“Truth and Method” by Hans-Georg Gadamer (translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall)

The title is adversative, not conjunctive. Gadamer's quarrel is with the assumption that the methodical procedures of the natural sciences alone set the standard for what counts as knowledge, and that the human sciences earn their keep by imitating them. His counterclaim is that art, history, theology, and philosophical texts make claims on us that no verification procedure can certify but that no honest reader can dismiss. Understanding, on his account, "does not consist in a technical virtuosity of 'understanding' everything written," but, instead, is "a genuine experience (Erfahrung) — i.e., an encounter with something that asserts itself as truth.”

Gadamer begins with the rejection of the idea that aesthetic experience can be isolated from the rest of existence. "Every experience is taken out of the continuity of life and at the same time related to the whole of one's life." He claims, "because it is itself within the whole of life, the whole of life is present in it too." Art intensifies this structure. "The power of the work of art suddenly tears the person experiencing it out of the context of his life, and yet relates him back to the whole of his existence." Thus, aesthetic experience is not merely one discrete subjective state among others. "Our experience of the aesthetic too is a mode of self-understanding…. Self-understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self." Ultimately, "art is knowledge and experiencing an artwork means sharing in that knowledge."

For this reason, the work of art cannot be detached from the circumstances in which it exists. "The work of art cannot simply be isolated from the 'contingency' of the chance conditions in which it appears.” Doing so produces "an abstraction that reduces the actual being of the work." Gadamer develops this argument through the model of play. The artwork is not primarily an object possessed by a spectator's consciousness, but an event that comes into being through its presentation. The being of art therefore cannot be defined merely as "an object of an aesthetic consciousness." Rather, aesthetic experience "is a part of the event of being that occurs in presentation, and belongs essentially to play as play." The same objection applies more broadly to an aesthetic consciousness that treats works as timeless objects, "The pantheon of art is not a timeless present that presents itself to a pure aesthetic consciousness, but the act of a mind and spirit that has collected and gathered itself historically."

This historical character of understanding becomes Gadamer's central concern. "Reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms…. It is not its own master but remains constantly dependent on the given circumstances in which it operates…. History does not belong to us; we belong to it." Long before reflective self-examination, "we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live…. The prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being." To acknowledge human finitude therefore requires Gadamer to "fundamentally rehabilitate the concept of prejudice."

This rehabilitation turns on a reversal. Freedom from prejudice is "the unattainable ideal of the Enlightenment," and the demand for it is itself a prejudice—one that conceals its own operation. A person who believes himself free of prejudice, "relying on the objectivity of his procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a tergo." The consequence for historical work is direct, "In seeking to understand tradition historical consciousness must not rely on the critical method with which it approaches its sources, as if this preserved it from mixing in its own judgments and prejudices. It must, in fact, think within its own historicity." The hermeneutical situation "is not a regrettable distortion that affects the purity of understanding, but the condition of its possibility."

That this could be seen at all Gadamer credits to Heidegger. The productivity of historical distance "could be understood only when Heidegger gave understanding an ontological orientation by interpreting it as an 'existential' and when he interpreted Dasein's mode of being in terms of time." Understanding ceases to be a procedure that a subject performs on an object and becomes the way the interpreter already is.

Gadamer calls the resulting self-awareness "historically effected consciousness." The interpreter does not stand outside history examining it, but is already constituted by the history and tradition he seeks to understand. Understanding, consequently, cannot be conceived as a detached subjective procedure. "Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated." Interpretation begins with "fore-meanings," which must be tested rather than simply discarded. "Working out appropriate projections, anticipatory in nature, to be confirmed 'by the things' themselves, is the constant task of understanding." We cannot "stick blindly to our own fore-meaning," but neither can we simply forget our prior assumptions. What is required is that "we remain open to the meaning of the other person or text," while situating that meaning in relation to our own.

