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The Enigma of Health: Hans-Georg Gadamer at 100

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Fred Dallmayr
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Extract

As Gadamer, the “dean” of European philosophy, turns 100 this year, it behooves philosophers and reflective people in general to ponder the relation between philosophy and “good life,” and more broadly between philosophy and natural health. As it happens, Gadamer himself has extensively reflected on this issue, especially in a book titled The Enigma of Health. The essay first recapitulates some of the main arguments of Gadamer's text, focusing on the difference between the growing scientific arsenal of medical intervention (combatting illness) and the unforced and un-constructed maintenance of human health through attentiveness to “nature's way.” The middle section inserts the text into the context of Gadamer's larger opus, exploring particularly the connection between health and such key Gadamerian concerns as “appropriateness,” “natural rightness,” and “mimesis.” The conclusion traces affinities between Gadamer and the teachings of Heidegger and Adorno, while also probing the political implications of his text for the maintenance of human freedom in the face of expertocracy and the reduction of politics to ideological blueprints.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , Spring 2000 , pp. 327 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2000

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References

1 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, trans. Gaiger, Jason and Walker, Nicholas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 5–6, 38–39.Google Scholar Compare also the comment (p. 105): “Through modern science and its experimental methods we compel nature to offer up answers. But in doing so we inflict a form of torture on it.”

2 ibid., pp. 4,17,101 (translation slightly altered).

3 ibid., pp. 32–33, 39.

4 ibid., pp. vii–viii, 22, 89. As Gadamer adds (p. 89): “Medicine is the only science which ultimately does not make or produce anything. Rather it is one which must participate in the wonderful capacity of life to renew itself, to set itself aright⃜ Recovery here does not only mean a return to the harmony of waking and sleeping, of metabolic change, of respiration and all the other vital functions involved in life which someone who has been sick must learn to coordinate once again. It also means meeting the challenge of finding a way back from the condition of social disruption which illness entails and of taking up again one's work or occupation, the sphere in which we actually live our lives.”

5 ibid., pp. 107,113–15,130–31.

6 ibid., pp. 36–37, 41–42,115.

7 ibid., pp. 98–99, 116,132–35. In addition to The Statesman, Gadamer also refers to the Republic (Plato's “great utopia”) where “the true part of the citizen in the ideal state is described in terms of health, as a harmony in which everything is in accord, in which even the fateful problem of governing and being governed is resolved through reciprocal agreement and mutual interaction” (p.75).

8 Gadamer, , Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Weinsheimer, Joel and Marshall, Donald G. (New York: Crossroad, 1989), pp. 3–5Google Scholar (translation slightly altered). In making this point, Gadamer obviously relies on the distinction between “nomothetic” and “idiographic” sciences familiar from Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband, though without sharing their preoccupation with methodology.

9 ibid., pp. 11, 21–22.

10 ibid., especially p. 519, note 26. Compare in this context also Gadamer's critique of a dogmatic and anti-hermeneutical “natural worldview” (as espoused, for example, by Karl Löwith); pp. 499–501, 532.

11 ibid., p. 105. As he adds (p. 108): “Play is really limited to presenting itself; its mode of being is that of self-disclosure. Now self-disclosure is a universal ontological characteristic of nature.”

12 Gadamer, , The Relevance of the Beautiful, and Other Essays, trans. Walker, Nicholas, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 83, 90–91, 99,101,103–104 (translation slightly altered)Google Scholar. The two essays date respectively from 1965 and 1966.

13 Gadamer, , “Wort und Bild—‘so wahr, so seiend’” (1992), in Gadamer Lesebuch, ed. Grondin, Jean (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1997), pp. 188–91,193–94.Google Scholar

14 Gadamer, , “Vom Wort zum Begriff” (1995), in Gadamer Lesebuch, pp. 104–105.Google Scholar

15 Heidegger, Martin, “Letter on Humanism” (1947), in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. Krell, David F. (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 193,242.Google Scholar The “Letter” also contains the famous phrase that thinking “lets being be” (p. 236). Heidegger moreover brings such thinking in connection with the search for das Heile, meaning both the healthy and the “hale”—a subtlety which the English translation fails to notice (p. 237).

