The Hermeneutic Function of Demonstration in Gadamer's Discussion of the Phaedo

Gadamer's discussion of Plato's Phadeo fulfills conditions requisite for a hermeneutic relation. For the time, these conditions can be stipulated in the following manner:

(a) that one's engagement with a historically situated text provides, at the very least, the possibility of discarding previously systematic and autonomous responses to the relevant matters discussed within the interpreted text;

(b) that in the 'discarding of previously systematized responses' one assumes an immediate, non-normatively attenuated dilemma of failing to bind to both the matter at hand and the intentionality of the matter in itself

Before going on, there is some curious and perhaps vague language which I must clear up.

Condition a means that the text is such that it may not yield to the interpreter's assumed projection system: the system of concepts the interpreter, whether consciously or unconsciously, assumes appropriate for the task of deriving meaning out of that to be interpreted. Notice not only that the object of interpretation is such as to possibly evade explanation, but more importantly, that it also is such as to go towards the selection of the conceptual system it will subsequently deem inappropriate. Kuhnian science is a good example: the current paradigm, which is used in the interpretation of phenomena classifiable by the paradigm, nevertheless, in retrospect, functions to end the appropriateness of the paradigm in its projection. If this all seems circular, it is.

Condition b relates that, as the interpreter's assumed projection system fails to project and sort the relevant matter(s), the interpreter both can neither 'grasp' the matter(s) nor yield intentionality in the usual way, that is, in the apparent presentation of an object of thought as something. Additionally and equally importantly is this: the interpreter fails to be conscious of the fact that they should assume another 'projection system.' This is where the phrase "non-normatively attenuated" comes into play. Basically, there is nothing in them which suggests, "hey, your system of interpretation, the one you thought would work, isn't in fact working...you should assume another stance towards this issue." This suggestion fails to present, for one cannot be towards anything without a stance upon which he comes from towards.

The aforementioned conditions are all well and good, but there's really a lot more at stake than what they purport, collectively or singly. This all is not already apparent, but will become apparent, I think, in what follows. I suggest that we go about a usual way, first, and follow that up with a "critique of the critique" that way establishes.[1] What I mean by "a usual way" is that act of applying one's methods of interpretation to what the interpretation purports in the first place. Speaking plainly, I have set up an interpretation which purports conditions under which something can be said to be hermeneutic, and 'the usual way' would be to go about applying what I have said to the primary object, that is, Gadamer's discussion of the Phaedo. Following this usual way, I go about a critique of the critique, which probably involves what I marvel at next.

If this is successful (the critiquing of the critique), then I may truly ask what I meant to ask in the beginning, without having formed a question of it: does this (that is, my) interpretation of hermeneutics fulfill the conditions elucidated above? If so, there's a lot that seems wrong with the framing of my interpretation, as seen in a and b. If not, then does my own system of interpretation as it is present here fail to exhaust its own stipulations? The real headache is caused when I ask if this kind of thinking is really appropriate to what is, artificially, yielded by a mechanism already presumptive of the nature of its course.

In the interest of precision, I am limiting my treatment of Gadamer's discussion of the Phaedo to only those sections concerning the sense in which Plato hypothesizes According to Gadamer, Plato's 'demonstrations' in the Phaedo functions not to justify the existence of immortal souls, in the Christian sense, but rather to oppose doubts as to our ability to engage in a kind of thinking which transcends the rigid designation of scientific and rational explanation. Gadamer posits as much when he states,

"Thus the point of the demonstrations, it seems to me, is that they refute doubts and not that they justify belief. And how indeed should the phenomenon of death in all its immensity ever become comprehensible for human reason and insight, and yet how much even so does it continue to demand from human beings a response to its imponderability. Evidence of this fact is provided above all by that silent yet eloquent ancestor worship and tomb art which projects human feeling and imagination beyond the inner certainty of one's own being alive to those departed in death and which preserves the dead one as a member of the family. It seems that Plato has in mind especially this answer of the religious tradition when he says that the task of giving ourselves courage, "singing to ourselves," and allaying our fear of death is never completed." (Gadamer, 37)

Without qualification, the 'justification of a belief' is entangled with the historicity of empiricism and of the modern conception of western science. This historicity rigidly purports how one is take, for example, the utterance "Plato demonstrates the doctrine of the immortality of the soul." What is immediately apprehended in that proposition is a sense of demonstration which aligns with 'demonstrative testing,' which itself resonates with the empirical endeavor of hypothesis formation and empirical reproduction. Gadamer's characterization of the sense in which Plato is demonstrative poses problems for this 'Anglo-American' 'assumed projection system,' for he proceeds to reverse the direction of hypothesis and verification which normally appropriates itself in a certain way. Gadamer's discussion of the significance of Cebes' objection, and Socrates subsequent response to, the immortality of the soul presents this instance of hermeneutic importance:

