of  "Hans-Georg Gadamer"

a lecture by : Dr. Richard Palmer

It is a great privilege to be invited by my friend, Pan Derong, to speak to you about the hermeneutical philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thank you very much! Before I retired in 1999, when I was teaching a course in “Confucianism, Taoism, and Zen Buddhism” at my college, I sought to explain Confucianism in an initial lecture by defining in some detail a number of key terms. I chose the following terms: jen, tao (defined as the way of the ancients), tê, li, hsiao, wen, T’ien, and the 8) Chün Tzu. Of course, this leaves out so much, like the importance of sincerity, for instance, but the students at least had something at the beginning to hang onto-and I also had something I could ask them on the examination! I do not propose to test you on this lecture today, but I would like use that same strategy in explaining Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy to you. I will discuss seven of his key terms or concepts.

Before doing this, however, I should like to mention six ways in which Gadamer is like Confucius. I believe Professor Chung-ying Cheng has also explored Gadamer’s affinities with Confucianism in a recent interview with Gadamer, but perhaps I could mention here several affinities that occur to me.

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1. He was an educator. Like Confucius, Gadamer was an educator with great concern for his students. Because he was an expert on Plato, he advocated entering into dialogue on any matter, asking questions and giving answers, as a means of reaching an understanding together. So, #1, he was an educator.

2. He valued tradition. Like Confucius, Gadamer valued the ancients and the texts of the transmitted tradition. Confucius actually edited the six classics. Of course, Gadamer did not have the cultural importance of a founding father, but like Confucius, Gadamer valued the ancient texts as a source of social wisdom. I would remind you that for us in the West today, the ancient texts are in another language: Greek or Latin, not the modern language. Gadamer and Heidegger saw Greek thought as deeper than modern thinking, and Greek terms were endlessly instructive in their ancient meanings and usage. Gadamer took training as a classical philologist as well as a philosopher. He studied and gained accreditation to teach classical texts. This extra knowledge added depth to his grasp of ancient philosophy. He wrote his philology exam in Latin about a Greek poet, Pindar. He was truly a scholar of the classics.

3. He valued virtue. Like Confucius, Gadamer was concerned with virtue, goodness, and the right way to live. He wrote his second doctoral dissertation (the habilitation, in order to be a professor) on “Plato’s Dialectical Ethics” (published 1931) and a recent masterful work on “The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy” (1978). He pondered, loved, and sought “the Good.”

4. He valued poetry and art. Gadamer valued art and poetry. He saw them not just as necessary to a cultured life but also a transmission of deep truths about the way things are. Two of the ten volumes of his collected works (volumes 8 and 9) are devoted to aesthetics and interpreting literature and art. Furthermore, the truth of art played a key role in his masterwork, Truth and Method. For Gadamer, art revealed “truth.” It was not just a special kind of “disinterested pleasure in the beautiful,” as philosopher Kant had believed.

5. He valued application. Like Confucius, Gadamer valued application of knowledge. Gadamer believed that to understand something rightly, one needs to grasp the application of it. For this reason he appealed to the example of law. A judge must apply the law handed down to the present, individual case.

6. He sought harmony. Like Confucius, Gadamer sought harmony, balance, negotiation, agreement in understanding, what he called “fusion of horizons.” His first step in any discussion was to seek a common ground.

In light of these six basic affinities with Confucian values, I believe Chinese students of philosophy will find Gadamer’s philosophy of some interest. Now I will turn to the seven key terms I have selected. I will try to explain each, sometimes with the help of other key terms in Gadamer. In another lecture I used 20 key terms, and I initially had chosen twelve for this paper, but through combining some terms under others I have reduced the number to seven! I hope this works!

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The seven key terms I will try to explain with regard to Gadamer’s understanding and use of them are:

1. Wahrheit

2. Zeitlichkeit,

3. phronesis

4. applicatio

5. Tradition and the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein

6. Gespräch

7. Solidarität

1. Wahrheit. Hans-Georg Gadamer uses the term Wahrheit in a special sense in the title of his masterwork, Wahrheit und Methode (1960). Ordinarily it is translated as “truth,” and his masterwork was translated into English as Truth and Method, but Gadamer uses the term in a way that goes back to Heidegger’s reference to the Greek term, aletheia [Greek for truth], which Heidegger translates as Unverborgenheit [unhiddenness, disclosure]. In his Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Origin of the Work of Art) of 1936, Heidegger describes the experience of encountering a work as an event of ontological disclosure. That is, when one experiences a work of great art, one does not just feel pleasure; one also feels that the work has “said” something-such that we are led to say, “So ist es!” [That is how it is! It is so!] It has shown us a truth about “the way things are,” an ontological truth, i.e., a truth about their being.

