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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2018
A small number of scholars have noted T. S. Eliot's anticipation of the hermeneutical theory later articulated by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. Eliot similarly concerns himself with the epistemological assumptions of positivism in the human sciences and the implications of objectivizing texts and other cultural phenomena by adopting the attitude of the scientific observer. For both thinkers, this represents an approach to social life which either distorts or altogether misses the truth claims of those whose ideas are to be interpreted. Furthermore, Eliot develops a theory of understanding that is similar to the historicizing of interpretation that one finds later in Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. However, among those who have observed these affinities, a key difference has been neglected. In his effort to confront such secularizing forces in the human sciences, Eliot comes to embrace an intellectualist philosophy of history, which relies on a tenuous dualism between the metaphysical and the physical, while Gadamer's philosophy of history collapses the dichotomy between the world of ideas and the existential realm. Thus, Eliot ultimately identifies what transcends history exclusively with the realm of the spirit. This essay argues that as the mature Eliot struggled with the empirically reductive tendencies of the human sciences and aimed to save religious truth from their deterministic assaults, he increasingly retreated to an intellectualism that misconceived the ultimate basis of religious truth. Consequently, the existing literature neglects the intellectualism that defines Eliot's understanding of truth within history and the more concrete understanding of that encounter that one finds in Gadamer's thinking.
1 See Jain, Manju, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Shusterman, Richard M., T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; idem, “Eliot as Philosopher,” in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (ed. A. David Moody; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 31–47, at 42–43; Davidson, Harriet, T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and Interpretation in “The Waste Land” (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Brand, Clinton A., “The Voice of the Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T. S. Eliot,” Modern Age 45 (2003) 357–365Google Scholar, at 361–65.
2 Because of the productive role of our prejudices (Vorurteile) in facilitating meaning, Gadamer ultimately sees genuine understanding as a process of translation between historically situated horizons, a dialectical encounter which he compares to that of the conversation. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method (2nd Revised ed.; London: Continuum, 2004)Google Scholar 356–71, 386–91. Gadamer thus rejects the position of those “hermeneuticists,” such as Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, who see our prejudices as principally an impediment to understanding, a conception which renders the interpreter effectively sealed off from meanings or truth claims that transcend the particularity of one's own historical horizon. See Wachterhauser, Brice R., “Gadamer's Realism: The ‘Belongingness’ of Word and Reality,” Hermeneutics and Truth (ed. Wachterhauser, Brice R.; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994) 148–50Google Scholar. Following Heidegger, Gadamer sees our prejudices as simultaneously revealing and concealing reality to us, and he thus rejects such time-bound conceptions of interpretation as essentially overemphasizing the latter at the expense of the former.
3 Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 113.
4 Thus, Eliot remarks that Bertrand Russell's symbolic logic, while satisfying for its precision and certitude, had lost all connection with reality. Ibid., 280, n.6.
5 Ibid., 112.
6 This is the critique of the modern human sciences at the center of Gadamer's magnum opus, Truth and Method, especially Parts 1 and 2 of this work, where he criticizes both the “aesthetic consciousness” and “historical consciousness” of those seeking scientific exposition of artistic works and historical texts, respectively. The distantiated interpretive approach to such cultural phenomena refuses to engage with the truth claims therein, instead seeing the task of the interpreter as mere recovery and explication of meaning as maintained in the historical mind that created it. Gadamer unearths the variety of intellectual strains that contributed to this development but identifies its primary influences as the nineteenth century romantic epistemology of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the appropriation of the latter by Wilhelm Dilthey, whose aim was to establish a foundation for a positive science of history.
7 Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 115.
8 Ibid. Jain notes this affinity between Eliot and Gadamer regarding their shared critique of positivist epistemology in the concluding portion of her chapter on Eliot's graduate seminar with Royce, at 156–57.
9 Eliot's intimations here about the ubiquity of interpretation in understanding anticipate Gadamer's assertions, following Heidegger, about hermeneutical understanding as the ontological condition of being in the world; see Gadamer, Truth and Method, xxvii. Although Shusterman acknowledges this affinity between Eliot and Gadamer with respect to interpretation's role in understanding, he attributes to Gadamer alone the more “radical” view that all understanding is interpretation. Shusterman believes this to be misleading and argues that there is understanding that is ultimately not interpretation. It is more accurate, he argues, to say that “there is no rigid or absolute divide but an essential continuity and interdependence between understanding and interpretation.” See T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, 128–31.