Accordingly, understanding a text does not mean reconstructing the author's psychology. "We do not try to transpose ourselves into the author's mind.” Rather, we try to enter "the perspective within which he has formed his views," which means trying "to understand how what he is saying could be right." Hermeneutics is, therefore, not "a mysterious communion of souls, but sharing in a common meaning." The interpreter already has "a bond to the subject matter" and "a connection with the tradition from which the text speaks," while genuine interpretation remains suspended in a "polarity of familiarity and strangeness." Neither wholly inside nor wholly outside what it interprets, hermeneutics has its true locus in this in-between.

Understanding is therefore never merely the reconstruction of a past meaning. Gadamer revives the hermeneutical concept of application: to understand what has been handed down is already to understand what its claim means within one's own present situation. Understanding, interpretation, and application are not three stages but one act, and the model is the judge who grasps the law only in determining what it requires of the case before him. Nor is the meaning of a text permanently fixed by its original author or audience. "The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience.” Instead, it is "co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter." From which Gadamer draws the consequence that gives the book much of its force: not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text exceeds its author, and understanding is never merely reproductive but always productive as well. Every age must understand a transmitted text in its own way. If we understand at all, we understand differently. Temporal distance is therefore not an obstacle to be eliminated. "Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates.” Rather, it is "the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted." Temporal distance is "a positive and productive condition enabling understanding," filled by "the continuity of custom and tradition."

This produces Gadamer's conception of understanding as a "fusion of horizons…. Understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves…. Every encounter with tradition that takes place within historical consciousness involves the experience of a tension between the text and the present." The task is not to eliminate that tension through "a naive assimilation of the two,” but consciously to bring it out. Tradition does not imprison understanding. "To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible." Genuine openness to tradition means allowing the past, in its otherness, nevertheless to "have something to say to me.” This is the same openness, Gadamer notes, that constitutes the relation of an I to a Thou, and which is destroyed the moment one reflects oneself out of the relationship in order to master it.

Understanding also proceeds through the structure of question and answer. Interpretation is "a circle closed by the dialectic of question and answer.” To understand a text is in part to recover the question to which it responds, while remaining open to the questions the text in turn puts to the interpreter. What looks like the interpreter's own initiating move is in fact a response. “The dialectic of question and answer always precedes the dialectic of interpretation. It is what determines understanding as an event."

That that tradition reaches us above all in writing is not incidental. "What has come down to us by way of verbal tradition is not left over but given to us, told us." Writing detaches meaning from both author and original addressee, and this detachment "gives it a life of its own. What is fixed in writing has raised itself into a public sphere of meaning in which everyone who can read has an equal share." Hence, Gadamer's blunt reversal of the Romantic assumption, "A text is not to be understood as an expression of life but with respect to what it says." Reading is not archaeology but participation. "The understanding of something written is not a repetition of something past but the sharing of a present meaning." In the form of writing, all tradition is contemporaneous with each present time.

Finally, this entire process is linguistic. "Language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs. Understanding occurs in interpreting…. The essence of tradition is to exist in the medium of language…. The linguisticality of understanding is the concretion of historically effected consciousness." The claim is not that we are sealed inside our vocabulary but that there is no vantage above it. "We cannot see a linguistic world from above in this way, for there is no point of view outside the experience of the world in language from which it could become an object." The world that appears in language is not thereby made into language's object. Rather, "the object of knowledge and statements is always already enclosed within the world horizon of language." Even the world of physics, on this account, is one project of inquiry carried out within that horizon rather than the measure of it.

