Philosophy

Employee Reactions to Leader-Initiated Crisis Preparation: Core Dimensions Marcus Selart • Svein Tvedt Johansen • Synnøve Nesse Received: 9 January 2012 / Accepted: 8 August 2012 / Published online: 26 August 2012  Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 Abstract Crisis prevention plans are usually evaluated based on their effects in terms of preventing or limiting organizational crisis. In this survey-based study, the focus was instead on how such plans influence employees' reactions in terms of risk perception and well-being. Five different organizations were addressed in the study. Hypothesis 1 tested the assumption that leadership crisis preparation would lead to lower perceived risk among the employees. Hypothesis 2 tested the conjecture that it would also lead to a higher degree of well-being. Both hypotheses were supported. The results and their implications are discussed. Keywords Leadership  Human resource management  Crisis management  Employee relations  Risk perception  Well-being The last decade has seen a strong emphasis on crisis management (Mitroff 2005; Gillespie and Dietz 2009). A crisis can be described in many ways. Taking a number of features into account it is defined here as an important threat to people that can have negative consequences, if not handled properly (Coombs 2007a, b, c). It has been suggested that a crisis can create three related threats: (1) public safety, (2) financial loss, and (3) reputation loss (Coombs 2007a, b, c). These are often interrelated such that industrial accidents may create damage to the reputation of an organization and thus cause financial losses. In fact, all crises threaten to tarnish an organization's reputation, since a crisis reflects poorly on it (Dilenschneider 2000; Coombs 2007a, b, c). The scope of effective crisis management is to deal with the threats sequentially. The most urgent concern relates to public safety. First, when the issues that belong to this area have been remedied, a shift of focus to reputation issues and financial concerns can be made. The ultimate goal of all crisis management is to protect the organizations from threats and/or reduce the impact felt by threats (Coombs 2007a, b, c). According to Egelhoff and Sen (1992) crises arise when there is a major incongruence between the expectations of a corporation and what happens in the environment. A crisis ''(1) threatens high-priority values of the organization, (2) presents a restricted amount of time in which a response can be made, and (3) is unexpected or unanticipated by the organization'' (Hermann 1963, p. 64). Crises affect the organization and its different constituencies as well as the social environment surrounding the organization. They can incur irreparable damage to local communities, shareholders, and employees who may face cutbacks and even layoffs. Organizational crises moreover often entail a loss of trust and ensuing distrust on the part of employees who may be less willing to engage in trust-informed behavior including information sharing, collaboration, and extrarole behavior (Dirks and Ferrin 2001, 2002). Crisis also threatens the legitimacy of the organization (Gillespie and Dietz 2009). This threat is aggravated by intensified media scrutiny and social media sites capable of spreading negative information around the world in an instant. In this article, the focus is thus on how crisis preparation among leaders is carried out and communicated to the rest M. Selart (&)  S. Nesse Department of Strategy and Management, Norwegian School of Economics, Breiviksveien 40, 5045 Bergen, Norway e-mail: email@example.com S. T. Johansen Harstad University College, Harstad, Norway 123 J Bus Ethics (2013) 116:99–106 DOI 10.1007/s10551-012-1448-6 of the organization and what impact this has on the risk perception and psychological well-being of the employees. It is better to prevent crises than handle them when they are fully developed. As a result, numerous organizations have invested heavily in crisis prevention plans that (i) seek to prevent crisis in the first place and (ii) help deal with crisis when they do happen. Crisis prevention plans are elaborate and often costly. So far their primary justification has been to prevent and handle crises. In line with this, most of the research on crisis prevention and crisis prevention plans has been on how they help organizations prevent a potential crisis to develop into a full blown crisis (Schenker-Wicki et al. 2010). Yet, crisis prevention plans have effects that go beyond prevention. Such plans can affect employees' perception of risk as well as employees' general sense of well-being, regardless of any impending or actual crises. An important phase of the crisis management process is the pre-crisis phase. Much research has been devoted to the management of crisis events after they have occurred, as opposed to the prevention of these situations (Seeger and Ulmer 2001; Simola 2003; Ulmer and Sellnow 2000). To some extent, the research that exists in this area has focused on the impact that leadership integrity could have on organizational culture, and the emergence of crisis situations (Cummings and Anton 1990; Schwartz 2000; Sims and Brinkman 2002). Other research has considered particular ethical theories for prevention activities (Simola 2005b). In the pre-crisis phase, prevention plays an important part since it involves seeking to reduce known risks that could lead to a crisis. There is recent research showing that organizations are better able to handle crises when they (1) have a crisis management plan that is updated at least annually, (2) have a designated crisis management team, (3) conduct exercises to test the plans and teams at least annually, and (4) pre-draft some crises messages (Barton 2001; Coombs 2006, 2007a, b, c). Planning and preparation are prerequisites for organizations to be able to react faster and to make more effective decisions. A crisis management plan specifies important contact information, reminders of what ought to be done in a crisis and guidelines for how the crisis response should be documented. It is not a step-by-step guide but rather a reference tool (Barton 2001; Fearn-Banks 2001; Coombs 2006, 2007a, b, c). It has been common practice in industry to establish an operational level emergency response plan (ERP) together with an emergency response organization (ERO). These have usually been based both on legislative and branch standards. Training has been carried out regularly. The scenarios have typically described human–technology interaction crises, that is, accidents and fires, etc. However, most organizations have started to apply a wider perspective that also considers strategic concerns. Hence, there has been a development of a legitimate concern for business continuity (BC) as an important aspect of strategic crisis management (Herbane et al. 2004; Simola 2005a). BC is all about taking planned and rehearsed steps to protect the business and its stakeholders (Herbane et al. 2004). This is needed in order to aid the organizations' ability to recover and increase their chances of survival when facing a crisis. The Rational for Crisis Preparation Organizations are sometimes seen as more or less perfect, but they have their faults (Bauman 2010). Due to planning mistakes, ignored procedures or simply chance, an organization is capable of harming their employees. It is therefore believed that leading an organization