher, was often thought to be an outsider to society, in a sense anyway, but what we’re beginning to observe under conditions of modern mass society is more or less the reverse of this. Increasingly, the job of the artist is to produce objects that please the masses, and this is a historically new phenomenon. The producers of great works of art and other cultural works, including philosophical texts, were not trying to reach a mass audience but a relatively restricted one. This relative antagonism between the cultural producer and the masses has gone more or less completely by the wayside, she points out, and evidently it’s not a phenomenon that she is enthusiastic about.

Numerous phenomenological and existential thinkers were discussing in a critical manner the phenomenon of what they were calling mass society, so Arendt is following in something of a tradition in this chapter. A large part of her dissatisfaction with American life was what she saw as its advanced and ever-growing social conformity. Culture, or the kind of cultural works that have long been associated with “high culture,” long had a somewhat aristocratic orientation; great art, for example, was unaffordable for most people and often transcended their understanding, as great works of philosophy were not understandable by most. This would change gradually in the modern era, as aristocracy declined, the middle class rose and mass society along with it. Culture would gradually lose its traditional distance from “society” or from the common life of the people. Cultural works which most people had long regarded as useless now served to promote one’s position in society; the nouveau riche, for example, would often be anxious to buy expensive works of art in order to elevate themselves in the social order, or to be thought “cultured.”

Under conditions of mass society, it was not the nouveau riche alone whom cultural works were beginning to serve, as they were now serving the population in general. This led quite directly, in her view, to a deterioration in cultural works, as countless critics of twentieth century art were pointing out. She writes, “Mass society … wants not culture but entertainment, and the wares offered by the entertainment industry are indeed consumed by society just like any other consumer goods…. [T]hey serve … to while away time, and the vacant time which is whiled away is not leisure time, strictly speaking…. [I]t is rather left-over time, which still is biological in nature, left over after labor and sleep have received their due” (BPF, 205). Not a kind description of modern art, one might say. Music, for example, becomes through the course of the twentieth century increasingly popular music—and I’m guessing she was not a fan of popular music. Her aesthetic tastes were rather aristocratic, as one might expect of a German intellectual born in 1906.

What was being called the “culture industry” was primarily an entertainment industry aimed at pleasing mass audiences and, of course, maximizing profit by this means. The name of the game was popularity. While she has nothing against entertainment, she wants to separate this from culture in the proper sense of the term. The problem she sees is that “culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment. The result of this is not disintegration but decay” (BPF, 207). Cultural objects in a proper sense are meant to endure, not merely to entertain for a brief period of time, and in transcending generations and centuries “they are the only things without any function in the life process of society; … they are deliberately removed from the processes of consumption and usage and isolated against the sphere of human life necessities” (BPF, 209).

The crisis in culture, then, consists above all in the deterioration of cultural works into entertainment products whose function is to please the largest audience possible. Increasingly, the whole point of life in mass society is to consume more and to be entertained more, and this is the virtual opposite of culture. She points out that the word culture is of Roman origin and is intimately related to the verb “to cultivate,” as in cultivating crops; “it indicates an attitude of loving care and stands in sharp contrast to all efforts to subject nature to the domination of man. Hence it does not only apply to tilling the soil but can also designate the ‘cult’ of the gods, the taking care of what properly belongs to them…. [C]ulture originally meant agriculture, which was held in very high regard in Rome in opposition to the poetic and fabricating arts” (BPF, 212).

There are more details in this chapter which I shall skip over, but the chapter does make for very interesting reading, as do the final two chapters that are included in the second edition of this book.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, second and enlarged edition. Viking, 1968.

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. Yale University Press, 2004.

PART THREE

Jeff Mitscherling and Paul Fairfield, Artistic Creation: A Phenomenological Account (2019)

Jeff Mitscherling is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. His other books include Roman Ingarden’s Ontology and Aesthetics (1997), The Artist’s Intention (with Aref Nayed and Tanya DiTommaso, 2004), The Image of a Second Sun (2007), and Aesthetic Genesis (2009). The other author you are probably familiar with at this point. The book is relatively brief at around 150 pages, so I’ll ask you to read it in its entirety. Being a coauthor of this book, in the notes that follow I haven’t thought it necessary to use conventional citations and quotation marks as I would were I not a coauthor.

“Preface: Tracking Intentions”

The topic of artistic creation is elusive, but maybe it’s not quite as mysterious as we often hear. These two authors (I’ll refer to them as “the authors”) will argue that the process by which art is created has a good deal in common with the experience of the audience, and that artistic creativity does not involve creation ex nihilo but the discovery of what is, in some sense, already there, what’s already going on in the world—something that’s waiting to be seen and to come fully into being. Michelangelo famously said of his sculpture that he freed the figures from the stone. There’s a sense in which this is true. Of course, it’s not literally true, but if we’re describing phenomenologically the artistic process, there’s some truth in this. But it’s a truth that needs to be philosophically elucidated.

There’s a lot of mystery here. Artists and philosophers since ancient times have always spoken of artistic creation as highly mysterious and subjective. But to say that it’s mysterious isn’t quite to say that it’s completely indescribable or beyond the reach of experience. Artists, they will argue, are not necessarily “geniuses”—if we mean by that individuals who have some capacity of mind that ordinary human beings don’t. Instead, they’re going to propose that artists are merely good at doing something that we all do every day—something that you’re probably doing right now, if you’re reading this. But what is that? They’re going to speak of this as a kind of following or tracking something or other, in something like the way you follow a trail in the woods, or follow a story, or follow what someone is saying to you. Think about when someone says to you, are you with me? and you nod. What are you indicating in your nod? I’m following along, I understand. This is what artists do—follow along. What they’re following is going to be very hard to describe. What artists do is imaginatively track what the authors call an “intention”—but not an intention in the sense of the word that we usually mean (a mental state of some kind). In both artistic creation and in aesthetic experience, we’re actively following something, some words, colors, shapes, sounds, or something that we can all perceive more or less adequately. We’re getting in touch with something, establishing relations with something. The verbs they’re going to use for this are following, apprehending, recognizing, discerning, and organizing. The artist is paying attention in a very specific way, seeing and arranging things in a particular way. There’s a familiar saying that “you see yourself in art,” and in a sense this is true. You do see yourself in art, whether you’re the person who creates it or the person who later experiences it. You can also become yourself in this mode of experience. Art does more than just entertain. It speaks—it speaks the truth. It can also change your life.

The authors are not trying to offer a definitive account of the nature of all art or all creativity. Instead, they’re going to try to describe an essential feature of artistic creation, an activity that’s been cloaked in mystery for as long as history records. Pre-Socratic philosophers (most or all of whom were also poets) were already writing about this and they described artistic creation as in some way divine. Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century BC thought that artists are in some way inspired by the gods, and philosophers ever since have continued to discuss the nature of art, artistic creation, and the experience of art in a variety of ways. What’s going to be new in their account is what they’re going to call a “fundamental structural identity” between what artists and their audiences do. The structural identity of the experience of the artist creating a work and the person aesthetically engaging with it points to an essential feature of all human experience, which is its intentionality. They’re going to distinguish works of art from other kinds of objects by virtue of the intentionality that’s inherent in their structure. They’ll also argue that the intentionality that’s inherent in works of art is organic in nature, and this organic intentionality of the work of art originates in the intentionality of the natural world as a whole.

What artists don’t do—and say they don’t do—is create works out of thin air, and they’re not inspired by the gods either. Plato was the most important ancient proponent of the inspiration theory of art. For Plato, the creative act is “a power divine, impelling you like the power in the stone Euripides called the magnet.” Plato wrote in the Ion, “the Muse ... first makes men inspired, and then through these inspired ones others share in the enthusiasm, and a chain is formed, for the epic poets, all the good ones, have their excellence, not from art, but are inspired, possessed, and thus they utter all these admirable poems. So it is also with the good lyric poets; as the worshiping Corybantes are not in their senses when they dance, so the lyric poets are not in their senses when they make these lovely lyric poems. No, when once they launch into harmony and rhythm, they are seized with the Bacchic transport, and are possessed—as the bacchants, when possessed, draw milk and honey from the rivers, but not when in their senses. So the spirit of the lyric poet works, according to their report.” What artists report, Plato pointed out, is that they don’t know how it is that they do what they do. Something comes over them, takes hold of them and works through them. The artist’s voice is not their own; rather, they are Hermes figures, intermediaries, messengers of the gods. This is the ancient Greek meaning of inspiration. The authors are going to return to the concept of inspiration, but obviously they won’t speak of it in mythical terms. Artists may well be inspired, but in a more worldly sense of the word.

