Nicholas Davey

O N THE POLITY OF EXPERIENCE: TOWARDS A HERMENEUTICS OF ATTENTIVENESS^

Attentive: 1. Concentrating; paying attention, observant awake, 2. assiduously polite. Courteous, courtly, gracious, accommodating, 3. mindful, carefully, alert, heedful, assiduous.

PHILOSOPHICAL hermcneutics is always full of surprises. The thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer invariably turns out on reflection to be more probing and exacting than its genial style might suggest.

Indeed, what was said of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, can be said with equal justice of Gadamer: "a quiet, urbane, conservative revolution­ary." In this vein, I shall argue that the most significant political element within Gadamer's thought concerns a critical re-invocation of the question of polity. The invocation is of strategic and tactical importance. Strategically speaking, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics aims at a philosophical re-articulation of the transcendental dimensions of poUty. The tactical importance of this is that it clarifies what is at stake in the collision between the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of conversation. The hermeneutics of conversation relies upon a notion of a hermeneutic community (pohty) and it is, precisely, the nature of this reliance that has been ostracized by the hermeneutics of suspicion. Political critics of philosophical hermeneutics invariably assume that the community in question is traditional and conservative by nature. This, it can be argued, is not necessarily the case at all. The implicit political value of Gadamer's thought lies in its ability not only to challenge conservative assumptions about the nature of a hermeneutic polity but also to articulate a plausible response to the cultural nihilism implicit with the deconstruc-tive hermeneutics of suspicion.

One strength of our proposal is that it avoids entanglement in the customary snares, which beset discussion of the political dimensions of Gadamer's thought. Debate in this area is often hindered by Gadamer's rare and somewhat mandarin-like comments on the political. The political, he once remarked, is that sphere in which one has to choose "between two evils, between possibilities which are not the most appealing" {On Education 147). Genuine debate about the political dimension of philosophical hermeneutics is often difficult because of the intellectually lazy tendency to present Gadamer's thinking as traditional­ist if not reactionary. Such loose thinking profoundly misunderstands the critical elements within the concept of tradition {Überlieferung).^ On the

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other hand, well-meaning liberal defenders of Gadamer's concept of hermeneutic openness often try to distill from it a laudable theory of political plurality, which is itself notoriously vulnerable to accusations of laissez-faire? The advantage of thinking about the relationship between Gadamer's thinking and the ancient notion of the polls is that it avoids these customary cul-de-sacs and opens a much richer theme for reflection.

In embarking upon our discussion, we should be clear about the fact that Gadamer's conception of the polls does not reflect any traditional conception of a consensus formed by social contract."^ The latter is, as Weinsheimer correctly notes, a modem subjectivist notion which philo­sophical hermeneutics strives to escape. Indeed, we shall argue that what is striking about the invocation of polls is that it is capable of surpassing the nihilistic demise of modem subjectivism. Indeed, this ability to surpass the nihilistic consequences of subjectivism contributes to the current political relevance of Gadamer's thought. Since the French Revolution, European political theory has conjured with conflicting views of the future. Whilst conservatism would retum us to a lost order, radicalism would propel us into the redemption of a new age. As Gadamer is well aware, Nietzschean skepticism has proved adroit at unmasking the "wills to power" animating both perspectives, indeed, so much so that modem political consciousness tends to seek the hidden agenda in each and every political position. However, the weakness of such skepticism concerns its failure to escape the subjectivism it so ably exposes. It is here that philosophical hermeneutics finds its political purchase. Because Gadamer's philosophy stands on ontological grounds rather than upon the platform of epistemological critique, his thinking about the polls is able to move away from modem subjectivism.

Gadamer's political thinking can move away from modem subjec­tivism because it is transcendental in style. It pursues the question of how an individual subject is mediated by and can come to have a feeling for that which at the same time exists both within it and yet also reaches far beyond it, i.e. the polls. Philosophical hermeneutics insists that "our actions are situated within the horizon of the polls'" and, as Weinsheimer points out, "being situated within" is how Gadamer is inclined to describe our relation to the transcendent, to a supra-individual being which, in the shape of the polls, is both near and far (Hermeneutics ix). In Truth and Method, Gadamer speaks of a substantiality which underlies the subjective and suggests that the task of philosophical hermeneutics is to recover a sense of that which transcends and yet is to be found within the subjective (302). It is our contention that this hermeneutical logic shapes Gadamer's re-invocation of the polls; more specifically, it is the transcen­dental dynamic of this style of thought which offers a powerful response

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to deconstructive skepticism. Before we turn to matters of detail, let us briefly outline the direction of our argument.

