The Democratic Theory of

HA N S -G E O RG
GA DA ME R
Darren
Walhof
The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer
 Darren Walhof

The Democratic
Theory of Hans-­
Georg Gadamer
Darren Walhof
Political Science
Grand Valley State University
Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA

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DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-46864-8

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Dedicated to the memory of
Bernard Walhof, 1944–2012
 Preface and Acknowledgements

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” Orwell famously wrote in 1946,
“needs a constant struggle” (Orwell 1968, 125). This is particularly true
when it comes to the practices of democracy, and the central argument of
this book is that the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer
helps us envision aspects of democracy that are right in front of our noses
but difficult to see. His work helps us do this, I argue, by shifting our view
away from the citizen-subject that underlies much of democratic theory
and to that which exists between citizens.
Broadly speaking, hermeneutics has to do with the theory or practice
of interpretation. Originally the term referred to methods of interpret-
ing sacred texts and legal documents, but the Romantic period saw its
extension to the interpretation of a broader range of literary texts. The
Historical School of the late nineteenth century further expanded the
scope of hermeneutics to include history itself, detailing methods for dis-
cerning the intentions of historical actors and the meaning of historical
events. As I explain more fully in Chap. 4, Gadamer develops his philo-
sophical hermeneutics partly in response to the Historical School and by
building on the work of Martin Heidegger, who regarded interpretation
as constitutive of all human understanding. Heidegger understood inter-
pretation as a mode of human existence rather than a set of methods rel-
evant only to the study of texts and history.1
1
 As Jean Grondin points out, the history of hermeneutics is of course far more complicated
than this (1994, 3). His book provides an excellent overview of that history, as does Richard
Palmer’s book Hermeneutics (1969). Dallmayr’s work is also helpful (2010, 103–10).

vii
viii  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In Truth and Method, Gadamer developed hermeneutical philosophy by

focusing on the ways in which we are necessarily historically and linguisti-
cally situated beings. His analysis takes the form of a defense of tradition,
authority, and prejudice against what he called the Enlightenment’s “preju-
dice against prejudice.” In Gadamer’s view, Enlightenment thinking had
led to an unfortunate and erroneous dichotomy between reason and tradi-
tion, in which only those things that could be proven through objective and
detached methods warranted the designation of truth. Against this view,
Gadamer argues that we cannot escape our historical embeddedness in this
way since the prejudices we have received from tradition always already
shape our view and, indeed, are the condition for understanding itself.
Gadamer characterizes the nature of understanding through his well-­
known metaphor of a fusion of horizons. The horizon always forms the
context for our range of vision, and it is always against the backdrop of
the horizon that something is brought to focal awareness. The horizon
moves with us as we change position and focus, and without it we would
be disoriented and lost. A text or a historical artifact is also situated within
a horizon, and so part of the task of the interpreter is to reconstruct this
historical horizon. Gadamer argues that when one understands the truth
that speaks from tradition, the result is a fusion of the horizon of the text
and the horizon of the interpreter. On this account, understanding some-
thing, whether a text, a historical artifact, a work of art, or a subject of
conversation, is not the result of method but rather has the character of an
event that happens to us.
The publication of Truth and Method in 1960 solidified Gadamer’s
standing as a significant figure in German philosophy and brought him
to the attention of philosophers in Europe and North America. This
was particularly true after Jürgen Habermas criticized the book, initiat-
ing an exchange that became known as the Gadamer-Habermas debate.
By 1970, a festschrift for Gadamer on his 70th birthday contained essays
by Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Ernst Tugendhat, Karl Löwith, and Paul
Ricoeur, in addition to several by Gadamer’s students (Grondin 2003a,
310). The translation of Truth and Method into English in 1975 helped
bring Gadamer’s work to a wider international audience, and his inquiry
into the nature and significance of understanding in human life eventually
proved influential across a range of disciplines, including literary theory,
rhetoric, continental philosophy, and theology.
In political theory, Gadamer’s work has been important in debates over
interpretive methods in the social sciences and methods of textual interpre-
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  ix

tation in the history of political thought. However, with a few important

exceptions, his writings have generally been neglected by democratic theo-
rists. This is partly due to the fact that both critical theorists and decon-
structionists branded Truth and Method as conservative because of its
emphasis on tradition, authority, and continuity. According to Habermas,
in emphasizing the linguistic character of our existence, Gadamer failed
to recognize that language itself can be ideological, something that could
be transcended, in Habermas’ view, only through critical reflection.
According to Jacques Derrida, Gadamer’s portrayal of understanding as a
fusion of horizons masked a will to power that treats the other as a mere
instrument for one’s own understanding, thereby denying the otherness
of the other. For both Habermas and Derrida, then, Gadamer’s herme-
neutics cannot offer grounds for critique of existing linguistic, ideological,
and political practices. This reading has tended to direct democratic theo-
rists away from Gadamer’s writings.
The exceptions include, most prominently, Fred Dallmayr and Georgia
Warnke. In both Beyond Orientalism (1996) and Integral Pluralism
(2010), Dallmayr analyzes cross-cultural encounters using Gadamer’s
account of understanding as a fusion of horizons. Likewise, in Alternative
Visions (1998), he employs Gadamer’s concept of Bildung (formation or
education) to shed light on the relationship between culture and eco-
nomic development. Warnke has used insights from Gadamer to shed
light on domestic policy issues. In Legitimate Differences (1999), she uses
his account of understanding to argue for treating debates over thorny
social issues (abortion, pornography, affirmative action, and surrogacy) as
interpretative disagreements rather than disagreements about principle. In
a subsequent book, After Identity (2008), she uses a set of case studies to
argue that we should take an interpretive approach in theorizing identity.
Dallmayr and Warnke have demonstrated the relevance and fruitful-
ness of Gadamer’s work for thinking about contemporary challenges to
democracy. This book extends their work by arguing that Gadamer offers
an important and unique contribution to democratic theory. It makes
this case by bringing works in democratic theory into conversation with a
broad range of Gadamer’s writings: his early work on Plato and Aristotle;
his development of philosophical hermeneutics in Truth and Method and
subsequent disputes with Habermas and Derrida; and his later essays and
speeches on science, technology, reason, solidarity, and friendship. My
book enacts, in other words, a fusion of horizons between Gadamer’s
thought and important strands in contemporary democratic theory. This
x  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

fusion reveals a number of things. First, it reveals the ways that democratic
theory tends to presume citizen-subjects who through reflection can dis-
tance themselves from their own commitments and prejudices. Second, it
shows how this presumption obscures important dimensions of our dem-
ocratic practices, particularly those not reducible to such self-conscious
citizen-subjects. Third, it demonstrates that Gadamer’s thought offers us a
means of bringing these obscured dimensions to light. In so doing, finally,
this project reveals the ways in which his work provides critical insights on
our democratic practices.
This argument unfolds through an analysis of core, interrelated con-
cepts in Gadamer’s thought: practical philosophy, truth, understand-
ing, tradition, friendship, and solidarity. Chapter 1 situates Gadamer as
a political thinker through an analysis of his account of practical philoso-
phy. Rejecting the modern divide between theory and practice, Gadamer
instead argues that social and political affairs necessarily involve contex-
tualized judgments about both ends and means, an approach he recovers
from the Greeks. Given this, the role of the political theorist is not as
the expert who stands apart from political reality to offer an explanatory
account but as a situated agent who assists others by bringing to aware-
ness things that might otherwise remain obscured. I call this practical phi-
losophy as the discipline of paying attention, and I argue that democratic
theory as practical philosophy ought to draw our attention to political and
social realities that have become hard to see or that are taken for granted.
Chapter 2 focuses on the possibility of truth in democratic politics. I
first outline a conception of truth, gleaned from Gadamer’s major works,
as knowledge of the Good that has become sedimented in our language.
As critics of Gadamer have noted, however, this conception of truth
potentially leaves us with few critical resources, since we would remain
trapped in the dominant ideologies inherent in our language. In response
to these critics, I argue that Gadamer’s conception of truth has a sec-
ond dimension—namely, the disclosure of the thing itself (die Sache)—a
dimension that emerges more clearly in some of his essays. As an event in
which something is recognized as familiar but also new, this disclosure of
truth, I suggest, enables us to evaluate existing democratic practices and
structures, even as we remain inescapably linguistic beings.
Chapter 3 argues that the possibility of understanding in dialogue, the
heart of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, reorients our views of democratic dis-
course and reveals the potential for forging common ground even in divi-
sive political contexts. I draw on Gadamer’s analysis of conversation to
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  xi

engage in a sympathetic though pointed critique of theories of deliberative

democracy, the dominant approach to democratic theory in the last few
decades. I argue that deliberative theorists are simultaneously too optimis-
tic and too pessimistic: they are too optimistic about the epistemic capaci-
ties of democratic citizens, and they are too pessimistic about the potential
of dialogue for forging common ground, a potential that is revealed when
we move away from a subject-centered account of deliberation that focuses
on reason-giving to one that emphasizes the emergence of a shared lan-
guage about a shared subject. The approach I develop argues for the vital
necessity of a political culture of face-to-face dialogue, in which citizens
and especially political leaders engage with each other about public prob-
lems in ways attuned to the possibility of free responses from others.
Chapter 4 builds on the previous chapters by taking up the question
of religion in democratic politics, a pressing issue among ordinary citi-
zens and democratic theorists alike. Among democratic theorists, I argue,
religion gets cast primarily in epistemological terms, as assent to a set of
theological beliefs. This approach treats religion as apolitical and ahistori-
cal in its essence and, thus, from the outset as an interloper on politics. I
develop an alternative approach built on an interpretation of Gadamer’s
conception of tradition as twofold: (1) tradition as that which forms our
unreflective prejudgments or prejudices and (2) tradition as an ongoing,
reflective, collective re-narration of the past. Whereas treating religion in
epistemological terms leads democratic theorists to focus on the distinction
between secular and religious reasons, highlighting the tradition-structure
of religion clarifies the role democratic politics plays in both reinforcing
unreflective religious prejudices and also re-narrating the identities of reli-
gious communities and individuals. I examine the shifting perspectives of
evangelical Christians in the US on climate change and same-sex marriage
to illustrate this complex relationship between religion and politics.
Chapter 5 argues that Gadamer’s later, post-Truth and Method writings
offer an account of solidarity that helps us conceptualize the bonds that
connect citizens, even in an age marked by hyper-partisanship and social
conflict. Gadamer’s conception of solidarity stands in contrast both to uni-
versal conceptions, on the one hand, and what I call identification concep-
tions, on the other. In different ways, these two approaches cast solidarity
in terms of a pre-political recognition of commonality, thereby subsuming
difference. I argue instead for conceptualizing solidarity in terms of his-
torically contingent bonds that, first, are not necessarily based on evident
similarities and, second, emerge through democratic practices themselves.
xii  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Through an analysis of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that

emerged in September 2011, I demonstrate how this account of solidar-
ity helps us see the connections that constitute political communities and
underlie democratic action. The bonds disclosed by OWS were not neces-
sarily those of shared interests or a shared identity; instead, they are best
seen as temporary manifestations of a shared life together that arises from
encounters among those who are, and remain, diverse. This framework
enables us to assess OWS and similar movements not in terms of policy or
electoral outcomes but as cases of solidarity-disclosing civic action.

I have for years been a recreational cyclist and a fan of the sport, and
I have also raced on occasion. One of the great things about cycling is
that it is simultaneously an individual and team endeavor. While it is ulti-
mately your own training, fitness level, and perseverance that will deter-
mine how well you ride or high you place, you also depend heavily on your
riding mates for companionship, encouragement, safety, and assistance.
Sometimes your legs are good and you take long turns pulling at the front;
other times all you can do is get behind someone’s wheel and draft while
you try to find energy reserves for the miles ahead.
Writing a book is similar. While the arguments, ideas, and words are
ultimately my own, they have come to fruition only with the compan-
ionship, encouragement, and assistance of others. During the years I
have been working on it, I have greatly benefited from those who read
draft versions of chapters, provided comments on conference papers, and
helped me clarify my thoughts and arguments in conversation. At the risk
of inadvertently omitting someone, I am pleased to thank the following
members of the scholarly peloton for their help: Lauren Swayne Barthold,
Susan Bickford, David Billings, Jeffrey Bos, Simone Chambers, Maria
Cimitile, Fred Dallmayr, Charles Devellennes, Mary Dietz, Doug Dow,
Steven Gerencser, Simona Goi, Ruth Groenhout, David Gutterman, Will
Katerberg, Ron Kuipers, Alex Livingston, Jill Locke, Rob Martin, Dean
Mathiowetz, Brandon Morgan-Olsen, Andy Murphy, Amit Ron, Stavroula
Soukara, Jacinda Swanson, David Vessey, Matt Walhout, Georgia Warnke,
Karen Zivi, and Lambert Zuidervaart. Two more scholars deserve special
thanks. My friend Clarence Joldersma read multiple versions of most of
the chapters, and our conversations about them were invaluable. Derek
Peterson has been a friend and intellectual companion for over 20 years.
Although we inhabit different fields of study, his influence on my thinking
has been significant and is evident throughout this book.
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  xiii

I would like to thank my colleagues in the Political Science Department

at Grand Valley State University for their encouragement and collegiality.
Thanks especially to Mark Richards, who as Department Chair has helped
me carve out time to pursue my scholarly agenda. A sabbatical leave from
Grand Valley in 2010 allowed me to do the initial research for Chaps.
2 and 4. I spent that sabbatical at the University of Toronto’s Centre
for Ethics, and I am grateful to the Centre and its Director at the time,
Melissa Williams, for providing a wonderfully hospitable and stimulating
environment for thinking and writing.
I thank Chris Robinson and the rest of the team at Palgrave Macmillan
for shepherding the project into print. An earlier version of Chap. 2
appeared as “Exposure and Disclosure: The Risk of Hermeneutical
Truth in Democratic Politics,” in Truth Matters: Knowledge, Politics,
Ethics, Religion, edited by Lambert Zuidervaart, Allyson Carr, Matthew
Klassen, and Ronnie Shuker, and published by McGill-Queen’s University
Press. Portions of Chaps. 3 and 5 appeared respectively in “Bringing the
Deliberative Back In: Gadamer on Conversation and Understanding”
(Contemporary Political Theory) and in “Friendship, Otherness, and
Gadamer’s Politics of Solidarity” (Political Theory). Thanks to these pub-
lishers for permission to use sections of those chapters here.
Friends and family members provided personal support and encourage-
ment while I worked on this book. I especially thank my partner, John
Slagter, who has always had more confidence in me than I have in myself.
I am deeply grateful for his unfailing love and encouragement and for the
many daily gestures that sustain a life together.
My parents, Bernard and Verla Walhof, always supported my academic
and professional pursuits, and I am grateful for my mother’s continued
support. My father died in 2012 of complications from Multiple System
Atrophy, a rare and incurable neurodegenerative disease, and so he did
not get to see this book in print. Dad lived all but a few of his 67 years on
the farm in southwestern Minnesota that he grew up on and then farmed
with my mother for four decades. My life has taken a different path than
his, but I could always count on his love and encouragement. This book
is dedicated to his memory.
 Contents

1 Paying Attention to Reality   1

2 Disclosing Truth  13

3 Conversation and Understanding  37

4 Tradition, Religion, and Democratic Citizenship 71

5 Solidarity, Friendship, and Democratic Hope 99

Epilogue: Between Citizens 127

Bibliography 133

I ndex 143

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Paying Attention to Reality

In an essay late in life, Gadamer used Heidegger’s involvement with the

Nazis to reflect on the relationship between philosophy and politics. The
title leaves no doubt about his conclusion: “On the Political Incompetence
of Philosophy.” The philosopher’s gaze, Gadamer claims, “is not predis-
posed to view correctly the possibilities and concrete circumstances of
social and political life” (1998a, 4). Philosophers have no special insight
into society and politics; in fact, their view is likely distorted by their philo-
sophical methods. In an earlier interview, Gadamer similarly claimed that
philosophy has “no competence to prescribe” and “becomes laughable”
when it attempts to do so (1999, 108). Philosophers are in no better posi-
tion than anyone else to make political prescriptions and should refrain
from doing so.
One of the difficulties in treating Gadamer as a political thinker, as I do
in this book, is that he followed his own advice on this point. His writings
contain few prescriptive statements about politics, and he provides little
that suggests a program of political action or could serve as a starting
point for policy positions or political strategies. More problematically, his
writings generally bear few other features that we expect from works of
political theory. He does not, for example, outline a theory of justice, even
as he takes up specific issues like the environment and nuclear weaponry
that surely raise questions of justice. Likewise, although he is attuned to,
and critical of, the power that science and technology exercise in modern
societies, his writings contain no systematic analysis of power of the sort

© The Author(s) 2017 1

D. Walhof, The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-46864-8_1
2 D. WALHOF

that Foucault and others give us. Freedom, liberty, and emancipation, too,
are largely absent from Gadamer’s thought.
And yet, Gadamer claimed late in life that his writings were, and always
had been, political. Though he was not inclined to articulate positions on
the political events of the day in the way that other thinkers might,1 he
nonetheless regarded it “already a sufficient political act to be a thinker
and to school others in thought, to practice the free exercise of judgment
and to awaken that exercise in others” (1992, 153). So, although he thinks
philosophers have no special insight into political and social phenomena,
Gadamer also regards philosophy as important for politics and considers
his hermeneutics political. In treating him as a political thinker, then, we
need to take care to set out how he understands the vocation of “practi-
cal philosophy” and in what sense it is, and ought to be, political. In this
chapter I do this by looking at Gadamer’s critique of the modern theory-
practice divide and his alternative understandings of theory and practice
drawn from Plato. After this, I outline Gadamer’s conception of practical
philosophy as the discipline of paying attention to the realities of social
and political life. This conception helps us understand why Gadamer views
his philosophical hermeneutics as inherently political, and it also gives us a
starting point for seeing his work as a contribution to democratic theory.

1.1 PLATO’S CAVE AND THE CRITIQUE OF MODERN

THEORY
Gadamer argues that theory in modern science and philosophy is improp-
erly conceptualized as distinct from, and opposed to, practice (e.g. 1998b,
29; 1995, 325ff; 1981, 90, 131). On this view, theory is understood as a
set of statements that describe some aspect of the world and that are thus
tested and revised by applying them to the world. Practical application
consequently allows for both the refining of the theory and for greater
control of empirical reality. In this way, building theories and applying
them are conceptualized as distinct though closely related activities, in the
same way that science and technology are seen to be distinct but related.
In many contexts, this is perhaps a sensible understanding of the nature
of theory and its relationship to practice. Gadamer reminds us, however,
that it is not the only way that theory and practice have been understood
and that treating it as such causes us to miss important dimensions of
1
In this case he was comparing himself to Jaspers.
 PAYING ATTENTION TO REALITY 3

our social and political world. He turns to Plato to help us recollect ear-
lier understandings of theory and practice. Gadamer’s reading of Plato is
somewhat peculiar, arising in reaction to Heidegger’s account of Plato’s
thought as the first step in the forgetfulness of Being and toward the dom-
inance of onto-theology (1994a, 160).2 Gadamer sets out to redeem Plato
from this account, which he does by rejecting the strongly idealist version
of Plato that is generally set in contrast to Aristotle’s empiricism and con-
textualism. Against these readings, Gadamer argues that we ought instead
to treat Plato and Aristotle as consistent with each other and as trying to
work out the same questions about the good in human life, albeit in differ-
ent political contexts and in different modes of discourse (1986b, 1–4).3
The result is a Plato that is much closer to Aristotle than other interpreta-
tions place him. Gadamer, as it were, reads Plato through Aristotle.
This is especially clear in his interpretation of Plato’s allegory of the
cave. The story is often interpreted in terms of the problems that the phi-
losophers encounter when trying to communicate truth about the good
to other citizens and to implement this knowledge in practice. Having
seen the good, the philosophers are rejected by the cave-dwellers, ridi-
culed and abused by those who do not know truth and who still take the
shadows as real. Gadamer argues that it is a mistake to understand this
contrast between theoretical knowledge and political practice in terms of
the modern theory-practice split—that is, as a problem of applying one’s
knowledge of the truth to practical life (1986b, 78). He argues that the
allegory is not about epistemology but is meant to demonstrate, in keep-
ing with Plato’s larger project, that dedication to the theoretical life is not
irreconcilable with the demands and practices of politics. Gadamer points
out that there is a double blindness in the story: first, when those accus-
tomed to the dark initially leave the cave and are blinded by the sun and,

2
Gadamer agrees with Heidegger, however, on other points of interpretation, especially
the priority of the question in Plato’s thought. Catherine Zuckert helpfully specifies areas of
agreement and disagreement between Heidegger and Gadamer on Plato (Zuckert 1996,
82–84).
3
Gadamer reminds us that the texts of each thinker that have survived are of different
kinds: literary dialogues in the case of Plato, and draft lectures or notes from lectures in the
case of Aristotle. Given this, the best approach according to Gadamer is to “constantly play
off two dissimilar things against each other” (1986b, 4), which is what he does throughout
his main work on Plato and Aristotle, Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles, pub-
lished in 1978 (later translated into English and published as The Idea of the Good in Platonic-
Aristotelian Philosophy). Smith’s introduction is good on this point (1986b, x–xiv).
4 D. WALHOF

second, when those who have seen the sun return to the darkness of the
cave. We should not be surprised that the cave-dwellers ridicule and abuse
those who return to the cave since, stumbling around blindly, they are of
no use to the cave-dwellers. As long as the philosophers remain unable to
see clearly back in the cave, the fact that they have seen the sun is irrel-
evant. As Gadamer notes, “one must not only get used to the light; one
must also get used to the dark” (1986b, 75).
But in neither case is this impossible. Those who escape the cave do,
in fact, adjust to the light outside the cave, and upon their return they
do, in fact, re-adjust to the darkness. They can, eventually, adapt to both
places. But adaptation is required; the task is not simply the application of
theoretical knowledge to practice or of the truth of ideas to the empiri-
cal world. Instead, the allegory shows that the philosophers are superior
to the cave-dwellers not because they have more or different knowledge,
but because of their newly-found concern for the good. Since the cave-
dwellers remain as capable as they had been at making their way in the
world, however, they do not understand the concerns of the philosophers.
The cave-dwellers still know, that is, “how things tend to go in social
and political life and what practices promise to be successful there,” even
though they never consider the good—that for the sake of which these
practices are carried out (1986b, 78).
The philosophers, in contrast, now do look to the good, not in a merely
theoretical sense, removed from the demands of political life, but in their
everyday exercise of political judgment. Their escape from the cave has
not equipped them with additional knowledge as much as it has changed
them, so that they now approach practical affairs differently than they used
to. Gadamer interprets Plato’s Socratic dialogues as an extended argument
for a certain kind of civic education. This education is concerned “not so
much with learning something as with turning ‘the whole soul’ around”
(1986b, 83).4 In other words, the education is aimed at cultivating a par-
ticular disposition, one that enables citizens and political leaders to hold
fast to what is good by means of the discriminating use of reason. Although
he does not state it in these terms, Gadamer, like Arendt and others, is
concerned about a certain kind of thoughtlessness, or un-thinking-ness,

4
Gadamer first makes this argument in one of his early articles, “Plato’s Educational
State,” written and published while the Nazis were in power (1983, 73–92). He continues
this theme in The Idea of the Good. Gadamer here agrees with Heidegger, who also empha-
sizes the importance in Plato of education as turning the soul around (1986b, 166–68).
 PAYING ATTENTION TO REALITY 5

in political life. Although it is possible to get along more or less unreflec-

tively, as the cave-dwellers did, this is not, for Plato nor for Gadamer, the
ideal for members of a political community (1986b, 173).
Gadamer contrasts this unreflective living to a reflective way of
life that involves choices in pursuit of the good. Following Aristotle,
Gadamer christens this reflective life practice. In contrast to the modern
notion of practice as the application of theory, Gadamer casts practice
as a mode of life in which one’s behavior aims at that which is good by
consciously choosing certain things rather than others. Practice is a way
of living, in short, in which one’s choices are governed by the good,
rather than merely being dictated by one’s drives and feelings or by the
dictates of public opinion (1981, 91). Practice involves the exercise of
critical judgment about what is good and what course of action will
advance it.
Making such choices requires the ability to distinguish good from bad,
true from false, in particular contexts (1986b, 43–43). In other words,
one must have knowledge of the good in order to choose rightly, but this
knowledge is not something that one knows in advance, as if the particular
decision were merely about the best route to a given end. The exercise of
reason that is intrinsic to practice is not means-end, instrumental thinking,
or what Gadamer calls “mere resourcefulness” (1981, 87). Knowledge
of this sort, which Gadamer labels technē, reduces practice to technique,
and relying on it in social and political affairs eventually results in “social
irrationality” (1981, 70–74). Technē is the province of the bureaucrat, the
expert, and the technocrat. It is not sufficient to sustain practice, and in
fact, threatens to undermine it.5
The kind of knowledge intrinsic to practice, in contract, is practical
reason, phronēsis. Practical reason is distinguished from technical reason,
among other ways, by the fact that it lacks pre-given ends. Instead, the
exercise of practical reason, the distinguishing of good from bad in a par-
ticular context, always also involves a judgment about what the good is. It
is necessarily both a judgment of the proper goal of action and the means
to it. In deciding how to act, we are also always deciding the purpose
for which we act; our judgment is revealed in the action itself. Gadamer
argues that the ability to make such judgments depends less on theoreti-
cal knowledge or information than on being a certain kind of person.

5
As Gadamer himself acknowledges, he is close to Habermas and the Frankfurt school
here in his critique of instrumental rationality (2001a, 83).
6 D. WALHOF

Practical reason, then, is perhaps best thought of as a disposition. It is, as

Gadamer says, “a way of holding oneself” (1998b, 40).
In emphasizing the differences between technical and practical reason
and the centrality of phronēsis to political life, Gadamer consciously places
himself in the tradition of Aristotelian practical philosophy. In fact, he
crowns hermeneutics as heir to this tradition (1979, 107). As I have noted,
Gadamer includes Plato in this tradition as well. In Gadamer’s view, read-
ing the cave allegory as an epistemological puzzle about applying truth
to everyday life mistakes the practical judgment required in political and
social matters for the technical knowledge of the specialist. Doing so pre-
sumes that Plato understands all political knowledge as technē and has little
appreciation for the role of phronēsis in political life, a reading that treats
Plato as little more than a foil against which the Aristotelian tradition of
practical philosophy can be developed. Gadamer argues, instead, that the
Republic and Plato’s other Socratic dialogues demonstrate that Plato, like
Aristotle, understood the vital importance of practical reason for politics
and thus the need for an education aimed at developing practical reason.
The philosophers who have left the cave and have seen the sun, who have
been educated to be able to see the good, return to the cave holding
themselves in a new way. They return better equipped to exercise practical
reason, making judgments about what is good in particular circumstances
and how best to pursue it. This is what distinguishes the philosophers
from those who never left the cave, who have little care for the good in
their daily lives and whose capacities for perceiving it remain underdevel-
oped, even if they are capable of making their way in the world.
One of the reasons that the philosophers are better equipped for rul-
ing is that their ability to distinguish the good and pursue it in political
judgments will help them resist the temptations of power that confront all
those who hold political authority (1986b, 96).6 This is the whole point
of the arduous education the philosophers must undergo: to fortify them
from the seduction of power by developing their commitment to the good
and their abilities to discern it. The problem confronting Plato, however,
is that phronēsis cannot be taught and learned in the way that technē can.
When it comes to technical knowledge, it is possible to learn a technique
for doing something by taking in information and learning to apply it. It

6
As Zuckert notes, this places Gadamer’s Plato directly at odds with Popper’s. Far from
justifying totalitarianism, The Republic demonstrates, according to Gadamer, the need to
found a polis on open inquiry and dialogue (Zuckert 1996, 83).
 PAYING ATTENTION TO REALITY 7

may take repeated attempts at application in order to become adept at the

skill, but the knowledge at stake in technique is knowledge that can be
mastered in this sense. In part, this is because there is a certain distance
between the person and the knowledge to be acquired. It can be repre-
sented in a form apart from the person learning it, making it possible to
approach the knowledge required as an object, something to be memo-
rized and applied.7
Phronēsis does not function this way. Since practical reason is not rooted
in the same kind of knowledge that technē is, it does not depend on infor-
mation, a set of precepts that can be learned, such that the only question
in practice is one of application. This modern theory-practice approach
presumes that we stand apart from the knowledge required for political
and moral judgments, but this of course is not the case. We are, instead,
always already in a situation of having to act. We are always already called
upon to make judgments about what is good (1995, 312–18), and in this
way, the knowledge required for the exercise of practical reason is not an
object to us, capable of being represented in statements and slogans.
For Plato, Gadamer argues, education for practical reason is education
in philosophy (1983, 73). Philosophy makes possible the distinguishing
that is central to the exercise of practical reason in politics: distinguish-
ing friend from enemy, sound advice from flattery, truth from prevail-
ing public opinion, what is just from what is expedient, and so forth.
By developing this capacity, “philosophy is what makes man as a political
being possible” (1983, 56–57, 83). Of course, this cannot be philosophy
in its modern sense, which renders one politically incompetent. Modern
philosophy is marked above all by what Gadamer calls the “primacy of self-
consciousness.” It shares with the natural sciences the presumption that
“only what can be investigated by method is the object of science” (1998b
29; see also 1999, 131). At the base of a philosophy of self-consciousness
is the belief that we can distance ourselves from that which we want to
know, standing apart from it and capturing its nature in a set of statements
or propositions. It presumes that truth is an object.

7
This account of learning technical knowledge is too simple, of course, and fails to capture
the dimensions of interpretation and commitment that reside in even basic technical tasks—
what Michael Polanyi called “personal knowledge” already in the middle of the twentieth
century (Polanyi 1974). It is useful, nonetheless, to present technē and phronēsis here as ideal
types in order better to understand our conceptions of knowledge.
8 D. WALHOF

For Gadamer’s Plato and for Gadamer himself, philosophy of this sort
is inadequate to the task of education for practical reason and, thus, educa-
tion for politics. It treats politics as mere application of theoretically-held
knowledge rather than as an activity based on practical judgment. For an
education in philosophy to be civic education—that is, to be education
for and in phronēsis—it must relinquish its ideal of self-consciousness and
recognize its roots in practice. It must be education in practical philoso-
phy. For Plato and for Gadamer, the means of this education is dialectic,
exemplified above all by Socrates in his incessant questioning of those who
think they know something (Zuckert 1996, 74). In other words, the task
of “turning the whole soul around” through education in practical phi-
losophy cannot be accomplished dogmatically. As Gadamer argues, civic
education “is anything but a total manipulation of the soul, a rigorous
leading of it to a predetermined goal. … [R]ather, it lives from question-
ing alone” (1983, 52). As Socrates shows us, education for practical rea-
son must be marked by an openness premised on a conviction that one
does not already know. Yet, its goal is still truth; it is not skepticism. What
this looks like will become clearer in the next chapter, which examines
Gadamer’s conception of truth and its manifestation in language.
Given all this, we can now return to the question posed at the begin-
ning of this chapter: How does Gadamer understand the vocation of prac-
tical philosophy and in what sense is it political? And, what then does
democratic theory in a hermeneutical mode look like? As we have seen,
Gadamer believes that practical philosophy ought to enable the choos-
ing that constitutes practice. In Gadamer’s view, practical philosophy
plays this enabling role by clarifying the nature of this choosing and the
ends involved and, thereby, enhancing our ability to recognize what’s
good and true in particular situations (1986b, 173). He reaches for what
he calls Aristotle’s “splendid image” of an archer as an analogy. In the
Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that practical philosophy is useful in
the same way that it is useful for an archer to pick a definite point on the
target at which to aim (Aristotle 1962, 1094a23). As the focal point of
his concentration and attention, this point guides the archer’s shot and
enables him to get a better score. But though concentrating on this point
is helpful, it does not necessarily mean that he will hit the target at the
intended point. Choosing a focal point does not of course guarantee a
good result because taking aim is not the whole of archery. The archer
must also have a feel for the bow, a proper stance, a properly developed
body, a sense of the distance to the target, an informed judgment about
 PAYING ATTENTION TO REALITY 9

wind effects, and many other traits, all of which can only be developed by
and in practice.
So too with practical philosophy. For Gadamer, practical philosophy
plays an analogous role in the exercise of practical reason that the point
on the target plays in archery. Practical philosophy “assists our concrete,
practical ability to size things up insofar as it makes it easier to recognize
in what direction we must look and to what things we must pay attention”
(1986b, 164). In other words, practical philosophy assists practical rea-
son by uncovering and bringing to awareness things that might otherwise
remain obscured. It involves looking and listening again, paying attention
to the disclosure of truths that have seemingly been lost, and drawing our
attention to them as a means of fostering practical reason. Practical phi-
losophy of this sort is a reflective task, but it is not mere “distanciation in
the theoretical” (1999, 115). Instead, Gadamer suggests, it has to do with
the original Greek sense of theoria as “a way of comporting oneself” that
involves seeing what is, a kind of seeing that only comes through being
present “in the lovely double sense that means that the person is not only
present but completely present” (1998b, 31). In this way, the theoretical
work of practical philosophy arises from and remains tied to our moral,
social, and political experiences and practices; it is reflection on practice
and reflection from practice.

