Cynthia R . Nielsen

This book offers a sustained scholarly analysis of Gadamer's reflections on art and our experience of art. It examines fundamental themes in Gadamer's hermeneutical aesthetics such as play, festival, symbol, contemporaneity, enactment, art's performative ontology, and hermeneutical identity.

In Interstitial Soundings, Cynthia R. Nielsen brings music and philosophy into a fruitful and mutually illuminating dialogue. Topics discussed include the following: music's dynamic ontology, performers and improvisers as co-composers, the communal character of music, jazz as hybrid and socially constructed, the sociopolitical import of bebop, Afro-modernism and its strategic deployments, jazz and racialized practices, continuities between Michel Foucault's discussion of self-making and creating one's musical voice, Alasdair MacIntyre on practice, and how one might harmonize MacIntyre's notion of virtue development with Foucauldian resistance strategies.

Through examining Douglass's and Fanon's concrete experiences of oppression, Cynthia R. Nielsen demonstrates the empirical validity of Foucault's theoretical analyses concerning power, resistance, and subject-formation. Going beyond merely confirming Foucault's insights, Douglass and Fanon expand, strengthen, and offer correctives to the emancipatory dimensions of Foucault's project. Unlike Foucault, Douglass and Fanon were not hesitant to make transhistorical judgments condemning slavery and colonization. Foucault's reticence here signals a weakness in his account of human being. This weakness sets him at cross-purposes not only with Scotus, but also with Douglass and Fanon. Scotus's anthropology provides a basis for transhistorical moral critique; thus he is a valuable dialogue partner for those concerned about social justice and human flourishing.

Gadamer understands play as a fundamental aspect of human life and experience. Play manifests and shows itself in a multiplicity of practices and activities. For example, we discern play in children’s games such as hopscotch, the back-and-forth musical play of a jazz quartet, and the play-fighting of dogs and coyotes. In his reflections on art, Gadamer argues that play is integral to art’s dynamic ontology—that is, the artwork comes forth and “speaks” through the dialogical play-movement of the artwork and its engaged participants. Moreover, Gadamer stresses that the artwork exists only in its performance or enactment. That is, an artwork is not experienced as an object, which a detached subject examines. Rather, an artwork is a dynamic, communicative, and communal event. Thus, performers include not only the artists who compose or create the work and the musicians or actors who enact the work, but also spectators and auditors. Understood in this way, artworks exhibit a being-toward-others and are incomplete without engaged participants. This chapter seeks to elucidate Gadamer’s notion of play in its multiple senses and is especially concerned with his analysis of play as central to art’s being as a dynamic, communicative, multi-player event.

I argue that one can articulate an historically attuned and analytically rich model for understanding jazz in its various inflections. That is, on the one hand, such a model permits us to affirm jazz as an historically conditioned, dynamic hybridity. On the other hand, to acknowledge jazz's open and multiple character in no way negates our ability to identify discernible features of various styles and aesthetic traditions. Additionally, my model affirms the socio-political, legal (Jim Crow and copyright laws), and economic structures that shaped jazz. Consequently, my articulation of bebop as an inflection of Afro-modernism highlights the socio-political, and highly racialized context in which this music was created. Without a recognition of the socio-political import of bebop, one's understanding of the music is impoverished, as one fails to grasp the strategic uses to which the music and discourses about the music were put.

In this chapter, I bring my personal correspondence with inmate Michael X. Smith—correspondence that includes Michael's reflections on his own experience of incarceration—into conversation with Loïc Wacquant’s analyses of the prison, the ghetto, and the hyperghetto-carceral continuum.  Although Michael has not had the opportunity to read Wacquant's work, his commentary on prison life not only complements Wacquant's analyses but also adds an existential dimension to the discussion and helps us to remember the concrete human beings whose lives have been forever changed (and often for the worse) by their experience of incarceration. Through my exchanges with Michael, I have come to understand more intimately the layers of bureaucracy and official policies that one must learn to "work around." In other words, one must be able to flex and institute "plan B" (and C-Z) when one's original plans fall through. Michael's determination to prove his innocence and his ability to remain hopeful despite so many closed doors, empty promises, and bureaucratic "red tape" has served as both an inspiration and a motivating factor for me—not only in relation to this project, but also in life generally speaking.

