By Darren Walhof
This ebook examines the targeted contribution that the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer make to democratic conception. Walhof argues that Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy enlarges our viewpoint by way of transferring our view clear of person voters to what exists among voters, thereby permitting us to examine political realities which are in a different way difficult to work out. those realities contain the disclosure of fact in democratic politics; attaining universal flooring in democratic discussion, even amidst major confrontation and variety; the general public and political nature of the spiritual traditions that make claims on and form electorate; and the solidarities that attach us to one another and let democratic motion. the writer argues that bringing those dimensions to expertise enriches our theories of democracy and is especially an important in an period of hyper-partisanship, accelerating inequality, and social conflicts regarding racial, sexual, and spiritual identities.
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Extra resources for The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer
Example text
Gadamer knows, however, that we can no longer rest this metaphysical approach on its traditional, theological grounding, and so he turns instead to language. As we have seen, Gadamer takes our existence to be fundamentally linguistic. In saying this, however, he does not mean that language is all there is—that there is no “there” there. He turns to language not to undermine metaphysics or to deny transcendence, but instead to ground the relationship between subject and object as a means to a revised metaphysics.
This is a substantial step forward, one supported by recent empirical studies, but I caution that the move to rhetoric should not come at the expense of dialogue. As Gadamer reminds us, true rhetoric remains closely tied to dialogue and understanding. ” A conversation remains outside the control of the participants; none of them can direct it, nor does anyone know how it will come out. It takes its own course, perhaps taking the participants in directions that none of them particularly intended, causing them to say things that they had not planned on, nor had necessarily even thought of before the conversation led them to it.
Participating in a genuine dialogue means that one allows oneself “to be conducted by the subject matter to which the partners in the dialogue are oriented”(1995, 367). This is the sense in which a conversation has its own spirit. It consists of a subject matter that, when pursued, directs the conversation in particular ways rather than others. 2 Gadamer takes up Plato’s approach to dialectic in his habilitation on the Philebus, first published in 1931 and later published in English as Plato’s Dialectical Ethics.