16 Heidegger, , “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936), in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. Krell, , pp. 168–74;Google Scholar for the German text see “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” in Heidegger, , Holzwege (Frankfurt-Main: Klostermann, 1950), especially pp. 30–40Google Scholar. See also “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Physis; Aristotles' Physik B, 1” (1939) in Heidegger, , Wegmarken (Frankfurt-Main: Klostermann, 1967), pp. 309–37 (on physis and art especially, p. 347)Google Scholar. The latter essay also contains revealing comments on illness and health and on the contrast between the technology of modern medical science and the art of healing, pp. 325–27.

17 Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, E. B. (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), pp. 14–15,179–80Google Scholar; and Aesthetic Theory, trans. Lenhardt, C., ed. Adorno, Gretel and Tiedemann, Rolf (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), especially pp. 453–55Google Scholar. On the relation between Adorno and Heidegger see my “Adorno and Heidegger” in Between Freiburg and Frankfurt: Toward a Critical Ontology (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), pp. 44–71.Google Scholar

18 Gadamer, , The Enigma of Health, pp. 19,109Google Scholar. The same collection contains an essay on “Authority and Critical Freedom” where Gadamer carefully distinguishes between proper authority and “authoritarianism” (pp. 117–24).

19 Gadamer, , “The Nature of Things and the Language of Things” (1960), in his Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans, and ed. Linge, David E. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 69–72Google Scholar. As one should note, Gadamer differentiates the cited expressions again carefully from a simplistic and dogmatic “naturalism” or objectivism which undermines and erodes human freedom. Thus, countering the invocations of a superior divine reality (Gerhard Krüger) or of a humanly indifferent natural world (Karl Löwith), he asks whether these assaults on human “subjectivism” are not a very “dubious battle cry” which falls far short of the insights of classical metaphysics—to the extent that the latter transcended “the dualism of subjectivity and will, on the one hand, and object and being-in-itself, on the other, by conceiving their preexistent correspondence with each other” (p. 74).

20 Heidegger has often been taken to task for not sufficiently differentiating between modern ideologies, and especially for not giving modern “liberalism” its due. The above point is merely that in one respect (not in all respects) modem ideologies are similar. For a strong attack by Heidegger on modern politics as a politics wedded to mastery and “machination” (Machenschaft) see his recently published Die Geschichte des Seyns (1938–1940), ed. Trawny, Peter, in Heidegger, , Gesamtansgabe, vol. 69 (Frankfurt-Main: Klostermann, 1998), especially pp. 46–50,179–214.Google Scholar

21 As it seems to me, the “language of things” often operates most eloquently not in speech acts or argumentative discourses but in the suffering of the marginalized and oppressed. In recent political theory, the notion of a free and non-manipulative praxis was articulated especially by Hannah Arendt (despite a peculiar aversion to Aristotle) and in part by Michael Oakeshott. In a “non-Western” context, the above mode of praxis seems to resonate with the notion of karma yoga as articulated in the Bhagavad Gita and as exemplified in the life of Gandhi.

22 See The Way of Life according to Laotzu, trans. Bynner, Witter (New York: Perigee Books, 1972), pp. 46 (chap. 17) and 58 (chap. 29)Google Scholar. As the text adds (p. 58): “The earth is like a vessel so sacred/That at the mere approach of the profane/It is marred/And when they reach out their fingers it is gone.” Regarding Buddhism see Nishitani, Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Bragt, Jan Van (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 159–60Google Scholar; also my essay “Heidegger and Zen Buddhism: A Salute to Keiji Nishitani” in The Other Heidegger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 200–226Google Scholar. The essay presents a comparison of the notions of “thing” and “nothing” in Heidegger and Nishitani.

23 In my reading of Confucianism I am deeply influenced by the work of Wei-Ming, Tu, especially his Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985)Google Scholar and Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979).Google Scholar

24 Gadamer, , “Vom Wort zum Begriff” in Gadamer Lesebuch, p. 104, and The Enigma of Health, p. 85Google Scholar. As Gadamer adds in the latter text (p. 78): “Here lies my own deepest hope, or perhaps I should say dream: that from the shared inheritance which is gradually being built up for us from all the different cultures across the globe we might eventually leam how to recognize our mutual needs and to address our respective difficulties.”