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Carmen Balzer A wiseman of our times Buenos Aires – Hans Georg Gadamer, the youthful 102 year old philosopher who died at the beginning of the year 2002, that fateful year which was however not void of all hope, appears not only as a profound thinker, but also as a real example of faith and hope. Faith and hope perhaps not precisely as signs of religiosity or adscription to a certain religion, but as virtues which are essentially human. Focused as such, hope in particular acquires the nature of a vital force directed towards the future, and faith presents itself as the faucet from which trust and the belief in others and the world stem. Without this secret light in its double meaning, human life is unconceivable, since it would imply restricting it to a restless wandering with no defined destiny. Whereas, armed with faith and hope, the homo viator finds his final course. When he achieved the last lap of his earthly pilgrimage, Gadamer’s life shows how step by step he moves towards the accomplishment of his destiny, whose meaning was always focused on the fulfillment of human values: goodness, aesthetics, truthfulness and sacredness. Here are the stars that shed their light in the night of his wanderings through a world full of unexpected events and misfortunes, but which can also be transformed by man’s creativity. Hans Georg Gadamer’s childhood and juvenile years were tough and painful. He was born in Marburg, Germany in 1900, and his mother died when he was only four years old, later on he had to take charge of an epileptic brother. Another painful event was that he discovered his vocation for philosophy and human sciences against the will of what his father Johannes Gadamer, a famous and honest pharmaceutical chemist, had planned for him. His father never understood his son’s inclination towards spiritual disciplines. His confrontation with his father left him with a deep wound. He also suffered greatly due to both World Wars, during which his family went through periods of great shortages and troubles, plus his brother’s final admission in hospital. Despite all these troubles his life remained a happy one, of tenacious perseverance in the philosophical work. He assimilated an enormous amount of philosophical material, which was expressed in an extremely rich erudition which he shared with others with great generosity, qualities that mark his philosophical work, in which dialogue is fundamental. This is so important that man is defined as a dialogical being, a being who can enter into a conversation, but above all, a linguistic being, for he is endowed with language as an authentic link of communication with the others. The thinker believes there is an original “linguisticity” of our hermeneutical experience –the interpretational experience– of the world. Now, this hermeneutical experience finds its clearest expression in what Gadamer calls the logic of the question and the answer. The latter must be referred to the following principle: there cannot be a sentence which cannot be understood as answer to a question, and likewise, it is not possible to understand the sentence in any other way than that one. This kind of question-answer logic, as science of truth in the discourse, is destined to replace the predicative logic, which is confined to the positiveness of the sentence. It is precisely in the frame of the question-answer that Gadamer approaches the fundamental issues of his philosophy: one of them, the main one, is that of the “work of history –Wirkungsgeschichte–, which is inseparable from his concept of tradition and of those of the “historic conscience” –Geschichtliches Bewusstsein– of hermeneutics and language. Jean Grondin, the specialist in European contemporary philosophers, Gadamer’s notion of Wirkungsgeschichte is the core and axis of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. That is precisely why our philosophers greatest work Truth and Method, which conveys his own and original conceptual world quite late in life, in 1960, reaches its utmost expression in this notion of the “work of history” regarding the level of historic and linguistic experience. But the concept of “work of history”, polysemous to start with, is in a way a correction of what Heidegger –one of his masters- understood as the fact of being spoken to and conducted by the history of the being, since Gadamer considers it as a hermeneutical experience, developed as a new interrogation about the ontological basis of comprehension. Further still, the conscience of the Heideggerian being adopts, due to the “Kehre” or Heideggerian turn, the shape of a conscience that knows and recognizes his belonging to a tradition that sustains it. Thus, the negative vision of a history that sentences us to the oblivion of the being as Heidegger suggests, will be replaced by the more positive perspective of a tradition that guarantees truth. Thanks to the Wirkungsgeschichte we are incited to answer with a comprehensive knowledge when facing the works or tracks of history. Work, in this context, means: work produced by a craftsman or artist, or also by history itself. According to this and to the meaning of the terms analyzed, we can see the underground influence of the different interpretations there have been of works such as Sophocle’s Antigone, Aristotle’s’ Poetics or even the Bible. This is precisely what the author of Truth and Method conceives as a work of history. Indeed, these works have