Horizons of Passion: Hermeneutics as Fusion or as Fracture

History of the Human Sciences 37 (3-4):200-222 (2024)
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Abstract

How can a post-Christian, secular audience understand the devoutly Christian, sacred music of Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion? This article addresses this question with reference to the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Blumenberg. Their confrontation reveals broad implications for the theory of humanistic interpretation at large. Gadamer celebrates Bach as a ‘classical’ touchstone of Western culture whom we may productively interpret through a ‘fusion of horizons’. Blumenberg, by contrast, cautions that our relation to Bach's Passion is fractured because it is impossible to ‘pace off the horizon’. Blumenberg emphasizes the first-person experience of the diminution of historical meaning, a position this article calls ‘shattered hermeneutics’. The article concludes that Blumenberg's interpretation of Bach and his critique of Gadamer thereby usefully and plausibly deepen and radicalize hermeneutics.

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David Liakos
Houston Community College System

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Truth and Method.H. G. Gadamer - 1975 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36 (4):487-490.
Retrieving Realism.Hubert Dreyfus & Charles Taylor - 2015 - Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Edited by Charles Taylor.
Hermeneutics and the Conservatism of Listening.David Liakos - 2020 - Cosmos and History 16 (2):495-519.

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