Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer is the decisive figure in the
development of twentieth century hermeneutics. Trained in neo-Kantian
scholarship, as well as in classical philology, and profoundly affected by the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Gadamer developed a distinctive and thoroughly
dialogical approach, grounded in Platonic-Aristotelian as well as Heideggerian
thinking, that rejects subjectivism and relativism, abjures any simple notion of
interpretive method, and grounds understanding in the linguistically mediated
happening of tradition. Employing a more orthodox and modest, but also more
accessible style than Heidegger himself, Gadamer's work can be seen as
concentrated in four main areas: the first, and clearly the most influential, is
the development and elaboration of a philosophical hermeneutics; the second is
the dialogue within philosophy, and within the history of philosophy, with
respect to Plato and Aristotle in particular, but also with Hegel and Heidegger;
the third is the engagement with literature, particularly poetry, and with art;
and the fourth is what Gadamer himself terms ‘practical philosophy’ (see
Gadamer, 2001, 78-85) encompassing contemporary political and ethical issues.
The ‘dialogical’ character of Gadamer's approach is evident, not merely in the
central theoretical role he gives to the concept of dialogue in his thinking,
but also in the discursive and dialogic, even ‘conversational’, character of his
writing, as well as in his own personal commitment to intellectual engagement
and exchange. Indeed, he is one of the few philosophers for whom the ‘interview’
has become a significant category of philosophical output (see Hahn, 1997,
588-599). Although he identified connections between his own work and
English-speaking ‘analytic’ thought (mainly via the later Wittgenstein, but also
Donald Davidson), and has sometimes seen his ideas taken up by thinkers such as
Richard Rorty and John McDowell, Gadamer is perhaps less well known, and
certainly less well-appreciated, in philosophical circles outside Europe than
are some of his near-contemporaries. He is undoubtedly, however, one of the most
important thinkers of the twentieth century, having had an enormous impact on a
range of areas from aesthetics to theology, and having acquired a respect and
reputation in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, that went far beyond the usual
confines of academia.
Born on February 11, 1900, in
Marburg, in Southern Germany, Hans-Georg Gadamer grew up in Breslau (now Wroclaw
in Poland), where his father was Professor of Pharmacy. Showing an early
interest in humanistic studies, he attended the University of Breslau in 1918,
returning to Marburg with his family in 1919, and completing his doctoral
studies (in his own words ‘too young’ -- see Gadamer, 1997b, 7) in 1922.
Gadamer's early teachers were Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann, while Paul
Friedlander introduced him to philological study (Gadamer passed the State
Examination in Classical Philology in 1927). It was, however, Martin Heidegger
(at Marburg from 1923-1928) who exerted the most important and enduring effect
on Gadamer's philosophical development. Gadamer worked as Heidegger's assistant
for a time, and although Gadamer took Heidegger to be disappointed with his
early habilitation research, Gadamer finally submitted his habilitation
dissertation ('Plato's Dialectical Ethics', [1991]), in 1928, under the guidance
of Friedlander and Heidegger. During the 1930s and 1940s, Gadamer was able to
accommodate himself, albeit reluctantly, first to National Socialism and then
briefly, to Communism. While Gadamer was not an active supporter of either
regime (he was never a member of the NSDAP), neither did he draw attention to
himself by outright opposition, and some have seen his stance as too acquiescent
(see Gadamer, 2001, for his own comments on this period; see also Wolin, 2000,
and the reply by Palmer, 2002). In 1953, together with Helmut Kuhn, Gadamer
founded the highly influential Philosophische Rundschau, but his main
philosophical impact was not felt until the publication of Truth and
Method in 1960 (1989b). He engaged in a number of important public debates
in the following decades, most notably with Emilio Betti, Jürgen Habermas and
Jacques Derrida. Gadamer was twice married: in 1923, to Frida Kratz (later
divorced), and, in 1950, to Käte Lekebusch. Gadamer received numerous awards and
prizes including, in 1971, Knight of the ‘Order of Merit’ -- the highest
academic honor awarded in Germany. Gadamer died in Heidelberg on March 13, 2002,
at the age of 102.
Gadamer's first academic appointment was to a junior position in Marburg in
1928, finally achieving a lower-level professorship there in 1937. In the
meantime, from 1934-35, Gadamer held a temporary professorship at Kiel, and
then, in 1939, took up the Directorship of the Philosophical Institute at the
University of Leipzig, becoming Dean of the Faculty in 1945, and Rector in 1946,
before returning to teaching and research at Frankfurt-am-Main in 1947. In 1949,
he succeeded Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, officially retiring (becoming Professor
Emeritus) in 1968. Following his retirement, he traveled extensively, spending
considerable time in North America, where he was a visitor at a number of
institutions and developed an especially close and regular association with
Boston College in Massachusetts.