If, ontologically speaking, we are situated within the horizons of the polis, how does that situatedness manifest itself within the individual? We shall suggest that the dynamics of experiential attentiveness gradually work towards "a progressive revelation of something which exists inde­pendently of me (us)." Contrary to expectancy, the quiet disciplines of individual attentiveness are far from being at odds with the broader polity of experience for both modes of experience are intimately related. How can an independent substantiality be conceived of as a polis and how can recognition of that transcendent entity make an individual responsive to its claims? We suggest that such responsiveness is made possible by continuity between an individual's immediate horizon and the broader historical and linguistic horizons which sustain it. We shall explore how such broader horizons might constitute a polis or community of experience. The central issue to be addressed concerns the confrontation between the hermeneutics of conversation and the hermeneutics of suspicion. We will indicate how Gadamer's re-invocation of the notion of polis can escape the nihilism of the latter. For the sake of clarity, we will reduce the hermeneutics of conversation and the hermeneutics of suspicion to two principles in order to make them more serviceable as philosophical stratagems. We will refer to them as the principle of there always being more to what is meant (the hermeneutics of conversation) and the principle of always meaning other than what is said (the hermeneutics of suspicion). We shall be particularly concerned with the problem of discontinuity within the hermeneutics of suspicion. The presence of this problem opens the hermeneutics of suspicion to the charge of aestheticism. The implication of this aesthetic celebration of the disruptive moment per se is that it undermines the movement and conti­nuities upon which any sense of polity of experience rests. This constitutes a real threat to the hermeneutics of conversation. However, we will argue that the continuities which define Gadamer's concept of experience (and the hermeneutics of conversation more generally) point to a polity of experience which simultaneously grounds and transcends the individual and, at the same time, avoids many of the difficulties presented by the aesthetics of disruption. We shall now turn to the detail of our case. By including aspects of Iris Murdoch's work within our discussion, we hope to show that a hermeneutical concern with transcendence is by no means limited to the German tradition of philosophy.

IN her essay The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts, Iris Murdoch comments on "attentiveness" as being unpopular with recent philoso-

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phers who prefer to talk of reasons rather than of "experiences" (84). Adhering to her preference for using philosophy as a means of deepening experience, she holds that attentiveness shares with art the ability to change the quality of an experience to such a degree that a change of consciousness can be achieved:

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then, suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. (84)

Attentiveness entails the transformation of everyday consciousness into an unpossessive almost aesthetic mode of contemplation in which we surrender ourselves to that which has won our attention and begin to free ourselves from the selfishness of everyday-consciousness. George Steiner senses that attentiveness has an ethical dimension. He speaks of a civility towards "the inward savour of things," and of that courtesy of mind which is both a "scruple of perception" and indicative of a well mannered under­standing (148). We might say the courtesies of attentiveness are the straits through which we slip out of the narrows of our immediate existence. At the same time those very channels render the calmer sounds of ordinary consciousness vulnerable to the storm tides of unbidden and unexpected insight.

Attentiveness has a dynamic rendered taut by centrifugal and centripetal impetuses. Attentiveness is centripetal in that it is a heightened mode of being aware and centrifugal in that it entails a sharpened consciousness of what it is aware of. Both impetuses are linked. Tact and courtesy, in Steiner's words, "would on a tree of meaning, connect the only partially perceived encounters between our conscious and unconscious selves to those meetings which take place in the lit spaces of social and political conduct" (148). Murdoch's discourse is equally sensitive to recognizing the authority of the outward: attentiveness works towards "a progressive revelation of something which exists independ­ently of me."

Attention is rewarded by knowledge of reality. [It] . . . leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal. (89)

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The willingness to attend, to look at the world as it is and to acquire a respectful sensibility to other kinds of outlooks, is a willingness to acknowledge the "authority" of what lies "beyond." It is to become aware of what is more than us (90-1). Yet what is it that binds us (in all our particularity) to the universalizing frameworks of shared meaning so that we both recognize ourselves in them and learn to sense that we participate in and have a stake within the common ties of history and language? Attentiveness and courtesy are inextricably entwined with moments when orders of meaning outside us begin to resonate within us and become in Charles Taylor's phrase "inseparably linked to a personal vision" (510). But this begs the question:

How does the graft on to our being take? What is it that tums the momentary reception (the knock at the door) — even where that reception is involuntary, subliminal, adverse . . . — into tenancy? (Steiner 180)

How does the self begin to accommodate to what initially appears to it as not-self? Whilst Heidegger's works do not offer an answer as to how this fusion is achieved, they do offer evidence for his belief in such a fusion. His lectures on Plato's Republic state that epiphanic or aletheic knowledge both reveal us as being a part of and bind us more tightly to that which is beyond us (individually): "fundamentally, all knowledge is a matter of binding [the community] to the existence which it (the Imowledge) has itself put forward into light" (qtd. in Roberts 263).

