Abstract
Whereas a selective yet representative sample of Anglo-American scholarship undermines its own intentions to explain Gadamer’s language-ontology and theory of time by confusing the ground of beings with beings, Cheng and Gadamer explain how a transformation in human existence allows for a temporalization of Being in time that incorporates the subjectivity of the human subject. This argument draws on the dual structure of their cosmogenic worldview in the source and origins of their traditions (Lao Zi/Heraclitus) and has implications for Cheng’s organistic model of causality: It depends on mechanical causation to understand things in themselves.
The present is the lively self-sowing nature, which transfers the ceaseless flow of history to permanence.1
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1 Introduction
The source of humanity is transhuman in the sense of originating in a mode of existence attuned to the inter-relation and therefore interdependence of all beings. Both Hans-Georg Gadamer and Chung-ying Cheng reposition the human person within this organic matrix and in so doing, ameliorate the psychological and physical fragmentations that afflict humanity when it upsets the balance of nature. There is evidence of this rebellion in world affairs, but it is also discernable in habits of mind and trains of thought. It is not feasible to analyze every philosopher in this regard. Nevertheless, a selective sample is indicative of a trend. The two scholars in question are Nicholas Davey and David Vessey. This is not a random decision. Davey analyzes Gadamer’s language-ontology and Vessey, his theory of time.2 They afford an opportunity to examine two prongs of both Gadamer and Heidegger’s thought that converge in the temporalization of Being.3
However, on account of their mode of reasoning, neither Davey nor Vessey are in a position to fully understand the event of understanding. The mode of reasoning in question stems from human subjectivity and mistakes beings manifest on the ontic surface with Gadamer’s hidden dialectical ontology. As a result of mistaking a part for the totality of being-as-a-whole,4 the world is separated from nature, spatial and temporal divisions ensue.5 Cheng corrects this tendency to create fragmentation in the name of openness and inclusivity by realigning the human person with the dipolar structure of the Daoist cosmos. When repositioned within these dipolar forces of an anthropocosmic worldview,6 hermeneuts cannot avoid the demand to weave harmony among beings in creative acts of interpretation. Cheng’s contribution to Western philosophical self-understanding is, in fact, in step with Gadamer’s cosmogenic world view and method of interpretation. Just as Cheng operationalizes the two-fold structure of the Dao in onto-generative hermeneutics, Gadamer operationalizes the two-fold structure of Heraclitus’ Logos in his method of interpretation.7 The Anglo- American interpretations that surf the horizontal trajectory and separate Being from time are thereby re-interpreted from the hidden-heard rhythms of nature. From the side of the Dao or Logos beings are understood in synchronicity with their self-unfolding structure. Cheng calls this the “principle of internality.”8 However, he does not sufficiently acknowledged its dependence on mechanical causation (in which Davey and Vessey's Gadamerian interpretations are implicated). In this way, the hidden grounds of Gadamer’s hermeneutics are integrated into Cheng’s onto-generative hermeneutics by way of Anglo-American scholarship.
The steps to recover a dialectical ontology in hermeneutics from within and out of an Anglo- American tendency to obfuscate the temporalization of Being in harmonious relations are as follows: (1) explain how Davey and Vessey circumvent their own intuitions about Gadamer’s language-ontology and theory of time respectively by relying on a concept of human agency that privileges efficient causation and control (2) establish affinities between Cheng and Gadamer’s method of interpretation based on the source and origins of their philosophy in Lao Zi and Heraclitus respectively (3) explain how the latter (2) entails a transformation in human ethos, perception and language that does not jettison subjectivity of the human subject but rather, incorporates it into the totality of being-as-a-whole (Dao or Logos) and (4) understand how interplay within the dipolar structure of the world or cosmos in Cheng and Gadamer’s method of interpretation yields understanding of things in themselves that depends on the dissonance of representational and propositional reasoning of the Anglo-American continental schools of thought.
2 Being and Time: Davey and Vessey
Recovering the ontological grounds of hermeneutics begins with a given state of affairs estranged from those very grounds that nevertheless reaches toward them. According to Thomé H. Fang, this conundrum is characteristic of “European wisdom.” He explains that it is without foundations, “like the anti-theses in polyphony,” “multi-dimension-confrontational,” and fraught with internal contradictions.9 Since Fang exempts the Greeks from this characterization, it would be more precise to specify “modern thought.” Yet he does not support his assessment with analysis of a text and hence, a turn to contemporary scholarship is in order. On the one hand, Nicholas Davey aims to decipher the presentational character of Gadamer’s ontology yet employs an efficient causation of ideas that neutralizes the structural motility of Being. On the other hand, David Vessey purports to explain Gadamer’s contribution to a theory of time. However, he reduces Gadamer’s notion of teleology to the predictions of natural science. These obfuscations of Being in Time follows from prioritizing the spectator standpoint on things to which Fang alludes in his criticism of modern thought.
2.1 Gadamer’s Language Ontology: Davey
Davey charts Gadamer’s “style of thinking” in an explication of his ontology of language. Since this ontology is notably, as Davey argues, “presentational” rather than “representational,” he aims to preserve its motion. He characterizes the Gadamerian mind as follows:
If we take Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutic engagement seriously, that is, that thinking understandingly is a thinking-with a movement of thought rather than an attempt to pin down and control a topic, then engaging with his thinking about language is to engage with a philosophical logic that unfurls itself historically.10
The “unfurling” or “revealing” of the “living totality”11 of Being-thought in history transpires through dialectic, dialogue and conversation.12 However, no sooner does he acknowledge Gadamer’s “presentational ontology” than Davey elaborates on the “philosophical logic that unfurls itself historically” in a way that undermines his goal.