This is my translation of Gadamer's 1990 lecture "The Diversity of Languages and Understanding of the World." "In his lecture, Gadamer presents his views of language and world in a distinctively hermeneutical key. For example, he emphasizes language as that which 'belongs to conversation.' That is, language as conversation helps to bring about understanding and involves the play of dialogical exchange. 'Language is not proposition and judgment; rather, it is what it is, only when it is question and answer.' Language involves another; it is on-the-way [unterwegs] to another. In fact, when addressing his question—what does world mean—Gadamer clarifies that humans and world are intimately connected; the world is that in which we are 'in the midst' and 'understanding is understanding oneself in the world.' But we are also in-the-world with others, and understanding ourselves in the world, means to understand ourselves with others. Gadamer goes so far as to say that our self-understanding as achieved in relation to others, as well as our understanding of others, should be taken in a moral and political sense. That is, the other is not there as merely a means to our ends or to exploit. Rather, 'the other indicates a principal limit to our self-love and self-centeredness. This is a general moral problem. It is also a political problem.' He goes on to emphasize the difficult task of achieving genuine solidarity with those from different cultures. Such a task requires language as conversation, the back-and-forth of dialogical exchange in which we come to understand the other and the other comes to understand us. Again and again, Gadamer underscores the task that each of has in light of our pluralistic world “to learn to bridge and reconcile the distances and differences between us and that means that we respect, look after, care for the other, and give one other a new hearing.” In contrast with the story of the Tower of Babel in which the people sought a pseudo-unity or 'oneness' driven by a will to dominate, Gadamer embraces both cultural and linguistic diversity and warns against reducing these multiple horizons 'by any special contrivance of unity [Einheitsmechanik].' He encourages us to seek out the open spaces that arise in our interactions with one another, to resist the levelling of language that information technology tends toward, and to 'cultivate language in its most distinctive possibilities.' In our present age of disinformation warfare, which threatens democracies worldwide and is a direct challenge to truth and the possibility of a meaningful dialogue with others, we would do well to linger with Gadamer’s hermeneutical and ethical insights and contemplate how we might bring these insights to bear on the global and political crises that we face today—Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, our climate catastrophe, and ever new forms of technical sophistry and disinformation that seek to erode our trust in truth, reality, and language itself."

Although most readers of Plato’s Symposium find Alcibiades’ speech humorous and delightful to read, commentators are divided on how to interpret it. This essay takes seriously Alcibiades’ portrait of Socrates as a satyr, whose peculiar philosophical eros gives rise to a philosophical practice that simultaneously attracts and repels. Despite Alcibiades’ flaws, the accusations that he levels against Socrates reveal tensions in the philosopher that are worth interrogating. Alcibiades’ speech, which both condemns and praises Socrates, proffers a complex picture of the challenges of the philosophical life and Socrates’ particular enactment of that life. The multiple textual clues in the Symposium—for example, Plato’s staging of Alcibiades’ speech as truthful and the stark contrast between Alcibiades and Apollodorus  indicate that Alcibiades’ censure of Socrates should be read with critical attentiveness and seriousness since the questions it raises are philosophically, not to mention ethically significant. By refusing to allow either Socrates or Alcibiades the last word, Plato’s text can be read as inviting his readers to participate in an ongoing interrogation of both figures—figures whose complexity and (dis)harmony of opposites continue to enchant and offend.
The notion of not having the last word, is a common theme in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s writings. For Gadamer, this means, among other things, that to engage in a genuine, reciprocal dialogue, one must remain open to the real possibility that one’s position is wrong or perhaps needs rethinking. This essay dialectically examines Socrates’ interactions with Alcibiades in the Symposium to see whether Socrates himself is, in fact, a good dialogue partner in Gadamer’s sense. My strategy is to offer a close reading of relevant passages of the Symposium in order to make manifest the dialectical and ethical tensions within the text, especially in the interaction of Socrates and Alcibiades. My aim is not to offer a detailed reading of Gadamer’s reading of specific Platonic dialogues;  rather, my aim is to articulate, as it were, a Gadamerian-inspired framework whose main structures include genuine dialogical openness to the other, anticipatory listening, risk, a willingness to put one’s own views to the test, and an embrace of one’s finitude. Having explained key aspects of Gadamer’s position, I then show how Socrates’ engagement with Alcibiades falls short of what Gadamer throughout his corpus emphasizes as hermeneutical virtues.

