The German philosopher whose Truth and Method (1960) made hermeneutics — the philosophical theory of interpretation — a central concern of twentieth-century continental thought, and whose 102-year career placed him at the meeting point of phenomenology, classical scholarship, and dialogic philosophy.
gadamer
German philosopher (1900–2002), Heidegger's student and later interlocutor, whose Wahrheit und Methode (1960) developed philosophical hermeneutics into a comprehensive theory of understanding that grounded twentieth-century reflection on interpretation across philosophy, theology, history, jurisprudence, and the human sciences.
Life
Hans-Georg Gadamer was born on 11 February 1900 in Marburg an der Lahn, the son of Johannes Gadamer, an established pharmaceutical chemist who would soon take a professorship at Breslau. The family moved to Breslau in 1902, where Gadamer was raised; his mother died of diabetes when he was four, and his father raised him and his brother under a strict and emotionally distant Protestant household culture. The father's scientific positivism and Hans-Georg's eventual humanistic vocation generated a lifelong tension between the two that Gadamer described in his autobiographical Philosophische Lehrjahre (1977).
Gadamer began his university studies at Breslau in 1918 but moved to Marburg in 1919 to study under Paul Natorp, the principal living representative of the Marburg neo-Kantian school. He completed his doctorate at twenty-two (1922) on Plato's dialogues under Natorp's direction. The brilliant young doctor was already, however, drawn to the new philosophy emerging around Martin Heidegger, then thirty-three years old and teaching at Marburg.
The encounter with Heidegger shaped the next sixty years. Gadamer became one of Heidegger's first Marburg students from 1923, attended the lectures on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and on Plato's Sophist that would feed into Being and Time, and was, with Hannah Arendt and others, part of the small circle Heidegger acknowledged as his most serious students of the period. The relationship with Heidegger was philosophically formative throughout Gadamer's life; the philosophical and political problems it produced — Heidegger's 1933 Nazi affiliation, his refusal of public reckoning afterward — generated continuous controversy.
Gadamer's Habilitation (the second German doctorate qualifying for university teaching) on Plato's dialectical ethics, defended in 1929 under Heidegger's supervision, allowed him to teach at Marburg. The academic position was modest — Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer), then ausserplanmässiger Professor (extraordinary professor without salary) — and Gadamer's professional progress under the Nazi regime was conspicuously slow, perhaps because of his refusal to make the political accommodations that would have accelerated it. He was finally appointed to a full chair only at Leipzig in 1939, at thirty-nine.
The Leipzig years included the war and the disaster of the postwar Soviet occupation. Gadamer served briefly as Rector of Leipzig University in 1946–47 under the new Communist regime, attempting to negotiate the university's continued operation; he found the conditions impossible and accepted a call to Frankfurt in 1947, then to Heidelberg in 1949 as successor to the chair Karl Jaspers had held. Heidelberg would be his base for the next fifty-three years.
Wahrheit und Methode appeared in 1960, when Gadamer was sixty — a late publication for a major work in the German academic tradition. The book was an immediate event in German philosophy; it became an international event with the publication of the English translation by Garrett Barden and John Cumming in 1975. From the early 1960s Gadamer was widely recognized as one of the major living continental philosophers, alongside Sartre, Merleau-Ponty (until 1961), Ricoeur, and Habermas.
The last four decades were spent in continuous activity: lecturing, traveling, debating, writing. The famous 1967–71 Habermas-Gadamer debate over the relation of hermeneutics to ideology critique was a defining event of late twentieth-century German philosophy; the dialogue with Habermas continued for thirty years. Gadamer lectured continuously in Europe, North America (he held visiting positions at Boston College and elsewhere for decades), and Latin America. He died on 13 March 2002 in Heidelberg, three weeks past his 102nd birthday, having published essays and given interviews into his last year.
Wahrheit und Methode
Truth and Method (1960), in three parts of unequal length, is Gadamer's principal work. The book's structure: Part I treats the experience of art as the entry point into a general theory of understanding; Part II treats the historical-philosophical development of the modern problem of understanding, particularly through the nineteenth-century human sciences; Part III treats the ontological dimension of understanding through language and dialogue.
The central theses:
The Rehabilitation of Prejudice
The Enlightenment, Gadamer argues, generated a prejudice against prejudice — the demand that genuine knowledge must be free of all prior judgment, all unexamined inheritance, all dependence on tradition. This demand is impossible. All understanding proceeds from the fore-structure of prior expectation; the interpreter never approaches the text or object as a blank slate but always brings the prior expectations that the tradition (linguistic, conceptual, historical) has supplied. The question is not how to escape prejudice — an impossible demand — but how to distinguish productive from unproductive prejudice, and how to allow productive prejudice to be educated by encounter with the text.
This position rehabilitates Vorurteil (prejudice, fore-judgment) as a positive condition of understanding rather than as the enemy of knowledge. The rehabilitation has had wide consequences, particularly in legal and theological hermeneutics, where the question of how to read inherited authoritative texts in a continuing tradition is the daily reality of disciplinary practice.
Effective History and the Fusion of Horizons
Wirkungsgeschichte (effective-history) is the historical influence the text has had — the cumulative tradition of reading, application, debate — that has shaped the way contemporary readers approach it. The reader does not approach the original text directly but always through the accumulated history of its reception. Wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein (effective-historical consciousness) is the interpretive awareness of one's own position within this effective history.
The fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) is what happens in successful interpretation. The horizon of the text — the world of meaning within which the text was originally produced — and the horizon of the interpreter — the world of meaning within which the interpreter stands — do not remain separate, with the interpreter merely reaching across to read what the text meant. Successful interpretation produces a fusion in which the interpreter's horizon is enlarged to include something of the text's, and the text's meaning is enlarged by the new question it has been brought to answer. The fusion is the genuine event of understanding.
Language as the Medium of Understanding
The ontological core of Truth and Method is the doctrine that understanding takes place in and through language. Being that can be understood is language — the most famous and most debated sentence of the book (Part III, section 3) — is not the reduction of being to linguistic constructs but the claim that language is the medium through which the world is intelligible at all. Understanding is essentially conversational; the conversation with a text takes place as a kind of dialogue in which the text addresses the interpreter and the interpreter must allow the text to question him as well as questioning the text.
The dialogue model derives from the Platonic dialogue — Gadamer's lifelong philosophical love — in which the back-and-forth of question and answer, with each party allowing himself to be addressed and corrected by the other, is what produces philosophical insight rather than predetermined conclusion. The hermeneutic experience of reading a great text, on Gadamer's account, has the same dialogical structure.
Other Works and Themes
The collected works (Gesammelte Werke, 10 vols., J. C. B. Mohr, 1985–95) include volumes on Plato, on the philosophy of art, on hermeneutic theory, on the history of philosophy, on theological and biblical interpretation, on practical philosophy and ethics, and on contemporary cultural-philosophical questions.
The Plato scholarship runs throughout the career: from the early Dialectical Ethics dissertation through Plato's Dialectical Ethics (1931), Dialogue and Dialectic (essays, 1980), The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (1978). Gadamer's reading of Plato was an Aristotelianizing one (taking the dialogues as serious philosophical works engaging in real argument rather than as literary or dramatic vehicles for predetermined doctrine), influenced by Heidegger's early lectures but developed in independent directions.
The practical philosophy of Aristotle was the other classical engagement. Gadamer treated the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics as central resources for thinking about practical reason in modern conditions; the recovery of phronesis (practical wisdom) as a distinctive mode of cognition appropriate to ethical and political questions is one of the major Gadamerian contributions to twentieth-century moral philosophy.
The Habermas Debate
The debate with Jürgen Habermas over the relation of hermeneutics to critical theory ran from Habermas's 1967 Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften through the back-and-forth of essays collected in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (1971) and in subsequent contributions through the 1980s. Habermas argued that Gadamerian hermeneutics, by absorbing the interpreter into the tradition and treating effective history as inescapable, lacked the critical distance needed for an emancipatory social theory; tradition could be ideological as well as authoritative, and an adequate hermeneutics needed a moment of critical distance from the inherited that Gadamer's account did not provide. Gadamer's reply: critique is itself always practiced from within a tradition, with vocabulary and standards the tradition supplies; the Habermasian appeal to a non-traditional standpoint of critique is itself a tradition (the Frankfurt critical-theory tradition), and the alleged distance is internal to the dialogue rather than external to it.
The debate did not produce convergence; it produced the most influential post-Heideggerian methodological discussion in late twentieth-century continental philosophy. Both positions have continuing defenders; the questions remain live.
Reception
Gadamer's reception spread from German philosophy of the 1960s outward across the human sciences. In theology, the Catholic and Protestant biblical hermeneutics of the postwar period absorbed Gadamerian framework. In legal theory, the work of Joseph Esser, Ronald Dworkin (the integrity of legal interpretation in Law's Empire), Robert Alexy, and the broader hermeneutical jurisprudence operates in a Gadamerian framework. In literary criticism, the reception aesthetics of Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser at Konstanz developed directly from Gadamerian premises. In the philosophy of social science, Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, and the broader hermeneutical wing of the human sciences treated Gadamer as a foundational reference.
The English-speaking philosophical reception came slower but eventually broadly. Joel Weinsheimer's Gadamer's Hermeneutics (Yale University Press, 1985), Georgia Warnke's Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (Stanford University Press, 1987), Brice Wachterhauser's edited volumes on hermeneutics and truth, Jean Grondin's The Philosophy of Gadamer (McGill-Queen's, 2003), and the Lewis Edwin Hahn Library of Living Philosophers volume on Gadamer (1997, while Gadamer was still actively working) constitute the principal Anglophone literature.
The second revised English edition of Truth and Method by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (Continuum, 1989; rev. ed. 2004) is the current standard English text.
Significance
Gadamer's importance has three dimensions. As philosophical hermeneut, Truth and Method made the theory of interpretation a central concern of late twentieth-century philosophy, with consequences for theology, legal theory, literary criticism, history, and the broader human sciences. As Plato scholar, his work shaped the post-Heideggerian recovery of Plato as a serious philosophical thinker (against the older view of Plato as the figure to be overcome by Aristotle or by the moderns). As public philosopher in a long career, his presence in German and international intellectual life across the postwar period embodied a model of philosophical engagement with the inherited tradition that resisted both the fashionable abandonments of the tradition and the unreflective continuations of it.