Volume 69, 2018
Political Philosophy
Ozgur Emrah Gurel
Pages 165-172
The Politics of Hermeneutical Experience in Gadamer
Judgment, Rhetoric and Tragedy
Experience itself, Gadamer argues, can never be science. It is a non-scientific deliberation. This paper aims to critically analyze the recovery of the concept of “hermeneutical experience” (Erfahrung) in Gadamer’s philosophical investigations. Focusing mainly on Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and Method and his later writings on ethics and politics, this examination will allow us to discuss a) the imaginative development of Gadamer’s interpretations on Aristotle’s notion of phronēsis as practical judgment and its political repercussions for modernity, b) a construction of a possible dialogue between Aristotle’s proto-hermeneutical inquiry on praxis and Hegel’s phenomenological account of the experience of conversation, c) a critical engagement with both Habermas’ procedural conception of political philosophy, through which the role of philosophy is largely restricted to the problem of designing procedures for determining the validity of generalizable, collectively binding norms and Derrida’s unconditional and anti-foundational idea of ethics where the call of the other; the arrival of the other, of a singular event, is a burden, an infinite political responsibility; and finally d) a more aesthetic and non-cognitivist idea of experience where there is an openness to the tragic nature of human action.