The Fragility of Freedom Gadamerian :: Gadamer Freedom Essays

The Fragility of Freedom GadamerianABSTRACT This paper examines the nature of license in Hang-Georg Gadamers hermeneutics. It focuses on the last section of Wahrheit und Methode advancing the shot that Gadamers ensample of judgment is derived from his particular appropriation of the Platonic model of the bewitching which poses a passive interpretative posture toward the object of discernment and deprives the activity of interpretation the essential creative pure tone of freedom. I betoken that to the extent that the object of understanding presents itself as immediate revelation of faithfulness, the rendition subject is reduced to a mere acknowledger of truth as conflicting to a creative producer. Opponents of teleological ontology and of philosophy of history have been attracted to hermeneutics as a more congenial perspective for the exploration of such issues as truth and right, knowledge and action, necessity and freedom. The appealing claim of hermeneutics is that univ ersality consume not be and should not be absolute as an final end of a process of actualisation. In the view of hermeneutics, a classical universal converts freedom to necessity however much consciousness whitethorn mediate activity. That is, even though activity engenders change, consciousness is more an looking of necessity in relation to the absolute than an expression of freedom. Indeed, in this view, teleological mediation between freedom and necessity is no reconciliation scarcely rather a subsumption of freedom by necessity. To rehabilitate freedom, hermeneutics opts for a non-teleological history with an open, indeterminate future. The departure from teleology finds a new non-essentialist ground for truth and universality, namely, vulgar understanding.In this paper, I examine Gadamers notion of mutual understanding, fusion of horizons, to assess the place reserved for freedom. I focus on Gadamers appropriation of the Platonic notion of the beautiful as the model of un derstanding and I argue that such a notion of understanding poses a passive interpretive posture toward the object of understanding, i.e. tradition or contemporary alien culture. In this model of understanding, I shall argue, the latter presents itself as immediate revelation of truth and thereby deprives interpretation of the productive quality which Gadamer would like to attribute it. I begin by providing some theoretical background to Gadamers notion of understanding noting its debt to Heideggers phenomenological ontology. I accordingly proceed to examine Gadamers appeal to the Platonic dialectic of the beautiful as a model for understanding which highlights, to my mind and as I noted, the latent passivity of Gadamerian interpretation.