through a crisis requires rational decision making guided by an ethical approach (Snyder et al. 2006; Bauman 2010). It is imperative that ethical considerations are part of any crisis management strategy. The application of a strictly ''economic'' or rational approach may produce greater resentment and reputation damage (Bauman 2010; Hosmer 1996; Snyder et al. 2006). An alternative approach may, for instance, focus on the ethics of care (Simola 2003). Taking this approach into account, practitioners and scholars should develop risk management models and recommendations to identify, prevent, and prepare for crises before they happen (Francis and Armstrong 2003; Simola 2005b). An ethic of care emphasizes strong relations with others and the fulfilling of responsibilities (Simola 2003). It has been specified by Gilligan (1982) how one's actions may influence the feelings of others. To consider the feelings of others is important for maintaining relationships (Tronto 1993). Fulfilling responsibilities to others is also important in this context. Hence, according to Simola (2003) an ethic of care is more occupied with fulfilling conflicting responsibilities to different people than with fulfilling conflicting rights among them. Solving moral problems is less about impartiality and standards and more about the complex features intrinsic to relationships among people (Bauman 2010; Simola 2003). An ethics of care is therefore to quite a large degree preoccupied with maintaining and enhancing relationships, as well as with the understanding and responding to the feelings and needs of others in their particular contexts. Also, important is the ability to find creative ways of fulfilling responsibilities both to others and to self, even in the face of seemingly divergent or conflicting needs (Simola 2005b). The key issue here is really the relationship between leadership and employees. The way leadership is handling the pre-crisis phase most often has an impact on its 100 M. Selart et al. 123 relationship with the employees. Such a relationship may be seen as a psychological contract. A psychological contract represents the mutual beliefs, perceptions, and informal obligations between the leadership and the employees. It governs the dynamics of the relationship and defines how the work is to be done on a detailed level. It has been proposed by Lester et al. (2007) that a high level of environmental uncertainty caused by changes can lead to a perception in employees of an eroding, transitional psychological contract, and that the leadership is not fulfilling their side of the contract. This can lead to a perception that the leadership does not value the relationship which in turn can have a detrimental impact on the employee's organizational commitment. Feelings of stress and lack of wellbeing may develop as a result of this. The Effects of Crisis Preparation on Employees We argue that leadership behavior in the pre-crisis phase to a high degree is linked to risk perception among the employees. As will be seen, the concepts of ''risk perception'' and ''trust'' are highly interconnected. The relationship between risk and trust has been analyzed by different quarters. According to Das and Teng (2004), perceived risk is equaled with the assessed probabilities of not having desirable results. The perspective implies that risk and subjective trust are seen as inverse dimensions in the sense that high subjective risk equals low trust and low subjective risk equals high trust. A complementary perspective has been launched by Mayer et al. (1995). They describe perceived risk as a trustor's beliefs about gains and losses outside of the relationship with a particular trustee. Frewer (2003) has suggested that trust is associated with perceptions of accuracy, knowledge, and concern with public welfare. Distrust, on the other hand, is connected to perceptions of information manipulation, bias, and poor past performance. Thus, risk does not only influence the level of trust but also what trust is all about. Different social situations are believed to have an impact on what characteristics of a trustworthy or not trustworthy person are highlighted (Mayer et al. 1995). When faced with risky situations, employees most often internalize information from trusted sources. Hence, this information is bound to influence them on how to perceive and respond (Frewer 2003; Cvetkovich and Lofstedt 1999; Maule 2008). In contrast to this, information from distrusted sources is likely to be disregarded as unreliable or self-serving. Such information may therefore result in attitudes opposite to those intended (Frewer 2003). As a result, the effectiveness of risk communication might be seriously reduced (Renn 1998, Rowe and Frewer 2005). It is argued by Van den Bos and Lind (2002) that people have a fundamental need to feel certain about their world and their place within it and that too much uncertainty threatens the meaning of existence. Uncertainty deprives one of confidence in how to behave and what to expect from the environment. Moreover, it has been found that uncertain individuals often become more rigid and closeminded about their attitudes, values, and identifications (McGregor et al. 2001). A key observation by Van den Bos and Lind (2002) is that fairness information may reduce high levels of experienced uncertainty. This is because fairness reduces individuals' anxiety about being excluded or exploited by the organization (see also Lind and Van den Bos 2002; Thau et al. 2007). Well-developed crisis prevention plans are likely to influence employees' risk perception for several reasons. First, information about crisis prevention plans suggests to employees that procedures are in place to handle eventual crises. Thus, such information advocates that crises are manageable and will be dealt with in a satisfactory manner. The better the crisis prevention plans the more likely the organization is in its capability of preventing and handling such crises. To the extent that employees are aware of such plans, they should contribute to reduce employees' perception of risk. This is since the plans are likely to reduce the likelihood for aversive outcomes and thus diminish the consequences of crises. Several studies show how risk and a general loss of control lead people to seek information that can help reduce uncertainty (Slovic 2000). Information about crisis prevention plans constitutes one such source. Thus, information about crisis prevention is likely to satisfy employees' needs for control and information (Greenberger and Strasser 1991). Second, information about risk prevention plans also provides information about the leader and the organization that commissioned such plans. To employees, crisis prevention plans might provide information about a leader's trustworthiness in terms of ability (crisis prevention plans signals competence and awareness of risks), integrity (crisis prevention plans suggest that leaders adhere to societal standards and act responsibly), and benevolence (crisis prevention plans suggest that leaders care about their employees who are likely to be affected by the crises). Employees' trust in leaders in turn is likely to reduce risk perception as employees feel confident that the leader will be capable of handling the crisis, will adhere to values that employees hold important and will care about the wellbeing of employees. Last, but not least, the existence of crisis prevention