10 Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 115.
11 Ibid., 118–20.
12 Ibid., 114.
13 Ibid., 115.
14 Ibid., 122–24.
15 Ibid., 122.
16 Ibid., 122, in reference to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (trans. Lilian A. Clare; London: Allen and Unwin, 1926) 44–45.
17 Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 123.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 124.
20 Ibid; Durkheim, Émile, The Rules of Sociological Method (ed. Catlin, George E. G.; trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1938) 29–30Google Scholar, quoted in Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 124.
21 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 161, 336.
22 For Eliot's dissertation on Bradley, see Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1964).
23 Kirk, Russell, Eliot and His Age (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008) 36Google Scholar.
24 Shusterman similarly remarks, “Perhaps the most important [influence of Bradley on Eliot] is Bradley's Hegelian holism, an organicism where the meaning of any thing is never autonomously given but always a function of its place and interrelations with other things in a wider whole.” See “Eliot as Philosopher,” 33.
25 Eliot's words here are quoted by Jain (p. 124) from his graduate paper, “The interpretation of Primitive Ritual,” which is included among a group of papers entitled, “Philosophical Essays and Notes, 1913–1914,” and held in The Hayward Bequest, MS p. 7.
26 Shusterman helpfully relates Eliot's idea of fore-understanding to an anticipation of the concept of the hermeneutic circle found in Heidegger and, ultimately, Gadamer. See T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, 130–31.
27 Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 124. Jain explicitly attributes this proximity to Heidegger regarding the presuppositional nature of understanding to Bradley's influence on Eliot. See ibid., 148.
28 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 269. While Jain notes the view shared by Eliot and Gadamer that prejudice is involved in all understanding, she insists that Eliot is more skeptical regarding the possibility of successfully revising old prejudices. The potential for error in all interpretation and the difficulty in establishing criteria of truth or falsity, according to her reading, precluded Eliot from acknowledging the possibility of distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate prejudices, which Gadamer explicitly maintains. Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 150. However, Shusterman is ultimately correct in arguing, to the contrary, that for Eliot, as for Gadamer, the challenge that other points of view present to our existing prejudices holds out the possibility of “enlarg[ing] our scope of understanding.” Further clarifying this point, he notes that for Eliot (as is certainly the case for Gadamer) the “testing” of prejudices is not through some “pure, unprejudiced transcendental faculty of reason” but through their repeated use over time. T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, 115, 168–69.
29 Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 124.
30 For an account of Gadamer's similar attempt to navigate between these extreme epistemological positions, see Bernstein, Richard, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
31 Kirk, Eliot and His Age, 36. For an in-depth examination of the influence of Bradley on Eliot's thinking, see Mallinson, Jane, T. S. Eliot's Interpretation of F. H. Bradley (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 305. See the discussions of Eliot's anticipations of Gadamer's “fusion of horizons” in Shusterman, T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, 113–14, and Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 152–53.
33 Gadamer thus likens genuine understanding to the “application” that has always been the goal of legal and theological hermeneutics, whereby statute or scripture must be understood precisely in terms of its relevance to the situation of the particular interpreter. This, Gadamer describes as the “true model” of interpretation. Truth and Method, 310. Shusterman notes the proximity of Gadamer's concept of application to Eliot's understanding of literature and the diversity of perspectives that are essentially applied or brought to bear on a text among and even within different historical periods (T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, 115–16).
34 Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 152.
35 Ibid., 153.
36 Eliot, T. S., “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964) 3–11Google Scholar, at 4.
37 Ibid, 4. Working against this living existence or “contemporaneity” of the past with the present, Gadamer says, is the “aesthetic differentiation” of aesthetic consciousness, which literally dis-integrates past and present, by abstracting works of art from their purpose or significance, rendering them a matter of subjective experience (Erlebnis) and incapable of communicating truth. Truth and Method, 75–76, 123–24. See also the helpful explanation of this phenomenon in Cesare, Donatella Di, Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait (trans. Niall Keane; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007) 54Google Scholar.