1.2 DEMOCRATIC THEORY IN A HERMENEUTICAL

REGISTER
Gadamer writes that “whoever wishes to profit from practical philosophy
must be trained for it in the right way. Only then is practical philosophy
useful in decision making” (1986b, 164). Practical philosophy as Gadamer
conceives it is itself a practice. Or perhaps it is best considered a discipline,
with that term’s dual resonance of a field of study and a set of rituals meant
to give shape to a certain kind of being. Above all, it is a discipline that
entails “a looking away from oneself and listening to the other,” paying
attention to what the other has to say. Doing so requires what Gadamer
calls a “cultivated consciousness”—that is, becoming someone who “has
learned to think along with the viewpoint of the other and try to come
to an understanding about what is meant and what is held in common”
(1998b, 35). As we will see more clearly in the chapters that follow, the
discipline of paying attention requires, and also fosters, openness to the
disclosure of truth, to the possibility of understanding, to the other in
10 D. WALHOF

dialogue, to the call of tradition, and to the manifestation of the things

that bind us to each other. Gadamer’s own work both reflects this culti-
vated consciousness and is also directed toward cultivating it in others.
Along these lines, then, democratic theory in a hermeneutical regis-
ter, as a discipline of paying attention, is a modest endeavor. Its modesty
comes in its reluctance to offer high-level theories about political sys-
tems and institutions, or to engage in ideal-type theorizing about the
nature of justice, equality, or freedom that can serve as the basis for
radical or large-scale change. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter,
one will look in vain for these elements in Gadamer’s writings since they
are alien to his emphasis on the to-and-from-practice character of prac-
tical philosophy. The relatively modest aim of Gadamerian democratic
theory instead is to draw our attention to political and social realities
that have become hard to see or that are taken for granted. At times, this
involves reminding us that some things have not changed, even when
everything appears to be in flux, and here we find the conservative bent
of Gadamer’s approach. It is important to note, however, that this is not
a call for keeping things the same, which Gadamer has sometimes been
accused of, but a call for an occasional “readjustment of our conscious-
ness” to what is—a readjustment, in Gadamer’s view, that both conser-
vatives and progressives need from time to time. Democratic theory in
a hermeneutic register eschews romantic allusions about the good old
days, but it also refuses to dismiss the past as merely conservative or
traditional. It instead reminds us, in Gadamer’s words, that “unchang-
ing and enduring realities—birth and death, youth and age, native and
foreign land, commitment and freedom—demand the same recognition
from all of us” (1992, 180). Its task is to help us see these enduring reali-
ties in changing circumstances.
This task suggests that hermeneutic democratic theory is not, however,
unduly modest, and it may at times be a bit presumptuous. It is not mere
description, nor does it accept that the way things first appear is the way
they need to be. Recall that for Gadamer practical philosophy involves the
identification of the goods and ends inherent in practice, those targets to
which we do and ought to aim. This is inevitably a normative task, one that
requires drawing attention to, and thereby advocating for, certain goods
and ends while ignoring or downplaying others. The presumptuousness
of hermeneutic democratic theory comes in its implied claim to be able
to judge these ends, to discern better from worse, and to foster some but
not others. Any defense of these judgments that stays true to the confines
 PAYING ATTENTION TO REALITY 11

of our knowledge as outlined by a hermeneutical approach will perhaps

remain unsatisfying. Ultimately they can only be judged in practice.
Treating Gadamer as a democratic theorist means paying attention to
the way his work helps enlighten political and social realities by drawing
our attention to certain ends and goods, and then critically engaging with
these claims by bringing them to bear on our understandings of democ-
racy. This is the task of the rest of this book. These realities include the
ongoing possibility of the disclosure of truth, even in a media-saturated
age marked by the production and reproduction of falsehoods, the subject
of Chap. 2. These realities also include the possibility of understanding
through dialogue even amidst elite polarization, real and manufactured
populist rancor, and sound-bite discourse. I take this up in Chap. 3, which
examines Gadamer’s phenomenology of conversation and the accompa-
nying events of understanding among its participants. Gadamer’s hope
for understanding through conversation affirms the deliberative turn in
democratic theory but also calls into question the heavily epistemological
approach favored by deliberative democrats, with their focus on reason-
giving and their tendency to fall into an instrumental view of language.
Gadamer also calls our attention to the reality of the force of tradition
in society and politics, the subject of Chap. 4. For Gadamer, tradition
is the condition for the possibility of understanding each other and the
world, the means by which truth speaks to us. The traditions that claim us
shape our encounters with others in the political realm, often in ways that
are not transparent to us. At the same time, we participate in the ongo-
ing construction and reconstruction of these traditions through collective
re-narrations of the past, something that occurs in part through political
engagement with those outside these traditions. Paying attention to the
workings of tradition, I argue, is particularly crucial for understanding
the complex ways that religion and politics are intertwined and mutu-
ally constituted. I make this case through an analysis of the debate over
the relationship between religion and democratic deliberation. I focus
particularly on recent attempts by those who, following Habermas, try
to make room for religious contributions to the public sphere while also
maintaining secular grounds for policy and law and a secular standard of
democratic legitimacy.
Finally, Gadamer’s work directs us to the reality of solidarity, calling
us to reflect on and point out the ways we are bound to each other as
members of the same community, society, and polity. I examine this in
Chap. 5, looking at the nature and reality of solidarity through the lens of
12 D. WALHOF

friendship. I argue that Gadamer’s conception of solidarity is best under-

stood neither in terms of particular identities nor as some universal aspect
of humanness but in terms of a “with” character to social and political life.
In other words, solidarity, like friendship, has to do with particular mani-
festations of things we share that arise among us as they are called forth in
our interactions with others. I argue that this approach helps us reassess
the efforts of Occupy Wall Street and similar movements as solidarity-
disclosing civic action.
In Gadamer’s view, practical philosophy has a particular responsibility
to bring “to our collective awareness the communality that binds every-
one together” (1981, 135). Fulfilling this calling is perhaps particularly
difficult in today’s politics, which seems to be more sharply divided by
ideology and identity than ever before. Such divisions provide all the more
reason, however, for training ourselves to look again and pay attention
to realities that may at first be difficult to see. Gadamer’s hermeneuti-
cal approach to truth, conversation, tradition, and solidarity, this book
argues, offers an ideal starting point for this task.
 CHAPTER 2

Disclosing Truth

Writing in the wake of the furor over her account of the Eichmann trial,
Hannah Arendt reflects on why truth and politics are, in her words, “on
rather bad terms” (1968, 227). She divides truth in two. The first type,
rational truth, the subject of mathematics and philosophy, has a long his-
tory of being in tension with politics, going back at least to Plato, who
worried about the displacement of rational truth by mere opinion. In the
modern age, Arendt says, opinion has generally won the day, rendering
rational truth politically irrelevant (1968, 235).
The second type, factual truth, which has to do with the record of
events and history, remains politically relevant in the modern age, in
Arendt’s view. Factual truth threatens power in its assertion that there are
facts of the matter, despite what those in power wish. But, Arendt points
out, factual truth is terribly fragile, contingent on our collective witness,
and so always at risk of manipulation and destruction. Under totalitarian-
ism, this occurs through organized lying on a massive scale, including the
rewriting of history itself. In mass democracy, Arendt insightfully notes,
this occurs through the reduction of factual truth to partisan belief, to
mere ideology or the expression of an interest.
If truth and politics were on bad terms in 1967 when Arendt wrote
her essay, the terms are now likely even worse. Increasingly, political issues
are treated not as if there are facts of the matter, but simply in terms of
differing viewpoints: Do carbon emissions affect the climate? What led to
the collapse of the financial system in 2008? What happened at the US

© The Author(s) 2017 13

D. Walhof, The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-46864-8_2
14 D. WALHOF

Embassy in Benghazi in 2012? Answers to these questions are viewed as

right or wrong only as a measure of which side one is on. We now have
entire cable news networks seemingly devoted to constructing and per-
petuating falsehoods, and political science research unfortunately shows
that citizens in the USA are not just woefully ignorant of facts, but also
that presenting accurate facts to them does little to change their minds
(Nyhan and Reifler 2010). The prospects for truth in democratic politics
indeed seem bleak.
Perhaps, however, Arendt’s categories miss something. Is there another
kind of truth than factual and rational truth that may fare better in mod-
ern democracies? This chapter examines Gadamer’s conception of truth as
the disclosure of something in language, especially in dialogue, which we
recognize as distinct, fitting, and enriching. As we will see in subsequent
chapters, this approach to truth as disclosure underlies Gadamer’s think-
ing on conversation, tradition, and solidarity.

2.1 KNOWING THE GOOD

The primacy of method in the human sciences is the target of Gadamer’s
best-known work, Truth and Method. His concern there and in some of
his later writings is that a methodological approach restricts what counts
as knowledge in the human sciences, rendering other ways of knowing
mere “half-sciences and pseudo-sciences.” This in effect de-legitimizes
knowledge that does not easily lend itself to objectification. Although
Gadamer would not deny that method is an appropriate and fruitful tool
in certain areas of investigation, he does not regard it as the only mode of
investigation, nor even the most important.1 He notes that many things
in life “fundamentally cannot be approached through objectivization and
treated as methodical objects” (1998b, 29). Method gives us truth of a
certain sort, but there is truth beyond method that remains fundamentally
important for human life.
Treating method as the sole means of discovering truth causes us to
miss this other, hermeneutical truth, but Gadamer does not see the inabil-
ity of modern method to get at this truth as a lamentable limitation. Our
inescapable immersion in social and political life, which makes objectifica-

1
Gadamer acknowledges that scientific methods may give us insight even in the human
sciences. But he notes at the same time that those researchers following them strictly “most
often do not have the truly important things to say” (1994b, 39).
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 15

tion impossible, at the same time enables our recognition of reality. It

makes possible our knowledge of this truth beyond method (1998b, 31).
Our ability to recognize hermeneutical truth thus stands at the heart of
practice (in Gadamer’s sense) and is tied to the exercise of practical reason
that makes social and political communities possible.
So, what is the nature of this truth and how do we come to know it?
How is it possible, that is, for us to know what is true and good in the
moments of choice that sustain practice? A good place to start is Gadamer’s
discussion of Plato’s Meno in his book The Idea of the Good in Platonic-
Aristotelian Philosophy. The central question in Socrates’ exchange with
Meno is whether virtue is teachable. For Gadamer, this dialogue and its
conclusions are important because here “Plato expressly theorizes the
aporia (perplexity) in which the other Socratic dialogues tend to end”
(1986b, 52), namely, that at the end of a dialogue we seem to know no
more about its central issue (e.g. justice or piety) than we did at its begin-
ning. In each case, Socrates demonstrates that his conversation partner
does not know what he first claimed to know, but what else, if anything,
has been discovered or learned often remains unclear. Even so, Socrates
continues to maintain that he is seeking out the truth about something
and that getting to this truth is possible. In directly asking whether virtue
is teachable, Plato in the Meno takes on this puzzle.
The dialogue with Meno eventually leads to the conclusion, in Socrates’
words, that “virtue is neither natural nor acquired, but an instinct given
by God to the virtuous” (Plato 1976, 100a). In short, virtue is not teach-
able in any conventional sense, certainly not in the way that the Sophists
alleged that they could teach it. Getting to this conclusion requires some
understanding of how we know and learn more generally, an epistemo-
logical question that Socrates pursues first with Meno and then through
an exchange with Meno’s slave. After he cannot give a satisfactory answer
to Socrates’ demand for a definition of virtue, Meno likens Socrates to a
magician who has bewitched him and to a “torpedo fish” who has stung
him and left him paralyzed. Then, seemingly trying to extricate himself
from the dialogue, Meno claims that the problem lies in the fact that they
cannot inquire into that which they do not already know; since they do not
know what virtue is, the inquiry has reached its end. In response, Socrates
introduces the myth that our souls are immortal, having been reincar-
nated repeatedly and, thus, having experienced all things again and again.
The knowledge of this experience remains imprinted on our souls, so that
learning in this life is only ever recollection of things we already know.
16 D. WALHOF

Socrates uses this myth to say that we can, in fact, investigate things we
do not appear at first to know. But since Meno is unconvinced, Socrates
tries to demonstrate this by asking Meno’s slave a series of questions
about the areas of different squares. The boy answers correctly about the
area of the first square, but missteps when Socrates asks about the area of
a square double the size of the first. However, through further question-
ing the boy eventually comes to understand the error he has made and
finds the right solution. Socrates uses this exchange to demonstrate to
Meno that even though the boy has never been taught anything about
geometry, he somehow understands it. Socrates points out that he did
not instruct the boy in geometry in any way but merely asked him ques-
tions. The boy made some incorrect assumptions along the way, but he
then subsequently refuted them. Thus, Socrates claims, the boy knew the
principles of geometry before the exchange, and all Socrates has done is
to help him recall what he already knows—that is, what his soul already
possessed.
Gadamer thinks that Plato’s theory of anamnēsis has “a much broader
sense which should hold for every sort of real knowing” (1986b, 59),
and he incorporates it into his own thinking about practical reason and
the good. Knowing what is good in a particular situation does not take
the form of applying abstract principles previously memorized. Rather, it
has the character of a “remembrance of something familiar and known”
(1986b, 52). The knowledge of the good, in other words, is called forth
more than it is learned as something new. The particular instances of
choosing what is good are also the occasions for knowing what the good
is, and the good cannot be known apart from the choice. Only in making
the choice does this knowledge emerge, taking the form of recognition,
or of a moment in which one sees things clearly because one has seen
them before. To switch metaphors, what is good in a particular case has a
familiar ring to it. However, Gadamer says, this is not so much an experi-
ence of being reminded of something forgotten, like someone’s name, as
it is “a new revelation about something already known” (1986b, 58). The
particular situation in which the good is called forth is distinctive, thus
demanding a new understanding of what is good, or of understanding
the good in a new way. Yet it is not completely new, since it remains tied
to what is already known, to the knowledge of the good that is somehow
already there. As such, knowledge of the good is always simultaneously
familiar and new.
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 17

Gadamer has no interest in defending the mythic elements in the Meno,

especially the claims about reincarnation and the immortality of the soul.2
Nor does he parse this out in psychological or theological terms, in the
sense that we might have something like an innate knowledge of natural
law or an intuitive sense of the right and wrong. Rather, Gadamer appro-
priates Plato’s theory of knowledge as recollection to highlight that when
making moral and political judgments, we draw on much that we have not
been, nor could be, taught in a formal or theoretical sense. Nonetheless,
we can choose rightly. As he says, “knowledge of the good is always with
us in our practical life” (1986b, 57). In Gadamer’s view, this results from
the fact that we always find ourselves in media res. We are able to distin-
guish good from bad, right from wrong, in particular instances only by
virtue of our situatedness in culture and language. We are able to identify
what is true and good in these instances because we draw from the social
and political norms, customs, prejudices, and discourses in which we are
inescapably immersed. It is all of this—and more—that constitutes that
which is “already known” and about which we have a “new revelation”
in the exercise of phronēsis. This, of course, is in keeping with Gadamer’s
broader claims, in Truth and Method and elsewhere, concerning tradi-
tion and prejudice as the conditions for knowledge and understanding, as
we will see in subsequent chapters. The things that we know in a formal
sense—that is, that have somehow been drawn to our conscious atten-
tion and become an object for us—are always connected to and situated
within a background of much more that we know in a hermeneutic sense.
It is impossible to become conscious of everything that we know all at
once, but it is precisely this unconscious knowledge that makes conscious
knowledge of anything possible. So too with practical reason. The par-
ticular judgment is called forth from a web of broader understandings that
we are not conscious of prior to that moment. It is in this sense that it is
a remembrance of something familiar and known. It is in this sense, for
Gadamer, that “all cognition is recognition” (1986b, 52).
According to Gadamer, then, practice contains what he calls a “living
awareness” of the good (1986b, 163). What this means is that practical
reason is always tied to that which is common. It is not an individual men-
tal faculty but a disposition that arises out of and is intrinsically connected
to ethos, which Gadamer describes as the “convictions, values, and habits
2
As Gadamer points out, Socrates himself admits doubt about the myth (Gadamer 1986,
54).
18 D. WALHOF

that we all share with the deepest inner clarity and the most profound
communality, the quintessence of all that goes to make up our way of life”
(1998b 58; see also 1999, 29). In other words, our practice always already
contains within it certain shared ends, and the exercise of practical reason
involves our recurring acceptance and affirmation of these ends. Thus,
ethos shapes but is also sustained by the exercise of practical reason. It
provides the pre-knowledge of what is good and right that is called forth
in choosing, but choosing the good and right at the same time involves
the reaffirmation and reacceptance of these norms, even as such choices
inevitably transform these norms at the same time. Practical reason is “a
way of holding oneself” that makes it possible for us to recreate and pro-
tect the “moral and human order that is established in common norms”
(1998, 40). In this way, practice, practical reason, knowledge of the good,
and ethos are linked.
In Truth and Method, Gadamer takes this up from a slightly differ-
ent direction, by theorizing the truth of aesthetic experience, especially as
found in the visual and dramatic arts. He later turns from aesthetic expe-
rience to hermeneutical experience more broadly, where he emphasizes
the fundamentally linguistic character of our existence. Unfortunately,
Gadamer does not really return to a systematic analysis of truth after mak-
ing this move; in fact, despite its title, Truth and Method contains few
direct references to truth beyond its role in art. His concern shifts from
aesthetic truth to the nature of understanding, which, as will become
clear, is related but not identical to his conception of truth. Nonetheless,
it is possible to glean insights about his approach to truth from his discus-
sions of language in Truth and Method and other writings.3

2.2 THE SEDIMENTATION OF TRUTH IN LANGUAGE

Gadamer works out his own views of language in opposition to an instru-
mentalist approach that treats language as analogous to a carpenter’s
toolbox, full of words and concepts that are ready for us to pick up and
employ when needed. On this view, language is regarded as a means of
expression, in the sense that it is how we give voice to our beliefs about
and knowledge of the world. This presumes that there is sufficient dis-

3
Later in this chapter, I will return to his argument about truth in the arts since they illus-
trate aspects of the experience of truth.
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 19

tance between ourselves and language so that we can step back, as it were,
view the toolbox with a task in mind, and select the necessary tools, like a
carpenter choosing between his reciprocating saw and his jigsaw to make
a particular cut. Then, like the carpenter, we put the tools back in their
place when we are finished (Gadamer 1976, 1995, 2001b). Gadamer
argues that language does not work this way, something that becomes
clear when we think about the process of learning a new language as an
adult. When we begin studying it, the language is an object to us. We
study its structure and rules, memorize lists of vocabulary words, and
learn how to use colloquial phrases appropriately. We have not yet mas-
tered the language, so in trying to speak, we are aware of these things and
are forced to think consciously about them. So, for example, we may have
to stop and think about what part of speech a particular word is so that
we know what ending to add to it, or we might think about how to make
regular nouns plural so that we talk about more than one of something.
But as we become more proficient, this object-ness recedes into the back-
ground, vanishing behind what is said. Likewise, in our native languages
we rarely think about structure, syntax, and vocabulary as we speak. Most
of the time we are unaware of the words and concepts that we use, nor
does it ordinarily make sense to describe our reaching for them in terms
of conscious choices. In fact, for the most part, we are not thinking about
language at all but are trying to communicate something to someone.
Words and concepts are not objects to us as we utter them, and we do not
have the distance between ourselves and them that the toolbox picture
would require. As Gadamer says, “the more language is a living opera-
tion, the less we are aware of it.” In receding into the background in this
way, language demonstrates what Gadamer calls its character of “self-
forgetfulness” (1976, 65).
In emphasizing the self-forgetfulness of language, Gadamer deliberately
tries to move away from the subjectivism that underlies an instrumentalist
view. Thinking about language as a tool leads to a subject-centered pic-
ture of the relationship between thought, reality, and language. Speaking
is understood primarily in terms of the translation of a person’s thoughts
into words, so that what matters is the intended meaning that resides, as it
were, in the speaker’s head. The crucial question then becomes the extent
to which thought, speech, and world correspond. Gadamer thinks that
this picture causes us to miss something fairly profound about the way that
we indwell language and the way it structures the world for us. Speaking
20 D. WALHOF

is not merely putting preexisting thoughts into words but participating

in a language that precedes us and that, therefore, enables thought and
constrains it at the same time. Far from being merely an instrument of
subjectivity, language is so bound together with thinking “that it is an
abstraction to conceive of the system of truths as a pre-given system of
possibilities of being for which the signifying subject selects correspond-
ing signs” (1995, 417). Thought and words and the world are all too
intimately linked for the subjectivist account to be right.
In other words, language is not a third thing alongside the world and
our thoughts about the world. Instead, “in all our knowledge of our-
selves and in all knowledge of the world, we are always already encom-
passed” by language. Thus, language is how we become acquainted with
the world, and learning to speak a language “means acquiring a familiarity
and acquaintance with the world itself and how it confronts us” (1976,
63). This is certainly true of our native languages, when as children we
expand our knowledge of the world as we learn to understand what is said
to us and, eventually, to speak. But it is also true when we learn another
language later in life. Learning a new language does not mean that we now
simply have an additional set of tools to express what we know. Instead,
learning another language opens another world to us. The new language
becomes a means of knowing by making it possible for us to become
acquainted with new things. Language is not a possession but is there
from the beginning. And so, “we are always already at home in language,
just as much as we are in the world” (1976, 63). In Gadamer’s view, our
“being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic” (1995, 443).
Thus, Gadamer argues, the “real being [of language] consists in what
is said in it,” which he theorizes by recalling the Greek concept of logos
(1976, 64–65). Indicative of the self-forgetfulness of language is the fact
that the Greeks had no word for language, only words for the tongue,
glotta, and for that which language communicates, logos (2001b, 125).
Gadamer appropriates the latter term, even as he recognizes that it has
fallen out of favor in contemporary philosophy. He laments that the cor-
respondence between logos and being was “destroyed” with the demise
of Hegelian philosophy and the subsequent dominance of epistemology.
Hegel was the “last and most universal representative of ancient logos phi-
losophy” because he taught that reason was in everything, including his-
tory (1995, 220). Gadamer wants to return to logos philosophy, though
not in a Hegelian sense. Although Gadamer does at times equate logos
with reason, he generally casts logos in terms of the truth that resides in
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 21

discourse or speech.4 Logos, in other words, has to do with “the actual

content of what languages hand down to us.” If we ignore this and treat
language only in terms of form, “we have too little left” to say anything
meaningful about truth (1995, 404). The distinction between the form
and content of language potentially leads us astray. Gadamer wants to
reconnect them by means of the concept of logos: the truth that a lan-
guage bears in its particular form.
What Gadamer means when he says that truth resides in logos (or that
logos bears truth) is not always clear. One thing he suggests is that lan-
guage acts like a depository of things that we know. Gadamer describes
logos at one point as the “communicative sedimentation of our experi-
ential world that encompasses everything that we can exchange with one
another” (2001b, 125). He regards logos as an accumulation of our col-
lective and historical experiences—experiences that one also partakes in, in
some sense, in learning a language. In becoming proficient in a language,
the learner does not acquire a set of tools for expressing the truth so
much as become familiar with truth as expressed in language. As language
changes over time with changing experiences and practices, it also accrues
truth, almost behind our backs. Truth is sedimented in language; logos is
sedimented truth.
The exchange between Socrates and Meno’s slave illustrates this. Before
interviewing the boy, Socrates asks Meno, “He is Greek, and speaks Greek,
does he not?” Meno responds in the affirmative, saying that the boy “was
born in the house” (Plato 1976, 82b). Presumably this means he grew
up speaking Greek, and so it is for him a native language. In asking this,
Socrates may simply want to know whether the boy will understand him if
he asks his questions in Greek, but Gadamer makes more of this exchange.
He explains that the boy’s recognition of the area of the bigger square
“implies that he already knows what ‘double’ means—he must know
Greek” (1986b, 55). The boy knows the concept of “double” because he
grew up speaking Greek, just like he knows what a line and a square are,
even though he has never formally studied geometry. In asking his ques-
tions, Socrates is merely drawing upon the boy’s implicit knowledge of
these things, acquired by learning language, and making them and their
connections to each other conscious objects of thought. The truth about
lines, squares, areas, doubling, and so forth has accumulated and resides

4
“[T]he tradition of the West …rendered the Greek word logos as reason or thought. In
truth, however, the primary meaning of this word is language” (1976, 59).
22 D. WALHOF

in the Greek language, as it were. One who speaks this language already
necessarily “knows” these things.
It important to note, however, that truth resides not in the words or
concepts by themselves, but only in their relation to other words and con-
cepts. This is why Gadamer focuses on logos rather than on words and
concepts in talking about the truth that is sedimented in language. Logos
is a kind of “relational ordering among words,” and we need to recognize
that “the truth of things resides in discourse … and not in individual
words, not even in a language’s entire stock of words” (1995, 411). What
we say is always instantiated in and connected to much more that we are
not saying. “Nothing that is said,” Gadamer notes, “has its truth simply in
itself, but refers instead backward and forward to what is unsaid” (1976,
67). When we speak, we draw on this truth, but in a different way than a
subjectivist account suggests: “logos (discourse and speech) and the mani-
festation of things that takes place in it, is something different from the
act of intending the meanings contained in words, and it is here, in speak-
ing, that the actual capacity of language to communicate what is correct
and true has its locus” (1995, 411). It is not as if we can compile a list
of truths that constitute logos, and then choose from among them when
we speak or when we wish to know something. To repeat a point that has
been emphasized already, we do not have the distance on truth that would
be required in order to do this. The truth of logos is not an object for us
in the way that the truth of method is. As Gadamer says, this “articulation
of the experiential world in logos … forms a kind of knowledge that … still
presents the other half of the truth” alongside modern science (2001b,
125). The truth sedimented in language is the truth that escapes method.
We inhabit this truth, as it were, rather than stand over against it. When
using language, when communicating with others, we do not draw on it
as much as we participate in it.
Socrates understood this, according to Gadamer. His questioning was
a way of drawing forth the truth sedimented in language, of recalling it to
focal awareness in order to shed light on social and political affairs, and also
to examine prevailing public opinions that had not been fully evaluated in
light of this truth. This is how to make sense of the perplexity in which
his dialogues end and which Plato theorizes in the Meno. Not just virtue
but also hermeneutic truth is unteachable in a dogmatic sense. It cannot
be objectified, memorized, and then applied. It is, instead, called forth in
dialogue, as the participants in the dialogue participate in the truth that is
sedimented in language—in other words, as they encounter and partici-
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 23

pate in the logos by being re-reminded of that which they know. But the
ability to recognize this truth depends on an openness to being wrong.
We can only see the truth in its new (yet familiar) form when we are able
to acknowledge the ways in which our current understandings are flawed.
Seeing the truth requires some acknowledgement, that is, that one does
not know, so that the truth can emerge anew. But of course, this acknowl-
edgment makes one vulnerable. It places oneself in question.
In The Idea of the Good, Gadamer contrasts Meno and the slave in terms
of their capacity to recognize what is true. Placing himself in question is
precisely what Meno cannot (or will not) do.5 He “wants to acquire the
new wisdom as cheaply as possible, and he bolts when he is about to be
forced to place himself in question” (1986b, 52). Meno has invested too
much in the views he already holds about virtue and in his view of himself
as one who knows something about it. As a result, he can only follow the
dialogue so far before getting frustrated. In contrast, the boy’s recognition
that his answers are on occasion false is “not anything that might cripple
him” (1986b, 56). His willingness to acknowledge his errors makes it pos-
sible for him, eventually, to recognize the truth. The boy has the wisdom
of Socrates; he knows that he does not know. This is the starting point for
dialogue that calls forth truth. Recognition of the new yet familiar truth
that resides in logos depends on an openness to being wrong, a willing-
ness to put oneself into question and to risk oneself, something that will
be examined more closely in Chap. 3.

2.3 TRUTH AS UNCONCEALEDNESS

One of the standard criticisms of Gadamer is that his hermeneutics leaves
us imprisoned in history and language without any means for getting criti-
cal distance on society, culture, and politics. The most famous of such
criticisms came from Jürgen Habermas, whose comments on Truth and
Method represented the initial contribution to what became known as
the Gadamer-Habermas debate. Habermas grants that Gadamer rightly
defends hermeneutical knowledge against the spread of instrumental
rationality, but he also argues that Gadamer gives only part of the picture.

5
Gadamer presents a rather harsh picture of Meno, which may not be completely war-
ranted by the text of the dialogue. Nonetheless, his contrast between Meno and his slave is
useful for putting forth his own understanding of the openness required for hermeneutical
truth.
24 D. WALHOF

In Habermas’ view, Gadamer fails to recognize that language itself is ideo-

logical, and thus, he fails to appreciate the role that critical reflection plays
in transcending ideology (Habermas 1988, 172). Through the critical
social sciences, for which Habermas finds an analogy in psychoanalysis, we
can transcend the hermeneutic circle, as it were, and find grounds to criti-
cize the dominant ideologies and (often hidden) exercises of social and
political power. Because Gadamer ignores this critical rationality and its
potential, Habermas argues, his defense of tradition and authority against
the Enlightenment can only affirm the status quo, rendering us incapable
of criticizing the dominant ideologies (Habermas 1988, 175–89).
Though Habermas has since softened his criticisms of Gadamer and
abandoned the psychoanalytical model of the critique of ideology,6 the
concerns he raised about Gadamer’s approach persist. Given the picture of
truth that has emerged so far in this chapter, this is not surprising. If truth
is sedimented in language and inherent in our practices, it is hard to see
how truth, as a product of history and culture, can provide grounds for
criticizing that same history and culture. Or, to put this in a slightly dif-
ferent way, it is not clear on this conception of truth how Gadamer’s hero
Socrates can call dominant opinions into question through his dialogical
approach. If truth is sedimented in language, how does this work? Are
not the dominant opinions and Socrates’ own questioning drawing on the
same language and, thus, participating in the same logos? Are these opin-
ions and his questions not drawn from the same set of social and political
practices and, thus, necessarily share conceptions of the good?
This picture of Gadamer’s thought will return in other chapters of this
book, and a full response to it will emerge in piecemeal fashion. But an
initial response is in order here, and that is that our account of Gadamer’s
approach to truth is at this point partial. He does argue that truth is sedi-
mented in language, but he also suggests that truth is more than this—
that truth is, in Heideggerian terms, “unconcealedness.”7 Truth is not
merely the product of language and culture but also has to do with a world

6
As Grondin rightly notes, the long-term result of the debate was a shift in the position of
each and a recognition that they share more than originally thought (Grondin 1994,
132–33).
7
Because Truth and Method remains so much the focus of Gadamer scholarship, most
discussions of his notion of truth remain limited to art and fail to take up his comments about
truth as unconcealedness. An exception is Risser (1997), who briefly takes up truth as it
relates to poetry and speech. Schmidt (1995), Figal (2002), and Wachterhauser (1999) are
also helpful.
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 25

or a reality beyond language. These claims undermine the accusations lev-

eled at Gadamer’s thought, but they also create problems for his account
of logos as sedimented truth. This section gives a fuller account of this
transcendent dimension of truth in Gadamer’s thought and its relation-
ship to language and logos.
A 1957 essay by Gadamer takes Pilate’s question to Jesus as its title:
“What is Truth?”8 Pilate’s question is not that of a skeptic, Gadamer
claims, nor is it an epistemological question; it is, rather, a statement about
political power and authority. Its intent is to communicate that what Jesus
claimed to be true about himself was of little interest to Pilate or to the
Roman Empire that he represented. In other words, the question is not,
“How do we (really) know what is true and not true?” but, “What does
truth matter to me?” or “Why should I care about truth?” It is a position
of indifference, which Gadamer labels “tolerance.” Pilate had no need for
truth; such claims were without import to him as a political leader. But
this is not the case anymore, Gadamer claims. The increasing ties between
science and the interests of the state have created a new situation, one
that risks equating truth with that which serves these interests. Since sci-
ence already has a tendency to dismiss questions about truth that cannot
be confined to its methods, this marriage of science and state power is an
even greater threat to our ability to recognize, much less theorize, truth-
beyond-method (1994b, 39).
As in his other writings, Gadamer is concerned in this essay to “reach
back behind the knowledge thematized in science” in order to bring this
truth to light. He does this through a brief critique of propositional truth,
the hallmark of modern science and modern philosophy. The truth of a
proposition, he claims, cannot be comprehended solely from its content
but only in terms of its broader situational horizon. Since what is said is
always related to that which is unsaid, no proposition stands on its own.
In order to understand a proposition, we need to bring this situational
horizon to light, and one of the most important ways to do this, according
to Gadamer, is to reconstruct and understand the question that brought
about the need for the proposition in the first place. Every proposition
is motivated; it gets articulated in response to a question that precedes

8
Though first published in 1957, it was originally an address given in 1955 at the invita-
tion of the Evangelical Student Association of the University of Frankfurt. All references are
to the English translation published in Wachterhauser (1994).
26 D. WALHOF

it. Understanding a particular proposition, Gadamer argues, requires an

understanding of the question to which it is an answer (1994b, 43).
Looking to the prior question gives us a fuller picture of the horizon of
the proposition, but even this does not fully capture how we understand
the truth of a proposition. The problem lies in the fact that the interpreter,
the one reconstructing the horizon of the proposition and the question to
which it is a response, also stands within a historical horizon. While some
schools of thought hold that an interpreter can more or less accurately
reconstruct and “enter into” the author’s world, Gadamer does not think
this is possible.9 The interpreter has also been shaped by history, so it is not
possible to reconstruct the situational horizon of the proposition without
the interpreter’s own horizon affecting the picture, as it were. As a result,
the reconstructed question stands not in its original horizon but in the
horizon of the interpreter.10 Here, we find an early and partial account of
Gadamer’s metaphor of the fusion of horizons. Because both the proposi-
tion and the interpreter are affected by history, understanding the truth of
a proposition brings about “a constant synthesis between the horizon of
the past and the horizon of the present” (1994b, 45). The interpretation
of the proposition that emerges is actually a merging of the situational
horizon of the proposition under study and the situational horizon of the
one doing the studying.
In other contexts, especially in Truth and Method, Gadamer calls this
fusion of horizons understanding, but here he explicitly ties it to the emer-
gence of truth: “what appears as the mere reconstruction of past meaning
is fused with that which addresses us immediately as true” (1994b, 45).
Notice how he assigns agency here: In the act of interpretation, something
addresses us as true. It is not the interpreter who is determining truth, nor
is it the original author of the proposition. Instead, the truth comes to us
and speaks to us out of the fusion that has taken place in interpretation.
More than that, the truth makes a claim on us. As Gadamer says, “under-
standing the past means to listen for what is binding in it” (1994b, 45).
What is binding is what is true.