Interpretation is accordingly speculative in Gadamer's sense. The interpreting word is the interpreter's own, so that "assimilation is no mere reproduction or repetition of the traditionary text; it is a new creation of understanding." What the interpreter says seems, set beside the text, to be something new, and "yet does not maintain any proper existence apart from the understanding process." The paradox that holds of everything handed down — "being one and the same and yet being different" — is what proves all interpretation speculative. The hermeneutic relation shares in dialectic without terminating in it. It is "fundamentally different from the dialectical self-unfolding of the mind, as described by Hegel's philosophical science," because the finitude on which it rests admits no consummation. Hence the book's most quoted sentence — being that can be understood is language — states not that everything is words but that whatever can be understood presents itself, and that we participate in that presentation rather than seize it. “Truth and Method” thus presents understanding not as the recovery of a fixed meaning by an autonomous subject, but as a historically situated, linguistically mediated encounter in which text, tradition, and interpreter continually determine one another.

“The City and the Mountain” by Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

This novel splits time between nineteenth century Paris and the mountains of Portugal. It is narrated by Ze Fernandes, the close friend of Jacinto, the heir to a fortune with vast estates across the Portugese countryside and a mansion in Lisbon. He was, nonetheless, born and raised in Paris, never having visited his homeland, the grandson of a self-exiled royalist noble. Jacinto spends his time indulging in food and wine, attending the theater and masked balls, perusing books from his 30,000 volume library, and tinkering with the newest mechanical inventions. “Jacinto had come up with an idea, namely, that “a man can only be superlatively happy when he is superlatively civilized.” And by “civilized” my friend meant the kind of man who, by honing his thinking skills on all the philosophy acquired since Aristotle onwards and multiplying the physical strength of his organs using all the mechanisms invented since Theramenes created the wheel, could make of himself a magnificent, near-omnipotent, Adam ready to reap—within a particular society and within the limits of Progress (at least as far as Progress had gotten in 1875)—all the pleasures and all the advantages that spring from Knowledge and Power.” Jacinto was also, as befits a man of his station, a dandy. “He always wore a flower in his buttonhole, not a real flower, but one skillfully concocted by his florist from the petals of several different flowers—carnations, azaleas, orchids, or tulips—all bound together on one stem, along with a sprig of fennel.”

Despite his wealth and position, the city of Paris gradually began to bore Jacinto. “He never openly confessed his feeling to me. Jacinto, elegant and reserved, did not wring his hands and moan: “Oh accursed life!” It was more the look of satiety on his face: a gesture angrily dismissing the importunate nature of things; the way in which he would sometimes sit immobile, as if in protest, on a divan from which he would not stir, as if he wished those moments of repose to be eternal; then there were the yawns, the gaping yawns with which he underlined everything he did.” All his books of political and economic philosophy and the modish salons, where they discussed the newest utopian fads, could not cure him. “Hardened in sin, the bourgeois revels in his strength, and against him all the tears of the Humanitarians, the reasoned arguments of the Logicians and the bombs of the Anarchists are impotent.”

Ever-tired of his routine in Paris, Jacinto spontaneously decides to journey to his family estate, spurred by the news of a ceremony to reinter the bones of his ancestors, displaced when a mudslide destroyed their resting place in the ancient familial chapel. “Those hairy Jacintos who returned to their high lands in Tormes, back from defeating the Moor at Salado or the Spaniard at Valverde, did not even bother taking off their battered armor to tend their fields and to train their vines to the elms, building their kingdom with lance and spade.” In the countryside, Jacinto finally finds himself, his calling, and his home. “Jacinto had put down strong loving roots in his rough mountain home. It was as if he had been planted, like a cutting, in the ancient soil from which his race had sprung and as if the ancient humus were seeping in and penetrating him, transforming him into a rustic, almost vegetable Jacinto, as much a part of the earth and as rooted in the earth as the trees he so loved.”

