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50 | Hermeneutics and Utopia: From Hans-Georg Gadamer to Ernst Bloch (Part 1) (Patreon)

Published:
2022-10-17 10:00:07
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2026-06
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Content

In part one of our two-part mini-series on hermeneutics and utopia we discuss the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer in his 1983 text Praise of Theory. We talk about the importance of prejudice and tradition for self-understanding, ask whether the natural sciences or the human sciences have sole claim to truth, and praise the (qualified) freedom of theory from instrumental reason (continental philosophy even gets a positive shout-out!). The purpose of this mini-series is to assess the insights of hermeneutics for theory and social philosophy, so look forward to our Patron exclusive conclusion on Ernst Bloch!

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Praise of Theory, trans. Chris Dawson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Comments

allison brown

if you ever do any more episodes in this series, i think Lauren Berlant would make a great theorist—their most recent book, published posthumously, is called On the Inconvenience of Other People, and it also deals with hermeneutics and utopia. short version: it posits that inconvenience, the desire or willingness to be inconvenienced in certain ways, and which ways those end up being—all those have hermeneutical payoffs (in a similar way to how Gadamer describes the substance of social life as the way we experience people as surprises, or allow them to surprise us) especially in terms of the experience and reproduction of solidarity.

Paul Bowman

Still none the wiser as to what hermeneutics is supposed to mean in this context. Overall I'm afraid Gadamer won't be going on the reading pile because it just sounds like liberalism on stilts and life's too short. On the discussion at the end re people objecting to theory or philosophy on the grounds of "what practical use is this to the struggle now?", generally the most appropriate rejoinder is "what practical use are _you_ to the struggle right now?". The implied presumption behind the first question is that the questioner is already a viable fighter for radical change and doesn't have to go through any intermediary steps to prepare themselves to be of any use. Soldiers have to weapons training, antifas have to do martial arts and would-be agents of radical change first need to learn how to think critically and creatively. There is a dialectical relationship between social change and personal change and if people think they're in a position to prejudge all theory on the basis of its instrumental value, without having bothered to do any work on themselves, then they are part of the problem, imho.