Central to Gadamerian hermeneutics is dialogical engagement, a back and forth “play” (Spiel) among interlocutors. For Gadamer, texts as well as works of art function as interlocutors capable of addressing and making a claim upon us. However, whether engaging a human dialogue partner or a text, one must approach the other with openness, which can be understood as a hermeneutic virtue. Consequently, in order for a fruitful dialogue to occur, one must embody a specific comportment to the other. In this sense, hermeneutics exhibits a politeness of sorts. If one considers the Latin roots (politus, polire) from which we derive our English term “polite,” relevant connections with notion of refinement and being “polished” emerge. That is, to be polite is in some sense to exhibit refinement, which often comes through a process of training or even suffering. One the one hand, openness to the other involves politeness or refinement in that one demonstrates respect for the other in a genuine willingness to hear the other’s view. Such refinement has been achieved through experience (Erfahrung) and continues to be achieved through dialogical engagement with others. On the other, it is also the case that hermeneutical dialogue involves elements of impoliteness, where one transgresses social norms in order to provoke a thoughtful, self-reflective response.

Like human existence itself, our enduring legacies—whether poetic, ethical, political, or philosophical—continually unfold and require recurrent communal engagement and (re)enactment. In other words, an ongoing performance of significant works must occur, and this task requires the collective human activity of remembering or gathering-together-again. In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima provides an account of human pursuits of immortality through the creation of artifacts—including laws, poems, and philosophical discourses—that resonates with Gadamer’s account of our engagement with artworks and texts. This essay explores commonalities between Gadamer and Plato through the complex character of Diotima, whose teachings on the processive character of human existence and her understanding of knowledge as dynamic have largely been ignored.

Comme l’existence humaine, notre héritage—qu’il soit poétique, éthique, politique ou philosophique—se développe continuellement et requiert un engagement commun et une remise en question permanente. Autrement dit, une représentation continue d’oeuvres significatives doit se produire, exigeant l’activité humaine collective de re-mémoration et de ré-assemblement. Dans Le Banquet de Platon, Diotime explore les poursuites humaines de l’immortalité par l’invention d’artéfacts—incluant des lois, des poèmes et des discours philosophiques qui font écho à l’explication de Gadamer sur nos relations avec les oeuvres d’art et les textes. Cet essai s’interroge sur les points communs entre Platon et Gadamer à travers la complexité de Diotime dont l’enseignement sur le caractère ‘processif’ de l’existence humaine et sa compréhension du savoir tel un processus dynamique sont largement ignorés.

This essay centers on Romare Bearden's art, methodology, and thinking about art, and likewise explores his attempt to harmonize personal aesthetic goals with sociopolitical concerns. Following an investigation of Bearden's work and thought, we turn to Hans‑Georg Gadamer's reflections on art and our experience (Erfahrung) of art. As the essay unfolds, we see how Bearden's approach to art and the artworks themselves resonate with Gadamer's critique of aesthetic consciousness and his contention that artworks address us. An important component of Gadamer's account is his emphasis on the spectator's active yet non-mastering role in the event of art's address – an event that implicates the spectator and has the potential to transform him or her. As we shall see, Gadamer's notion of aesthetic experience sharply contrasts with modern, subjectivizing aesthetics, as it requires not only active participatory engagement, but it also brings about a transformed " vision " and understanding of one's self, others, and the world. In closing, we return to Bearden in order to explore how his art unearths a crucial activity of our being-in-the-world. I call this activity " un-fabricating one's world " and discuss how it expands and enriches Gadamer's account.