This conceptual sequence entails a transition from epistemological to ontological foundations moving from (1) a transcendental subject to (2) a universal subject or historical Geist to (3) a phenomenologically revealed Being and, finally, to (4) a language-being or Sprachlichkeit. The passage of Gadamer’s thinking about conversation entails movement between the logical entailments of these terms.13
According to Davey, “The philosophical logic that unfurls itself historically” is a sequence that represents the conceptual foundation of Modern European thought. When time is thus represented as a sequence, he cannot but think of change in terms of efficient causes of which there are three. He pins Kant to (1), Hegel to (2) and Heidegger to (3).14 Of the three, Heidegger is treated as the proximate cause of Gadamer’s thought (and Plato a remote cause). Hence, he claims that Heidegger’s existential analytic of Being is the foundation of Gadamer’s language ontology and, that “Gadamer pursues Heidegger’s claim that ‘Language is the House of Being’.”15 How can Davey square the existential analytic of Dasein (1927 and based on the philosophical repudiation of Socratic dialogue) with the later Heidegger’s turn to language? There must be an unsaid family resemblance between the early and late Heidegger that would justify enframing Gadamer in terms of both. The common denominator between the early and late Heidegger is the revealing and concealing of aletheia or Being. Assuming that Gadamer pursues Heidegger, Davey resorts to a horizontal interplay of opposites to explain the relation between whole and part, apophantic and apophatic propositions, linguistic consciousness and “language-being,” self and collective-consciousness in Gadamer.
Not unrelated to the logic of efficient causation that justifies using Heidegger to explain what Gadamer means, is Davey’s way of explaining the “transition” from epistemology to ontology. When the vertical axis of Being (to which an auditory ethos is attuned) is suppressed, he cannot but explain the said transition in the following terms: “logical entailment,” “implication,” and “inference.” But does logical entailment do justice to the (paradoxical) “suddenness of transition,” from a transcendental to a universal subject? To the presentational structure of Being? As a result of prioritizing efficient causation and related inducive mode of reasoning to explain “transformation,” Davey does not interpret finitude from the context of tragedy that is simultaneously receptive to beings-as-a whole but instead, from the side of wanting to say more; he dislodges the horizon of understanding from the transformative experience of a fusion, which justifies his criticism that Gadamer insufficiently emphasizes a multiplicity of horizons such as historical, social, cultural, and biographical ones.16 However, Gadamer’s silence speaks for itself. They are not any more important than contingency of education and cultural location17 to understanding the meaning of Being, which is a question of one’s way of life and the actualization of life both of which define animals at large.18 Further to the point, he is deaf to Gadamer’s turns of phrase. Although Davey rightly explains that “the logical instinct of language” in Gadamer’s hermeneutics refers to a totality of meaning derived from language-being itself,19 he does not understand this claim from the side of language-being – the rhythmic reciprocity of nature’s cycles that blend into one another and become “one,” i.e., (musical) “instinct” in the logic of language. Instead, he equates the “logical instinct” with Wittgenstein’s feeling that words ought to point to something else.20
2.2 Gadamer’s Theory of Time: Vessey
In his analysis of Gadamer’s contribution to a theory of time-consciousness,21 Vessey highlights the following remark by Gadamer about teleology: “experience is related exclusively teleologically to the truth that is derived from it.” According to Vessey, Gadamer “means that experience bears with it the expectation of confirmation in the future. It is this futural, verificationist aspect that makes possible empirical science.”22 This move demonstrates that he aligns teleology with the scientific method; however, his quotation from Truth and Method is truncated. Gadamer continues, “and this experience is not just an accidental one-sidedness in modern scientific theory, but has a foundation in fact.”23 Gadamer is referring to a non-scientific fact that belongs to “another side” of experience.
In support of another side of experience consider that Gadamer distinguishes two kinds of teleology from one another in the historically-effected structure of experience. On the one hand, he refers to the confirmation of a goal that the sciences enact while abolishing history.24 This is consistent with efficient causation that subsists independently of the formal, material and final cause and thus allows for instrumental reason, techne, and craftsmanship. This is also a one-sidedness in modern scientific theory to which Vessey is partial when he identifies the teleological aspect of experience with empty/fulfilled time.25 On the other hand, Gadamer refers to “inner historical experience.”26 This implies that there is an experience of teleology in history that does not merely confirm a goal or bias. In this case, the efficient cause (falls into) and coordinates as much as it is coordinated by the other causes.27 Citing Hegel, Gadamer places the two aforementioned senses of teleology (scientific and ontological) in a dialectical relation to one another.28 By not acknowledging this distinction and instead, blurring them together Vessey cannot but equate openness and the endless quest for meaning with technological progress (against nature).
3 Ameliorative Response: Cheng and Gadamer
Contemporary interpretations of hermeneutics reduce being-as-a-whole to the perspective of human agency; however, this is not an outright impediment to elucidating the moving grounds of eternity in time. On the contrary, the mode of self-understanding exemplified in the reasoning of Davey and Vessey represents a mode of human existence, knowledge and understanding that conceals as much as it reveals about the nature of reality. Hence, it is possible to find agreement with the hidden ontological grounds with which they are also at variance. The basis for this agreement is a change in disposition; namely, from the visual to the auditory, from the alleged spectator to the participating observer, from a given point of view to the middle without perspective between contesting forces.29 This change in disposition from which to reinterpret the fragmented ontic surface pivots on the middle of being-as-a-whole, and has implications for perception, language and understanding things-in-themselves. These topics are developed in turn as they bear upon integrating the Anglo-American interpretation of Gadamer’s hermeneutics into the compass of onto-generative hermeneutics.