38 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 5 [italics in original]. Davidson notes the anticipation in the final line of this quotation of Gadamer's concept of “effective historical consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein). See Davidson, T. S. Eliot and Hermeneutics, 51. The essay, as a whole, has inspired similar remarks regarding its connections to this concept. See Shusterman, T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, 118–19 and Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy, 152–54. P. Christopher Smith and subsequent translators render the term “historically-effected consciousness,” in order to capture Gadamer's double meaning of a consciousness that is brought about by virtue of the movement of history or historical effect, as well as the modern consciousness’ awareness of this historical coming-into-being. See Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, “Translator's Preface,” in Gadamer, Truth and Method, xi–xix, at xv, and Gadamer, “Foreword to the Second Edition,” in Truth and Method, xxv–xxxvi, at xxx.
39 Such interpretations focus on Eliot's provocative remark that in his consciousness of the past, the individual artist will engage in a “continual surrender of himself” and a “continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 6–7.
40 Ibid., 4.
41 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 282.
42 Eliot himself documents the influence of Dawson on his thinking in the Preface to each of these works. See Eliot, T. S., The Idea of a Christian Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940) v–viiGoogle Scholar, at vi and idem, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture(New York: Harcourt, 1949) 7. Eliot was already familiar with Dawson's work by the late 1920s. By that time, Dawson's first two books had been reviewed by The Criterion, where Eliot was editor, and he had even written Dawson inviting him to contribute an essay to the journal. See Lockerd, Benjamin, “Beyond Politics: T. S. Eliot and Christopher Dawson on Religion and Culture,” in T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition (ed. Lockerd, Benjamin G.; Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014) 217–236Google Scholar, at 217–19. The thinkers’ intellectual kinship was further facilitated by their mutual participation in The Moot, a group of Christian intellectuals who met periodically between 1938 and 1947. See Kojecký, Roger, T. S. Eliot's Social Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972) 164Google Scholar, 237–39.
43 Lockerd's chapter is the most elaborate in establishing the nature and extent of Eliot's intellectual indebtedness to Dawson, and he focuses, in particular, on their shared cultural outlook, referring to Dawson as “[Eliot's] primary mentor on cultural issues.” Lockerd, “Beyond Politics,” 218. In his biography of Eliot, Russell Kirk also notes, “Of social thinkers in his own time, none influenced Eliot more than Dawson.” Eliot and His Age, 253. And, in his intellectual biography of Dawson, Bradley Birzer similarly states, “Eliot was quite taken with Dawson's views, and it would be difficult if not impossible to find a scholar who influenced Eliot more.” Birzer, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2007) 6.
44 This identification of history with the intellect's escape from material causality is a feature of Eliot's thinking that is neglected, in particular, by Shusterman, who imputes to Eliot a Heideggerian notion of Dasein (“there-being” or “being-there”) and the concrete knowing that this entails, while comparing him to Gadamer. See T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, 110–12. Certainly, this characterization is correct with respect to Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. However, Shusterman assumes that Eliot's awareness of the limitedness of our horizon of understanding similarly implies a recognition of concreteness, which need not be the case. The partial perspective afforded by a historical period of human thought and the individual minds therein provides an account of consciousness that is limited without ever touching on the question of facticity or the phenomenality that contributes to human knowing. Allusions to partiality of perspective in Eliot's writing, however, are continually taken by Shusterman to imply the same concrete, existential sensibility that Gadamer inherits from Heidegger, an assumption that is at least questionable in light of the intellectualism in Eliot's work on religion and culture, to be discussed below.
45 Lockerd, “Beyond Politics,” 220–22. Lockerd points, in particular, to Dawson's article in The Criterion entitled, “The End of an Age,” which, he argues, demonstrates these substantial affinities with Eliot's thinking. In this piece, he says, one observes “the touchstones of Eliot's cultural criticism, where we find the same history of ideas, the same emphasis on the effects of secularism, and a similar proposal of a renewed integration of Christianity and culture.” Ibid., 220.
46 Birzer, Sanctifying the World, 109.
47 Dawson, Christopher, “T. S. Eliot on the Meaning of Culture,” in Dynamics of World History (ed. Mulloy, John J.; New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956) 106Google Scholar.
