Abstract
In this chapter, Carr lays out the foundation for her exploration of the use of stories and hermeneutical tools to do the conceptual work of philosophy and the social-transformative work of what she calls “reading for change.” She begins by grounding her own position in relation to the social issues raised by modern feminism, and then proceeds into a discussion of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work as a resource for important hermeneutical tools and concepts. In doing so, she lays out a substantive and appreciative, but constructively critical, exploration of his understanding of tradition. Having discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the tools Gadamer provides, Carr turns to a brief introduction of the two authors whose work forms the body of Story and Philosophy—Christine de Pizan and Luce Irigaray—that situates their work in relation to her own.
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Notes
- 1.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum Press, 2000), 284.
- 2.
Even after my family ended their membership in a radically conservative Christian charismatic movement to which they belonged when I was young (which had male “headship” as a central doctrinal tenet), the family remained members of a denomination that did not, for instance, allow women to become elders or pastors and which was still heavily fundamentalist.
- 3.
This of course could be my blind spot. For all I know, fifty years down the road, we will have made first contact with peoples from outside our world who are not human but who are full persons in the intersubjective and ethical sense. As I cannot possibly conceive what that would be like from where I stand now, I will leave that aside here.
- 4.
For a variety of approaches to Gadamer’s work from a self-consciously feminist standpoint, see Lorraine Code, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). I do not have the space here to provide a reaction to the many different essays in that book, but it will become clear below that I disagree fundamentally with many, though not all, of them.
- 5.
Some of these issues I agree are a problem, while there are others on which I believe he has been misread. More on that below.
- 6.
I mean “world” in all the Heideggerian depth it held for Gadamer.
- 7.
One cannot of course ever fully understand tradition, as it is much too large and shifting. One can, however, through critical reason, begin to perceive it and form judgments about it. Gadamer would concur (see his “Foreword to the Second Edition,” xxxvii, which I will discuss momentarily), though, as I will explain, I place much more emphasis on “breaking with” tradition than he does.
- 8.
I will not be engaging much with the secondary literature on Gadamer in this work because exploring Gadamer’s work in depth is not my intent here, nor do I have the space to do so; rather, I am making clear how my deep engagement with his work has framed my own. I do, however, hope to write more on Gadamer’s work as such later, and will of course situate my voice as part of the extensive secondary literature conversation at that point. For interested readers, there are a number of excellent sources on Gadamer’s work, including a recent book by Donatella Di Cesare, Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait, trans. Niall Keane (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
- 9.
This is not to say that he does not come to conclusions; he does. He works by questioning and analyzing texts, experience, and language, however, and does not tend to define his terms up front. This was likely due to his larger project, part of which was showing that the human sciences have their own ways of knowing, and should not have to conform to the terms of how knowledge is defined in the natural sciences.
- 10.
This characterization of tradition, which I will unpack in the next paragraph, can be found in Truth and Method Part 2 II. 3.B. (“Elements of a theory of hermeneutic experience: Analysis of historically effected consciousness: the concept of experience (Erfahrung) and the essence of the hermeneutic experience”); in particular, pp. 358–362.
- 11.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 358. Emphasis in text.
- 12.
I use “develop” instead of “begin,” because we are always already in relation with language, and indeed tradition, from the moment of our birth (if not even before). Gadamer, in fact, notes that communication with an other begins before birth, “in the mother’s body.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Hermeneutics” in Gadamer in Conversation , ed. and trans. Richard Palmer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 43. That particular kind of communication is perhaps not yet language, but it is communication and relation nevertheless.
- 13.
Gadamer himself acknowledged this, and even wrote on such topics as gesture, for instance.
- 14.
In Gadamer’s words, “It is an illusion to see another person as a tool that can be absolutely known and used.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 359.
- 15.
This is of course Kant’s formulation, which Gadamer cites on p. 358 of Truth and Method.
- 16.
See, for example, his “Foreword to the Second Edition,” Truth and Method, xxxv.
- 17.
In Gadamer’s words, “human consciousness is not an infinite intellect for which everything exists, simultaneous and co-present. The absolute identity of consciousness and object simply cannot be achieved by finite, historical consciousness. It always remains entangled in the context of historical effect.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 234.
- 18.
This is what Gadamer means when, against Enlightenment thinking, he notes, “The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice, and removing it opens the way to an appropriate understanding of the finitude which dominates not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 276.
- 19.
Gadamer, “Supplement II: To What Extent Does Language Preform Thought?” Truth and Method, 542. This was written more than twenty years after Truth and Method, following extensive dialogue with other thinkers about key terms such as tradition, language, and prejudice.
- 20.
Gadamer, “Supplement II,” 549.
