Dialogue and Community: The Ethical Claim of Tradition
In: Journal of the Philosophy of HistoryThe essay reconstructs an ethical approach towards history. The hermeneutic insight into the requirement for a dialogical access to the meaning of history is shown to entail an ethical dimension. The central thesis is that tradition raises an existential claim towards the interpreter that requires a dialogical recognition of the other’s expressed perspectives. The essay develops this thesis via a concept of tradition as an intersubjective community based on dialogue, which is inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reflections on the intertwinement of dialogical interpretation, tradition, and the ethical recognition of the other. The Gadamerian concept of tradition will nevertheless be radically revised so as to be suitable for historical interpretation. Dialogical recognition will now reach beyond the textual claims of linguistically raised validity claims to include an existential openness towards the other’s fully situated life-projects and narratives. The argument culminates in the introduction of an existential claim that history entails, and from there establishes a thorough rejection and critique of interpretive objectivism as well as of interpretive presentism.
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14
See J. Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
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21
Ibid., pp. 358, 359.
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24
Ibid., pp. 359, 360.
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25
Ibid., p. 360. Gadamer challenges here the idea that the alleged (!) possibility to objectively reconstruct the other’s thoughts gives the interpreter a tool to gain more insight into the other’s presuppositions than the other has herself. Challenging this possibility as well as its ethical justifiedness is not to deny that (a) another can have insights that transcend and radically challenge one’s own self-understanding, or (b) that any such interpretation will produce more perspectives or meanings than were previously understood by the agent herself. The critique aims at the non-relational idea of this process being the privilege of the interpreter-subject vis-à-vis the interpreted-object – while in truth this should be a mutually provocative and expanding engagement of both sides of the dialogical relation.
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29
Ibid., p. 361.
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Dialogue and Community: The Ethical Claim of Tradition
In: Journal of the Philosophy of HistoryThe essay reconstructs an ethical approach towards history. The hermeneutic insight into the requirement for a dialogical access to the meaning of history is shown to entail an ethical dimension. The central thesis is that tradition raises an existential claim towards the interpreter that requires a dialogical recognition of the other’s expressed perspectives. The essay develops this thesis via a concept of tradition as an intersubjective community based on dialogue, which is inspired by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reflections on the intertwinement of dialogical interpretation, tradition, and the ethical recognition of the other. The Gadamerian concept of tradition will nevertheless be radically revised so as to be suitable for historical interpretation. Dialogical recognition will now reach beyond the textual claims of linguistically raised validity claims to include an existential openness towards the other’s fully situated life-projects and narratives. The argument culminates in the introduction of an existential claim that history entails, and from there establishes a thorough rejection and critique of interpretive objectivism as well as of interpretive presentism.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 201 | 39 | 2 |
| Full Text Views | 161 | 1 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 35 | 4 | 2 |