plans suggests that a situation is normal, foreseeable and controllable and is likely to support normalcy beliefs and reduce a experience of ambiguity often associated with organizational crises and change (McKnight et al. 1998; Employee Reactions to Leader-Initiated Crisis Preparation 101 123 Garfinkel 1963). Based on this reasoning we state the following: Hypothesis 1 Information about crisis preparedness will be associated with lower perceived risk among employees. When an employee's role in the organization is clearly defined and understood, and when expectations upon the individual are also clear and non-conflicting, stress can be kept to a minimum (Selart and Johansen 2011). Role ambiguity is seen to be a major source of stress. This is a concept that has rendered a lot of research historically (Warshaw 1979; Schaubroeck et al. 1993; Breaugh and Colihan 1994; Beehr 1995; Frone et al. 1995). Role ambiguity arises when employees do not have a clear picture of their work objectives, their colleagues' expectations of them and the responsibilities of their job. Often this ambiguity results simply because the leadership does not communicate to the employee what his or her role will be in a potential crisis situation. If the contents of a crisis management plan are not communicated by the leadership to the employees, ambiguity is bound to occur. The employee just does not know how he or she fits into the plan and is unsure due to this. Such leadership behavior might therefore serve to create a temporary state of role ambiguity. The stress indicators found to relate to role ambiguity are depressed mood, lowered self-esteem, life dissatisfaction and low motivation. Perceived risk is in itself likely to constitute a threat to a general sense of well-being. Higher perceived risk is likely to activate more stress symptoms as employees worry about the potential negative outcomes. However, crisis prevention plans might also signal that the management of the organization takes an interest in the employees. Elaborative crisis prevention plans suggest that the management of the organization cares about their employees and values the relationship to them. This is likely to undergird a sense of inclusion and belonging which is essential to employees and to people in general (Tyler and Degoey 1996; Baumeister and Leary 1995). Hence, based on this reasoning we suggest that Hypothesis 2 Information about crisis preparedness will be associated with a higher degree of well-being among employees. Method Participants Five different organizations participated in the study. Two of these belonged to the private sector and three were members of the public sector. In each organization, 20 employees took part in the study. Thus, a total of 100 questionnaires were handed out to the employees. The response rate was 97 %. In addition, each manager of health and safety at the organizations completed a specially designed questionnaire. This aimed at measuring the quality level of the organization's crisis preparedness. All of these five managers completed the questionnaire. Of the 97 employees who responded to the survey 56 were men and 41 women. These participants were between 19 and 63 years and had a mean age of 45.1 years. Materials The study used two questionnaires. In both of these, structured response options were applied which were designed using Likert scales. In order to get respondents to consider the various statements, we chose to make use of four possible answers: strongly agree, partially agree, partially disagree, and strongly disagree. One of the questionnaires was designed for those responsible for health and safety in the workplace/department. This was built around 12 statements which sought to find out how the crisis preparedness looked like at the company. The questionnaire designed for the employees was built around 30 statements. These focused on the employees' knowledge of the organization's crisis preparedness, how they felt in general, and how safe they felt in their workplace. Furthermore, there were a number of issues concerning the employees' gender, age, number of years employed at the organization and position held. To be able to formulate the statements in the questionnaire designed for the health and safety managers we used official regulations in this area. The same sources were applied in order to formulate 10 of the statements in the employee questionnaire. These statements were included in order to explore what knowledge the employees had about the crisis preparedness at the workplace. Examples include: 1. I am satisfied with the information on crisis preparedness at my company, 2. I get information about the crises that arise in my workplace, 3. I know what my organization's crisis preparedness means, 4. I know what is required of me in a crisis, and 5. At a crisis in my work, I know what support is available for the employees. In addition, 10 statements were applied in order to find out the well-being of the employees. These focused on both mental and physical health, and were formulated based on research on well-being and psychosomatic symptoms (Sivertsson 2000). Examples include: 1. I get the social support I need from my colleagues, 2. I like it in my workplace, 3. I'm happy with my life, 4. I feel for the most part happy, and 5. I like to go to my work. Which risks the employees experienced at work were investigated by means of an additional 10 statements about risk perception. Examples include: 1. I feel safe in my workplace, 2. I believe that in my workplace employees are 102 M. Selart et al. 123 well prepared for a crisis, 3. My job feels unsafe, 4. I rely on the crisis preparedness at my workplace, and 5. Security is good in my workplace. In order to explore the reliability of all statement categories we applied the Cronbach's a measure. For knowledge of the organization's crisis preparedness a value of a = 0.90 was recorded, for well-being a = 0.80, and for risk perception a = 0.74. Procedure To find companies that were willing to participate in the study, we made phone calls in the area. We had set as a requirement that organizations should have at least 50 employees. At first contact by phone, we asked to speak with the personnel manager at the company. Thereafter, we announced our study and its purpose. All companies had the opportunity to see both questionnaires and then decide whether they wanted to participate or not. These two documents and other information were subsequently sent to the organizations via e-mail. Then, we contacted the organizations in order to arrange a time for distribution of the questionnaires. A pilot study was conducted at a public sector organization in order to pre-test the questionnaires, get feedback, and examine whether there were any statements that could be misunderstood. After the pilot study was performed, we chose to expand the questionnaire's information section that explained what we meant by crisis preparedness and where we also gave examples of crises that may arise in the workplace. The data collection was arranged such that the questionnaires were distributed and collected by two project assistants. All employees received the same information and were given the opportunity to ask questions. We also enclosed relevant phone numbers so that participants could take contact if possible ambiguities and questions emerged. In order to categorize the companies and place them in groups of less good, good, and very good