3.1 Being-as-a-whole
That all knowledge is historically conditioned seems to be an indelible feature of contemporary Gadamer scholarship.30 However, emphasis on the role of “historically-effected consciousness” suppresses evidence of Gadamer having a share in Cheng’s cosmogenic view of the world that envelops “the speech-created world.” They both reposition the human person in the middle of the dipolar world or cosmos based on the origins and source of their respective traditions; Heraclitus and Loa-Tzu.31 At issue is the transcendent side (totality of beings-as-a-whole) and immanent side of the Dao or Logos (constancy in change) and their interplay.32
Steven Burik disputes treating either the Dao or Logos as a metaphysical principle that stands beyond and apart from the world of change.33 Instead, he argues for a non-metaphysical interpretation where the Dao and Logos are “squarely located in this world.”34 In keeping with this stance, after pointing that both Dao and Logos mean discourse/speaking and grounding, he draws on Heidegger, Zhuangzi and the Daodejing to argue for dispensing with representational and propositional language because they contradict the opening up of language to the process of change and growth such that within that process, there is “interplay between beings coming together in being different.”35 According to Burik, in contrast to metaphysics and the representational function of language, Logos and Dao affirm the interplay of things in their relations to one another which, he says, imparts a relative and provisional stability. He reasons that this process does not have a goal.36
Burik’s position resonates with both Davey and Vessey’s approach to Being and time in that he thinks about unity of differences or “goals,” without metaphysics. For these philosophers, any pretense toward goals or ends are considered incompatible with openness and inclusivity, which however, for both Gadamer and Cheng, is self-contradictory and emblematic of a schism in the history of Western thought. In contrast to Burik, they treat Logos and Dao as both a metaphysical principle beyond beings, and as a force that is part and parcel of the very world he describes, i.e., both/and rather than either/or. With respect to Cheng, Lauren Pfister explains that after having reviewed Julia Ching’s book, The Religious Thought of Chu-Hsi, “Cheng agreed with Ching’s analysis of taiji as that which is ‘both transcendent and immanent,’” and inherent to human nature (as tianli).37 Pfister notes that Cheng’s concept of tianli resembles the “Inner Word” (or Word of God Incarnate) that Gadamer analyzes in Truth and Method.38 However, since Gadamer reports that the morphological relation of father to the son surfaces in Heraclitus,39 it is not clear that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation has an exclusionary affinity with Daoism. Nevertheless, as Pfister reports, Cheng attributes to the Dao a transcendent side emphasized in the West and an immanent side in which human nature has a share that has been emphasized in Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism.40 As a transcendent form beyond beings, the Dao is a totality distinct from either of the constituent elements (that appear to be parts of the whole when they have been separated from it).41 At the same time, the Dao is also a force immanent to the world or “in time.” In this regard, Elena Butti explains that both the Dao and Logos share the “dual structure of reality, comprising an inner, fundamental layer and a superficial, manifest one.”42 The hidden fundamental layer is commensurate with the rhythms of nature or the Dao (yin-yang), and the superficial, manifest layer with the ontic surface or beings.
Gadamer’s method of interpretation similarly maps onto the tripartite structure of the cosmos; transcendent and dual structure of the Dao or Logos. On the one hand, Gadamer recalls the ladder of love in Plato’s Symposium43 where the mind is purged of sediments (of experience) that obscure a vision of the beautiful or the symmetry idealized in the ratio of a circle or whole (sides equidistance from the center) – a vision Plato calls Nous. He names this vision of the thing itself “the Beautiful” but clearly, it is also beyond language and nameless. This paradox is part and parcel of the insight that the mathematical form is and is not the same as the abstract noun. Hence, on the other hand, the ascent to the “beyond” is mediated by the immanent hidden law of the One and many in language, e.g., Plato's oral instruction. As Gadamer indicates while describing Plato’s dialectic, the means of communicating knowledge, e.g., demonstration and explanation, are always “called into question” by the inner telos of beings (beings in Being, many in One).44 The possibility of realizing the pre-given harmony (in dialogue and thus friendship) imparts a desire to know such that every concept is but another instantiation of the One and thus refers back to the ebb and flow of all things.
