Power, History, and Truth:
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault
In this essay, I will attempt to present three differing views of the interpretive enterprise in regard to issues of power, history, and truth. Firstly, Gadamer’s hermeneutics will be examined as it posits truth within history, truth as within interpretation. Secondly, I will examine Habermas’ conception of truth as the goal of a free, uncoereced realm of communication. Lastly, Foucault power/knowledge nexus will be interpreted as generating truth; that is, truth as produced by historically situated discourses and within “régimes.”
Firstly, for Gadamer the hermeneutic problem is key; it is the issue of alienation. In other words, interpretation takes place within history, within tradition(s) of accumulated beliefs or prejudices. But this tradition cannot understand the present; hence it relies on its belief system and interpretation is always prejudiced. Moreover, Gadamer locates the prejudiced nature of our knowledge in our very condition as human beings: “It is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudices that constitute our being” (“The Hermeneutical Problem” [THP] 151). Thus, alienation is Gadamer’s phenomenological term for the problem of prejudice in interpretation.
Indeed, Gadamer remarks that: “[i]n fact, the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the world, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something — whereby what we encounter says something to us” (THP 152; italics added). Our very existence as being-in-the-world determines the partiality of our knowledge: Alienation is, at base, the very condition of meaning.
If meaning is therefore problematic, then the manner by which we express meaning will be just that much more problem ridden: Thus the role of language is key in Gadamer’s endeavor, language is constitutive of our historical being. Gadamer remarks that “[l]anguage is the fundamental mode of operation of our being-in-the-world and the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world” (THP 147). History thus operates within the linguistic medium; our concepts of meaning, our concepts of truth as expressed in language are historical; truth is conditioned by our historical ‘giveness.’ I thus suggest that hermeneutics may be seen as an effort to contextualize epistemological universals.
Gadamer does this, but he also argues for contextualization as producing new knowledges and understanding. Moreover, the model of hermeneutics as espoused by Gadamer seeks to “transcend the prejudices that exist within aesthetic consciousness, historical, consciousness, and the hermeneutical consciousness that has been restricted to a technique for avoiding misunderstandings and to overcome the alienations present in them all” (THP 151). As such, interpretation occurs within wider and wider hermeneutic circles. There are no fixed meaning, but better understandings are indeed possible.
Gadamer’s model of better understanding is built on the concept of a reflective critique which seeks to understand by interpretation ad infinitum: For Gadamer, there is no alternative. Thus he writes of the effort to “decipher history’s fragments of meaning, fragments which border on the dark contingency of facticity and which relentlessly advance upon the twilight into which the future of every present consciousness fades“ (“Reply to My Critics” [RC] 285). Indeed, I suggest that here ‘Truth’ has been stripped of any universal, metaphysical pretensions by Gadamer’s reflective hermeneutical critique: Knowledge has become localized, contingent, and historical.
If, on Gadamer’s account, truth is no longer metaphysical; then truth is no longer a question of absolute knowledge: It is instead a question of a “completed openness for new experience. That is the truth which hermeneutics presses home against the concept of absolute knowledge. In this truth is not ambiguous” (RC 290; italics added). Hence, each individual is located in this fixed, historical locale and period which informs that person’s interpretative act; our historical being plays a role in our knowledge of the world and it is this situatedness, this “being-there,” that Gadamer refers to as a “definite articulation of the world” (THP 155).
The hermeneutic praxis as espoused by Gadamer thus problematizes our understanding of the world by fixing us within history; it also problematizes our previous conception of history. The past, i.e. history, always informs our interpretations of the present by situating us within a context that influences the questions that we may ask of the past; moreover, the issues posed by the historically past discourses remain. Thus when we interpret, we do so on a two-fold level: “There is already a world already interpreted, already organized in its basic relations, into which experience steps as something new, upsetting what has led our expectations and under going reorganization itself into upheaval” (THP 156). In other words, we come to interpretation with our own cultural ‘baggage’; but the object itself is also framing and determining our responses: The great metaphysical categories of ‘Subject’ and ‘Object’ have been thoroughly deracinated.