Professor Chang Chung-yuan in his book, Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry , refers to the artist’s “ontological experience” in creating Chinese works of art, and the artist’s creative power to disclose being. Chang here refers to Chuang Tzu’s term “spiritual court” and the whole book works within the tradition of Taoism, but Gadamer got his conception of truth as “emergence into visibility” from Heidegger, whose thought definitely has affinities with Taoism! (Another topic! We cannot go into this.) In any case, this sense of “emergence into being,” of “event of disclosure,” is what Gadamer has in mind with the term Wahrheit. The contrasting definition in the West is truth as correspondence, that is, the agreement of a statement with a “state of affairs” [Sache].

By the way, the verb wahren in German means to protect and preserve, and this applies to what the artwork does. It protects, preserves, and transmits the experience of the being of things that the artist has experienced and transmitted in the work. When the work is encountered by a viewer who is open to it, there is a moment of the “disclosure of truth” and that which has been protected, preserved, and transmitted is realized, or as Heidegger says in The Origin of the Artwork, “is brought to stand before us.” This is the Heideggerian sense of truth that is the basis for Gadamer’s definition of Wahrheit in his masterwork. As he shows there, this is a truth that cannot be gained by merely methodological inquiry. The “statement” it makes is not of the type customary in logic.

2. Zeitlichkeit. Literally, this term means “time” “-ly” “-ness” in English, but in the context of Gadamer’s philosophy it refers to the fact that through the miracle of language that has been put into writing, a text speaks with the same power and presence as it originally did when it was composed. In fact, perhaps more! Gadamer and I discussed whether the term should be translated into English as “contemporaneity” or “simultaneity.” I favored “contemporaneity” because it has the signification of something that is relevant in our times, but Gadamer preferred “simultaneity,” because it means that something past is equally meaningful in the present-simultaneous in time. I still used my choice, because “simultaneous” in English suggests two things occurring at exactly the same time in the present. What Gadamer wanted to suggest is that when we read a classic text it speaks as powerfully now as before.

The term may be linked with three related concepts which it presupposes, but which, for simplicity, we have not listed as separate terms: Sprachlichkeit, Schriftlichkeit, and “eminent text.” The first, Sprachlichkeit, refers to the linguistic character of being, as reflected in Gadamer’s famous saying, “Being that can be understood is language.” The second is Schriftlichkeit, which refers to the power of “writtenness” to overcome time and space, and to speak with a certain authority. Without the miracle of the writtenness of texts (whether Western or Eastern), we would not have access to the ancient world, or even the world of our immediate predecessors. Finally, there is the term “eminent text,” which Gadamer first used in the United States. It refers to the fact that poetry, in particular, with its careful selection and placement of words, is the form of language that uses the great resources of language in the most powerful way. It is therefore “text” in the “eminent”-that is, fullest-sense. Each word in a poem is irreplaceable; no substitute word will be adequate, and even the order of the words cannot be changed. A poem is a work of art and cannot be improved upon or changed. All three terms go together in helping us to clarify Gadamer’s meaning in using the term Zeitlichkeit. Through the miracles of language, writtenness, and poetry, comes the miracle of “simultaneity” in a text that overcomes historical time. As Gadamer says late in Truth and Method, “Literature does not present us with only a stock of memorials and signs. Rather, the literary text acquires its own contemporaneity [Zeitlichkeit] with every present. For a person to understand it does not mean primarily to reason one’s way back into the past, but to have a present involvement with what it said. It is not really a relationship between persons, between the reader and the author, but about sharing in what the text shares with us” (391/WM 1: 395). In this way, we see the error of imagining reading in terms of the subject-object dichotomy, which pictures a subject mastering an object, the text.

Because Gadamer’s philosophy ponders these phenomena related to text interpretation, it is rightly termed “hermeneutical,” that is, related to the art of understanding texts. But he goes beyond methods of right interpretation to reflect on the “being”-the ontology-of the moment of understanding as an event that manages to bring us the meaning of texts that are distant in time, place, and language. For this reason his thought is termed “philosophy.”