Gadamer's thinking began and always remained connected with Greek thought,
especially that of Plato and Aristotle. In this respect, Gadamer's early
engagement with Plato, which lay at the core of both his doctoral and
habilitation dissertations, was determinative of much of the character and
philosophical direction of his thinking. Under the influence of his early
teachers such as Hartmann, as well as Friedlander, Gadamer developed an approach
to Plato that rejected the idea of any ‘hidden’ doctrine in Plato's thought,
looking instead to the structure of the Platonic dialogues themselves as the key
to understanding Plato's philosophy. The only way to understand Plato, as
Gadamer saw it, was thus by working through the Platonic texts in a way that not
only enters into the dialogue and dialectic set out in those texts, but also
repeats that dialogic movement in the attempt at understanding as such.
Moreover, the dialectical structure of Platonic questioning also provides the
model for a way of understanding that is open to the matter at issue through
bringing oneself into question along with the matter itself. Under the influence
of Heidegger, Gadamer also took up, as a central element in his thinking, the
idea of phronesis ('practical wisdom’) that appears in Book VI of
Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. For Heidegger the concept of
phronesis is important, not only as a means of giving emphasis to our
practical ‘being-in-the world’ over and against theoretical apprehension, but it
can additionally be seen as constituting a mode of insight into our own concrete
situation (both our practical situation and, more fundamentally, our existential
situation, hence phronesis constitutes a mode of self-knowledge). The
way in which Gadamer conceives of understanding, and interpretation, is as just
such a practically oriented mode of insight -- a mode of insight that has its
own rationality irreducible to any simple rule or set of rules, that cannot be
directly taught, and that is always oriented to the particular case at hand. The
concept of phronesis can itself be seen as providing a certain
elaboration of the dialogic conception of understanding Gadamer had already
found in Plato, and, taken together, these two concepts can se seen as providing
the essential starting point for the development of Gadamer's philosophical
hermeneutics.
Traditionally,
hermeneutics is taken to have its origins in problems of biblical exegesis and
in the development of a theoretical framework to govern and direct such
exegetical practice. In the hands of eighteenth and early nineteenth century
theorists, writers such as Chladenius and Meier, Ast and Schleiermacher,
hermeneutics was developed into a more encompassing theory of textual
interpretation in general -- a set of rules that provide the basis for good
interpretive practice no matter what the subject matter. Inasmuch as
hermeneutics is the method proper to the recovery of meaning, so Wilhelm Dilthey
broadened hermeneutics still further, taking it as the methodology for the
recovery of meaning that is essential to understanding within the ‘human’ or
‘historical’ sciences (the Geisteswissenschaften). For these writers,
as for many others, the basic problem of hermeneutics was methodological: how to
found the human sciences, and so how to found the science of interpretation, in
a way that would make them properly ‘scientific’. Moreover, if the mathematical
models and procedures that appeared to be the hallmark of the sciences of nature
could not be duplicated in the human sciences, then the task at issue must
involve finding an alternative methodology proper to the human sciences as such
-- hence Schleiermacher's ambition to develop a formal methodology that would
codify interpretive practice, while Dilthey aimed at the elaboration of a
‘psychology’ that would elucidate and guide interpretive understanding.
Already familiar with earlier hermeneutic thinking, Heidegger redeployed
hermeneutics to a very different purpose and within a very different frame. In
Heidegger's early thinking, particularly the lectures from the early 1920s ('The
Hermeneutics of Facticity’), hermeneutics is presented as that by means of which
the investigation of the basic structures of factical existence is to be pursued
-- not as that which constitutes a ‘theory’ of textual interpretation nor a
method of ‘scientific’ understanding, but rather as that which allows the
self-disclosure of the structure of understanding as such. The ‘hermeneutic
circle’ that had been a central idea in previous hermeneutic thinking, and that
had been viewed in terms of the interpretative interdependence, within any
meaningful structure, between the parts of that structure and the whole, was
transformed by Heidegger, so that it was now seen as expressing the way in which
all understanding was ‘always already’ given over to that which is to be
understood (to ‘the things themselves' -- 'die Sachen selbst’). Thus,
to take a simple example, if we wish to understand some particular artwork, we
already need to have some prior understanding of that work (even if only as a
set of paintmarks on canvas), otherwise it cannot even be seen as something to
be understood. To put the point more generally, and in more basic ontological
terms, if we are to understand anything at all, we must already find ourselves
‘in’ the world ‘along with’ that which is to be understood. All understanding
that is directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based in
a prior ‘ontological’ understanding -- a prior hermeneutical situatedness. On
this basis, hermeneutics can be understood as the attempt to ‘make explicit’ the
structure of such situatedness. Yet since that situatedness is indeed prior to
any specific event of understanding, so it must always be presupposed even in
the attempt at its own explication. Consequently, the explication of this
situatedness -- of this basic ontological mode of understanding -- is
essentially a matter of exhibiting or ‘laying-bare’ a structure with which we
are already familiar (the structure that is present in every event of
understanding), and, in this respect, hermeneutics becomes one with
phenomenology, itself understood, in Heidegger's thinking, as just such a
‘laying bare’.
