Unquiet Understanding: Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics

Abstract

Gadamer's contribution to philosophy in the twentieth century cannot fail to command attention for three reasons: it responds to the full difficulty of affirming a distinctively German humanist tradition, starting with Herder, Kant, and Schiller; it takes on the task of constructing such an affirmation, in full knowledge of the devastating disruptions of this tradition, by Nietzsche, by Heidegger, and by the historical catastrophe of Nazi Germany; and despite or perhaps as a consequence of these first two, it contrives to do justice to the magnitude of Heidegger's philosophical inventions, while retaining a discrete critical distance from them. It is important to set discussions of Gadamer's supposed conservative retrieval of enabling presuppositions in this context: this is a selective process of retrieval which affirms connections back to Fr Schleiermacher and Fr Schlegel; to Ernst Cassirer and Wilhelm Dilthey. Gadamer's principal text, Wahrheit und Methode, published in 1960, consists of three main sections: one on the retrieval of concepts, one on a broadening of the scope of truth, beyond the scope of questions in epistemology and methodology, and one on hermeneutics, as part of a linguistic turn in ontology. Gadamer always insisted that his title was to be understood disjunctively; that truth happens beyond the scope of method. For this reason he was reluctant to affirm the development of the more specifically literary hermeneutics of Wolfgang Iser, and indeed Peter Szondi.