Part 1: The question of truth...

(b) The Guiding Concept of Humanism

(i) Bildung (Culture)

The concept of Bildung is one of four foundational concepts of the humanistic tradition which Gadamer believes may help liberate the human sciences from the artificial narrowness in which its methodology is caught. In other words, the human sciences can and should be understood more easily from the tradition of the concept of Bildung than from the modern idea of scientific method.

At its most brute level, Bildung is associated “with the idea of culture and designates primarily the properly human way of developing one’s natural talents and capacities” (9). Wilhelm von Humbolt argues that by Bildung “we mean something both higher and more inward, namely the disposition of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavor, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character” (9). We might think of Bildung as growth, in its richest sense. There are a few aspects of Bildung which we must note:

It is organic: Bildung is not a technical construction, but an inner process of formation and cultivation, and therefore constantly remains in a state of continual Bildung

It is process-oriented: Bildung has no goals outside itself and is not a goal, itself, but a process.

It is relational: Bildung is unlike the simple cultivation of talents, because the thing through which one is formed becomes completely one’s own (10).

It is historically bound and future-oriented: “To some extent everything that is received is absorbed, but in Bildung what is absorbed is not like a means that has lost its function. Rather, in acquired Bildung nothing disappears, but everything is preserved” (10).

Gadamer uses Hegel as a starting point. Hegel argues that a defining characteristic of a rational being is the separation from the immediate and the natural process of being in the world. It is from this separation, according to Hegel, that humanity strives to the level of becoming a “universal intellectual being,” which reciprocally requires the restraint of desire. In working toward a universal or abstract understanding, the human consciousness raises itself above the immediacy of its existence. This universal is not one thing but is any ‘capacity’ or working skill. In working to understand underlying, universal structures a person gains the sense of him or herself by taking the universal upon oneself. This work can be done both practically and theoretically.

“To recognize one’s own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of spirit, whose being consists only in returning to itself from what is other. Hence all theoretical Bildung, even acquiring foreign languages and conceptual worlds, is merely the continuation of a process of Bildung that begins much earlier. …Thus every individual is always engaged in the process of Bildung and in getting beyond his naturalness, inasmuch as the world into which he is growing is one that is humanly constituted through language and custom. Hegel emphasizes that a people gives itself its existence in its world. It works out from itself and thus exteriorizes what it is in itself” (13).

The core aspect here is that Bildung is an ongoing working between abstract other/universal and the self/particular. “Thus what constitutes the essence of Bildung is not clearly alienation as such, but the return to oneself – which presupposes alienation, to be sure” (13). Gadamer adds that we can acknowledge what Hegel has to say about Bildung without having to be tied to Hegel’s concept of absolute spirit.

The idea of memory is, then, key component to Bildung, because Bildung is not simply the compilation of an encyclopedic knowledge. Instead, memory is also part of the process of Bildung and “must be formed; for memory is not memory for anything and everything” (14). For Gadamer, memory is not “a psychological faculty” (14). Instead it is “an essential element of the finite historical being of man. In a way that has long been insufficiently noticed, forgetting is closely related to keeping in mind and remembering; forgetting is not merely an absence and a lack but, as Nietzsche pointed out, a condition of the life of the mind. Only by forgetting does the mind have the possibility of total renewal, the capacity to see everything with fresh eyes, so that what is long familiar fuses with the new into a many leveled unity” (14). Bildung requires a letting go of the idea of memory as factual photograph, and instead an understanding that memory is shaped, formed and reconstructed as part of the process of forgetting and discovering.

“If all that presupposes Bildung, then what is in question is not a procedure or behavior but what has to come into being” (15). “…the general characteristic of Bildung: keeping oneself open to what is other – to other, more universal points of view. It embraces a sense of proportion and distance in relation to itself, and hence consists in rising above itself to universality. To distance oneself from oneself and from one’s private purposes means to look at these in the way that others see them” (15).


(ii) Sensus communis

‘Common sense,’ at its most basic level, is having a rich understanding of the sensibility of a group of people, as well as the ability to employ that sensibility appropriately in unique contexts and situations.

Sensus communis might be represented by the contrast between (a) saying something well and (b) saying the right thing. Here, the former is subsumed under the latter, in which the aesthetic merges with the moral, ethical, political and relational. We might also use the contrast between (a) the scholar and (b) the wise man, in which the former is again subsumed under the latter. Sensus communis “…is a kind of genius for practical life, but less a gift than the constant task of “renewed adaptation to new situations” (23).

Gadamer outlines the history of the term with respect to several thinkers: Vico, Shaftesbury, Bergson, Oetinger.

“By sensus communis, according to Shaftesbury, the humanists understood a sense of common weal, but also ‘love of the community or society, natural affection, humanity, oblingingness’” (22). “What Shaftesbury is thinking of is not so much a capacity given to all men, part of the natural law...(but more like) the attitude of the man who understands a joke a tells one because he is aware of a deeper union with his interlocutor” (22).

“Oetinger expressly distinguishes rational truths from receptivity to common truths – “sense truths,” useful to all men at all times and places” (26). “Its hermeneutical meaning can be illustrated by this sentence: ‘the ideas found in Scripture and in the works of God are the more fruitful and purified the more that each can be seen in the whole and all can be seen in each.’ Here what people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like to call ‘intuition’ is brought back to its metaphysical foundation: that is, to the structure of living, organic being in which the whole is in each individual: ‘the whole of life has its center in the heart, by which means of common sense grasps countless things all the same time’” (26).

A core component of sensus communis is that “more profound than all knowledge of hermeneutical rules is the application to oneself” and one’s unique context (26).

Yet, “the concept was emptied (of all political and moral content) and intellectualized by the German enlightenment” (27). In doing so, lost its critical significance and, instead, “was understood as a purely theoretical faculty.”

For Gadamer, “…the human sciences (should) work on the concept of sensus communis. For their object, the moral and historical existence of humanity, as it takes shape in our words and deeds, is itself decisively determined by the sensus communis. Thus a conclusion based on universals, a reasoned proof, is not sufficient because what is decisive is the circumstances” (20). Further, “The possibilities of rational proof and instruction do not fully exhaust the sphere of knowledge” (21). The basic problem is, then, that “the human sciences’ claim to know something true came to be measured by a standard foreign to it – namely the methodical thinking of modern science” (21).

In other words, the problem with the human sciences employment of the inductive method is that it does not organically account for the unique, particular contexts and circumstances in which its object of study occurs. Instead, the inductive method becomes a type of Procrustean bed for its object of study.