Gadamer‟s Basic understanding of Erlebnis and Erfahrung

Gadamer‟s Basic understanding of Erlebnis and Erfahrung Agnik Bhattacharya PG-1,109 Department of History Presidency University Kolkata, India

 Abstract This article mainly deals with different feelings, the basic understanding and the process in which Gadamer distinguishes between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, which both are experiences. According to Gadamer, it differed and the notion of education along with it plays a big part in framing ones idea about different experiences. This article also focuses on Gadamer‟s understanding as argument, know- how, application and translation and the hermeneutical circle. I therefore have tried to sum up the different ideas of Hans- Georg Gadamer through this critical analysis of mine.

I Gadamer while presenting his own ideas or analyzing concepts likes to follow the lead of language. The fact that the basic notions of Gadamer were unfolding often had very different meanings and does not bother him much. „Truth and Method’, which has been referred back to a particular origin of hermeneutical problem of understanding, but according to Gadamer all pertain to a certain phenomenon that has to be comprehended in it unity.1 In understanding the manifestations of a lifelong experience (Erlebnis), one can quite naturally associate his understanding with an epistemological or cognitive 1

According to Gadamer, this could also be seen as one of the basic insights of his philosophy “every specialization is associated with a certain narrowing of horizon”.

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process. Similarly to understand (Verstehen) is, in general, to grasp something (“I get it”), to see things more clearly, to be able to integrate a particular meaning into a larger frame. This basic notion of understanding was certainly dominant in the hermeneutical theories of the 19th century. 2 In Truth and Method, Gadamer evolves in this regard the very revealing example of the painter, the sculptor, or the musician who would claim that any linguistic rendition or explanation of his work would be beside the point. The artist can only discard such a linguistic interpretation, Gadamer contends, in lights of some other “interpretation” that would be more to the point.

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According to Gadamer, unlike the verb erleben, the noun Erlebnis became common only in the 1870‟s. Its first appearance, seemingly, is in one of Hegel‟s letters. The world appears equally seldom in the fifties and sixties, and appears suddenly with some frequency in the seventies. Since Erlebnis is a secondary formation from the verb erleben, which is older and appears often in the age of the Goethe, erleben means primarily “to be still alive when something happens”3. Thus the word suggests the immediacy with which something real is grasped- unlike something which one presumes to know but which is unattested by one‟s own experience.4 Dilthey‟s famous title „Das Erlebnis and die Dichtung (Experience and Poetry)‟, gives us a glance back at the unconscious prehistory of the word, since this essay precedes the version of 1877 and its later reworking in Das Erlebnis and die Dichtung (1905).In this essay Dilthey compares Goethe with Rousseau, and in order to describe the new kind of writing that Rousseau based on the world of his inner experiences , he employs the expression das Erleben, this appears clearly in a passage from which Dilthey cut the word “Erlebnis”, in later editions. The coined word Erlebnis, of course, expresses the criticism of Enlightenment rationalism, which, following Rousseau, emphasized the concept of life (Leben). The man 2

(ed. Dostal 2004) (Gadamer 2004) 4 Both meanings obviously lies behind the coinage Erlebnis: both the immediacy, which precedes all interpretation, reworking, and communication, and merely offers a starting point for interpretation. 3

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concept of Erlebnis mainly originated from Dilthey‟s concept of Erlebnis which clearly contains two elements, the pantheistic and the positivist, the experience (Erlebnis) and still more is result (Erlebnis)5. What we call an Erlebnis in this sense thus means something unforgettable and irreplaceable, something whose meaning cannot be exhausted by conceptual determination. Thus, at the end of our conceptual analysis of experience we can see the affinity between the structure of Erlebnis as such and the mode of being of the aesthetic.

III The entire point of his analysis of the hermeneutical circle concerned indeed this tentative nature of understanding. The basic hermeneutical experience (in the strong sense of Erfahrung), Gadamer argues that is the experience that our anticipations of understanding have been shattered. Most experience, true experience that, that delivers insight, is negative, he insights.6 In Truth and Method especially in the second edition, Gadamer draws form this conclusion that true experience must thus lead to openness to ever newer experience. Someone with experience, he argues, will also be ready to leave things open, to even tolerate a plurality of possible interpretations, because no single one can really be exhaustive. Gadamer‟s Socratic wisdom clearly finds expression in this hope that the insight in the prejudiced character and negativity of hermeneutic understanding can only lead to further openness. But a shrewd critic of Gadamer, Claus van Bormann, drew a very different consequence from Gadamer‟s analysis of the finite and prejudiced character of every human understanding. He thus spoke of the „Zweideutigkeit’, the equivocal nature of the hermeneutical experience. But the fact that Gadamer had stressed openness rather than closure shows in what direction he wished his hermeneutics would lead. So Gadamer never disputes that one must distinguish between “the true prejudices, by which we understand from the false ones, by which we misunderstand”.