9
In Truth and Method he gives an extended critique of this approach, which he labels the
“historical school” (1995, 300–308). I take a closer at this critique as it relates to Gadamer’s
conception of tradition in Chap. 4.
10
All of this is related to Gadamer’s concept of “historically effected consciousness,” our
awareness that we have been exposed to the effects of history. I will say more about this when
discussing tradition in Chap. 4.
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 27

Thus, although a proposition has meaning in a particular context, it

does not contain truth in and of itself. But rather than claim that all inter-
pretations are merely subjective and there is, therefore, no such thing as
truth per se, Gadamer goes in a different direction. He insists that the
nature of propositions reveals that truth is “unconcealedness,” an idea he
takes from Heidegger, who developed it through a recovery of the Greek
concept of aletheia (1994b, 36). Heidegger argues that correspondence
theories of truth, which treat true propositions as accurate descriptions of
the world as it exists independent of our thought and language, actually
conceal a more primary truth that involves the disclosedness or uncon-
cealedness of being.11 In saying this, Heidegger is, above all, trying to
shift the locus of truth away from consciousness and subjectivity and to
truth as a mode of existence. Truth, in other words, has not first and
foremost to do with our mental states about things that exist—that is,
with knowledge conceived in terms of ideas or beliefs that we have in our
head or assert in words. While assertions can be true and false in terms of
being correct or incorrect descriptions of a state of affairs, they are already
abstractions from and, therefore, derivative of a holistic context of truth in
which they are situated (Zuidervaart 2004, 83). In other words, the truth
of assertions “presupposes a prelinguistic, preconventional, precognitive
disclosure of beings” (Allen 1993, 86). There is a truth to which asser-
tions testify, but they do not contain truth in the way that correspondence
theories claim. Instead, they represent occasions for the disclosedness of
being. Heidegger calls this unconcealedness truth.
Similarly, Gadamer wants to treat truth not as a function of conscious-
ness but more like an event that happens to us. For him, this event takes
place because of and in language, especially in speech. In the “What is
Truth?” essay, he states this starkly: “the meaning of speech [die Rede] is to
put forward the unconcealed, to make manifest” (1994b, 36). Language
is the means by which truth is disclosed, but not in the sense of proposi-
tions that accurately describe a reality out there. Truth is not “in” the
proposition but arises out of the interaction between interpreter and text
and makes a claim on the interpreter.
What this means becomes clearer in a brief 1960 essay in which Gadamer
argues that we should dispense with the phrase, “the nature of things,”

11
Heidegger’s conception of truth is complex and problematic. Since it is not the main
concern here, I only give enough background to help understand Gadamer. Zuidervaart
(2004) and Allen (1993) are good sources for understanding Heidegger on truth.
28 D. WALHOF

and instead talk about “the language of things.”12 Gadamer begins by

noting that the dismissal of transcendental reflection and the turn to sub-
jectivity in philosophy has led us awry, and he praises classical metaphys-
ics for its emphasis on the preexistent correspondence between subject
and object, between idea and being. Gadamer knows, however, that we
can no longer rest this metaphysical approach on its traditional, theologi-
cal grounding, and so he turns instead to language. As we have seen,
Gadamer takes our existence to be fundamentally linguistic. In saying this,
however, he does not mean that language is all there is—that there is no
“there” there. He turns to language not to undermine metaphysics or
to deny transcendence, but instead to ground the relationship between
subject and object as a means to a revised metaphysics. Gadamer draws
our attention to the inherent relationship between language and things
themselves—that is, to the “interconnection of word and thing [Sache]”
(1976, 77). Talking about “the nature of things” implies that we know
what this nature is apart from language and that we simply express this
nature in words. In Gadamer’s view, this returns us to the subject-object
problem of modern philosophy and to an instrumental view of language.
Talking instead about “the language of things” highlights the fact that it is
only in language that “the primordial correspondence of soul and being is
so exhibited that finite consciousness too can know of it” (1976, 76–77).
In other words, language unconceals being to us. Or, said differently,
the world discloses itself in language.13 Whoever has language, Gadamer
claims in Truth and Method, has the world. In short, as he famously puts it,
“Being that can be understood is language” (1995, 450, 474).14

12
This essay, “The Nature of Things and the Language of Things,” was first published in
Gadamer’s Kleine Schriften (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr Verlag). All references are to the English
translation published in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Gadamer 1976).
13
Gadamer claims that we see this best exemplified in poetry. Poetry “is a saying that says
so completely what it is that we do not need to add anything beyond what is said in order to
accept it in its reality as language. The world of the poet is autonomous in the sense that it is
self-fulfilling” (1986b, 110).
14
This phrase, which pithily captures the central argument of Truth and Method, conjures
Heidegger’s claim that “Language is the house of being.” Gadamer’s indebtedness to
Heidegger is obvious here, although there are important differences. In particular, while
Heidegger is dismissive of “everydayness” and ordinary discourse, privileging instead a
notion of “authentic” existence that rises above this (Zuidervaart 2004, 78), Gadamer gives
significant weight to everyday language and speech. Moreover, Gadamer increasingly moves
away from talking about “being” as that which is disclosed in language, instead preferring to
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 29

Being is never disclosed in a complete sense all at once, however, as

Gadamer notes: “That language and the world are related in a funda-
mental way does not mean, then, that world becomes the object of language”
(1995, 450). The disclosure of truth in language does not mean that a
“world-in-itself” is objectified. This is the mistaken assumption of mod-
ern philosophy of consciousness, as well as of those who equate truth
in the human sciences with the results produced by method. The non-
instrumental nature of language and our fundamental linguistic existence
means that language cannot offer us the distance necessary to gain a view
of the world-in-itself. Since we remain “caught,” as it were, in language,
only the truth of a thing (Sache), not truth in a comprehensive, object
sense, is unconcealed in language. But even here, any disclosure is merely
“the experience of an ‘aspect’ of the thing itself” (1995, 473). Gadamer
immediately clarifies that he is not saying that this disclosure represents an
“imperfect understanding” of the thing (1995, 473). It is the thing itself
we understand, but this understanding is always, unavoidably partial and
always, unavoidably historical. Truth is revealed differently in different
historical circumstances, or an aspect of its being is revealed in different
moments. There is a there there, but since we have no means for accessing
all of it at once, it does not make sense to talk about any particular mani-
festation as imperfect. Saying that our knowledge of the truth of a thing is
imperfect presumes there is something like perfect knowledge.
It seems, then, that Gadamer wants to have it both ways: on the one
hand, he wants to avoid the relativism that follows from a view of language
as sedimented truth by appealing to a thing itself that is disclosed in lan-
guage; on the other hand, he criticizes the philosophy of consciousness
approach that treats truth as an object outside of language and language as
a mere instrument. So, he insists both that truth involves the unconcealed-
ness of the thing itself (or of being or the world) and that this always and
only occurs within language and history.
If we accept both of these claims, the difficulty is that we are left
with no external criteria that we can use to evaluate an event of disclo-
sure and decide whether or not, in fact, we have encountered something
true. Instead, whatever criteria we might have are internal to the expe-
rience itself. Or, put differently, we do not have “criteria” at all, if by
that we mean something against which we can measure something else to

talk about the “thing” (Sache) disclosed. Weinsheimer has a nice discussion of additional dif-
ferences between Heidegger and Gadamer on this score (Weinsheimer 1985, 213–16).
30 D. WALHOF

determine whether truth has been disclosed. As Gadamer admits in Truth

and Method, “In understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and
arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to
believe” (1995, 490). We are “too late” because it is only with the disclos-
ing event itself that we encounter truth. Truth has an event quality to it,
and so “the revealedness and unconcealedness of things … has its own
temporality and historicity” (1995, 46). Truth discloses itself in speech,
but this means that the event of truth is always tied to the horizon of the
present.
So what does this look like in more practical terms? Can we know when
truth has been disclosed, and, if so, how? Gadamer’s discussion of truth
in art provides some useful insights here, especially in the connection he
draws between the true and the beautiful. One of the characteristics of
the beautiful is that we recognize and value it for its own sake, not as a
means to something else (1986c, 14).15 Moreover, our recognition of the
beautiful stems from the fact that it is “visibly manifest” and “makes itself
immediately evident,” often in an unpredictable fashion: “It appears sud-
denly; and just as suddenly, without any transition, it disappears again”
(1995, 481–82). In other words, our recognition of the beautiful is tied to
its character of self-presentation, which takes the form of a kind of “radi-
ance” or a shining forth. The beautiful, Gadamer argues, has the character
of light. It is not a distinct thing that has its own existence, but instead
makes something else visible in its shining (1995, 482). We recognize
beauty only in seeing the thing as beautiful.
This holds for truth as well: “Just as the mode of being of the beautiful
proved to be characteristic of being in general, so the same thing can be
shown to be true of the concept of truth” (1995, 487). Like the beautiful,
the truth shines forth and is recognizable in its shining forth by making
something manifest, by enlightening it.16 Moreover, like the beautiful, the
truth that shines forth has a self-evident quality about it. An event of
truth thus involves a moment of recognition, of seeing something in a way
that is familiar but also new. As James Risser explains, it is a moment of

15
Similarly in Truth and Method: “Beautiful things are those whose value is of itself evi-
dent. You cannot ask what purpose they serve. They are desirable for their own sake and not,
like the useful, for the sake of something else” (1995, 477).
16
See Schmidt’s helpful discussion of Gadamer’s notion of the enlightening (die
Einleuchtende) as the self-presentation of the thing in language. Like the power of light to
illuminate, language possesses an illuminating quality, which “permits the thing to be seen in
its self-presentation in language” (Schmidt 1995, 76).
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 31

something coming to light, “in the sense that something becomes clear.”
This above all involves the appearance of something that we recognize
as fitting (Risser 1997, 146, 152). In a conversation, in reading a text or
in some other experience, a fitting response emerges that captures some-
thing precisely. When this happens, what emerges may surprise us, but it is
not something that was completely unknown to us before its appearance.
In fact, we only recognize it because in some sense it is already known,
although obscured.17
Another way to think about this is in terms of disentanglement. As
Gadamer claims, “that a thing behaves in various ways permits one to rec-
ognize its independent otherness,” and so the unconcealedness of a thing
includes a kind of distinguishing: “To be this and not that constitutes
the determinacy of all beings” (1995, 445). An event of truth, in Risser’s
words, involves a moment in which “we cognize something as some-
thing that we have already seen in our entangled condition” (Risser 1997,
153). It comes not in seeing (or hearing) everything at once but in dis-
tinguishing something from that in which it is enmeshed. It is a moment
of clarification in which something comes into focus by presenting itself
as distinct from other things. Such moments are familiar to us from the
performing arts. We sometimes say of a play or a movie, for example, that
it “rings true.” By this we mean that the performance brought something
to light in a way that distinguished it from the messiness of everything
else. Perhaps an exchange, a character, a relationship, or a moment in the
performance brought to the foreground of our attention a truth about
our existence that we previously could not see because it was caught up in
everything around it. In such a case, Gadamer claims, “what is emerges.
It produces and brings to light what is otherwise constantly hidden and
withdrawn” (1995, 112). The what is comes into view in being disen-
tangled from everything else. As Gadamer says, it “manifests itself as what
it is only when it is recognized. As recognized, it is grasped in its essence,
detached from its accidental aspects” (1995, 114).
Note the language of being, essence, and accidental here. For Gadamer,
truth as unconcealedness involves the self-presentation of the enduring
essence of something as distinct from the contingent and inessential in

17
As Nicholas Davey nicely puts it, an event of truth “is not a bursting forth from a nou-
menal realm but a sudden shift of perspective that allows us to see that which we had not
anticipated even though the elements of what we now know stood before us albeit in a frag-
mentary way” (Davey 2006, 120).
32 D. WALHOF

which it is situated: “In recognition what we know emerges, as if illumi-

nated, from all the contingent and variable circumstances that condition
it; it is grasped in its essence. It is known as something” (1995, 114). In
the case of a drama, this means that as the what is is brought to the fore-
ground, the performers and their skillfulness recede into the background.
We get lost in the truth of the performance, so that “the players no longer
exist, only what they are playing” (1995, 112). The skill with which some-
thing is done has only secondary interest compared to the truth that we
recognize in its unconcealedness. This is a distinguishing, a separation of
what endures from that which is contingent, particular, accidental.
This disentanglement is evident not just in the arts but also in the every-
day experience of finding exactly the right word to express something. We
have all had the experience of not quite being able to retrieve a word that
fits, of sensing that the terms we are using are not quite right and also sens-
ing that there is a term that fits, even if we cannot recall it. According to
Gadamer, this occurs because “experience of itself seeks and finds words
that express it. We seek the right word—i.e., the word that really belongs
to the thing—so that in it the right thing comes into language” (1995,
417). Finding the right word—and note that we experience it as finding
and not choosing the word—has an “aha!” quality to it. The moment it
comes to us, we simply know that it fits. In this way, “the truth of speech
is determined by the adequation of speech to the thing” (1995, 36). The
right word disentangles something from whatever else surrounds it. The
thing discloses itself in language only through the word that belongs to it.
According to Gadamer, this moment of disentanglement is also char-
acterized by a fullness or an abundance. The truth we recognize is famil-
iar—this is what makes it possible for us to recognize it—but the moment
of recognition is accompanied by “the joy of knowing more than is already
familiar” (1995, 114). The disclosure of something enriches us by giving
us a new understanding of what is familiar. We can see this by way of a neg-
ative example. Art performances that we might describe as “flat” or “hol-
low” or that “come up empty” do not have this character of fullness and,
thus, are not accompanied by the joy of knowing more. We say that such
performances do not “ring true” because they have flattened experience
and have robbed it of its complexity and fullness. Think of propaganda,
or an after-school special that is meant to communicate a single, simplistic
message. They seem flat or false because they are reductive. In an event of
truth, in contrast, something is distinguished or disentangled, but in a way
that also points to something beyond itself. Something true is disclosed,
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 33

but in a way that maintains a connection to the fullness of the world in

which it is situated and from which it is drawn. Our recognition includes a
sense of knowing something we had not known before. Gadamer’s notion
of truth as unconcealedness, then, involves the disclosure of something in
such a way that we recognize it as distinct, fitting, and enriching.

2.4 TRUTH AND POLITICS

Recall that Gadamer is presenting a phenomenology of truth that is not
established by method nor captured in propositions. Hermeneutical truth
is beyond method and beyond propositions. The exercise of practical rea-
son in making choices about the good, which we examined in Chap. 4,
draws upon this truth that has been disclosed as something distinct, fit-
ting, and enriching, and that is subsequently sedimented in our language,
as we saw through Gadamer’s reading of the Meno.
We can thus view Gadamer’s conception of truth as a supplement to
Arendt’s categories of factual and rational truth, which, as we saw above,
she saw as being “on rather bad terms” with politics. Conceptualizing
hermeneutic truth as that which is disclosed among us and sedimented in
language helps draw attention to social and political realities that other-
wise are difficult to see. The possibility of disclosing truth through demo-
cratic deliberation will be taken up in more detail in the next chapter, but I
want to offer a brief example in closing this chapter that illustrates the link
between hermeneutic truth and democratic politics: the disclosure of the
truth of civic equality and its subsequent sedimentation in our language
and practices.
Though Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s reported on what was to
him a surprising degree of equality in the USA, the democracy he saw was
of course marred by substantial civic inequality. Women’s suffrage activists
had already started organizing at the time, but it would be nearly a century
before women won a constitutional right to vote. Likewise, abolitionists
were also already at work when Tocqueville visited, but it would be nearly
forty years before the Civil War amendments promised civic equality for
African Americans, and nearly another century after that before many of
those promises began to be fulfilled. In each of these cases, the truths that
sex and race are not legitimate grounds for inequalities in public life—in
voting rights, property rights, rights to education, access to the judicial
system, employment protections, consumer protections, and so forth—
were disclosed among citizens through the substantial and prolonged
34 D. WALHOF

efforts of members of the subjugated groups and their allies. Their orga-
nizing, speaking, marching, and hounding of local and national officials
demanded that those officials recognize and engage with them. This
engagement, in turn, eventually rendered it impossible to hold onto the
ideal of equality while also defending differential public standing on the
basis of race and sex. The disclosed truth about equality, in other words,
over time became sedimented in the language of democratic politics.
This is not to argue that full civic equality for women and African
Americans has been achieved. Actual social, economic, and political con-
ditions may not live up to the truths disclosed in language. Nor is it to
claim that racism and sexism have been eliminated. Rather, it is to point
out that our language of civic equality is no longer natural to those who
wish to subjugate these groups. In a way that was not the case, say, half a
century ago, their arguments have become strained and forced, as if they
are working against that language itself.
We are today witnessing further disclosure of the truth about civic
equality, this time with respect to sexual orientation and, more haltingly,
gender identity. We have seen some of the same patterns here, though in
compressed time, of gaining access to the public dialogue through orga-
nizing, speaking, and protesting. The gay rights movement began with
local efforts to end discrimination in housing, employment, and criminal
law, and then decades later, set its sights on equal marriage rights and
the attendant privileges and responsibilities that go with them. The US
Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that state bans on same-sex marriages vio-
late the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment
represented another step toward full equality for gays and lesbians, at least
for those in committed relationships (Obergefell v. Hodges 2015). Further
steps remain, especially in the area of employment discrimination.
The terms of public debate around these issues changed rapidly in
recent years and remain in flux. As the conservative columnist and same-
sex marriage opponent Ross Douthat acknowledged already in 2010,
long-standing arguments against marriage rights for same-sex couples
were becoming no longer persuasive, including that marriage has always
been defined as the union of one man and one woman, that heterosexual
monogamy is natural, and that the nuclear family is the “universal, time-
tested path to forming families and raising children” (Douthat 2010).
These are now, Douthat admits, not just “losing arguments” but also
wrong. He argues that heterosexual marriage should instead be defended
on less universalist grounds, as “a particular vision of marriage, rooted in
 DISCLOSING TRUTH 35

a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal” involving

two sexually different human beings (Douthat 2010). In other words, in
order to defend the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, Douthat
must explicitly abandon the notion of equality. The only ground left, in
his view, is an ideal of marriage that is particularistic and unequal. When
this ideal of marriage is no longer dominant, Douthat concedes, same-sex
marriage will be not just permitted but “morally necessary.” As in the
earlier cases of race and gender, the arguments against marriage rights
for same-sex couples have become increasingly strained and forced; they
work against the truth about civic equality disclosed and sedimented in
our public language.
Nonetheless, a substantial minority of Americans still oppose same-sex
marriage,18 and the Obergefell decision provoked resistance, including both
organized and individual efforts to undermine the legitimacy of same-sex
marriages in certain parts of the country. Even here, however, the terms
of discourse reflect the sedimentation of the truth about civic equality. As
Douthat predicted, opposition to same-sex marriage is rarely expressed in
terms of disallowing it altogether but is instead couched in terms of a right
not to participate in activities that affirm these marriages based on one’s
deeply held religious convictions. In some places, this argument has been
made on behalf of individual government employees who do not wish
to issue marriage licenses or otherwise authorize a same-sex marriage. In
other cases, this argument has been made by commercial vendors who do
not want to provide wedding services, such as flowers or use of a venue,
to a same-sex couple. Although the courts will have to weigh such claims
carefully given their potential effects on the civic equality of either the
same-sex couples or the religious adherents, the claims already presume
the equal civic status of same-sex couples, and opposition can now only be
framed in terms of insisting on an exemption from the law for those who
disagree.
Arendt concludes her reflections on truth and politics on a somewhat
hopeful note, somewhat at odds with the rest of her essay. While fragile,
truth is also resilient, she alleges. Though it will be defeated in a head-
on clash with power, truth is nonetheless also less transitory than power,
and whatever those in power may contrive, they are unable to discover
or invent a viable substitution for truth. Likewise, hermeneutic truth as

18
A Pew Research Center poll from March 2016 found that 37% of Americans oppose
same-sex marriage (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2016).
36 D. WALHOF

disclosed and sedimented in language is fragile, at risk of being concealed

by partisan and ideological echo chambers and by our refusal to fall into
dialogue with those unlike us. Over time, however, it too demonstrates a
degree of resilience. As the example of civic equality suggests, taking the
long view can help us see the possibility of the emergence of hermeneutic
truth in democratic politics, at least so long as we and others are willing to
expose ourselves to the risk of its disclosure. The key to these possibilities
lies in democratic dialogue, the subject of the next chapter.
 CHAPTER 3

Conversation and Understanding

Talk is central to democracy. Collective decision-making about public

matters is impossible without discussion among citizens and leaders alike,
something the Athenians recognized long ago. The development of the
modern state, mass democracy, and new communication technologies
have substantially changed the nature and places of democratic discourse,
but it remains as crucial as ever, as democratic theorists have insisted the
past few decades. Indeed, as John Dryzek notes, deliberative approaches
now dominate democratic theory and even political theory more gener-
ally (2007, 237). This is true not just in terms of the volume of offerings,
which are legion and diverse and have now expanded to include attempts
to test and refine the theory empirically (Thompson 2008), but it is even
more true in terms of the normative orientation of democratic theory.
A deliberative approach, broadly defined, has become the default view,
something against which alternative accounts have to define themselves.
This would be welcome news to Gadamer, whose philosophical herme-
neutics at their core are about dialogue. However, his own writings have
had relatively little direct influence on these developments in democratic
theory, both because they tend not to be explicitly political and also
because the I-and-Thou character of his thought seems too limited for
thinking through problems of mass democracy.1 As I noted at the end of
1
On this point, see Rasmussen, who interprets Gadamer’s hermeneutics as unable to offer
the necessary critical perspectives for public deliberation (2002, 510). Georgia Warnke has, in
contrast, demonstrated the possibilities of a dialogical approach drawn from Gadamer (1999).

© The Author(s) 2017 37

D. Walhof, The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-46864-8_3
38 D. WALHOF

Chap. 1, however, I think Gadamer’s account of understanding in con-

versation calls our attention to realities that we are prone to overlook and
need to be reminded of. Most importantly, as I will argue in this chapter,
by drawing our attention away from the citizen-subject and to the phe-
nomenology of conversation itself, Gadamer’s work reveals the potential
for understanding through civic discourse and, thus, the critical impor-
tance of face-to-face dialogue, especially among political leaders and other
citizen representatives, broadly defined.
I make this case by first laying out Gadamer’s phenomenology of con-
versation and understanding in some detail and illustrating it with the
1957 movie, Twelve Angry Men. I then turn to theories of deliberative
democracy, arguing that the most restrictive theories, like those of Cohen
and of Gutmann and Thompson, oddly neglect the potential for under-
standing in dialogue because of their focus on the conditions for delib-
eration, especially the high epistemological demands placed on citizens.
These theorists, I argue, simultaneously demand too much from citizens
and expect too little from democratic discourse. What I call the “rhetorical
turn” in deliberative theory, starting with Iris Marion Young and recently
developed in different ways by Simone Chambers and John Dryzek, has
relaxed some of these conditions in order to make deliberative theory
more applicable to mass democracy. This is a substantial step forward,
one supported by recent empirical studies, but I caution that the move to
rhetoric should not come at the expense of dialogue. As Gadamer reminds
us, true rhetoric remains closely tied to dialogue and understanding.

3.1 GADAMER’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONVERSATION

Although we might talk about conducting a conversation, in fact a genuine
conversation, Gadamer claims in Part Three of Truth and Method, is “never
the one we wanted to conduct.” A conversation remains outside the control
of the participants; none of them can direct it, nor does anyone know how
it will come out. It takes its own course, perhaps taking the participants
in directions that none of them particularly intended, causing them to say
things that they had not planned on, nor had necessarily even thought of
before the conversation led them to it. In this way, Gadamer contends, it is
more correct to say that “we fall into conversation, or even that we become
involved in it” (1995, 383). A conversation draws us into it, perhaps even
though we might be reluctant to participate, and once drawn in, we find
ourselves led in directions we did not intend or had not anticipated.
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 39

Gadamer’s analysis depends on a distinction between conversations

that are “genuine” (1995, 383), “authentic” (1995, 363), or “true”
(1995, 303), on the one hand, and those conversations that are inau-
thentic or not genuine, on the other. Inauthentic conversations come in
a variety of forms, but they share a common deficiency: one of the parties
to the conversation treats the other(s) as an object rather than a partner
in dialogue (1995, 303). Included here would be a conversation with
someone who constantly seeks to control rather than follow the conver-
sation as it unfolds. In this case, the others exist merely so that he has
someone to listen to his views and to whom he can prove himself right
about something (1995, 363). They are objects rather than partners. The
same is true, albeit in a different sense, of oral examinations and doctor-
patient exchanges, two examples of potentially inauthentic conversations
that Gadamer gives (1995, 303). Here the goal is obtaining information
about what someone knows (the exam) or information about the person
herself (doctor-patient exchange). Thus, one party is treated as an object
of knowledge rather than a partner in dialogue.
To further explore the nature of a genuine conversation, Gadamer
turns to Socrates and the art of dialectic, the art of conducting a real
dialogue.2 The goal in Socrates’ exchanges is not to win every argument
but to persist in questioning ever further, as a means of pursuing the truth
about something, a subject common to the participants in the dialogue.
It is the presence of this common subject that is one of the distinguish-
ing features of a true conversation, according to Gadamer. A genuine
conversation focuses on a common subject that binds the participants to
each other, and it is this common subject that conducts the conversation.
Participating in a genuine dialogue means that one allows oneself “to be
conducted by the subject matter to which the partners in the dialogue are
oriented”(1995, 367). This is the sense in which a conversation has its
own spirit. It consists of a subject matter that, when pursued, directs the
conversation in particular ways rather than others.

2
Gadamer takes up Plato’s approach to dialectic in his habilitation on the Philebus, first
published in 1931 and later published in English as Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. In this early
work, Gadamer limits dialectic to “scientific” talk, especially that which has to do with
knowledge of the good (1991, 38, 53). When he later discusses dialectic as the art of con-
ducting a conversation in Truth and Method, he takes a broader approach. That is, he now
seems to think that all genuine conversations, not just scientific or philosophical ones, have a
dialectical quality to them.
40 D. WALHOF

A genuine conversation, Gadamer claims, is “a process of coming to

an understanding,” which he casts as a fusion of horizons (1995, 385).
Gadamer’s interest here is understanding historical texts, so the fusion
that he has in mind is one between an interpreter’s horizon and the hori-
zon of the text. But a similar process occurs in conversation; here, too,
there is a fusion, this time between the horizons of the participants. In
fact, Gadamer’s account of understanding as a fusion of horizons better
fits conversation than it does textual interpretation. A phenomenology of
conversation as a fusion skirts the difficult problem of what it means to
say that a text has a horizon, which Gadamer describes as the “range of
vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage
point”(1995, 302). What does it mean for a text to have a “range of
vision” or a “vantage point,” except as it is reconstructed by the inter-
preter him- or herself? Whose vantage point are we talking about in this
case? Gadamer gets entangled in this problem when he acknowledges that
in historical interpretation the two horizons are not distinct but are actu-
ally just one: “There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in
itself than there are historical horizons which have to be acquired. Rather,
understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by
themselves.” He explains that part of the interpreter’s task is first to bring
out the tensions between the present and the past by consciously project-
ing “a historical horizon that is different from the horizon of the present.”
Even this constructed horizon, however, immediately “recombines” with
the horizon of the present, itself the effect of tradition and history (1995,
306, emphasis in original).
These problems are substantially lessened in thinking about conver-
sation as a fusion of horizons, as Gadamer explains in a later essay. In
contrasting written language and speech, Gadamer notes that while texts
require interpretation (the reconstruction of the historical horizon) as part
of understanding, speech as part of dialogue simply is interpretation. In
conversation, in other words, the interpretation of speech “is not an addi-
tional supplemental moment.” Rather, “in the dialogue we are really inter-
preting. Speaking then is interpreting itself” (Gadamer 1984, 81–82). In
fact, as he argues in Truth and Method, reconstructing the horizon of the
other in a conversation can actually be a means of avoiding understanding.
We claim to know where the other person is coming from by giving an
account of why they believe the things they do (“Of course, she would say
that; she’s an evangelical Christian.”), thus maintaining our distance from
them rather than falling in with them. In a genuine dialogue, the process
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 41

of understanding is more immediate, as the horizons of the participants

are fused through the back and forth that constitutes the conversation,
rendering this task of reconstruction unnecessary.
Gadamer represents this as a fusion because he wants to distinguish his
approach from the claim that understanding is achieved by transposing
oneself into the other’s point of view. He does not conceptualize under-
standing in terms of somehow being able to see the world as another
sees it (1995, 304–5). Rather, what occurs is a fusion in the sense that
the result is a new thing, something that was not present before and that
belongs to none of the participants. “In a conversation,” Gadamer claims,
“it is something [etwas] that comes to language, not one or the other
speaker”(1989, 122, emphasis in original). This something is the subject
of the conversation, that which binds the participants to each other, and
its emergence coincides with the event of understanding. In other words,
the subject of the conversation is a product of dialogue itself. As the con-
versation proceeds, as we jointly address questions that arise, treating each
other as partners in dialogue, we come to an understanding of the subject.
The dialogue discloses or constitutes the subject among us. This constitu-
tion is the event of understanding.
But what is the nature of this understanding for Gadamer? Is it mere
recognition of a common subject or does it also entail substantive agree-
ment about the issue at hand? In his reply to Derrida in their 1981
exchange, Gadamer says he does not think dialogue always leads to under-
standing in the sense of mutual agreement. Even in the case of just two
individuals, he says, “this would require a never-ending dialogue,” since
we “encounter limits again and again; we speak past each other and are
even at cross-purposes with ourselves.” But, Gadamer contends, none of
this would even be possible if “we had not traveled a long way together,
perhaps without even acknowledging it to ourselves” (Gadamer 1989,
57). Similarly with texts, “every reading that seeks understanding is only a
step on a path that never ends.” He emphasizes that we start on this path
knowing that we’ll never be completely done with it and knowing that the
text may deliver a “blow” against us even as we enter into it. This entering
in presumes neither harmonious agreement nor self-confirmation as the
result: “One must lose oneself in order to find oneself. I believe I am not
very far from Derrida when I stress that one never knows in advance what
one will find oneself to be” (Gadamer1989, 57).
Moreover, no such thing as understanding as complete agreement
could exist, given the nature of language. As we saw in Chap. 2, it is in the
42 D. WALHOF

nature of language that whatever is said is always connected to and situ-

ated within that which is unsaid. Every dialogical encounter, whether with
a text or with others in conversation, will be marked by an excess of mean-
ing, such that any agreement with another will always be partial and ill-
grounded. In his discussion of dialectic in Plato’s Seventh Letter, Gadamer
frames this in terms of “the multiple valences of meaning which separate
from one another in speaking,” a multiplicity that in his view accounts
for the “productive ambiguity” inherent in language (1983, 113). This
ambiguity works against attempts by philosophy and science to pin down
concepts with absolute precision: “An unequivocal, precise coordination
of the sign world with the world of facts, i.e., of the world of which we
are the master with the world which we seek to master by ordering it
with signs, is not language”(1983, 113). This ambiguity, then, means that
understanding includes disagreement, but this disagreement would be of
a different sort than that which existed prior to dialogue, as Warnke points
out. Drawing on the fusion metaphor, she casts understanding in terms of
achieving “an integration of differing perspectives in a deeper understand-
ing of the matters in question.” Participants in the dialogue, although not
necessarily coming to share the same judgment of a subject, do view the
subject differently than before by virtue of having engaged in dialogue
(Warnke 1987, 103, 169–70).
This might be the kind of disagreement we have in mind when we
“agree to disagree,” a disagreement in which we now have a better and
deeper understanding of its nature and what it might take to resolve it.
In such cases, there is a kind of understanding as well, a recognition of
a subject that binds us together, but about which we still have different
(though changed) views.3 We can see that understanding can encompass
disagreement if we contrast this situation with a dialogue in which the par-
ticipants, as we say, “talk past each other.” Here, Gadamer concedes, the
dialogue is not fruitful, since what we see is not really dialogue but “two
monologues following one upon the other”(Gadamer 1984, 82). In such
a case, understanding has not really occurred, and so the disagreement
lacks a certain reality.
More specifically, in using the phrase “talking past each other,” we
acknowledge that the participants failed to find a common language,
which for Gadamer is a fundamental aspect of understanding. The com-
mon subject achieved in a conversation must be in language, and it is, in

3
Dallmayr helpfully characterizes such exchanges as “agonistic dialogue” (Dallmayr 1996, 45).
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 43

fact, the very nature of language that makes such understanding possible.
As Gadamer notes, the “fusion of horizons that takes place in understand-
ing is actually the achievement of language. …The way understanding
occurs—whether in the case of a text or a dialogue with another person
who raises an issue with us—is the coming-into-language of the thing
itself”(1995, 378). What is going on, according to Gadamer, is the forg-
ing of a common language that is not the possession of one or the other
parties. It is not that a common language exists prior to understand-
ing; instead, conversation “creates a common language” (1995, 378).
Elsewhere he describes dialogue in terms of a process of “building up a
common language,” which can occur even in difficult conversations in
which the participants find themselves divided: “It is the function of the
dialogue that in saying or stating something a challenging relation with
the others evolves, a response is provoked, and the response provides the
interpretation of the other’s interpretation.” According to Gadamer, the
“real act of work” in such a case is the construction of a common language,
despite differences (Gadamer 1984, 81–82). In genuine conversations
marked by understanding, “it is finally possible to achieve …a common
diction and a common dictum” through the give and take, the back and
forth. This achievement of a common language is not a precondition for
understanding but “coincides with the very act of understanding and
reaching agreement”(1995, 387–88). For Gadamer, then, understanding
in conversation is a fusion that brings into existence a common thing in a
common language, forged by means of questioning and answering.
Exactly what Gadamer means by the subject of a conversation is not
always clear. At times he seems to mean this in the mundane sense of the
“topic” of conversation; at other times, he clearly lends this more weight
and is referring to the subject in the sense of die Sache explored in Chap.
2, the thing itself as disclosed in language. In either case, his descrip-
tions of the subject being disclosed by the conversation, or its coming
into language, suggest that it is not fully present prior to a conversation
or fully known to outside observers. It is, instead, constituted by the con-
versation itself. We can get a glimpse of this by thinking about the differ-
ence between a description of a conversation that has already taken place
and participating in a conversation itself. When someone approaches a
conversation that is already in progress, for example, she brings the con-
versation to a halt by asking, “What are you talking about?” One of the
parties briefly relays the topic, and the conversation resumes. The new-
comer may at this point chime in, but she does not really know the subject
44 D. WALHOF

of the conversation in the way that the others do and will perhaps make
initial comments that disrupt or stall its flow. Only by becoming part of
the conversation itself will its subject be disclosed to her. That is, she will
have come to an understanding of the subject with the other participants
by participating in the common language; indeed, her participation in the
conversation changes the subject and language in some fashion, and the
result will be, as Gadamer says, a new thing. More generally, we are always
falling into conversations before we know their subjects, since they are the
ongoing achievement of the conversations themselves. Only in achieving
understanding with others do we know what is at stake in the exchange.

3.2 RISKING PREJUDICES

In Gadamer’s view, the key to genuine conversations is that they proceed
along an underlying logic of question and answer, something exemplified
by Plato’s Socratic dialogues. Socrates’ famous claim that he is wiser than
other men because he knows that he does not know is, for Gadamer, the
starting point for any genuine conversation and for understanding more
generally. Asking questions presupposes that one does not already know
something; likewise, remaining open to being questioned by another
reflects acknowledgement of the possibility one does not know, or that
what one thinks is wrong. This is what distinguishes true questions from,
say, rhetorical or pedagogical questions, which take the form of a question
but in which case the answer is known in advance.4 In these cases, there is
nothing at stake, no real question to which there could be a real answer.
By contrast, true questions require openness, a minimal awareness that the
answer is not known or at least not settled (1995, 363–66).
This openness is required precisely because it is not so much the par-
ticipants in a conversation who ask questions, as much as it is the com-
mon subject of the conversation that produces them. Gadamer notes that
although we might begin a conversation with certain questions in mind,
over the course of the conversation other questions “arise” or “occur” to
us. That is, the questions present themselves to us, or they press them-
selves on us; it is almost as if we cannot avoid them (1995, 366). The sub-
ject reveals itself through the logic of question and answer. As Gadamer

4
“Pedagogical” is the term Gadamer uses here. He seems to have in mind the questions
asked in an oral exam setting. Clearly, we can and do ask questions in pedagogical settings to
which we do not already know the answer.
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 45

notes in his discussion of the Meno, “Questioning is seeking, and as such it

is governed by what is sought”(1986b, 59). Pursuing these questions and
seeking out answers to them gives rise, in turn, to more questions. This is
what it means to allow oneself to be conducted by the subject disclosed by
the dialogue. A conversation proceeds by means of questioning, by plac-
ing seemingly known truths in the open, and allowing the subject and the
possibilities to be fluid rather than fixed.
Because understanding involves the forging of a common language that
belongs to none of the parties, it is risky. In his work on cross-cultural
encounters, Dallmayr describes it as entering “the border zone or inter-
stices between self and other, thus placing oneself before the open ‘court’
of dialogue and mutual questioning”(1996, 47). Gadamer goes so far as
to call it “an adventure” and “dangerous” (1981, 109). It is dangerous
because the course and outcome of a genuine conversation cannot be pre-
dicted, and the creation of a common language does not leave the partici-
pants unchanged. Engaging in a conversation “is not merely a matter of
putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view,
but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what
we were”(1995, 379). In a genuine conversation, we cannot assert our
views and continue to hold them in the same way that we did upon enter-
ing the dialogue. Rather, the act of engaging in conversation transforms
these views or leads to the disclosure of new truths of which we were
previously unaware. In this sense, understanding is an event that leads
to the “broadening of human experiences, our self-knowledge, and our
horizon, for everything understanding mediates is mediated along with
ourselves”(1981, 110). For Gadamer, the change that occurs with under-
standing is not so much a choice as an event that happens to us.
What has happened is that our prejudices, understood in Gadamer’s
broad sense of the (usually nonconscious) expectations we bring to an
interaction, have been brought into play by virtue of engaging in dia-
logue. As we fall into conversation, certain of our prejudices are brought
into the open, made explicit to us and the others, and potentially exposed
to the questioning that is at the heart of conversation. These prejudices
are thus placed at risk. As Gadamer explains in “Text and Interpretation,”
his initial contribution to the exchange with Derrida, “genuinely speaking
one’s mind has little to do with a mere explication and assertion of our
prejudices; rather, it risks our prejudices—it exposes oneself to one’s own
doubt as well as the rejoinder of the other”(1989, 26). There is always the
potential that we will find out that what we thought we knew to be true is,
46 D. WALHOF

in fact, not true at all or not true in the way we thought. Our prejudices
will be revised in the course of coming to an understanding with others.
In fact, for Gadamer there is no other way for us to get beyond the
prejudices that currently constitute our understanding of the world.
Only through dialogue, through the forging of a common language with
another, are our prejudices revealed and called into question (1986b, 43).
The interactive aspect of dialogue is crucial here: “the mere presence of
the other before whom we stand helps us to break up our own bias and
narrowness, even before he opens his mouth to make a reply”(1989, 26).
In other words, speaking and listening to another creates the possibil-
ity for change. The mere attempt to be understood and to understand,
then, already serves to put our prejudices at risk. Thus, it turns out that
the openness that distinguishes authentic from inauthentic dialogue is
more like an openness to the other person or persons than an openness to
abstract ideas or to certain views, which is what we normally think of when
we use the term “open-minded.” It is not that we suspend belief or doubt
our views as a precondition to dialogue. Instead we engage with another
as what Gadamer variously calls a “partner” or “fellow knower” or “fellow
speaker.” This openness is best understood as a disposition that regards
the other as having something to offer, as someone whose participation
jointly helps disclose the subject that is common to us and whose presence
risks our prejudices and our views.
But it is not simply our views that might change. Gadamer insists that
understanding in dialogue potentially involves a further transformation of
our very selves, if we may use that language. The event of understanding
“is not limited to the sphere of arguments and counterarguments, the
exchange and unification of which may be the end meaning of every con-
frontation. Rather, …there is something else in this experience, namely, a
potentiality for being other that lies beyond every coming to agreement
about what is common”(1989, 26). By drawing us in, forging a common
language, and disclosing a common subject, understanding in conversa-
tion potentially makes us other than we were. Indeed, one mark of an
inauthentic conversation, says Gadamer in Truth and Method, is that a
speaker places himself beyond reach. Rather than attempting to forge a
common language and come to an understanding, the person states his
views in such a way that makes his standpoint “safely unattainable” (1995,
303). For this person, asking questions is merely role-playing, whereas in
an authentic dialogue, “the questioner is always one who simultaneously
questions himself” (1986b, 59). Genuine conversation involves a commit-
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 47

ment of one’s very self to the possibility of transformation. It puts oneself

and one’s prejudices at risk.