To say that artists are inspired means that they are followers, and the act of following here is not simple. You’ve all seen a dog pick up on a scent and then track it to its source. We all do this kind of thing, and in a thousand ways. It’s what you’re doing when you’re following a story. You’re not exactly making it up. There’s something going on in the world—they’ll describe it as an intention—that you’re tuning into and pursuing. Speaking phenomenologically, there is an experience of following along, and it’s not simply passive. You don’t know where things are going. At the beginning of the novel, the reader doesn’t know where the story will lead, and nor, in a way, does the novelist. They don’t know what the final outcome will be, nor do they quite control the process. Instead, they’re led—they allow themselves to be led—by an intention that holds a kind of authority over what they do. The work of art itself contains an intention, a kind of internal logic, which the artist follows in the very act of creating it. The process is extremely complex. The artist, and in time the audience, become completely drawn in by a movement that seems to flow beyond one’s own initiative and control. This is the meaning of inspiration. Both the artist and the audience allow themselves to be swept up in a process they don’t control so much as imaginatively participate in and follow.

Mark Twain described his experience of writing novels this way: “A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows these people, he knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No—that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale; a very little tale; a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times. And I have noticed another thing: that as the short tale grows into the long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite different one.” Probably no one is born with “the novel-writing gift,” but all of us are probably born with the natural ability to track intentionality. It’s this ability that makes it possible to learn a language, for example, and all of us continue developing this ability throughout our lives. We become better at certain activities, with practice, that is, with the inculcation of certain skills and habits, and this usually takes a lot of time and effort.

Plato provided an example of the phenomenon our authors are going to describe. In the Apology, Socrates spoke of his daimon as a kind of ethical authority which he trusted and followed. This is an authority that is instinctive and also unreasoning. The daimon told Socrates what not to do—without saying why. Socrates was in his own way inspired—by something he didn’t understand or control, but he trusted it. Plato writes that Socrates received instruction from his daimon much in the same way that the poets received their instruction from the gods via the muses. This wasn’t an intellectual instruction, because it couldn’t be reformulated discursively. Neither the poets nor Socrates could give a rational account of the source of this information, yet it had authority. There’s necessity here. The experience is one of being directed in a certain way and a relinquishing of control. You’re following your instincts, in much the way that a detective follows a hunch or a moral agent follows their conscience. In all these cases, we’re tracking intentions, and where an intention is a “tending towards” something or other. All intentionality consists in a tending towards or a directed movement that one undergoes prior to any conscious deliberation.

Intentions of this kind are not all in your head. They are substantial; they have being. What they don’t have is physical, material being (the kind of being that things like tables and chairs have). They also are not ideal (ideal being belongs to things like abstractions and numbers). Intentions exist—but not materially and not ideally. They have a different mode of being, but what kind, and why say they have being at all? The main reason is because artists themselves report it: the shape slumbers within the stone; it’s there, in some vague sense. This is more than a metaphor. It’s true, or so artists themselves often tell us. There’s something out there that the artist must in a sense reveal. An example: Bob Dylan was once asked in an interview, “Until you record a song, no matter how heroic it is, it doesn’t really exist. Do you ever feel that way?” Dylan answered: “No. If it’s there, it exists.” So, what’s there? He’s not a philosopher, and he’s not about to give a philosophical account of what it is that’s “there.” He’s saying, this is my experience. He’s writing the song that, in a sense, needs to be written, and when it’s going well, the song writes itself. Something comes over you, and it’s nothing mystical either. This can happen to any of us. Falling in love is like this: you don’t control it, something happens to you, you fall into it. It isn’t passive, but it’s receptive; you’re actively following something, and so is an artist: they’re following a progression of notes, or the course of a narrative. The artist is taking direction from the work itself and what it needs, matching and synthesizing elements into an arrangement that makes sense.

There’s also an incompleteness to art. The audience must carry to completion the very process that the artist has engaged in. In aesthetic experience, we’re allowing the work to wash over us, but we’re also participating in what we see. Aesthetic experience is a mode of following and responding in much the way that artistic creation is. We’re following a work’s trajectory a while further, completing it, making it concrete, something that’s meaningful to me. We’re making it come alive in our experience. The authors are going to define a work of art as something that’s created for the purpose of producing this kind of experience. At the center of the account they’re going to give is the concept of intentionality, but before saying more about this, they’re going to spend a chapter listening to what artists have said about their creative process—a lot of artists, working in different styles and genres.

Chapter 1: “What Artists Tell Us”

Plato wrote that his notion of inspiration was based on artists’ own reports of what they do, especially poets. Our authors are going to begin here too. Artists are often asked in interviews, “How did you do that? Where does your inspiration come from? How did you learn that?” In biographies of artists and autobiographies, the same subject often comes up. Are there any recurring themes here? The authors think there are , and they divide this chapter into sections, each of which gives a brief analysis of some recurring theme that they think they have noticed. They provide more detailed theoretical analysis of these themes in later chapters.

The first theme is mystery. Many artists place a great deal of emphasis on this theme, and maybe more than any other. Bob Dylan speaking of “Like a Rolling Stone”: “It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except that the ghost picked me to write the song.” Here’s John Lennon: “When the real music comes to me—the music of the spheres, the music that surpasseth understanding—that has nothing to do with me ‘cause I’m just the channel. The only joy for me is for it to be given to me and transcribe it. Like a medium. Those moments are what I live for.” Author Pamela Travers: “With that word ‘creative,’ when applied to any human endeavor, we stand under a mystery. And from time to time that mystery, as if it were a sun, sends down upon one head or another, a sudden shaft of light—by grace one feels, rather than deserving—for it always comes as something given, free, unsought, unexpected. It is useless, possibly even profane, to ask for explanations.”

We hear that this process is more instinctive than cerebral, more felt than understood. It’s not that the intellect is banned altogether, but we constantly hear from artists about the priority of feeling over thinking. Here’s Michael Jackson: “You can’t think about these things, you have to feel your way into them.” You can’t explain it, or not in so many formal propositions. It’s instinctive, or it comes from the heart, they say. The heart has its reasons. These are common metaphors: the heart, the wellspring of creativity, and so on—that’s where art comes from, and it’s a place that’s highly resistant to description. We often read interviews with artists that go like this: “How do you do that?” I just do it. “How did you know how to…?” I just knew. “Where did it come from?” It just came.

The second theme is inspiration and perspiration. To say the whole matter is mysterious isn’t the end of the story. A word that constantly comes up is still inspiration. What is this, and where do artists find it? They say that they find it where they can, which is anywhere and everywhere. It’s found in experience, any experience, and it’s especially found in other works of art or in the work of influences. It’s very common for artists to sing the praises of other artists and to learn from them, to style their own work to some extent on the work of others. Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) writes: “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself.” Jimmy Page: “As a musician, I’m only the product of my influences.” Michael Jackson: “The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work.” Also, speaking of his younger days: “I carefully watched all the stars because I wanted to learn as much as I could. I’d stare at their feet, the way they held their arms, the way they gripped a microphone, trying to decipher what they were doing and why they were doing it. After studying James Brown from the wings, I knew every step, every grunt, every spin and turn.”

It seems, then, that art doesn’t come out of thin air. It is derivative. Usually we use this word as a criticism, but it might not be—at least sometimes. All art is derivative, from the best to the worst. Creation is an appropriation of the tradition that an artist stands within. Pete Seeger: “The moment I became acquainted with old songs I realized people were always changing them. Think of it as an age-old process, it’s been going on for thousands of years. People take old songs and change them a little, add to them, adopt them for new people. It happens in every other field. Lawyers change old laws to fit new citizens. So I’m one in this long chain and so are millions of other musicians.” This is something of a cliché among artists: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” This has been attributed to everyone from Pablo Picasso to T. S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, and William Faulkner, among others. Here’s T. S. Eliot: “One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” One artist who is sometimes thought to be a counterexample is Victor Hugo. In the nineteenth century he gained a reputation as a single-minded genius who appeared out of nowhere and was influenced by no one. His biographers say otherwise. One writes: while Hugo “tends to be seen as the lone trailblazer” of French Romanticism, “[h]is procedures are an object lesson in hijacking a revolution.” In his early days “Hugo engaged in a literary equivalent of asset-stripping. Virtually every new aspect of his work from 1824 until the Romantic putsch of 1830 can be traced back to [Charles] Nodier: the attack on the classical unities, the deification of Shakespeare, … parodies of the classical style …, an erudite interest in folklore and the supernatural, a subversive sense of humour, and the detection of vanished civilizations in the ruins that were being cleared away in the name of progress or for profit.” Hugo’s biographer isn’t saying this as a criticism. Hugo was a towering figure in this movement, but he remained a member of a movement—and one that he didn’t initiate. But he made it his own.