“The Moral Economy” by Samuel Bowles

Bowles wants to take down the idea that homo economicus rules. Of course, behavioral economics (as well as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and the other social sciences) have already posited that man does not always act in his longterm monetary self-interest alone. This might be because of lack of information, because of framing issues, time preference, or because of altruism. Nonetheless, the starting assumption in economics is that it is often best to think of man as a rational actor acting in his own best interest. Therefore, when designing a form of governance it is best to assume that men are selfish, acting for their own gain over the general weal. What is best is to restrain their motives and channel their selfish individual desires in a better direction for the group as a whole: to create a Constitution for knaves. Political theorists from Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, and James Madison felt that it was better to design a system based on the assumption man acted more as knaves than as angels. Bowles suggests, “what the classical economists (and most economists since) missed is the possibility that moral and other prosocial behavior would be affected- perhaps adversely- by incentive-based policies designed to harness self-interest.” Are incentives and morals additively separate as basic economics suggests or is Bowles onto something? Can we separate moral and economic worth? Do economic incentives, in fact, change people’s moral calculus? Does putting a price on something (be it a fine or a reward) change how an issue is framed? Does the moral sphere of society get crowded out by the economic sphere? The bottomline: if you put a price on something, make sure you are willing to accept it when someone is willing to pay it.

“The Slaughterman’s Daughter” by Yaniv Iczkovits (translated by Orr Scharf)

This novel, translated from Hebrew, has its fair share of Yiddish sprinkled in. It takes place during the nineteenth century in the Pale of Settlement. Most of the action takes place in Motal, a predominantly Jewish village with a few muzhiks in the mix. It has quite the cast of characters—a mute Russian Army veteran, a degenerate-gambling Jewish cantor, a hobbling Okhrana officer, a brothel owner, an apocalyptic Yeshiva scholar, and, of course, a slaughterman’s daughter or two. “Fanny feels the sheath against her thigh: Why has she continued to carry the knife even after abandoning her career of slaughtering? She does not know. She intended many times to bury it in the back of a cupboard, but whenever she removed the blade from her body she felt as though something was amiss, as if it were another body part in addition to the 248 that the Sages of antiquity had enumerated in the human body.” Fanny belongs to an insulated rural Jewish community, but is a bit of an outcast, having married a stoic cheesemaker, who lives dangerously close to the goyim. “The righteous do not take political positions, they strengthen their allegiance to the Blessed Holy One instead, and they could not care less whether the nobility is bickering with the peasants, and it is all the same to them if Polish nationalists are clashing with Russian oppressors. If there is something to sell to the gentiles or to buy from them in order to make a living, so much the better—but this is where the line between them and us is drawn. We share with them the same soil but not the same world.” The adventure Fanny will end up going on will bring death aplenty, as well as soul searching, hero-making, and reconciliation. “Now she is proud of the riff-raff she has gathered around her, the types that townspeople would point at and say: “See them? They’re exactly what we’re not.” Well, this is her army. And although none of them would admit it, she knows that whatever powerful thing it is that unites this divided, battered crew, it has made waves throughout the entire empire.”

“The Beast in the Nursery” by Adam Phillips

I would not recommend this book to any of my friends with young children. It might seriously disturb them. On the other hand, it might also enlighten. Freud claimed, “if children could follow the hints given by the excitation of the penis they would get a little nearer to the solution of the problem” of how to best navigate the mysteries of growing into a successful adult. In another essay, Freud propounded, “no one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.” Phillips does not dwell on all things Oedipal, yet, as in all psychoanalysis, it lurks in the recesses of the mind.