The foregoing remarks establish that the centrifugal and centripetal dynamics of attentiveness and courtesy can both reveal and define us in terms of a "polity of experience." One element of that polity is continuity, a prominent theme in Gadamer's thinking. The sense of being bound to and bound up with a polity of experience presupposes both a temporal and a narrative horizon. That history never quite manages to snap the threads of continuity despite its enormous discontinuities (Hoffman 193) speaks for what Gadamer identifies as the "hermeneutic continuity" which constitutes our being. He refers to an endeavor to preserve the hermeneutic continuity of our existence despite the lacerations of the unexpected and unforeseen (Truth and Method 96). Hermeneutic continuity involves the self becoming increasingly bound to that which is more than itself. The impetus is away from modem subjectivism towards an opening "to a hitherto concealed experience which transcends thinking from the position of subjectivity" (Truth and Method 96). Given this tran­scendence, hermeneutic continuity is evidently bound up with the polity of experience.

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We contend that the dynamics of attentiveness and its courtesy as well as the impetus towards hermeneutic continuity are connected to the polity of experience. What do we mean by this term? The word polity is related to the word "political." Both refer to the polis (the Greek for city). The meaning of political (a person who is engaged and practiced within the body politic) is secondary to the notion of polity. To be political pre­supposes a polity or community within which one becomes a political (poHticized) being. It is the ontically prior polis which for Heidegger "assigns man his ethos, his place as a member of a genuine community."^ As will be apparent, this essay is not concerned with the political understood as the exercise of authority and influence but with the subtler connections between polis and polity.

Polity loosely defined means an organized community. In its more ancient connotations, polis brings to mind the central pole or post around which the individuals of a community gathered (the polarization of opinion) and acquired (through their coming together) a sense of being/becoming what they were not fully aware of being before; namely, a self-conscious community. The polis marks a place of gathering and emergence. This offers, for our purposes, a vital connection with the notion of polity. The latter is a term which also refers to nation, an entity which gives birth to itself. A ''polity" is therefore that polis or articulate community which is in the perpetual process of gathering, organizing itself of giving birth to itself through its binding communality of experience. The sense of "polity" we are talking of here is analogous to that collective "self-consciousness" described by Hegel in his essay, "Realization of Spirit in History," which is continually emerging in relation to its recognition of its own truth and being.^ It is noteworthy that Hegel speaks of such collectivization as a process, which bonds its components.

Dilthey's proclamation that "everything in history is intelligible, for everything is text" assumes as Gadamer points out that "life and history make sense like the letters of a word" (Truth and Method 241, nt. 7). Gadamer openly opposes this hermeneutic of deciphering — as if Hermes merely de-coded a fixed message and remained unaffected by his experience of it. Derrida's opposition to decipherment is more radical: "writing is read, it is not the site, in the last instance," of a hermeneutic deciphering, that is, of decoding a meaning or truth (21). This skepticism derives from an analysis of the consequences of iterabiUty.

. . . at the very moment when someone would like to say or to write, "On the twentieth . . . etc.," the very factor that will permit the mark (be it psychic, oral, graphic) to function beyond this moment — namely the possibiHty of it being repeated another

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time — breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude of self-presence of intention, of meaning and a fortiori, of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters, contaminates parasitically what it identifies and enables to repeat "itself: it leaves us no choice but to mean (to say) something that is (always, also) other than what we mean to say, to say something other than what we say and would have wanted to say, to understand something other than . . . etc. (Derrida 65-6)

The poignancy of the argument succinctly encapsulates the essential antagonism between the hermeneutics of suspicion and (what James Risser has called) the hermeneutics of conversation. For Derrida, whatever we say will always mean (according to the principle of iterability) something other than what we say. For Gadamer, however, whatever we say, will (according to the principle of interpretive openness) always mean something more than what we say. Joel Weinsheimer ably describes Gadamer's argument:

There is always room for further interpretation. The fact that the human word is not one but many, the fact that the object of thought is not wholly realized in any one of its conceptions, impels it constantly forward toward further words and concepts. (Weinsheimer 237)

The hermeneutic conception of meaning is therefore a conception of ambulant meaning, of meaning on the move. When something is said or written, it can never be fully said so that the meaning of what is commu­nicated is always in need of further explication. Let us contrast deconstruction and hermeneutics more succinctly.