It is hermeneutics, in this Heideggerian and phenomenological sense, that is
taken up in Gadamer's work, and that leads him, in conjunction with certain
other insights from Heidegger's later thinking, as well as the ideas of dialogue
and practical wisdom, to elaborate a philosophical hermeneutics that provides an
account of the nature of understanding in its universality (where this refers
both to the ontologically fundamental character of the hermeneutical situation
and the all-encompassing nature of hermeneutic practice) and, in the process, to
develop a response to the earlier hermeneutic tradition's preoccupation with the
problem of interpretive method. In these respects, Gadamer's work, in
conjunction with that of Heidegger, represents a radical reworking of the idea
of hermeneutics that constitutes a break with the preceding hermeneutical
tradition, and yet also reflects back on that tradition. Gadamer thus develops a
philosophical hermeneutics that provides an account of the proper ground for
understanding, while nevertheless rejecting the attempt, whether in relation to
the Geisteswissenschaften or elsewhere, to found understanding on any
method or set of rules. This is not a rejection of the importance of
methodological concerns, but rather an insistence on the limited role of method
and the priority of understanding as a dialogic, practical, situated
activity.
In 1936 Heidegger gave
three lectures on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’ In these lectures, not
published until 1950, Heidegger connects art with truth, arguing that the
essence of the artwork is not its ‘representational’ character, but rather its
capacity to allow the disclosure of a world. Thus the Greek temple establishes
the ‘Greek’ world and in so doing allows things to take on a particular
appearance within that world. Heidegger refers to this event of disclosure as
the event of ‘truth’. The sense of truth at issue here is one that Heidegger
presents in explicit contrast to what he views as the traditional concept of
truth as ‘correctness'. Such correctness is usually taken to consist in some
form of correspondence between individual statements and the world, but
so-called ‘coherence’ accounts of truth, according to which truth is a matter of
the consistency of a statement with a larger body of statements, can also be
viewed as based upon the same underlying notion of truth as ‘correctness'. While
Heidegger does not abandon the notion of truth as ‘correctness', he argues that
it is derivative of a more basic sense of truth as what he terms
‘unconcealment’. Understood in this latter sense, truth is not a property of
statements as they stand in relation to the world, but rather an event or
process in and through which both the things of the world and what is said about
them come to be revealed at one and the same time -- the possibility of
‘correctness' arises on the basis of just such ‘unconcealment’.
It is important to recognize, however, that the unconcealment at issue is not
a matter of the bringing about of some form of complete and absolute
transparency. The revealing of things is, in fact, always dependent upon other
things being simulataneously concealed (in much the same way as seeing something
in one way depends on not seeing it in another). Truth is thus understood as the
unconcealment that allows things to appear, and that also makes possible the
truth and falsity of individual statements, and yet which arises on the basis of
the ongoing play between unconcealment and concealment -- a play that,
for the most part, remains itself hidden and is never capable of complete
elucidation. In the language Heidegger employs in ‘The Origin of the Work of
Art’, the unconcealment of ‘world’ is thereby grounded in the concealment of
‘earth’. It is this sense of truth as the emergence of things into unconcealment
that occurs on the basis of the play between concealing and unconcealing that is
taken by Heidegger as the essence (or ‘origin’) of the work of art. This idea of
truth, as well as the poetic language Heidegger employed in his exposition, had
a decisive effect of Gadamer's own thinking. Indeed, Gadamer described his
philosophical hermeneutics as precisely an attempt to take up and elaborate this
line of thinking from the later Heidegger (Gadamer, 1997b, 47)
There are two crucial elements to Gadamer's appropriation of Heidegger here:
first, the focus on art, and the connection of art with truth; second, the focus
on truth itself as the event of prior and partial disclosure (or more properly,
of concealment/unconcealment) in which we are already involved and that can
never be made completely transparent. Both of these elements are connected with
Gadamer's response to the subjectivist and idealist elements in German thought
that were present in the neo-kantian tradition, and, more specifically, in
romantic hermeneutics and aesthetic theory. As Gadamer saw it, aesthetic theory
had, largely under the influence of Kant, become alienated from the actual
experience of art -- the response to art had become abstracted and
‘aestheticised’ -- and, at the same time, aesthetic judgment had become purely a
matter of taste and so of subjective response. Similarly, under the influence of
the ‘scientific’ historiography of such as Ranke, and the romantic hermeneutics
associated with Schleiermacher and others, the desire for objectivity had led to
the understanding of a text becoming alienated from the contemporary situation
that made that text relevant and significant, while, at the same time, such
understanding had come to be seen as a matter of somehow reconstructing the
subjective experiences of the author, and yet such reconstruction, as Hegel made
clear, was surely impossible (see Gadamer, 1989b, 164-9).