Inspiration can be neither predicted nor planned. It’s something that happens to us. It can strike any time, in any place, but what is it? They’re going to speak of it as a certain way of “noticing” something. An artist will notice some particular object, feeling, sound, etc. and then start to focus on it and to ask questions about it: what is that? what does it mean? what does it suggest? might we see it some other way? Stravinsky: “The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation. And the true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note. He does not have to concern himself with a beautiful landscape, he does not need to surround himself with rare and precious objects. He does not have to put forth in search of discoveries: they are always within his reach. He will have only to cast a glance about him. Familiar things, things that are everywhere, attract his attention. The least accident holds his interest and guides his operations.”

A related point we often hear from artists is that artistic creation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Creation is more than raw feeling; it’s work, and often hard work. If you’re going to do this at a high level, you need to immerse yourself in your medium or your art form. You need to know your tradition, and we see this in the biographies of many artists: first, the discovery, usually at a young age, of a particular form of art, then a growing fascination and love of it, the emergence of influences, learning from the masters, and a determination to follow in kind, but not to follow slavishly.

A third theme: borrow and vary. Artists are borrowers. Again, this is not a criticism. They appropriate ideas from other artists and wherever they can find them. But it’s also creative. Artists typically have a voracious appetite for experiencing other works of art in their tradition or form, in their formative period anyway. They participate in a tradition and an art form by making it their own. Here’s Dylan again, in a speech he gave for MusiCares in 2015: “These songs didn’t come out of thin air. I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth.... It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock and roll, and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them, back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone. For three or four years, all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs.” Elsewhere the same artist says this: “What happens is, I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate.... I meditate on a song. I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly—while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”

This kind of borrowing isn’t simple repetition or copying. Even musical “cover versions” are supposed to be moderately original interpretations of a song written by somebody else. Whether it’s good or not comes down to the variation. Here’s poet Cliff Fell: “Ovid, himself, stole lines and stories from Homer, as did Virgil. And Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare all stole ideas and lines from Virgil and Ovid. It goes on. It’s a part of the poetic process.” It’s not all of it. An artist has to make what they “steal” their own, by changing it, and not just in any way but in some way that “works.”

Fourth theme: taking direction. If artists are, in some sense, followers, what is it that they’re following? We can speak of this as a kind of imitation, but imitation is itself far more complex than we tend to think. Many artists speak of the creative process as responsive. The work of art, in some sense, creates itself. Jimmy Page: “A solo is like a meditation on the song. You find a piece of filigree and then try to play something in total empathy with everything else that’s going on. You can get quite spiritual about soloing. It’s almost like channeling. It’s not there one moment, but then all of a sudden it is. I’m sure anyone who’s creative has that moment. That point where it just sparks. One minute it wasn’t there and the next minute it is, and you know it’s positive and constructive.” Drummer Neil Peart: “It is certainly part of the wisdom preached by my late drumming teacher, Freddie Gruber: ‘If the stick want to fall, let it fall. If the stick wants to bounce, let it bounce. Get out of your own way.’” “The stick wants to fall”—what could that mean? It sounds odd to non-drummers, but this is what musicians often report. Another example is Michael Jackson: “I went down to the kitchen of our house and played ‘Billie Jean.’ Loud. I was in there by myself, the night before the show, and I pretty much stood there and let the song tell me what to do. I kind of let the dance create itself. I really let it talk to me; I heard the beat come in, and I took this spy’s hat [a fedora] and started to pose and step, letting the ‘Billie Jean’ rhythm create the movements. I felt almost compelled to let it create itself. I couldn’t help it.” The dancer “becomes the dance,” a common saying has it. The music directs the dancer. The dancer isn’t exactly making it up, deciding in a vacuum how their body is going to move. They move in the way that the music indicates or requires. They take direction, especially from the rhythm (in some forms of music anyway).

Artists often describe an activity that in unformalizable, non-linear, and non-technical. They don’t begin with a clear idea of what outcome they want to achieve, and then start planning how to achieve that end, even while some technique and problem-solving do come into play. In the bigger picture, the artist is less in command than commanded. It’s the work itself that holds authority. One gives the work what it needs. The artist disappears into the thing they’re creating. Here’s Bruce Springsteen: “When you get the music and lyrics right, your voice disappears into the voices you’ve chosen to write about. Basically, with these songs, I find the characters and listen to them.” The artist is paying attention, focusing on something that’s specific. There is a narrow zone of concentration that is not unlike what athletes sometimes report. Dylan: the artist is “someone who could see into things, the truth of things—not metaphorically, either—but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it was and reveal it for what it was with hard words and vicious insight.” This kind of seeing is passionate and intensely gratifying. One does it for the simple love of it. Creation is instinctive, and descriptions of it tend toward the excessive. It is bold, fearless, and often requires an enormous expenditure of energy.

Fifth theme: art speaks. It speaks the truth. Artists have long used this word in describing what they do. They have something to say; they’re not just providing entertainment. But what kind of truth is this? Works of art don’t report facts. They do something else, but what? Their work “speaks” but in what sense?

Dylan again: “Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice. He said, ‘Well, that’s very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth.’ Think about that the next time you are listening to a singer.” Art “works” when it has something to say. It’s “truth” that makes a work come alive and speak. Here is the late Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries: “A very true, simple love song doesn’t come easy…. It has to be genuine. It has to be from the heart, right? So you have to really mean it. You can’t fake it. Because if you fake it, people feel that. You’re faking it.” A love song is a revealing, or a showing, of what something means, and if it isn’t “from the heart” then it’s empty. A work of art doesn’t work if it’s contrived or calculated. The emotional register needs to be correct. If it’s not, the audience will hear it; it doesn’t speak.

This mode of truth is personal. You can’t show what you haven’t experienced or felt. An artist needs to mean what they say, and they probably can’t if they haven’t lived it. An artist creates from experience. There is an autobiographical element at work here. Great art is soulful; it comes from within. The truth it expresses is a personal mode of truth.

Sixth theme: play. The great jazz drummer Buddy Rich said: “I just want to play and tell the truth. As I said many times, I don’t go to work at night, I go to play!” Creating art is often very hard work, but it’s a form of work that is hard to separate from play. Rich played the drums in a way that required an enormous output of mental and physical energy, but it’s work that is passionate and often intensely pleasurable.

Recall Nietzsche: there’s something extraordinary about the child at play. They are fully immersed in their activity and in the present moment. Their activity absorbs their concentration totally. They’re in love with life, in that moment. Nietzsche: “The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes. Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wins its own world.” Springsteen echoes the point: “I’ve left enough sweat on stages around the world to fill at least one of the seven seas; I’ve driven myself and my band to the limits and over the edge for more than forty years. We continue to do so but it’s still ‘playing.’ It’s a life-giving, joyful, sweat-drenched, muscle-aching, voice-blowing, mind-clearing, exhausting, soul-invigorating, cathartic pleasure and privilege every night.” There is a tension here between hard work and joy, between action and passion. Psychologist Frank Barron describes the artistic mind this way: “It is filled with curiosity and wonder. There is something childlike about it. It loves to get off the beaten track, to explore paths that are not the ones taken by social convention. Playfulness is sometimes important. The opened mind likes to play with an idea or object, and enjoys looking at it as if for the first time. It remains open to the possibility that we may not know everything there is to know—and what we do know may be wrong. It challenges assumptions, makes new connections, finds new ways of viewing the world. The opened mind can wander playfully into areas others do not take seriously, and return with creations that must be approached in all seriousness.”

Creation is serious play. It’s impulsive and controlled at the same time. It arises from a kind of tension—“creative tension.” There is a collision of opposites, a union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

Chapter 2: “Some Central Concepts and Theories”

This chapter outlines several important theoretical notions that are central to the authors’ argument. The main themes are what they take to be the nature of art and intentionality, imitation, participation, habit, and play, echoing, but in a more theoretically elaborate way, some of the themes in Chapter 1. Each of these themes, they argue, plays a central role in both the creation and reception of art. They’re going to be drawing in this chapter primarily upon Plato and Aristotle as well as Gadamer and Franz Brentano.