This essay is concerned with Gadamer’s reflections on solidarity and practice as found in several of his later writings. While Gadamer offers a robust explanation of practice, practical reason, and how both are operative in solidarities, his investigations of solidarity are in no way systematic. He does, however, distinguish two aspects of solidarity, viz. what one might call “natural solidarity” and “avowed solidarity”. In contrast to natural solidarities, avowed solidarities require an intentional decision and commitment to act with others for a common cause. Since Gadamer’s writings on solidarity are more sketches than detailed treatises, we will bring his work into dialogue with feminist and political philosopher Sally Scholz. Scholz has devoted significant research to the concept of political solidarity. Like Gadamer, Scholz too is concerned with how we engage natural others and how our present practices harm and exploit them. By bringing Scholz’s and Gadamer’s work into dialogue, we gain a better understanding of different facets and types of solidarity, how they interrelate and influence one other, and how their interrelations might help to effect positive social and political changes for all who inhabit this world.

Several prominent contemporary philosophers, including Habermas, Caputo, and Bernasconi, have at times painted a negative picture of Gadamer as not only an uncritical traditionalist, but also as one whose philosophical project fails to appreciate difference. Against such claims, I argue that Gadamer’s reflections on art exhibit a genuine appreciation for alterity not unrelated to his hermeneutical approach to the other. Thus, by bringing Gadamer’s later works on our experience of art into conversation with his philosophical hermeneutics, we are able to better assess the viability of his philosophy in contemporary discussions of difference and alterity.
Sections two–five are devoted to (1) explaining key concepts in Gadamer’s account of our experience of art and art’s dynamic ontology and (2) highlighting how difference and the other’s enigmatic dimensions are upheld and integral to Gadamer’s account. In section six, I gesture toward a Gadamerian approach to avant-garde jazz, which underscores Gadamer’s openness to new expressions of art and alterity.

[Final draft for journal submission; do not circulate or cite]

Although Gadamer has been criticized, on the one hand, for being a ‘traditionalist’ and on the other, for embracing relativism, I argue that his approach to knowing, being, and being-in-the world offers contemporary theorists a third way, which is both historically attuned and able to address significant social and ethical questions. If my argument holds, then we ought to give Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics a fair hearing, as its import and application can be expanded and employed for contemporary ethical and sociopolitical purposes.1 In section one I discuss key features of Gadamer’s hermeneutics broadly construed, commenting on partial incommensurability, horizon-fusing, and—via dialogue with Charles Taylor’s essay—Gadamer’s notion of dialogical, open-ended understanding. Next, I explain Gadamer’s complex account of experience, comparing and contrasting it with Hegel’s account. In section two I continue my analysis of Gadamer’s understanding of a fusion of horizons and provide several musical analogies to further explicate key aspects of this concept. Throughout my essay I highlight how his philosophical hermeneutics and dialogical model of understanding not only emphasizes but also embraces our finitude and thus our partial claims on knowledge. Given his stress on our ontological and epistemological limitations, his model requires that in our quest to understand the other—whether a live dialogue partner or a text—we must continually put ourselves in question. In other words, Gadamerian dialogue necessitates a willingness and openness to hearing the other’s ‘voice’ in a reharmonized key and to creating a new language together. Lastly, in the final section I present a brief analysis of Gadamer’s interpretation of Plato’s doctrine of the forms. Having sketched the broad contours of my essay, I turn now to examine Gadamer’s model of dialogical understanding and partial knowledge.

Foucault’s later writings continue his analyses of subject-formation but now with a view to foregrounding an active subject capable of self-transformation via ascetical and other self-imposed disciplinary practices.  In my essay, I engage Foucault’s studies of ancient Greco-Roman and Christian technologies of the self with a two-fold purpose in view. First, I bring to the fore additional continuities either downplayed or overlooked by Foucault’s analysis between Greco-Roman transformative practices including self-writing, correspondence, and the hupomnēmata and Christian ascetical and epistolary practices. Second, I add exegetical support to recent arguments denying Foucault’s advocacy for the death of the subject per se.