48 Christopher, Dawson, “The End of an Age,” The Criterion 9 (1930) 392Google Scholar.
49 Ibid., 392.
50 See Dawson, Christopher, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (1st ed.; 1929; repr., London: Sheed and Ward, 1945)Google Scholar. Page numbers taken from the reprinted edition.
51 Dawson, Progress and Religion, 11–12.
52 Ibid., 221.
53 Ibid.
54 Birzer, Sanctifying the World, 23. Dawson was explicit about the extent of this indebtedness, indicating at one point that “nearly all of his ideas were ‘an attempt to reinterpret and reapply the Augustinian theory of history.’” Dawson, Oxford, To Professor Schlesinger, Notre Dame, IN, January 25, 1950, Box 15, Folder 124, UST/CDC, quoted in Birzer, Sanctifying the World, 26. Birzer effectively links all three of the thinkers in this line of influence, stating not only that it would be difficult to find a thinker who influenced Eliot more than Dawson (see n. 43 above), but that it would likewise be difficult to find a greater influence on Dawson than St. Augustine. Sanctifying the World, 63.
55 Birzer, Sanctifying the World, 72–73.
56 Dawson, “T. S. Eliot on the Meaning of Culture,” 108.
57 Birzer argues that in seeing culture and the individual as the meeting point or metaxy between the spiritual and the material realms, Dawson at once avoids “extreme spiritualism” and “extreme materialism.” Sanctifying the World, 72. This is true, insofar as it is possible to conceive of a position more extreme than Dawson's, and Birzer's advertence to gnosticism is illustrative in that regard. However, it does not follow that any position short of the extreme outlook of gnosticism will tout court avoid spiritualism or intellectualism.
58 Dawson, Christopher, Religion and Culture (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2013) 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Eliot describes culture as the “incarnation” of the religion of a people. See Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 27, 32.
59 Dawson, “T. S. Eliot on the Meaning of Culture,” 109. To be sure, Eliot can be seen as less extreme in his dualism than Dawson, who with this remark expresses qualified concern regarding Eliot's conviction that religion and culture are “inseparable,” and Dawson aims to remind him that these elements are “essentially distinct.” Ibid., 107–8. However, while Eliot says that he is aiming to avoid the idea of a “relation” (which would imply separation) between religion and culture, he also rejects the idea of their “identification.” See Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 31–32. Religion and culture might, therefore, be seen as inseparable but distinct, for Eliot. His point in maintaining this distinction would thus appear to be a metaphysical concern with preserving the transcendence of religion, since the distinction is primarily based on culture's materiality. In this sense, Eliot appears to be more Dawsonian than Dawson is aware.
60 Cervantes, Fernando, “Progress and Tradition: Christopher Dawson and Contemporary Thought,” Logos 2, no. 2 (Spring 1999) 84–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 86. For this reason, Dawson can be seen as a “faithful heir of the romantic tradition” who saw it as “a welcome corrective [to] . . . the rationalist conviction that the empirical physical sciences constituted the paradigm of all knowledge.” Ibid., 87.
61 Dawson, “The End of an Age,” 397. Despite his anti-Christian polemics, Dawson goes so far as to express a qualified admiration for Friedrich Nietzsche's Romantic assertion of the free spirit against modern scientific rationalism. Ibid., 388, 391.
62 Dawson, Progress and Religion, 30.
63 Ibid., 32. The reference here is to the thinking of Spengler and Hegel.
64 Ibid., 44–45.
65 Dawson, “T. S. Eliot on the Meaning of Culture,” 108. Birzer's extensive account of Dawson's view of human beings as homo religiosus leaves no doubt regarding this primacy of religious belief in the ordering and directing of culture. Sanctifying the World, 75–84.
66 Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 69, 74, 83.
67 Ibid., 27.
68 Ibid., 69. Eliot echoes his earlier work on prejudice here, noting, “No religion can be wholly ‘understood’ from the outside—even the sociologist's purposes. . . . No one can wholly escape the religious point of view, because in the end one either believes or disbelieves.” And, echoing Gadamer's hermeneutical conclusions, he says, “The reader accordingly must try, not only to make allowance for the religious views of the author, but, what is more difficult, to make allowance for his own—and he may never have examined thoroughly his own mind. So both writer and reader must be on guard against assuming that they are wholly detached.” Ibid., 69–70.