Iris Murdoch writes of experience.

In fact, any experience is infinitely rich and deep. We feel it to be intrinsically significant because we can brood upon it, but at the same time brooding shows it to be endlessly various in its meaning. ("Nostalgia for the Particular" 54)

Deconstruction and hermeneutics acknowledge the commonplace truth that experience and expression are "endlessly various" in their meaning yet they clearly divide on what is meant by such variousness. Deconstruction contends that we will always mean other than what we mean: variousness of meaning amounts to variance of meaning. Hermeneutics insists that we always mean more than we intend: variousness of meaning anticipates a voluptuousness of meaning. Two

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quite different stratagems of questioning pivot on the differentiation between the other and the more.

DECONSTRUCTIVE questioning, like ideological criticism, is driven by a suspiciousness of closure: it does not seek to recover universal truths

suppressed by particularistic pretenses at possessing the truth but to uncover what it takes to be the self-driven tragedy of language. It recovers the (frequently repressed) frailty of any claim to meaning and truth: iterability condemns us to always mean other than what we claim to mean. Such questioning infers a political critique which is (appropriately) ambiguous in character. On the one hand deconstructive criticism threatens death by fragmentation. It can undo any simple (monolithic) truth claim by revealing how the act of making that claim (in language) inevitably places the claim at variance with itself: meaning begins to stammer. And yet, on the other hand, the critique is pernicious. Since its premises drive it to disrupt, reverse and displace (Derrida 21), any attempt to seek continuity with the position criticized so that it may be extended or re-constructed is, in principle, excluded. Deconstruction cannot and does not seek to enter into dialogue with any philosophical thesis it questions, for to enter into conversation with an opposing thesis presupposes a willingness to acknowledge that one's own position as well as the one which one criticizes, fill out the truth of a subject-matter in different ways. It is the continuity of such subject matters which decon­struction questions. Whereas hermeneutic dialogue seeks an understanding which becomes more through the language's ability to bind the variousness of meaning — conversing meaning to unify in speech — deconstruction seeks the reverse by insisting that the logos in dialogue is a word that becomes two (dialogue). The dynamic of hermeneutics might be described as metabolic whereas the dynamic of deconstruction tends to the diabolic. Hermeneutics tends to regard different readings of a text as co-ordinates, as means to getting a bearing on a singular though never single meaning. Deconstruction is uncomfortable with any such idealization.

Without the hermeneutics of suspicion reminding us — and this could be its proper function — that meaning escapes programatization, talk of meaning can easily retum into ideological self-deception (Hart 277-8). Yet deconstmction's fascination with the sublime, infinite, variety of meaning can only be sustained by perpetuating meaning's self-variance. Thus Derrida, it has been suggested, wrenches open the codes of spoken and written communication, and diverts and exploits them to the end of moving from the say able in the direction of the unsay able (Hart 277-8). This gives rise to a vital question. Does the hermeneutics of suspicion

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with its attendant principle of otherness and its attempt to generate the discontinuities of meaning-at-variance-with-itself, not lead to the discon­tinuities and atomism of what Gadamer decries as aesthetic consciousness (Truth and Method 97, nt. 7)? Derrida's resistance to closure is not a being-open in the hermeneutic sense of being receptive to transformation by otherness but indicative of a breaking-open of closure so as to gain momentary insight into the unendingly discontinuous and other. This insight can be judged as a mode of aesthetic consciousness not just because a version of the sublime is its object but because, as Gadamer argues, the pure immediacy of such insight, the breaking asunder of our semantic horizons, is discontinuous with the continuities of understanding upon which our existence rests. It is in this sense that the hermeneutics of suspicion can be accused of being a mode of aesthetic consciousness.

How is one to account for deconstmction's fascination with the subhme? The allure of deconstmction is not without a tinge of decadence, for its betrays an expectancy of release, the promise of unhinging the shutters of one's immediate horizons of meaning in order to gain a tantalizing vision of difference. Yet to what does such a vision relate?