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The concept of Erlebnis is primarily, purely epistemological. Its theological meaning is taken into account, but it is not conceptually determined. 6 Ibid, pp:44-45

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Gadamer‟s prime example for the distinction between true and false prejudices was the experience of art, because it is only through time that we come to recognize what is of value in art and what is only passing. So he defended in 1960 the strong thesis that “it is only temporal distance that can solve the critical question of hermeneutics”, i.e. the distinction to be made between true and false prejudices. Gadamer modified the text of “Truth and Method”, when it was published in his complete works edition in 1986 and, instead of “it is only temporal distance”, he then precedently wrote: „Often, temporal distance can solve the critical question of hermeneutics.’ This is a very minor change linguistically, but it highlights Gadamer‟s own willingness to revive the interpretations, that have proven too restrictive or untenable. For Gadamer, understanding is essentially open, but also a risk, this tentative nature of our understanding might be unsettling to more methodologically attended hermeneutical theories, which will settle for nothing less than methodical certainty.

IV The concept of aesthetic cultivation (Bildung) historically developed from the meaning of the concept of “aesthetic consciousness”. But today we do not find this term „aesthetic‟, what Kant still associated with the word when he called the doctrine of space and time “transandental aesthetics’. It is true that Gadamer was able to follow Kant himself, in as much as Kant had already accorded taste the significance of a transition from sensory pleasure to moral feelings. But when Schiller proclaimed that art is the practice of freedom, he was referring more to Fichte than to Kant.7 Traditionally the purpose of „art‟, which also includes all conscious transformation of nature for human use, was to supplement and fill the gaps left open by nature. Art becomes a standpoint of its own and establishes its own autonomous claim to supremacy. But this raises a new obstacle to overcoming than Kantian dualism of the world of the senses and the world of morality, as they are overcome in the freedom of aesthetic play and the harmony of the work of art. But the phenomenological return to aesthetic experience (Erfahrung) teaches us that the latter does not think in terms of this relationship, but, rather, regards, what it experiences as genuine truth. Correctively, the nature of aesthetic experience is 7

Ibid, pp:70-72

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such that it cannot be disappointed by any more genuine experience of reality. The art of “beautiful experience” is opposed to reality, so aesthetic consciousness includes an alienation from reality- it is a form of the “alienated spirit”, which show Hegel understood culture (Bildung). What we call a work of art and experience (erleben) aesthetically depends on a process of abstraction. Aesthetic experience (Erlebnis) is directed towards what is supposed to be the work of proper – what it ignores are the extra- aesthetic elements that cling to it , such as purpose, function , the significance of its content. It practically defines aesthetic consciousness to say it differentiates what is aesthetically intended from everything that is outside the aesthetic sphere. Thus this is a specifically aesthetic kind of differentiation “the work loses its place and the world to which it belongs in so far as it belongs instead to aesthetic consciousness”.8

V On this topic the fundamental essay by Georg van Lukas, “The subject – Object relation in Aesthetics,” reveals the problem. He describes a Hercalilean structure to the aesthetic sphere, by which he means that the unity of the aesthetic object is not actually given. The work of art is only an empty form; a mere nodal point in the possible variety of aesthetic experiences (Erlebnisse), and the aesthetic objects exists in these experiences alone. 9 Self understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self, and includes the unity and integrity of the other. This raises the question of how can do justice to the truth of aesthetic experience (Erfahrung) and overcome the radical subjectivization of the aesthetic that began Kant‟s critic of Aesthetic Judgment. However, it is necessary to take the concept of experience (Erfahrung), more broadly than Kant did, so that the experience of the work of art can be understood as experience. Thus our concern is to view the experience of art in such a way that it is understood as experience (Erfahrung). The experience of art should not be falsified by being turned into a possession of aesthetic culture, thus neutralizing its special claim. The question of the truth of art in particular can serve to prepare the way for this more ranging 8

The concept of aesthetic differentiation involves certain theoretical difficulties which it took a form of cultivation (Bildung). 9 Ibid , pp:82-83

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question, because the experience of work includes understanding, and thus itself represents a hermeneutical phenomenon- but not all in the sense of a scientific method.10

Bibliography: ed. Dostal, Robert J. The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer. London: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gadamer, Hans- Georg. Gadamer Truth and Method. New York: Continuum Publishing group, 2004. Mendelson, Jack. "The Habermos- Gadamer Debate." New German Critique, No.18, 1979: 44-73. Richter, Melvin. "Begriffsgeschichte and the History of ideas." Journal of History of ideas,Vol.4, No.2, Apr- Jun 1987: 247-283. - "Conceptual History(Begriffsgeschichte) and Political Theory." Politiical Theory, Vol.14, No.4, Nov.1983: 604-637.

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Rather understanding belongs to the encounter with work of art itself, and so this belonging can be illuminated only on the basis of the, ‘mode of being of the work of art itself’.

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