3. Phronesis. Phronesis is an ancient Greek term found in Aristotle and earlier in Plato, as well as in common usage. It designates a use of reason that is not a matter of calculative reasoning but of mature, ethical human judgment. The term is sometimes translated as “practical rationality,” or “practical wisdom,” or even simply as “intelligence” in the sense of an intelligent choice. Phronesis is a knack for choosing what is right and good, virtuous and fitting. Confucius says in the Lün Yu that a gentleman takes as much care to do what is right as what is successful (IV:16). It is this kind of virtuous intelligence that Aristotle discusses in Book VI of the Nichomachean Ethics (1142ff.) and that Gadamer points to in his Truth and Method and later in The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy. This is not a term Gadamer discusses just in passing, then; rather, he repeatedly refers to it as the alternative to the expediency and calculative thinking that dominate twentieth century political thinking in the West. Phronesis is the intelligence that chooses the Good in an ethical way. In GW 7, the phronesis entry in the index refers the reader to areté, virtue, and offers no separate listing of its own; just: “See Areté”!). It is an intellectual virtue rather than a moral virtue in Aristotle, but it is connected to the ethical as the intelligence to know and choose the Good.

4. Applicatio. This Latin term in Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy translates into English as “application.” By this word he means that when we understand something from the past, we also see how it applies in the present. Gadamer explains this by referring to three “moments” in understanding that go back to the 18th century figure J. J. Rambach Rambach distinguished three subtiliti in understanding: the subtilitas intelligendi, the subtilitas explicandi, and the subtilitas applicandi (TM 307/GW 1:312). The romantics made a great forward step by uniting the first two, claiming they were to interactive to be separated. They were a unity. But they did not include Rambach’s third moment. Gadamer argues that all three subtiliti function simultaneously and interact in the event of understanding. The third moment, the moment of application, should not be separated from the first two and in practice is not.

Gadamer devotes a lengthy section of Truth and Method to the phenomenon of application (pp. 307-340/GW 1: 312-346). In it he calls attention to the fact that in both theology and law application is an integral part of interpreting a text. When a minister interprets a religious text on Sunday morning, he or she also shows how it applies to the listeners. Only when he or she understands the application does he or she fully understand the texts. When a judge interprets a law, he or she brings it into relationship to a special case in the present that must be decided one way or another. The law does not float in splendid isolation but is continually applied. Gadamer goes on to literary texts and makes the same argument: the reader in the act of reading a poem or novel is taking his own values and worldview into the event and lets the text address those values or worldview. In all three cases, in religion, in law, or in literature, the classical text possesses a certain authority. The reader submits to some degree to the authority of the text out of respect for its age, its greater claim to truth, and the special authority of writtenness [Schriftlichkeit] itself. As Gadamer says, “We have the ability to open ourselves to the superior claim the text makes and to respond to what it has to tell us” (311/1:316). Towards the end of the section Gadamer says:

Likewise, the person who recites a poem aloud for others, who gives a “performance,” becomes part of the interpretation, essentially belongs to it (310/GW 1:315). Application, then, is an integral part of the reading of a text. In fact, the process of reading itself, as Gadamer argues in a later and important part of the book (391ff./in ”Sprachlichkeit als bestimmung des hermeneutischen Gegenstand,” GW 1: 394ff.), is a paradigm of interpretation.

Gadamer’s proposal to mix application in with the moments of understanding and explanation was immediately attacked in a 1962 pamphlet by Emilio Betti titled Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (Hermeneutics as Universal Method for the Human Sciences. Betti was a German-born author in Italy of an imposing earlier three-volume book, Teoria della interpretazione (1955). Betti himself translated the work into German and published it twelve years later in one thick volume with the title, Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften, that is: A General Theory of Exegesis as Methodology for the Human Sciences. Betti and his American follower, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., author of Validity in Interpretation (1967) accused Gadamer of mixing together and confusing the meaning of a text and itself with its significance for a reader. This, had, they said, had bad methodological consequences. Both Hirsch and Betti (Hirsch was inspired by Betti) argued that basic “validity” of interpretation would be irreparably harmed as an objective discipline dedicated to the explication of “meaning” if one argued that the present significance for the reader was always in play in understanding. Gadamer was accused of being an enemy of objectivity of meaning in the human sciences.

Gadamer’s reply was that he was not doing methodology but ontology and phenomenology. He was not making a methodological choice but stating that, in the ontology of understanding-the way understanding takes place-there is a moment of application. whether this is recognized or not. Even the questions with which one approaches a text tend to contain the relevance to the present. One can attempt to exclude the moment of significance from understanding, but doing so only impoverishes one’s view of understanding.