3.3 12 ANGRY MEN

Before turning more directly to democratic dialogue, it is perhaps useful
to bring Gadamer’s approach into sharper focus by way of an example. An
excellent demonstration of what I have described can be found in the clas-
sic film 12 Angry Men, written by Reginald Rose and directed by Sidney
Lumet (1957). Aside from short scenes at the beginning and end of the
movie, the film consists of a jury’s deliberation in a capital murder case. At
the start of their deliberations, eleven jurors vote immediately for a convic-
tion; only juror #8 (played by Henry Fonda) votes for acquittal. Over the
course of the deliberation, the others are eventually won over to his side,
one or two at a time, until there is a unanimous vote for acquittal. For our
purposes, what is interesting about the drama is the way that the discus-
sion proceeds and how the various jurors come to their acquittal votes,
illustrating Gadamer’s claims about conversations.
The deliberations take place only because of an openness on the part
of juror #8. He votes not guilty at the outset, but when asked whether
he believes the defendant is innocent, he says he does not know. He
“just wants to talk,” since he is not altogether convinced of the defen-
dant’s guilt, and “it’s not easy to vote to send a kid to die without talking
about it first.” He seeks out the other jurors as partners in dialogue; he
approaches them as fellow seekers. They, on the other hand, are puzzled
and even angered by his suggestion, since the defendant’s guilt seems
obvious to them. Some see no point in talking at all: juror #7, who is
mostly concerned about making it to a Yankees game that evening, claims
they could talk for “another hundred years” and he still wouldn’t change
his mind. Juror #8 responds that he’s not trying to change anyone’s mind
but simply wants to talk. Realizing they have little choice but to talk, the
jurors decide to go around the room, each providing an explanation of
his vote.
Only a few have spoken when certain questions begin to emerge, as
potential weaknesses in the prosecution’s case come into view and a few
of the jurors begin to have doubts. Various jurors find themselves drawn
into the conversation in different ways at different times, leading them to
doubt their previous certainty. No one piece of evidence demonstrates the
defendant’s innocence, evidence that any reasonable person would have
48 D. WALHOF

to accept, nor is there a single oration by juror #8 that leads them all to
acknowledge that he offers the most reasonable case. Instead, what causes
each juror to realize he knows less, or sometimes more, than he thought
is tied specifically to his particular prejudices (in Gadamer’s sense) called
into play by the conversation, despite its heated nature at times and the
fact that some jurors remain reluctant to participate. More than once, the
conversation is punctuated by protests along the lines of, “I don’t have
to answer to you.” Over the course of the dialogue, however, each juror
is drawn into the conversation and finds his views altered as a result, but
in each case, this change comes about through something that would not
have necessarily had the same impact on another.
For example, when the damning testimony of an elderly neighbor to
the victim is called into question, one of the jurors demands to know
what incentive the elderly man would have for claiming to be certain of
something that he wasn’t. The question elicits a response from juror #9,
an elderly man himself, who through the exchange realizes he may have
an explanation: the elderly witness feels neglected and useless and, hence,
enjoys the attention that has come by being the star witness in a mur-
der trial. This conversation, in part, prompts the elderly juror to switch
his vote. Likewise, after a reenactment of the crime in the jury room,
juror #5 realizes that the testimony about the angle of the stab wounds is
inconsistent with the claim that a switchblade was the murder weapon. He
had seen switchblade fights as a youth, and the stab wounds would have
required holding the knife in a way that no one proficient with a switch-
blade would.
Throughout all of this, the group struggles to find and maintain a com-
mon language. Juror #12 throws around phrases drawn from his advertis-
ing career (“Let’s run this idea up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes
it.”) that have little resonance with the others and strike some as vaguely
inappropriate. When juror #10 launches into a racist tirade about “those
people” and their little regard for life, another juror, an immigrant himself,
confronts him while the other jurors respond with cold silence. In addi-
tion, although it seems like the subject in a jury deliberation is obvious,
there is a sense in which this, too, is an ongoing product of the dialogue
itself. When juror #7 declares “I’ve had enough,” and flippantly changes
his vote to not guilty so that he can make it to the Yankees game on time,
another juror angrily challenges him to have the guts to do what he thinks
is right. It is a battle over what, precisely, is at stake in the conversation.
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 49

The last juror finally relents after an emotional and heated exchange com-
pels him to recognize that his desire to convict stems, in part, from his
own anger and guilt over a wayward son. The course of the conversation
finally brings about an understanding of what the matter at hand is. As
this happens, as understanding occurs, the jurors find themselves and their
views transformed.
This fictional account nicely exemplifies dimensions of a genuine con-
versation in Gadamer’s sense. The conversation that takes place in the
jury room is not the one any of them wanted or anticipated. There is
little to no agreement at the start on the terms of the discussion, nor
necessarily a commitment by each juror to listen to the others and offer
reasons in return. All there is at the outset is some impulse or felt obliga-
tion to engage with the others, a minimal openness to them as partners
in dialogue. Despite some not wanting to have a conversation at all,
they nonetheless find themselves drawn in at various points. The course
of the conversation is the result of no one’s intentions but proceeds in
response to questions that, when addressed, give rise to further ques-
tions. Through this questioning, a common language is forged around
an emerging and changing subject, which turns out to be not just the
question of guilt but also matters like ethnic and class prejudice and
parent-child relationships.
Throughout the deliberations, the jurors’ prejudices are not suspended
or set aside in advance, but are brought into play by virtue of the conver-
sation itself. Near the end of the film, juror #8, the lone dissenter at the
beginning, declares, “Where ever you run into it, prejudice always obscures
the truth.” In fact, the opposite is true in this case: prejudice revealed
the truth. The jurors’ prejudices actually constituted the conditions for
dialogue and for understanding. The conversation would not have taken
place otherwise. Even the overtly racist juror participates by beginning
from that which he thinks he knows; his prejudgments are called forth by
the questions raised and by his attempts to respond and, thereby, to be
understood. These prejudices are not left untouched. Once called forth,
they also are open to question; having been brought into play, they are
now at risk. Through the logic of question and answer, these prejudices are
potentially exposed as untrue, or not true in the sense that one thought, or
perhaps the certainty with which they are held will be undermined in some
way. In this way, understanding is achieved, eventually leading to agree-
ment. Moreover, one gets the sense that a genuine change has taken place;
the jurors leave the deliberation other than they were.
50 D. WALHOF

3.4 THE EPISTEMIC DEMANDS OF DELIBERATIVE

DEMOCRACY
As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, deliberative theories have
come to dominate normative reflections on democracy, and these reflec-
tions are also now driving significant empirical research as well. These
theories differ substantially from each other, but they share a common
rejection and a common commitment: they reject theories that see prefer-
ence aggregation and fair competition for power as the defining features of
democracy, and they share a commitment to some form of deliberation as
a core requirement of a well-functioning democracy. Significant disagree-
ments continue over what counts as deliberation, how and where delibera-
tion does and should take place, and the relationship between deliberation
and the decision-making mechanisms of mass democracy.
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s book, Democracy and
Disagreement, continues to stand out as a complex and comprehensive
argument for the possibilities of deliberative democracy, compelling in its
conceptual thoroughness and clarity and its ability to connect these con-
cepts to examples drawn from contemporary politics (1996). Their sub-
sequent work responds to criticisms and defends a refined version of their
earlier theory (2004). Their task is to return a form of moral reasoning
to democratic politics, which they situate as a third way between “impar-
tiality” and “prudence.” The way of impartiality, they contend, aims at
adoption by citizens of some comprehensive view of morality and poli-
tics, based on universal justifications. This requires, among other things,
altruistic citizens who suppress their own interests in pursuit of something
akin to truth and who submit to the demonstrations of formal argument.
The way of prudence, in contrast, seeks a mere modus vivendi based on
mutually advantageous agreements. This requires only that citizens exer-
cise a form of enlightened (as opposed to unreflective) self-interest and are
willing to engage in bargaining to mutual advantage (1996, 53). Neither
course is satisfactory to Gutmann and Thompson. They instead propose a
form of moral reasoning grounded in deliberation whose aim is mutually
acceptable ways of resolving disagreements.
Compared to other deliberative theorists, many of whom use their work
as a starting point, Gutmann and Thompson take a relatively restricted
view of what counts as deliberation and where it occurs. First, they confine
deliberation to situations in which participants must at some point reach
a binding decision. This entails a distinction between deliberation, on the
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 51

one hand, and other forms of political talk among citizens, on the other.
Though other forms of discussion are important, they do not qualify as
deliberation, as Thompson stresses again recently (2008, 502). Second,
deliberation depends upon the willingness of citizens to seek mutually
acceptable and generally accessible reasons, which in turn requires civic
dispositions marked by three characteristics: reciprocity, publicity, and
accountability. Of these, reciprocity is the most important, the “leading
principle” that shapes the meaning of the other two. Reciprocity demands
that citizens appeal only to reasons that potentially can be shared by other
citizens. In other words, reciprocity involves the exercise of epistemic self-
restraint, in which one searches for and offers only those justifications that
one believes can be adopted by fellow citizens who are themselves similarly
disposed to deliberation. Only in this way can citizens reach moral prin-
ciples based on mutually acceptable reasons, which serve as the grounds
for agreement on a policy or a course of action (1996, 55–57; 2004, 4–7).
Joshua Cohen similarly defends a narrow set of criteria for delibera-
tion, which he also distinguishes from public discussion and other forms
of political talk. Though he acknowledges the importance of these other
forms of talk for democracy, he contends they are not the same thing as
deliberation, a more restrictive ideal for evaluating the democratic institu-
tions and procedures of collective decision-making (2009, 160–61). The
distinctive characteristic of deliberation for Cohen is that it subjects the
exercise of power to “reason’s discipline”—to, in Habermas’ well-known
formulation, the unforced force of the better argument. For Cohen, as
for Gutmann and Thompson, this entails a commitment to “finding con-
siderations that others can reasonably be expected to acknowledge as rea-
sons.” In a democracy of equals, the only reasons that other citizens can
reasonably be expected to acknowledge are those framed in terms of the
common good. Cohen’s deliberative ideal thus has both procedural and
content restrictions, which he, democratizing Rawls, summarizes in terms
of “the common reason of a democratic public” or “democracy’s public
reason” (2009, 330–31).
The deliberative theories of Gutmann and Thompson and Cohen
articulate an ideal standard for evaluating our democratic institutions and
practices. In many respects, it is an attractive ideal, one that places reflec-
tive reasoning oriented toward the public good at the center of demo-
cratic policy-making and that ties democratic legitimacy to the mutual
acceptability of the grounds for coercive policies. Yet, the restrictive crite-
ria for deliberation have come under criticism. Bohman and Richardson,
52 D. WALHOF

who are sympathetic to a deliberative approach, persuasively argue that

the standard of “reasons that all can accept” is difficult if not impossible
to specify and, in any case, adds nothing to the explicit or implied sub-
stantive standards already part of deliberative theories (2009). These sub-
stantive standards themselves have also been criticized for presuming an
Enlightenment conception of Reason that is no longer plausible or for
favoring well-educated, articulate, and likely wealthier citizens through
the emphasis on rational discussion and thus further marginalizing poor
citizens and those with lower levels of education (Young 2000).
Gadamer’s work highlights something different. His phenomenol-
ogy of conversation suggests that these restrictive approaches actually
strip deliberation of its potential for bringing about understanding. In
defining deliberation narrowly as a reasoned process of offering mutu-
ally acceptable and accessible justifications, restrictive theories like those
of Gutmann and Thompson and Cohen place extraordinary epistemic
demands on those who deliberate. The prerequisites for deliberation, to
put it in starkest terms, include: (1) forming one’s views on the sub-
ject at hand, (2) formulating reasons for these views, (3) discerning
whether these are reasons that fellow citizens can reasonably be expected
to accept, (4) having the motivation to offer such mutually acceptable
reasons as justification for the policy, and (5) being capable of clearly
expressing these reasons in ways that, to the best of one’s knowledge,
will be accessible to and adoptable by fellow citizens. Beyond the thresh-
old question of whether citizens and civic leaders are capable of meeting
these demands, we need to ask what the actual deliberative exchanges on
this model consist of and what they accomplish. They appear primarily
to involve expressing already-formulated reasons for already-formulated
views, and then trying to discover whether others either share these rea-
sons or might adopt some of them for the views they hold. Beyond this,
the exchange itself appears to do little. Most of the work, it seems, takes
place outside of the deliberations, in citizens formulating their views and
the reasons for them.
These restrictive accounts thus preclude the possibility of citizens being
drawn into a discussion even though they are unsure of their views, much
less the reasons for these views, and even though they do not know the
course the deliberations might take. As we saw in the 12 Angry Men exam-
ple, what compels a particular person to fall into conversation with others
is not known at the beginning, nor will it necessarily be the same thing
that draws another person in. If juror #8, rather than simply saying he
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 53

didn’t know and asking the others for their thoughts, had instead tried
to offer mutually acceptable reasons for an already-formulated view, the
deliberations might never have gotten off the ground. Or, if the others,
when asked by him for their reasons, had tried to come up with mutually
acceptable reasons, they may have never been drawn into the dialogue in
ways that brought their prejudices into play and put them at risk. In fact,
they may have instead offered general reasons that placed themselves safely
beyond reach, not at risk of being transformed by constituting a common
subject with others through forging a common language.
A key point here is that the focus of the restrictive deliberative theories
is a certain kind of justification. They specify the kinds of reasons that are
appropriate in a deliberative context, suggesting that when such reasons
are given, a solution can perhaps be found that accommodates the existing
positions and grants legitimacy to the outcomes. Gadamer’s approach, in
contrast, does not demand that participants appeal only to reasons that can
be shared by others or that one seek mutually justifiable moral principles.
His approach reorients our view away from the reasons or justifications
and to the interactive nature of dialogue itself, particularly its capacity for
generating a common language that helps disclose a common subject as a
means of achieving some kind of understanding.
It is not just that Gadamer’s approach relaxes the overly-demanding
epistemic requirements put forth by the restrictive deliberative theorists.
The contrast goes deeper than that. Gadamer’s approach does not presume
the same kind of citizen-subject that these deliberative theorists do. The
restrictive deliberative theories presume that political agents already know
their views and their reasons for holding these views. They have these
views and reasons in their minds, as it were, and the deliberative moment
provides an opportunity for articulating what is known. Although under
the right circumstances this articulation may lead to a new understanding
of one’s views and reasons, or to a recognition that others share these views
or reasons, in general the participants’ views and justifications for them are
formulated and known to them independently of the exchange, and the
course of the dialogue remains fundamentally tied to their intentions.
The broader premise of Gadamer’s approach, in contrast, is that dialogue
is not to be understood in terms of the subjectivity of the participants. As
we saw in Chap. 2, Gadamer rejects instrumental approaches to language,
including a picture of speech as putting pre-existing thoughts into words.
His hermeneutics reveal that focusing on the subjective intentions of the
speakers is misleading, given the way that language and dialogue work.
54 D. WALHOF

Our meanings and intentions are constituted in and by speech itself. He

explains this in his exchange with Derrida:

The dialogical character of language … leaves behind it any starting point in

the subjectivity of the subject, and especially in the meaning-directed inten-
tions of the speaker. What we find happening in speaking is not a mere reifi-
cation of intended meaning, but an endeavor that continually modifies itself,
or better: a continually recurring temptation to engage oneself in something
or to become involved with someone. (Gadamer 1989, 26)

The nature of dialogue is such that the intentions of the dialogue’s partici-
pants are not determinative. Indeed, they may not even have had relevant
intentions at the outset of the dialogue, or at least may not have had a full
sense of what these intentions were. Instead, meaning is located in the
interaction itself; it emerges from the conversation as it proceeds.
On this approach, then, the epistemological demands of the restric-
tive deliberative theorists are not just too high, they are also misguided.
Since the views of the participants in a dialogue and the reasons for these
views do not in themselves determine the nature of the interaction and the
meanings located within it, it is unhelpful to conceptualize deliberation in
terms of citizens stating their views and offering certain kinds of reasons
for them. Gadamer’s approach asks us to revise our demands of citizens
when it comes to deliberation, focusing instead on a willingness to engage
with others. As we have seen, the openness to the other in his account is
not primarily an epistemological disposition, a kind of skepticism or sus-
pension of conviction that may seem normal to political theorists but may
be quite foreign to citizens generally. Instead, it has to do with a willing-
ness to interact with others, to fall into conversation with them, which also
potentially involves an openness to the subject matter itself.
Shifting focus away from the reasons given to the dialogue itself changes
not only the epistemic demands placed on citizens but also our expecta-
tions for what deliberation might accomplish. The reason-giving approach
of the restrictive deliberative theorists significantly constrains the possibili-
ties for thinking along these lines. Gadamer’s approach opens up new ways
of thinking about how understanding or agreement might result from
being drawn into conversation. This would include the possible emer-
gence of a new thing, an outcome that none of the participants intended
in entering the conversation. In so strictly specifying the nature of appro-
priate reasons in deliberation, the restrictive theories miss this possibility.
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 55

It is appropriate that our fictional example of a Gadamerian conversa-

tion happens in a jury room. At the time of the American founding, local
juries were viewed as important deliberative bodies that protected citizens
from arbitrary and tyrannical exercises of power. The Anti-Federalists, in
particular, argued that juries had the power not just to apply but also to
interpret the law in both criminal and civil cases. They saw juries as the
quintessential democratic body: a group of ordinary citizens giving mean-
ing to the law and applying it to other citizens (Abramson 1994, 22–33).
Central to this understanding is the deliberative nature of juries. It is not
just that ordinary citizens are the ones interpreting the law; they do so
together in dialogue with each other.
Research on “citizens’ juries” also lends some support to the account
of dialogue outlined here. A citizens’ jury brings together several citizens
(usually twelve to sixteen) in order to examine a particular issue or policy
proposal. Jurors hear from various witnesses and have access to policy
information, after which they deliberate and produce a recommendation
or report (Smith and Wales 1999, 296–297, and 2000, 51–65). One of
the interesting findings is that jurors often change their minds during the
deliberations, as face-to-face dialogue leads to a kind of mutual under-
standing (Smith and Wales 1999, 303, and 2000, 59–60). One partici-
pant in a group that examined drugs and community safety issues recalled,
“I came in with many preconceived ideas—my views have almost somer-
saulted over”(Coote and Mattinson 1997, 9). In some cases, the delibera-
tions lead to new options that were not on the agenda at the beginning of
the process (Coote and Mattinson 1997, 6–7). In these cases, the dialogue
produces a new thing, which arises through the calling into question and
transformation of prejudices created by an openness to falling into dia-
logue with others.
In general, however, the empirical evidence on citizens’ juries and
other “mini-public” deliberative settings—like James Fishkin’s delibera-
tive polls, AmericaSpeaks’ 21st Century Town Meetings, or the Kettering
Foundation’s National Issue Forums—is mixed on the question of
whether dialogue leads to something like understanding, a difficult thing
to operationalize and measure in any case.5 Like the research on citizens’
juries, Walsh’s work on the Study Circles on Race program in Madison,
Wisconsin, highlights the promise of civic dialogue for creating positive
bonds even across significant cultural and racial divides. In this case, it

5
Goodin and Dryzek provide a good overview of the relevant studies (2006, 223–25).
56 D. WALHOF

must be noted, participants were primed for cooperation rather than for
debate or competition, and the dialogue was not focused on making a par-
ticular policy decision (Walsh 2007). These two factors, it seems, allowed
citizens to fall into dialogue with others, even with those who on first
appearance were unlike them. Other studies suggest that directing groups
to make a specific policy decision can lead to polarization. Intense parti-
san differences among the participants make this polarization more likely
(Thompson 2008). This is not surprising, since strong partisan commit-
ments make us suspicious of falling in with someone of a different partisan
stripe. In such situations, we are less inclined to open ourselves to another
and, thus, less inclined to risk the exposure of our prejudices and ourselves
that comes from forging a common language about a common subject.
Intense partisanship, especially among elites, remains a difficult problem
for dialogical approaches to democracy.
Empirical studies suggest that partisanship and ideology are even big-
ger obstacles online. In the last decade, political blogs have become an
important part of the public sphere, even if their numbers remain rela-
tively small,6 since they are monitored by political elites as indicators of
public opinion and are increasingly interconnected with leading news out-
lets. Bloggers frequently link to and respond to the arguments of other
bloggers, and many of them also have comment sections that allow inter-
action with and among their readers. Given their interactive nature, then,
blogs represent an opportunity for citizens to engage with each other in
dialogue, albeit in written form rather than face-to-face. Unfortunately,
the vast majority of the references, responses, and links on leading political
blogs are to other blogs with a similar ideological stance. Only about 15%
of links cut across ideological lines, and about half of these were classified
by the researchers as “strawman” arguments rather than serious, substan-
tive engagement with opposing views (Hargittai et al. 2008).
Likewise, a study of blog readers found virtually no overlap between
left- and right-wing political blog readers in terms of party identification
or ideology. An overwhelming majority, 94%, of regular readers visit only
political blogs from one side of the ideological spectrum. These citizens
are more partisan and ideological than other citizens. Unfortunately, they
are also the most politically aware citizens and those who report the high-
est levels of political participation; in addition, they are more highly edu-

6
In his study, Hindman estimates that only 86 political bloggers had more than 2000 daily
visitors (2008).
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 57

cated than citizens who do not regularly read political blogs (Lawrence
et al. 2010, 146–50). In other words, participants in the blogosphere are
those most equipped to engage in thoughtful, reflective consideration of
their political views and to engage in dialogue with other citizens. Yet, at
least in their online lives, they insulate themselves, rarely encountering
ideas and arguments with which they might disagree.
The blogosphere continues to evolve, so perhaps it will change in ways
that promote dialogue among those with different viewpoints rather
than serving primarily as a means for enclave deliberation, to use Cass
Sunstein’s term (2001). Given its current form, however, we should be
under no illusion that online “dialogue,” though not without its uses, is a
substitute for face-to-face interaction, the value of which was highlighted
in a recent study by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla. They found that
conversations with door-to-door canvassers in Miami, in which citizens
were asked to speak about times when they themselves had been judged
negatively for being different, produced greater levels of acceptance of
transgender persons (Broockman and Kalla 2016). Online, asynchronous
written exchanges, in contrast, are far less likely to lead to the kind of
falling in with another that face-to-face dialogue can. Given the absence
of a real person with whom one tries to forge a common language and
to whom one has to respond, one is left with disembodied arguments
and reasons. This should not matter, according to the most restrictive
theories of deliberative democracy, as long as the reasons are reasons that
others can reasonably be expected to accept. In reality, however, it does
matter. Here again we see the important difference between the open-
ness to another at the heart of Gadamer’s hermeneutics and the kind of
epistemic open-mindedness required by restrictive theories of deliberative
democracy.

3.5 THE RHETORICAL TURN

So far this chapter has focused on how Gadamer’s phenomenology of con-
versation as the forging of a common language about a common subject
reveals some of the inadequacies of what I have called restrictive theories
of deliberative democracy. Gadamer’s approach shows that by focusing
on the epistemological demands necessary for deliberation, these theories
foreclose the potential that dialogue holds for bringing about understand-
ing, even though it may remain an understanding that includes disagree-
ment. It would be unfair, however, to hold up these restrictive theories
58 D. WALHOF

as representative of all deliberative theories. Other deliberative theories

incorporate more forms of political talk and also do not rely on such
demanding epistemic prerequisites. Recently, some have also included
more direct attention to rhetoric in an effort to address two concerns
about deliberative theory: (1) that it emphasizes public reason or rational
discourse to the neglect of emotion and other forms of communication
and (2) that it focuses only on face-to-face exchanges in micro-settings,
thus limiting the scope of deliberative theory’s application to mass democ-
racy. These theorists have attempted to reformulate deliberative democ-
racy to include rhetoric so that the deliberative standard can apply to mass
democracy marked by emotional and interest-based appeals and not just
to the reason-giving found in jury rooms, deliberative polls, and other
small gatherings.
Concerned that deliberative theories privilege unity at the expense of
difference and syllogistic reasoning at the expense of other forms of com-
munication, Iris Marion Young was among the first to explicitly incorporate
rhetoric into a deliberative approach (Young 2000, 37–44). She concep-
tualizes deliberative democracy broadly as a form of practical reasoning
that depends upon inclusion, equality, publicity, and reasonableness. The
last criterion, in particular, distinguishes hers from the more restrictive
accounts, since her notion of reasonableness encompasses forms of com-
munication generally taken to fall outside the bounds of rational argument,
including rhetoric and narrative. In fact, Young wants to break down the
distinction between rational argument and rhetoric altogether. In her view,
rhetoric includes emotional tone, style of speech, the symbols one draws
on, and, more broadly, all of the ways that we orient our speech to a par-
ticular audience. Rhetoric is connected to the situatedness of communica-
tion, the dimension that attends to the attributes and experiences of the
audience, the speaker’s location with respect to this particular audience,
and to the occasion of the communication itself (1996, 130, 2000, 65).
Thus understood, rhetoric unavoidably colors and conditions the sub-
stance of what is said, according to Young, and so is not merely about its
form. As a result, the distinction between rhetoric and rational argument
is no longer so sharp. This blending of rhetoric and argument needs to
be recognized and incorporated into democratic theory, she argues, for to
do otherwise privileges certain rhetorical elements of speech, particularly
those that are dispassionate, disembodied, general, and formal. Since these
modes of communication tend to be correlated with other forms of social
privilege based on race, class, and gender, deliberative theory unwittingly
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 59

becomes an agent in further marginalizing those already on the margins,

against its egalitarian claims (Young 1996, 124). Given all this, Young
argues, our theories should not demand that deliberation take only the
form of rational argument, but instead acknowledge the appropriate role
of rhetoric, along with greeting and storytelling, as part of deliberation.
For Young, the key distinction is not between rational argument and
rhetoric, but between communicative acts that merely aim to use others for
one’s own ends and those that aim to further understanding and coopera-
tion (2000, 66). What distinguishes them is the reasonableness of citizens,
which she conceptualizes as a set of dispositions upon which deliberation
depends: a willingness to listen to others and treat them with respect; a
willingness to enter a discussion to solve collective problems with the aim
of agreement; and a willingness to change one’s opinions and preferences
through the course of deliberation (2000, 24). This expanded notion of
reasonableness, while entailing a willingness to listen, seek agreement, and
change one’s views, does not carry the same epistemological requirements
that the more restrictive deliberative theories do. Citizens are not asked to
formulate reasons for their views and to be able to express them in ways
accessible to all. The exchange is not simply about offering justifications
for already-held positions but potentially involves the revelation and mod-
ification of the views of the participants as well. Since deliberation always
involves addressing a particular audience, not simply making abstract jus-
tificatory claims, it matters who one’s fellow deliberators are, not just in
terms of what reasons must be given and accommodated but also in terms
of the way one presents one’s claims.
Young’s criticisms hit a nerve among deliberative theorists. In response,
Gutmann and Thompson deny making a distinction between passion and
reason, charging that Young and other critics are the ones who presume this
dichotomy, thereby casting the marginalized as somehow less rational than
more privileged groups. Their own view, they contend, is that “in the polit-
ical arena passionate rhetoric can be as justifiable as logical demonstration”
and that modes of persuasion combining reason and passion are legitimate
(2004, 51). However, when they further specify passion’s role in demo-
cratic politics, they point to marches, sit-ins, and strikes as means of bring-
ing issues onto the political agenda. Such “nondeliberative” activities, as
they call them, can in their view serve deliberative ends by provoking more
deliberation (2004, 51). So despite their protests, there remains an implicit
division here, with passion being on the side of activities that can lead to
deliberation, though not conceptualized as part of deliberation itself.
60 D. WALHOF

Their disagreement with Young stems in part from differing concep-

tions of deliberation and the conditions for it. As we have seen, Gutmann
and Thompson’s theory sets high epistemological demands on citizens:
they must be able to know their views and the reasons for their views,
as well as be able to reflect their way into the views of others so that
they can offer reasons that others can be reasonably expected to accept.
These demands require that citizens be able to distance themselves from
their own views and reasons, so that they can evaluate them as objects in
order to determine whether they meet the deliberative criteria. Rhetoric,
which Gutmann and Thompson conceptualize primarily in terms of emo-
tion, threatens to collapse this distance, rendering it difficult for citizens to
evaluate and discipline their views and reasons. In other words, rhetoric,
on this model, undermines reflection, which in turn undermines the delib-
erative demand of reciprocity. By drawing attention to the particularity of
discourse and incorporating it into a communicative theory, Young helps
reinsert a dialogical element back into the heart of deliberative theory.
In many ways, then, her approach to deliberation resembles Gadamer’s
account of dialogue, although, as we have seen, Gadamer relies on a con-
cept of openness to the other rather than Young’s concept of “reason-
ableness.” For both of them, however, the willingness to engage with
particular others, not just disembodied arguments, holds the potential for
understanding and transformation.
Although some deliberative theorists resisted Young’s introduction of
rhetoric to deliberation, in general, her argument won the day and helped
change deliberative theory. As Dryzek notes, most deliberative theorists
would now come down firmly on the side that rhetoric does have a role to
play in deliberation (2010, 322). More recently, other theorists, includ-
ing Dryzek himself, have turned to rhetoric in response to a different
concern about deliberative theory: that its standards are largely irrelevant
to democracy on a large scale, especially mass democracy in a highly medi-
ated age. Simone Chambers worries that in its focus on micro-settings,
deliberative theory has abandoned mass democracy. She conceptualizes
this problem in terms of a split between theories of democratic delibera-
tion, which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives like the ones described
above, and theories of deliberative democracy, which address questions of
the relationship between the state and the public sphere (2009, 323–24).
In her words, theories of democratic deliberation “focus on the outcome
and define deliberation in terms of choosing a course of action under non-
coercive and discursive conditions,” while theories of deliberative democ-
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 61

racy, in contrast, “focus on the process and define deliberation in terms of

encouraging reflection and thoughtfulness about public policy in a nonco-
ercive and discursive way” (2009, 333–34). While theories of democratic
deliberation have grown in recent years, she says, theories of deliberative
democracy have been on the decline.
Chambers wishes to reinvigorate theories of deliberative democracy by
arguing that the mass public can be deliberative, despite the fact that it
cannot rely on face-to-face dialogue, that politics is dominated by elites,
and that much of mass political discourse is monological rather than dia-
logical. She does this through the concept of rhetoric. Since political rhet-
oric will necessarily be part of mass democracy, the key, in her view, is to
distinguish types of rhetoric that contribute toward making democracy
more deliberative from types that move us away from this standard. The
latter type, which she calls plebiscitary, is what has given rhetoric a bad
reputation in the first place. This is the kind of rhetoric rejected by Plato,
who contrasted it to the use of philosophical dialogue as a means of pur-
suing truth (Chambers 2009, 328). Plebiscitary rhetoric deploys speech
strategically merely for the purpose of securing agreement, with little con-
cern for the merits of the argument or for the practical judgment of citi-
zens. It can come in a variety of forms, from highly emotional, passionate
speech all the way to cool, dispassionate speech, depending on what works
in what contexts to move listeners (2009, 337).
Chambers makes it clear that she is not thinking primarily of individ-
ual demagogues and their manipulation of language and voters. Rather,
she is concerned about a more general character of the public sphere and
democratic institutions. We see the ascendancy of plebiscitary rhetoric in
modern democracies when “campaigns are vapid and vacuous, when vot-
ers are given no information, when the press only covers strategy and
never policy, when politicians say anything to get elected, and finally and
most importantly, when the audience, that is citizens, remains passive”
(2009, 337). Plebiscitary rhetoric includes strategies of both pandering
and priming. Pandering involves appeals by elites to the existing unreflec-
tive preferences in public opinion. Priming, its opposite, involves elites
consciously crafting language to evoke certain emotions like fear and
anger in order to alter public opinion. Chambers argues that both of these
strategies threaten deliberative ideals, making it difficult for citizens to
reflectively and thoughtfully engage in politics. Indeed, in different ways,
pandering and priming are each designed to prevent reflection and instead
evoke unreflective agreement (2009, 338–39).
62 D. WALHOF

Chambers acknowledges that plebiscitary rhetoric will always be a part

of mass democracy. However, she argues that rhetoric itself need not be
plebiscitary but can instead be more deliberative. Drawing on Aristotle,
she characterizes deliberative rhetoric in terms of both its content and
form. It is deliberative in content, she argues, in that its subject matter
has to do with choosing collective outcomes. Deliberative rhetoric in this
sense is, as she puts it, “future and action oriented.” It is deliberative
in form, she argues, in that the rhetoric induces “considered reflection”
about this collective action. Deliberative rhetoric conveys knowledge
and information, and it gets people to think and to see things in new
ways. Though it necessarily takes place in the context of an asymmetrical
relationship between speaker and hearer, deliberative rhetoric maintains
a dynamic relationship between them. The manner and content of the
speaker’s words spark active reasoning and thinking among the audience,
and so listeners remain engaged rather than passive (2009, 335). Though
plebiscitary rhetoric is an ineradicable part of mass democracy, Chambers
argues, we should work toward minimizing it in favor of more deliberative
forms of rhetoric.
Dryzek, too, turns to rhetoric to save deliberative democracy for mass
democracy. Drawing on Young, he conceptualizes rhetoric broadly as the
persuasive dimension of speech connected to its situatedness. On this
view, rhetoric includes argument, the virtue of the speaker, and emotion,
as well as “vivid metaphors, creative interpretation of evidence, arresting
figures of speech, irony, humor, exaggeration, gestures, performance, and
dramaturgy” (2010, 320). Given this broad conception, Dryzek is able to
theorize rhetoric as an inherent part of deliberation, not its opposite, argu-
ing that it has only been conceptualized as the opposite of deliberation, at
least implicitly, in certain narrow theories based on public reason, like that
of Rawls (2010, 323).
Dryzek’s concern is with the link between rhetoric and what he
calls “representative claims” in democratic discourse. He imagines citi-
zens as inhabiting multi-dimensional identities and possessing multiple
commitments, and so at any particular moment, an individual will expe-
rience themselves as represented by a number of different claims or dis-
courses within the public sphere, some of them competing with each other
(2010, 324). The question for Dryzek, then, is how rhetoric is used to
draw individuals toward some representative claims rather than others at a
particular moment, or to move them to act on some of their commitments
rather than others. Drawing on Putnam’s work on social capital, Dryzek
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 63

partly answers this question by distinguishing bonding rhetoric from

bridging rhetoric. Bonding rhetoric is used by a speaker to mobilize those
who are like-minded and similarly situated by highlighting representative
claims and identities that they obviously share, usually by contrasting these
identities with those who do not share them. Bonding rhetoric, in other
words, uses the persuasive dimension of speech to emphasize “in-group”
characteristics by exacerbating their difference from “out-groups” (2010,
328). Because of this, democratic theorists generally see bonding rheto-
ric as producing group polarization, threatening social unity and politi-
cal stability. Dryzek concedes this possibility, though he also points out
that bonding rhetoric can be important for generating solidarity within an
oppressed group. It can serve, then, as a pre-requisite for a group finding
a voice and demanding recognition in the public sphere, thereby con-
tributing to the overall representativeness of the public sphere. Whether
bonding rhetoric is a good or bad thing for deliberative democracy, then,
is always a matter of context (2010, 331).
Bridging rhetoric, in contrast, is directed at an audience who does not
obviously share an identity and commitments with the speaker. It works
not by trying to represent a group as a whole in contrast to another, but
by representing a discourse on one’s side as being compatible with repre-
sentative discourses of those one is trying to reach. This is a difficult task,
Dryzek points out, because one has to remain connected with one’s own
group while also understanding and appealing to others. His example of
bridging rhetoric is Martin Luther King’s ability to connect the discourse
of civil rights for black citizens with the discourse of liberal universalism,
thereby reaching out to white liberals and moderates. This meant, of
course, marginalizing both black liberationist discourse on one side and
white supremacist discourse on the other (2010, 329). King was able to
walk this line and, thereby, help constitute a fragile coalition.
Bridging rhetoric is generally hailed by democratic theorists for its abil-
ity to construct common ground, build solidarity, and contribute toward
democratic legitimacy. Dryzek urges caution, however, pointing out, once
again, that context matters. Though bridging rhetoric is generally more
likely than bonding rhetoric to produce deliberative virtues and to induce
reflection by citizens on their preferences, it can be also used by dominant
groups to co-opt and neutralize discontented groups (2010, 330–31).
In the end, he claims, the bonding-bridging categorization of rhetoric is
only useful as a means of helping us determine whether any particular use
of rhetoric helps “create and constitute an effective deliberative system
64 D. WALHOF

joining competent and reflective actors.” Since deliberation is a “particu-

lar kind of reflection-inducing communication that can never be assumed
to exist,” it requires work to maintain it. Rhetoric is an important part of
this project, and so it must always be judged on whether it helps to bring
about reflection and to connect reflective citizens (2010, 332).
As with Chambers, Dryzek’s effort to rehabilitate rhetoric for delibera-
tive theory focuses on the reflective capacities of citizens. For each of them,
certain kinds of rhetoric stimulate reflection (bridging rhetoric for Dryzek
and deliberative rhetoric for Chambers), while other kinds do not (bond-
ing rhetoric for Dryzek and plebiscitary rhetoric for Chambers). In this
way, each is concerned with the relationship between political communica-
tion, citizenship, and the health of democracy, no doubt critical questions,
and ones that have long been the focus of political thought. But in the end,
are these theories still theories of deliberative democracy, or has the turn to
rhetoric come at the cost of surrendering the core claim that democratic
legitimacy rests in political dialogue, not monologue? Encouraging reflec-
tion among citizens, while something to be valued, is not the same thing
as maintaining a standard that sees legitimate democratic outcomes as the
result of deliberation, either in the narrow sense advocated by Gutmann
and Thompson, or in the broader sense of dialogue that I have drawn from
Gadamer’s hermeneutics, in which citizens fall in with each other and forge
a common language about a common subject. An other is not required
for reflection. Not only can reflection take place entirely on one’s own, in
solitude, we tend to associate it with being alone. We talk of needing space
for reflection, of needing the quiet that comes with the suspension of other
voices that potentially drown out our own thoughts. Reflection substitutes
an internal dialogue for dialogue among diverse citizens.
To be sure, both Chambers and Dryzek still see a role for dialogue
among citizens, but their take on rhetoric risks rendering dialogue merely
into a means of stimulating reflection. Chambers, for example, argues that
one way to encourage reflection is to “enhance and multiply citizen-citizen
encounters.” These encounters represent an “opportunity to hone the skills
necessary to be able to critically evaluate orators” and “the skills needed to
be a critical yet receptive audience,” especially “skepticism, self-confidence,
and knowledgeable judgment” (2009, 340). Clearly these are important
civic skills, and Chambers’ approach in general has much to recommend
it, but it is also important to note that these skills are individual capaci-
ties, ones that generally presume the same self-conscious subject, aware
of its own views and the reasons for these views, that we see in the more
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 65

restrictive deliberative theories of Cohen and Gutmann and Thompson.