To clarify how the One is temporalized in the many, how the rhythmic reciprocity of nature measures the value of what we claim to know and do, it is apt to reflect on Gadamer’s point of departure from Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle. Once understood, Cheng’s criticism that Heidegger lacks a vision of the totality of all beings is also answered.45 After acknowledging Heidegger’s rendition of the interplay of part and whole in the hermeneutic circle, Gadamer writes:
Our understanding of the content-relevant sense of the whole-part circle at the base of all understanding must, however, as I believe, be expanded to accommodate a further feature, which I would like to call “the anticipation of perfection.” In this way a presupposition is formulated which guides all understanding.46
Heidegger projects Dasein toward its ownmost possibility for death. Death is always one’s own and therefore,47 never becomes a fact of every living being. Heidegger is closed to “being-as-a-whole.” In other words, his understanding of the meaning of Being is confused with beings and cannot but yield a treadmill of revealing and concealing.48 Granted, in the context of a phenomenological horizon of time, there might well be a goal, but irrespective of intentions, it cannot but be conceptualized along a horizontal trajectory and is therefore, epistemological and verificationist. In this context, “self-transformation” never goes beyond a revision of one’s prior understanding and therefore, does not come to terms with the ethical or existential implications of having forgotten the meaning of Being.49 In contrast to Heidegger, Gadamer does not hesitate to include anticipation of perfection within an interplay between part and whole that always leaves the process of inquiry open. How can the hermeneutic circle (projection toward a wholeness that exceeds any determination) be indeterminate yet also envisioned? Projection toward an idea-seen, recollects/hearkens the absolutely prior One in the sense of the source of generativity of nature’s rhythms.50 This moment of recollection turns on Socratic aporia, and experience of finitude in tragedy, e.g., one’s declining years or the decline of an era or epoch. For Gadamer, this aporia is not final but rather a limit that unfolds into the limitless or eternal – the realization that our lives are interconnected with the good (ends) of all living beings. Aporia is not unlike a boundary between death and life, they touch one another in euphoria.
3.2 Phenomenology of Perception
As indicated, a visual bias characterizes the Anglo- American tradition of Gadamer scholarship. This is consistent with the influence of the printed word on cognition51 and explains why Gadamer resists the latter by modelling interpretation of a text on the living language, or conversation, and why Cheng rehabilitates comprehensive observation in onto-generative hermeneutics. Cheng might, therefore, consider reassessing his conclusion that on account of the influence of Platonism, Western philosophy forecloses observation and thereby sunders understanding from “a deep ecological source of nature and life.”52 Just as there is a surface and hidden dimension to the Dao or cosmos, to too are there two modes of perception whose fusion constitutes a totality of understanding.
In the course of developing an experiential, comprehensive and human involved philosophy of change to correct the deficiencies in Western philosophy,53 Cheng specifies that comprehensive observation envisions relations of things in specific times and places, and within background contexts.54 Alongside this grasp of a particular in a situation, Cheng adds that comprehensive observation encompasses emerging patterns of rise and decline, yin and yang. This totality becomes visible (and felt) from having no perspective (or no point of view as Cheng says).55 Is there a comparable way of being-in-the-world that “sees to feel” for Gadamer?56 According to Walter Lammi, Gadamer models the experience of art on the Greek cult experience of the divine where ordinary consciousness slips away and hence, how we perceive and experience the world changes. In this regard, “In Boundaries of Language” Gadamer acknowledges the priority of seeing (one prong in his dialectic of stances and characteristic of enlightenment of reason) and adds, “In point of fact, our hearing can listen to language and thereby it cannot only reveal the most differences, but all possible differences. This universality of hearing indicates the universality of language.”57 Hearing is fitted to language and since language is the means for collection and division, so too does hearing reveal the most (at one level) and all possible difference (at another level). In alignment with auditory disposition of participating observer, Cheng compares guan to hearing and reasons that it unites the heart and mind (or embodied mind) with nature or spirit.58 Through guan or attunement, the human person is united with the pre-given harmony.
From this pre-given side of the world or cosmos, the forms of things and forms of seeing coincide (guan xiang).59 They cannot but become separated again. Nevertheless, the art of making does not create something entirely “new” because it comes to be from that which is common to the observations (or has been discovered).60 This is as true of an army reforming while in retreat as it is of a child learning to speak.61 The formation of a concept yields (like play) its own law of development and growth. The end is in the beginning. “The new object contains the truth about the old,”62 as long as the end is ontologically prior to itself.63 Is this “new beginning” constituted by the objects of our speaking, the Platonic form, the autonomous metaphysical entity, a new durability, and genuine measure of truth in art that re-establishes the validity of epistemology (fore-understanding) in the hermeneutic circle? Yes and no. Just as the poet who could not be a poet without also being a craftsperson, objectivity in the sense of value-neutrality depends on subjectivity. This mutual dependence among of opposites is intelligible from the non-position of immersion in the pre-given harmony.
3.3 Language
The point at which the Anglo-American interpretation of Gadamer derails is precisely the location (ethos) from which Cheng redirects human existence toward the inter-relation and therefore, interdependence of all things. Hence, the transformation in ethos does not relinquish the spectator standpoint toward beings but rather, re-interprets them from the side of “participation” (comprehensive observation/Dao and attunement/Logos). The subjectivity of the subject and related spectator standpoint toward beings is thereby allotted a role within a wider compass of Cheng and Gadamer’s cosmology. The logic whereby variance is also agreement carries over to the instrumental and representational uses of language that has been analyzed in Katarina Gajdosova’s interpretation of naming in the Warring State texts.
