This post isn’t yet logically tight, but what the heck!

When is a performative contradiction not a contradiction? When the ‘performative contradiction’ objection is a tu quoque fallacy.

So what is a performative contradiction? We need look no further than Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police to answer this question. Hollywood actor Gary Johnston (the Tom Cruise parody) is approached by Spottswoode, a United States Government agent, to join the Team America forces. Spottswoode proposes that Gary meet the rest of the team. Gary agrees; Spottswoode and Gary get into Spottswoode’s limousine to make their way to Team America headquarters. But to Gary’s surprise the limousine doesn’t drive, it flies. This is the dialogue that ensues:

Gary Johnston: OK, a limousine that can fly. Now I have seen everything.
Spottswoode: Really? Have you seen a man eat his own head?
Gary Johnston: No.
Spottswoode: So then you haven’t seen everything.

US Government agent Spottswoode and Hollywood actor Gary Johnston take a trip to Team America headquarters

And Gary will never see a man eat his own head because to eat one’s head is impossible. A man simply cannot eat his own head for one good reason: the mouth is a part of the head. So to eat all of one’s head one would have to eat one’s mouth. But how can one eat one’s mouth with one’s mouth? You may get the lips down, but that’s about it. Once you get to the teeth and jaw, you’re done. At this point anyone who tries to do this will realise that he’s engaged in a performative contradiction. (No doubt dejection would follow.) Insofar as we maintain that eating involves chewing and to chew we need to have a mouth, including teeth and a jaw, then there comes a point when you cannot eat any more of your head because the very apparatus required for eating are part of the head.

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In the process of shifting my research from political philosophy to hermeneutics, as I will be over the next few weeks, I thought I’d publish a post on Jürgen Habermas’s objections to Gadamer’s conclusions in Truth and Method, particularly as they apply to politics. One should never transition too quickly.

Gadamer (1997)

The title of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s magnum opus, Truth and Method, captures the essence of his project. This title discloses Gadamer’s central contention that truth and method are not equivalent. For Gadamer, the modern view that only by adopting and using an appropriate method may one reach truth in both the natural and social sciences is mistaken. It is this (what others would call ‘scientistic’) view of truth-as-method that Gadamer sets out to describe and attack in Truth and Method. In place of emphasis on a method for reaching truth, in Truth and Method Gadamer sets out a program for a hermeneutics or ‘method’ of interpretative understanding of the ‘other’ — be that other a tradition, cultural group, a text, what have you.

Although Habermas and Gadamer share a loathing for instrumental reason — that form of reasoning associated with modernity, technology and science (including the ‘dismal science’ of economics) — Habermas objects to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Gadamer defends the role of prejudice or pre-judgement in interpretive understanding, as will be clarified in what follows. Habermas argues, however, that Gadamer’s defence of prejudgements goes beyond recognising that prejudgements are vital for understanding the other to further conclude that prejudgements are based on knowledge. For Habermas, from the fact that understanding the other requires understanding that other’s and one’s own history and traditions — that other’s and one’s own prejudgements — it does not follow that those prejudgements qualify as knowledge.

Habermas argues that to hold that prejudgements are a form of knowledge is to hold that authority or tradition is a source of knowledge. What Habermas aims to demonstrate through his own work, however, is that traditions can contain what he calls ‘systematically distorted communication’, a type of communication that falls short of an ideal of how communication should function and produces a response that is somehow tainted. This less-than-ideal type of communication can reinforce relations of domination. Accordingly, Habermas argues that systematically distorted communication precludes any necessary relationship between the prejudgements inherited from a tradition and knowledge, and that insofar as a tradition reproduces relations of domination the prejudgements upon which it depends are illegitimate.

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