Though Chambers would likely see Gutmann and Thompson as offering
a theory of democratic deliberation rather than deliberative democracy,
she shares their epistemological approach. The tension between rhetoric
and deliberative democracy re-emerges here. Earlier deliberative theories
tended to see rhetoric as an impediment to rational discussion, but these
recent attempts to recover rhetoric for deliberative theory have done so
only by reducing its dialogical dimension.

3.6 RHETORIC, TRUTH, AND DEMOCRATIC DIALOGUE

Is there not a way to hold rhetoric and dialogue together? The key is to
conceptualize rhetoric in such a way that it includes the response of others
as part of the concept. In other words, the critical element is not whether
rhetoric induces reflection but whether it opens up and advances dialogue
or closes it down by preventing or hindering response. Gadamer struggles
with this very issue over the course of his scholarship, and his appreciation
for rhetoric and its inherent connection with dialogue grows over time
(Grondin 2003b, 139). In his early work on Plato, he contrasts dialectic,
the art of conducting a conversation, with two degenerate forms of speech:
rhetoric and eristic. Each of the degenerate forms involves the appear-
ance of knowledge that precludes the possibility of a free response from
another. In each case, the goal is “not primarily to make the facts of the
matter visible in their being and to confirm this through the other person”
but to exclude the other person “in the function of fellow speaker and fel-
low knower.” They do this in different ways: rhetoric by using speech to
secure agreement with one’s position regardless of its truth and eristic by
using speech to refute all claims made by others without considering their
merits (1991, 44–50). These forms of speech are employed precisely as a
means of avoiding dialogue. They involve a stance of closure to the other
and thus also to the subject of the dialogue and the questions to which it
gives rise. In this sense, both degenerate forms of speech are also efforts to
conceal the nature of the subject, to refuse to allow it to be disclosed by
means of the questioning that marks an authentic conversation.
Already in this early essay, however, Gadamer shows he is not opposed
to rhetoric per se. He distinguishes the degenerate form of rhetoric from
what he calls “genuine rhetoric,” which resembles degenerate rheto-
ric in its attempt to make speech pleasing as a way to make its content
credible. Both degenerate and genuine rhetoric involve the manipulation
66 D. WALHOF

of language, but the latter remains oriented to the truth of what is said,
while degenerate rhetoric has no regard for truth. With genuine rhetoric,
Gadamer claims, a speaker tries “to move his listeners to something that
he would be in a position to argue for but which, in front of many people,
he cannot simply exhibit as it is, because the many are not the one whom
alone one can force into a process aimed at a shared substantive under-
standing” (1991, 49). Presented here as a second-best option to dialogue,
genuine rhetoric is something necessitated in certain contexts, especially
those involving large numbers of people.
Later Gadamer gives a different account of rhetoric in his response to
Habermas’ claim that hermeneutics merely affirms the status quo in not
providing a ground for critical, emancipatory reflection.7 Gadamer takes
issue with the critical theorists’ distinction, whether implied or explicit,
between reason and reflection on the one hand, and prejudice, hermeneu-
tics, and rhetoric, on the other. He criticizes their “fantastic overestimation
of reason,” and he contends that hermeneutics and rhetoric, far from being
opposed to reason, in fact precisely involve the realm of practical reason-
ing, where “controversial issues are decided by reasonable consideration.”
In so doing, Gadamer casts the reasonable as including the rhetorical: “If
rhetoric appeals to the feelings, as has long been clear, that in no way
means it falls outside the realm of the reasonable.” Seeing rhetoric only as a
mere technique for manipulation misses the fact that rhetoric is “an essen-
tial aspect of all reasonable behavior” (1995, 568). Here rhetoric is pre-
sented not as the self-conscious manipulation of language, as in his earlier
essay, but as the dimension of speech that evokes responses from another.
Gadamer’s claims here about the inherent rhetorical dimension of
speech are similar to those later made by Young, Dryzek, and Chambers,
which is not surprising since all are in some way drawing on Aristotle.
Gadamer incorporates rhetoric into the reasonable, as Young later would,
and he also distinguishes better from worse uses of rhetoric, like Dryzek
and Chambers later do. In some of his post-Truth and Method essays, how-
ever, Gadamer turns to Plato to explicitly connect rhetoric and dialogue.
In a 1978 article, Gadamer argues that Plato integrates rhetoric and dialec-
tic in the Phaedrus rather than opposing them as he had in his earlier dia-
logues. In so doing, he says, Plato endows rhetoric with a “more profound
meaning” than he had in the Gorgias, in which rhetoric appears as the

7
Gadamer’s response in this case is in the Afterword to the third edition of Truth and
Method.
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 67

art of flattery, a techne akin to the art of cooking. Rhetoric is now instead
granted “a share of a philosophical justification.” In fact, rhetoric is shown
to be “indissoluble from dialectics; persuasion that is really convincing is
indissoluble from knowledge of the true” (1981, 119, 122–23). Similarly,
in a 1979 lecture, Gadamer argues that the Phaedrus shows that “true
rhetoric is not to be divided from what [Plato] calls ‘dialectic,’ dialectic in
that originary sense that comprises the art of conducting a conversation.”
One’s contributions are always, as it were, tailored to the context of the
conversation, to the other participants in it, and to the subject of the con-
versation. Thus, conversation “demands that one know to and for whom
one is speaking,” which is at the core of rhetoric (1998b, 124, 129).
Gadamer’s integration of rhetoric and dialogue is clearest in a set of
interviews with Riccardo Dottori, conducted just a couple of years before
Gadamer’s death at age 102 (Gadamer 2004). As John Arthos notes, what
had been a “subterranean” theme in Gadamer’s work emerges in these
interviews as the central focus, as he returns again and again to the impor-
tance of rhetoric and its connection to truth, ethics, and dialogue (Arthos
2008, 173–74). Gadamer situates rhetoric on the side of things of which
we must be persuaded, as opposed to that which is provable in a strict sense.
In the past couple of centuries, only the provable has been equated with
truth, a development that has led to the “false conception of rhetoric as the
art of appearances” and seeing it as “merely instrumental” (2004, 65). In
Gadamer’s view, however, it is incorrect to pit rhetoric and truth against
each other. Rather, he contends, “rhetoric desires, above all, to persuade us
of the true without being able to prove it” (2004, 51). His project during
his last years was to recover this ancient sense of rhetoric from the Greeks.8
Gadamer argues that rhetoric and truth stand together rather than
being opposed to each other. He says to Dottori:

It’s really a matter of our actually being able to speak to others, and this
means that we must appeal to their emotions and their passions …but not
in order to deceive others or to profit by it personally, but, instead, to allow
what is true to appear and to reveal what we ourselves are persuaded by and
what, otherwise (through the usual methods of proof), could not appear as
such. (2004, 52)

8
I will not take up here whether Gadamer is correct that this is the sense of rhetoric put
forth by Plato and Aristotle. Arthos discusses some of the difficulties in Gadamer’s interpre-
tation of the Greek texts, especially the Gorgias, while also making a case that Gadamer’s
approach is plausible (2008).
68 D. WALHOF

Rather than being conceptualized as the manipulation of language for the

purpose of concealing truth, rhetoric here is cast as necessary for allow-
ing truth to emerge. Because, as we have seen in Chap. 2, truth is not
a possession of one or another but is disclosed among us in language,
rhetoric in this sense is tied to the back and forth of dialogue. Rhetoric
has to do with the attunement of speech in the service of understanding
some thing with others and, thereby, allowing the disclosure of truth. In
keeping with his focus on the excess meaning inherent in language rather
than on subjective intent, Gadamer presents this rhetorical dimension not
in terms of conscious manipulation but as simply part of what happens
when we seek to understand and be understood by falling into dialogue
with others. In this sense, rhetoric has to do with responding to others
and receiving responses from them about a subject that binds us to each
other; more precisely, it has to do with the way that we attune our speech
to others in this back and forth. Though this dimension is subject to abuse
by those who are committed neither to understanding nor to truth, it is
a mistake to equate the abusive concealment of truth with rhetoric per se.
As Gadamer insists in his conversation with Dottori, “what stands behind
the whole of rhetoric is not power …but coming to an understanding and
the truth” (2004, 63). This coming to an understanding and disclosing
the truth about a common subject depends on allowing the free response
of others instead of trying to manipulate them.
Attuning one’s speech in order to allow a response from others is what
separates rhetoric in the service of understanding and truth from rhetoric
that seeks to manipulate by preventing a response. The latter is monologi-
cal whereas the former is dialogical. The type of rhetoric Gadamer defends
in his later works, in other words, necessarily occurs only in dialogue with
others. The rhetorical turn in democratic theory, as I have argued above,
neglects this dialogical core of rhetoric and instead approaches rhetoric
in terms of monologue. It also tries to specify the nature of rhetoric with
little attention to the issue of truth, even though the link between speech
and truth (or the lack thereof) has historically been at the core of thinking
about rhetoric. Gadamer’s work, in contrast, provides a means of hold-
ing dialogue, rhetoric, and truth together, where each is necessary to the
other. Rhetoric need not fall only on the side of monologue, leaving dia-
logue behind.
Gadamer’s approach to rhetoric, however, does not directly address
the question of mass democracy in the way that Chambers and Dryzek
would like. Instead, it brings us back, in some ways, to the problem of
 CONVERSATION AND UNDERSTANDING 69

deliberation and mini-publics that these deliberative theorists were trying

to address by introducing rhetoric in the first place. Undeniably, a signifi-
cant part of democratic speech today comes in the form of monologue,
usually mediated through television, radio, or the internet, with little pos-
sibility for the back and forth of dialogue and disclosure of truth. In these
situations, the speaker cannot attune her speech in ways that allow for a
response, since no such response is expected or even possible.
At the same time, a substantial amount of democratic talk takes the
form of dialogue, both among ordinary citizens and even more so among
elites. In survey research by Fay Lomax Cook, Michael Delli Carpini, and
Lawrence Jacobs, two-thirds of Americans report they have informal con-
versations about political issues several times a month, while about a quar-
ter report having attended at least one meeting in the last year to discuss
a political issue (2007, 32). In addition, a dialogue format is prevalent
among the chattering classes on cable news and the Sunday talk shows, as
well as among elected politicians, executive officials, and interested parties
in committee hearings and constituent meetings. To the extent that they
are conducted in public, we can think of them as representative dialogues,
in that the conversations potentially mimic those that citizens might them-
selves have, or in the sense that citizens witness exchanges that resonate
with them.9 As such, these representative dialogues also can serve a civic
educative function, in that they model democratic dialogue to ordinary
citizens.
As I noted above, a significant challenge facing democracy in the US is
that pervasive partisanship and hyper-suspicion of the motivations of oth-
ers prevent dialogue. Too often, representative dialogues are in fact merely
prepared monologues delivered in turn, with little regard for the responses
of others, much less the truth about a subject. Given the dialogue for-
mat, however, there always remains the possibility that these representa-
tive conversations lead to understanding and the disclosure of truth that
Gadamer describes. While there are never any guarantees, there always
remains the possibility that the participants end up falling in with each
other, attuning their speech in ways that invite the responses of others and
the disclosure of the truth about a subject.

9
Calling these dialogues “representative” of course raises issues of representation, espe-
cially the nature of accountability and constituency, that are beyond the scope of this chapter.
On these issues see Urbinati (2006) and Rehfeld (2006), among others. On the tensions
between representation and deliberation, see Williams (1998, 2000).
70 D. WALHOF

Of course, Gadamer’s approach remains primarily phenomenological

rather than normative. His claims have to do with what happens when
a genuine conversation takes place and the truth of a subject is disclosed
among those taking part. We should not, then, move from his account
of conversation to a naïve conclusion that any particular dialogue can
and should end in understanding, nor that most political conflicts will be
resolved if we just talked more. Instead, his account reminds us of the vital
necessity of a political culture of face-to-face dialogue, in which citizens
frequently engage with each other about public problems in ways attuned
to the possibility of a free response from others. In particular, Gadamer
gives us insight into the potential that dialogue has for drawing people in,
calling their prejudices into play, and achieving understanding with each
other. Perhaps even more importantly, it highlights the need for political
leaders and other elites to fall into dialogue about important subjects that
bind us as citizens to each other, even amidst partisanship and mistrust.
Another way to put this is that Gadamer’s account rests on a fundamental
faith in dialogue, rooted in his understanding of how language makes
fusion possible across even great distances. For Gadamer this is true across
distances created by history as well as by culture, tradition, or worldview,
as we will see in the next chapter. His approach presumes that understand-
ing will be the ongoing achievement of dialogue; this is, in his view, simply
what it means to have a conversation.
 CHAPTER 4

Tradition, Religion, and Democratic

Citizenship

The previous chapter argues for the fruitfulness of Gadamer’s concep-

tions of conversation and rhetoric for theorizing democratic deliberation.
In this chapter, I do something similar with his conception of tradition,
which I use to address one of the ongoing challenges facing contempo-
rary democracies: the place of religiously-informed speech and action in
the public sphere. This chapter addresses this issue by analyzing the way
that religion has been conceptualized by democratic theorists, particularly
those working in the Habermasian strand of deliberative theory. The con-
clusion is that these theorists conceptualize religion in ways that remain
too cognitivist and individualistic, as they rely on what I call a “belief-
container” model of the religious citizen.
I argue that democratic theorists instead must consider the need that
religious citizens have for making their civic identities consonant with
their religious identities, something best illuminated through Gadamer’s
work on tradition. His conception of tradition holds in tension two
aspects that mark contemporary religion: tradition as that which con-
stitutes our prejudices and tradition as an ongoing re-narration of the
past. Highlighting this tradition-structure of religion, this chapter
argues, reveals the complex ways that religion and politics are mutually
constituted.

© The Author(s) 2017 71

D. Walhof, The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-46864-8_4
72 D. WALHOF

4.1 RELIGION AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

For the past two decades, democratic theorists have primarily approached
the question of religion and democracy in terms of public reason. Initially
the debate was between exclusivists and inclusivists: exclusivists argued
that a commitment to public reason demands the exclusion of explicitly
religious reasons and language in public (e.g. Rawls (1993), Rorty (1994),
and Audi (1997)), while inclusivists countered that democratic values and
religious liberty demand that religious citizens be able to appeal without
restriction to religious reasons and language in public (e.g. Wolterstorff
(1997), Weithman (2002), and Stout (2004)). More recently, it has become
clear the exclusivist-inclusivist dichotomy no longer captures the complex-
ity of views in this literature, as Simone Chambers notes (Chambers 2010,
16). Especially since Habermas reinvigorated the debate by taking up
these questions in an effort to overcome the exclusivist-inclusivist divide,
democratic theorists have offered more nuanced ways of navigating the
relationship between religion and democracy. This is particularly true of a
set of theorists, including Chambers herself, Maeve Cooke, and Cristina
Lafont, who in various ways try to refine and improve upon Habermas’
approach. All three attempt to articulate an ethics of democratic citizen-
ship that is open and sensitive to the important role that religion plays in
the lives of citizens, including in their social and political views.
Habermas criticizes Rawls, in essence, for failing to take the religious lib-
erty of religious citizens seriously enough in demanding that such citizens
have a moral responsibility to justify their political convictions indepen-
dent of their religious ones (Rawls 1993, 224). Habermas acknowledges,
following Wolterstorff, that religious citizens may not be able to find com-
pelling nonreligious reasons for their social and political views, given that
their religiously-grounded conceptions of justice tell them what is politi-
cally right and wrong. As Wolterstorff argues, theological claims refer not
only to a restricted set of “religious” issues important for the individual
believer in his or her personal life, such as the nature of God and the soul,
how to please God, and how to attain eternal life. Rather, they also have
to do with this-worldly social and political concerns like the nature of jus-
tice, equality, and freedom (Audi and Wolterstorff 1997, 105). A liberal
approach cannot require these citizens to justify their political convictions
independently of their religious ones, since this would violate the very
rights that liberalism claims to protect. Moreover, since under Habermas’
theory the deliberative mode of democratic will-formation demands the
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 73

equal participation of all citizens, requiring religious citizens to proffer

secular reasons for their views would violate equality and lead to illegiti-
mate outcomes (Habermas 2008, 128). Thus his theory must somehow
accommodate religious reasons in public.
Habermas, however, goes beyond merely accommodating religious cit-
izens. He also argues that religion potentially makes unique and positive
contributions to public discourse and secular philosophy. Habermas con-
cedes that while western philosophy has historically assimilated Christian
truths and concepts, it has not exhausted their meanings. He argues that
these meanings can be cultural resources for solidarity against encroach-
ing market and administrative power; in this way, religion can be an ally in
resisting system domination (2008, 111; see also 2006, 45–46). In addi-
tion, Habermas claims, religion has a unique ability to articulate moral
intuitions, especially with regard to “vulnerable forms of communal life.”
To the extent that these insights have not yet been conceptualized by
philosophy, religion can assist the struggle for justice by articulating these
moral insights in the public sphere (2008, 131–32).1
However, since he is not satisfied with a mere modus vivendi approach
to democracy, Habermas cannot simply side altogether with Wolterstorff,
who argues that all liberal democracy needs to succeed is the “fairly gained
and fairly executed agreement of the majority” on particular policies (Audi
and Wolterstorff 1997, 114). Habermas’ normative vision of delibera-
tive democracy instead links civic solidarity with the rational acceptabil-
ity of democratic decisions, in which citizens understand themselves as
the authors of laws under which they live. Thus, only policies that can
be accepted by all those affected as participants in rational discourse are
legitimate (Habermas 1996, 107). Habermas, then, is in a difficult spot:
he wants a robust notion of religious liberty that accords religious citizens
full equality and does not cut public discourse off from the resources reli-
gious traditions may have to offer, but he also wants the policy and law
outcomes of democratic decision-making to be grounded in public rea-
sons that are accessible to all, a standard that religious reasons, in his view,
generally fail to meet. His solution is to distinguish between the informal
public sphere of democratic opinion-formation, on the one hand, and the
institutional decision-making public sphere (legislatures and courts, for
example), on the other. Habermas claims that religious citizens should be

1
See Chambers for a summary of how Habermas envisions religion contributing to post-
metaphysical philosophy and politics (Chambers 2007, 214–18).
74 D. WALHOF

free to express and justify their political views in religious language in the
informal sphere. However, “those who hold a public office or are candi-
dates for such,” and thus operate within the institutional public sphere,
“have a duty to remain neutral among competing worldviews” (2008,
128). In other words, coercive policies must be based solely on secular
reasons, not on religious reasons or language, even though religious lan-
guage can contribute to democratic opinion-formation. Habermas calls
this, perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, the “institutional translation pro-
viso.” This division of the public sphere, in his view, solves the dilemma
of protecting the equality and liberty of religious citizens and remaining
open to the resources religious traditions offer while also grounding the
legitimacy of law in public reasons accessible to all.2
Maeve Cooke presses Habermas on this proposal by relating it to his
earlier writings on discourse ethics and communicative rationality. She
points out that religious and theological claims pose a particular problem
for him, given that these claims violate his distinction between moral dis-
courses, which have to do with agreement on universal norms, and ethical
discourses, which have to do with the collective self-understandings of
a community. Theological claims are generally made in universal terms,
claiming to refer to truths that hold for all times and all places; to regard
them, then, merely as ethical, non-universal claims is to ignore this uni-
versal orientation. At the same time, however, such claims are not ones
that could be accepted as reasons by all, Habermas’ standard for universal
validity claims. So, Cooke concludes, “religious and theological validity
claims pose the problem that they assert universal validity for proposi-
tions and norms on which universal, discursively reached agreement seems
unattainable in practice” (Cooke 2006, 191–92). Cooke argues that
Habermas fails to confront this problem and instead simply tries to evade
it by treating religious language and reasons as potentially holding mean-
ing for others, including nonreligious citizens, even though the truth of
these claims cannot be assessed. Engagement with religious reasons, and
thus with the potential meaning offered by religious traditions, is allowed
to take place in the weak publics of the informal sphere, but the translation
requirement is meant to ensure that only generally accessible truth claims
are allowed to become the basis of law.
The problem with this approach, Cooke argues, is that Habermas rules
out in advance the possibility that nonreligious citizens could come to see

2
See Walhof (2013) for a more detailed description and critique of Habermas’ approach.
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 75

the validity of the truth claims made on the basis of religion by religious
citizens. This exclusion represents, then, an abandoning of Habermas’
own commitment to the transformative power of argumentation—that is,
to the possibility of coming to universally valid norms through discourse
without restricting discursive offerings from the outset (Cooke 2006, 194;
2007, 228). The result, according to Cooke, is that Habermas’ exclusion
of religious reasons from the public sphere replicates the split between
religious and civic identity at the institutional level that Rawls imposes on
the individual level. This in turn means that the conception of political
autonomy Habermas relies on—that we live under only those laws that
could be accepted as valid by all—is biased in favor of citizens without
religious worldviews. Those with religious worldviews are hindered from
seeing themselves as authors of the laws under which they live, possibly
leading to social and political disaffection (Cooke 2006, 197–98).
Cooke puts forth an alternative approach to the question of religion and
democracy by introducing a distinction between authoritarian and non-
authoritarian approaches to truth. Authoritarian approaches claim knowl-
edge of truth apart from the mediation of language, history, and context;
thus, on this view, our knowledge of truth is independent of argumentation
with others. Non-authoritarian approaches, in contrast, acknowledge the
role of language, history, and context in our knowledge of truth, and they
therefore regard this knowledge as dependent on argumentative justifica-
tion (Cooke 2006, 200). Importantly, the distinction between authoritar-
ian and non-authoritarian approaches does not correlate with a distinction
between religious and secular reasons. Instead, Cooke’s distinction cuts
across the religious-secular divide. Claims to religious truth can be either
authoritarian or non-authoritarian in nature, as can appeals to truth that
do not involve any religious commitments. Religious believers with a non-
authoritarian approach acknowledge that we only know religious truth
within language, culture, history, and tradition, whereas religious believers
who take an authoritarian approach deny this mediation, claiming knowl-
edge of the truth through inspiration, direct knowledge, or a literal read-
ing of sacred texts. Both cases, Cook argues, still might involve claims on
behalf of metaphysical, unchanging truth, but they differ on whether our
knowledge of this truth is fallible.
Cooke argues that the distinction between authoritarian and non-
authoritarian approaches to truth is more fruitful for addressing the
question of religion and democratic deliberation than the distinction
between religious and secular reasons. The ideal standard she articulates
76 D. WALHOF

for contributions to public debate, whether in the informal or institu-

tional public spheres, is non-authoritarianism: these contributions are only
admissible if they reject authoritarian conceptions of knowledge and of
justification (Cooke 2007, 234). In her view, this standard is both more
inclusive than Habermas’, in that it does not exclude religious reasons in
the institutional sphere solely because they are religious in nature, and also
more promising in terms of political autonomy and democratic legitimacy.
If contributions to the public sphere are premised on the mediated nature
of their truth claims, public discourse is more likely to lead to the possibil-
ity of citizens seeing themselves as authors of the laws under which they
live.
Cooke’s replacement of Habermas’ religious-secular distinction with
her authoritarian-non-authoritarian distinction has the virtue of avoiding
altogether the question of what counts as a “religious” and what counts
as a “secular” reason, a problem that has plagued the literature on religion
and public reason. As I have argued elsewhere, determining whether a
particular justification is religious or nonreligious is not at all straight-
forward (Walhof 2013). Chambers makes a similar argument when she
criticizes Habermas for his call to expunge religious reasons from parlia-
mentary records, saying it would be like trying to expunge Shakespeare
from the English language. Any particular reference to religion, she says,
may be one of many things, depending on the context: “When is quoting
from scripture or appealing to Divine powers a justification and when is it
simply a rhetorical flourish? When are religious appeals inspirational and
motivational and when are they justificatory?” (Chambers 2010, 17). One
can only know, Chambers rightly argues, by actually engaging someone in
dialogue. Habermas’ institutional barrier to religious reasons, then, turns
out to be arbitrary and ultimately unworkable.
Cooke avoids the problem of defining religious reasons, yet her own
solution suffers from some of the same problems. The distinction between
authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches to truth may not be as
useful in practice as it first appears. It is not clear, first of all, to what her
standard applies. She says it applies to “contributions” to public debate,
and these contributions must reject authoritarian conceptions of knowl-
edge and justification in order to be admissible. But does this mean that
the standard of non-authoritarianism applies to a proposed course of
action (e.g. legislation to tighten regulations of carbon emissions), to the
reasons offered to justify the proposal (e.g. humans are called to care for
creation), or to the entire worldview or set of beliefs that a citizen draws
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 77

from in making and justifying the proposal (e.g. evangelical Christianity)?

One can imagine proposals and reasons that on their own do not neces-
sarily invoke authoritarian approaches to truth, even if those proposing
and defending them hold to an authoritarian approach more generally.
Perhaps they understand their belief in God itself to be unmediated, and
this then leads them to conclude that we have collective obligations to care
for the planet, which in turn leads to the conclusion that we need tighter
restrictions on carbon emissions. Is the whole set of claims suspect, or only
the belief in God? It seems her distinction can only apply to the whole set,
since it is not clear how a particular reason could be judged on its own
terms as involving an approach to truth.
In addition, determining which approach to truth underlies any par-
ticular justification offered in the public sphere requires dialogue, which
means that the parties involved will already find themselves engaged in the
reciprocal offering of reasons. As we saw in Chap. 3, this means that one
has already fallen in with another, potentially putting one’s prejudices at
play and at risk. Even justifying a policy proposal solely with “God told
me” involves offering a reason that opens the reason-giver up to question,
leading to an exchange that may also call their understandings of truth
into question. In other words, even if some citizens understand their own
knowledge of the truth in authoritarian terms, these understandings are
already situated in history, language, and culture, and it is through dia-
logue that this fact will emerge.
The larger problem here involves specifying an ethics of democratic
citizenship in terms of classifying and regulating reasons according to their
epistemological status, a problem that also attends Cristina Lafont’s pro-
posal. Like Cooke, Lafont develops her religion-sensitive ethics of citi-
zenship through a critical engagement with Habermas. Lafont points out
that his institutional translation requirement presupposes that it is possible
to come to the same conclusion by different epistemic means. However,
she claims, there is no guarantee that corroborating secular reasons can
be found for religious reasons in a given case, since there may be cases
when the religious reasons offered for or against a particular policy pro-
posal are simply at odds with any secular reasons offered. In such cases,
these religious reasons may be the only voice available for the citizens who
hold them. “Translating” their reasons would effectively change them,
resulting in their exclusion from the deliberations (Lafont 2009, 134–35).
Lafont also disputes Habermas’ claim that nonreligious citizens have an
obligation, based on the possibility that religious traditions might offer
78 D. WALHOF

meaningful resources to democracy, to assist in the translation of religious

reasons into secular reasons. She argues that the cognitive possibility that
these religious reasons may be true does not generate any civic obliga-
tions; rather, citizens must be allowed to remain closed to the possible
truth of other viewpoints (Lafont 2009, 137). In short, no one is obli-
gated, in Lafont’s view, to engage in a way of thinking foreign to one’s
own, whether religious or secular. Indeed, she argues that all citizens, both
religious and nonreligious, must have the right to take their own cognitive
stance in public deliberations, although this right does not extend to the
protection of the integrity of this stance (Lafont 2009, 141).
Lafont tries to combine this right to take one’s own cognitive stance
with the deliberative ideal of the legitimacy of law based on public rea-
sons, which she defines as reasons generally acceptable to everyone, or
those based on basic democratic principles like freedom and equality. She
does this not by excluding any reasons from public discourse, in either the
informal or institutional public sphere, but by according special status to
public reasons: they are reasons that cannot be “ignored, disregarded, or
overridden once they are brought to public deliberation” in opposition
to a proposed coercive policy. In other words, one may appeal to any rea-
sons one wants in the public sphere, but if public reasons are offered in
response, one has a civic obligation to address these reasons. Moreover,
she argues, coercive policies ought not to be implemented if public rea-
sons against them have not been defeated (Lafont 2009, 141–42).
Thus, Lafont’s religion-sensitive ethics of citizenship works not by
excluding certain reasons and thereby potentially putting religious citi-
zens at a disadvantage, but by privileging certain reasons. She argues for
a concept of “mutual accountability” that requires citizens to respond to
public reasons, though not necessarily in the same terms that they are
offered. The advantage of this approach over those of Habermas and
Cooke is that it is interactive from the outset. There is no requirement
to sort reasons and identify them as religious or secular, authoritarian or
non-authoritarian in character. Nor is anyone asked to exercise the kind of
epistemic restraint that potentially leads to religious citizens having either
to dissemble or refrain from full participation. There is, as it were, neither
an epistemic nor an institutional firewall standing in the way of offering
justifications for policy proposals, even if couched in religious terms, in
any part of the public sphere. Instead, the mutual accountability Lafont
calls for is one that is inherent in dialogue itself, in that it involves respond-
ing to the claims made by others.
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 79

And yet, Lafont’s approach retains some epistemological criteria of its

own. The obligation to respond is not general, nor does it seem that she
has correctly characterized her conception of accountability when she calls
it mutual. Citizens have a right to take their own cognitive stance and to
offer their own justifications for policy proposals in their own terms, but
not all of them can expect that their claims will garner response. Only
those putting forth public reasons, as she defines them, have the right
to a response to their claims. Moreover, if these claims are not defeated,
they function as trump cards in blocking proposals they have been used
to oppose, despite the fact that other reasons may have been more persua-
sive to more of those participating in the deliberations. Certainly there is
something attractive about this: a policy proposal that would violate, say,
equal protection if made law should be defeated in a liberal democracy, and
one would like to think that this outcome can be the result of democratic
citizens who recognize the validity of arguments for equality. Lafont’s
approach, however, represents an odd route to this outcome. It presumes
that there is intersubjective agreement on what counts as a public reason
in a particular case, and thus on which reasons require response or serve as
trump cards. But this is often precisely at issue in democratic deliberations.
Claims to equality and freedom are abundant in democratic discourse, and
part of what is at stake in our political disagreements is what these mean
and whether they are appropriately invoked in a particular context. As we
do with Habermas’ and Cooke’s proposals, we find ourselves having to
sort reasons based on their epistemological status.
Moreover, even if we could agree on what counts as a public reason, it is
not clear what Lafont means when she says that a proposal cannot become
law if a public reason against it has not been defeated. In democratic delib-
eration, whether an argument has been defeated or not in a particular case
is a judgment made by those participating in the deliberations themselves.
It is not something measured by external, objective criteria, like its confor-
mity to the rules of logic. So, she cannot mean that a public reason against
a proposal remains undefeated only in the eyes of those putting forth the
public reason, not those promoting the policy; this is just a disagreement.
Instead, she must mean that those putting forth the policy have also been
convinced that it violates a democratic principle like freedom or equality;
they also recognize that they have not defeated an argument based on
public reason. It seems, then, that the only cases in which this standard
would apply would be ones in which those advocating a policy recognize
and are willing to admit that their proposal violates equality or freedom,
80 D. WALHOF

and yet they continue to advocate it. I suspect these cases are rare. Because
equality and freedom are complex, essentially contested concepts, partici-
pants in democratic debates can almost always defend their proposals by
appealing to them. Lafont seems to presume that there are cases in which
public reasons will be capable of being offered in support of only on one
side of a disagreement, when in fact any particular proposal is generally
supported by a complicated mix of claims that are both public and non-
public according to her definition.
Simone Chambers avoids many of these problems. She classifies
Habermas as an “open secularist,” a term she uses to describe those who
endorse a public sphere open to both religious and nonreligious citizens
and their arguments, and a category in which Chambers places herself.
The challenge facing open secularists, she notes, is how to ensure that law
and policy are not based solely on religious grounds (2010, 17). As we
saw above, Chambers regards Habermas’ use of an institutional firewall to
meet this challenge as arbitrary and unworkable. She thus rejects this insti-
tutional approach in favor of an ethical discursive approach that involves a
defense of a modified version of public reason.
In Chambers’ view, an ideal of public reason need not be founded on
the claim that justifications for law must be sharable by all, the criterion
that religious reasons are said to violate. Moreover, she contends that reli-
gious reasons need not close down conversation, as reductive conceptions
of religion presume. Like others, Chambers regards the religious-secular
distinction as largely unworkable, alleging that religious reasons are also
in many cases public reasons that can be understood and sometimes even
shared. Following Bohman and Richardson (2009), Chambers instead
focuses on the ethical dimensions of public reason in a way that can incor-
porate a broad set of beliefs, including religious ones that underlie the
reasons offered. She argues for an ideal of mutual respect, which she char-
acterizes as the willingness to revise one’s views in response to the arguments
of others. This revisability criterion need not apply to the underlying
beliefs or comprehensive doctrines themselves, only to the public propos-
als for coercive laws (Chambers 2010, 18–19). As with Lafont’s approach,
this allows citizens to make their case in the public sphere in the terms that
they wish, but they are also under a civic obligation to take seriously chal-
lenges to their claims and to alter their views accordingly.
Chambers thus wants to hold on to a normative ideal of public reason,
but rather than focus on the epistemological status of the reasons offered,
she focuses on the manner and spirit in which arguments are made. In
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 81

this way, her ideal might be more accurately called one of public reasoning
rather than of public reason. It focuses on the civic obligations inherent
in the back and forth process of making and responding to arguments,
rather than on the nature of the arguments made. As a result, her approach
avoids the problem of having to classify reasons as either religious or sec-
ular, authoritarian or non-authoritarian, or public or nonpublic, as the
proposals of Habermas, Cooke, and Lafont require. Another virtue of
Chambers’ approach is that it does not single out religious citizens or their
beliefs and, in effect, burden them asymmetrically, which has been the
primary criticism of other public reason approaches. Instead, she holds all
citizens to the same standard when making and responding to arguments
in the public sphere, regardless of the sources they draw on in making
these arguments. In this way, Chambers helps move us back to the ethics
of democratic citizenship, where the key normative issue confronting us is
the nature of our democratic practices of deliberation, as opposed to treat-
ing religion itself or religiously-motivated citizens as ipso facto a problem
for democracy.
And yet, one has to wonder whether this approach too easily passes
over some of the real challenges posed by religiously-motivated political
discourse and activity. Certainly, the ideal of mutual respect as the will-
ingness to revise one’s views in response to arguments is attractive. It is
also an extremely high standard, one that is met all too rarely in other
realms, including academia, where scholars are supposed to be explicitly
committed to a disinterested pursuit of the truth. It would seem to be
even further out of reach in the interest-laden world of democratic poli-
tics. The standard’s relative unattainability does not on its own render it
inappropriate for ideal-type theorizing (Goodin 1995); however, it may
turn out to be unhelpful for our scholarly reflections if the standard pres-
ents a misleading picture of religion-based forms of democratic partici-
pation. Though Chambers avoids some of the epistemological problems
of Habermas, Cooke, and Lafont, she shares with them a tendency to
approach the question of religion and democracy in terms of individual
belief-holders. Regardless of whether it is sorting one’s own reasons and
offering only those that are secular (Habermas) or non-authoritarian
(Cooke), or sorting the reasons of others and responding to those that
are public (Lafont), or maintaining a stance of cognitive openness that
allows the revision of one’s views (Chambers), the presumed picture of
the citizen in these accounts is as a container of beliefs, and the problem
is framed in terms of the citizen taking the right stance toward his or her
82 D. WALHOF

beliefs. The right stance is achieved in different ways according to the

different proposals, but in each case, it somehow involves modifying or
altering certain beliefs through a combination of self-monitoring and/or
responding to the claims of others.
The belief-container view of the citizen tends to obscure the role that
habits of mind themselves, along with senses of identity, play in demo-
cratic discourse. Or, to put it differently, the belief-container model rests
on an implicit assumption that civic habits of mind are largely distinct (or
distinguishable) from the religious traditions and communities in which
citizens find themselves. However, when it comes to religiously-inflected
democratic engagement, what is at issue is that citizens are acting as mem-
bers of communities and traditions that have significantly shaped not just
their stated politico-theological beliefs but their habits of mind and senses
of self, sometimes in ways that they themselves could not consciously
identify. Gadamer’s work on tradition, I will argue in the next two sec-
tions, helps us see and address this problem more clearly.

