From the Renaissance period, the imperative that created Europe has had to assert itself al a problem that, to the Medieval conscience, would have been unsolvable: the lost of a common mythic conscience. Without that linking origen of Europe, ideas such as the absolute value of a person or personal freedom, were not so evident nowadays. It is then that Political Philosophy becomes essential in trying to justify theoretically, the necessary social conditions for living together in a world that everyone of us live as a fragmentary set of differenciated worldviews, with the result that a person is really a world.
The problem is even worst if we consider that, specially from the II World War, Europe realizes that its way of life based on an almost world-wide technical-industrial society lacks the resources to make our world habitable. The technification of nature and our world is already at the end of a process of desmythologization: there are no anthropological references to live in the world. In other words, the ways of life given make people unable to identify themselves with their culture. Such social ways of life seem to be subordinated to an automatism in which social contribution is just something controlled before-hand: it is the society in which the administrative bureaucracy has taken an unavoidable importance. The manegement scientifically organized threatens decision and choose, kills creativity and, at the same time, frees personal liberty from any responsibility. Rationalization covering every field of life cause a despersonalization which young people rejects vigorously: something tells us that social unity does not have to do with homogeneity and that, in fact, we do not believe in anything that joins us.
In 1982 Richard Bernstein accused Gadamer of being excessivily optimistic when he considered that there could be a responsible choice in relation to moral ends in a modern world where there are no unifying social principles. Gadamers answered him in a well-known letter doubting about the existence of any human society where common interests are only formed by social engineers, through direct and nameless forces. "Rather, says Gadamer, I am concerned with the fact that the displacement of human reality never goes so far that no forms of solidarity exist no longer"[1]. According to Gadamer, the possibility of existence of a social reason goes before the idea of solidarity. If it is true that science cannot replace the comprehension of our world and the decision that people take as human beings, the question to be answered is: What kind of basis for peaceful coexistence is solidarity?
There is the temptation, which European Enlightment already explored, of trusting the existence of an objective knowledge of social reason which ruled the relations and aims of a political community. But the truth is that this search of knowledge cannot stablish rationally and with general validity the direction of human acts. This has made Political Philosophy think and suspect that, in general, human deliberations and motives cannot be viewed as a search of the appropriate mean for the attainment of an end because what we consider as right or wrong is always related to circunstances and conventions. However this should not give way to Scepticism because, implicitly, there is always something common behind individual deliberations. The advisability of each case is always limited by the existence of the unavoidable conditions which determine everybody a priori. In short, whatever the distance between people and cultures may be, there is an unavoidable condition that we could call principle of solidarity.
This notion of solidarity should not be understood as the participation in a perfect bureaucracy or in the abstract representacion in the State, but in being involved on what is shared by everybody: social life. This is exactly how freedom was conceived by the old Greeks. Scientific progress and the rationatization of political, legal and moral processes will never stop the need of friendship, which base our common life. There is always something that remains in all society: the fact of being organized in relation to a common vital order, so that people becomes a part of a society as long as they organize something in common.
But this is something that does not need be justified as a phenomenon of nature or a mathematical proposition. On the contrary, it is justifying in a factual way any kind of human activity. Acting means acting with others and deciding on common problems. Acting already implies a shared world: a set of things which are taken as evident, right or wrong. Instead of underlining the conventional character of what is considered right or wrong, it could be good to realize that the rationality on which praxis lies is more a special human attitude than an idea that guarantees peaceful coexistence. This is what Aristotle defined as practical knowledge, different from the theory or téjne. The Science about ends of human actions can only be understood by those who share a similar way of life. That is why Political Philosophy is a practical Science and, as theory, has a special character.
Hermeneutical Philosophy has paid attention to this aspect from Gadamer. For example, Smith argued that from a hermeneutical point of view there is no foundation to support an ethical principle[2]. Foster claimed that Gadamer would go a little further than Wittgenstein´ silent attitude towards ethics[3]. Both Wittgestein and Gadamer think that scientific conscience cannot give account of the moral fact or problems such as the sense of life or destiny. I think that Dadford is right when he says that Wittgenstein never regarded the possibility of a practical knowledge such as the Greeks formulated and he also considered all normative Science as irrational and impossible[4]. In this sense, Gadamer goes even further.
However, there is a central aspect which both authors share if we read Wittgenstein´s Lecture on Ethics carefully. Wittgenstein says here that language is not able to talk about what is unconditional and that reason must be silent when talking about the final sense of actions. Thus, the world is regarded in religious terms: a new viewpoint is open and language is now the main miracle. Language becomes senseless, even though it wants to go further, when applied to the ethical object. In the same sense Gadamer sustains that methodical reason is not enough: the certainty of the objetive study of culture is more related to the finding of what is reasonable and acceptable -to translate to our terms what has been expressed- than to deep explanations of causes. The work of Moral Sciences is not a self-transparency conscience process but to continue the conversation that was started some 24 centuries ago.
Thus, the principle of solidarity could be identified with this preexistence of "lebensWelt" that human life has in a linguistic form: the distance with the present and the ability to make far ends present. In a sense, the miracle of language is that of the way of human life. If Wittgenstein describes Philosophy "as the cure for intellectual diseases, for the tormenting puzzles of the mind" (PI, 1, 255), for Gadamer Philosophy becomes inescapably political. Philosophy is an architectural science for the rest of Sciences, specially because uncovers what comes before any sciencific method, technical application or the theory itself. This fact does not make philosophers speak in the name of reason, but puts them in the same position as the Renaissance humanists when they tried to reconcile strained relations between countries and also received a great deal of information from different cultures as well as the Greco-Roman tradition.
The growing unification of the planet and our concept of world has as a compasating tendency to cultural differenciation and the need of joining differences together. Solidarity as a foundation of world peace is, more than an idea, an imperative in the hands of evertybody: what joins us beyond strong differences just because we are human beings. Managing plurality is not certainly guaranteed as if it were the monetary union. The philosopher is not the great leader to reach unity, either. When philosophers speak in the name of reason there is usually some kind of totalitarianism. Gadamer and Wittgenstein tell us to be offstage: preparing, mending and sewing so as to keep the play going. It is a more modest watchtower than a seat in the stalls; but this lack of comfort make philosophers less suspect of being always suspecting and their compromise does not let them be too ironic with those on stage.
[1] R. BERNSTEIN, A Letter by Professor Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Beyond Objetivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis, Basil Blakwell, Oxford 1983, 264.
[2] P. C. SMITH, Hermeneutics and Human Finitude. A Theory of Ethical Understanding, Fordham University Press, New York 1991, 203-28.
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