By turning back to the direct experience of art, and to the concept of truth
as prior and partial disclosure, Gadamer was able to develop an alternative to
subjectivism that also connected with the ideas of dialogue and practical wisdom
taken from Plato and Aristotle, and of hermeneutical situatedness taken from the
early Heidegger. Just as the artwork is taken as central and determining in the
experience of art, so is understanding similarly determined by the matter to be
understood; as the experience of art reveals, not in spite of, but precisely
because of the way it also conceals, so understanding is possible, not in spite
of, but precisely because of its prior involvement. In Gadamer's developed work,
the concept of ‘play’ (’Spiel’) has an important role here. Gadamer
takes play as the basic clue to the ontological structure of art, emphasizing
the way in which play is not a form of disengaged, disinterested exercise of
subjectivity, but is rather something that has its own order and structure to
which one is given over. The structure of play has obvious affinities with all
of the other concepts at issue here -- of dialogue, phronesis, the
hermeneutical situation, the truth of art. Indeed, one can take all of these
ideas as providing slightly different elaborations of what is essentially the
same basic conception of understanding -- one that takes our finitude, that is,
our prior involvement and partiality, not as a barrier to understanding, but
rather as its enabling condition. It is this conception that is worked out in
detail in Truth and Method.
One might react to
Gadamer's emphasis on our prior hermeneutic involvement, whether in the
experience of art or elsewhere, that such involvement cannot but remain
subjective simply on the grounds that it is always determined by particular
dispositions, on our part, to experience things in certain ways rather than
others -- our involvement, one might say, is thus always based on subjective
‘prejudice’. Such an objection can be seen as a simple reiteration of the basic
tendency towards subjectivism that Gadamer rejects, but Gadamer also takes issue
directly with this view of prejudice, and the negative connotations often
associated with the notion, arguing that, rather than closing us off, our
prejudices (or ‘pre-judgments') are themselves what open us up to what is to be
understood. In Truth and Method, Gadamer redeploys the notion of our
prior hermeneutical situatedness as it is worked out in more particular fashion
in Heidegger's Being and Time (first published in 1927) in terms of the
‘fore-structures' of understanding, that is, in terms of the anticipatory
structures that allow what is to be interpreted or understood to be grasped in a
preliminary fashion. The fact that understanding operates by means of such
anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer
terms the ‘anticipation of completeness' -- it always involves the revisable
presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is
understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and
therefore meaningful, whole.
Gadamer's positive conception of prejudice can be seen as connected with a
number of different ideas in his hermeneutics. The way in which our prejudices
open us up to matter at issue in such a way that those prejudices are themselves
capable of being revised exhibits the character of the Gadamerian conception of
prejudice, and its role in understanding, as itself constituting a version of
the hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutical priority Gadamer assigns to prejudice
is also tied to Gadamer's emphasis on the priority of the question in the
structure of understanding -- the latter emphasis being something Gadamer takes
both from Platonic dialectic and also, in Truth and Method, from the
work of R. G. Collingwood. Moreover, the indispensable role of prejudice in
understanding connects directly with Gadamer's rethinking of the traditional
concept of hermeneutics as necessarily involving, not merely explication, but
also application. In this respect, all interpretation, even of the
past, is necessarily ‘prejudiced’ in the sense that it is always oriented to
present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and interests
that allow us to enter into the dialogue with the matter at issue. Here, of
course, there is a further connection with the Aristotelian emphasis on the
practical -- not only is understanding a matter of the application of something
like ‘practical wisdom’, but it is also always determined by the practical
context out of which it arises.
The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we
understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own
self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue
of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a
crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they
themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become
apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own
turn. While Gadamer has claimed that ‘temporal distance’ can play a useful role
in enabling us better to identify those prejudices that exercise a problematic
influence on understanding (Gadamer acknowledges that prejudices can sometimes
distort -- the point is that they do not always do so), it seems better to see
the dialogical interplay that occurs in the process of understanding itself as
the means by which such problematic elements are identified and worked through.
One consequence of Gadamer's rehabilitation of prejudice is a positive
evaluation of the role of authority and tradition as legitimate sources of
knowledge, and this has often been seen, most famously by Jürgen Habermas, as
indicative of Gadamer's ideological conservatism -- Gadamer himself viewed it as
merely providing a proper corrective to the over-reaction against these ideas
that occurred with the Enlightenment.