4.2 GADAMER ON TRADITION

Gadamer’s conception of tradition emerges from his critique of histor-
icism, found primarily in Truth and Method (1995) and an essay from
the same period, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness” (1979).3
According to Gadamer, the problem with historicist thinkers like Johann
Gustav Droysen and Leopold von Ranke was that, despite their attempts
to address the problem of our historical situatedness, they ended up for-
getting their own historicity (Gadamer 1995, 299). The historical school
wanted to avoid the teleological approach of Hegelian idealism, and so
they sought to give a non-teleological account based on a reliable, empir-
ical method for the human sciences. Ranke, for example, combines an
appreciation for empirical methods with a faith in the overall unity of his-
tory (Bambach 1995, 43). Rather than judge the past in terms of some
future goal, Ranke claims that he merely wants “to show the past as it
once was” (Koselleck 1985, 31). The aim of the historian is not prog-
nostication but a god-like view of the past, as Ranke writes: “I imagine
the Deity—if I may allow myself this observation—as seeing the whole
of historical humanity in its totality (since no time lies before the Deity),

3
The latter was originally a lecture delivered in 1957 at the University of Louvain. It was
published in French in 1963 and in English in 1975.
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 83

and finding it all equally valuable”(quoted in Gadamer 1995, 210). Thus,

history is conceptualized as a unified, universal object that stands apart
from the historian and can be known through method. Likewise, Droysen
argued that we should treat history as humanity’s increasing conscious-
ness and awareness of itself; we should, that is, approach historical events
in terms of increasing, collective self-knowledge, a view that lends coher-
ence and continuity to otherwise discrete events. This means that histori-
cal research is always a conscious act of reconstruction, of situating the
particular pieces of evidence and testimony within the emerging larger
whole (Grondin 1994, 81–83).
In Gadamer’s reconstruction of the history of hermeneutics, it is
Wilhelm Dilthey who first recognizes the historical school’s failure to
adequately confront the fact that we know only from within a histori-
cal perspective because we are historical beings ourselves.4 Dilthey argues
that we are limited by our situatedness in history and so could never view
the past from the universal, distanced standpoint that Droysen and Ranke
would like, even through rigorous methods. Like Heidegger after him,
Dilthey treats our historicity as a mode of being, the result of which is
that our consciousness is not universal or pure but always exists within
the context of human life and, thus, is always specific. We begin, in other
words, not with abstract consciousness or pure reason but in the middle
of life itself (Bambach 1995, 145, 161). However, in Dilthey’s view this
need not lead to historical relativism or an inability to know the past with
certainty. Our historicity is not merely a limitation but actually the ground
of our historical knowledge and the means of a scientific view of history
(Gadamer 1979, 16–18).
Dilthey grounds our knowledge of history in an epistemological aware-
ness that emerges from the experience of history itself—that is, from one’s
“lived experience.” Experience is for him the basic unit of life, and through
it reality is revealed to us. Our experience of everyday life, in other words,
provides the means for understanding history by shaping our conscious-
ness (Bambach 1995, 153–55). What is required, in Dilthey’s view, is to
move from one’s own life experience to an understanding of the objec-
tive mind (objektiver Geist) that resides in social and cultural products like
custom, religion, philosophy, science, and the state. Dilthey claims that
through this objective mind “the past is a permanently enduring present

4
Gadamer calls Dilthey “the interpreter of the historical school. He is formulating what
Ranke and Droysen really think” (Gadamer 1995, 198).
84 D. WALHOF

for us” (Dilthey 1962, 120–121; quoted in Bambach 1995, 162). In other
words, in coming to an understanding of the objective mind, one can also
gain a scientific, non-relativistic understanding of history as well. Making
this move from everyday life to objective mind requires particular methods
and procedures, the method of hermeneutics (Bambach 1995, 163). The
hermeneutic consciousness posited by Dilthey thus attempts to combine
empirical method with universal history by, in Gadamer’s words, adopt-
ing “a reflective posture toward both itself and the tradition in which it is
situated. It understands itself in terms of its own history” (Gadamer 1995,
235). In this way, we can achieve a scientific understanding of history,
Dilthey believes, without denying our historical situatedness and without
appealing to a transcendent telos—hence his formula, “Life is understood
by life” (Gadamer 1995, 229).
While he applauds Dilthey’s attempt to take seriously the effect of his-
tory, Gadamer does not think he has taken our historicity seriously enough.
Gadamer accuses Dilthey of ultimately betraying his life philosophy for
the reflective philosophy of idealism, based on a latent Cartesianism in
Dilthey’s thought. This Cartesianism is especially evident, Gadamer
argues, in Dilthey’s concerns about historical relativism. Although Dilthey
sets out to ground our knowledge of history in the certainty of life experi-
ence, life experience turns out not to offer the kind of certainty he wants.
Instead, Dilthey falls back on the alleged certainty acquired through
Descartes’ universal doubt and reflection, so that in the end, Gadamer
insists, the historicity of historical experience is not actually integrated into
his thought (1995, 237–41).5
Gadamer regards Dilthey’s failure in this respect as instructive, and he
uses it to develop his own argument about history and tradition. Of course,
he certainly agrees with Dilthey that we are historical beings ourselves
who know only from within history and tradition. Unlike Dilthey, how-
ever, Gadamer does not give ground to the charge of relativism, a charge
that in his view makes sense only in terms of the Enlightenment opposi-
tions of authority versus freedom and of tradition versus reason. Gadamer
refuses to accept these dichotomies, instead defending tradition and its
authority as fundamental to understanding. He argues that, despite its
critique of rationalism, historicism remains wedded to an Enlightenment
approach and shares with it the one prejudice that “defines its essence:

5
Bambach’s discussion of Dilthey’s Cartesianism and the unresolved contradictions in his
thought is superb (1995, 176–85).
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 85

the fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against

prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power” (Gadamer 1995, 270).
Gadamer wants to redeem prejudice from the negative connotations of
false or unfounded judgment, something that must be eliminated through
scientific method. As we have seen in previous chapters, at the heart of
a hermeneutical approach is the claim that we cannot but avoid making
judgments before all the evidence is in—that we are, to use Heideggerian
language, always already “thrown” into a world from which we cannot
extricate ourselves to gain an objective view before judging and acting.
We can think of prejudices in Gadamer’s sense as anticipatory com-
mitments. They are the expectations that we bring to any interaction
with the world, whether conversing with a friend, watching a film, listen-
ing to music, entering one’s house, or reading a text. Whether we are
aware of it or not at the time, we come to these interactions anticipating
things to be a certain way. Sometimes our expectations are met; other
times they are thwarted, and we are surprised or “called up short,” in
Gadamer’s phrase (1995, 268). Only then do these anticipatory commit-
ments become objects to us, a matter of conscious reflection or judgment.
As Weinsheimer explains, our prejudices “preclude the self-transparency of
consciousness” (1985, 10–11); they are instead prior to, and the ground
of, conscious judgment. The picture of a self-conscious subject who
through critical reflection can distance itself from its prejudices and com-
mitments is misleading. In Gadamer’s view, this self-awareness is but “a
flickering in the closed circuits of historical life,” and so, “the prejudices of
the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality
of his being” (Gadamer 1995, 277, emphasis in original).
In his defense of tradition as a condition for understanding, then,
Gadamer reverses the picture of a subject knowingly evaluating and choos-
ing its commitments. We do not choose or assent to tradition so much as
it makes claims on us. We do not possess tradition in the sense of hanging
on to it; instead tradition delivers those things we take for granted, against
and within which we exercise judgment. As Gadamer puts it, “the author-
ity of what has been handed down to us—and not just what is clearly
grounded—always has power over our attitudes and behavior” (1995,
281). Tradition lives and reproduces itself, in part, through the prejudices
it fosters on the part of those who stand within the tradition. Such preju-
dices represent the claim that tradition has made on us and accounts for
our recognition of its authority, something Gadamer expresses in terms of
our belonging (Zugehörigkeit) to tradition.
86 D. WALHOF

Casting tradition as received prejudicial authority suggests that our

belonging to tradition is largely un-self-conscious and that it seamlessly
and comprehensively constructs our historical reality. Critics of Gadamer
have sometimes read him this way, arguing that his emphasis on the
authority of tradition leaves little possibility for reflective criticism of tra-
dition.6 These interpretations are understandable given some of the things
Gadamer says in Truth and Method, especially his tendency to use the
singular tradition, implying that we all inhabit a single overarching tradi-
tion. However, as interpreters of Gadamer like Watson (1996) and Bruns
(1992) have argued, Gadamer’s take on tradition is more complex than
this totalizing reading allows, as he grants an important role to critical
reflection in encountering, perpetuating, and questioning tradition. In
fact, even while countering the Enlightenment’s dismissal of tradition, he
also criticizes Romanticism’s faith in tradition and its tendency to conceive
tradition as the opposite of freedom and reason—an approach Gadamer
labels “traditionalism.” Traditionalism fails to see that there is always an
element of freedom in tradition and that tradition itself must be always
be “affirmed, embraced, cultivated” (1995, 281). For Gadamer, tradition
includes reflections on, and interpretations of, a tradition itself, which in
turn recreates, changes, and sustains the tradition.
Gadamer’s concept of “historically effected consciousness” (wirkungsge-
schichtlichesBewußtsein) is at the heart of this reflective dimension of
tradition. In his analysis of hermeneutic experience (Erfahrung) in the
second part of Truth and Method, Gadamer contrasts historically effected
consciousness with mere historical consciousness. The latter, one of the
achievements of the historical school, involves a recognition of the past
as unlike the present and an awareness by scholars that we cannot under-
stand the past immediately but need a method for transcending historical
difference. As we have seen, Gadamer views historical consciousness alone
as insufficient since it ignores and hides the fact that it is itself “situated
in the web of historical effects.” Historically effected consciousness, in
contrast, is aware that it too is “always already affected by history” and
that this historicity is part of any act of understanding itself (Gadamer
1995, 300–301). As a consequence of modernity, we are now aware of
the fact that our own consciousness is a historical product and that we
too are shaped by history, culture, language, and place. It is no longer
possible to encounter the past un-self-consciously. Historically effected

6
See, for example, Caputo (1987) and Eagleton (1983).
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 87

consciousness is this awareness of the relationship we necessarily have with

the past through tradition, an awareness that produces an openness to
learning from tradition and the past (Gadamer 1995, 360–362).
A comparison to Anthony Giddens’ thoughts on tradition and mod-
ern reflexivity clarifies the distinctiveness of Gadamer’s approach. In The
Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that a new and distinctive form
of reflexivity allows us to distinguish the “modern” from the “traditional,”
even though he acknowledges that there are always combinations of the
two in concrete settings. In pre-modern civilizations, reflexivity is largely
limited to the reinterpretation and clarification of tradition, so that the
past is weighed more heavily than the future. The distinguishing feature
of modernity, however, is that thought and action are constantly refracted
back upon each other, as social practices and systems themselves are evalu-
ated and altered in light of new information as part of a project of colo-
nizing the future. Under these circumstances, the very nature of tradition
changes, since it now must be defended on the grounds of something
else—that is, by knowledge that does not itself rest on the authority of
tradition. Such defenses do take place, in Giddens’ view, so tradition does
not completely disappear. But Giddens regards this as “tradition in sham
clothing” since it receives its identity from modern reflexivity (Giddens
1990, 36–39).
In one of his Reith Lectures nearly a decade later, Giddens reaffirms the
contrast between pre-modern and modern and the fundamental change
in tradition that accompanies this shift. Though the Enlightenment set
out to destroy tradition, he argues, it did not succeed for a long while.
But because of globalization, everyday life in the west today is “becoming
opened up from the hold of tradition,” creating a society “living after the
end of tradition.” Tradition has not disappeared, Giddens concedes, but
he thinks that it can no longer be lived in “the traditional way.” Tradition
is no longer defended by virtue of its claim to truth but is increasingly
defended on nontraditional grounds. Likewise, religious traditions are
increasingly forced to defend themselves on nonreligious ground. Giddens
does not bemoan this situation; rather, he thinks that “this is exactly as it
should be.” One of the felicitous consequences of the retreat of traditional
tradition, for him, is that “we are forced to live in a more open and reflec-
tive way” (Giddens 1999).
Although Giddens’ modern reflexivity overlaps with the concept of
historically effected consciousness, his contrast between pre-modern and
modern, between traditional tradition and “sham” tradition, is much
88 D. WALHOF

sharper than Gadamer allows. Giddens assumes that the prejudicial dimen-
sion of tradition generally fails to hold in modernity, and as a result, he puts
far more stock than Gadamer does in reflection’s capacity to “ground”
tradition in other forms of authority. Gadamer’s concept of historically
effected consciousness, in contrast, acknowledges the reflective dimension
of tradition while also keeping its prejudicial nature in view. As he notes
in the foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method, “there is a
certain legitimate ambiguity in the concept of historically effected con-
sciousness,” since it refers both to the consciousness effected by history
and to our consciousness of this effect (Gadamer 1995, xxxiv). We are
aware of our historicity, but this awareness does not mean that that we
know how and in what respects the past has shaped our consciousness,
nor that we have now escaped tradition’s influence. As he says later, “to be
historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete” (1995,
302). Whatever awareness we have of the nature and effects of tradition
will be partial because we simultaneously remain under its claim. Our
consciousness of tradition’s effect, in short, does not reduce tradition’s
effect.7 Because the prejudicial authority of tradition maintains its claim on
us, we cannot reflect our way outside of its grasp, nor can we successfully
ground its claims in some other kind of authority.
Gadamer attempts to maintain both the prejudicial and reflective
aspects of tradition by casting our encounter with it as a dialogue. We
encounter tradition, he claims, neither as an arms-length object nor as a
totalizing presence but as a Thou, as an other. Our interaction with tradi-
tion is neither objectification nor passive reception but is instead media-
tion. One of the primary ways this takes place is through encounters with a
tradition’s texts: “When it is interpreted written tradition is brought back
out of the alienation in which it finds itself and into the living present of
conversation” (1995, 368). Our attempt to understand the defining texts
of a tradition allows their voices to be heard, and so they speak to us like
a partner in conversation. Playing on the connection between hören and
Zugehörigkeit, Gadamer notes that our belonging to tradition is mani-
fested in its addressing us. The auditory metaphor is important: when you
7
Ricoeur’s gloss on historically effected consciousness is helpful here: “In general terms it
can be characterized as the consciousness of being exposed to history and to its effects in
such a way that this action over us cannot be objectified, for the efficacy belongs to the very
meaning of the action as a historical phenomenon.” As a result, he continues, “there is no
overview that would enable us to grasp in a single glance the totality of the effects” (Ricoeur
1991, 281).
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 89

view something, it is possible to look away, to avert one’s eyes so you no

longer have to see it, but it is not possible to “hear away.” According to
Gadamer, “[e]veryone who is situated in a tradition—and this is true, as
we know, even of the man who is released into a new apparent freedom by
historical consciousness—must listen to what reaches him from it”(1995,
462–63).
Hearing the voice of tradition is an experience of both familiarity and
strangeness. On the one hand, it reaches us only because of our belonging
to tradition and the continuity of the past and present. On the other hand,
it speaks each time in a new voice in a new setting, and it always contains
the possibility of calling us up short and putting our prejudices in play. We
might, Gadamer says in his essay on historical consciousness, have “the
experience of an impasse—maybe the text is totally incomprehensible to
us or the response it seems to offer contradicts our anticipations” (1979,
43). Because of this impasse we become aware of what our expectations
had been and possibly of their need for revision. A dialogical encounter
with traditionary texts, then, is not simply reflection on and refinement of
the tradition itself, though this is part of it. But, importantly, the fusion
of horizons that occurs also transforms the tradition, as its manifestation
in a new context is also a rearticulation of the tradition itself. In this way,
tradition is “not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it
ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tra-
dition, and hence further determine it ourselves” (Gadamer 1995, 293).
Part of the way that tradition is sustained, then, is through this ongoing
re-narration of the past in order to meet present concerns and to imagine
a future.
It is important to appreciate the continuity in tradition without over-
stating it. The re-narration of the past generally aims at coherence, as it
seeks to project a unified tradition back into history as a means of offering
resources for the present and future. However, since this is unavoidably an
interpretive task, which for any particular tradition is carried out by many
interpreters, coherence will remain elusive. Fissures and tensions will exist
in any such narration. Gadamer emphasizes the “variety of voices” that
we hear in any encounter with the past. “Only in the multifariousness of
such voices does it exist: this constitutes the nature of tradition in which
we want to share and have a part” (1995, 284). As Watson notes, there is
always an agonistic element within traditions, and claims from and about
a tradition “inevitably suffer from a certain disequilibrium” just as much
as they are marked by coherence (Watson 1996, 68). Our encounters
90 D. WALHOF

with, and thereby our (re)constitution of, tradition is always an event that
involves continuity but also discontinuities and change.

4.3 CONCEPTUALIZING RELIGION AS TRADITION

Gadamer’s use of the term tradition is imprecise and at times over-
broad, occasionally giving the impression that it accounts for everything.
Moreover, he is not usually thinking of religion specifically when discuss-
ing tradition. Nonetheless, the complex conception of tradition I have
gleaned from his thought, as something that claims us by constituting our
prejudices and as something we reflectively re-narrate in our encounters
with it as another, highlights important aspects of religion’s nature and
role in modern democracies that are obscured by what I have called the
belief-container model.
Gadamer’s insight that tradition makes its claim, in part, by constitut-
ing our prejudices captures something important about religious faith.
Life as part of a religious community includes distinct ways of being in the
world—behaving, speaking, perceiving oneself, relating to others—that
take place to a large degree without conscious thought. Such practices
arise from, and also contribute to, the inhabitation of a world in which, to
use Gadamer’s terms, the authority of what has been handed down exerts
power over attitudes and behaviors. The authority of a religious tradition
expresses itself in part through these practices, which both arise from and
also help constitute the prejudices of those within the tradition. In this
way, a life of faith involves a particular set of anticipatory commitments
that structure one’s interaction with the world, commitments that are not
wholly a matter of conscious choice and to which one cannot fully gain
reflective access.
Adam Seligman’s work on ritual helps further illuminate such practices
(Seligman 2010). Seligman argues that ritual works to create a “subjunc-
tive universe,” a mutually shared “could be,” in our lives. The perfor-
mances of everyday rituals, such as saying “fine” when asked how one is
doing, or saying “I love you” to your partner or children as you leave for
work, help constitute and sustain this shared world, even though these
utterances may or may not conform at that moment to one’s internal state.
In fact, Seligman claims, internal states are irrelevant much of the time,
and sincerity is not determinative. Saying “I love you” on a daily basis does
not require that each time, at that particular moment, you intensely feel
love toward the person you are addressing. (In fact, its saying is perhaps
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 91

most important when one is not feeling loving or lovable.) Rather than
being an expression of sincerely-felt love at that moment, the ritual saying
helps constitute and sustain a long-term relationship of love. In this way,
Seligman argues, ritual is meaning-producing, but “it does not produce a
meaning that can be analyzed as a coherent system of beliefs about some-
thing else.” Although ritual includes words and language, the meaning it
produces is “non-discursive” (2010, 13–14). Its meaning consists in the
constitution of a shared reality.
Similarly, the everyday lives of religious citizens are permeated by prac-
tices that are productive of meaning and constitutive of certain kinds of
subjects who share a reality.8 This is true most obviously in traditions in
which individual or corporate worship includes long-standing, prescribed
rituals, such as Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and
some versions of Islam. However, even traditions that are expressly anti-
ritualistic and in which sincerity is valued above all, like contemporary evan-
gelicalism, are permeated with everyday ritual, whether acknowledged or
not. For example, when it was revealed that Sarah Palin said it was “God’s
plan” that she was chosen as John McCain’s running mate in the 2008
presidential campaign, this sounded strange and hubristic to many and
hence became a story (Associated Press 2010). However, for an American
evangelical, this is a relatively normal thing to say, something said without
thinking too much about it and without it representing a strong claim
about knowing God’s mind or having been specially chosen by God.9 This
is simply the way evangelicals sometimes talk, and the way their parents
and friends and fellow congregants sometimes talk, reflecting a reality they
inhabit in which God is in control and they habitually acknowledge this
fact, usually without thinking about it much. These habits of mind and
ways of speaking work on the prejudices of those who inhabit these tradi-
tions, and these prejudices in turn create and sustain a shared world. They
are one of the means by which a religious tradition makes it claim on suc-
cessive generations, the means by which the tradition is handed down.
My description is not meant to discount or explain away the claims
of inspiration or communication with the divine at the heart of many

8
Asad’s Genealogies of Religion (1993) also helpfully brings out this dimension of religious
faith.
9
In this case, Palin’s claim was in response to a question in private conversation about how
she could remain calm in the face of so much publicity, which makes her answer even more
ritualistically mundane.
92 D. WALHOF

religious traditions, nor does one find such dismissals in Gadamer’s writ-
ings. They instead demonstrate an appreciation for the importance of
religion, especially Christianity, in shaping the western philosophical tradi-
tion. In Truth and Method, for example, he uses the Christian doctrines
of the Incarnation and the Trinity to help illustrate the nature of language
(Gadamer 1995, 418–25). At the same time, the emphasis on finitude
and the limits of our knowing at the core of his hermeneutics produce a
wariness toward dogmatic statements about the divine, and Gadamer was
personally agnostic when it came to religion (Vessey 2010, 645–47). My
interests here are in how we conceptualize religion, and whether or not
one regards a divine call as part of religion, the description of the tradi-
tion’s force in shaping prejudices is apt. Certainly, even those who believe
in divine inspiration and revelation in the contemporary world are also
diligent in attempting to shape their children’s habits of mind, belief, and
action so that they persist in the religious tradition and pass it on to new
generations.
On this account, religion in democratic theorizing is best conceptual-
ized not primarily as a set of beliefs but as something closer to an identity,
as a particular way of being in the world that, because of the force of
tradition, includes a sense of self, habits of thought, and ways of relat-
ing to others. In saying this, I am not arguing that religion is an ascribed
identity, the same as other identities of political import like gender, race,
ethnicity, or sexual orientation.10 But a theoretical account that takes reli-
gion to consist primarily of chosen, consciously-held beliefs and ignores
its prejudicial dimension will be flawed. Democratic theories that require
religious citizens to forego or limit public appeals to religion presume that
believers have a self-conscious awareness of their beliefs and of the rela-
tionship between these beliefs and their political views. This is a mislead-
ing picture of the lived reality of religious faith since, as Gadamer shows,
these citizens do not have a full view of the ways in which their religious
traditions construct their horizons and form the ground of their judg-
ments. Like other citizens, they cannot get an overview of the prejudices
that shape their reality, much less distinguish which prejudices stem from
their religious traditions and which are of nonreligious origin through
mere reflection.

10
Linda Martin Alcoff’s conceptualization of race and sex in interpretive terms, using
Gadamer, however, suggests that there may be important similarities (Alcoff 2006, 94–102).
See also Georgia Warnke’s Gadamerian account of identity (Warnke 2008).
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 93

The prejudicial character of religion, however, is not the whole story,

and it must be held together with its reflective character. Gadamer’s con-
ception of tradition highlights the way that theological claims function as a
means by which religious traditions constitute and reconstitute themselves.
As members of a tradition interpret sacred texts, creeds, confessions, and
other traditionary documents, they are at the same time participating in a
collective re-narration of the tradition itself. This inevitably involves judg-
ments and arguments about which texts and thinkers best represent the
core of the tradition, who stands within and who stands outside of the
tradition, both historically and in the present, and the present meanings of
these texts and doctrines. These arguments and articulations are the life-
blood of tradition; without them, a tradition ceases to exist. If the central
texts and claims of a tradition are no longer taken up and argued about in
new contexts, the tradition becomes merely an object of historical interest,
no longer a living tradition that makes its claim on old and new members
and on subsequent generations.
Religiously-oriented citizens are not just individuals who hold a par-
ticular set of religious beliefs that influence their political views and behav-
iors. Instead, they inhabit traditions and communities that shape them
in ways that include the desire to work on their identities as members of
these traditions and communities. We might call this the “aspirational”
dimension of religious practice. It involves inhabiting a narrative about
what it means to be part of this tradition and community, a narrative that
reaches back into the past but also includes current choices that extend the
narrative into the future. In addition, the religious identity to which many
believers aspire is not just about some segment of life called “religion”
that has to do with believing in God, living righteously, and so forth.
Instead, their aspiration is that this identity becomes general, that it shapes
their friendships, professional life, neighborhood interactions, consumer
choices, and political activities.
Charles Taylor’s work provides helpful context for the aspirational
dimension that marks contemporary religious communities. Against theo-
ries that see secularism as the privatization and decline of religious belief
and practice, Taylor’s A Secular Age traces the change from a society in
which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God to one in which
faith is just one possibility among others, and frequently not the easiest to
embrace. In his telling, a critical factor in this change was the emergence
of a self-sufficient humanism that became widely available as a possible
organizing social imaginary. This then helped make unbelief a plausible
94 D. WALHOF

option as well, alongside belief (Taylor 2007, 18–22). The plausibility of

unbelief was aided by a second development, which Taylor calls the Great
Disembedding, in which society came to be seen as consisting of individu-
als rather than of orders that are connected to an ordering of the cos-
mos. According to Taylor, concepts like the economy, the public sphere,
and the people provided means of conceptualizing society as a collection
of individuals pursuing mutual benefits that take the form of immanent
goods rather than future transcendent ones (Taylor 2004, 49–67).
In this context, the aspirational dimension of contemporary religion
includes the desire that one’s religious identity will be recognized as such
by others, not only those who are part of the same tradition and com-
munity but also those who are outside of it. In other words, what these
religious citizens aspire to is not merely to be, say, a good Christian, but
to live in such a way that it is evident to others that one is a good Christian.
On this model, one’s political views and activities are thus also a means by
which this identity is performed and recognized. Sometimes these aspi-
rational identities pose no conflict with one’s identity as a democratic
citizen, but on other occasions there is tension, and perhaps even direct
conflict, between civic and religious identities. In such cases, the reli-
gious identity sometimes trumps the identity of being a good democratic
citizen.

4.4 RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND THE ETHICS

OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP

If religion is best conceptualized not as a set of beliefs but as an aspirational

identity rooted in the prejudices and rituals of tradition, as I have argued,
democratic theorists’ proposals for an ethics of democratic citizenship that
is sensitive to religion must attend to the fact that religious citizens need
to have their civic identities able to be made consonant with their religious
identities. Political theories that demand that religiously-oriented citizens
articulate their reasons according to the standards of public reason, or that
they only hold to non-authoritarian conceptions of truth, or that they
revise their views in the face of arguments by others, fail to grapple suffi-
ciently with the problem of conflicting identities, which is different than a
problem of conflicting reasons. Citizens with deeply-rooted, aspirational,
religious identities will have a difficult time changing their political views
if doing involves adopting a self-conception that is seen to be incompatible
with their religious tradition.
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 95

Concern for the environment among American evangelicals is a case

in point. Evangelicals were for many years suspicious of the environmen-
tal movement because of its association with a left political agenda and
because of what evangelicals saw as pantheistic leanings among some
groups within the movement. These suspicions remain strong in some
quarters, but the last decade has also seen a growing number of evangeli-
cals embrace some of the environmental movement’s particular concerns
and policy proposals, especially related to global climate change (Harden
2005; Kintisch 2006; Schleifer 2014; Tupper 2013). Earlier it was diffi-
cult for evangelicals to reconcile their identity as good, Biblically-oriented
Christians, whose tradition emphasized that God created humans in his
own image as the crown of creation and then commanded humans to sub-
due the earth and exercise dominion over it (as mandated in Genesis 1:28),
with the identity of an “environmentalist,” which also entailed adopting
the identity of being a “liberal.” There was too much dissonance between
their evangelical sense of self and the self-conception that would accom-
pany expressing support for pro-environment policies. One can imagine,
then, that this dissonance would trump efforts to persuade them through
offering public reasons, and it could also inhibit attempts to induce them
to make their own arguments in secular or non-authoritarian terms.
What seems to have made it possible, eventually, for some evangeli-
cals to support environmental policies was a widening or loosening of
their aspirational religious identity with respect to this policy area. This
change came about, in part, through long-term, behind-the-scenes efforts
by evangelical scientists and scholars who were eventually able to convince
key evangelical leaders like Richard Cizik and Rick Warren to voice public
support for efforts to protect the environment (Kintisch 2006; Schleifer
2014). These public statements of support, while still quite controversial,
gave environmentally-conscious lay evangelicals permission, as it were, to
incorporate pro-environment political views into their identities as good
Christians. These efforts also included forging a language that spoke to
evangelicals and allowed them to retain a level of distinctiveness, despite
their shift on policy matters. For example, instead of talking about envi-
ronmentalism or sustainability, many evangelicals prefer the language of
“creation care” (Bouma-Prediger 2001). This concept fits with their aspi-
rational identity as good Christians who are taking care of God’s world,
but it also helps reinforce the commitment that their religious views ought
to influence their policy views, without merely adopting the alternative
identity of being an “environmentalist,” much less a “liberal.” Thus,
96 D. WALHOF

religiously-inclined citizens can further their aspirational religious identi-

ties at the same time that their participation potentially contributes to the
legitimacy of democratic processes and outcomes.
We can see similar identity tensions surrounding the issue of rights for
those of marginalized sexualities. For many conservative Christians in the
US, opposition to equal marriage rights for LGBT citizens has recently
become a central, defining feature of their religious identities. While sup-
port for same-sex marriage rights among white evangelicals has increased
from 13% in 2001 to 24% in 2015, the majority of white evangelicals
remain opposed, according to surveys by the Pew Forum on Religion
and Public Life. Support among black evangelicals is slightly higher, but
it has remained largely unchanged in the last decade: 30% in 2001 and
34% in 2015 (Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage 2015). Given this, it
is difficult to imagine public reasons providing a way for these citizens to
acknowledge the legitimacy of laws recognizing same-sex marriages, much
less to imagine them revising their views in the face of contrary evidence
and arguments. For most evangelicals, the conflict in identities between
“good Christian” and “supporter of gay rights” remains too sharp.
At the same time, a majority of mainline Protestants (62%) and
Catholics (57%) in the US now support same-sex marriage (Changing
Attitudes on Gay Marriage 2015). A substantial portion of these groups,
then, has been able to make their religious identity consonant with an
identity as a supporter of equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. The
relatively recent (and still controversial) strategy among gay rights activ-
ists of focusing on marriage rights, as opposed to full sexual diversity and
autonomy, has likely made this consonance easier, since it allows these
religious citizens to imagine themselves as pro-marriage rather than as
merely pro-gay.11
These examples highlight both the tradition-structure of religion and
how religious identities rooted in tradition potentially conflict with civic
identities. At the same time, the examples suggest that the identities at
stake are somewhat malleable. Though the prejudices handed down by
tradition form the initial response to a new public problem or political
demand, the traditions in question are also subject to re-narration and

