Hermeneutics or Critique of Ideology?
On the Gadamer-Habermas Debate
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In his essay “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” Paul Ricouer tells us that there are two mutually exclusive ways of approaching both text and life: one path is expressed by Gadamer, the other by Habermas. One goes by the name of “hermeneutics of tradition,” the other by the name “critique of ideology.” One sees misunderstanding as the obstacle to understanding, the other sees ideology as the true source of distortion. One sees our human existence as inherently dialogical; the other sees genuine dialogue as an ideal from which we are mostly alienated. One sees the task of social science as a clarification of our pre-reflective intuitions; the other sees it as a critical endeavor aimed at unmasking lies and myths. One sees tradition as a resource; the other grants no special authority to the past.
While the debate between Gadamer and Habermas may seem high falutin or academic, it seems to be at the core of so much of the contemporary culture wars. Gadamer’s approach is inherently more conservative in that it takes tradition and “prejudice” as the basis for thought. Habermas’s approach is inherently more “revolutionary” in that it believes one can start from scratch, using a-historical reason to criticize the prejudices of the past.
Habermas seems to be more in keeping with the Enlightenment (Kantian) tradition, while Gadamer is closer to romanticism 2.0. While the Enlightenment sees reason as universal, the romantics believed that culture precedes and enables reason. Herder, for example, thought that language determines thought, and that because languages differ, so must the worldviews of those who speak them. Habermas, by contrast offers us the dream of transcending one’s language and culture and entering into a technocratic code free of the burdens of identity.
If you want to straw-man either thinker, you’d say Gadamer is too apologetic for tradition, too incapable of realizing that our ability to leave our cultures or religions of birth proves we have a rational capacity that stands outside our given circumstance. Habermas, meanwhile, naively thinks he has transcended culture when all he has done is projected his own Germanic, European lineage as universal and tricked himself into thinking he can do without tradition and culture.
Gadamer taken to extreme smacks of relativism; Habermas taken to extreme turns us into computers, as if the only thing needed to improve society was a software update.
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