crisis preparedness, we used the questionnaires designed for the health and safety managers and the resulting scores for each of these. The maximum score was 48. Organizations who achieved\24 points were put in the group of organizations with less good crisis preparedness. Those who reached the score in the range of 24–36 were placed in the group of organizations with good crisis preparedness, and those who achieved 36–48 points were placed into the group of organizations with very good crisis preparedness. Results The fit of the data to the normal distribution was examined to see if we could use parametric tests. The basic descriptive statistics for key variables are revealed in Table 1. A stepwise multiple regression analysis, with risk perception as the dependent variable and age, gender, and employee awareness of crisis preparedness as independent variables was conducted. This showed that employees' knowledge of crisis preparedness was a significant predictor of the risk that they perceived at work (F (1, 96) = 75.56, p \ 0.001.). For all predictors the joint Radj 2 was 0.36. There was also a significant effect of employees' knowledge of the organization's crisis preparedness and their perceived well-being (F (1, 96) = 8.18, p \ 0.05). In this stepwise multiple regression analysis employees' perceived well-being was used as the dependent variable and age, gender, and employee awareness of crisis preparedness were again applied as independent variables. For all predictors the joint Radj 2 was 0.16. A two-way analysis of variance was conducted with the degree of crisis preparedness at the organization (less good, good, or very good) and employee gender as independent variables. Risk perception was applied as the dependent variable. The analysis revealed a main effect of degree of crisis preparedness on risk perception (F (2, 96) = 7.14, p \ 0.001) (see Table 2). By using a post-hoc test (Tukey HSD), with risk perception as the dependent variable, a significant difference between the organizations with good and the very good crisis preparedness was established (p = 0.019). The mean difference was 0.38 and SD = 0.14. There was also a tendency for a significant difference between the organizations with less good and good crisis preparedness (p = 0.063). The mean difference was 0.39 and SD = 0.17. An additional two-way analysis of variance was carried out using the same independent variables as in the former one. This time, experienced well-being was used as the dependent variable. A main effect of degree of crisis preparedness on Table 1 Descriptive statistics on employees' knowledge of the organization's crisis preparedness, risk perception in the workplace, and perceived well-being M SD N Knowledge of the organization's crisis management 2.34 0.73 97 Risk perception in the workplace 2.81 0.65 97 Perceived well-being 3.23 0.50 97 Table 2 Descriptive statistics on the organizational level of crisis preparedness and employee risk perception Organizational level of crisis preparedness N M SD Less good 19 2.97 0.68 Good 38 2.58 0.60 Very good 40 2.96 0.65 Employee Reactions to Leader-Initiated Crisis Preparation 103 123 well-being could be observed (F (2, 96) = 6.09, p \ 0.005) (see Table 3). By using a post-hoc test (Tukey HSD), with experienced well-being as the dependent variable, a significant difference between the organizations with less good and good crisis preparedness could be established (p = 0.049). The mean difference was 0.32 and SD = 0.13. Discussion We found that crisis preparedness was associated both with lower perceived risk (Hypothesis 1) as well as with increased well-being (Hypothesis 2) among the employees. Thus, both hypotheses were supported. This suggests that crisis preparedness, accomplished in the form of well-developed crisis prevention plans, has effects that extend beyond the intended purposes of preventing or accommodating crises. The findings thus introduce new and different arguments for implementing crisis prevention plans. Even in the absence of any actual or impending crises, crisis preparedness still may have important and valuable effects on employees' well-being. This, in turn, is likely to have other beneficial effects for employees and the organization alike. The article and its findings contribute to different literatures. First, it contributes to the crisis management literature by describing a new set of outcome variables as well as a new set of relationships between crisis preparedness, risk perception, and employee well-being (Barton 2001; Coombs 2006, 2007a; Quarantelli 1988). Second, the article can also be seen as contributing to the literature on work psychology and, more specifically, to our understanding of the mechanisms that govern work satisfaction and well-being in the organization. In this realm, crisis preparedness can be viewed as one of several contextual variables that influence well-being in the workplace (Ilies et al. 2007; Brief and Weiss 2002). Finally, the findings can also be related to the literature on trust in organizations, and more specifically, to how managers can initiate and develop employees' perception of leaders as trustworthy (Dirks 2006; Dirks and Ferrin 2001, 2002; Whitener et al. 1998). In this capacity, crisis preparedness plans constitute a policy that on the one hand fosters trustworthy behavior, including greater transparency, and simultaneously signifies managerial trustworthiness (Whitener et al. 1998). While the results are promising, more research is needed in order to develop a better understanding of how crisis prevention plans influence risk perception and well-being. A cross-sectional design like the one used in this study has obvious limitations in that it can establish co-variation but not causality. Future studies should seek to rule out the possibility of spurious relationships and confounding variables. Thus, crisis preparedness is likely to show a positive correlation with a set of other factors that may in themselves reduce employees' perception of risk as well as increase their sense of well-being: Organizations that score high on crisis preparedness may also be managed by leaders who are more capable, benevolent, and in possession of greater integrity than other organizations. There may also be a positive relationship between crisis preparedness and the general management of the organization in that well-prepared organizations might be synonymous with better managed organizations. Wellmanaged and orderly organizations constitute a more predictable and controllable environment that is likely to reduce employees' perception of risk as well as promoting general well-being (Hodson 2004). As such, crisis preparedness may be more a symptom of a well-run organization than a causal factor in its own right. As a result, future studies will need to control for confounding variables of the type described above. The effects of crisis preparedness plans on risk perception and general well-being might also be likely to involve different mediating processes and be influenced by different contextual moderators. Thus, crisis prevention plans might have a direct effect on employees' risk perception in which case the circumstances surrounding the implementation of the plans are irrelevant. However, the effects of crisis prevention plans might also stem from the effects such plans have on employees' view of their leaders. Here, employees' attributions about the management's motives for