69 Ibid., 126. It may seem surprising to see Eliot use this term, in light of his earlier rejection of Durkheim's idea that there could ever be any such thing as a social “fact.” However, Eliot clearly has something different in mind than the ideal of the modern social sciences, in light of his rejection of detached observation above and his acknowledgment of the inevitability of prejudice in sociological understanding (see n. 68). Moreover, he ends this passage with a citation of the very different conception of the relationship between facts and values belonging to the sociologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard: “The answer would seem to be that the sociologist should also be a moral philosopher and that, as such, he should have a set of definite beliefs and values in terms of which he evaluates the facts he studies as a sociologist.” Evans-Pritchard, E. E., “Social Anthropology,” Blackfriars 27 (1946) 409–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 414, quoted in Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 70.
70 Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 126.
71 Ibid., 32.
72 See Lockerd, “Beyond Politics,” 225 and see also Christopher McVey, “Backgrounds to The Idea of a Christian Society: Charles Maurras, Christopher Dawson, and Jacques Maritain,” in T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition (ed. Lockerd), 179–93, at 187.
73 Eliot's essay, “Religion and Literature,” written in 1935, stands out as an early, prominent illustration of this normative authority of religion vis-à-vis culture. In the early pages of this essay, Eliot expresses the concern that if literature and the criticism used to judge it were completely secularized or “detached” from any theological background, such detachment would undermine the salutary relationship between religion and culture. In other words, because Eliot sees religious truth as residing exclusively in principle or doctrine, the possibility of culture being independent of the regulation of theological principle represents the drift of ethical standards in some arbitrary direction, i.e., in whatever direction the culture happens to move. As will be seen below, holding steadfastly to a theological “code” is Eliot's preferred remedy for modern secularism, which ultimately requires the separation of Christian literary standards from those of the rest of society, in order to protect the latter from the corrupting influence of a degraded culture. In Eliot's call in this essay for a conscious awareness of the “gulf fixed” between Christians and the larger secular society, it is difficult not to hear echoes of St. Augustine's two cities. See Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” in Selected Essays, 343–54, esp. 343–44, 353.
74 Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 27 [italics in original].
75 Ibid., 27, 34.
76 See, for example, Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 29 and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 73.
77 Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 29 [italics in original]. In these and the preceding pages, Eliot alternates between characterizing the relationship between religion and culture as one of a “unity” or “identification,” on the one hand, and a “relation” or “separation,” on the other. The entire discussion leads up to his conclusion that these articulations, while capturing something of the relationship, are each “errors” to be avoided. Ibid., 31.
78 Ibid., 31–32. Eliot also speaks of the “conscious conformity of behavior” with Christian belief among his men of state. The Idea of a Christian Society, 27.
79 Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 34, 37.
80 Ibid., 37. The educational system, while not designed to compel belief, aims to “train people to be able to think in Christian categories.” Ibid., 26.
81 Ibid., 43.
82 Ibid., 9.
83 Thus, even without such cognizance, Eliot says what unifies the activity of the Christian Community is a religious-social “code of behavior.” Ibid., 27, 33.
84 Ibid., 32.
85 See, in particular, Gadamer, Hans-Georg, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986)Google Scholar and various essays in idem, Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics (trans. Joel Weinsheimer; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). Other writings related to Gadamer's practical philosophy can be found in idem, Reason in the Age of Science (trans. Frederick G. Lawrence; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), as well as his discussion of phronesis in the context of interpretation in Truth and Method, esp. 309–20.
86 Gadamer is anything but systematic when it comes to his discussion of religion and religious experience. However, his philosophical hermeneutics has in recent years received a considerable degree of attention in the fields of theology and biblical hermeneutics, and from philosophers interested in the dialogue between religion and philosophy. An interview with Gadamer shortly before his death in 2002 explored this dialogue and substantiated Gadamer's understanding of “philosophical hermeneutics . . . [as] a search for transcendence” and his view that “his entire work can be seen as a sustained phenomenological description of transcendence.” Jens Zimmermann, “Ignoramus: Gadamer's ‘Religious Turn’” Symposium 6 (2002) 203–17, at 203, 209–10. Gadamer's more theological writings often engage with ancient Greek conceptions of the divine, particularly as found in the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, which he characterizes as “philosophical theology.” “On the Divine in Early Greek Thought,” in Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, 37–57, at 37.