Inasmuch as understanding
always occurs against the background of our prior involvement, so it always
occurs on the basis of our history. Understanding, for Gadamer, is thus
always an ‘effect’ of history, while hermeneutical ‘consciousness' is itself
that mode of being that is conscious of its own historical ‘being effected’ --
it is ‘historically-effected consciousness' (wirkungsgeschictliches
Bewußtsein). Awareness of the historically effected character of
understanding is, according to Gadamer, identical with an awareness of the
hermeneutical situation and he also refers to that situation by means of the
phenomenological concept of ‘horizon’ (’Horizont’) -- understanding and
interpretation thus always occurs from within a particular ‘horizon’ that is
determined by our historically-determined situatedness. Understanding is not,
however, imprisoned within the horizon of its situation -- indeed, the horizon
of understanding is neither static nor unchanging (it is, after all, always
subject to the effects of history). Just as our prejudices are themselves
brought into question in the process of understanding, so, in the encounter with
another, is the horizon of our own understanding susceptible to change.
Gadamer views understanding as a matter of negotiation between oneself and
one's partner in the hermeneutical dialogue such that the process of
understanding can be seen as a matter of coming to an ‘agreement’ about the
matter at issue. Coming to such an agreement means establishing a common
framework or ‘horizon’ and Gadamer thus takes understanding to be a process of
the ‘fusion of horizons' (’Horizontverschmelzung’). The notion of
‘horizon’ employed here derives from phenomenology according to which the
‘horizon’ is the larger context of meaning in which any particular meaningful
presentation is situated. Inasmuch as understanding is taken to involve a
‘fusion of horizons', then so it always involves the formation of a new context
of meaning that enables integration of what is otherwise unfamiliar, strange or
anaomalous. In this respect, all understanding involves a process of mediation
and dialogue between what is familiar and what is alien in which neither remains
unaffected. This process of horizonal engagement is an ongoing one that never
achieves any final completion or complete elucidation -- moreover, inasmuch as
our own history and tradition is itself constitutive of our own hermeneutic
situation as well as being itself constantly taken up in the process of
understanding, so our historical and hermeneutic situation can never be made
completely transparent to us. As a consequence, Gadamer explicitly takes issue
with the Hegelian ‘philosophy of reflection’ that aims at just such completion
and transparency.
In contrast with the traditional hermeneutic account, Gadamer thus advances a
view of understanding that rejects the idea of understanding as achieved through
gaining access to some inner realm of subjective meaning. Moreover, since
understanding is an ongoing process, rather than something that is ever
completed, so he also rejects the idea that there is any final determinacy to
understanding. It is on this basis that Gadamer argues against there being any
method or technique for achieving understanding or arriving at truth. The search
for a methodology for the Geisteswissenschaften that would place them
on a sound footing alongside the ‘sciences of nature’ (the
Naturwissenschaften)-- a search that had characterized much previous
hermeneutical inquiry -- is thus shown to be fundamentally misguided. Not only
is there no methodology that describes the means by which to arrive at an
understanding of the human or the historical, but neither is there any such
methodology that is adequate to the understanding of the non-human or the
natural. Gadamer's conception of understanding as not reducible to method or
technique, along with his insistence of understanding as an ongoing process that
has no final completion, not only invites comparison with ideas to be found in
the work of the later Wittgenstein, but when applied to the philosophy of
science, can also be seen as paralleling the work of T. S. Kuhn and others.
The basic model
of understanding that Gadamer finally arrives at in Truth and Method is
that of conversation. A conversation involves an exchange between conversational
partners that seeks agreement about some matter at issue; consequently, such an
exchange is never completely under the control of either conversational partner,
but is rather determined by the matter at issue. Conversation always takes place
in language and similarly Gadamer views understanding as always linguistically
mediated. Since both conversation and understanding involve coming to an
agreement, so Gadamer argues that all understanding involves something like a
common language, albeit a common language that is itself formed in the process
of understanding itself. In this sense, all understanding is, according to
Gadamer, interpretative, and, insofar as all interpretation involves the
exchange between the familiar and the alien, so all interpretation is also
translative. Gadamer's commitment to the linguisticality of understanding also
commits him to a view of understanding as essentially a matter of conceptual
articulation. This does not rule out the possibility of other modes of
understanding, but it does give primacy to language and conceptuality in
hermeneutic experience. Indeed, Gadamer takes language to be, not merely some
instrument by means of which we are able to engage with the world, but as
instead the very medium for such engagement. We are ‘in’ the world through being
‘in’ language. This emphasis on the linguisticality of understanding does not,
however, lead Gadamer into any form of linguistic relativism. Just as we are not
held inescapably captive within the circle of our prejudices, or within the
effects of our history, neither are we held captive within language. Language is
that within which anything that is intelligible can be comprehended, it is also
that within which we encounter ourselves and others. In this respect, language
is itself understood as essentially dialogue or conversation. Like Wittgenstein,
as well as Davidson, Gadamer thus rejects the idea of such a thing as a ‘private
language’ -- language always involves others, just as it always involves the
world.
