4 - Gadamer's universalism: the limits of hermeneutic authority

Summary

Hermeneutics and the end of modernism

Today's academy is a compromise between classical-medieval forms of authority and the ideals of modern science, Enlightenment rationalism, and democratic liberalism. Recently, however, these older conceptions of authority have suffered a concurrence of heterodox assaults: (1) on philosophy by the hermeneutics of suspicion, (2) on natural science by sociologists of knowledge, (3) on literary criticism by political and gender critique, and (4) on empirical social science by genealogists of power. This new counter-orthodoxy hopes to add to the quarrel of ancients and moderns a third antagonistic perspective, one whose resistance to traditional and modern universalisms seeks to give a more radical emphasis to historical uniqueness, freedom of identity, and the contextual limits of theoretical claims to social authority.

One common theme among these challenges concerns the inadequacy of philosophical and scientific methods to the problems of meaning and truth, with consequent doubts about the human sciences as sciences. Whereas the nineteenth century had witnessed Dilthey's defense of the autonomy of historical sciences against positivism, some postmoderns are less concerned to insulate the human sciences from physics than to turn the problems of language and interpretation against the very possibility of an objectivist science. As a final reversal of philosophy's struggle to ground language in theory, radical postmoderns seek to undermine theory with the instability of meaning.

Some of the irrational aspects of postmodern critique have lent to its emergence a distinctly radical flavor, an appearance that has not been lost on recent academic politics and its media presentations.