- 21.
I will discuss Christine’s concerns about violence when I cover her work in the Path of Long Study , as well as elsewhere in her writings to the French princes. Christine was of course pre-industrialization, so some of the other more environmental concerns that Gadamer raised here, and which continue to face us, were not problems of which Christine could have conceived. She also would not have conceptualized language (or tradition) in the way that Gadamer did. That said, she was very attentive to words, both written and spoken, and was very concerned with the way that what we read shapes our thought. This concern becomes very obvious in her debate over the Roman de la Rose , as well as many other texts. I will cover Christine’s engagement with how reading shapes thinking later.
- 22.
I say one can end or quit all these relationships but I am well aware that what “can” be done, and what is feasible for the circumstances are often a poor match—in particular, in situations where resources or power are already limited. One “can” quit an abusive job, but lacking the possibility to find another means of income, one will simply then be free to starve. Without intervention from an outside source, a young child cannot sever contact with an abusive parent. Some abusive marriages or partnerships are similarly structured in community or cultural settings where ending the relationship is near to impossible. It is in situations like these that not only the abusive relationships must be ended but first the circumstances themselves changed to enable the genuine possibility of ending that relationship.
- 23.
I admit this is a rather earthy metaphor. Christine uses a similar one, however, in a prologue to one of her works, where she has a figure called “Chaos” eating all humans at birth; we live our entire lives in his belly and only exit his system at the end of our lives—quite literally out the other end of Chaos. See my discussion in the section titled “Aristotle and Nature, Naturally.”
- 24.
Gadamer, “Hermeneutics,” 51–52.
- 25.
Picking up an insight he identifies as coming from the Romantics, Gadamer writes, “Interpretation is not an occasional, post facto supplement to understanding; rather, understanding is always interpretation, and hence interpretation is the explicit form of understanding.” To this he adds in the next paragraph, “In the course of our reflections we have come to see that understanding always involves something like applying the text to be understood to the interpreter’s present situation. Thus we are forced to go one step beyond romantic hermeneutics, as it were, by regarding not only understanding and interpretation, but also application as comprising one unified process.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 307 and 308 respectively.
- 26.
As he writes, “the hermeneutic phenomenon too implies the primacy of dialogue and the structure of question and answer.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 369. This position is developed from about pp. 362–379 of Truth and Method, and I will return to a discussion of it in the final portion of my book.
- 27.
Gadamer discusses how one proceeds in dialogue with an other in Truth and Method and again in his “Reply to Jacques Derrida .” In the latter, he states more succinctly, “one does not go about identifying the weaknesses of what another person says in order to prove that one is always right, but one seeks instead as far as possible to strengthen the other’s viewpoint so that what the other person has to say becomes illuminating.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reply to Jacques Derrida” in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard Palmer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 55. For his discussion in Truth and Method see his section “The Model of Platonic Dialogue,” 362–369.
- 28.
As, for example, when he says, “Does not the experience of art contain a claim to truth which is certainly different from that of science, but just as certainly is not inferior to it? And is not the task of aesthetics precisely to ground the fact that the experience of art is a mode of knowledge of a unique kind, certainly different from that sensory knowledge which provides science with the ultimate data from which it constructs knowledge of nature, and certainly different from all moral rational knowledge, and indeed from all conceptual knowledge—but still knowledge, i.e., conveying truth? This can hardly be recognized if, with Kant, one measures the truth of knowledge by the scientific concept of knowledge and the scientific concept of reality.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 97–98.
- 29.
In a 1993 interview with Carsten Dutt, Gadamer, speaking about poetry, states, “You cannot paraphrase a poem. You cannot substitute something else for it … when a work of art truly takes hold of us, it is not an object that stands opposite us which we look at in hope of seeing through it to an intended conceptual meaning. Just the reverse. The work is an Ereignis—an event that ‘appropriates us’ into itself. It jolts us, it knocks us over, and sets up a world of its own into which we are drawn.” Gadamer, “Aesthetics,” Gadamer in Conversation , 71. Gadamer here also brings up the notion of memorizing, though he does not comment much on it; however, we will see later that this has a similar ring to Christine’s practice regarding memory when I return to this quotation in its larger context.
- 30.
I have not, for instance, mentioned his notion of play, or participation, nor his insistence on practical philosophy or his work on the ancient Greeks. Neither have I discussed his complicated indebtedness and concurrent distancing from the thought of Martin Heidegger . All these are hugely important in Gadamer’s work, and tie in with all the other aspects of his thought I have already mentioned, as well as those many I have not had time to bring to the surface here in this introduction.
- 31.
