خلاصة:
This essay explores Gadamer’s ambivalent relationship with modernity. Gadamer is a prominent critic of the Enlightenment project. His criticisms are both theoretical and practical. Theoretically، representationalism is at the center of modern epistemology for Gadamer. Practically، Gadamer sees the demotion of prudence (phronesis) as fundamental to the “bad” Enlightenment. Gadamer’s attempt to revive an appreciation of rhetoric is a way to the join the theoretical and practical dimensions of speech and life. The central representative philosopher of the Enlightenment for Gadamer is Kant. The antithetical thinker is Aristotle. Gadamer would have his Kant and his Aristotle too. The tension between these is at the heart of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.
ملخص الجهاز:
"Gadamer writes in a footnote in Truth and Method: We know that in his [Descartes’] letter to Mersenne of November 20, 1629, which Leibniz knew, Descartes had already developed, on the model of the creation of mathematical symbols, the idea of such a sign language of reason that would containthe whole of philosophy.
" He writes: …if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow, that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence has invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat: and therefore however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them.
Though Kant’s great positive contribution for Gadamer is his check on Enlightenment overweening pride in reason and his account of freedom in his ethics, we cannot leave our consideration of Gadamer’s complicated treatment of Kant without looking at the opening section of Truth and Method and Gadamer’s critique of Kant’s subjectivizing of aesthetics: "The radical subjectivization involved in Kant’s new of grounding aesthetics was truly epoch-making."