Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002)

A brilliant introduction to the practice of hermeneutics (the art of understanding). Gadamer manages to clearly describe the conditions for understanding, revealing many great ideas also present in Derrida, Levinas and others. The advantage of Gadamer is that he explains these ideas with rigor and systematically. It is not an easy book, but due to Gadamer's skill in explaining, the ideas manage to get across quite well.

Especially noteworthy is the unbelievable achievement of Gadamer to cross show more the boundaries of hermeneutics as a practice of understanding texts, towards an ontological hermeneutics. Here he is especially close to Derrida's concept of differance, which, albeit in first instance refering to language, also refers to world-constitution. The last part of Wahrheit und Methode is of paramount importance to understand these ideas and I would recommend it the most - even though it becomes most clear if one reads the entire book. show less

I was a bit disappointed in this collection of essays. Gadamer writes on his usual topics and the other authors also put a heavy emphasis on familiar hermeneutic perspectives. None of them is able to engage in a particularly interesting way with any aspect of philosophy of science or scientific practice. I would recommend books by Kockelmans or Crease instead if you're interested in the hermeneutics of science.

When a first-rate 20th century philosopher tackles the greek classics, it usually provides for interesting reading. This book is no exception, but it might be more difficult than most other encounters between the past and the present. As the title indicates Gadamer's starting point is in his own hermeneutical theory which is quite a challenge in itself. So it's a lot of work to interpret Gadamer's interpretations in this book.

Gadamer gets at least three stars for everything, just because he manages to be a serious student of German philosophy, but his sentences are comprehensible on first reading 80 to 90 percent of the time. That makes... one serious student of German philosophy, who is also an original thinker in his/her own right, about whom this can be said.

As to the content of this book, it's probably better for dipping into rather than reading straight through. The essays in the first half are mainly about show more the relation between Gadamerian hermeneutics and other disciplines. In the order of the book, they are: the hard sciences, the social sciences, biblical hermeneutics (kind of), classical metaphysics, semantics, and aesthetics. So if you're interested in any of these disciplines, you'll find the corresponding essay interesting (save for that which is ostensibly about Bultmannian biblical scholarship, but actually has nothing to say about said scholarship at all, in any way). Sadly, Gadamer's approach is the same to all of these disciplines: they are partial and not fundamental, whereas his own hermeneutical approach is universal and fundamental. I have some sympathy for the idea that human knowledge is at base interpretive, and if Gadamer just meant that, I'd be fine with it.

But he doesn't. He also means that the act of interpretation is at base passive (that is, it happens behind our backs); that this is an ontological rather than a social fact (so it is simply impossible to make our interpretations conscious or rational); and that the warrant for this is a range of outrageous assumptions about language (that it is identical with human thought and activity in general). A lot of this comes out in the second half of the book, a half dozen essays on philosophical history. They do a pretty good job of explaining how German philosophy managed to get from Kant, through Hegel and Fichte, to Husserl, Heidegger and, ultimately, Gadamer himself. They're reasonably sympathetic to all of these figures, but also reveal the obvious flaw in Gadamer's thought: he claims that, like Hegel, his theory aims to unify 'objective spirit' (basically non-private, social or structural stuff) with 'subjective spirit,' (individualist, subjective stuff). But he doesn't do this at all. Gadamer is a great corrective to the more Kantian strands of German thought, but he swings too far to the other side. Despite his claims to the contrary, he eliminates subjective spirit and leaves himself with a philosophy of objective spirit (for his, that objective spirit is language; like Heidegger he's too comfortable with the idea that 'language speaks us'). Because he sets up this all-devouring structure, he's unable to explain the possibility of rational thought. This is ironic and sad, since he also seems to be deeply committed to rationality in a way that Derrida, for instance, is not.

That aside, he's a great model for philosophers everywhere: clear (except for occasional obfuscatory Heideggerian mysticism), willing to deal with history as an important part of his thought, willing to accept criticism (witness just how far he's willing to go towards ideology critique when thinking about Habermas, for instance), willing to accept the importance of tradition. Every now and then he makes Heidegger and, even more remarkably, Husserl, comprehensible.

I especially recommend 'The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem,' 'Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,' 'The Philosophical Foundations of the Twentieth Century,' and 'The Science of the Life-World.' show less