Gajdosova studies the recently excavated Warring State texts with a view to harmonizing the Ruist/Legalist and Daoist understanding of “naming” based on the creative and receptive side of onto-generative hermeneutics.64 Accordingly, names have a two-fold function. On the one hand, names represent a state of affairs or an idea (consistent with the instrumental use of language). On the other hand, and alongside this, names are “directly involved in how things of the world come to be, in other words, in the very structuring of the cosmos as such.”65 The two kinds of naming (Ruist/Legalist and Daoist; technical and philosophical) although contradictory belong together (as contraries). She recognizes the dual-purposes of names in Cheng and quotes him as follows:
[…] Language is both a medium and a tool, not medium alone, for unifying the receptive experience of the world in meaning, whether presupposed or not, in reference, whether explicit or not, and in the creative experience of the human self in inter-subjective communication and cross-cultural translation and persuasion.66
Language is a tool in the sense inadvertently exemplified by the Anglo-American interpretations of Gadamer. Yet is it also a medium for the Dao when consciousness of self is expanded to include consciousness of constancy in change (by way of a change in disposition). The implication for the Anglo-American interpretation of Gadamer is that contra Davey who counterposes Plato’s representational language with Gadamer’s language-being, language-being depends on representations. Hence as Gadamer argues, abstract nouns, copula, and neuter played a role in founding the beginning of philosophy.67 While it is imperative not to confuse the perfect form with anything in particular and thereby fall into the conundrum of trying to square the circle (where geometrical concept is confused with something seen),68 identifying Logos/Dao with an idea “beyond being” is productive insofar as it generates its opposite (concept of becoming) and thus a contradiction that demands a resolution. However, the command does not originate in a personal call of conscience but rather, in an instinct; the logical instinct of language inherent to having become time and “free.”69
As Gajdosova suggests while quoting Cheng (above), language is the medium for self-structuring the cosmos in the creation of new spatial relations, e.g., the music of architecture and yet, she introduces an important qualification. She states that “the act of structuring the world through language would be only one of the many ways in which the ‘one’ differentiates itself in its temporary manifestations.”70 If language is the language of a linguistic community, then there are many ways in which to individuate the One. At the same time, consider that we are also “lingual beings” who hear the Logos.71 If so, then the Dao ought to be audible in any language. Which language is that? Certainly not German, Chinese or Greek.72 Logos is not audible in a language but rather in the dialogue form. Pfister suggests just this very idea. He relates that Cheng does not follow Gadamer on the fusion of horizons in a dialogical encounter,73 but draws near to that conclusion when he allows for a “dynamic conception of li, so that it would seem that the question of personality in tian should be addressed.”74 He says that personality migrates into taiji through unity of qi in li75 but does not elaborate. This calls for an explanation.
If we are lingual beings who hear the logos, then dialogue is the “Primary Way” to apprehend being and cultivate no-self in the self.76 One need only transpose the experience of the work of art to a living dialogue to reach this conclusion. Assuming immersion in “the All” through attunement or comprehensive observation the processual dialectic is as follows: Reply and address (construed as opposing forces); interplay (rhythmic reciprocity between them and congruence of feeling) generates while also being molded by the name (topic, subject-matter, idea) that unites both speakers in the sense of (1) acting on them (they follow it) and (2) transforming itself according to their causal agency (practice and self-cultivation).77 The middle voice captures the experience of language sustained by balance or symmetry among these moving parts and hence, in the living language, dialogue has the character of song, dance, poetry or music (unity of virtue and reason) – a medium for rhythmic reciprocity and therefore qi in li. The dialogue form thus understood re-enacts taiji, the moral and spiritual order; the symmetry and balance of “cosmic play” that Thomé H. Fang discerns in poetry, ritual and music “as manifest in the six arts.”78 Not unlike beautiful music/poetry, a dialogue is characterized by the ever-present affinity for the whole that does not change because change is internal to what it does, which is to anticipate the beginning in the end (tonic between every tone heard in the unison of the chord).
3.4 Internalist Principle and Mechanical Causation
Cheng employs “correlative reasoning” to pry predictions, explanations and “controllability” from the the cryptic verses from the Tao Te Ching. While he reasons that these verses point to causality in the Chinese dialectical and “organistic” outlook, he is also clear that Chinese philosophy is “radically different” from Western philosophy.79 He writes conclusively, “In fact, as noted earlier, the dichotomy between man and God, the natural and the supernatural, does not exist in Chinese philosophy. There are, consequently, no arguments between transcendentalism and immanentism in Chinese philosophy.”80 However, Pfister’s report on the change in Cheng’s understanding of the Dao suggests otherwise. By acknowledging a transcendent and immanent side to the Dao, Cheng joins the Western spirit of contestation. Yet since opposites generate one another in Cheng and Gadamer’s view of the world, there is always potential to remove the contradiction.
As mentioned earlier, the ascent to the clarity of a mathematical form that illuminates the means of knowing the thing itself, e.g., demonstration, explanation,81 would not be possible without the hidden-heard dialectic of the dialogue form, i.e., living language. The ascent or anticipation of perfection therefore, is not of the alone to the alone but rather, happens in conversation with another, e.g., Socrates and Glaucon (Republic Book VI), or with oneself (silent dialogue of the soul with itself). Effectively, Gadamer temporalizes Plato’s idea of the Good in the dialogue form and thereby restores an Aristotelian/organistic concept of causality to the natural sciences. However, this move resonates with Cheng’s in that it incorporates the transcendent side of the Dao into the Chinese internalistic tradition that regards “all cases of scientific causality on a par with the movement of the seasons and the succession of day and night.”82 For Gadamer and Cheng, dialogue is a channel through which the transcendent One merges into the many. Since this happens during an intellectual climb toward the light-seen, the hidden Dao (darkness) mediates every epistemological claim, concept or observation.
