Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is as much a reaction as an initiation: a reaction against a relativistic historicism that “locked” speakers and actors “inside” world views, a reaction against the overwhelming prestige of the natural sciences and the insistence on methodology inspired by that success, and a reaction against the “bloodless academic philosophizing” of neo-Kantian philosophy and its perennialist “great problems” approach to the history of philosophy. But in several of his autobiographical remarks, Gadamer singles out an opponent that seems to loom oddly large in his reminiscences about provocations. “Using Heidegger's analysis, my starting point was a critique of German Idealism and its Romantic traditions” (PG, 27), he writes in one such recollection. And in the same essay, he writes of trying to avoid or to “forfeit” (einbüßen) “the fundamentum inconcussum of philosophy on the basis of which Hegel had written his story of philosophy and the neo-Kantians their history of problems – namely, self-consciousness” (PG, 7). And later, “So I sought in my hermeneutics to overcome the primacy of self-consciousness, and especially the prejudices of an idealism rooted in consciousness” (PG, 27).

I want to explore in the following what Gadamer might mean by giving to hermeneutics the task of “overcoming the primacy of self-consciousness” and to ask whether it is really Hegel in his sights as he attempts to do so.