Political Hermeneutics: The Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer 电子书下载

书名：Political Hermeneutics: The Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer

A distinct logic to Gadamer`s early writings makes them more than mere precursors to the mature thought that appeared in Truth and Method. They contain their own, new and different, `philosophical hermeneutics` and are worth reading with a fresh eye. The young Gadamer began his publication career by arguing that Plato`s ethical writings did not `express` doctrine but rather depended upon the `play` of language among speakers in an ethical discourse community. This was the key idea of Plato`s Dialectical Ethics, Gadamer`s first book. Following the classical formula of seeing politics as the continuation of ethics, Gadamer`s writings in the 1930s and 1940s concentrated on the Platonic idea of the state and argued two key points. First, the exiling of poets from the city was a way of banishing monologue and clearing the way for a dialogue as the language form appropriate to political discourse communities. Second, the Platonic state`s defining task was the educational one of shaping the soul, and this could not be achieved monologically but rather had to take place as a dialogical play between the educator and the soul. The mature philosophical hermeneutics of Truth and Method is a metaphor taken from the literary experience of constructing textual meaning out of the play of parts and whole. The philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer`s early writings rests on a play between the ethical whole initially the Gestalt figure of the `Platonic Socrates` but later the Platonic state and the individual soul in need of ethical guidance. There is no conflict between the early and the later hermeneutics, but the early hermeneutics retain a freshness of spirit and boldness of interpretation that is characteristic of the Weimar culture of Gadamer`s Marburg youth. From beginning to end, Gadamer`s early writings remind us that Plato`s dialogues really do record the conversational essence of Western philosophy at its birth.