5. Tradition and the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein. The German term for tradition is “Überlieferung.” Literally, “die Überlieferung” means “that which is handed down to us.” But this does not refer just to a pious acceptance of the great texts, but also to our seeing that an attitude and way of seeing that we inherit in our language is at work in our consciousness as we attempt to understand anything. This ties directly into one of the most important of Gadamer’s contributions, his critique of objectivity, especially the ideal of practicing scientific objectivity when taken over into the humanities. It is important that the section following the “applicatio” section in Truth and Method is an “Analysis of Historically Effected Consciousness”-that is, the “wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein”-another distinctively Gadamerian term. This analysis not only supports the importance of tradition in understanding but also offers a trenchant critique of objectivity! It does this by showing that the consciousness with which we understand is a consciousness in which history and tradition are always at work, thus we find the term Wirkung, working or effect, in wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein. This term is usually translated as “historically effected consciousness” but I find this not meaningful and translate it as “a consciousness in which history is always working.” I think this conveys more clearly what Gadamer meant.

Heidegger in Being and Time had a similar principal in his redefinition of the hermeneutical circle: According to him in the hermeneutical circle, you have to already understand a good deal in order to understand something new. And understanding is rooted in existential self-understanding. We understand ourselves on the basis of an existential understanding that is already present before we understand other things. Thus the hermeneutical circle actually is an arc that rises up out of existential understanding and returns back into it.

Let’s go a little more deeply into what Gadamer himself says about the “wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein” in Truth and Method. In explaining the “historically effected consciousness,” Gadamer points out that: “Hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition. This is what is to be experienced. But tradition is not simply a process which experience teaches us to know and to govern; it is language-i.e., it expresses itself like a Thou. A Thou is not an object; it relates itself to us” (TM 358/GW 1: 363-364). The tradition, then, is already present in our language and in our concepts, not just in specific works. It is present in the consciousness with which we understand specific things. To imagine an empty, unprejudiced consciousness perceiving isolated objects is a dialectical illusion. Gadamer sees this idea as the weakness in Western Enlightenment thinking of the 18th century, which rejects tradition as dogma and wants to start with what reason and experience find to be correct. Because this Enlightenment approach does not recognize its own prejudices, it operates with a “vis a tergo” [Latin phrase]. Gadamer states this point as follows:

Here, Gadamer invokes the mutuality described in Martin Buber’s famous book, still in print-Ich und Du [I and Thou]-that is, the close relationship between friend and friend, to illustrate the hermeneutical relationship to tradition. Preserving the relationship to the other person makes one open to what he or she has to say. Says Gadamer, “Without openness to one another there is no genuinely human bond. Belonging together [Zugehörigkeit is another distinctly Gadamerian term] always also means being able to listen to one another” (361/GW 1: 367). This readiness to listen is the hermeneutical virtue par excellence.

Contrary to the assumption held by the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century, the traditional furniture of our consciousness-including our “prejudices”-does not get in the way of understanding! For “to be situated within a tradition does not limit one’s freedom of knowledge but makes it possible” (361/1:367). A hermeneutical consciousness is a consciousness in which history and tradition are always already at work and it is a consciousness which makes understanding itself possible. This consciousness is present whether one is aware of it or not, but a hermeneutically mature person will be aware of the way history, language, and tradition are already at work in his or her every act/event of understanding.

Gadamer even went provocatively so far as even to speak of the fruitfulness of prejudices in our effective historical consciousness, since those prejudices are what make interpretation possible, and he also provocatively argued that not all authority is illegitimate! For instance, isn’t it true that one accepts the authority of one’s doctor, or one’s parent, or the judge deciding a case of law, because they know more than we do and we granted them a recognition of this fact. Nevertheless, defenders of Enlightenment rationality, most famously, Jürgen Habermas, stringently objected to Gadamer’s legitimizing of authority and defense of prejudice. In their view, this marked him as a conservative in an era of change. Yet his reply is that his critics are appealing to popular concepts of prejudice and authority rather than the ones he put forward and explained in Truth and Method. In that work he was describing a phenomenon rather than defending it: the fact is that we must use the concepts and judgments we already have about the way things are when we engaged in the process of understanding something or someone. This is the basic consequence of the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein. Also, there are admittedly times to question authority, but there are also examples of legitimate authority. Furthermore, one can point out that Gadamer’s stance of hermeneutical openness to the claim of the other person and his willingness to engage in discussion, and even possibly to be corrected about a matter [Sache], mark him not as a conservative in the usual sense but as a Socratic searcher for truth. One must see Gadamer’s references to authority and to the fruitfulness of prejudice in the context of his analysis of the “consciousness in which history if always at work” (my translation of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein).

