In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method ( Wahrheit und Methode). Although he had authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, “Philosophical Hermeneutics.” The publisher responded that “hermeneutics” was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed “Truth and Method” for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made “hermeneutics” and Gadamer’s name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in an attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language.

This chapter provides a biography of Gadamer and includes an overview of the philosophical work that Gadamer produced. It provides an account of his youth and education, his early career in Nazi Germany, and his career after World War II. He was named Rektor of Leipzig University in East Germany but gave up the position and came to West Germany, first to Frankfurt and then to Heidelberg. In 1960 he published Truth and Method, which slowly became recognized world-wide. He retired in 1968 and was very productive throughout his old age.

This chapter explores the historical relationship between Heidegger and Gadamer. It points out several surprises and disappointments that Gadamer experienced with Heidegger. More importantly, the chapter considers the phenomenological character of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer rejects many of the basic characteristics of Husserl’s phenomenology, but he is also indebted deeply to other aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology. These aspects he also shares with Heidegger–the concepts of horizon and lifeworld, the account of temporality, and the rejection of a representational epistemology. The chapter points out the distinctiveness of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in relation to Heidegger’s. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is more dialogical, embraces the antinomy of beginnings, and embraces Plato and Aristotle.

One common view of the history of twentieth-century Continental philosophy is as follows. At the beginning of the century, Edmund Husserl, disturbed by what he saw as the increasing relativism and historicism of Western culture, introduced the phenomenological method as a way to ensure that philosophy would arrive at final, incontrovertible truths. Phenomenology means primarily description - description of the things presented in our experience and description of our experience of them. The phenomenological movement was heralded by Husserl's cry, “Back to the things themselves!” Because phenomenology “brackets,” or suspends belief in, all metaphysical constructs in order to focus solely on what shows up as it presents itself in our experience, its findings are supposed to be apodictic, beyond all possible doubt.

According to the standard story, the early Heidegger came along and raised questions about the viability of Husserlian phenomenology by taking an “interpretive” turn. What is most important about Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology, so the story goes, is his recognition of the significance of the finitude, worldliness, and historicity of our human predicament - the recognition that our access to things is always colored and preshaped by the sense of things circulating in our historical culture.

Gadamer's life and work is closely connected with and indebted to the life and work of Martin Heidegger. Gadamer's autobiography makes clear that the encounter with Heidegger in the early 1920s was quite literally fateful. Theirs was a lifelong personal and intellectual relationship. Throughout his published work and in his lectures and private conversation, Gadamer everywhere modestly acknowledges his deep debt to Heidegger. He tells us, for example, that Truth and Method, his magnum opus, was, among other things, an attempt to open the way for readers to the work of the later Heidegger. In honor of Gadamer's 100th birthday in February 2000, Hermann Heidegger, Martin Heidegger's son, dedicated the 16th volume of Heidegger's Collected Works to Gadamer, “the oldest loyal pupil of my father.” Yet in many significant and fundamental respects, Gadamer's thought, life, and work did not follow the path of Heidegger. As we shall see below, Gadamer learned and borrowed much from Heidegger, but Gadamer's own characterization of the relationship between himself and Heidegger as one of constant challenge and provocation is perhaps the best short characterization of this complex relationship. Stylistically and substantively, the difference between their two modes of thought is the difference between a meditative thinker (Heidegger) and a dialogical one (Gadamer). Not unrelated to this difference is Gadamer's refusal to take Heidegger's lead to a kind of thought that is postphilosophical. This refusal has many ramifications.

GADAMER’S PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS

In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). Although he authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato's Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, “Philosophical Hermeneutics.” The publisher responded that “hermeneutics” was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed “Truth and Method” for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made “hermeneutics” and Gadamer's name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into ten languages thus far - including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in the attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language. “Being that can be understood is language,” writes Gadamer in the culminating section of the work in which he proposes a “hermeneutical ontology” (TM 432). For his concept of the understanding and the task of ontology, Gadamer relies importantly on Martin Heidegger's treatment of these concepts in Being and Time (1927).

In many respects the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has led an unremarkable life. Born into a well-to-do middle class, academic, German family, he enjoyed a Gymnasium (a secondary school preparatory to the university) and a university education that led to a career as a philosophy professor. He retired from the university at age 68 and continues to lecture and write. What distinguishes Gadamer's life is his work. With the publication of Truth and Method in 1960, he helped inaugurate, in philosophy and human studies, an interpretive turn with a worldwide impact. We also note that Gadamer has led a very long life. Born in 1900, his life spans the entire twentieth century. It goes without saying, that Gadamer has led a German life - a German life in a century that might well have been a German century on the world stage but instead was an unmitigated disaster for Germany and for the world. Gadamer's life is closely bound to Germany and its intellectual life, though in his retirement he lectured around the world and spent extensive time teaching and lecturing in North America. A look at his life can illuminate Germany's century as well as the context for his philosophical work. The work, however, is not to be understood merely within this context, for, as Gadamer himself has often argued, a philosophical or literary work always surpasses what the author understands. In addition, this German philosopher found himself with audiences and a readership worldwide.