Traditional remains: the politics of transmission in German philosophy and law since 1782

In light of the upsurge of appeals to “tradition” in contemporary cultural and political discourse, this dissertation attempts a philosophical and political-semantic analysis of the concept, with a specific focus on its place in German thought. These appeals from political and philosophical positions that appear wholly incompatible—ranging from tradition’s avowal in conservative and right-wing thought, to its centrality for postcolonial claims of redress for the devastating consequences of globalisation and colonialism— warrant an attempt to understand the concept in a more comprehensive and critical manner. A dismissal of the term as the atavistic other of “modernity” is no longer capable of taking stock of the various uses of the concept, nor the different political expectations bound up in its use.

The following study seeks to show that not only do singular traditions change internal to their hermeneutical form of self-reference, but the concept itself has a history, often occluded in its avowal, which we would be well advised to acknowledge rather than assume a self-evidence to its meaning. This history includes semantic translations and displacements leading to what might be called the “becoming concept of tradition”. That a term originally denoting a form of private property transfer in Roman Law would become a form of historical experience implies a political history capable of being analysed philosophically. This necessarily includes the role of European colonisation and its imposition of the term tradition as both an anthropological and historical form of differentiation.

The dissertation analyses this history within modern German thought, without however claiming to be an exhaustive survey. Its point of departure is the period following the semantic rendition of tradition as Überlieferung, and its subsequent conceptual differentiation from its original referent. While formally a direct translation of the Latin cognate traditio, Überlieferung came to take on the sense of transmission. Both history and tradition rely on an often under-thematised conception of transmission; for both require, fundamentally, that something of the past transmits itself to the present. They differ, however, regarding what is transmitted, the institutional forms under which this transmission takes place, and the independence of the present in its knowledge and shaping of that past. This informs the political stakes in each of the chapters of the study.

In centring on this specific tension of transmission—both shared and distinct— within history and tradition, the following work hopes to contribute to a richer appreciation of transmission as a central philosophical concept. It is structured in three Parts, each of which focuses on a specific dispute concerning transmission. It locates these debates within the context of a perceived “crisis” to tradition, in response to which new and surprising transformations take place to the concept. Part One investigates the role of tradition in Hamann and Herder’s ‘metacritiques’ of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, especially in relation to the role of language and a history of mankind, in contrast to history from a ‘cosmopolitan perspective’. Part Two studies Schelling’s Positive Philosophy and the jurist von Savigny’s Positive Law in the context of the Napoleonic Wars and their respective conflicts with Hegel regarding its philosophical significance. Part Three centres on a debate, both latent and actual, between Heidegger and Benjamin on the legacy of the so-called crisis of traditional experience within modernity. These two chapters examine their respective accounts of the site and subject of tradition capable of gathering and transmitting the past, and whether these subjects are ultimately compatible with their notions of differential time and discontinuity, respectively