4 Conclusion
Whereas the Anglo-American philosophers pin the human person to the manifest layer of the cosmos even while thinking about the inner law of nature (language-ontology and teleology), Gadamer and Cheng reposition the human person in the middle of no perspective within the dipolar world or cosmos.83 For both Gadamer and Cheng, contradiction is the inner life of the real and therefore, dichotomies between subject and object, spectator and performer, the transcendent “beyond beings” and experience generate the potential to reconstrue oppositions as contrary elements of one harmonious whole. The argument between transcendental and immanent sides, between objectivity and subjectivity are methodologically necessary for resetting the human person in the middle of hermeneutics as a participating observer. Just as distance draws near, concealing is simultaneously revealing, and hence, alongside mechanical causation and related epistemic (correspondence) theories of truth there is always the possibility for eternity (yin and yang, One and many) to enter time and transform how we understand whatever we happen to be doing or claim to know. While the creative role of the human person beholden to generativity of the cosmos has been explained by Cheng, this has yet to be seen in Gadamer.
Gadamer transposes Plato’s coeval causality into his own dual causality.84 By coeval cause he means that which happens by Reason and Necessity (in the Timaeus) but in typical Gadamer fashion, he detects it in the oral Socrates of the Phaedo in terms of a purpose and material causes (of Anaxagoras). Like Cheng, Gadamer argues for mixture between them facilitated by the charm, persuasion (midwifery) of the hermeneut modelled, in this case, on the work of Plato’s Demiurge to reveal order in the disorder, i.e., the disorder that ensues from a purely mechanistic picture of the world (or Greek atomism). Not unlike his remark about the evidentness of Nous in Plato’s dialectic, this interpretation of the Timaeus carries over seamlessly into his own experience of logical positivism. Hence, not unlike Gajdosova and Pfister who enact the dual structure of reality in language,85 Gadamer’s thinking pivots on uniting Plato’s doctrine of the One and many with Aristotle’s physics, or with that which lives.86 Everything strives for balance. However, neither Gadamer nor Cheng are the primary way in which to recover the significance of the ebb and flow of nature in epistemology, science and technology. More is at stake than who said what. Neither Gadamer nor Cheng ask who influenced their thought or how it evolved. As if in reply to Heidegger’s question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Gadamer asks how it is possible to think opposites together while holding them apart.87 This is a question about the creative nature of human existence that any thoughtful person can answer. There is a feeling that when the senses are awakened to “the whole that is present in the seeing,”88 then words point to the just proportion of a form in relation to the unnamed and nameless One.89
Jing Liu, “Permanence and Transience: Philosophy of Time in the Dao De Jing” in Dao and Time: Classical Philosophy, ed. Livia Kohn (Saint Petersburg: Three Pines Press, 2021), 83.
Nicholas Davey. “Dialectic, Dialogue and Conversation” In The Gadamerian Mind, ed., Theodore George & Gert-Jan van der Heiden. London: Routledge, 2022. David Vessey. “Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Contribution to a Theory of Time Consciousness.” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 7, Edition 2 (September 2007): 1–7.
Heidegger temporalizes Being in a projection toward death (one’s ownmost possibility) and Gadamer, in the transfiguration of discord and conflict on the ontic surface into harmonious relations. This is accomplished by receptivity (attunement) to the inter-relation of the totality of all beings and signals his affinity with Cheng’s account of guan or comprehensive observation.
“Beings-as-a-whole” refers to the unitary structure of the cosmos as Dao or Logos that is co-extensive with time and space not unlike any living thing.
I am consulting Chuang-Tzu, The Inner Chapters, trans. A.C. Graham (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 2001), 9.
I am borrowing the term “anthropocosmic worldview” from On-cho Ng, “Religious Hermeneutics: Text and Truth in Neo-Confucian Readings of the Yijing,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 34, no. 1 (2007): 10.
Hans Ruin explains the enduring influence of Heraclitus in the history of hermeneutics but does not explain how Logos informs Gadamer’s method of interpretation. Hans Ruin. “Unity in Difference – Difference in Unity: Heraclitus and the Truth of Hermeneutics.” In Hermeneutik och tradition: Gadamer och den grekiska filosofin, (Huddinge: Södertörns högskola: 2003), 41–61.
Cheng-ying Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo- Confucian Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 101.
Thomé H. Fang, “Appendix: Three Types of Philosophical Wisdom,” trans. Chengyang Li. In Comprehensive Harmony – Thomé H. Fang’s Philosophy, ed. Chengyang Li, Fan He and Lili Zhang (New York: Scholarly Publications, 2018), 65. See ibid., 75.
Davey, “Dialogue, Dialectic and Conversation,” 61.
Ibid., 62.
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 61.
Cheng parses this manner of reasoning into sufficient and necessary conditions (Kantian presupposition), efficacy of motion and force and priority in time. New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 91.
Davey, “Dialogue, Dialectic and Conversation,” 62.
Ibid., 66.
Ibid., 63.
Gadamer says that “freedom of choice” distinguishes humans from animals, but this is only true from a merely historical point of view that has forgotten the nature of prohairesis, where prior choices/preferences embed us within a world not unlike an environment for animals. This shift from freedom of choice (which is usually negative freedom or freedom from) to prohairesis and thus “world” allows him to remove the said distinction between animals and humans and hence, he attributes bios or way of life to animals (because we both enact praxis). Gadamer, “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” in Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 90–91.
Davey, “Dialogue, Dialectic and Conversation,” 64.
Ibid., 70.