implementing crisis prevention plans are likely to influence the effects of such plans on perceived risk and general well-being. In this context, crisis prevention plans become indicative of management's benevolence, competence, and integrity. Nevertheless, the effects of such plans will likely depend on employees' attribution regarding managements' motives for initiating them. Where such plans are viewed as reflecting external pressure (as when being legally mandated) the informational value of the plans diminishes as do the effects of crisis prevention plans on employees' perception of leaders' trustworthiness (Jones and Davis 1965). As a result, mandatory crisis management plans might enable organizations to reap some of the rewards described here, but not all, since mandatory plans reveal Table 3 Descriptive statistics on the organizational level of crisis preparedness and employee well-being Organizational level of crisis preparedness N M SD Less good 19 3.42 0.55 Good 38 3.10 0.54 Very good 40 3.24 0.40 104 M. Selart et al. 123 little or nothing about a leader's motivations and intentions. The findings suggest that the complexity of the plans matters for how they are perceived. Thus, more elaborate crisis management plans have a tendency to result in more positive effects on risk perception and general well-being. Yet, the results reveal little about how the specific content or design of such plans influence risk perception. Nor does the study look at the effects of how such plans are communicated in the organization. Future studies may seek to explore how variation with respect to content, organization and dissemination of such plans influence employees' risk perception, trust in managers, and general well-being. Hence, future studies should seek to (i) establish the time order of effects by studying risk perception and wellbeing before and after the introduction of crisis prevention plans, (ii) control for spurious relationships by introducing measures of potential confounding variables (preferably from independent informants) about, for instance, the competence and trustworthiness of management, and (iii) seek to establish different paths through which crisis prevention plans can influence risk perception and general well-being. Finally, new studies should eventually move on to test the impacts of different types of crisis prevention or even different forms of communicating crisis prevention plans on employee risk perception and well-being. Together these steps should enable us to develop more confident inferences about the effects of crisis preparedness and crisis management plans. 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Anticipations of Hans Georg Gadamerâs Epistemology of History in Benedetto Croceâs Philosophy of History

Philosophy

Open Journal of Philosophy 2013. Vol.3, No.2, 273-277 Published Online May 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojpp) DOI:10.4236/ojpp.2013.32043 Anticipations of Hans Georg Gadamer's Epistemology of History in Benedetto Croce's Philosophy of History Cody Franchetti Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, New York, USA Email: email@example.com Received January 3rd, 2013; revised February 5th, 2013; accepted February 18th, 2013 Copyright © 2013 Cody Franchetti. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In Truth and Method Hans Georg Gadamer revealed hermeneutics as one of the foundational epistemological elements of history, in contrast to scientific method, which, with empiricism, constitutes natural sciences' epistemology. This important step solved a number of long-standing arguments over the ontology of history, which had become increasingly bitter in the twentieth century. But perhaps Gadamer's most important contribution was that he annulled history's supposed inferiority to the natural sciences by showing that the knowledge it offers, though different in nature from science, is of equal import. By showing history's arrant independence from the natural sciences, the former was furnished with a newfound importance, and thrust on an equal footing with the latter-even in a distinctly scientific age such as ours. This essay intends to show that the idea of history's discrete ontology from science was prefigured almost a century earlier by Benedetto Croce. Croce and Gadamer show compelling points of contact in their philosophies, notwithstanding that they did not confer equal consequence to what may be identified as Gadamer's principal substantiation of history's epistemology-hermeneutics. Of course this essay does not aspire to be exhaustive: the thought of both philosophers is far too dense. Nevertheless, the main points of contact shall be outlined, and, though concise, this essay seeks to point out the striking similarities of these two cardinal philosophers of history. Keywords: Gadamer; Croce; History; Epistemology of History; Historical Knowledge; Non-Scientific Truth; Hermeneutics; Tradition Introduction The history of the hermeneutic tradition and its application to history is essentially German. Born out of philology, which was dominated by Germany in the nineteenth century, the hermeneutic approach sought Truth in Interpretation. The first to embark into an ontology of hermeneutics was Friedrich Schleiermacher , who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, described the task and the nature of interpretation. If it was Schleiermacher who inaugurated modern hermeneutics, Hans Georg Gadamer brought its culmination, for in Truth and Method he revealed its original impetus-that of bearing truth outside of the natural sciences, which hitherto had its exclusive right. Applied historically, hermeneutics rid history of the shackling argument against its veracity-of being a "soft" science -and conferred its independence as an ulterior way of knowing. Gadamer demonstrated in its fullest sense that hermeneutic understanding is the epistemology of historical knowledge and how the latter is altogether different from scientific knowledge. This conception of history was first held at the turn of the twentieth century by the Italian Benedetto Croce, who despite being situated well outside the European cultural dialogue- Italy had become increasingly provincial in the nineteenth century -was one of the few Italian intellectuals who read and was influenced by Schleiermacher, and, more generally, by German philosophy. In history's gradual appropriation of its own, parascientific validity Benedetto Croce represents an important station , for his philosophy anticipates a number of Gadamer's concepts . The Demise of "Method" in History One of the most important aspects of Gadamer's thought has been the dismissal of the dominance of scientific method as the source of truth in historical understanding. This mental frame, Gadamer insists, is an inheritance of the natural science model inaugurated by Descartes. In his Idea of History, Collingwood recognized that it was Croce who for the first time posited history's independence from science: Croce, by denying that history was a science at all, cut himself at one blow loose from naturalism, and set his face towards an idea of history as something radically different from nature. We have seen that the problem of philosophy everywhere in the late nineteenth century was the problem of liberating itself from Copyright © 2013 SciRes. 