First, the authors are going to hazard an answer to another elusive issue: what is art? What kinds of objects count as works of art? This little word—“art”—is extraordinarily elusive. Everyone imagines they know what it means, but do we really? Perhaps not. We lack a straightforward, agreed upon definition. In recent decades the most influential philosophical definition of art has been the “artworld” theory which was first advanced by Arthur Danto in 1964. It’s closely associated with “the institutional theory of art,” which was first formulated by George Dickie in the 1970s. Both notions are dominant today in art schools and philosophy departments. Danto: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” Referring to Andy Warhol, he adds: “What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting. It could not have been art fifty years ago. But then there could not have been, everything being equal, flight insurance in the Middle Ages, or Etruscan typewriter erasers. The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible. It would, I should think, never have occurred to the painters of Lascaux that they were producing art on those walls. Not unless there were neolithic aestheticians.”

On this view, what makes something a work of art is that it finds a home—is accepted—within the “artworld,” as opposed to the world of ordinary life. It is accepted by whom? By people who (claim that they) are in the know about art: people like artists, art critics, museum curators, gallery owners, and other art VIPs, i.e., art-institutional authorities. This way of answering the question “what is art?” has become remarkably popular. It is essentially definition by fiat, and the authors will reject both notions completely. Their view will be that the claim that simply placing something in an art gallery makes it a work of art is simplistic, arbitrary, and authoritarian. They’re going to speak of works of art as anything that is created for the purpose of inspiring a certain kind of experience—specifically aesthetic experience. More on this later.

A central theme in this book is what they will speak of as “intentionality.” What is this? Franz Brentano is the source for the modern understanding of intentionality. Brentano’s concept of intentionality has played a central role in contemporary phenomenology, and it’s also central to the authors’ account of the creative process. Artists, they want to say, are “seers” or “noticers” of a certain kind. They have the same senses the rest of us have, but they also develop important habits of perceiving that are trained over time. We’re all perceivers, but we don’t perceive the same things in the same ways. Non-artists don’t typically see a person with a view to how they might be depicted in a painting. This isn’t to say we couldn’t do this—but we typically don’t. We get on with life, where the artist stops and notices some detail which might escape our notice. That detail holds the artist’s attention and seems to lead somewhere. It suggests some possibility or meaning. It gives rise to a thought of one kind or another.

Intentionality surrounds us. The basic meaning of intentionality is as follows. Things in our experience don’t just sit there, inert, and merely are what they are. They “tend” this way or that. For instance, they relate to other things in our experience. They’re always already in motion, in relation, in process, on the way to becoming something else. They are in some way or other directed, and all our experience is like this. This directedness isn’t merely a projection of the mind. It belongs to the phenomena as they are for us. An intention is more like an activity than any kind of thingly being. Consciousness itself is an activity that crucially involves some form of relating or of coming into a kind of transaction with things in the world. In this relation, both subject and object, these two poles of awareness, are mutually created.

All of us do this, but artists do this in a particular form or medium. An artist is tracking or following or coming into relation with a specific kind of intention. One is following where it leads and taking direction from it. The artist isn’t altogether an inventor, making something up from nothing. They’re doing what the work itself requires, listening to the work of art itself and what it requires, and doing so habitually.

Human experience is pervaded by imitation, participation, and habit. These overlap and pervade our experience. We are natural imitators, and we also become what we imitate. We do this by participating over time in a particular activity. It’s not only children who imitate. We all do this in one fashion or another. Imitation leads to what Plato termed participation and also habit formation. Artists imitate—in the sense of learn from, become influenced by, model themselves in some way on—other artists, and not only those who work in one’s own medium. To participate in an art form is to share in similar habits of seeing, noticing, selecting, synthesizing, etc. One creates art on the basis of what one has learned and made one’s own. One makes it one’s own by taking it further, extending a chain. Artists do this habitually. A habit is itself an intention, something that has intentional—not material or ideal—being.

We see ourselves in art. We see ourselves as participants, with others, in a particular form of life or activity, as those who adhere to certain meanings and values. Works of art can produce profound psychological effects on an audience, and this is owing to the ontology of the work itself.

Both artistic creation and its reception involve an often serious-minded form of play. This means far more than that their experience is enjoyable. It means that the work of art itself never comes into being—not fully—until the viewer (co-) constructs or completes it. The work isn’t entirely dependent upon the viewer for its existence. But the work of art, before it’s encountered by the viewer, exists only potentially, not actually. It needs to be completed or concretized by the viewer. This is what is happening in the experience of play. Play, as Gadamer maintained, is a back-and-forth movement between, in this case, the activity of the artist and that of the audience. Play, on the part of the audience, is a re-creating of the work in one’s own imagination, where one can see it and feel it for oneself. Gadamer’s example from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “The staircase that Smerdjakov falls down plays a major role in the story. Everyone who has read the book will remember this scene and will ‘know’ exactly what the staircase looks like. Not one of us has exactly the same image of it and yet we all believe that we see it quite vividly. It would be absurd to ask what the staircase ‘intended’ by Dostoevsky really looked like…. By not describing the scene in any more detail than he has, Dostoevsky stimulates us to construct an image of the stairs in our imagination.” The artist as well plays with, and “is played” by, a work of art, and specifically an art work’s intention. Playing here is a participating in a dialectical movement that they don’t control but fall into, as a result of how their habits have been formed. Every individual will concretize a work of art is their own way. We all contribute something of ourselves to aesthetic experience. We all see ourselves in art; we bring ourselves into the experience and co-create the work of art. As Plato noted, “like attracts like.” This is part of our human makeup. We are attracted to works of art that are like us; to an extent they are us. The instincts to play and to imitate are constitutive of human nature. Artistic creation and aesthetic experience are expressions of these drives. Both are a form of self-creation, and they’re also an expression of what Gadamer called the “play drive. Two of the most basic human drives are to imitate and to play. Artistic creation is a (seriously) playful activity. The authors will return to these notions later.

First, some more on intentionality: consciousness has what phenomenologists call an intentional structure. This means that the mind apprehends an intentionality that is in the world. In saying this, the authors are significantly modifying a standard phenomenological hypothesis, which is what Edmund Husserl termed the “intentionality of consciousness.” For Husserl, intentions are a kind of outward projection of the mind. They originate in minds and are imposed onto the world as we experience it. For example, space and time don’t belong to the world but to minds. The authors want to locate intentional structures at least partly in the world, outside of minds. Consciousness as they speak of it is an engagement with intentional structures that are in the world; they’re not pure inventions of consciousness. Human consciousness, in their view, consists in the “mutual creation” of subject and object, and neither has priority over the other. Consider the humble paramecium. When viewed under a microscope, this organism doesn’t just lie there; instead it tends this way and that. It shows movement, directionality, and relations. These are not imposed by the mind; they belong to the thing itself. Any organism is continually responding to its environment. An intention, most fundamentally, is an affair of tending, relating, being in motion, and being directed in one way or another. When we speak of intentionality, we’re speaking more of a kind of activity than any sort of thingly entity which subsequently becomes directed toward an end. Consciousness itself is an activity that crucially involves some form of relating. It’s the nature of intentional beings to direct awareness in a certain way. To act is to respond or follow along in the trajectory that the intentional structure sets forth, and this includes the activities of artistic creation and reception and also the lion’s share of what minds do. Consciousness is a learned activity that exhibits some form of learned directedness. It’s also governed, as a great deal of human activity is, by habits which are also learned.

A few related themes they speak of in this chapter are imitation, participation, and habit formation. These three phenomena overlap and pervade much of our experience in general. It’s not only children who imitate and learn to act in accordance with habits. We all do, including artists and their audiences. But imitation and habit formation feature especially prominently in artistic creation. How so, and what do these notions mean? Plato famously worried about the natural tendency of children to imitate their elders—because children become what they imitate. In other words, they come to participate in the same activity as their models, for better or worse. It’s not only actions that are habitual; consciousness itself is. Our awareness learns or acquires certain tendencies or becomes directed in certain ways, as a result of the way of being in which it has participated with others. For example, learning a language involves imitating certain patterns of speech which over time become habitual. To form a habit isn’t merely to repeat an action but to participate in a way of being. The word “habit” comes from the Latin habitus (habere, to have), which means the way in which one holds or “has” oneself, the way one is or exhibits oneself. Imitation, Plato believed, may lead to participation—so Plato’s fear of the dangers of imitation seems quite reasonable. Aristotle also pointed out that a great deal of our earliest experience and education consists in imitating the actions of our elders. Imitation might also inculcate good habits in the child. In any event, the child will become what she repeatedly imitates. She will come to participate in or to possess the same “way of being” as the model copied. This isn’t limited to the moral or practical sphere; all behavior develops in this way, including the ways we perceive, feel, and think.