11
See, for example: David Myers and Letha Dawson Scanzoni, What God Has Joined
Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage (2006); Justin Lee, Torn: Rescuing the Gospel
from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate (2013); and Matthew Vines, God and the Gay Christian:
The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships (2014).
 TRADITION, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 97

reconstitution. So, while some continue to experience conflict between

a self-conception as an evangelical Christian and as a supporter of tighter
environmental regulations, others have found ways to reconcile these
identities. In the case of same-sex marriage, the conflict between evangeli-
cal Christian and supporter of same-sex marriage remains sharper, though
there is some softening of this division as well, especially among young
evangelicals (Public Religion Research Institute 2011, 3). This mallea-
bility surely involves giving and responding to reasons, the focus of the
deliberative theorists under study here, but it involves far more than this
as well, an ability to experience one’s sense of self differently and to relate
to one’s tradition and community differently. Conceptualizing religion as
tradition in Gadamer’s terms captures both the continuity and malleability
of religious identities.
Of course, democratic theorists are not concerned with whether reli-
gious citizens are pro-environment or pro-same-sex-marriage per se.
Instead, our concern is democracy. As we saw above, Habermasian delib-
erative theorists ask religious citizens to take a stance of epistemological
openness, albeit with different targets: toward truth itself (Cooke), toward
public reasons offered by others (Lafont), or toward one’s own views
(Chambers). In each case, this openness on the part of religious citizens
is proposed as a means to democratic legitimacy, conceptualized in terms
of citizens seeing themselves as the authors of the laws under which they
live. However, if religion functions more as a deeply-rooted, aspirational
identity than as a set of beliefs, as I have argued, religious citizens will find
it difficult, if not impossible, to conform to these proposals. Given that
their very habits of mind and senses of self are shaped by their religious
traditions and communities, they can exhibit the epistemological openness
demanded by Cooke, Lafont, and Chambers only by adopting different
habits of mind and self-conceptions—that is, by no longer aspiring to be
good members of the traditions and communities that have made claims
on them.
This is too high of a price to demand in a liberal, democratic polity.
Moreover, demanding this price as a condition for the possibility of demo-
cratic legitimacy ensures that the standard of legitimacy set by deliberative
theorists will not be met. To avoid this conundrum, deliberative theorists
must revise their proposals for a religion-sensitive ethics of democratic citi-
zenship in ways that accord with the reality of religious identity rather than
an idealized model of religion as a set of beliefs. These proposals should,
in other words, demand not that religious citizens somehow maintain
98 D. WALHOF

epistemological openness but merely that they in good faith seek, as far
as possible, to make their religious identities consonant with their civic
identities as democratic citizens.
In places like the US, where levels of religious identification remain
high, this process will take place in part through democratic deliberation,
not just in the informal public sphere but also in the institutional pub-
lic sphere as well. Rather than seeking to protect the public sphere from
religious citizens and activists, democratic theorists should encourage
their engagement with others in the public realm itself. Only through
such engagement can religious and nonreligious citizens hope to produce
democratic outcomes that allow both to see themselves as authors of the
policies and laws under which they live.
 CHAPTER 5

Solidarity, Friendship, and Democratic Hope

The previous chapters have used insights from Gadamer to draw atten-
tion to political realities that are difficult to see because they exist
between citizens and thus are not reducible to individual citizen-subjects.
Chapter  2 looked at truth not as a possession of one or another, but
as something that is disclosed among us and sedimented in language.
Chapter  3 examined Gadamer’s account of understanding as the consti-
tution of a common subject in a common language through dialogue.
Chapter 4 addressed Gadamer’s account of tradition as that which claims
us by shaping our prejudices and that which we simultaneously and col-
lectively re-narrate. Each of these chapters then went on to make a case
for how this glimpse of the in-between enriches democratic theory, espe-
cially when it comes to theories of democratic deliberation and the place
of religion in politics.
This chapter brings these threads together by focusing on Gadamer’s
most explicitly political concept, solidarity, which is central to several of
his post-Truth and Method essays and interviews, especially from the mid-
1980s onward. These later works are often more directly focused on social
and political questions than on the interpretation of texts, art, and history
that are prominent in his earlier writings. In Gadamer’s own words, his
later works “address the phenomena at issue rather than the science or
theory of them” (1992, 150). A recurring theme in these works is the

© The Author(s) 2017 99

D. Walhof, The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-46864-8_5
100 D. WALHOF

presence of, and need for, solidarity in the face of political and social chal-
lenges. As this chapter will reveal, Gadamer’s conception of solidarity is a
complex one, having to do with historically contingent manifestations of
things that are shared among us, rather than with a recognition that oth-
ers as like us.
Because of this complexity, I turn first to another important concept
in Gadamer’s later works, friendship, as a means of shedding light on his
notion of solidarity. The core of Gadamer’s conception of friendship is a
life together of reciprocal co-perception, something that depends crucially on
the fact that our friends are other to us even as the friendship is sustained
by commonalities that bind us to each other. Though friendship and soli-
darity are not identical phenomena, neither are they merely parallel ones.
Instead, I suggest, solidarities represent partial and temporary manifesta-
tions of bonds that reflect a civic life together of reciprocal co-perception,
bonds that may include friendship but also extend beyond our friends to
fellow citizens and noncitizens. These bonds go beyond conscious recog-
nition of observable similarities and differences, and they emerge, I argue,
from encounters among those who are, and remain, in important ways
other to each other.
This complex account of solidarity enriches our understanding of the
connections that constitute political communities and underlie democratic
action, something that becomes clear when examining the Occupy Wall
Street (OWS) movement that emerged in September 2011. Interest-based
and identity-based frameworks fail to capture the intersubjective bonds at
work in OWS and similar phenomena. These bonds are not necessarily
those of shared interests or a shared identity based on observable simi-
larities and differences. Instead, they are best seen in terms of temporary
manifestations of a shared life together that arise from encounters among
those who are in important ways other to each other. In other words,
they are bonds of Gadamerian solidarity. This framework enables us to
assess OWS not in terms of policy or electoral outcomes but as what I call
solidarity-disclosing civic action.
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 101

5.1 FRIENDSHIP
Friendship is a recurring theme in Gadamer’s later writings, with his most
extensive discussions in essays from 19851 and 19992 that have to do with
the place of friendship in Greek thought. Gadamer looks to the Greeks,
he explains, not because past theories can be re-infused with life into a
substantially changed world, but because they can serve as a corrective to
our own thinking. In particular, the Greek concept of friendship can help
us “recognize the bottleneck of modern subjectivism and modern volun-
tarism” (1992, 219). We can think through the nature of friendship with
the Greeks in order to see a dimension of life that contemporary modes
of thought obscure. As I will argue below, this dimension of life is also at
issue in Gadamer’s conception of solidarity, and so we can use his phe-
nomenology of friendship to bring solidarity into better view.
Gadamer contrasts the prominence of friendship in Greek thought to
its relative neglect in modern thought. Because friendship is not a value
or belief, Gadamer claims, it does not fit easily within modern thought,
premised on a self-conscious subject. Although one can value friendship in
the abstract and one’s friends in particular, this valuing is not the same as
friendship itself. Nor, Gadamer claims, is friendship a “personal quality” or
a virtue that one might adopt or try to cultivate. Though the capacity for
friendship requires certain personal qualities like empathy and integrity,
having and cultivating these qualities is not the same as friendship, nor
would it guarantee friendship (1999, 117). Rather than a value or a virtue,
friendship is a good, Gadamer contends, but it is a peculiar good since “by
its very nature, friendship cannot be the business of the one or the other”
(1999, 131).Friendship is a good that can only arise between persons,
one that exists only by virtue of being shared. It is necessarily common.
According to Gadamer, this means that friends are bound to each other
in a way that is different than other types of relationships. Friendship can-
not be summoned at will from oneself, nor can it be demanded from
another. You cannot force yourself to be friends with someone else, nor

1
“Friendship and Self-Knowledge: Reflections on the Role of Friendship in Greek Ethics”
(in Gadamer 1999). As Gadamer notes, this essay had its origins in his inaugural lecture in
Marburg in 1929. He returns to the subject of friendship many years later because he real-
ized that his original address insufficiently addressed how friendship cannot be reduced to
subjectivity and, in fact, functions as a critique of modern subjectivity (1999, 131).
2
“Friendship and Solidarity” (2009). There is substantial overlap between this essay and
“Friendship and Self-Knowledge.”
102 D. WALHOF

can you force another person to be friends with you. Friendship is consti-
tuted between or among individuals in a way that is not directly the result
of any one’s will. It is, as Gadamer says, a good that is “bestowed on us”
(1999, 117).
Friendship thus goes beyond merely being well-disposed or having
good will toward another. Drawing explicitly on Aristotle,3 Gadamer
wants to maintain a distinction between friendship, on the one hand, and
“mere friendliness,” on the other. As an exercise of will, friendliness can
be extended to a stranger who is, and may remain, unknown. In these
cases “the two people [are] not really openly bound to each other” (1999,
134). While extending good will toward a stranger could lead to friend-
ship in the future, there remains a distance between the persons that dis-
tinguishes this interaction from friendship, despite the possible element of
care in extending good will to another. The gesture of friendliness is an
act of conscious subjectivity based on some other conviction or interest.
Friendship involves more than this. The more has to do with the distinctive
way in which friends find themselves bound to each other, though what
this is can be difficult to articulate, and Gadamer is not always precise
or thorough in his descriptions. In fact, he qualifies his own reflections
on friendship by noting that it is something that “one can only live and
can never define” (2009, 5). Nonetheless, I would like to highlight two
important features, gleaned from Gadamer’s account, that mark the bonds
among friends: life together and reciprocal co-perception.
The first feature arises in Gadamer’s contrast of friendship and friendli-
ness: “The common condition of all friendship is more than [friendliness]:
the true bond that—in various degrees—signifies a ‘life together’” (1999,
134). As a common good, friendship involves a being-with or living-with
each other. At times this might involve a literal living with, in the same
house or the same apartment complex or on the same block. In most cases,
it involves frequent interactions on a regular basis. We can see the impor-
tance of this when comparing long-distance friendships to friendships
with those close at hand. Although current communication technologies
and easy travel have made long-distance friendships easier than before, we
know the difficulty of sustaining such friendships. Fewer routine interac-

3
See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1962, 255ff.). As Vessey points out, Gadamer’s gen-
eral reading of Aristotle on friendship tends to be selective and sometimes at odds with domi-
nant readings (2005). My concern here is Gadamer’s own account of friendship, not his
reading of Aristotle per se.
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 103

tions and face-to-face contacts make it difficult to keep up on the day-to-

day doings and ordinary events of each other’s lives. Though these doings
and events may be insignificant in and of themselves, knowing about and
sharing in them, in fact, constitutes a significant part of friendship. They
are the visible manifestations of the intertwined nature of the friends’ lives.
In his 1999 essay on friendship, Gadamer calls this togetherness “house-
ness” or “home-ness,” drawing on the Greek term Oikeion. Although we
usually associate this term with economics, it can, Gadamer points out,
also connote “friendship.” He treats this as a mysterious aspect of friend-
ship, a connection “about which we cannot speak” because it is “some-
thing hidden” and thus difficult to get in view (2009, 5–7). He does not
elaborate on this claim, but he seems to mean that this connection, which
we experience as a sense of being at home with our friends, is too close at
hand for direct observation. It is not the focal point of the relationship per
se—something we aim at or try to foster—but is instead an unintended
by-product.
Perhaps because of this hiddenness, Gadamer refrains from getting too
specific about what exactly binds friends in their life together. Nor does
he follow Aristotle in setting up friendship typologies, since friendship
is not, in his view, “some abstract concept, which is divided into various
subspecies” (2009, 7). So, trying to specify exactly what binds friends to
each other belies the complexity of these relationships, and “one cannot
say that it is something definite in him, something I like, that makes him
my friend” (2009, 8). Reflecting on one’s own friendships bears this out,
I think. Certainly in one’s close friendships, specifying what the friends
have in common always comes up short as a way to characterize the rela-
tionship. Is it shared hobbies, political views, or other interests? Similar
tastes in music, art, literature, or film? Shared features of identity, such as
race or ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, or geographical
origin? Even if one allows that it might be several of these things, so that
one could make a master list of commonalities, the list would still fail to
capture something vital to the friendship, something beyond these iden-
tifiable similarities that constitutes the friendship and binds the friends to
each other. This remainder, although situated within the context of evident
similarities and differences, cannot be reduced to them. It is this “with-
structure” of the relationship (1999, 134), this “home-ness” beyond such
similarities, that Gadamer sees as central to the bond of friendship.
This is related to the second feature of this bond that I want to highlight:
what Gadamer calls “reciprocal co-perception” (1999, 139). Friendship is
104 D. WALHOF

obviously reciprocal, but Gadamer notes that “something more must be

added to reciprocity: namely, that in their being good to one another the
partners cannot remain concealed from each other” (1999, 134). The
bond of friendship exposes the friends to each other, in part, through
a deepening mutual knowledge beyond the kinds of evident similarities
and differences just discussed. Most straightforwardly, this involves com-
ing to know what a friend is like—a phrase that covers a whole range of
things, including temperament, interests, features of personality, anxieties
and hopes, typical reactions, habits of mind, and more. While we might
be able to maintain a projected image of ourselves in our professional
relations or in our encounters with strangers, we denote others as friends
precisely because it is with them that such projections fade away and who
we are is more fully exposed.
Gadamer contends that this knowing is not just of one’s friend, however.
It is also connected to, and accompanied by, deepening self-knowledge.
In friendship, Gadamer writes, “one recognizes oneself in others and the
other recognizes itself in us,” either by seeing something that the friends
share, or by seeing something distinctive in a friend that one does not see
in oneself (2009, 9).These disclosures of new commonalities and differ-
ences among us and our friends come by means of the relationship itself,
a consequence of our life together. For example, a friend might say in
reaction to something one has done, “It didn’t seem like you to do that.”
And one might react to this by agreeing, “You’re right, that wasn’t like
me.” In some cases, this merely confirms an existing self-portrait, but on
other occasions this comes as a revelation, and as a result, one understands
oneself in a different way. Or a friend might say, “I wouldn’t have done
that,” and one might respond, “No, you wouldn’t, but I’m different than
you.” This, too, can be revelatory, as one simultaneously recognizes some-
thing about oneself and one’s friend that was not known before. In these
cases, the friend is a “mirror of self-knowledge” that helps us overcome
illusions about ourselves and continue the hard task of self-knowledge
(1999, 137–38).

5.2 DIFFERENCE
Before turning directly to solidarity, we need to take note of something
that has so far mostly remained implicit: the role of difference in Gadamer’s
account of friendship. It is easy in theorizing friendship to focus solely on
the unity among friends, looking at their care for each other and what they
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 105

have in common, to the neglect of their differences and distinctiveness.

Robert Dostal criticizes Heidegger precisely on this point, claiming that
he fails to see that friendship “is not merely a matter of unity and total-
ity but of negativity and difference as well” (Dostal 1992, 410). Because
he follows Heidegger by emphasizing the “with-structure” of friendship,
Gadamer too runs the risk of over-emphasizing the unity of friendship in a
way that neglects otherness. This is a particularly important concern given
the criticism, made most prominently by Derrida in their 1981 exchange,
that Gadamer’s account of understanding as a fusion of horizons fails to
recognize the other. According to Derrida, portraying understanding as
a fusion pre-ordains consensus and, thus, gives no real standing to the
other, whether a text or another person in conversation. On this view, the
fusion account masks a will to power that treats the other as a mere instru-
ment for my understanding, thereby denying the otherness of the other
(Derrida 1989, 53).4
From the beginning, Gadamer resisted this reading of his hermeneu-
tics, and careful scholars of his work, especially Robert Bernasconi (1995),
Fred Dallmayr (1996), James Risser (1997), and Lawrence Schmidt
(2000), have persuasively argued that Derrida’s criticism and others like
it are ill-founded. This is especially true when one considers Gadamer’s
later writings, which give more attention to the importance of the other,
perhaps in response to Derrida’s criticisms.5 Nonetheless, it is still often
presumed that Gadamer’s approach suppresses difference, and since this
presumption potentially distorts his insights about both friendship and
solidarity, it is necessary to say something about the role of the other in
his thought.
I outlined Gadamer’s approach to understanding as a fusion of hori-
zons in Chap. 3, placing particular emphasis on its productive character—
that is, the capacity for generating a new thing, common to us, through
the event of understanding. In one of his later essays, Gadamer empha-
sizes that these events also involve a confrontation with the limits of one’s
authority and knowledge. The other’s freedom and participation in the
disclosure of a common subject reveals that “the other is not my dominion
and I am not sovereign” (1992, 233). The presence of the other results in
a revised and deeper understanding of the limits of our own knowledge,

4
See also, among others, Simon (1989) and Caputo (1989).
5
Schmidt, however, makes a compelling case that Gadamer’s concern for the other is not
merely a recent phenomenon but can be found in his earlier writings as well (2000).
106 D. WALHOF

as we realize that what we thought to be true is not, in fact, true, or at

least not true in the way that we thought it was.6 As previous chapters have
noted, our interaction with others calls forth some of what we thought
we knew or what we expected to be the case, thereby putting these preju-
dices into play. By virtue of being put into play, these prejudices are called
into question and exposed as limited and partial. In revealing our limited
and finite knowledge, the event of understanding makes possible greater
self-knowledge.
However, the role of the other in understanding also goes beyond this.
Gadamer criticizes Heidegger for treating the other as merely a limit or a
frustration to us and, thereby, giving short shrift to the phenomenon of
understanding. Heidegger fails to ask, notes Gadamer, “why I experience
my own limitation through the encounter with the Other, and why I must
always learn to experience anew if I am ever to be in a position to surpass
my limits” (2000, 285). For Gadamer, it is not just that we understand
differently or confront our own limitations through the presence of the
other; without this presence, we do not understand at all. As he says,
only the other’s presence allows me “to open up the real possibility of
understanding” and “to allow one to go beyond one’s own possibilities”
(2000, 284). The event of understanding that entails a recognition of our
limitations and a negation of our knowledge is at the same time a conces-
sion to the one with whom we interact. “What is at issue here,” Gadamer
says in a 1986 interview, “is that when something other or different is
understood, then we must also concede something, yield—in certain lim-
its—to the truth of the other” (1992, 152). He calls this the “soul” of his
hermeneutics: that understanding involves not just the recognition of our
own limits, but recognizing and yielding to the truth that confronts us in
the other.
In short, the presence of the other is indispensable for understanding
on Gadamer’s account. The fusion that produces a new thing cannot take
place without the other that stands before us and through whose pres-
ence our prejudices are called forth, put into play, and revised. Coming
to an understanding with another is the only way my own prejudices can
become known to me and the only way that they can be transformed.
The other is both an obstacle, in that he or she exposes the limits of my

6
Gerald Bruns nicely casts this experience in terms of failure. He claims that for Gadamer
understanding is not the product of interpretation, but “the product of the failure of inter-
pretation to holds its ground” (Bruns 1992, 205).
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 107

grasp of something, and also the means by which a new understanding of

this something emerges. It is in this sense that an event of understanding
involves a concession to the other. The presence of the other is necessary
for seeing new possibilities, the ground of the fundamental openness that
is part of an event of understanding (Dallmayr 1996, 39–49; Risser 1997,
16–17).
As we saw in Chap. 3, its dialogical character renders understanding
necessarily beyond one’s control, and one does not know in advance what
limits one will confront, how one’s finitude will be manifested, or what
truth will be brought forth by the encounter with another. The same is
true of friendship. The “with-structure” and reciprocal co-perception that
mark the bond of friendship depend on another who is and remains dis-
tinct. The self-knowledge and self-love that are part of the bond of friend-
ship are inherently related to the distinctiveness of the friend, not from
envisioning the friend as simply a reflection of oneself. In discussing the
nature of this self-knowledge, Gadamer claims that “because this other,
this counterpart, is not one’s own mirror image, but rather the friend, all
powers come into play of increasing trust and devotion to the ‘better self’
that the other is for oneself” (1999, 139). As we saw above, one knows
oneself, in part, by seeing what is distinctive in the friend—that is, by see-
ing the friend as model, as having characteristics that one either aspires
to or participates in through the friendship. What draws us to one who
becomes a friend is often not similarity but “those differences worthy of
admiration and love that one discovers in another” (2009, 5). As in under-
standing, this encounter is also an experience of one’s own limits.
Moreover, in their life together, friends can only have a relationship
of true friendship if they remain other to each other in a way that allows
the emergence of new commonalities and differences that may not be
evident at first. If the otherness of the friend is suppressed or hidden, the
full scope of what binds the friends to each other cannot emerge. If one of
the friends, say, so dominates the friendship that she refuses to acknowl-
edge the distinctiveness of her friend, that which appears common to them
is falsely constructed, and we do not have a friendship but some other
kind of relationship—leader and follower, or teacher and disciple, perhaps.
Similarly, the bond between friends cannot be sustained if a friend is cer-
tain that he “knows” the other in some complete and static sense, so that
he reduces and objectifies his friend to a set of characteristics. In short,
in order for a life together of reciprocal co-perception to endure, a friend
must be and remain an other. The friends must remain distinct, and this
108 D. WALHOF

otherness is an indispensable part of the friendship, making it possible for

the shared dimensions of the relationship to be revealed in new ways.
Given this, friendships have an unpredictable quality about them. Over
time, as we engage in a life together with our friends and as reciprocal co-
perception continues, we perceive our friends and ourselves anew, some-
times in surprising ways. In some cases, these disclosures serve to sustain
and strengthen the bond of friendship by revealing new ways in which our
lives are shared. In other cases, such disclosures result in greater distance
between friends, even to the point of eventually bringing a friendship to
an end. We may then look back and say, “She’s different than she used to
be,” or “I thought I knew him, but it turns out I really didn’t,” or “We
simply drifted apart.” In saying these things we attest to the fact that there
is no way to predict, much less guarantee, that the bond of friendship is
strengthened by the ongoing process of encountering the other in the
friend.

5.3 SOLIDARITY
I have discussed Gadamer’s account of friendship because by helping us
get a glimpse of the in-between, friendship gives us insight into solidarity
and its importance for democratic politics. Before looking at this connec-
tion, it is important to clarify first that Gadamer does not equate the rela-
tions among citizens with friendship, nor am I arguing for this equation.
Because friendship involves a life together based on mutual knowledge and
love, it can be problematic for conceptualizing relations between citizens
who are strangers to each other. Attempts to revive friendship as a model
for citizenship in contemporary democracies recognize this difficulty, and
so the primary approach has been to articulate norms of friendship that are
transferable to citizenship: a generalized concern for the virtue of other
citizens, for example (Schwarzenbach 1996), or more particular norms
like truth and tenderness (Scorza 2004).7 Similarly, Gadamer recognizes
that “the romantic image of friendship and a general love of one’s neigh-
bor” cannot be the basis of modern society (1992, 219). Even if this were

7
For a different approach see Kahane, who proposes what he calls a “relationship-cen-
tered” account of friendship, in which the bond between friends is constructed through “the
process of telling and retelling the friendship.” Similarly, a bond between citizens “will derive
primarily from their valuing the civic relationship itself” (1999, 279, 284–85).
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 109

true of the ancient polis, nostalgia for a mythic past in which citizens were
friends will not get us far in complex, anonymous societies.
Using friendship to theorize citizenship is problematic for another rea-
son. Because citizen is also a legal category defined by law and connected
to state boundaries, it becomes difficult when making a direct connection
between friendship and citizenship to adequately theorize associations
and attachments that do not align with legal definitions, including ones
that transcend national borders and those among citizens and nonciti-
zens within a state’s borders. In specifying a more circumscribed relation-
ship than citizenship, solidarity functions as a mediating concept between
friendship and citizenship. In other words, the link I am proposing is
between solidarity and friendship, not friend and citizen. This is important
because what we are trying to bring into view are not friends or citizens
per se, but that which exists between them. This is what solidarity is meant
to capture.
Gadamer’s writings display both a confidence about existing solidarities
and also an anxiety that democratic polities no longer foster the solidari-
ties necessary to sustain democracy for the long term. In a 1967 essay on
the role of scientific experts in politics, for example, he laments the decline
of solidarity in modern society (1992, 181–92). Bureaucracy, technology,
and specialization all increasingly threaten to fragment society, he argues,
and standard sources of unity like religion can no longer counter these
forces. Moreover, political discourse and practices, rather than counteract-
ing the fragmenting forces, further contribute to the problem by focusing
precisely on what divides citizens: “Our public life appears to me to be
defective in so far as there is too much emphasis upon the different and
the disputed, upon that which is contested or in doubt.” The result is that
“what we truly have in common and what unites us remains, so to speak
without a voice” (1992, 192). Nearly twenty years later, in a 1986 speech
in Heidelberg on modern forms of alienation and their effects on the uni-
versity, Gadamer similarly complains that it is “so unbelievably difficult
just to discover an existing authentic solidarity,” not only in the university
but also in society at large (1992, 59).
Alongside these doubts, however, are professions that discovering
and strengthening existing solidarities remains possible, even in diverse,
modern democracies. The challenge, in Gadamer’s view, is to bring
these solidarities to focal awareness. In the same 1986 lecture, he advises
his audience to recall their own experiences of solidarity, starting with
those among family (“nobody who has been embraced by a family for an
110 D. WALHOF

extended time should discount that he has once known solidarity”) and
working out from there to experiences with friends, colleagues, and the
academic community more broadly. These forms of solidarity, Gadamer
says, serve as “precursors” to broader forms that include fellow citi-
zens and potentially even “the grand universe of humanity, of all human
beings” (1992, 59). This call to awareness is a familiar refrain in his later
works. In a 1993 interview, for example, he points out hopefully that we
are, in fact, “becoming ever more aware of the solidarities that now exist”
(2001a, 80). The work of bringing them to attention, he says in a 1999
essay, is especially crucial in an age of “interrelated foreignness,” where we
may not even know our neighbors (2009, 4). This is, in part, a political
project: “Among the tasks of politics today, I think a top priority should
be to make us more generally aware of our deep solidarities” (2001a,
80). Gadamer calls on political leaders to stop exploiting differences as a
means to electoral victory and instead give voice to those things that unite
citizens. The social and political task of the day, he claims, is “becoming
aware of what unites us” (1992, 192).
Both Gadamer’s fears and hopes about solidarity are framed in terms
of something already existing rather than as something that must be cre-
ated. His fear is that solidarities are “difficult to discover” and remain
“without a voice”; his hope is that we can and will become “more aware”
of them. Gadamer presumes that solidarities already underlie communi-
ties—that any existing community must have some things in common,
even though they may be difficult to see. This presumption arises from the
way Gadamer conceptualizes solidarity and from its close connection with
practice. He concludes a 1976 essay, “What Is Practice?,” by explicitly
linking the two: “Practice is conducting oneself and acting in solidarity”
(1981, 87). As we saw in Chap. 1, practice involves the use of practical
reason to make choices about the good, something that entails choosing
both ends and means. In making these judgments, we draw on the shared
understandings, norms, and convictions that underlie our life together.
When making choices about what is good and right, one does not merely
draw on these shared understandings, norms, and convictions to deter-
mine what is good and right for oneself. Rather, solidarity has to do with
the fact that in making such choices, we are also in some sense choosing
what is right and good for us, whether we recognize it or not. Or, to use
the terms outlined in Chap. 4, the choices about the good that we make
are shaped by our prejudices, the anticipatory commitments given us by
the traditions we inhabit, but these choices are also a means by which
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 111

these prejudices are called forth and revised and thus also a means by
which our individual and collective identities are re-narrated. To varying
degrees, in other words, one’s choices about the good are made on our
collective behalf rather than merely one’s own behalf.
We can get a better view of Gadamer’s conception of solidarity by con-
trasting it with what it is not. As described in the previous paragraph, soli-
darity might seem indistinguishable from concern for the public good or
from an effort to subsume one’s private interests in favor of public or shared
interests. This is not, however, quite what Gadamer has in mind. Solidarity
is more, or different, than mere public mindedness. Representing solidar-
ity as a concern for the public good or as a search for mutual interests casts
it in terms that depend too heavily on the intentions of individuals. Public
mindedness requires a self-consciousness on the part of citizens, an ability
to step outside themselves, as it were, and distinguish their own interests
from the public interest and choose the latter, or perhaps see how they are
intertwined. It requires, in short, that citizens make their own interests
and the interests of others present before them as objects of knowledge.
Gadamer’s conception of solidarity differs from this, partly because his
hermeneutical approach complicates this picture of knowledge. As we have
seen, he criticizes the primacy of self-consciousness in modern thought,
along with its restricted understanding of knowledge as that which is pres-
ent as an object of consciousness. Instead, he emphasizes our situatedness
in history, tradition, and language, which means that our conscious under-
standings represent merely those things that have been brought to the
foreground of thought at a particular moment. Given this, it is not sur-
prising that Gadamer does not conceptualize solidarity in terms of shared
political interests. On his terms, this is too limited of a way of thinking
about the complex nature of our shared life. While we are capable of mak-
ing some of our interests objects of consciousness at a given moment and
determining which ones might be shared by others, doing so would at the
same time miss other significant ways that we are bound to each other. In
short, Gadamer would not want to reduce solidarity to consciously shared
interests because this reduction fails to capture the richness and complex-
ity of the shared life underlying political communities.
Second, Gadamer’s conception of solidarity also needs to be distin-
guished from universal accounts. Rather than appeal to pre-existing
universal sources of solidarity based on a common humanity or on the
capacity for rationality, the solidarities Gadamer highlights instead have
to do with things that bind persons to each other at particular historical
112 D. WALHOF

moments and in specific cultural and social contexts. In this, his approach
to solidarity bears some resemblance to that of Richard Rorty, and a brief
comparison is instructive. Rorty explicitly rejects a conception of solidar-
ity based on a “recognition of one another’s common humanity” (Rorty
1989, 189–91). Universal notions like this are, Rorty claims, weak and
unconvincing, and they are generally not strong enough to prevent cruelty
or motivate charity. Instead, our attachment to and concern for others is
strongest when they are seen “as ‘one of us,’ where ‘us’ means something
smaller and more local than the human race” (1989, 191). Rorty regards
this parochialism as unavoidable but not regrettable. In fact, this is pre-
cisely the approach to solidarity that he defends, one in which “feelings of
solidarity are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities
strike us as salient” (1989, 192). Solidarity on these terms has to do with
historically contingent identifications, a recognition that in this context
and at this moment, certain others are part of us by virtue of some shared
marker or markers. Our solidarity with others rests on the fact that we
identify with them. We might call this solidarity as identification.
Solidarity as identification is seen most clearly in cases of shared national
origin, ethnicity, race, or religion, where clear identifiers mark us off from
them. In characterizing his own approach as “ethnocentric,” Rorty pro-
vocatively calls these solidarities to mind, knowing that they can also be
fertile ground for nationalism, racism, and religious bigotry, including
violence and injustice to those not part of us. However, the version of
ethnocentrism Rorty defends is more inclusive than these forms: “To be
ethnocentric is to divide the human race into people to whom one must
justify one’s beliefs and the others. The first group—one’s ethnos—com-
prises those who share enough of one’s beliefs to make fruitful conversa-
tion possible” (1991, 30). In other words, the solidarities that divide up
the world may, and often do, involve traditional differences like national
origin, ethnicity, race, or religion, but they need not be limited to these.
In fact, part of Rorty’s project is to convince us that these are less impor-
tant than similarities “with respect to pain and humiliation.” In his view,
solidarity ought to be based on an understanding that others suffer in the
way that we do, an understanding we can encourage through detailed
descriptions of particular pains and humiliations (1989, 192). According
to Rorty, then, we need to actively create a broader sense of solidarity
rather than merely recognize those that already exist (1989, 196).
It is evident, then, that Rorty’s project is explicitly normative, and
although it eschews universal foundations, it has what we might call a uni-
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 113

versal impulse, in the sense that its orientation is toward an expanding com-
munity based on the recognition that we suffer similarly. Gadamer shares
Rorty’s belief that solidarities are historically contingent, not antecedently
universal, but he does not view the achievement of solidarity in the same
terms. The difference stems from the fact that Gadamer does not see soli-
darity resulting primarily from identification in the way that Rorty does.
For Gadamer, solidarities bind members of political communities together,
but these bonds are not, or at least are not necessarily, the result of a rec-
ognition that others are like us. Though Rorty wants to construe the mark-
ers that define us broadly, his conception of solidarity remains tied to a
recognition of salient similarities (and differences), an approach Gadamer
would reject. For Rorty, solidarity is the consequence of identification; it
proceeds from a knowledge that those included in the us have something
in common. This is what allows Rorty to advocate the creation of new,
broader forms of solidarity. On Gadamer’s terms, in contrast, we cannot
create solidarities because they are not the consequence of a conscious-
ness of similarities. Instead, the relationship is reversed: solidarities underlie
communities, and democratic politics can and ought to help disclose them,
bringing them to awareness. In fact, as I will argue further below, focusing
on evident similarities potentially obstructs the disclosure of solidarities.
Gadamer links friendship and solidarity in a 1969 lecture on social and
political isolation, which he sees as a widespread and troubling response
to the pressures of modern society (Gadamer 1998b). In his view, the
temptation to withdraw stems, in part, from the loss of the capacity for
friendship. The self-knowledge and self-love fostered by friendship results
in what Gadamer variously calls being “at home with oneself” or being
“friends with oneself.” If we lack this comfort with ourselves, he argues,
we will be ill equipped to “fit into what is common”—that is, to live with
others and engage in common affairs (Gadamer 1998b, 112). These com-
mon affairs, our life together, depend upon mutual bonds of solidarity.
The inability to engage with others in joint endeavors means that we will
instead become isolated from each other and, as a result, experience our
necessary condition of “unfathomable dependencies” on each other not
in terms of solidarity, but as alienation from others and eventually from
ourselves (Gadamer 1998b, 110–11).
Friendship and solidarity are thus closely connected for Gadamer,
though they are not identical phenomena, as he makes clear when he
returns to this theme in later essays and speeches. The bonds of solidarity
may include one’s friends, but they also extend to neighbors, community
114 D. WALHOF

members, fellow citizens, and beyond. While we are not friends with these
persons, our participation in the good of friendship with a few enables our
capacity for solidarity with these others. Friendship not only develops the
self-knowledge and self-love necessary for solidarity; friendship also, in
Gadamer’s view, attunes us to the disclosure of ways in which our lives and
those of our neighbors, co-workers, and fellow citizens are intertwined.
Attending to the ongoing disclosures of the bonds among friends fos-
ters a heightened and ongoing awareness of our mutual interdependence
with others beyond our circle of friends. In a later speech, Gadamer plays
on the resonance between the Latin solidum and the German der Sold
when he calls solidarity “a promise of a payment of friendship” (Gadamer
2009, 12). Our existing friendships attune us to other bonds of solidarity,
which themselves depend on a shared life of reciprocal co-perception, thus
prompting us to respond to these others as potential friends.
Like friendship, solidarity has to do with this dimension of things that
we share and that constitute our life together. Thus, solidarity depends
upon social and political interactions that are also means of reciprocal
co-perception. As with friendship, our interactions with others disclose
momentarily some of the ways in which our lives are intertwined by expos-
ing us, in part, to each other. Through this mutual exposure we come to
see each other and ourselves in new, sometimes surprising ways, thereby
helping to reveal previously unrecognized bonds of solidarity. This recip-
rocal co-perception is particularly important since our historical and cul-
tural situatedness means that we never have a comprehensive view of the
things common to us. Instead, the solidarities that emerge will always be
particular, as momentary and specific manifestations of things we share.
As with friendship, where it is impossible to give an account of all that
binds one to another, so it is impossible to know the totality of that which
binds us together as strangers who are also co-inhabitants of a shared world.
At the same time, an awareness of solidarity does not render identity mark-
ers unimportant, nor does it obliterate otherness more broadly. Rather
than obliterate the otherness of the other, social and political interactions
that produce an awareness of solidarity depend upon the presence of oth-
ers who confront us with the limits of our knowledge, thereby making it
possible for us to see new ways that we are bound together.8 Conversely,

8
This account, then, supports Bernstein’s early recognition that there is a “latent radical
strain” in Gadamer’s thought that Gadamer himself in some ways failed to realize (Bernstein
1987, 336).
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 115

solidarities that emerge from exclusionary processes, or through efforts to

make the other same, will be limited at best, since exclusion or oppression
will have prevented dimensions of what we share from coming to light.
Such alleged solidarities will not, in fact, be manifestations of the things
that bind us to each other, and so they will have but limited function as
the grounds for political community and joint action.
We can see, then, that Gadamer’s approach to solidarity is related to
but distinct from a politics of recognition, the topic of much theorizing
in the last two decades. On the one hand, recognition in the sense advo-
cated by, among others, Charles Taylor (1992), Nancy Fraser (1997), and
Axel Honneth (1995),9 may be an important part of a politics aimed at
bringing solidarities to our awareness. Recognition of groups tradition-
ally denied equal status may be necessary for disclosing solidarities, and it
may at the same time be part of maintaining the otherness of the other.
As we saw with friendship, perceiving that which binds us together entails
perceiving the distinctiveness of the other, so inasmuch as the politics of
recognition is about legitimating and taking certain features of identity
seriously, the emergence of solidarities may be enhanced by it. However,
if recognition includes the presumption that the other is known in some
substantial sense, or if it takes one feature of identity as determinative,
this precludes bringing to awareness solidarities that are not immediately
evident or may be only distantly related to these features of identity.10
While we might have a general sense of that which binds us to each other,
a clearer awareness of the particular ways that we are bound to each other
emerges only through social and political interaction with others.
In contemporary political theory, this territory of plurality and
otherness is often reserved for Hannah Arendt. Given their common

9
The literature on recognition is large, and of course there are important differences
among these works that are beyond the scope of this chapter. For a helpful overview of some
of this literature, see the first chapter of Patchen Markell’s book, Bound by Recognition
(2003).
10
Benhabib criticizes Taylor for relying on all-encompassing forms of identity (2002,
52–56). Similarly, Markell argues for what he calls “acknowledgement” rather than recogni-
tion, in part because he finds the latter concept too static, with the demand of recognition
based on who a group already is—on its identity as a fait accompli. Relying on Arendt, he
argues that this neglects “our basic condition of intersubjective vulnerability” and belies the
complex ways that identities are constructed and reconstructed through politics (2003, 14).
I would agree, although my concern here is with how identity aids or hinders the emergence
of solidarities, whereas his concern is primarily with the construction of these identities
themselves.
116 D. WALHOF

ancestry in Heidegger, it should not be surprising that a Gadamerian

politics of solidarity also has Arendtian overtones. As Bernstein notes,
Gadamer and Arendt broadly share an emphasis on political dialogue,
judgment, and plurality as an antidote to modern tendencies toward
technocratic and bureaucratic politics (Bernstein 1987, 518).11 But
despite this agreement, there are important differences between their
approaches, two of which I would like to highlight briefly. First, like
Gadamer, Arendt emphasizes the way that citizens are revealed to each
other not as a matter of will but through political speech and action.
However, for her the reciprocal revelation is largely limited to knowing
the other. She does not regard increased self-knowledge as an impor-
tant or even possible part of these encounters, claiming that “who” one
is can be seen by others even though it remains hidden from oneself
(Arendt 1958, 179–80). In contrast, for Gadamer, as we have seen,
self-knowledge is crucial for understanding the ways in which we are
bound to each other.
The second difference also has to do with mutual exposure. In both
The Human Condition and On Revolution, Arendt distinguishes the pub-
lic persona—the citizen—that is revealed through speech and action from
the human being that also inhabits the private and social worlds. This
public identity of the citizen, in Arendt’s view, is what makes possible a
politics of reasoned action aimed at freedom, and she attributes the failure
of the French Revolution, in part, to its failure to maintain this distinc-
tion (1958, 181–188; 1963, 106–108).12 Gadamer does not theorize a
public—nonpublic distinction in this way. For him, life together and the
reciprocal co-perception that are part of both friendship and solidarity are
all of a piece. In fact, as with conversation, both friendship and solidarity
in Gadamer’s account depend on at least a minimal willingness to fall in
with another, to open oneself up and expose oneself to some degree to the
others who stand before you, as Chap. 3 argued. Or, to state it differently,
dialogical understanding, friendship, and solidarity all require not steeling
oneself against others and not working to maintain unaltered one’s current
prejudices about others.