87 Wachterhauser, “Gadamer's Realism,” 150.
88 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 318, 320, 536.
89 P. Christopher Smith, “Translator's Introduction,” in Gadamer, The Idea of the Good, vii-xxxi, at xxi.
90 Gadamer, The Idea of the Good, 11.
91 Smith, Hermeneutics and Human Finitude: Toward a Theory of Ethical Understanding (New York: Fordham University Press, 1991) 217. Smith notes the strong affinities of Gadamer here with Edmund Burke, who draws on the tradition of analogia entis in Medieval philosophy, itself inherited from Aristotle. Ibid., 216–17. For broader treatments of Gadamer's ethical thinking, which draw explicit connections with that of Burke, see ibid., esp. ch. 3, “The Ethical Implications of Gadamer's Theory of Interpretation” and “Conclusion: Gadamerian Conservatism”; Holston, Ryan R., “Two Concepts of Prejudice,” History of Political Thought 35 (2014) 174–203Google Scholar.
92 Smith, Hermeneutics and Human Finitude, 229.
93 Smith notes the parallel implication for ethical reasoning, which is that “there is no logos without ergon, which is to say, no reason and reasoning without deed . . . there is neither logos nor ergon without a hexis or predisposition to choose the appropriate course of action in reasoning or deliberation.” Hermeneutics and Human Finitude, 230–31.
94 To be sure, the understanding behind any articulation and reception of religious truth, according to Gadamer, is best understood as a glimpse of the transcendent, whose communication merely points toward the experience of divine presence and the eternal. See Gadamer, “Articulating Transcendence,” in The Beginning and the Beyond: Papers from the Gadamer and Voegelin Conferences Supplementary Issue of Lonergan Workshop, Volume 4 (ed.Fred Lawrence; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984) 1–12.
95 Joel Weinsheimer, “Translator's Preface,” in Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, vii–xiv, at x.
96 Weinsheimer quoting Acts 17:22–7 in ibid., x–xi.
97 Weinsheimer, “Translator's Preface,” xi.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.
100 See especially Gadamer, “On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics” and “Aristotle and Imperative Ethics,” in Hermeneutics, Religion and Ethics, 18–36, 142–61.
101 Gadamer, “Aristotle and Imperative Ethics,” 30.
102 It is for this reason that in his critique of Kantian deontology, Gadamer uses the Christian commandment to love one another as an example of that which is ultimately incapable of articulation as a formal principle. Ibid., 26–27.
103 It might be thought that the abstract character of Eliot's philosophy of history is, in the end, attributable to the difference of orientation that comes from his lifelong métier as a poet and literary critic, whereas Gadamer developed no such orientation. Certainly, there is always the potential, and perhaps even a propensity, for the poet or critic to succumb to the excesses of abstraction. However, it would be inappropriate to see this disciplinary orientation as the cause of the differences identified in the present essay. Indeed, it is worth noting that Gadamer, for his part, spent his academic career in the fields of philology and philosophy and was steeped in the German Idealist tradition. Furthermore, even to the degree that there is some truth in the foregoing assertion, it should be acknowledged that the other influences identified above were additionally operative on Eliot's thinking. Thus, the present essay has highlighted the reductive empirical orientation against which Eliot was reacting, along with the substantial influence of Dawson on his mature intellectual development. Additionally, one might further consider the waning influence during Eliot's career of Irving Babbitt, one of his principal intellectual mentors at Harvard. Indeed, it is interesting to note that although Babbitt himself was a professor of Comparative Literature, he possessed—in contrast to Eliot—a highly concrete, even Aristotelian understanding of morality. In sum, the observation that Eliot's poetical orientation was the cause of his intellectualism might shed some degree of light on this tendency in his thinking, but it is ultimately too blunt to suffice as an explanation.