More on play: Gadamer’s hermeneutical analysis of art also draws heavily on Plato. For Gadamer, a game reaches its completion only when it’s being played: “In the reproductive arts, the work of art must constantly be reconstituted as a creation. The transitory arts teach us most vividly that representation is required not only for the reproductive arts, but for any creation that we call a work of art. It demands to be constructed by the viewer to whom it is presented…. [I]t is something that manifests and displays itself when it is constituted in the viewer.” In aesthetic experience, the viewer is participating in the creation of the work of art; they’re completing it. The work of art doesn’t fully come into being until the viewer constructs or constitutes it. Both the object and the subject come into being as players in the game of artistic creation, or in the recreation of artistic play. They don’t exist as separate players but as one and the same creative activity itself, or subject and object both take on a new identity. Both come to be identified with the game they’re engaged in, just as the dancer becomes the dance and the dance exists only as the dancing of the dancer. It allows itself to be danced, or “concretized,” in many ways. In general, a work of art comes fully into being through our participation in its constitution. It also changes us. As Gadamer noted, art “does not leave him who has it unchanged.” We might say that prior to a work of art being encountered by the viewer, it exists potentially but not actually. This isn’t to return to the old view that art is completely subjective. Their point is to emphasize the role of the viewer in the ontology of art, but it’s not completely subjective. There’s an important intersubjective basis of aesthetic experience. We see in the work of art a reflection not only of one’s own values but a reflection of a larger context of intersubjectively constituted values. Art doesn’t confront us as an object in opposition to ourselves but as something in which we become caught up in an immediate way, in the way one becomes caught up in a conversation or falls in love. Gadamer compared this to the dialectical structure of play. Art has a dialectical or play structure. The actions of artist and audience alike, as Gadamer puts it, “should not be considered subjective actions, since it is, rather, the game itself that plays, for it draws the players into itself and thus itself becomes the actual subjectum of the playing.” The artist herself is “played,” as is the audience. Both allow themselves to be drawn into a process that has the structure of a dialectic. Both artist and audience are taking direction and must in some way respond to the intentionality of the work itself.

Chapter 3: “More Clues from Plato and Aristotle”

In the last two chapters the authors have discussed a number of concepts: intentionality, play, participation, imitation, habit formation, the artworld and the institutional theory, inspiration, some others. They all have a point, to some extent anyway. The question now will be how these notions can be integrated into a coherent account of artistic creation, and to integrate them also with some ideas in Plato and Aristotle. These two were the first in the Western tradition to write about the nature of art. What is important in Plato’s critique of the poets isn’t the moral criticism but the ontological criticism. They’re going to spend some time looking at Plato and Aristotle in some detail. I’ll skip the details and outline the main argument.

For Plato, art stands at the furthest remove from reason and reality. Art appeals to the imagination, which is irrational and associated with the appetites. It should be banned from the ideal state, Plato thought. It also involves imitation. Over time, imitation leads to participation in certain kinds of behavior, and it does this by creating habits which might be good or bad. Habits are highly resistant to change. For Plato, as we’ve seen, imitating a bad model can lead to the development of bad habits. How does this happen; what “causal mechanism” is at work here? Plato didn’t answer this in a systematic way. Aristotle did; he provides a more systematic treatment of what kind of causal operation habit formation involves. For Aristotle, imitation is natural to human beings, and it involves a specific kind of causality. It’s primarily by means of imitation that we learn. It’s natural for imitative (mimetic) beings to take pleasure in art works, which are themselves works of imitation. How does imitation “cause” participation? Aristotle’s answer: by means of “formal causality,” as opposed to the other three kinds of causality: the material, the efficient, and the final. Formal causality underlies the concept of participation, and it’s the same kind of causality that’s at work in aesthetic experience and in cognition in general.

For Aristotle, there is a kind of identity between the experiencing subject and the experienced object. The thinking subject and the experienced object are in some way identical. To know an object is in a profound sense to “be” it, that is, to participate in an identical way of being. In other words, habitual exposure to the same kind of object naturally brings about a change in one’s own being. You become what you see; this is Aristotle’s ontological hypothesis. You become it through repeated imitation and participation. Cognition itself is an enactment of formal causality.

In creating a work of art, then, the artist bestows an intentional structure upon the work, and in the course of its creation, the work acquires an intentionality of its own. It’s an intentionality which also guides the artist in its construction. It’s the same intentionality in which the audience will later participate during their experience of it. The whole operation is a process of formal causality, which belongs both to the work of art and to the interpreter.

More detail on Aristotle on imitation: Aristotle gave us the first systematic inquiries into the psychology of (especially moral) education and development. Plato’s psychology of imitation, and its relation to art, became a central theme in Aristotle’s philosophy as a whole. His question was, which of the four kinds of causality is operative in imitative behavior, and also in cognition? From Aristotle’s Poetics (1448b4-24): “It is clear that the general origin of poetry was due to two causes, each of them part of human nature. Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation. And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation. The truth of this second point is shown by experience: though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms for example of the lowest animals and of dead bodies. The explanation is to be found in a further fact: to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning—gathering the meaning of things, e.g. that the man there is so-and-so; for if one has not seen the thing before, one’s pleasure will not be in the picture as an imitation of it, but will be due to the execution or colouring or some similar cause. Imitation, then, being natural to us—as also the sense of harmony and rhythm, the metres being obviously species of rhythms—it was through their original aptitude, and by a series of improvements for the most part gradual on their first efforts, that they created poetry out of their improvisations.”

Here is his definition of tragedy (1449b-22-28): “A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.” Actions and events are represented, or imitated, on stage. Members of the audience, ourselves imitative beings, are drawn into the performance. We enter the world of the dramatic work, suspending our disbelief in the reality of that world, and we experience the emotions that are appropriate to the situations presented. These feelings are perfectly real. The situations depicted on stage invoke in us feelings of real fear, excitement, etc. These experiences of emotion can’t be explained in terms of physiology or neurology. Such physicalist accounts only enable us to understand the material basis of the feelings, but not their cognitive significance.

For Plato, imitating a bad model can lead to the development of bad habits. Aristotle agrees, but then asks how? What is the “causal mechanism” at work? Plato doesn’t account for this, or not in any detail. Imitation in some way “causes” participation, he says, and leaves it at that. Aristotle: the answer crucially bears upon the notion of formal causality. Formal causality in cognition and in aesthetic experience come into focus here. Things become more technical as the authors go into some detail in their interpretation of Aristotle. For our purposes, the main point is this: as Joseph Owens writes: “With the basis of reasoning located firmly in the thing that is other than the cognitive act, Aristotle is able to offer his explanation of what knowing or perceiving a thing means. It means that the percipient or knower becomes and is that thing in the actuality of the cognition. This is not a case of having a thing in a material way. In material possession the possessor remains distinct from the thing he has, in the way you possess a house or a car. On the other hand, cognition means thoroughgoing identity with the thing insofar as it is perceived or known. Aristotle repeats this assertion of identity of knower and known too often to leave any doubt about its important role. To know a thing is to be it in a distinctive way of being.” This sounds strange to us: “To know a thing is to be it?”—what does that mean? It means we need to understand cognition as enacting a specific type of causality, that is, formal causality. For Aristotle (and for the authors who are here agreeing with him), in the act of cognition the cognizing subject takes on the form “without the matter” of the object of cognition. In other words, the thinking/experiencing subject becomes identical with the object “with respect to its form.” As they write: “The form of the activity of the cognizing on the part of the subject is one and the same as the form of the activity of the being on the part of the object.” In cognition, the subject’s act of cognition is the same as the form of the object’s act of being. This generally characterizes the relation between consciousness and the world.

Chapter 4: “A Model of the Work of Art”

This chapter presents a general account of (twentieth-century Polish phenomenologist) Roman Ingarden’s analysis of the work of art and of our experience of the work. The authors will return in Chapter 5 to a more detailed examination of artistic creation. There is a lot of technical detail in this chapter. I’m going to skip over much of this in order to clarify the central points.