Indeed, I suggest that this two-fold model of interpretation also allows Gadamer to posit a model of historical change as flexible, as unteleological. Gadamer notes this specifically in his reply to Jürgen Habermas:
[H]ermeneutic praxis always contains within it an effective historical factor which co-determines the consciousness of understanding. However, in this situation a reversal is also found. That which is understood always develops a certain persuasive power which takes a part in the development of new convictions (RC 291).
It is in this manner that Gadamer attempts to account for change in the world: Old interpretations affect our attempt to arrive at new ones; by this new and “persuasive” element we come to form new horizons of expectation, i.e. convictions.
In contradistinction to Gadamer, Habermas tries to limit the universality of the hermeneutic problem via a theory of communicative competence. Habermas recognizes that prejudices shape thought and practice while also changing through that interaction. Nevertheless, the project of Habermas’ critical theory conceives of an undistorted understanding as the model for Truth. Hence, for Habermas, hermeneutics achieves only a distorted understanding; it falls short of his goal of communicative competence (“The Hermeneutical Claim to Universality” [CU] 265). I suggest that it is precisely here that the hermeneutic problem of alienation is salient.
For Gadamer, there is no undistorted understanding nor is there a distorted understanding — there is only understanding within the universality of alienation. Conversely, if Habermas’ consensus model of social decision-making is the method whereby one arrives at undistorted understanding, then he also assumes that he can transcend or overcome the hermeneutic problem of alienation. Moreover, I take Habermas to hold that he can have knowledge of a final end purpose; clearly, teleology’s presence is felt here. In other words, Habermas has completely removed the idea of history from his idea of truth.
Indeed, Habermas argues against Gadamer’s conception of truth as being too determined by context, by history and language. Thus, according to Habermas, history’s salience drives Gadamer to “conclude to the ontological priority of linguistic tradition over all possible critique; we can consequently criticize specific traditions only on the basis that we are part of the comprehensive context of the tradition of a language” (CU 266). Clearly, Habermas here wants hold onto some grand conception of the “Truth.”
In place of this world of Gadamer’s interpretation and context-bound truth, Habermas argues for a conception of meaning that is firmly based in truth; for a truth that “measures itself on an idealized consensus achieved in unlimited communication free from domination, also [on] the structures of solidarity co-existence in communication free from force” (CU 267). Here I suggest that Habermas’ project reveals itself most forcefully: Habermas tries to deny his own historicity, to deny his own historical being or being-in-the-world, by positing knowledge of an ideal, specified realm. Indeed, this realm is the fundament of Habermas’ “unfinished project of modernity.”
The ideal of a coercive free communication that attains truth is the key feature in Habermas’ claims: Here I suggest that Habermas’ ideal may be interpreted as an exercise of the will to power, of the will to truth (Foucault). As such, I suggest that Habermas’ discourse may be fruitfully analyzed by examining Foucault’s power/knowledge nexus.
For Foucault, “[t]ruth is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. Truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A ‘régime’ of truth” (Truth & Power [TP] 133). Thus, truth may be seen as a product of totalizing discourses within these regimes of truth. Moreover, science, scientific method, and the corresponding institutions are salient in truth production (TP 131).
Instead of truth as science, as a universal, Foucault argues for truth as a discourse that is a historically constituted form of knowledge. These discourses occur within a web of power relations that constitute knowledge itself; thus truth is situated within the power/knowledge nexus. In other words, by speaking the truth, we are already thoroughly enmeshed in the discursive relations of power and truth production. Thus “[t]he individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle.” (Two Lectures [TL] 98).
It is within these totalizing discourses that ‘truth’ is generated. Moreover, one should not conceive of truth as existing outside of social relations; instead, truth is firmly located in the here-and-now. “Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint” (TP 131). For Foucault, “Truth” and our knowledge of it are permanently enmeshed in the web of power relations that constitutes and is constituted by knowledge.
Summarily, I have attempted to present three differing views of the interpretive enterprise as regards the issues of power, history, and truth. Firstly, I addressed Gadamer’s hermeneutics that places truth within history via the act of interpretation. Secondly, I examined Habermas’ conception of truth as the goal of a free, uncoereced realm of communication. Lastly, I explored Foucault’s conception of the power/knowledge nexus that generates truth as produced by historically situated discourses within “régimes” of truth.