In this essay I highlight the complexity of Foucault’s thought through an examination of the diverse philosophical traditions—from Kant, to Nietzsche, to Foucault’s phenomenological lineage via Cavaillès and Canguilhem—that influence his own distinctive project. In addition, I identify key Foucauldian concepts worthy of continued reflection and offer, as my own contribution to the dialogue, various musical analogies as hermeneutical and analytical “tools” that (1) illuminate and clarify Foucault’s ideas and (2) provide a coherent way to understand episteme change.

Frederick Douglass describes vividly how his socio-political identity was scripted by the white other and how his spatio-temporal existence was constrained through constant surveillance and disciplinary dispositifs. Even so, Douglass was able to assert his humanity through creative acts of resistance. In this essay, I highlight the ways in which Douglass refused to accept the other-imposed narrative, demonstrating with his life the truth of his being—a human being unwilling to be classified as thing or property. As I engage key events from Douglass’s narrative, I likewise explore the ways in which the resistance-tactics he performs complement Foucault’s elaboration of power relations and resistance possibilities, as well as Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse.

Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty’s overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted ‘blackness’. Through a re-telling of his own experiences of racism, Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the ‘white gaze’. In this essay I bring Fanon’s insights into conversation with Foucault’s discussion of panoptic surveillance. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of ‘blackness’ and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. Lastly, I discuss Fanon’s historically attuned ‘new humanism’, once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners.

Frantz Fanon recounts how his subjectivity as colonized other was constructed and how a politics of white assimilation contributed to his self-fragmentation. While cognizant of the social forces at play in systemic racialized contexts, Fanon, nonetheless, refuses to deny a black person’s agency. Fanon’s insistence that the oppressed retain their ability to act as free agents and to resist and (re)configure their subjectivity has political, ethical, and philosophical import, as it highlights the fact that the subjugated are not mere things determined from the outside. To the contrary, just as several contingent factors coalesced to create the historical situation in which the colonized subject finds herself, other equally contingent factors—including the oppressed engaging in intentional subversive acts and resistance strategies—can emerge and help to bring about socio-political transformations. Moreover, Fanon, like his teacher Aimé Césaire, understood that the process of decolonization and subject re-narration would occur over a period of time and in various stages. By studying Fanon’s complex relationship to the Négritude movement and by highlighting his appropriation and critique of its themes and variations, Fanon’s resistance tactics come into sharper focus. That is, contrary to worries of Fanon promoting a reactionary racialized essentialism, I argue that Fanon’s employment of essentialized narratives can be interpreted as a variant of (what Spivak calls) strategic essentialism. In short, Fanon, like Césaire, understood that different historical moments require different resistance strategies. His recognition of the need to adopt for a time essentialized narratives for therapeutic and upbuilding purposes, coupled with his understanding of the productive nature of socially constructed identities signals a movement beyond a mere reactionary response still trapped within a binary Manichean framework.

"Although contemporary Western culture and criticism has usually valued composition over improvisation and placed the authority of a musical work with the written text rather than the performer, this essay posits these divisions as too facile to articulate the complex dynamics of making music in any genre or form. Rather it insists that music should be understood as pieces that are created with specific intentions by composers but which possess possibilities of interpretation that can only be brought out through performance.
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This is a commentary on chapter two, “Critical Fusion: Toward a Genuine Hermeneutics of Suspicion” from Lorenzo Simpson's book, Hermeneutics as Critique. (It was presented in partial form at the 2021 NASPH conference as part of a book panel on Simpson's work) . The commentary focuses especially on two key notions in the chapter: 1)  second-order rationality and 2) counterfactual dialogical critique. [My commentary is also posted on http://hermeneuticalmovements.com/].