The theoretical model of the work of art that the authors are putting forward is basically Ingarden’s, with some revisions. The question at this point is, what is art? We can begin to answer this by recalling Ingarden’s realist rejoinder to Husserl’s idealism. This is a long story, but I’ll keep it short. For Husserl, operations of the mind produce or “constitute” (form, fashion, construct) the objects of our experience. The world as it’s experienced by us is essentially a construction of our own consciousness. This, in a nutshell, is Husserl’s idealism (of course, there’s a lot more to it). The authors are going to reject this, as did Ingarden. In presenting his argument against Husserl’s idealism, Ingarden chose the literary work of art as an example. His question about it is, what is a work of art’s mode of being? He was focused on the literary work of art, but he could have chosen another art form. Does a novel—or any other work of art—have its basis in consciousness alone? His answer: no. It seems to him that the work of art’s mode of being is neither ideal (like numbers or concepts) nor material (tables, planets). Its way of being seems to be something else—but what?

Ingarden’s answer: it’s “intentional.” That is, we need to posit a third (in addition to the material and the ideal) order of being—intentional being. Władysław Strozewski: “In the dispute primarily between the ‘subjectivists,’ or ‘idealists,’ and the ‘realists,’ centering on the theme of the structure and the mode of existence of the work of art, Ingarden took an altogether distinct position which allowed him to overcome the difficulties of the former group but at the same time to accept everything that was valid in them. This had become possible thanks to the discovery of the intentionality of the work of art, though conceived in such a manner that it did not exclude its objective character but rather allowed it to be understood.” On the authors’ view, there are three kinds of being: material, ideal, and intentional. Works of art fall under the third category.

Think of a work of art as a “stratified [layered] and schematic construction that consists of relations among elements that an artist has put together with a view to inspiring an aesthetic experience in an audience.” In Ingarden’s (and the authors’) view, these various strata make up a work of art. The artist needs to combine these strata in such a way as to create what Ingarden calls a “polyphonic harmony,” that is, in creating a work, the artist weaves together several ontologically distinct strata. Strata are levels or layers of the different kinds of elements that comprise the work. A work of art is made up of these strata, and the specific number of strata varies among the different sub-categories of art. Works of art need to be completed or concretized by an audience. Their job is to fill out particular features of the work that the artist puts forward only schematically and incompletely. The work of art comes into being through the creative acts of the artist, and the re-creative acts of the audience complete this process. The artist bestows an initial intentionality upon the work, and gradually, in the process of its creation, the work acquires an intentional structure of its own. Intentionality here isn’t a function or construction of consciousness alone. It belongs to the work itself. The authors give an example: “When, for example, a reader puts down a book, relations of grammar, syntax, and so on among the words on the pages don’t cease to exist, and neither do the other ‘intentions’ of the work that lie in the strata of represented objects and schematized aspects. We may think of the literary work of art, and indeed of all sorts of artworks, as guidebooks for our consciousness, telling us step by step how to aesthetically engage our consciousness in our own experiential re-construction of the works of art that we are encountering. What we shall next be suggesting is that just as the audience is guided by the intentionality inherent in the structure of the work in the course of its re-creation, so too is the artist guided by the same structural intentionality during the course of its initial creation.”

More on Ingarden’s analyses: Ingarden criticized Husserl’s “transcendental idealism”—the view that the world as we experience it is dependent upon acts of consciousness or is “constituted” in or by consciousness. He argues the following: we need to distinguish between three kinds of being: material, ideal, and intentional. Material things possess “material being,” ideal things possess “ideal being,” but works of art are neither. We need to speak of them as “intentional objects” which possess “intentional being.” A work of art exists in a very different way than how both material and ideal objects exist. It’s not reducible to either the material or ideal elements that it may include. A work of art isn’t identical to the material thing that we perceive with our senses. For example, the novel is not this particular physical book; there’s only one War and Peace, but many copies. But nor is the work an idea.

Ingarden is going to describe it as a formation or a construction which consists of relations among parts. The artist has assembled these elements with an eye to producing an experience in an audience. Ingarden: “The essential structure of the literary work of art inheres, in our opinion, in the fact that it is a formation constructed of several heterogeneous strata. The individual strata differ from one another (1) by their characteristic material, from the peculiarity of which stem the particular qualities of each stratum, and (2) by the role which each stratum plays with respect to both the other strata and the structure of the whole work.” Every work of art is a construction that the artist builds out of various strata. For example, a song is “a purely intentional object which has its source of being in the creative acts of the composer and its ontic foundation in the score.” The score (what’s written down) isn’t the song. The score, according to Ingarden, specifies “only some determinations of [the work’s] purely tonal (acoustic) base, while others are left open and variable within certain limits, although they are also mediately codetermined. The work enters the world as a decidedly schematic formation. In its univocally determined and, as it were, actually existing content, the work is riddled with places of indeterminacy that can be eliminated only in the individual performances.” The score needs to be brought to life by the activity of the musicians. The song needs to be “concretized”—brought to life, made fully real, first by the musicians, then by the audience. The score “guides” the performance, but also underdetermines it.

It’s further concretized, or brought fully into being, by the listener. The listener’s experience of the work is being guided by the performance of the work. But the listener also contributes to the further concretization of the work. This concretizing is also an interpretation, which is based largely on the listener’s personal taste and experience. A work of art is created for the purpose of becoming the object of an aesthetic experience (this is both Ingarden’s and the authors’ view). The work also provides the direction for an aesthetic experience. A natural object (e.g., a piece of driftwood) or a produced artifact (e.g., Duchamp’s urinal [Fountain]) may also give rise to an aesthetic experience—maybe anything can. But it’s not brought into being to serve this purpose. Art objects are. This is what art is for: to produce a special kind of experience. But it also underdetermines that experience. The work includes a kind of potentiality—a power to give rise to an aesthetic experience—but for it to be actualized, the audience has some work to do. They need to engage with it, interpret it, relate it to their own circumstances. In other words, they need to “actualize” the work of art. The audience receives at most a kind of guidance from the work, but the rest—the personal aesthetic experience that the individual interpreter has—is up to them.

As an example, consider the act of dancing. You need to move to the music, take direction from the music. You’re free to move the way you want to move, but not completely. There are lousy dancers, but what makes them lousy? They’re not following the rhythm. They’re doing something else, not picking up on the song’s intentionality—the rhythm in this case—and following in kind, or where it leads. Or maybe they don’t know how to follow in kind—how to move. They’re not “becoming the dance” or losing themselves in it. Another way of saying this, ontologically, is that they aren’t being effected by the music’s formal causality. The cognition or thinking that the dancer is engaged in doesn’t consist in the “mental representation” of an object (the song) that’s ontologically distinct from the dancing. Nor does cognition amount to a mental construction of the song. The subject (the dancer) is in immediate contact with the object, “through the sharing of form, a process that gives rise to a formal identity of subject and object.” This is Aristotle’s twist on the Platonic doctrine of participation: there’s no Form or Idea that is separate from the mind. Instead there’s one form in which both subject and object participate. This assertion that there is a relation of formal identity between cognition or consciousness and its “real-world” object is incompatible with Husserl’s idealism—or the view that consciousness constitutes the world. Husserl’s view reduced real-world objects to consciousness. Ingarden rejected this view and so do the authors. They want an account that is neither idealist nor materialist.

Chapter 5: “Structural and Hermeneutic Considerations”

Is there any accounting for taste? The usual answer is no, aesthetic judgments are simply subjective preferences. There is no reasoning about it, no basis for preferring one work of art to another. It’s in the eye of the beholder. The authors are going to say: yes and no (mostly no). It’s subjective only in part. There are something like criteria/standards that allow us to judge works of art—although not in a way that is completely objective either. There are criteria that are entailed by the account of artistic creation that they have put forward.

They’re going to put these criteria in the form of a number of questions that one might ask of any work of art and that help us to distinguish better from more ordinary works. The questions are: (1) does a work of art have something to say? (2) and in a relatively novel way? (3) does the work borrow well? (4) has the artist made it look easy? (5) does the work have a sense of play? (6) and also a sense of mystery? Great works of art have all of these things, among their other qualities. We’ll look in a bit more detail at each of the six.

First, why do we need criteria at all? Art is personal and subjective; why not just leave it at that? The authors: because it’s not very plausible to say that the poetry of Shakespeare is no better than what your average teenager might come up with. We want to say that the former is, in a non-subjective way, better. But on what basis? Dylan is better than Bieber (way better! not even close). You could just take my word for it (you definitely should), but you might also want to know on what grounds one would say this. The search for some kind of criteria/standards for judgments like this has proven remarkably elusive, and many philosophers gave up trying. But the consequence of this is a thoroughgoing subjectivism which to the authors looks implausible. The authors present their argument in two stages: they outline what they term structural conditions and hermeneutic conditions which any work of art ought to fulfill.