"Far from being a modification of scientific procedure, the hypothesis is introduced here as a dialectical tool with a purpose relative to the task at hand: combating sophism. The new element in the procedure does not consist in the invalidation of a previous hypothesis and a replacement of it with another when it is found to contradict the facts-that is taken for granted. The new requirement which Socrates establishes is in fact the converse. In contrast to the modern procedure of verifying a hypothesis, the hypothesis of the eidos is not to be tested against an experience which would validate or invalidate it. Such a procedure would be totally absurd in respect to a postulated eidos: that which constitutes being a horse could never be proved or disproved by a particular horse...the test which is to be applied in respect to the eidos is a test of the immanent, internal, coherence of all that is intrinsic to it." (Gadamer, 33)

In this instance the matter at hand is not at all defined by what is immediately available for use in knowing what Socrates says, for Gadamer's effective reversal of what previously afforded a scientific conceptualization of Socrates' response to Cebes' abstraction disallows the employment of any conceptual structure which could intelligibly yield the meaning of this foreign sense of hypothesis-formation and verification. One is forced to employ words once thought appropriate for a matter under discussion which has ceased to be a matter under discussion; verification, or what can be restated as that which realizes the conditions under which an explanation is 'good,' now is intentional (meaningful) from a phenomenal and not an empirical place. Knowledge of verification resides solely in the projection of the conceptual structure upon relevant matters, but this shift in the intentionality of verification in the Phaedo, as Gadamer asserts, has a residual effect of making present the difference between understanding and knowing. I may immediately apprehend and know that "in a sense, Socrates formulates a hypothesis such that the form of an answer to a question is possible," while also understanding that such knowledge is prefabricated upon, among other things, a certain class of referents which 'hypothesizing' picks out, and that these referents are themselves shaded with conceptual irregularities which can only be investigated under a scrutiny of scrutiny.

This scrutiny of scrutiny is not a meta-level of scrutiny, and its movement is not determined in one direction, just as "I doubt that I doubt p" need not mean, or be determined by, "I think that p is the case." Notice that, given the determination of double negatives in the English language, it is difficult to appreciate how it is that doubting that you doubt p is not different from thinking that p is the case, it is possible to understand a sense in which doubting that you doubt p means doubting (that you doubt p). This kind of possibility of direction, and lack of strict determination, is requisite to the hermeneutic relation.

Bearing this in mind, Gadamer's interpretation of Plato provides a novel sense of the role of demonstration in philosophical argumentation, one that functions to defend against objections not via the demonstration of the predication of a general rule to a particular, but rather via the transcendence of the question beyond the designation of the rule, so to speak: "When it is said that the search for the right reassurance should go beyond the community of those who speak the same language, is that not an indication that the question being asked transcends the community of any language and what can be conceived of in it?" (Gadamer, 38) This transcendence manifests the question as a mystery, and one that, despite our linguistic and analytic capabilities, cannot be framed in the familiar give and take of question and answer, but which the give and take of question and answer presupposes in all human inquiry.

I have attempted to refine the notion of the conditions under which something is said to be hermeneutic, but the mystery would be left a question if I failed to afford whether my own interpretation, especially the formal construal of it, is in some sort of hermeneutic relationship with me. Immediately as I pose the question the fore structures appear: I myself systematized my notion of interpretative mechanisms which, on the one hand, appropriate their use upon a set of matters, while on the other hand, affect the interpreter in such a way as to cause a dilemma in him mentioned in the b condition. That I systematized this relationship is no doubt in conjunction with the philosophy of mind employed in current scientific and philosophical discourses pertaining to 'the mental.' Nevertheless, the historicity of the formation of my own interpretive scheme has a utility outside what it purports, that is, outside its mere content. This kind of self-reflection heeds the third and final condition which I now propose:

C) That a schema of interpretation hermeneutically devised will not partake in the failure to acknowledge its projection upon itself and the resultant stacking of interpretations it must presume in doing so

This relates that a hermeneutic interpretation will advise the intentionality of the interpreted text, but in doing so must recognize its own coloring of interpretation it must presume in doing so. At this point in the circle, I'm not sure how appropriate it is to continue.

Works Cited

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Dialogue and Dialectic. London: Yale University Press, 1980

Putnam, Hilary. Ethics without Ontology, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. 2004

[1] I borrow the phrase "critique of critique" from Hilary Putnam's discussion of John Dewey's place in the pragmatist enlightenment. The most relevant passage is where Putnam states, "By 'criticisms of criticisms'...he [Dewey] meant not just the criticism of received ideas, but higher-level criticisms, the 'standing back' and criticizing even the ways in which we are accustomed to criticize ideas, the criticism of our ways of criticism." Putnam, 96