The Nature of Political Theory

316 The Nature of Political Theory

economic, social, and evolutionaryconditionsin which language develops and is used,
that need rigorous attention and painstaking analysis from various knowledge pos-
itions. Only this comprehensive rigour will ensure that the potential, deeply subtle,
distortions, and forms of domination can come to light and potentially be eliminated.
This, in turn, supports the more philosophically orientated vocation to formulate
the logical, pragmatic, and practical conditions for universal, distortion-free open
speech. This also forms the basis for theories of discourses ethics, deliberative demo-
cracy, human rights, and law. Philosophy can articulate, then, what Habermas calls
the ‘general presuppositions of communicative action’ (Habermas 1979: 1). In this
sense, philosophy supports other dimensions of social, psychological, and evolution-
ary theory. Gadamer, however, represents another form of hermeneutics, which is
more intensely self-critically philosophical and sees all the dimensions of knowledge
throughthe ontology of language and the hermeneutic circle. Nothing can escape
this. This, I have suggested, has deep and subtle repercussions on the way we perceive
ethical and political practice. In itself, though, it is not a normative political theory.
Gadamer does not deny other spheres of knowledge. He is neither anti-science nor
anti-enlightenment, however, he does view these as ways or modes of understanding,
which are all, at root, linguistic. Further, they all presuppose prejudices and tradi-
tions. Gadamer does not provide any (what might be regarded as) rigorous resources
for analyzing the pathologies of human social and political life, but, he does remind
us philosophically of the finitude, historical mediation, and temporal nature of all
our knowledge claims. Thus, as suggested, many of Gadamer’s central arguments
concerning human finitude, fallibilism, and dialogic play contain indirect, subtle,
and complex implications for ethical and political theory, which are often missed by
critics of hermeneutics.

Notes

1. In fact, he posited that hermeneutics is about interpretation in general. Phenomena, which
   happen to us on a day by day basis need to be interpreted. Thus, hermeneutics can be read,
   on the broadest level, as the paradigm of systematic cognition.


2. ‘The whole context of the mind-constructed world emerges in the subject; it is the mind’s
   effort to determine the meaningful pattern of that world which links the individual, logical
   processes involved. On the one hand, the knowing subject creates this mind-constructed
   world and, on the other, strives to know it objectively. How, then, does the mental con-
   struction of the mind-constructed world make knowledge of mind-constructed reality
   possible? This is the problem of what I have called a Critique of Historical Reason’, Dilthey
   (1976: 207).


3. This would not be true though of Dilthey.


4. Sections 31–33, particularly, in Heidegger’sBeing and Time.


5. ‘A critical hermeneutics of facticity that calls Dasein back to itself and its possible freedom
   thus has the purpose of dismantling or deconstructing these traditional explications of
   Dasein which have become self-evident and resistant to criticism’, Grondin (1991: 99).


6. In Habermas this lifeworld, as far as one can ascertain, has a deeply rational content.