If the immediate attraction is a vision of discontinuity and othemess, it promises little more than aesthetic escapism. If so, the moment of deconstmctive vision is an Erlebnis and not an Erfahrung. As a vision of discontinuity it cannot, by definition, relate to anything else. The promotion of such an Erlebnis of difference leads to a multiple annihila­tion of continuity. What Gadamer says of the aesthetics of Erlebnis, therefore, applies as forcefully to the deconstmctive vision; both lead "to an absolute series of points which annihilates the unity of the work of art (text), the identity of the artist with himself, and the identity of the person understanding or enjoying the work of art" (Truth and Method 95). This is indeed desperate and untenable. Nietzsche sustains Gadamer's criticism somewhat paradoxically.

Persönlich ist übrigens diese ganze Position unbrauchbar: in dieser Skepsis kann niemand leben. Wir müssen über dieser Skepsis hinaus, wir müssen sie vergessen. (Sämtliche Werke 62)

[Personally, after all, this position is untenable: in this skepticism no one can live. We must get beyond this skepticism, we must forget it.]

Although for Nietzsche actual life surpasses tragedy in its violent arrests of experience and anguished expectations, he nevertheless insists (and how often is this now forgotten) that life needs to impose order, continuity.

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One should not understand this compulsion to construct species, forms, purposes, laws . . . as if they enabled us to fix the real world but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible. (The Will to Power 282)

The absence of continuity within actuality is no cause for despair but an incentive for life to establish and take responsibility for the continuities it is compelled to establish. Although Nietzsche recognizes the "meaning-lessness of events," abjures the notion of meaning in itself and, like Derrida, celebrates the limitless ways in which the world can be interpreted, this is for him a mere prelude to the creation of new meanings. In other words, Nietzsche does not regard the deconstructive vision of sublimity as an aesthetic end-in-itself as Derrida seems to (does he not tie it to a notion of critical play?) but as a (tragic) means to re-invigorating life's creative renewal of meaning. This provides an unlikely but timely endorsement of Gadamer's conception of a hermeneutic impulse within human experience (Erfahrung) towards continuity. Before we develop the consequences of this criticism, there are others to be discussed.

We have seen that deconstructive analysis seeks to break open any ideological hold on meaning by insisting that meaning always fragments and doubles. The question is whether (contrary to expectation) the placing of meaning at variance with itself in fact promotes a marginalization of alternative interpretive options? If such alternatives are radically discon­tinuous with those of my horizon, what interest would they hold for me? Without any continuity of subject matter, how can any link or graft between such disparate horizons be established? The deconstructivist might compensate for this difficulty by arguing that at least the principle of meaning always being at variance with itself will always block any claim to the final word on a given issue. Yet this is hardly persuasive. Hermeneutics with its attendant principle of the always more to be said is equally effective at preventing such claims. The latter principle indeed offers sound reasons as to why I should remain open to different interpre­tive stances. If the promise of truth lies in expanding the available horizons of understanding, I should remain open to alternative positions since it is only through them that I approach the possibility of expanding my own horizon of meaning. Yet this is possible only on the assumption of a continuity between the competing interpretations. If the latter do not share any common attributes or subject matters or if the world-views they express are incommensurable, continuity collapses and with it the possibility of transforming one's understanding. This would have the unpalatable consequence of locking us even more firmly within our immediate horizons of meaning. Discontinuity between interpretive horizons leads to a marginalization of the other horizon, which in turn

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renders the transformation of one's understanding unUkely. It would also render us indifferent to the other and to other interpretations. The decon­structive position undermines the polity of experience, for by insisting upon the radical discontinuity between interpretive stances, it seals off one's initial horizons of meaning and (thereby) facilitates a diminishment rather than a transformation of understanding. If there is no interpretive consistency between perspectives, one perspective cannot be recognized as a variation or extension of the other. If there is no recognition, I will never find the other of myself in the person who is the other to myself but will confront an othemess I will never appreciate. The polity of experience would be diminished.