6. Gespräch. This term is translated into English as “conversation.” For Gadamer language lives most typically in the give and take of conversation, of question and answer, of dialogue. A recent book that published three conversations of Carsten Dutt with Gadamer was titled, Gadamer im Gespräch: Hermeneutik, Ästhetik, Praktische Philosophie. I recently translated it into English adding three more conversations.

Gadamer was a formidable partner in debate, yet, as a recent essay by Hans Albert, in Gadamer’s Century shows, Gadamer always respected his conversation partner, and at his 100th year, Albert [a follower of Karl Popper] who had harshly criticized Truth and Method in the 1960s, recognized Gadamer in 2000 as one of the greatest philosophers of the century. In the essay Albert referred to the unfailing courtesy with which Gadamer treated him back in those days, a most unexpected response. A conversation, as Gadamer sees it, requires respect for one’s partner, and the acceptance that he might be right! This is a Socratic principle of eumeneis elenchoi. Likewise, at the celebration of Gadamer’s 100th birthday in Heidelberg, his old partner in dialogue, Jürgen Habermas, engaged in a lively and cordial conversation after the ceremony which I photographed.

Not all conversations succeed, as was the case in his famous conversations with Jacques Derrida in 1981 in Paris and 1988 in Heidelberg, but Gadamer valued and sought the opportunity for an Auseinandersetzung [debate], a stimulating conversation, with a philosophical contemporary who, in this case, also was a creative follower of Heidegger. Conversation remained a central element of Gadamer’s practice and hermeneutic philosophy throughout his career. Even the encounter with the text is a conversation: with questions and answers, a “fusion of horizons,” and sometimes is an experience that shatters all expectations.

7. Solidarität. The term Solidarität, solidarity, does not appear in Truth in Method but it or its basic principle does appear in later works, especially in the three major categories explored in Die Aktualität des Schönen. translated into English as The Relevance of the Beautiful and in the as yet untranslated the final essay of volume 8 of his Gesammelte Werke (1993), “Zur Phänomenologie von Ritual und Sprache” (GW 8: 400-440). These two essays take what I would call an “anthropological turn” rather than the earlier “ontological” orientation, built on Heidegger, arguing that the rituals and rites that hold human beings together in solidarity are the basis for real communication.

The three categories in “The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as Play, Symbol, and Festival”-namely, play, symbol, and festival-are all drawn from ancient Greek anthropology and all three terms suggest that art is rooted in the solidarities that hold us together. Gadamer points out that “thinkers like Huizinga and Guardini, among others, have stressed for a long time that the element of play is included in man’s religious and cultic practices” (Relevance 22/Actualität 29). Symbol comes from an ancient practice of breaking an object in hospitality so that it can be refitted for recognition when they meet again. Festival, however, is a recurrent, usually annual, celebration that brings people together. Gadamer remarks, “If there is one thing that pertains to all festive experience, it is surely the fact that they allow no separation between one person and another. A festival is an experience of community and represents community in its most perfect form” (R 39/A 52). For brevity we will not go into the links Gadamer forges here between art and the three forms of solidarity, but it is interesting that Gadamer is going back to his foundations in Greek culture to seek his understanding of art there rather than in the event of ontological disclosure of truth. Most likely, I think, he is, in “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” not rejecting the earlier ontological formulation in Truth and Method but rather deepening his concept of art by going back to its anthropological roots in ancient Greek culture.

Yet even in Truth and Method the direction toward solidarity can be found in such concepts as Zugehörigkeit [Belongingness and participation in a Sache, the matter being discussed], Spiel [play as participation in a game that is more important than any player], and Bildung (culture, which calls for participation in the arts of the culture that also unite a people). In fact, I would go one step further and note that here is a philosopher, who, like Confucius, roots his thinking in interpersonal realities. Here is a philosopher who finds foundational meaning in ritual as promoting human solidarity. That is unusual. Here is a philosopher who dares to focus on festivals and the way they bring a community together. Gadamer does not seek to root his thinking in metaphysics, or in abstract systems, or the analysis of hypothetical sentences, but in the concrete bonds of solidarity that hold us all together. He is a thinker who looks for deeper levels of communication and understanding. He urges the hermeneutical virtue of openness. He acknowledges that we may learn something from the philosophies found in other cultures. But the most important thing, I think, is another virtue he shares with Confucius: He roots his philosophy in the realities of human relationships, the network between persons. These form the ultimate foundation of his late philosophical thinking.