already been perceived and received, further still, they have been understood and lived. All those multiple echoes which are produced by the work of history come to us and influence our own understanding. In a deeper sense, the work of history is related not to the work itself, but with the “action of working”, with the wirken of history, which in most cases remain unconscious, and according to Gadamer, is “more being and substance than knowledge”. This is also where tradition arises alive, understood as transmission of culture and linked to that, the secondary issue of the work of the effect of culture. In fact, whenever for instance, we question a work of art from our present, a “fusion of horizons” occurs, in which something that is common to both the spectator and the work is expressed. That is why tradition is essentially linguistic, in other words, it is a conversation. If we apply this philosophical concept to Gadamer’s own life we see that the vital-spiritual impact that he buoys up from the core of his being is what makes him remain a young thinker. But not only his spiritual youthfulness attracts our attention, it is also his sense of philosophical pragmatism, for which we could also qualify him as a Wiseman. This is precisely someone who knows how to live his life and does not let himself be carried away by the events. The Wiseman, because he is above events, is capable of guiding the rivers of his existence. We are not thinking of somebody who only limits himself to contemplate the Supreme Good, a contemplation which we usually cover with the word sapientia, but also someone who practices wisdom, that is, he subscribes a rational discipline of human things, which includes the sphere of the activities of man and which expresses the rational conduct; in fewer words, we are talking of a knowledge about the way of conducting human life that covers the sphere of the activities that belong to man and expresses a rational conduct; we are referring therefore, about a knowledge of the way of living life. Precisely this, which constitutes Gadamer’s wisdom, is not only something that is practiced spontaneously, as a guide –and using an expression which is typical of Jorge Luis Borges–, as the “compass” of his life, but he also goes into it and studies it as a practical knowledge with reference to the game about the idea of good that took place between Plato and Aristotle (1). The game (suggested in the title of Gadamer’s book), that deals with the issue, refers to a problem that the philosopher had already discovered in the Platonic dialogue Filebo. The question here is about to what extent the passionate impulse and the conscious thought can achieve a harmonic balance in life. The problem here includes the turning from the ideal towards what is better in reality, a turn which would seem directly opposed to the ideal construction of the Republic. But in reality, good, as it happens in human life is also put as the initial objective in the Republic. Indeed, the conversation about good starts with the same problem, which is if good is edone, pleasure, like most men believe, or if it is phronesis, prudence; if it consists in satisfying the vital impulse or having a vision about good (Republic). But in Filebo such opposition is no longer considered as an open alternative, it is rather seen as the harmonic balance between these two words that become the thrust of the discourse (2). Of course this means achieving an integration of knowledge and wisdom, with which Gadamer himself would most certainly have agreed. Anyway Plato as well as Aristotle were two thinkers of antiquity, admired and studied by the big German philosophers such as Leibniz, Kant, Hegel and the neo-Kantians among which we find Meinong (3) Gadamer’s first teacher. The book which has been quoted enhances the intimate relation established between practical philosophy: ethics, here Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the practice of virtues, mainly prudence (phronesis) and restraint and politics. This way wisdom is expressed in a philosophical manner since it supposes reflection –we could also call it “mirroring” as Gadamer himself does–; for there’s no doubt that speculation feeds on the metaphor of the mirror about human conduct, individually as well as collectively considered. This last point takes us precisely to the old perspective of the polis or city, and today to that of the State. Thus Gadamer embodies the pure ideal of the Wiseman, but not only in the sense of practical wisdom, in relation to life, but also of the “knowing man” that contemplates the Supreme Good. This same knowing wisdom allows him to visualize the obvious anchorage of man in history. On the other hand, historical knowledge is only possible when there is a mediation between present and past, as it occurs I the “fusion of horizons” we already spoke about in this work, and which is an original idea of the German thinker. We could finish by saying that Gadamer is a philosopher who is well rooted in history and concrete events, but he was never unconnected to the universal sense of truth and good. 1. “L’idée du Bien comme enjeu platónico-aristotélicien”, Le savoir pratique, Paris, Librairie Philosophique, 1994. 2. Ut supra, L’enjeu de la question, p. 36. 3. Jean Grondin, Hans Georg Gadamer. Una biografía, Barcelona, Herder, Spanish version, 2000. __________________ Carmen Balzer Article published in Criterio magazine .
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