How Gadamer Changed My Life

Abstract

How could I have imagined back in 1958-59 as a doctoral student in European Comparative Literature taking the last step in preparation for college teaching, that my career was to unfold as it did? Could I ever have dreamed that it would take me to Germany for four different years of postdoctoral study and into contact with such famous German philosophers as Hans-Georg Gadarner, Martin Heidegger, or Jiirgen Habermas? Could I foresee summer study with American literary critics Geoffrey Hartman and Stanley Fish? Had it not been for Professor Gadamer, none of this would have happened. In a 1965 summer semester, he set my career on a new path, and now I pause to acknowledge my debt to him. In 1964, some 38 years ago, I arrived in ZUrich with my wife Louise and children for an American Council of Learned Societies Cross-Disciplinary research fellowship in theology and literature with theologian Gerhard Ebeling at the Institut fur Hermeneutik in ZUrich. I had a recommendation in hand from theologian Karl Michalson, who tragically died in a plane crash later that year. At that time I had not even heard of Hans-Georg Gadamer. My proposed research topic for the year was the influence of existentialism on theologians Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Fuchs, and Gerhard Ebeling with regard to its potential methodological relevance for literary interpretation. At Redlands I had written a Ph.D. dissertation on existentialism in Baudelaire, Rilke, and T. S. Eliot (1959). That was my preparation, such as it was; this research was to continue it. My perspective was unexpectedly widened, however, when Professor Ebeling disputed the opening sentence of my fourteen page research prospectus, which stated that hermeneutics was largely known to theologians as the methodology of theological interpretation. No, he said, hermeneutics was not, or at least was not now, merely a methodology of text interpretation, and it certainly was not restricted to theology. Insofar as he and other post-Bultmannian theologians had any methodology, it was that of philology! He recommended that I read at once Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode, which had been the focus of a seminar there at ZUrich in 1962. Furthermore, he suggested that my topic of hermeneutics and literary interpretation would be better pursued starting from philosophy, with Gadamer. But watch out, because hermeneutics in Gadamer was not a methodology.