Based on “Concerning Empty and Ful-Filled Time,” David Vessey contrasts the scientific with the hermeneutical experience of fulfilled time. Whereas the former identifies fulfilled time with the verification of a prediction and suppresses human finitude, hermeneutics thinks of fulfilled time in terms of the cycles of life, which has a bearing on Gadamer’s understanding of epoch in both history and a person’s life. Hans-Georg Gadamer. “Concerning Empty and Ful-filled Time.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 8, no. 4 (Winter 1970), 341–353.
Vessey, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Contribution to a Theory of Time Consciousness,” 4.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd revised edition, trans., Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 356.
Ibid.
Vessey, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Contribution to a Theory of Time Consciousness,” 4.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 356.
Compare this to Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans., William Lovitt (London: Harper and Row Publishers, 1977), 8.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 362.
Davey alludes to this auditory disposition attuned to the Logos/Dao when he explains Gadamer’s language-ontology in terms of dialectic, conversation and dialogue. However, he does not distinguish hearing from an auditory way of being-in-the-world that hearkens to the pre-given harmony in nature.
For example, Yong Huang contrasts Gadamer with Cheng Yi on the grounds that the former is only interested in understanding whereas the latter unifies understanding Dao and practicing Dao. “Cheng Yi’s Neo-Confucian Ontological Hermeneutics of the Dao,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy Vol. 27, no. 1 (2000): 70.
Youru Wang’s interpretation of Zhuangzi on the infinite transformation of things is comparable to Heraclitus. “Philosophy of Change and the Deconstruction of the Self,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 27, no. 3 (2000): 347–350. Cheng also likens them to one another while also criticizing Heraclitus for lacking a concept of creativity. The Primary Way: The Philosophy of the Yijing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 60–61.
Gadamer discerns the inner logic of the Platonic-Pythagorean One and the many in Heraclitus' verses. As if in conversation with Fränkel, he believes that geometrical proportions run through Heraclitus' thought and hence, do not only aim for transcendence but are also immanent to the world. See Hermann Fränkel. "A Thought Pattern in Heraclitus." The American Journal of Philology 59, no. 3 (1938): 309–337.
Steven Burik, “Logos and Dao Revisited: A Non- Metaphysical Interpretation,” Philosophy East and West 68, no. 1 (2018): 23.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 27–28.
Ibid., 32.
Lauren Pfister, “Gadamerian Reflections on Post- Dialogue Onto – hermeneutic Philosophy,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 48, no. 4 (2021): 347.
See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 436–445.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Heraclitus Studies,” in The Beginning of Knowledge, trans. Rod Coltman (London: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001), 24.
Pfister, “Gadamerian Reflections on Post-Dialogue Onto – hermeneutic Philosophy,” 349. He quotes Cheng, “Dimensions of the Dao and Onto-Ethics in Light of the Daodejing,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2004): 150.
I am consulting Qiu Lin, “Zuangzi on Yu, Zhou, and the Ontic Indeterminacy of the Dao.” Unpublished manuscript presented at APA Eastern Division Meeting, January 13 2022.
Elena Butti, “A Comparison Between Heraclitus’ Logos and Lao-Tzu’s Tao,” Journal of East-West Thought 16, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 41.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 494. Dan Tate treats the ladder of love as an ascent to the beautiful independently of a mathematical form (ratio) and for this reason, does not integrate “separation” or “beyond beings” into his account of the ladder of love. “Renewing the Question of Being: Gadamer on Plato’s Idea of the Beautiful,” Epoché 20, no. 1 (2015): 28. On-cho Ng also sets up Gadamer as “dismantling the scientific conception of reality.” “Chinese Philosophy, Hermeneutics and Onto-Hermeneutics,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy Vol 30, nos. 3 & 4 (2003): 376.
See Gadamer on this moment of insight in “Dialectic and Sophism in Plato’s Seventh Letter,” in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (London: Yale University Press, 1908), 103, 120. And in “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic” in Dialogue and Dialectic, 146.
Cheng, The Primary Way, 125.
Gadamer, “On the Circle of Understanding,” in Hermeneutics vs. Science, ed., John Connolly and Thomas Keutner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 74. See also “perfect understanding” and “fore-conception of completeness” in Truth and Method, 304–305.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press), 233/SZ 240.
See Stanley Rosen. “Thinking about Nothing.” In Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, edited by M. Murray. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.
Gajdosova associates the pre-given structure with a world into which we are thrown, but does not locate the world within the cosmos and hence, overlooks the significance of recollecting the source of new beginnings in fore-understanding (that aims for its own prior understanding and accounts for the processual circular motion in the hermeneutic circle). Gajdosova, “Naming and Cosmology,” 389–390.
Gadamer indicates his point of departure from Heidegger on this score when he writes, “aletheia” does “not simply mean unconcealment,” but “at the very same time” that which “authenticates itself.” Whereas Heidegger’s perspective on Being never transcends human beings, Gadamer embraces the consanguinity between mind and nature. For this reason, his creations have a share in the coming to be of things themselves. Gadamer, “The Artwork in Word and Image: ‘So True, So Full of Being!’,” in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, trans. Richard Palmer (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 206. See also Gadamer, “Dialectic and Sophism in Plato’s Seventh Letter,” in Dialogue and Dialectic, 214. In marked contrast to Heidegger, he also connects aletheia (in Plato) with beauty, ibid., 204.
I am thinking of Marshall McLuhan’s argument that print media has conditioned the mind to think in a linear sequence.
Cheng, The Primary Way, 63.
Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 68.
Ibid., 124.