Hegel claimed that the life of the spirit is movement: it is also the life of understanding. Movement requires a discernable continuity between positions. Not only is our understanding dependent upon the continuity of such movement but so also is our sense of standing in between the past and the future. The hermeneutics of suspicion in effect derails the continuity of movement upon which the vitality of understanding depends. In defense of the critique of continuity, any multiplication of narratives and identities might be justified because it pluralizes existential possibili­ties and horizons. Breaking open one narrative discloses others. Yet this defense surely concedes to hermeneutics its need for continuity. The social theorist Anthony Giddens comments in this respect,

. . . it would not be correct to see contextual diversity, as simply and inevitably promoting the fragmentation of the self, let alone its disintegration into multiple "selves." It can just as well, at least in many circumstances, promote an integration of self [ . . . ] A person may make use of diversity in order to create a distinctive self-identity which positively incorporates elements from different settings into an integrated narrative. (190)

The stress upon an integrated narrative gives the lie to Nietzsche's perspectivism for as with deconstmction's appeal to alterity, multiple perspectives are only of interest if they reveal different aspects of the same world or fill out different aspects of what we project the world to be. In both instances, continuity has to be supposed.

To conclude, the conflicting principles of always meaning other than what we say and of there always being more to be added to what we say, represent an aporia. There are no formal criteria which can settle this opposition. Yet despite this, we should be clear as to what the conse­quences of adopting these principles are. We have contended that deconstructive criticism threatens death by fragmentation by placing meaning at variance with itself. Deconstruction does not seek dialogue for

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that would be to acknowledge that one's own position as well as the one which one criticizes, fill out the truth of a subject matter in different but related ways. This would suppose the very continuity which is denied. Deconstmction's resistance to closure seeks to gain momentary insight into the unendingly discontinuous. If the immediate attraction of this is a vision of discontinuity, it promises little more than aesthetic escapism. The placing of meaning at variance with itself promotes a marginalization of altemative interpretive options which locks us within our immediate horizons of meaning. Worst (and most dangerous) of all, it marginalizes othemess, reducing it to a matter of indifference. This diminishes the polity of experience and hobbles the movement between perspectives on which the life and spirit of understanding depend. Now let us tum to the hermeneutic position.

HERMENEUTICS insists that we always mean more than we intend: variousness of meaning anticipates a voluptuousness of meaning. The

stratagem of questioning which pivots on this more appeals to a wish to understand more, to grasp more of a position than one has previously been able to. Murdoch's intuitive sense about the incalculable significance of experience is connected to her conviction conceming attentiveness; that is, we attend to and listen to experience because we sense that it works towards the progressive realization of "something more." The function of such experience and the questioning that it inspires is in Fergus Kerr's words, "to set us on a pilgrimage inspired by intimations of a wholeness which invariably lies just beyond what can be easily seen" (83). Indeed, Murdoch comments herself in this respect that "what is considered as most real in our lives is connected with a value which points further on" (86). The references to attentiveness, to that which has yet to be understood, to a pilgrimage and to a pointing further clearly connect with the notion of understanding's movement, a movement that invokes, as we have seen, the concept of continuity.

That hermeneutics should be characterized as conservative because of its appeal to continuity and tradition is plainly nonsense.^ As the history of European thought amply demonstrates, tradition is driven not by sameness but by a continuity of concems whose life is rejuvenated by genuine debate, disagreement and schism. A tradition dominated by the perpetua­tion of the same will decline into entropy. A healthy tradition will always remain, to a degree, at odds with itself in that it will be animated by lively differences over the variousness of meaning. The distinction between the hermeneutic and deconstmctive accounts of difference is that the latter seeks to establish the discontinuity of meaning within a tradition whilst the former strives to discover the continuities at play between different

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philosophical approaches to a subject matter. Hermeneutic difference is accumulative and not divisive: it assumes that in so far as there are different approaches to a subject-matter, our understanding of it is enriched rather than sundered: there are not as many worlds as there are perspectives: although Gadamer holds that in language the reality beyond every individual consciousness becomes visible, he does not imply that there is a world beyond all individuals.

In every world view the existence of the world-in-itself is intended. It is the whole to which linguistically schematized experience refers. The multiplicity of (different) world views does not involve any relativization of the "world." Rather what the world is, is not different from the views in which it presents itself. (Truth and Method 447)

The "world" to which we refer in language is that continuity of ideas and perceptions which forms when different perspectives shade into one another (Truth and Method 448). In fact, philosophical hermeneutics assumes that because human existence can be described as the being of linguisticality, all different thought and language perspectives are never contingent or in isolation from one another. Each is shaped and informed by previous horizons so that whether an individual is aware it or not, he or she is always "more" than him or herself. Each individual is both connected to and is an expression of that reality which stretches behind and before it. At this point we can retum to our guiding themes: the hermeneutics of attention and the polity of experience.