First, the structural conditions. These aren’t exactly objective standards; they’re more like intersubjective. They have to do with the structural features that any work of art has. Remember that they want to define a work of art as “an artifact created by an artist that is intended to evoke an aesthetic experience in the subject who engages with it.” Recall also that the work of art is a “schematic formation” or a construction built out of several strata. The work of the artist is to craft the material they’re working with in such a way that all the strata are weaved together and function together in a harmonious way. The artistic value of a work will depend in part on two things: (1) the degree of technical skill of the artist—this is a matter of “artistic craftsmanship”—and (2) the extent to which the work guides (without completely dictating) the interpreter’s concretization of the work. Both may be executed more or less well.

Second, hermeneutic conditions. By “hermeneutic” they mean that which pertains to the audience’s reception/interpretation of the work rather than what belongs to the work itself.

(1) Does a work of art have something to say? Singer-songwriter Bob Neuwirth was once invited to a concert by a young Bob Dylan. His response: “Does he have anything to say?” He continued: “In those days artistic success was not dollar driven. Those were simpler times. If you had something to say, which was basically the way people were rated, they’d say have you seen Ornette Coleman? Does he have anything to say? And it was the same with Bob or anybody else. Do they have anything to say or not?” Art should do more than entertain or deliver a certain kind of pleasure. It should speak—and speak what artists have long called “truth.” This speaking isn’t a stating but a showing—revealing what something is or what it means. The artist also “means” what they’re saying, and an audience can usually discern this. They can feel it. The audience’s experience is that it’s as if the work of art is speaking to me, in a way that’s personal, and probably to a lot of other people too.

(2) And in a relatively novel way? All art is in some way, to some extent, derivative. The artist has borrowed from another work. The question isn’t whether they have done this at all—they have, or else they have nothing to say—but whether they’ve done it well or badly. Badly usually means excessively—they’re merely being a copycat, or maybe plagiarizing (borrowing without significant revision). Artists are supposed to know the difference between borrowing and stealing. There’s a grey zone between the two. A work of art needs to be the artist’s own work. What it says has to be in some way new and their own. It has likely been said before, but not in exactly this way.

(3) Does the work borrow well? It either borrows well or it borrows badly. The question is how? Has a work of art been inspired by some other work? Is the artist borrowing from their own life experience? It is inspired by a tradition, but does it add to it in some interesting way? The better works of art exhibit perceptual insight, novelty, technical mastery, and also work. The various aesthetic elements—all of which have been borrowed—are weaved together in some moderately new way. This is what borrowing well means, and it requires artists to immerse themselves in their art form—and, one might say, to become it. An artist who doesn’t borrow well either (1) doesn’t know their tradition, (2) isn’t technically proficient, (3) doesn’t draw upon much, or (4) doesn’t introduce some interesting variation on their tradition.

(4) Has the artist made it look easy? Creating art isn’t easy, but when it’s well done, it can look like it was effortless. From the audience’s point of view, the artist is no longer “doing” it; she “is” it. The dancer has become the dance—or so it seems to the audience. She’s totally losing herself in the intention of the work, taking direction from it, and becoming it. The genius is the one who makes it look easy, even though it’s far from easy. Sarah McLachlan, speaking of her song “Angel”: “I channeled that. It came through me. I don’t know how else to say it, because usually writing songs is like extracting blood from a stone, especially lyrically, and that song, it just happened over the course of a week.” “It just happened”; some will speak (metaphorically) of “channeling.” Artists often speak this way, and they also judge each other’s work by this standard. Ordinary works can appear labored. There’s an experience of ease that comes from behavior that has become habitual and instinctive. Here’s Jackson Pollock, speaking of his preference for painting on the floor: “On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added. When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”

(5) Does the work have a sense of play? You lose yourself in play. The players are swept up in an event they don’t control but participate in. Jimmy Page: “Whether I took it on or it took me on, I don’t know. The jury’s out on that. But I don’t care. I’ve just really really enjoyed it, that’s it.” Gadamer: “Is it not the case that in the final analysis, … artistic creation itself is an expression of a play-drive?” Here’s Heraclitus: “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” Here’s Nietzsche: “A man’s maturity—consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.” Play can be serious business, and it belongs to the activity of both the artist and the audience.

(6) And also a sense of mystery? Here’s Leonard Cohen: “If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often. It’s a mysterious condition. It’s much like the life of a Catholic nun. You’re married to a mystery.” Good art doesn’t remove the mystery or make everything explicit. Michael Jackson speaking of Britney Spears: “I would never do what she’s doing. In a few years no one will want to hear her anymore. She knows nothing about mystery.” “The power of mystery” is fundamental to an artist’s work. Art has a sense of mystery about it. There’s always more to think about and to feel. It keeps you coming back; it demands to be experienced again and again, and it refuses to oversimplify or to dumb things down. The interpreter also has some work to do. Better art leaves them free to do it, while also setting down a direction to follow.

Chapter 6: “Implications”

This chapter spells out some implications of their argument which go beyond artistic creation. They’re going to outline several implications that appear to follow in the fields of metaphysics, psychology, sociology, and education and also for the distinction in aesthetics between art and craft, and without going into great detail; each of these topics would take a book to describe in detail. They’re striving for breadth in this chapter. I’m going to keep these notes short, since the arguments in this chapter are somewhat tangential to their main argument regarding artistic creation and aesthetic experience.

In aesthetics: what is the difference between art and craft, and also between art and entertainment? The distinction they draw between works of art and craft bears upon the notion of final causality. The distinction is rooted in ontology and concerns an art work’s final cause, i.e., its purpose. Why do we have art? Their answer: to give rise to an aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experiences can be had by other means, but works of art are created with this end in view.

What about craftwork? What is its purpose, its final cause? They mention the example of a cupboard. This is a work of craft. What is its purpose? To contain household items. It might also, as a secondary matter, have been designed with an eye to beauty, but elegance of design—its ability to inspire an aesthetic experience—is an optional extra. That’s not, primarily anyway, what furniture is for. It serves both a utilitarian and an aesthetic purpose. A work of art’s final cause—specifically its “intrinsic final cause”—is to give rise to an aesthetic experience. It may also serve a second purpose: a painting might also cover a stain on the wall, for example, but that’s not what the painting is for “intrinsically.” The cupboard, or any work of craft, has an intrinsic purpose: to contain things. It might also, as a secondary matter, inspire an aesthetic response, but it is secondary. An artisan may also be an artist: when the works they produce have more than one intrinsic final cause, one utilitarian and the aesthetic.

Much the same applies to the distinction between art and entertainment. The primary purpose of a work of entertainment is to afford pleasure some kind. Calling it entertainment is not to look down upon it. In most cases—and there are many exceptions—a piece of entertainment comes into being in order to afford a certain amount of pleasure for an audience. But a work’s intrinsic final cause may be more than one. The distinction between a work’s intrinsic and extrinsic final causality can also be subtle. An entertainer can also be an artist, but they don’t want to collapse the distinction altogether. Just calling something art doesn’t make it so.

In metaphysics: some metaphysical issues that have come up in the book include the Platonic concepts of imitation and participation, the Aristotelian view of the relation between matter and form, and Ingarden’s criticism of Husserl’s idealism, also the operation of formal causality in cognition. But the most important implications for metaphysics lie in their rethinking of the concept of intentionality. This idea concerns phenomenology, cognitive science, and the metaphysical foundations of science. A metaphysically materialist view of the universe has been widely prevalent among philosophers since the Renaissance, and it’s prevalent among contemporary scientists as well. An increasing number of physicists, biologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have become increasingly unhappy with this view, but what might replace it? How does the mind relate to the body, or how does consciousness relate to the world? The approach the authors have taken to the concepts of intentionality and formal causality might provide a new ground for scientists who are looking for a philosophy of mind and of its interaction with the world.