This course focuses on the philosophy of art and beauty. We will examine questions such as: What is the relationship between art and beauty? Must art be beautiful? Does art have a cognitive dimension? Does art communicate truth? What role do the emotions play in our experience of art? How do the phenomenological and hermeneutical traditions understand art? What role do culture, institutions, and the Artworld play in shaping our understanding and experience of art? We will investigate these questions both thematically and historically through a consideration of the views of ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophers among whom include Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Gadamer, and Jean-Luc Nancy. In addition to painting, we will discuss music and architecture.

Course Description: Phenomenologically speaking, how do we experience an artwork? Is our understanding of art primarily about clarifying specific types of aesthetic pleasure derived from our encounters with artworks? Does art have a cognitive dimension? Can art, as it were, "speak" to us and make a "claim" on our lives? Hans-Georg Gadamer responds to the last two questions with an emphatic yes. That is, for Gadamer art is a dialogical, communicative event that has the potential to radically transform our self-and world-understanding. This course focuses on Gadamer's phenomenologico-hermeneutical approach to art through a careful reading of part one of Truth and Method, where Gadamer engages in a complex dialogue with Kant's third Critique. We will also read selected essays from The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays and the Gadamer Reader. In his post Truth and Method writings on art and beauty, Gadamer continues to develop earlier notions of play, symbol, and the festival, all of which are central to his account of hermeneutical aesthetics and form part of his critique of certain over-subjectivizing tendencies in modern aesthetics. In addition to Gadamer's own texts, we will likewise read relevant articles from scholars working in the area of hermeneutical aesthetics.

Since the advent of industrialization it has become clear that modern technology is not simply tools and instruments, nor merely the application of scientific principles to human practice and production in fundamental ways. This course examines the nature and scope of technology with the aim of understanding its contemporary manifestations and their causes.

The term " hermeneutics " can be traced back to classical antiquity and originates from the Greek verb, hermeneuein, which means " to interpret. " However, neither Heidegger nor Gadamer limit interpretation to texts as earlier hermeneuts did; rather, they understand the activity of interpreting as basic to human existence and the human condition. In other words, we are interpreting beings. In this course we shall read, discuss, and dwell with significant portions of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method. Shorter readings from Gadamer will be assigned as well. One cannot overstate the importance of Heidegger's Being and Time and its formative influence on 20 th century Continental philosophy. Although in his later work, Heidegger tends to distance himself from hermeneutics, Being and Time, his magnum opus, is unmistakably influenced by the hermeneutical tradition. In fact, Gadamer credits Heidegger with having revealed the historicity of understanding and consequently liberating hermeneutics from its misguided quest for a method in the image of the natural sciences. The following include some of the key topics from Being and Time that we will discuss: the hermeneutic circle, facticity, thrownness, Dasein, readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and present/presence-at hand (Vorhandenheit), and aletheia. In Truth and Method Gadamer sets forth his own philosophical hermeneutics, making the important claim that all aspects of human understanding presuppose a hermeneutic dimension. Gadamer, in other words, argues that hermeneutics is universal in its scope. In addition, as the title itself suggests, one of Gadamer's principal aims in the work is to recover and disclose other ways of understanding and experiencing truth (such as the truths of art, religion, and history), which the Enlightenment in essence rejected through its emphasis on method. The following are some (by not all) of the topics that we will cover in our reading of Truth and Method: Gadamer's rehabilitation of tradition and authority (contra Enlightenment reductive views), his strategic employment of the term pre-judgment or prejudice (praejudicium), fusion of horizons, hermeneutical experience (Erfahrung, not Erlebnis), hermeneutical openness, and the need for dialogical engagement for genuine hermeneutic experience to occur.

In this essay, I draw attention to some of Ukraine's environmental agony, discuss some of the key articles of international humanitarian and international criminal law vis-à-vis environmental harm during wartime, analyze the history and meaning of ecocide, and make a preliminary argument that Russia's destruction of the Kakhova Dam constitutes an act of ecocide and should be treated and prosecuted as an environmental war crime.