The disposition of attentiveness to the voice of another albeit a text, artifact or person, is essentially a dialogical disposition in that it is willing to listen, its spirit of questioning springs from both an honest recognition of its own limitations of understanding and its desire to understand more, and it is open to the risk of having its initial presuppositions about a subject-matter substantially transformed. The risk of such trauma indicates that the hermeneutic principle of continuity is no stranger to radical revelation. Yet despite the radicality of such transfomiation, one's initial understanding is not pushed to one side as one amongst many other perspectives, but is re-contextualized within a framework of greater universality or communicative polity. Such re-contextualization would not be possible were there not a logical connection between one's initial pre­suppositions and the horizons of understanding which transform them. Attentiveness focuses upon and waits for those moments of (never final) transformation. It is Murdoch's appeal to attentiveness which finally brings us to the polity of experience.

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FOLLOWING Heidegger's efforts, Gadamer has sought to overcome the negative heritage of Nietzsche's "philosophy of subjectivity." In his

opposition to subjectivism, Gadamer made a seminal appeal to Hegel.

Al l self knowledge arises from what is historically pre-given, what with Hegel we call "substance," because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility for understanding any tradition whatsoever in its historical alterity. This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel's phenome­nology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it. (Truth and Method 302)

The substantiality which Gadamer specifically concems himself with is linguisticality. Thus whether an individual is aware of it or not, his or her utterances are necessarily grounded in, express and invoke the substantial­ity that determines them. The ontological framework of language is in other words the basis of the possibility of the transformation of conscious­ness that attentiveness seeks. For all its seeming privacy the disciplines of attentiveness seek an opening for the self to receive the mediation of the transcendent in and through the mediation of language. Yet that transfor­mation is not merely of a given subjectivity for, as Gadamer insists, "in a successful conversation (both parties) come under the influence of the tmth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community'' (Truth and Method 379). Reaching an understanding is, he argues, a matter of being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were (Truth and Method 379). We thereby gain a living sense of our indebtedness, of our belonging to a polity of experience that embraces, articulates but nevertheless transcends our individuality. This gain brings to light the polity of experience to which we belong. The philosophy of subjectivism is not strictly speaking refuted but transcended, for subjectivity ceases to be mere subjectivity when it grasps that it is the location for the coming into appearance of an objective truth which can only be realized subjectively, i.e. the reality of the polity of experience. We claim this as the primary political achievement of Gadamer's form of hermeneutic thought: despite its individual intensity, the attitude of attentiveness is a medium through which the individual finds his or her place in the simultaneously grounding and transcending polity of experience.

The dictum intellectum da mihi, et vivam (grant me understanding that I may live) is reminiscent of the hermeneutic axiom that all understanding entails an element of application. Attainment of understanding enables us to apply ourselves differently to that which we have come to understand.

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Hermeneutic understanding is a transformative process which Gemma Fiumara argues "demands our entire mind: listening [to] our totality'' (191). She contrasts such a mode of response with purely theoretical or analytic modes of philosophy in which, "possible responses to significant questions are lucidly articulated and when they are sufficiently satisfying (from an abstract point of view) they are accepted without any personal transformation being implied" (Fiumara 191). Hermeneutical experience, however, entails just such a transformation. This is a position which almost defines Gadamer's outlook.

The truth of experience always implies an orientation towards new experience . . . The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself {Truth and Method 335)

Of course, this is not to say that hermeneutical reasoning is relieved of the duty of sound reasoning: to the contrary, but such reasoning is not an end in itself but a means to effecting a sounder appreciation of what is at issue.

The issues with which this essay has concerned itself have been threefold: what is the relationship between the hermeneutics of attentive­ness and a polity of experience? How does the notion of a polity of experience enable a critical intervention in the debate between the hermeneutics of conversation and the hermeneutics of suspicion? And how does an individual's personal understanding of a polity bind him or her to that which exists both within him or her and yet also reaches far beyond him or her, i.e. the supra-individual reahty which is the polity of experience?

We have argued that the hermeneutics of attentiveness demonstrates that being attentive to one's own interpretive intuitions and listening to others express theirs is part of the same interactive and transforming process. Philosophical hermeneutics insists that whether an individual is aware of it or not, subjective consciousness is mediated by, grounded and dependent upon a transcendent supra-individual polity of experience for which Gadamer takes linguisticality as the appropriate model. The dual fact that many of my thoughts cannot be fully clarified by me alone and that T am never fully transparent to myself, forever drives me forward in the quest to understand myself more fully by probing further into words and concepts the provenance of which lies outside myself As Tris Murdoch has so aptly argued, attentiveness to one's own thoughts invariably leads to a progressive realization of that "something more" which grounds our thinking. The passage of hermeneutic understanding might indeed be said to entail subjective consciousness coming to realize

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the significant extent of its dependence upon the supra-individual polity of experience which grounds it.