One can see these aims in her books such as the Book of the City of Ladies and The Vision of Christine de Pizan, but also in such works as The Book of the Body Politic and Epistle to the Queen of France (among many others).
- 32.
See, for instance, her claim at the beginning of An Ethics of Sexual Difference: “Sexual Difference would constitute the horizon of worlds more fecund than any known to date—at least in the West—and without reducing fecundity to the reproduction of bodies and flesh. For loving partners, this would be a fecundity of birth and regeneration, but also the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language.” Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference , trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 5.
- 33.
Bruce Holsinger , The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 20. Like myself, Holsinger focuses on particular thinkers to demonstrate his point (though the figures he chooses differ from mine. In fact, there appears to be no mention of Irigaray in his book). Most of his work is centered on how authors such as Bataille, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Bourdieu, and other French postwar thinkers drew on medieval thinkers, but an overall point he makes is simply how much their work drew on medieval material, and how critical doing so was to their various projects. As Holsinger writes, “In its variegated assault on the legacy of the Enlightenment, the critical generation of this era turned to the Middle Ages not in a fit of nostalgic retrospection, but in a spirit of both interpretive and ideological resistance to the relentless inevitability of modernity.” Ibid., 5.
- 34.
Irigaray, “Divine Women ” found in Sexes and Genealogies trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 58. Irigaray is here is discussing the story of Melusine , a tale of a woman whose lower half, when wet, takes the form of a serpent (or in some versions a fish, like a mermaid). Irigaray notes that the particular version of Melusine’s story she read in preparation for writing “Divine Women” was Jean d’Arras’ version, published in 1478—only a few decades after Christine’s death.
- 35.
There was a popular uprising in Paris during Christine’s life (the Cabochien revolt, 1413), in which reforms were demanded, and for a short time achieved (though it was likely the Duke of Burgundy that drove the majority of the revolt). It was nothing like the scale of activism that takes place today, however. Organizing social movements for change is becoming both an art and a science, neither of which was really conceivable in Christine’s milieu. Movements such as Idle No More, Occupy, the uprisings that began in December of 2010 and are sometimes referred to as the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, One Billion Rising, and—I add now, during the final stage of copy-editing, the January 21, 2017 Women’s March—did not and do not just take place in one locality; they are national or in some cases even international, and while the names of movements change, there seems to be a growing groundswell of people all over the world engaged in this kind of activism aimed at effecting lasting systematic social changes.
- 36.
Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies , trans. Earl Jeffery Richards (New York: Persea, 1998), 3. I discuss this later, in Chap. 2.
- 37.
Christine de Pizan, City, 22.
- 38.
I will argue in this work that the “Christine” who appears in her texts is not identical to Christine de Pizan, the woman who wrote the texts. She is, as I discuss shortly, a fictionalized persona created to help do the work Christine de Pizan the writer was attempting.
- 39.
Christine de Pizan, City, 5.
- 40.
In Speculum, the first voice in Irigaray’s text is not her own, but Freud’s: “Ladies and gentlemen… Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity… Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply—you are yourselves the problem.” Luce Irigaray, quoting Sigmund Freud , Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 13. Both ellipses and italics are in Irigaray’s text. Gill notes the lecture in question can be found in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , XXII 112–35. See the first footnote in Speculum.
- 41.
Responding to the quote she began with from Freud, she says, “So it would be a case of you men speaking among yourselves about woman, who cannot be involved in hearing or producing a discourse that concerns the riddle, the logogriph she represents for you. The enigma that is woman will therefore constitute the target, the object, the stake, of a masculine discourse, of a debate among men, which would not consult, would not concern her. Which, ultimately, she is not supposed to know anything about.” Irigaray, Speculum, 13. Emphasis in text.
- 42.
I cover several examples of her interactions with Heidegger’s work, including her The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger in the chapter on Irigaray.
- 43.
See my section “It takes (more than!) two.”
- 44.
- 45.
Said with a nod, of course, to J.R.R. Tolkien.
- 46.
She develops this in her Path of Long Learning, which I discuss later.
References
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de Pizan, Christine. The Book of the City of Ladies. Translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards. New York: Persea Books, 1998.
Di Cesare, Donatella. Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait. Translated by Niall Keane. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Aesthetics,” in Gadamer in Conversation. Edited and Translated by Richard Palmer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
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Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Reply to Jacques Derrida,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer–Derrida Encounter. Edited by Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard Palmer, 55–57. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum Press, 2000.
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Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
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Irigaray, Luce. “Divine Women,” in Sexes and Genealogies. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
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Carr, A. (2017). An Introduction. In: Story and Philosophy for Social Change in Medieval and Postmodern Writing. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63745-7_1
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