This book is about the struggles with and conflicts in growing up- what we have to give up and what we, unfortunately, leave behind. We are told that “being realistic is a better guarantee of pleasure” and that “morality is the way we set limits on wanting,” but we don’t want to kill that inner child for “inspiration is the best word we have for appetite, and that appetite is the best thing we have going for us.” In the end, “lives are only livable if they give pleasure: that is, if we can renew our pleasures, remember their intensities.” We are told or we figure out as children that there is a natural progression in life. We are not fully humans until we become adults. Children are in search of the missing, what will complete them. But as we age we learn we must all make sacrifices, that we are not the center of the universe, and that we must settle, for not all our wishes will become fulfilled. “People come for psychoanalysis when they are feeling under-nourished, and this is because- depending on one’s psychoanalytic preferences- either what they have been given wasn’t good enough, so they couldn’t do enough with it, or because there is something wrong with their capacity for transformation…. We are interested in things despite ourselves.” To grow up is to learn to live with disappointment. “Wishing is the sign of loss; wanting things to be otherwise because they are not as they are supposed to be. For the child to live his curiosity is itself an acknowledgement of loss, of wanting as the sign of life…. We are the animals for whom something is missing and for whom what is missing is always privileged. What is absent, ironically, is what is there for us to be interested in.” Growing up also often means settling. “Education, Freud implies, teaches the child either to lose interest in what matters most to her or to compromise that interest.” What is lost on the child is that she too has something unique to offer to the world as is. The child is not merely waiting to become an adult. One could say that an adult is a child who has become stale and calcified. “If you know too well how to do something, you’re less likely to fall into originality.” The adult can try to teach, but only the child can learn. “Children’s self-education [is] about what they learned despite the adults, not because of them…. From an unknowable (unconscious) set of criteria a person, unbeknown even to himself, picks out and transforms the bits he wants; the bits that can be used in the hidden projects of unconscious desire.” Learning about the world is a mysterious process that one is constantly involved in and what is unconsciously absorbed is often more lasting than what is learned through effort.

Phillips suggests the best kind of learning is done by simply taking a hint. But “the useful hint is, more often than not, not intended as such.” It is often the case that we do most of our teaching when we never even intend it- or, at least, not how we intend it. “We might make our words smell as nice as they can, but they will go into the world and be made use of sometimes beyond our wildest intentions. They will fuel that dreamwork of everyday life called gossip. They will evoke idiosyncratic personal histories- what we call associations- in their listeners.” Life is a continuous project, but it is not always linear. But we are always growing up (or growing somewhere, at least). But as we are growing into something, we must also be growing out of something. And that loss can be acute. “How could growing up be anything but an adaptation to something other than oneself, and therefore a disillusionment?…. Something essential is lost, or at least attenuated, in the process of growing up. Whether it is called vision or imagination or vitality or hope, lives are considered to erode over time.” As we grow we learn to accept life, to accept compromise. But what we cannot compromise on, what we will not compromise on, are our morals. “It is from our discontents that we can infer our ideals…. Our unofficial, more idiosyncratic morality is only available, so to speak, through humiliation. Once you know who or what humiliates you, you know what it is about yourself that you ultimately value, that you worship. Tell me what makes you enraged- what makes you feel truly diminished- and I will tell you what you believe or what you want to believe about yourself.” In the process of growing up the child’s pleasures turn into the adult’s ideals. “Freud is not saying that we are really children, but that the sensual intensities of childhood cannot be abolished, that our ideals are transformed versions of childhood pleasures. That the values and ambitions- the representations- of the adult are an obscured picture of the passions and conflicts and curiosities of childhood. (So the wish to be rich, for example, becomes a fantasy of uninhibited access, or of being exempt from dependent need.)” What is the underlying need that is being superficially satisfied by wealth? What fears do riches satisfy? Self-sufficiency? Adulthood? Growing up? Growing old? “There is an inevitable element of humiliation in simply being a child, though the child’s relative helplessness can be more or less exploited by the parents; the child is not sufficient unto himself, he cannot bring himself up…. Compliance is always experienced by the child as demeaning (sadomasochism is the trick by which adults make compliance and domination bearable by making them sexually exciting.)”

In the end, do we ever really grow up? Is it healthy to do so? “What children supposedly suffer from is not being what they think of as adults; and adulthood becomes the afterlife for children, which means a growing acquaintance with the unappeasable nature of desire…. Growing up, in other words, is not so much acquiring a more realistic sense of ourselves, but rather the process of forgetting our earliest entitlements.” However, the really interesting question for Freud was quite the opposite of growing up, “why is it that adults are more like children than they want to be?”