273 C. FRANCHETTI the tyranny of natural science1. It had taken a long time for the forces of skeptical positivism unleashed by the English and Scottish thinkers to weaken enough to conceive of another way of knowing; this other knowledge was not the one that originated with the reconstitution of the world outside Doubt. Croce's non-scientific interpretation of history superseded other similar, contemporary attempts such as Dilthey in Germany and Bergson in France: though both of them recognized the necessity of finding legitimacy outside of science, it was Croce's merit to separate history from natural science entirely. Croce's argument toward an identity of history completely independent from empiricism was to unhinge it from the idea of "universal history". Universal history was an inheritance of German idealism; it was an ideal shared by the German historical school of the nineteenth century, which believed there was a history that existed in itself that was an objective act of selfconsciousness , part of a wider, collective consciousness. This was a manifestation of a concept that had originated in the Eighteenth century with Voltaire's Essai sur les Moeurs, but which fully sprouted in Germany with Hegel's concept of "Weltgeist'; its effects reverberated in historians" thought throughout the nineteenth century-often polemically. Ranke was a paradigmatic example, for he believed history to be composed of "spiritual beings" which in their totality would constitute "world history"; Droysen sought to understand the "inner essence" of things; Dilthey conceived of the historical world as an existing text that had to be deciphered. According to Gadamer, this idealistic footing was the limitation of nineteenth century's historiography: it had the positivist prejudice of an "infinite knowledge", as well as the belief in universal knowledge as a thing in itself; and despite the German historical school reacted to Hegel's eschatological vision of history as self-awareness, its stance nevertheless betrayed the age's epistemological prejudices: The historical school was forced into a theological understanding of itself. If it was not to undermine its own disposition to think of itself as progressive research, it had to relate its own finite and limited knowledge to a divine spirit, to which things are known in their perfection. It is the old ideal of infinite understanding applied to the knowledge of history2. Gadamer calls it the "old ideal", because despite nineteenthcentury historians and thinkers reacted to-or thought they were breaking off from-the rationality of the Enlightenment, they were still anchored to scientific models of knowing. Croce, too, violently opposed this old way of conceiving history, for he viewed the historical gaze as subjective. He refuted the notion of universal history by saying that "the only thing of importance is the actuality of the new situation and the new disposition of soul that has been produced" and that thus "we know at every moment all the history that we need to know; [...] That 'remaining' history is the eternal phantom of the 'thing itself', which is neither the 'thing' nor 'in itself', but only the imaginative projection of the infinity of our action and of our knowledge."3 Here, his polemic is mainly directed at Hegel's idealism that "taught reason in everything"4; but Croce made sure to add that "to negate universal history does not mean to negate the universal in history"5. This is the crux of his concept of history: the subjective thinker makes history by thinking it, and history is universal in its being thought. Therefore Collingwood's appellation of Croce's vision of what constitutes history-making as a methodology was mistaken: "within the concrete whole which is historical knowledge, philosophical knowledge is a component part: it is the thinking out of predicate-concepts. Croce put this by defining philosophy as the methodology of history."6 Collingwood was fundamentally right in essence, but I would argue that his choice of the word "methodology" is misconceived since Croce inveighed against method in historical thinking. Narrative as an Escape from Science Croce's other argument for history's independence from science is the appropriation of the narrative element in history. Firstly, he stressed the distinction between history and chronicle. Chronicle, he maintained, is dead narrative-non-historical. History, on the other hand, while it may be composed of chronicle , is history only if thought out consciously. First comes history, then chronicle: first comes the living being, then the corpse; and to make history the child of chronicle is the same thing as to make the living be born from the corpse, which is the residue of life, as chronicle is the residue of history7. In other words, the act of narration must be performed to make sense of chronicles-to apply them to real life's continuum-and that very act is history. This idea is strikingly similar to Hayden White's; in fact, it is its direct antecedent. The only difference here between Croce and White is that the former considered chronicles themselves as being narratives, while White, under the influence of the postmodernist "linguistic turn", deemed the world-including chronicles-as a form of storytelling itself. Croce's modernity here should be stressed: thinkers of the later 20th century such as Danto, Hayden-White, and Ricoeur, who have been hailed as great originals, did not duly acknowledge this contribution by Croce. After having distinguished with some insistence between chronicle and history, Croce makes the essential step of divesting historical knowledge from method when stating that the superiority of documents over narrative is a methodological prejudice that is entirely fictitious. "It was the clean cut which he made in 1893 between the idea of history and the idea of science that enabled him to develop the conception of history so much farther than any philosopher of his generation"8. It is of great historical interest to note that Croce himself did not recognize the significance and originality of his move, for he did not emphasize it: he spoke in an exalted state about connecting history to art but not about severing it from science. This, I believe, reveals a significant aspect of nineteenth-century culture: that Croce was not nearly as proud of severing history from science, as for having attached history to art, is symptomatic of a dominating current of the period, which believed that all eventually coalesces into art. It is also telling about our own time that Croce's abutment of art and history is disturbing today, for positivism, ironically, in the age of non-Newtonian physics, seems to have 1Collingwood, 1946: p. 193. 2Gadamer, 2004: p. 207. 3Croce, 1923: p. 55. 4Gadamer, 2004: p. 216. Gadamer calls Hegel the last and most representative of ancient "logos" philosophy for this reason. 5Croce, 1923: p. 59. 6Collingwood, 1946: p. 201. 7Croce, 1923: p. 20. 8Collingwood, 1946: p. 193. Copyright © 2013 SciRes. 