Hermeneutic and Ethical Encounters: Gadamer and Levinas

Abstract

The encounter with the Other entails both hermeneutic and ethical responses: my understanding of self and world may be brought into question by a radically alien presence and my values starkly revealed by my reaction to it. This chapter examines some of the theoretical issues associated with this encounter through discussion of the work of Gadamer and Levinas. Levinassian ethics and Gadamerian hermeneutics are both preoccupied with the same fundamental problem, namely the possibility and significance of the encounter with alterity. Levinas’s work is characterized by the endeavour to preserve the Other as Other, to avoid its reduction to the familiar and the already known. In the terms which have dominated postwar French thought, the Other eludes totalization and brings into question the primacy of the Same in all its avatars: the Self, the transcendental Ego, Being, essence or Dasein. For Levinas, respect and responsibility for the Other become the ethical principles at the source of nonviolent human relations and a just social organization. Gadamer’s thought, though less explicitly concerned with ethics, revolves around a similar respect for the Other. For Gadamer, the task of hermeneutics is to describe and justify the occurrence of a non-appropriative understanding of alterity, as it may be encountered through a literary text, history, other people or nature.