11
In his earlier book, Bernstein discusses the similarities and differences between Arendt
and Gadamer at length on a range of issues, including freedom, authority, and their interpre-
tations of Aristotle and Kant (Bernstein 1983, 207–20).
12
See also Moruzzi (2001).
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 117

5.4 DEMOCRATIC HOPE

I have argued that Gadamer’s concept of solidarity refers to historically
contingent manifestations of things that bind us to each other. Solidarity
in this sense is distinct from universal, interest-based, and identification
conceptions. Gadamer’s conception of solidarity is also distinct from
friendship, though the experience of friendship helps attune us to the ways
in which our lives are intertwined with those who are not friends but
neighbors and fellow citizens. Like friendship, solidarity is a good that
exists among us; moreover, like friendship, it involves a life together of
reciprocal co-perception.
Gadamer claims that bringing solidarities to awareness is an important
political and social task, but this presumes, as we have seen, that such soli-
darities exist. This may be a difficult claim to accept in the current political
environment. We noted in Chap. 3 the extent of political polarization in
US politics today and how this polarization inhibits dialogue and under-
standing. Likewise, Chap. 4 took note of the presence of religiously-
inflected political speech and action, which is often today deployed to
divide citizens. Indeed, it has become fashionable to decry the extent to
which we are divided, and when it comes to central political issues like
immigration, national security, economic and fiscal policy, and the need
for a social safety net, we appear to be more at odds with each other than
ever. The growing gap between rich and poor in the US and the policies
that enabled and continue to enable this gap exacerbate these differences
(see Hacker and Pierson 2010; Piketty 2014). All of this calls to mind
Gadamer’s lament that “what we truly have in common and what unites
us remains, so to speak without a voice” (1992, 192).
The historian Daniel Rodgers argues that these divisions reflect a more
fundamental shift in the very ideas that give shape to social reality (2011).
By examining political rhetoric, paradigm shifts in economics and politi-
cal science, and changing conceptions of gender and identity in the last
three decades, Rodgers documents the fracturing of previously shared
concepts of society, power, and history that reigned during the middle
decades of the twentieth century. In their place, he argues, arose social
theories with choice, contingency, individuals, and agency at their core.
He deems the post-WW II decades an “era of consolidation,” while what
we are now experiencing is disaggregation, an “age of fracture” (Rodgers
2011, 5). While Rodgers may be right about the threat of fragmentation,
his account of its causes focuses too heavily on its epistemological origins.
118 D. WALHOF

It is not so much different views of the world that threaten solidarity as

much as our inhabiting different worlds. In the US, social mobility and
advances in technology have made it easier to associate only with those
whom we choose, who are often those whose lives already look much like
one’s own. The result is self-segregation by wealth and income, profes-
sion, tastes, and identities, and, consequently, fewer encounters with those
who at first glance appear to be unlike us. The lack of such encounters
robs us of the possibility of falling in with others and disclosing bonds of
solidarity with them.
In a late speech on solidarity and friendship, Gadamer notes that disclo-
sures of solidarity are often prompted by crisis or threat:

One declares oneself in some sort of solidarity or one also feels oneself in
solidarity. I can recall in an instant the things that have illuminated my own
life experiences and I'm certain that the older ones of you have experi-
enced similar things. I mean how the bombing in the war created solidarity.
Suddenly your neighbors, those who in the circumstances of the city were
unknown strangers, were awoken to life. (Gadamer 2009, 10)

The fear and crises prompted by the bombing brought one’s neighbors
into view. One recognized them, perhaps for the first time, as neighbors—
that is, as those whose life is somehow intertwined with one’s own, some-
thing that was always the case but is only now brought to consciousness.
As Gadamer puts it, these “unknown strangers were awoken to life.” In
Warnke’s words, these strangers are “no longer faceless to us nor are we any
longer faceless to them” (Warnke 2012, 10). This reciprocal co-perception
fostered what Gadamer goes on to call “undreamed of possibilities of feel-
ings of solidarity,” which then formed the basis for “acts of solidarity” in
response to the needs created by the bombing (Gadamer 2009, 10). We
are likely familiar with similar temporary manifestations of solidarity that
emerge in response to crises, especially at the local level. In the face of chal-
lenges created by floods, wild fires, tornados, violence, or some other threat,
residents who are strangers to each other find themselves in each other’s
presence, confronting the ways in which their lives are bound together,
perhaps despite sharing few evident similarities or identity characteristics.
The heightened awareness of their common fate discloses bonds of solidar-
ity, helping undergird the joint work necessary to face a pressing challenge.
Cases of more remote, more diffuse, or less immediately discernible
threats are more problematic in terms of disclosing solidarities. In these
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 119

cases, seeing others as those with whom our lives are intertwined is more
difficult and takes more effort. Gadamer’s reference to the solidarity
evoked by the environmental movement is instructive here (2001a, 80).
The concern over present and forecasted ecological problems testifies to
the fact that we share a life together as residents of a town, city, region,
nation, and world, and that we are bound to each other in crucial respects,
even if we are divided and fragmented in others. In bringing this dimen-
sion of our life together into view, the environmental movement helped
bring about a change in some of the mundane choices and actions that
constitute our lives, one example being the way that recycling has become
habit for many North Americans when it was virtually unheard of a few
decades ago.13 Stating it this way, however, oversimplifies what took place.
It is not as if this shared dimension of our lives was first brought into
view and then habits were changed; rather, these were mutually occur-
ring phenomena. The change in practice on the part of some, along with
their efforts to draw attention to these practices, helped bring into view
an aspect our life together, which in turn altered the practices of others,
which helped sharpen this shared dimension of life, and so forth. As a
result, for many citizens, it would now be strange not to think about at
least some of their life choices with environmental concerns in mind.
Eventually, the disclosure of solidarity in this case helped bring about
legislative and regulative efforts at the local, state, and national levels to
slow down some forms of environmental degradation. At the same time,
of course, the causes and extent of environmental damage, the types of
solutions, and the nature of our shared life in these respects remain deeply
contested, especially when it comes to the more distant threats of climate
change. We can see, then, that the disclosure of solidarity is an ongoing,
sometimes difficult effort, not something that is done once and then com-
pleted. Moreover, the case of the environmental movements shows that
the mere disclosure of solidarity is no guarantee of policy solutions. Such
disclosures are not the same thing as, nor do they eliminate the need for,
the political dealings in the halls of power, including efforts by local and
national party organizations, interest groups, lobbyists, and others with a
stake in the outcomes of such policy.
Similarly, one way to understand the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street
(OWS) movement that emerged in the US and elsewhere in September

13
According to the EPA, the percentage of municipal solid waste going to landfills fell
from 89% in 1980 to 54% in 2012 (Environmental Protection Agency 2014, 2).
120 D. WALHOF

2011 is as precisely this kind of solidarity-disclosing civic action. During

and immediately after the protests, scholars and the media alike struggled
to fit OWS into standard categories of analysis. While some celebrated the
camps in Zuccotti Park and other cities as reinvigorating and perhaps rede-
fining democracy itself (Barber 2012; Van Gelder 2011), others argued
that the movement’s lack of coherent vision, refusal to articulate demands,
and commitment to consensus undermined its effectiveness and caused it
to fail (Greenberg 2012; Roberts 2012). Indeed, social movement veteran
Andrew Young dismissed OWS as an “emotional outcry” rather than an
organized movement (quoted in Tarrow 2011). Even its critics, however,
acknowledge the impact of OWS in helping to place inequality on the
political agenda in the US. Though it took some time for media outlets to
provide serious coverage of the camp in Zuccotti Park, the eventual atten-
tion helped shift the terms of public discourse, in part through the spread
of the now immediately recognizable slogan, “We are the 99%.”
Using Gadamer’s terms, we can see that the effects on public dis-
course were a product of the disclosure of solidarities among those in the
encampment, which called attention to broader bonds of solidarity across
society. As Jodi Dean has noted, those gathered in Zuccotti Park were not
joined by a substantial identity like race, ethnicity, or religion; instead the
participants were drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds and iden-
tity groups (Dean 2014, 385). Political scientists and OWS observers
Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, and Nick Zukowski describe the New York
General Assemblies, the deliberative gatherings before and during the
occupation, as “radically inclusive,” in part because of the low barrier to
participation: one simply had to show up (Welty, Bolton, and Zukowski
2013, 31). Likewise, sociologist Rebecca Solnit calls the inclusiveness of
the encampments “one of the greatest achievements of this movement,”
noting that they drew persons of many backgrounds, including young and
upper- and middle-class activists as well as the “thrown-away people of our
society” like the homeless and mentally ill (Solnit 2012, 297). Moreover,
as Craig Calhoun notes, the activist leaders of the Occupy movement had
myriad and diverse concerns, from the lack of regulations in the financial
sector, to hydraulic fracturing, to global climate change, to labor con-
ditions around the world (Calhoun 2013, 26–27). Those participating
in the occupations, in other words, did not necessarily share pre-existing
political or economic interests, narrowly defined.
Defined neither by identity nor interests, the OWS activists nonetheless
also refrained from claiming a generic universal identity like “human” or
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 121

“citizen.” Instead, as Dean notes, they asserted a collectivity that was also
a division: the 99% slogan drew attention to the fundamental divide in
twenty-first century capitalism (Dean 2014, 386). Sidney Tarrow makes
a similar claim when he identifies OWS as a “we are here” movement.
By this he means that it is not a conventional social movement aimed at
specific legal and political reforms, and it should not be judged as such.
Instead, the OWS activists demand recognition: “By their presence, they
are saying only, ‘Recognize us!’” (Tarrow 2011). This is a demand not
for the recognition of a substantive identity, as might be the case with
certain forms of identity politics. Instead, Tarrow argues, it is a demand
that certain realities be recognized. He uses the analogy of the women’s
movement of the 1970s. Although it was eventually defined by its specific
demand for an equal rights amendment, the movement was driven by a
broader goal of having the gendered reality of everyday life itself be seen
and recognized. In Tarrow’s telling, OWS likewise demands that a system
of economic and political relations that no longer serves the public be
recognized and addressed (Tarrow 2011).
Dean sees this as a new form of representative politics, against those
who allege that OWS is anti-representation because of its insistence on
rule by consensus and its refusal to participate in party politics. Its form
of representation is, however, unconventional; it is one not of persons
aggregated by territory or procedures required by the state but of a self-
authorized group representing the divide between exploited and exploit-
ers (Dean 2014, 387). As she and Jason Jones note elsewhere, “Occupy
Wall Street is not actually the movement of ninety-nine percent of the
population of the United States (or the world) against the top one per-
cent. It is a movement mobilizing itself in the name of the ninety-nine
percent. Asserting a division in relation to the fundamental antagonism
Occupy makes appear, it represents the wrong of the gap between the rich
and the rest of us” (Dean and Jones 2012). In other words, OWS helped
draw attention to the threat posed by accelerating inequality, a threat that
largely remains diffuse and distant for those comfortably in the upper-
middle classes and above.
Calling attention to this breach required the disclosure of bonds of soli-
darity among those in the encampments, something that emerged, using
Gadamer’s terms, from productive acts of understanding among those
who remain distinct from each other. As both participants in and observers
of OWS have noted, the group’s commitments to horizontal structures,
inclusive participation, and working by consensus required extensive and
122 D. WALHOF

ongoing dialogue. Philosopher and activist Nicholas Smaligo notes how

the discussions in the General Assembly created a space for people to listen
to each other and to become more attentive and more open to the argu-
ments and narratives of others. He describes such experiences as small
steps toward the goal of recovering the political dimension of life. In addi-
tion, he notes, these participatory experiences “helped foster a mood of
emotional openness, of strong bonds, and of trust among people who
sometimes just met” (Smaligo 2014, 20). Todd Gitlin quotes a 29-year-
old organizer and graduate student, Mark Bray, making a similar point
about a September 30 march he joined, despite his initial skepticism of
OWS: “It was enthusiastic in a really fresh way, and nonsectarian….There
was a great feeling of building momentum, of solidarity, and defiance”
(Gitlin 2012, 63). Such moments of understanding were experiences of
disclosing the bonds connecting participants to each other.
These manifestations of solidarity came not only through dialogue
and speeches but also through the everyday acts of life together in the
encampments. Among some of the organizers of the movement, this was
a conscious effort to carry out what the anthropologist David Graeber has
termed “prefigurative politics,” in which activists do not demand change
from the larger political system but instead prefigure the world they wish
to live in by building a version of that world. Graeber talks about the
encampments as consisting of the “institutions of a new society—not only
democratic General Assemblies but kitchens, libraries, clinics, media cen-
ters, and a host of other institutions” (Graeber 2012, 145). Solnit similarly
casts the OWS encampment as a new civil society, one that provided sleep-
ing space, food, and medical care for those marginalized and neglected by
the “old uncivil” society (Solnit 2012, 297). The practices of building and
sustaining a civil society within the encampments helped foster the recip-
rocal co-perception and the friendship-like attachments that Gadamer
theorizes as the grounds of solidarity.14
There is no need to romanticize these attachments in order to recognize
them as disclosures of solidarities. Certainly OWS was also beset by dis-
agreements, tensions, and conflicts, especially regarding strategy. A central
criticism of the movement was its failure to articulate demands, an issue
that divided the participants themselves. Susan Kang documents how a
subset of the initial leadership adopted the “no demands” stance and then

14
Çiğdem Çıdam offers a similar analysis of the 2013 protest camps in Istanbul’s Taksim
Gezi Park (Çıdam 2014).
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 123

employed the 90% modified consensus threshold to prevent the adoption

of specific proposals from the Demands Working Group. The adoption
of the “no demands” identity, Kang argues, may have cost the move-
ment growth, influence, and diversity, even as it also served as a strong
defense against cooptation by other interests (Kang 2013, 63–66). Other
scholars have documented how the commitment to equality and consen-
sus led to long and sometimes acrimonious meetings, alienating potential
participants and allies. In addition, some of the more dedicated mem-
bers expressed frustration with the consensus model because it allowed
low-commitment participants to block action easily (Welty, Bolton, and
Zukowski 2013, 31).
The economic diversity mentioned above was also a source of tensions
within the movement. Some of the long-term homeless had needs well
beyond what the new civil society in the park could meet, and they found
themselves in conflict with those who had become temporarily homeless
in the encampment but who nonetheless had resources to draw on and
homes to return to (Welty, Bolton, and Zukowski 2013, 48). As Gitlin
notes, broader societal class and racial divisions constantly threatened
to reassert themselves within the movement, with young affluent whites
sometimes viewed as a clique of “insiders” exerting control over everyone
else (Gitlin 2012, 94–99). Later Gitlin quotes another experienced activ-
ist, Shane Patrick, on the fragility of the movement as a result of this diver-
sity: “People coalesced around an initial vision, but it’s a huge coalition. If
the structures aren’t agile and capable enough to accommodate this huge
span of people, this coalition could wither and collapse under intense pres-
sure” (Gitlin 2012, 162).
Such tensions and conflicts co-existed with the bonds of solidarity that
emerged in the movement. As we saw in Chap. 3, on Gadamer’s account
events of understanding do not require or necessarily result in substan-
tive agreement. Moreover, difference and otherness are also a necessary
and ineradicable part of both friendship and solidarity. The durability of
the bonds formed in the encampment, despite these tensions, was later
demonstrated in one of the groups that arose from the OWS network.
After Hurricane Sandy struck New York and New Jersey in 2012, a group
of Zuccotti Park activists created Occupy Sandy to provide disaster relief
throughout the region, particularly in places that FEMA workers were
unable to reach quickly. Among other things, Occupy Sandy mobilized
networks of activists to set up sites for providing meals and taking in and
distributing donations. The organization also arranged volunteer training,
124 D. WALHOF

construction and medical committees, and a motor pool of borrowed

vehicles to bring volunteers to ravaged areas (Feuer 2012). The OWS vol-
unteers organizing and carrying out these efforts had a heightened sense
of the interdependence of their lives with others along the Atlantic coast,
and they drew upon the bonds of solidarity disclosed in Zuccotti Park in
order to meet this threat to their shared life.
Since Gadamer’s conception of solidarity is not based on identification,
it helps move us beyond the idea that we are primarily bound to those
others who are like us. The solidarities brought forth in the environmen-
tal movement or in Occupy Wall Street are not primarily predicated on
characteristics like race or ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.
In fact, relying on such markers of identity to determine to whom, and
in what ways, our lives are intertwined may actually work to obscure the
bonds of solidarity among us. If we presume, based on readily identifiable
identity markers, that we antecedently know someone else in substantial
or definitive ways, we end up predetermining who we are willing to fall in
with and who we are not willing to fall in with, thereby potentially thwart-
ing the emergence of commonalities that are initially difficult to perceive.
The example from Chap. 4 of American evangelical Christians partly re-
narrating their tradition in order to make their religious identity more
consonant with the identity of environmentalist is apt here as well. From
the point of view of many evangelicals, environmentalists presumably were
part of them, not us, and so concern for this dimension of our common life
was muted. The increasing concern about global climate change among
evangelicals documented in Chap. 4 points to a growing awareness of a
bond of solidarity with others, despite partisan and religious labels.
These examples should give us hope, even though American society
and politics remains divided in significant ways, especially by partisan
commitments. By convincing us that we already know who is part of us
and who is part of them, partisan identities thrive on and also foster an
alleged knowledge of the other. This supposed knowledge works then to
steel us against falling in with those who are not part of our camp. Elite
manipulation of partisan sentiments in the US today threaten to obscure,
if not actively undermine, forms of solidarity not rooted in shared par-
tisan or ideological views. Even though the Occupy activists, as I have
argued, helped draw attention to our shared fate in the face of accelerat-
ing inequality, responses to the movement and to proposed solutions to
growing inequality continue to differ based on partisan identity. Similarly,
while there may be more widespread acknowledgement of our shared fate
 SOLIDARITY, FRIENDSHIP, AND DEMOCRATIC HOPE 125

in the face of climate change, proposed solutions continue to evoke differ-

ent responses based on party affiliation.
Here we get a glimpse of the normative undertones of Gadamer’s
reflections on solidarity. We can interpret his claim that becoming aware
of our solidarities is a central political task as a plea that our political inter-
actions be inflected with an openness to others and, thereby, to the emer-
gence of new solidarities. The core of a politics of solidarity is a disposition
that nudges us toward interactions with each other that enable the disclo-
sure of those things that bind us to each other. Of course, seeking what
is common among us in this way can be difficult and frustrating, and we
are often not inclined toward such a disposition; it is something that must
somehow be engendered in us, in part through recognizing this openness
in our friendships. Gadamer understands his own efforts in this light, as
he offers “a philosophy which teaches us to see the justification for the
other’s point of view and which thus makes us doubt our own” (1992,
152). More generally, he admits that “we must learn to respect others
and otherness. This implies that we must learn that we could be wrong”
(1992, 233). What this suggests is that disclosing solidarities, like friend-
ship, is unpredictable. Our encounters with others may reveal ways that
our lives are bound up with others that we did not know about. Some
of these revelations may be pleasant surprises, while others may make us
uncomfortable. Or, these encounters might reveal that we do not, in fact,
have the kind of solidarity with others that we previously assumed.
 EPILOGUE: BETWEEN CITIZENS

The central argument of this book has been that Gadamer’s hermeneuti-
cal philosophy provides ways of seeing political and social realities that are
otherwise hard to discern. Bringing the central concepts of his herme-
neutics to bear on important strands of democratic theory shifts our view
away from individual citizen-subjects and to that which exists among
them, thereby enhancing our understandings of contemporary democratic
practices. This enlarged perspective means, as we saw in Chap. 2, that we
no longer see truth only in scientific or factual terms and thus solely as a
casualty in a media-saturated and public-relations-driven political environ-
ment. Instead, we can also look for the disclosure of truth among us, like
the truth about civic equality, and the further instantiation of that truth
in our public language. Similarly, as Chap. 3 demonstrated, Gadamer’s
hermeneutics reorients deliberative theory to focus on events of under-
standing that attend falling into dialogue with others, rather than focusing
on citizens who are already aware of their views, and also why they hold
them, offering acceptable reasons in public discourse.
The enlarged perspective of Gadamerian democratic theory also
enriches our accounts of the complicated, mutually-constitutive relation-
ship between religion and politics. Chapter 4 argued that, rather than
viewing religion primarily as a set of beliefs held by individual citizens,
democratic theorists should pay attention to the ways that religious tradi-
tions make their claims on and shape the identities of citizens. This shift in
perspective opens up possibilities for allowing citizens to rework their reli-

© The Author(s) 2017 127

D. Walhof, The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-46864-8
128 EPILOGUE: BETWEEN CITIZENS

gious and civic identities jointly, instead of merely calling upon religious
citizens to discipline their beliefs in order to be good democratic citi-
zens. Finally, Chap. 5 uncovered how democratic theory in a hermeneu-
tical register attunes us to the solidarities that connect us to each other
and enable democratic action, even in a period marked by division and
social conflict. In obscuring these various dimensions, subject-centered
accounts of democratic theory distort our views of democracy, while pay-
ing attention to matters of truth, dialogical understanding, tradition, and
solidarity enriches our understandings of our contemporary democratic
practices.
Of course, we cannot see what is not there, and in order to be use-
ful, the enlarged perspective of Gadamer’s democratic theory must be
more than wishful thinking. Democratic self-governance in the US and
elsewhere is in rather difficult straits right now, under intense pressure
from a variety of sources. The list of challenges is long, well-known, and
troubling. At the top of the list are problems brought about by changes
in global capitalism, including accelerating inequality, labor displacement,
the erosion of sustainable incomes, and an increasingly precarious exis-
tence for many. Related to these are the challenges stemming from the
effects of global climate change and the inability or unwillingness among
policy-makers to pursue solutions. In addition, the global labor market,
economic crises, wars, and failed states have conspired to produce large
migrations and an unprecedented refugee crisis. These movements of per-
sons present financial, logistical, and security challenges in the destina-
tion countries, challenges that in turn have been exploited by elites in
Europe and North America to stoke nationalist and xenophobic senti-
ments. Populist movements on both the left and right have led to growing
support for protectionist and isolationist policies, seen most dramatically
in the June 2016 majority vote in the United Kingdom to withdraw from
the European Union.
Democratic policy solutions to these challenges are badly needed, but
in the US addressing them has been hampered by dysfunction in Congress
and stalemates between the executive and legislative branches. Much of
this stems from increasing polarization between elected officials of the
two major political parties, as the parties have been transformed in recent
decades from loose coalitions of interests to more ideologically-driven
organizations. This transformation also has an identity dimension, with
voters of color and LGBT voters favoring the Democratic party, and
white evangelicals, Mormons, and other religious citizens favoring the
 EPILOGUE: BETWEEN CITIZENS 129

Republican party.1 This sorting around identity has spurred and perpetu-
ated social conflict around race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender
identity, and religion, eroding social trust and undermining common
ground. Given these difficult realities, perhaps looking for truth, under-
standing, and solidarity is a fool’s errand.
Hyper-partisanship and polarization are ongoing challenges to democ-
racy, as the previous chapters have noted. At the same time, focusing too
much on partisan divisions and conflicts, especially as recounted endlessly
by cable news networks, threatens to overstate and thus also foster frag-
mentation. While the polarization among national political leaders and
among strong party identifiers is real and significant, the extent to which
this is true of ordinary citizens more generally is a matter of dispute among
political scientists (Fiorina and Abrams 2008, 2009; Iyengar et al. 2012;
Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010; Druckman et al. 2013). When we turn away
from the news cycles of partisan fighting at the national level, especially
in election years, we can perhaps better see the trust, understanding, and
solidarities necessary to sustain our shared institutions, public spaces, cit-
ies, and democratic institutions.
In an interesting set of blog posts and feature articles for The Atlantic,
reporter James Fallows and his wife Deborah Fallows, a linguist, have
documented their travels across the US over more than three years.2 They
call their project American Futures, and among the project’s distinctive
features are that they travel by single-engine plane, a Cirrus SR22 piloted
by James, and that they focus their attention specifically on midsize cities,
as opposed to major US cities, on the one hand, or small towns regarded
as quaint examples of Americana, on the other (Fallows 2016, 60). Their
journeys are Tocquevillian in nature, with the advantage of combining
on-the-ground, detailed explorations with a bird’s-eye view. They have
hopped around the country on multiple trips, spending time in places like
Burlington, Vermont; Starkville, Mississippi; Duluth, Minnesota; Bend,

1
According to polling by the Pew Research Center, 80% of African American voters, 65%
of Asian American voters, and 56% of Hispanic voters identify with the Democratic Party,
while around 70% of white Evangelicals and Mormons identify as Republicans (Pew Research
Center 2015).
2
The blog posts of both James and Deborah Fallows are collected on The Atlantic website
(http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/all/2015/10/the-american-futures-blog/411148/).
James Fallows’ magazine pieces from the project include, “Why Cities Work Even When
Washington Doesn’t,” which appeared in April 2014, and “How America is Putting Itself
Back Together,” which appeared in March 2016 (Fallows 2014, 2016).
130 EPILOGUE: BETWEEN CITIZENS

Oregon; Fresno, California; and many others. To this point they have
visited twenty-four cities on multiple, extended visits totaling about two
weeks in each place, and they have visited about that many additional cities
on shorter, single visits.
The Fallows intentionally pick places that have endured economic, polit-
ical, environmental, or other kinds of hardships, in order to see whether the
particular responses, good or bad, can be instructive for other communities.
At every stop they find examples of civic-minded groups and organizations,
entrepreneurial energies, and joint problem-solving. In San Bernardino,
California, a city that was already facing monumental challenges of bank-
ruptcy, crime, and unemployment even before the 2015 mass shooting, the
Fallows discover a diverse group of young people, many of them artists,
who formed Generation Now to deliberate about common problems and
increase civic participation. They also find a retired teacher partnering with
an aerospace engineer and Air Force veteran to set up a nonprofit tech-
nical school to train local unskilled workers for advanced manufacturing
jobs (Fallows 2016, 60). In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they write about a
partnership among the US State Department, local religious groups, and
city officials to find housing and employment for refugees and help them
transition to life on the Great Plains. One of the large employers in the city,
a slaughterhouse now owned by a Chinese firm, posts safety instructions in
thirty languages (Fallows 2016, 68). In the generally conservative cities of
Holland, Michigan, and Greenville, South Carolina, they find downtown
development projects led by city government officials partnering with civic
groups and business leaders that transform decaying downtowns into draws
for businesses, consumers, employees, and tourists (Fallows 2014, 69).
These are just a few examples; their dispatches contain many more.
Their cumulative effect is to convey a sense of hope about the prospects
for the social, economic, and civic health of these communities. As James
notes repeatedly, their discoveries and encounters are often jarringly at
odds with news reported by major outlets and with the analysis of the
chattering classes, who focus on national and international problems and
dysfunctional party politics in Washington. He explains in his March 2016
article that one of the things they are trying to do with the American
Futures project is draw together these local, disparate stories into a broader
narrative as a way to counter the tale of decline that dominates national
news (Fallows 2016, 60).
I draw attention to the Fallows’ work in closing not to suggest that the
pressures on democracy mentioned above are not real and worrisome, nor
 EPILOGUE: BETWEEN CITIZENS 131

to participate in a nostalgic, naïve hope that something like “American

ingenuity” will necessarily prevail over all else. Indeed, many of the cit-
ies they visit continue to face problems, some of them severe, and larger
forces can easily overwhelm local efforts and undo positive trends, as we
witnessed in the 2008 financial collapse and its aftermath. I highlight their
work, instead, because it draws attention to the existence of some of the
same social and political realities that I have argued for in the previous
chapters. Reflecting on their experiences in his recent magazine piece,
James provides a provisional list of signs that suggest a city is headed in
the right direction. The list includes, most importantly for our purposes,
an openness to newcomers, including recent immigrants and refugees,
combined with a collective focus on local problems while keeping divi-
sive national politics at a distance (Fallows 2016, 62–70). In other words,
their observations point to the local realities of productive understanding,
working across differences, and disclosing bonds of solidarity in response
to challenges and crises that I have argued are at the center of Gadamer’s
approach to democracy. Looking for these things is not, in fact, a fool’s
errand, even in an age marked by hyper-partisanship, accelerating inequal-
ity, and social conflict.
I also highlight the American Futures project as a reminder that the
headline-grabbing problems of Washington, London, and Paris are not
the whole of democracy, and what we perceive to be important matters
and questions of democratic theory depends in part on the concepts and
categories we bring to our inquiries. In Chap. 1, I described democratic
theory in a hermeneutical register as a modest, though not unduly mod-
est, endeavor. The modesty and immodesty stem from a tension between
the phenomenological and normative dimensions of Gadamer’s work,
as I have noted at various points throughout this book. His philosophi-
cal hermeneutics offer accounts of what happens when truth is disclosed
among us, when understanding happens to us, when traditions claim us,
and when solidarities emerge, but these descriptions are, at the same time,
calls to remain open to the possibility of truth, to the voice of the other,
to the call of tradition, and to the bonds of friendship and solidarity. This
call contains a normative vision, held out as a possibility for both ordinary
citizens and democratic theorists, who as situated observers both partici-
pate in and reflect on our democratic practices.
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 INDEX

A difference, 105, 106, 123

Arendt, Hannah, 13, 33, 35, 115 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 83
Aristotle, 3, 6, 8, 102 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 82
Dryzek, John, 60, 62

B
the beautiful, 30 E
education, 4, 7
enlightenment, viii, 24, 84
C environmental movement, 95, 119
Chambers, Simone, 60, 80 equality, 33, 73, 117, 123, 128
citizens, 50, 52, 54, 64, 72, 108, 114, evangelicals, 91, 95
121
citizen juries, 55
Cohen, Joshua, 51 F
conversation, 38, 44, 45, 52 Fallows, James and Deborah, 129
Cooke, Maeve, 74 Fraser, Nancy, 115
friendship, 101, 108, 125
and difference, 104, 107
D and solidarity, 113, 116
Dallmayr, Fred, ix, 42n3, 45 fusion of horizons, viii, 26, 40, 43,
Dean, Jodi, 121 105
deliberative democracy, 38, 50, 54, 60,
97
Derrida, Jacques, ix, 41, 53, 105 G
De Tocqueville, Alexis, 33, 129 Giddens, Anthony, 87

© The Author(s) 2017 143

D. Walhof, The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-46864-8
144 INDEX

Gitlin, Todd, 123 Meno, 15, 21, 23, 45

Graeber, David, 122 Philebus, 39n2
Gutmann, Amy, 50, 59 rhetoric, 66
Polanyi, Michael, 7n7
practical philosophy, 8
H practical reason, 5, 9, 17
Habermas, Jürgen, viii, 23, 66 practice, 2, 5, 17
religion, 72, 76 and solidarity, 110
Hegel, G.W.F., 20 prejudice, 45, 85
Heidegger, Martin, vii, 3, 27, 106
historically effected consciousness,
26n10, 86, 88 R
historical school, vii, 82 Rawls, John, 72
Honneth, Axel, 115 recognition
in friendship, 104
and Occupy Wall Street, 121
J politics of, 115
jury, 47, 55 and solidarity, 114
truth, 30, 106
religion, 90, 94, 96
L and public reason, 72, 75, 79, 80
Lafont, Cristina, 77 and the public sphere, 74, 92
language, 18, 22, 27, 29, 32, 43, 53, religious liberty, 35, 72
70 representation, 62, 69, 121
logos, 20 rhetoric
and deliberative democracy, 58, 61,
62
O and dialogue, 65, 67, 69
Obergefell v. Hodges, 34 in Plato, 66
Occupy Sandy, 123 and reason, 66
Occupy Wall Street (OWS), 119, 121 and truth, 67
diversity, 120, 122 ritual, 90
Rorty, Richard, 112
ethnocentrism, 112
P
partisanship, 56, 117, 124, 128, 129
phronēsis, 5, 7, 17. See also practical S
reason same-sex marriage, 34, 96
Plato, 3, 6 self-consciousness, 7, 111
allegory of the cave, 3 Seligman, Adam, 90
anamnēsis, 16 solidarity, 109, 119, 121, 125
dialectic, 39, 42 and crises, 118
 INDEX 145

and difference, 114 U

and friendship, 113, 116 understanding, viii, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46
and practice, 110 and the other, 106, 123
and public mindedness, 111

V
T von Ranke, Leopold, 82
Tarrow, Sidney, 121
Taylor, Charles, 93, 115
technē, 5, 7 W
Thompson, Dennis, 50, 59 Warnke, Georgia, ix , 42, 118
Tradition, 87, 90
tradition, 84, 93
and understanding, 85, 89 Y
truth, 21, 25–7 Young, Iris Marion, 58
and art, 30, 31