In psychology: the authors have spoken of the mind as no kind of thing—including a brain and a machine—but as an activity or an extremely complex array of activities. These activities are saturated with intentionality. These intentions have an organic structure. Things in our experience tend, relate, and interrelate, and their tending itself may be understood on the model of growth. Intentions are constantly on the move. Their parts work together, interact, and intend one another in countless ways. These parts are themselves activities, and they all intend other activities. Your mind is directed in particular ways; it tends to prefer x, to desire y, to fear z, etc. Part of this is a consequence of your biology. The rest (likely most of it) is a consequence of the intentions that you have imitated and come to participate in over time. Imitation leads to participation. It causes it, in Aristotle’s sense of formal causality. Our whole way of being is to be directed this way and that. A great deal of our psychological experience and behavior consists in learned and habitual activity, most of which is resistant to change. This is why we speak of the “force” of habit and the need for some particular sensory stimuli. As I write this—it’s 4:30 a.m.—I need more coffee; the first cup wasn’t enough. Why? Because an intention (habit in this case), once formed, continues to tend in the same way. It keeps going in the same direction, until some other intention leads the mind elsewhere. Something like this happens when a song gets stuck in your head. It keeps playing, even if you don’t like the song—until your attention is drawn away by something else, such as another song. What’s happening is that an intention that originates “out there” (in the song) is continuing its trajectory in your own mind and “infecting” you, causing you to hum along or to tap your foot, etc. The motion of your foot is one with the rhythm of the song. You get caught up in it, and you remain there until some other intention pulls you away in another direction as a kind of gravitational force.

Both the natural world as a whole and the human mind or psyche are permeated with intentionality. Think of the psyche as a great bundle of intentions—countless activities, relations, and interactions—many of which take on a life of their own when they’re not checked by competing intentions. Both genius and madness (some of it) can be thought of as a kind of monomania, where the mind becomes totally focused on a single course of intentionality. An example is addiction. The genius too is a kind of extremist or addict. Artists are mad, according to an old legend; they’re possessed. So are lovers, world-class athletes, etc. Personality itself is a bundle of tendings, relatings, strivings, and habits. Sometimes these are narrowly focused, sometimes they are broader.

In sociology: intentionality is at work everywhere in the human world. Artists are not social scientists, but they are rather good at glimpsing what’s happening in a given society at a given time or within the experience of some group of people within it. If you want to understand your (or any) society, it would be a good idea to listen to the artists that society produces. They’re rather good at tracking socially shared intentions, putting their finger on the pulse of things. They often will notice and comment on where a society may be going, reflecting on the spirit of the times. They don’t reckon with statistics but capture the ethos of a particular time and place. Sociology is an empirical investigation of society and it uses quantitative and qualitative methods to construct a fairly comprehensive and scientific explanation of human affairs. Artists do something similar. They mention Allen Ginsberg’s “America” (1956) and Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964). These works are true—they were changing. Artists aren’t prophets, but they are noticers and commentators on what they notice. They’re rather good at depicting how things stand from the point of view of lived experience—what people are going through, what they’re up against, what things mean. Artists often see things before the rest of us do, or see them more clearly. Larger trends in art can shed enormous light on how things stand in a given society. In art history, a particular movement or style can be seen as emerging from the soil of a society, e.g., Renaissance art made sense to a particular historical community. It spoke to them, just as Beat poetry spoke to post-war America. Art is a plant that grows in a particular soil, and if you want to know what’s happening in a given society, look to its art.

In education: one final set of implications the authors speak to concerns the value of the arts in education. There’s an ongoing debate about the significance of the arts in schools and universities. Do we need them? Music won’t make you rich, ergo.… STEM subjects might, ergo…. The economy needs the latter, so when budget cuts come, what gets the axe? Why does my kid’s school have no music program? This is an old and ongoing debate within education circles. The authors argue that the educational significance of the arts has little to do with utility. We need to adopt a different vocabulary: there’s more to education than utility. Governments usually have no concept of this. For most of them, education is conceived within a mindset of managerialism, planning, efficiency, and instrumental rationality. The purpose of an education in art is consistent with the purpose of art itself. We (including students) see ourselves—and become ourselves—in art. We are formed—come into our own—in this kind of experience. When students become habituated to and formed by utility alone, whole realms of experience are closed to them, often for life. One who becomes entirely habituated to the rat race becomes the rat race. An education in the arts feeds and forms the soul, at least potentially. It leads to the growth of habits, sensibilities, and a sense of life which can endure through life. It opens up a world, acquaints us with our tradition and ourselves. A work of art, whether it’s canonical or not, can teach us different ways of seeing the world. It can change your life. It shows you how to perceive and to feel, to see what matters. Plato’s insight was both educational and ontological: children become what they see—so expose them to the right things, including works of art that can be profoundly formative. It matters what aesthetic objects the young are exposed to and become familiar with and whether they’re exposed to them at all, because they will imitate and in time participate in what they see. If they are surrounded by blandness and aesthetic uniformity, they will become that as well.

“Conclusion”

The authors are going to summarize the argument of the book and add some further thoughts on intentionality and some related themes. First, intentionality: intentionality pervades our experience of the world in general. It’s neither wholly discovered (realism, empiricism) nor wholly imposed (idealism, postmodern constructivism). Intentionality is there to be discerned—in the world. In artistic creation and aesthetic experience, we follow where it leads, extend the chain. We all do this. Their example: “When you walk through a forest, there’s a way that’s there to be seen (likely more than one). We’re not speaking of the kind of path that’s been carefully planned and constructed by the tourist industry but something else, something that preceded it and that also made it possible. We’re making our way through the trees and the brush, heading south, toward a river that can’t be seen from where we’re standing. Some bushwhacking is involved, ducking under branches, backtracking, and so on. A compass helps, but if we follow it too unthinkingly we’re sure to run into a tree before long. We need to veer to the left, then back quickly to the right to avoid a thicket. This way leads between two mature trees, followed by a clearing before the brush again becomes thick. We look left and right, trying to find the way. We’re not making it up or inventing anything; it’s there to be seen. It’s no more in our head than the trees we’ll walk into if we step too far to the left. The path is there—potentially, not actually, but to say it’s ideal or a construction of consciousness is as mistaken as saying it’s a material object. The tourist’s path is a material object. The path we’re speaking of isn’t, but to say that it doesn’t exist, or that it’s a pure construction of consciousness, violates our experience. This is the way, or a way; it takes us to the river without being pointlessly circuitous or forcing us to walk through unnecessarily difficult terrain.”

Here’s another example, from an artist (Neil Peart) who’s speaking about motorcycling: “Perhaps it is only long habit that makes me prefer to find my routes on paper maps, with the tactile details they seem to reveal—and that’s the perfect word. I do not so much design a route as study the page for a while and let the ‘right’ roads be revealed to me. With highlighter pen, I stitch together a complicated thread of Rand McNally’s thin red lines, gray lines, and, best of all, the broken gray lines—the unpaved roads.” Something is revealed to you; you’re not inventing something out of thin air. You’re following a course . Artists often speak this way, and it’s not metaphorical. You can get it wrong too. Their example: “when Victor Hugo arrived at the end of Les Misérables, he might, after some 1200 pages of narrative, have had an aging Jean Valjean suddenly convert to Buddhism and relocate to a mountaintop in India. Hugo was the author, after all. It’s his book—or is it? Nothing in the novel foreshadows that, and had he taken the narrative in that direction, even he would have had a very difficult time pulling it off. It wouldn’t have worked—been convincing, we might say, or indeed been true—no matter how formidable the author’s literary skills. The sense of an ending would have been frustrated, narrative coherence lost, and the reader annoyed. An ending may surprise, but not if a chain has been broken.” One more example: in music, if you follow this progression of notes: C, D, E, F, G, A, B with F# rather than C, this is like following 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 with 29.6. It’s wrong; the answer is 6. You’re not making it up. Artists are free, but not completely. They have to do what the work requires, listen to the work as it goes along creating itself.

Intentionality is at work everywhere, and its mode of being is neither material nor ideal. It’s neither strictly “out there” nor “in here.” Rather it underlies and sustains subject and object alike, and this is the mode of being that works of art have. What a thing is, it is in relation to something else. Everything in our world tends this way or that. It is in motion and changing, becoming or passing away, opposing, betwixt and between, interacting and interrelating in 1000 ways. Everything in our experience is dynamic, pushed around by forces, or part of a larger phenomenon. Our world is permeated with intentionality, and these intentions exist dialectically, between subject and object. It binds them together.

What the authors have tried to show is that there’s a structural identity between what artists do in creating art and what’s involved in art’s reception. Artists track particular intentions in particular ways—and their audience follows in kind. Artists are noticers, experimenters, and players, and so are their audiences. There’s a deep and enduring sense of mystery that’s at work here. The authors don’t pretend to have explained everything artists do or to have removed the mystery, only to have described phenomenologically some of what’s at work in the creation and encounter with works of art.