Gadamer claims that language is the universal horizon of hermeneutic
experience; he also claims that the hermeneutic experience is itself universal.
This is not merely in the sense that the experience of understanding is familiar
or ubiquitous. The universality of hermeneutics derives from the existential
claim for hermeneutics that Heidegger advanced in the 1920s and that Gadamer
made into a central idea in his own thinking. Hermeneutics concerns our
fundamental mode of being in the world and understanding is thus the basic
phenomenon in our existence. We cannot go back ‘behind’ understanding, since to
do so would be to suppose that there was a mode of intelligibility that was
prior to understanding. Hermeneutics thus turns out to be universal, not merely
in regard to knowledge, whether in the ‘human sciences' or elsewhere, but to all
understanding and, indeed, to philosophy itself. Philosophy is, in its essence,
hermeneutics. Gadamer's claim for the universality of hermeneutics was one of
the explicit points at issue in the debate between Gadamer and Habermas (see
Ormiston and Schrift [eds.], 1990); it can also be seen as, in a certain sense,
underlying the engagement between Gadamer and Derrida (see Michelfelder and
Palmer [eds.], 1989), although in Derrida's case this consisted in a denial of
the primacy of understanding, and the possibility of agreement, on which
hermeneutics itself rests.
Gadamer's
commitment to the historically conditioned character of understanding, coupled
with the hermeneutic imperative that we engage with our historical situatedness,
means that he takes philosophy to itself stand in a critical relation to the
history of philosophy. Gadamer's own thought certainly reflects a hermeneutical
commitment to both philosophical dialogue and historical engagement. His public
debates with contemporary figures such as Habermas and Derrida, although they
have not always lived up to Gadamer's own ideals of hermeneutic dialogue (at
least not in respect of Derrida), have provided clear evidence of Gadamer's own
commitment to such engagement. The dialogue with philosophy and its history also
makes up a large part of Gadamer's published work and, while that dialogue has
encompassed a range of thinkers, its primary focus has been on Plato, Aristotle,
Hegel and Heidegger.
In the case of Plato and Aristotle (see Gadamer 1980, 1986a, 1991), Gadamer
has argued for a particular way of reading both thinkers that attends to the
character of their texts, that takes those texts to display a high degree of
consistency, and that, particularly in the later work, also views Plato and
Aristotle as holding essentially similar views. In The Beginning of
Philosophy (1997a), Gadamer also takes Plato and Aristotle as providing the
indispensable point of entry to an understanding of Pre-Socratic thought. When
it comes to Hegel (see Gadamer, 1971), although there is much that Gadamer finds
sympathetic to his own hermeneutic project (particularly Hegel's attempt to move
beyond the dichotomy of subject and object, as well as aspects of Hegel's
revival of ancient dialectic), Gadamer's commitment to a hermeneutics of
finitude (and so to what Hegel terms ‘bad infinity’) places him in direct
opposition to the Hegelian philosophy of reflection that aims at totality and
completion. It is with Heidegger, however, that Gadamer had his most
significant, sustained and yet also most problematic philosophical engagement
(see especially Gadamer, 1994a). Although Gadamer emphasized the continuities
between his own work and that of Heidegger, and was clearly gratified by those
occasions when Heidegger gave his approval to Gadamer's work, he can also be
seen as involved in a subtle reworking of Heidegger's ideas. On a number of
points, that reworking has a rather different character from that which is
explicit in Heidegger. In particular, Gadamer argues that Heidegger's attempts,
in his later thinking, to find a ‘non-metaphysical’ path of thought led
Heidegger into a situation in which he experienced a ‘lack of (or need for)
language’ (a ‘Sprachnot’). Gadamer's own work can thus be seen as an
attempt to take up the path of Heidegger's later thought in a way that does not
abandon, but rather attempts to work with our existing language. Similarly,
while Heidegger views the history of philosophy as characterized by a
‘forgetting’ of being -- a forgetting that is inaugurated by Plato -- Gadamer
takes the history of philosophy to have no such tendency. In this respect, many
of the differences between Gadamer and Heidegger become clearest in their
differing readings of the philosophical tradition, as well as in their
approaches to poets such as Hölderlin.