How does the notion of a polity of experience enable a critical inter­vention in the debate between the hermeneutics of conversation and the hermeneutics of suspicion? We saw that it was precisely the possibility of subjective consciousness transforming and transcending itself within a polity of experience, which deconstructive thought seeks to question. The deconstructive position undermines the polity of experience for by insisting upon the radical discontinuity between interpretive stances, it seals one within the initial horizons of one's understanding and (thereby) facilitates a diminishment rather than a transformation of understanding. Yet, as we argued, the plausibility of the deconstructive position comes into serious question. If the immediate attraction of the deconstructive vision is discontinuity, it promises little more than aesthetic escapism. Erfahrung is reduced to Erlebnis. The placing of meaning at variance with itself promotes a marginalization of altemative interpretive options, which threatens to lock us within our immediate horizons of meaning. It also menaces the marginalization of othemess by reducing it to a matter of indifference. This diminishes the polity of experience and hobbles the movement between perspectives on which the life and spirit of under­standing depends. The political dimension of the debate between the hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of conversation is far from academic.

We concerned ourselves with the question of how does an individual's personal understanding bind him or her to that which exists both within him or her and yet also reaches far beyond him or her, i.e. the supra-individual reality which is the polity of experience? How does a recognition of the actuality of the polity of experience tum from an acceptance of fact to being assimilated within and, in Taylor's words, "inseparably linked to a personal vision"?^ How does recognition of fact tum into a sense of recognition of dependency ? We suggest that what is at issue here is an ecstatic politics, a politics in which an individual subject begins to shed the illusion of only being-in and for itself.^ A hermeneutics of attentiveness brings with it the realization that how we presently understand ourselves is greatly dependent upon our being grounded in that polity of experience which stretches beyond us. As finite human beings, we can only become more fully aware of who we are by moving both beyond and yet towards ourselves. This becomes possible if what was described above as the aestheticism of subjectivism can be overcome and we begin to engage with that polity of experience which holds the key to understanding what is genuinely substantive in our subjectivity. In conclusion, the political import of the hermeneutics of

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attentiveness is that in recognizing the transcendent character of the polity of experience, I come to recognize, become bound up with and, indeed, become indebted to that dialogical other who in Gerard Loughlin's words "constantly challenges me to be other than I am."^° A recognition of our dependence upon the polity of experience is the transformative insight which the hermeneutics of attentiveness achieves. Would that it might also achieve a transformation of the political.

Notes

1) A shorter version of this paper was delivered to the Hermeneutics Seminar at the University of Heidelberg, June 31-July 2, 2000.

2) In his book, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, (London, Darton, Longman and Todd), Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that although any claim to truth within a tradition is temporally conditioned, that very claim nevertheless invokes the notion of the truth of a tradition which in its turn can be used to criticize the temporally conditioned circum­stances of the initial claim. Pannenberg argues,

The hermeneutical process as a process of productive appropriation is possible because the elements of the tradition, both in their content and in the process of their transmission, stand in relation to a truth which lies ahead of them and which in its own shape is still open, and which because of this can be made to refute its own "temporally conditioned" shape by the freedom of the interpreter. (198)

3) See for example the otherwise impressive text by Roberto Alejandro, Hermeneutics, Citizenship and the Public Sphere.

4) See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutics, Religion and Ethics, p. ix. 5) See Karsten Harris, "Heidegger as a Political Thinker" in Heidegger and Modern

Philosophy. 6) See G. W.F.Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction, p.96. 7) For example, John Caputo remarks that Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics "is a

reactionary gesture, any attempt to block off the realization of a radical hermeneutics." See Radical Hermeneutics, p.5.

8) It is interesting to note that Hegel also argues in a similar vein to Taylor. Hegel writes.

The principle of experience contains the infinitely important element that in order to accept a content as true, the man himself must be present or more precisely, he must find that such content is unity with the certainty of himself. (Hegel, Encyclopedia, Section 7, qtd. by Gadamer in Truth and Method, p. 355).

9) See Rowan Williams, "Logic and Spirit in Hegel," in Post Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, p. 116-129.

10) See Gerard Loughlin, reviewing Rowan Williams in the Times Literary Supplement, August 4, 2000.

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