274 C. FRANCHETTI regained its reins over the collective unconscious as the sole way of understanding9. And only those whom we consider radical thinkers recovered this idea in contemporary times, with statements like, say, "emplotment is the mimesis of action" (P. Ricoeur)10. The Subjectivisation of History Let us now turn to some of the arguments made against Croce's and Gadamer's stance the "metaphysical" notion of history, another correspondence shall emerge. Somewhat similarly to Gadamer's reification of the historical immanence of an historian's prejudices, Croce posited history from the subjective point of view. In Historians and Historiography of the 19th Century G. P. Gooch illuminates this aspect of Croce's philosophy : The past, he [Croce] declares in History, its Theory and Practice, exists for us solely as a subjective idea of what happened. All history is contemporary history in the sense that we can only think of the past with the mind of our own day. The notion of sequence, indispensable for the practical purposes of life, fails to provide us with objective reality. The sole reality is subjective-occurred. History is not a science: unlike the world of nature, it has no ascertainable laws. Nor can any philosophic system be extracted from it, for every mind and every age regards it from a different angle. While the facts are historical, interpretations are purely subjective. To Croce the average historian is a mere chronicler, for facts only become history when they have passed through the crucible of an individual mind11. Croce is in effect conferring authorship to the thinker of history. For this reason, it is not surprising that both Gadamer and Croce have been criticized as being relativistic; but the counter argument is already within their work, since the relativistic argument against them is mainly born out of oversimplification of their thought. Gadamer's description of understanding as an experience of history itself wrests the question of truth out of the reach of empiricism. For him, historical understanding is neither a child of method-or any normative datum-nor of relativism, because in our understanding of history our historicity is manifest: "In all understanding, whether we are aware of it or not, the efficacy of history is at work."12 Croce made a similar case when stating, "truth itself perishes, particular and determined truth, because it is not re-thinkable save when included in the system of a vaster truth and therefore at the same time transformed."13 Croce and Gadamer, in different ways, are expressing that truth is born out of interpretation, which is subjective, surely, but also based on the constantly changing truths of history (or the texts that the historian is trying to understand). Hermeneutics We have seen that Croce's subjectivisation of history prefigures Gadamer's ideas; but other antecedents of Gadamer's thought may be found in Croce's position in the history of the hermeneutic approach. Though Gadamer may be its culmination, we ought to start with Schleirmacher, for it was he who inaugurated modern hermeneutics and stressed the importance of reconstructing the meaning of the original intention of a text14. Schleiermacher was the first to speak of the hermeneutic circle; a metaphor for the way comprehension runs-understanding the part from the whole and the whole from the part. Since the movement from part to whole and back was constant, in a sort of gyrating motion, progressively expanding, he called it "Zirkel im Verstehen" or circle/compass of understanding/ comprehension. According to Schleiermacher, the hermeneutic circle was the methodology of understanding; and as a philologist he described the circle as the way we interpret texts. Croce was influenced by Schleiermacher's Aesthetic and wrote about it in a late essay15. In it Croce acknowledged Schleiermacher's foundational step for the independence of interpretation and language from logic, stating that "Schleiermacher circumscribed appropriately aesthetical understanding as a form of knowing that is not yet logical knowledge."16 Though Croce never wrote about hermeneutics directly, we may infer that he attached implicitly as much importance to it as Gadamer, since, as we saw, subjective understanding was to both thinkers the germ of historical thought. Croce's belief in the inalienable historicity of history-making is an earlier and less audacious step than Gadamer's concept that in understanding the past we bring ourselves into the historical situation; and with us we bring our own prejudices (or prejudgments) and as well as those of our age, which are history, even though some historians are still bound by the Cartesian "prejudice against prejudice"17 and beseech impartiality18. Without explicitly mentioning the hermeneutic circle, Croce exhibited a Schleiermachean perspective of understanding: the part versus the whole and back, "The individual is called the subject of the judgment, the universal the predicate [...] But for him who dominates words with thought, the true subject of 9I open, for example, a contemporary New York Times editorial and find the gray mentality that pervades today's rationality, as well as its general ignorance: Some people live in romantic ages. They tend to believe that genius is the product of a divine spark. They believe that there have been, throughout the ages, certain paragons of greatness-Dante, Mozart, Einstein-whose talents far exceeded normal comprehension, who had an other-worldly access to transcendent truth, and who are best approached with reverential awe. We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocuspocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart's early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people's work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today's top child-performers. What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had-the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there (David Brooks, "Genius: the Modern View." The New York Times: 1 May 2009, A23). 10Ricoeur, 1990: p. 224. 11Gooch, 1959: p. xxxvi. 12Gadamer, 2004: p. 300. 13Croce, 1923: p. 91. 14"To understand a writer better than he understood himself" is his famous and often quoted phrase. 15L'estetica di Schleiermacher, written in 1933. 16["Schleiermacher bene circoscrisse il campo dell'Estetica come quello di un conoscere che non è ancora il conoscere logico."] Croce, 1996: p. 554. 17Gadamer, 2004: p. 283. 18For the historian usually chooses concepts to describe the historical particularities of his objects without expressly reflecting on their origin and justification. He simply follows his interest in the material and takes no account of the fact that the descriptive concepts he chooses can be highly detrimental to his proper purpose if they assimilate what is historically different to what is familiar and thus, despite all impartiality, subordinate the alien being of the object to his own preconceptions. Thus, despite his scientific method, he behaves just like everyone else-as a child of his time who is unquestionably dominated by the concepts and prejudices of his own age. (Gadamer, 2004: p. 397). Copyright © 2013 SciRes. 