The engagement with literature and
art has been a continuing feature throughout Gadamer's life and work and, in
particular, Gadamer has written extensively on poets such as Celan, Goethe,
Hölderlin, and Rilke (see especially Gadamer, 1994b, 1997c). Gadamer's
engagement with art is strongly influenced by his dialogue with the history of
philosophy, and he draws explicitly on Hegel as well as Plato. At the same time,
that engagement provides an exemplification of Gadamer's hermeneutics as well as
a means to develop it further, while his hermeneutic approach to art itself
constitutes a rethinking of aesthetics through the integration of aesthetics
into hermeneutics. In contrast to much contemporary aesthetics, Gadamer takes
the experience of beauty to be central to an understanding of the nature of art
and in the final pages of Truth and Method, he discusses the beautiful
as that which is self-evidently present to us (as ‘radiant’) exploring also the
close relationship between the beautiful and the true. Of particular importance
in his writing about art and literature are the three ideas that appear in the
subtitle to ‘The relevance of the beautiful’ (1986b): art as play, symbol and
festival. The role of play is a central notion in Gadamer's hermeneutic thinking
generally, providing the basis for Gadamer's account of the experience both of
art and understanding (see Aesthetics and
Subjectivism above). The symbolic character of the artwork is seen, by
Gadamer, not in terms of any form of simple ‘representationalism,’ but instead
in terms of the character of art as always showing something more than is
literally present to us in the work (this aspect of art as referring outside
itself is also taken up by Gadamer elsewhere in relation to the character of art
as ‘imitation’ -- mimesis). The artwork, no matter what its medium,
opens up, through its symbolic character, a space in which both the world, and
our own being in the world, is brought to light as a single, but inexhaustibly
rich totality. In the experience of art, we are not merely given a ‘moment’ of
vision, but are able to ‘dwell’ along with the work in a way that takes us out
of ordinary time into what Gadamer calls ‘fulfilled’ or ‘autonomous' time. Thus
the artwork has a festive, as well as symbolic and playful character, since the
festival similarly takes us out of ordinary time, while also opening us up to
the true possibility of community.
Gadamer's emphasis on application
in understanding already implies that all understanding has a practical
orientation in the sense of being determined by our contemporary situation.
Gadamer has himself engaged, however, in more direct reflection on a range of
contemporary issues (see Gadamer 1976a, 1989a, 1993b, 1998b, 1999). Much of
Gadamer's discussion of these issues depends upon the hermeneutic ideas he has
worked out elsewhere. A central concern in many of Gadamer's essays is the role
of Europe, and European culture, in the contemporary world -- something that was
especially pressing for Gadamer with the advent of German reunification and the
expansion of the European community (see especially Gadamer, 1989a). Here,
however, a number of other closely connected issues also come into view: the
nature and role of modern science and technology (see especially, 1976a, 1998b),
and together with this, the role of the humanities; the question of education
and, in particular, of humanistic education (1992); the question of
understanding between cultures and especially between religions. In addition,
Gadamer has written on matters concerning law, ethics, the changing character of
the modern university, the connection between philosophy and politics, and the
nature of medical practice and the concept of health (see especially Gadamer
1993b).
An extensive bibliography of Gadamer's
work, compiled by Richard E. Palmer, can be found in Hahn, 1997, 555-602;
Palmer's bibliography is essentially a simplified version of Makita, 1995.
a. Works in German
- 1985-1995, Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols., Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr;
Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer
philosophischen Hermeneutik, 5th edn, 1975), is included as v.1; a list
of contents for all 10 vols. is included in vol.10.
- 1967-1979, Kleine Schriften, 4 vols, Tübingen: Mohr.
Other works not included in the Gesammelte Werke or
Kleine Shriften:
- 1971, Hegels Dialektik, Tübingen: Mohr, English trans. Gadamer
1976b.
- 1976a, Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft: Aufsätze,
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, English trans. Gadamer, 1981.
- 1989a, Das Erbe Europas: Beiträge, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, English
translation in Gadamer, 1992
- 1993a, Hermeneutik, Ästhetik, Praktische Philosophie: Hans-Georg
Gadamer im Gespräch, ed. by Carsten Dutt, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag
C. Winter, English trans. Gadamer 2001.
- 1993b, Über die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit: Aufsätze und
Vorträge, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, English translation Gadamer 1996.
- 1997a, Der Anfang der Philosophie, Stuttgart: Reclam, English
trans. Gadamer 1998a
- 2000, Hermeneutische Entwürfe, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
- 1976b, Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. by
P. Christopher Smith (from Gadamer, 1971), New Haven: Yale University Press.
- 1976c, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. by David E.
Linge, Berkeley: University of California Press.
- 1980, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on
Plato, trans. and ed. by P. Christopher Smith, New Haven: Yale University
Press.
- 1981, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. by Frederick G.
Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- 1985, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. by Robert R.
Sullivan, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- 1986a, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy,
trans. P. Christopher Smith, New Haven: Yale University Press.
- 1986b, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. by
N. Walker, ed. by R. Bernasconi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- 1989b, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn. (1st English edn, 1975),
trans. by J. Weinsheimer and D.G.Marshall, New York: Crossroad.
- 1991, Plato's dialectical ethics: phenomenological interpretations
relating to the "Philebus", trans. by R. M. Wallace, New Haven: Yale
University Press.
- 1992, Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry and History: Applied
Hermeneutics, ed. by Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson, trans. by
Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Ruess, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
- 1994a, Heidegger's ways, trans. by John W. Staley, Albany, NY:
SUNY Press.
- 1994b, Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue: Essays in German
Literary Theory, trans. By Robert H. Paslick, ed. by Dennis J. Schmidt,
Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
- 1996, The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific
Age, trans. by John Gaiger and Nicholas Walker, Oxford: Polity Press.
- 1997b, ‘Reflections on my Philosophical Journey’, trans. by Richard E.
Palmer, in Hahn (ed.), 1997.
- 1997c, Gadamer on Celan: ‘Who Am I and Who Are You?’ and Other
Essays, trans. and ed. by Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski, Albany,
NY: SUNY Press.
- 1998, The Beginning of Philosophy, trans. by Rod Coltman, New
York: Continuum.
- 1998a, Praise of Theory, trans. by Chris Dawson, New Haven: Yale
University Press.
- 1999, Hermeneutics, Religion and Ethics, trans. by Joel
Weinsheimer, New Haven: Yale University Press.
- 2001, Gadamer in Conversation, trans. by Richard Palmer (from
Gadamer, 1993a), New Haven: Yale University Press.
- 2002, The Beginning of Knowledge, trans. by Rod Coltman, New
York: Continuum.
- 2003, A Century of Philosophy: a conversation with Ricardo
Dottori, trans. by Rod Coltman and Sigrid Koepke, New York: Continuum.
- Code, Lorraine (ed.), 2003, The Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg
Gadamer, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press.
- Dostal, Robert L. (ed.), 2002, The Cambridge Companion to
Gadamer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Grondin, Jean, 2002, The Philosophy of Gadamer, trans. by Kathryn
Plant, New York: McGill-Queens University Press.
- Hahn, Lewis Edwin (ed.), 1997, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Library of Living Philosophers XXIV, Chicago: Open
Court, contains Gadamer, 1997b.
- Makita, Etsura, 1995, Gadamer-Bibliographie (1922-1994), New
York: Peter Lang (in German, this is the definitive bibliographic source for
works by and about Gadamer), for corrections and additions to this
bibliography see the entry for the ‘Gadamer Home Page’ in Other Internet
Resources below.
- Malpas, Jeff, Ulrich Arnswald and Jens Kertscher (eds.), 2002,
Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honour of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
- Michelfelder, Diane. P. and Richard E. Palmer (eds.), 1989, Dialogue
and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Debate, Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
contains a number of Gadamer's writings relevant to the debate with Derrida.
- Ormiston, Gayle and Alan Schrift (eds.), 1990, The Hermeneutic
Tradition, Albany: SUNY Press, contains a number of writings by Gadamer
and others relevant to the debate with Habermas as well as Betti.
- Palmer, Richard, E., 1969, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in
Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, Evanston, Northwestern
University Press, one of the first detailed accounts of Gadamer's thinking,
and of hermeneutic theory generally, available in English.
- Palmer, Richard, E., 2002, ‘A Response to Richard Wolin on Gadamer and the
Nazis’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 10 (2002),
pp.467-82, a reply to Wolin, 2000.
- Scheibler, Ingrid, 2000, Gadamer. Between Heidegger and
Hermeneutics, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.
- Schmidt, Lawrence K., 1985, The Epistemology of Hans-Georg
Gadamer, Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
- Silverman, Hugh J. (ed.), 1991, Gadamer and Hermeneutics, New
York: Routledge.
- Sullivan, Robert, 1990, Political Hermeneutics: The Early Thinking of
Hans-Georg Gadamer, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
- Wachterhauser, Brice, 1999, Beyond Being: Gadamer's Post-Platonic
Hermeneutic Ontology, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
- Warnke, Georgia, 1987, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and
Reason, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Weinsheimer, Joel, 1985, Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of "Truth
and Method", New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Wolin, Richard, 2000, ‘Nazism and the Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer:
Untruth and Method’, New Republic, pp.36-45, replied to by Palmer,
2002.
- Wright, Kathleen (ed.), 1990, Festivals of Interpretation: Essays on
Hans-Georg Gadamer's Work, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Heidegger, Martin | hermeneutics | phenomenology
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