I am borrowing “sees to feel” from Alejandro A. Vallega, “From the Hermeneutics of Historically Affected Consciousness to Concrete Cosmological Understanding” in The Gadamerian Mind ed. Theodore George and Gert-Jan Van der Heiden (London: Routledge 2022): 476. Vallega’s argues for including the Andean Indigenous cosmological way of being-in-the-world (as understood by Kusch) within the European self-understanding. The connection with Gadamer is dialogical, transformative and builds from “the limits of historical reason.”
Gadamer, “Boundaries of Language,” in Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, ed., Lawrence K. Schmidt (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000), 10.
Cheng, The Primary Way, 126.
Ibid., 121.
Consulting Gadamer, Truth and Method, 359–361.
Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge (London: University of California Press, 1977), 14.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 363.
Given Gadamer’s cosmogenic view of the world, his notion of play is worthy of reinterpretation in light of Eugene Fink. Play as Symbol of the World and Other Writings. Translated by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.
Receptivity is coordinate with yin and creativity with yang.
Gajdosova, “Naming and Cosmology,” 384.
Ibid., 391. Cheng, “Receptivity and Creativity in Hermeneutics: From Gadamer to Onto-hermeneutics,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 42, nos. 1–2 (2015): 12.
Gadamer, “The Language of Metaphysics,” in Heidegger Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 78–79. See also Gadamer, “Historical Transformations of Reason,” in Reason in Rationality To-Day, eds., Theodore F. Geraets. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Rationality To-Day, October 27–20, 1977 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1979), 3; “Heraclitus Studies,” in The Beginning of Knowledge, 28–29; “Natural Science and the Concept of Nature,” ibid., 100.
Consulting Gadamer, “The Artwork in Word and Image,” 106.
I am consulting Jing Liu, “Permanence and Transience.”
Gajdosova, “Naming and Cosmology,” 391.
The distinction between linguistic and “lingual beings” was mentioned by Andrzej Wierciński at the East-West Center for Philosophy, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2013. As Heidegger highlights in Heraclitus, the Logos is heard through attunement, which calls to mind Socrates’ dictum, refute the argument and not me.
While explaining that “Cheng’s onto-hermeneutics is deeply embedded in and firmly grounded on the understanding of the fundamental nature of the Chinese language and Chinese worldview,” Ng also argues that the Chinese language is itself a hermeneutic circle. He is referring to the mutual interaction between Chinese characters in a text that define one another yet this is already on the cusp of the universal logic internal to the dialogue form. On-cho Ng, “Chinese Philosophy, Hermeneutics, and Onto-hermeneutics,” 397.
Pfister, “Gadamerian Reflections on Post-Dialogue Onto – hermeneutic Philosophy,” 350.
Ibid., 347.
Ibid., Note 37.
I recall Peter Emberley remarking that conversations were erotic.
Dialogue thus understood could be parsed into efficient, material, formal and final causes, i.e., phusis.
Thomé H. Fang, “Three Types of Philosophical Wisdom,” 71.
Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 104–105; 91, 98–99.
Ibid., 83–84.
I am consulting Gadamer, “Dialectic and Sophism in Plato’s Seventh Letter,” 103.
Cheng, New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy, 102.
With reference to phenomenological-ontology, Cheng describes the middle as follows: comprehensive observation (guan) is not a point of view but rather a viewing from all points (The Primary Way, 124). And, “To make explicit this principle, one can say that one sees or views (guan) things from the perspective of Being, which should be identified with Dao, as we shall see later” (Ibid., 130).
The two layers of reality are coordinate with mechanical and organistic causes or reasons which hermeneuts blend or mix together. I am consulting Gadamer, “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus,” in Dialogue and Dialectic, 171.
Gajdosova explains how the One and many are two perspectives on the same reality where the former is an undifferentiated totality and the latter, manifestations of the one. Yet this numerical formulation is embedded in the passage she quotes from Taiyi Sheng Shui about water, and its movement in the seasons (Gajdosova, “Naming and Cosmology,” 385). Pfister finds unity in diversity, the immanent in the transcendent in Gadamer’s account of the “inner word” yet also draws on the Neo-Platonic (and Biblical) metaphor of a “fountain,” spring or well of fresh water (Pfister, “Gadamerian Reflections on Post-Dialogue Onto – hermeneutic Philosophy,” 344–345). As if by instinct they correct and counter-balance concepts abstracted from phenomenon with such commonplace things as water. Their very manner of expression integrates allegedly opposed elements and thereby expresses the dual structure of the Logos or Dao.
See Gadamer, “Amicus Plato Magis Amica Veritas,” in Dialogue and Dialectic, 200.
Effectively, thinking in contradictions as Gadamer says of Hegel and then summons when he says, “Someone understands what cognition, knowing, insight, is only when he also understands how it can be that one and one are two and how “the two” is one.” Gadamer, “Plato’s Unwritten Dialectic,” 135. See also, “Dialectic and Sophism in Plato’s Seventh Letter,” 94.
Gadamer, “The Artwork in Word and Image,” 211.
Given what has already been concluded about Gadamer and Cheng’s cosmogenic understanding of the world, a close examination of the affinities between Gadamer and Cheng on the scale of a cosmology is in order. Just as Cheng’s interpretations grow in the force-field (qi) between The Great Ultimate (taiji) and non-ultimate (wuji), Gadamer’s grow in the force field (chora) between the two-fold structure of reality that constantly separates from itself and coalesces again.