275 C. FRANCHETTI history is just the predicate, and the true predicate the subject."19 Croce is following Schleiermacher closely-even literally, for Schleiermacher himself wrote, "The subject must receive its final determinacy via the predicate and the predicate via the subject"; Gadamer calls understanding a "fusion of horizons"; from this point of view, too, we may regard Croce as the link between Romantic hermeneutics and Gadamer, even though Croce did not address hermeneutics directly. Other points of contact between Croce and Gadamer appear in their response to Dilthey's aporias. Dilthey was the first to apply hermeneutics as the epistemic tool of history. Gadamer acknowledged this contribution, but criticized Dilthey for envisaging historical understanding as a methodological practices, though hermeneutics and method are not commensurable (cfr. footnote 23): Romantic hermeneutics and the philosophical method on which it is based are not adequate as the basis of historical study. Similarly, Dilthey's concept of inductive procedure, borrowed from the natural sciences, is inadequate [...] the epistemological Cartesianism that dominated him proved stronger, so that in Dilthey the historicity of historical experience is never truly integrated in his thought. [...] Thus Dilthey ultimately conceives inquiring into the past as deciphering and not as historical experience20. Now Croce has, as far as I know21, only mentioned Dilthey once, in reference to Schleiermacher (polemically too, I might add, since he blamed him for not having heeded Schleiermacher's Aesthetic). But if we read Gadamer's last sentence above and confront it with Croce's quote below, Croce's anticipation of Gadamer's emphasis of history outside of empiricism-in flagrant opposition to Dilthey's epistemology-is evident: [History] arouses the mind from its empirical slumbers and makes it see that in place of supposed things there are in reality spiritual acts [...] History would indeed be in a fix if it expected to be born of what comes after it, to be born of external things! Thing, not thought, is born of thing: a history derived from things would be a thing-that is to say, just the inexistent of which we were talking a moment ago22. Croce's and Gadamer's proximity is evident here; both thinkers see the historical experience as a form of history. Croce's implication that history is an act of the spirit-a sort of phenomenology of the historian-fringes, albeit embryonically, with Heidegger's idea that understanding is ontological. It was upon Heidegger, who renewed previous questions of being (thus superseding Dilthey's aporias) that Gadamer built his recognition of the interpreter's prejudices as an essential constituent of historical understanding, since Heidegger showed that the latter is a function of the Dasein and its questions with temporality23. Tradition Finally, Croce also anticipated Gadamer's stress on tradition. Croce found his own antecedent in the writings of Gianbattista Vico, who defined historical knowledge as different from the knowledge that the "modern sciences" yielded. According to Croce, Vico anticipated nineteenth-century philology by defining the influence of tradition over it: "[philology] proceeded by testing and selecting those authorities which seemed to it to be the most worthy of faith, it is always a question of faith and not of criticism, of verisimilitude and not that certainty that is truth."24 Gadamer, too, in a chapter devoted to Vico acknowledged the latter as a lonely voice in the struggle against methodological strictures, who instead appealed to tradition and sensus communis against the abstract universality of reason: "He does not deny the merits of modern critical science but shows its limits. Even with this new science and its mathematical methodology, we cannot do without the wisdom of the ancients and [...] the training in the sensus communis, which is not nourished on the true but the probable, the verisimilar."25 Here the correspondence between Gadamer and Croce is not only conceptual but also literal. Conclusion It is curious that Gadamer disregarded Croce despite the philosophical similarities of his Italian antecedent. That Gadamer praised Vico for his crucial role in the reaction against the preeminence of scientific knowledge over all other forms of knowledge makes Gadamer's disregard for Croce ever more conspicuous. After all, Vico influenced Croce more than any other thinker, and, as we have seen, Croce himself indubitably anticipated Gadamer's thought. Yet in Truth and Method Gadamer mentions Croce but once and does not acknowledge neither his contribution nor his landmark position; he mentions Croce only in passing-and unfavorably-in a passage where discussing Emilio Betti, an Italian legal historian who wrote on legal hermeneutics: "Clearly reacting against Croce's extreme position, Betti seeks the mean between the objective and the subjective element in all understanding."26 Gadamer here is displaying the same superficiality, as we saw above in the facile criticism that had been directed at Gadamer himself, when the latter was accused of relativism. Croce, as we saw above, in stating that "truth itself perishes [...] because it is not rethinkable save when included in the system of a vaster truth [...]" he affirmed that the 'subjective' truth a historian generates in his understanding of history is always set against "a vaster truth" which contravenes its possible excesses. This is exactly the same defense that Gadamer made when countering the portrayal of his thought as relativistic: Gadamer's saying that our being indissolubly rooted in history means we understand it by fusing our own truths with that of history-the very thing we are trying to understand-is strikingly similar to Croce's argument. The similarity of the criticism leveled against both Gadamer and Croce, as well as their defense, abuts these two philosophers considerably. I should like to end this essay with a quote from Gadamer, which, while embracing Croce's fundamental-as well as historical-move of history outside the realm of natural science, 19Croce, 1923: p. 60. 20Gadamer, 2004: p. 234. 21In the 1681 pages of collected works of Croce's works on the philosophy history. 22Croce, 1923: p. 24. 23Gadamer studied with Heidegger in Freiburg in the mid 1920's and was influenced by him. According to Gadamer, Dilthey's limitations-in short, not having conceived of understanding itself as a historical act-were overcome by Heidegger. In Being and Time Heidegger designated the hermeneutic experience as the way we understand our being, our "thrown-ness" into the world. Heidegger saw interpretation as indissolubly tied with being, hence, not a method. Upon this conception of hermeneutics (as well as Heidegger's analysis of the historicity of the Dasein) Gadamer built his philosophy of historical understanding. 24Croce, 1923: p. 29. 25Gadamer, 2004: p. 19. 26Gadamer, 2004: p. 511. Copyright © 2013 SciRes. 276 C. FRANCHETTI Copyright © 2013 SciRes. 277 REFERENCES also reveals the marrow of Gadamer's idea of historical understanding: Collingwood, R. G. (1946). The battered child (5th ed.). London: Oxford University Press. Anticipating an answer itself presupposes that the questioner is part of the tradition and regards himself as addressed by it. This is the truth of historically affected consciousness. It is the historically experienced consciousness that, by renouncing the chimera of perfect enlightenment, is open to the experience of history27. Croce, B. (1923). History, its theory and practice. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Croce, B. (1996). Filosofia, poesia, storia. Milano: Adelphi Edizioni. Gadamer, H. G. (2004). Truth and method. London: Continuum. Gooch, G. P. (1959). History and historians in the nineteenth century. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Gadamer, through an itinerary that started with Schleiermacher and passed through the ideas of Benedetto Croce has re-attached us to the original meaning of the word history, the one embodied in its etymological root "his" that itself stems from the Indo-European root "vid"-view. Ricoeur, P. (1990). Time and narrative, volume 1. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 27Gadamer, 2004: p. 370.