Background

Born on February 11, 1900, in Marburg, in Southern Germany, Gadamer grew up in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland), where his father was Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Breslau, later taking the Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Marburg. Gadamer’s family background was Protestant, and his father was sternly Prussian. His mother died of diabetes when Gadamer was only four, and he had no surviving brothers or sisters.

Education

Showing an early interest in humanistic studies, Gadamer began university studies in Breslau in 1918 (studying with Richard Hoenigswald), moving to Marburg with his father in 1919. Gadamer completed his doctoral studies at Marburg in 1922 (in his own words, "too young") with a dissertation on Plato. In that same year, Gadamer also contracted poliomyelitis, from which he recovered only slowly, and the after-effects of which remained with him for the rest of his life.

Gadamer’s early teachers at Marburg were Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann. Paul Friedlander introduced him to philological study, and Gadamer also received encouragement from Rudolf Bultmann. It was, however, Martin Heidegger (at Marburg from 1923-1928) who exerted the most important and enduring effect on Gadamer’s philosophical development. Gadamer had first met Heidegger in Frieburg in early 1923, having also corresponded with him in 1922. Yet although Gadamer was a key figure in Heidegger’s Marburg circle, working as Heidegger’s unpaid assistant, by 1925 Heidegger had become quite critical of Gadamer’s philosophical capacities and contributions. As a result, Gadamer decided to abandon philosophy for classical philology. (Gadamer was not alone in being the recipient of such criticism - Heidegger was also unimpressed by Jacob Klein and was certainly prone to deliver harsh judgments on his students and colleagues - but Gadamer seems to have been more particularly affected by it.) Through his philological work, however, Gadamer seems to have regained Heidegger’s respect, passing the State Examination in Classical Philology in 1927, with Friedlander and Heidegger as two of the three examiners, and then going on to submit his habilitation dissertation, in 1928, under Friedlander and Heidegger’s guidance. Gadamer’s relationship with Heidegger remained relatively close throughout their respective careers, even though it was also a relationship that held considerable tension - at least on Gadamer’s side.

Career

Gadamer’s first academic appointment was to a junior position in Marburg in 1928, finally achieving a lower-level professorship there in 1937. In the meantime, from 1934–35, Gadamer held a temporary professorship at Kiel, and then, in 1939, took up the Directorship of the Philosophical Institute at the University of Leipzig, becoming Dean of the Faculty in 1945, and Rector in 1946, before returning to teaching and research at Frankfurt-am-Main in 1947. In 1949, he succeeded Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, officially retiring (becoming Professor Emeritus) in 1968. Following his retirement, he traveled extensively, spending considerable time in North America, where he was a visitor at a number of institutions and developed an especially close and regular association with Boston College in Massachusetts.

In 1953, together with Helmut Kuhn, Gadamer founded the highly influential Philosophische Rundschau, but his main philosophical impact was not felt until the publication of Truth and Method in 1960. Gadamer’s best-known publications almost all date from the period after Truth and Method, and in this respect much of his philosophical reputation rests on publications either after or in the decade just before his transition to emeritus status (in 1968). The important debates in which Gadamer engaged with Emilio Betti, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida all took place in this latter part of Gadamer’s philosophical career, and the translation of his work into English also began only quite late, in the 1970s.

Gadamer has also published an enormous amount of work on the history of philosophy, notably on Greek thought, scientific rationality, and other topics, including, most recently, essays on the history and philosophy of medicine.

Remaining intellectually active until the very end of his life (he held regular office hours even in his nineties), Gadamer died in Heidelberg on March 13, 2002, at the age of 102.

Achievements

• From his work as a teacher, his many writings, and his appearances and teaching abroad, Gadamer acquired a world reputation. His importance lies in his development of hermeneutic philosophy. Gadamer developed a distinctive and thoroughly dialogical approach, grounded in Platonic-Aristotelian as well as Heideggerian thinking, that rejects subjectivism and relativism, abjures any simple notion of interpretive method, and grounds understanding in the linguistically mediated happening of tradition.
  
  Gadamer received numerous awards and prizes including, in 1971, Knight of the Order of Merit - the highest academic honor awarded in Germany.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Philosophical Hermeneutics

    (This excellent collection contains 13 essays from Gadamer...)

    1976
  • Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies

    (These five essays on Hegel give the English-speaking read...)

    1976
  • Truth and Method

    (Truth and Method is a landmark work of 20th-century thoug...)

    2004
  • The Beginning of Philosophy

    (In The Beginning of Philosophy Gadamer explores the layer...)

    2000
  • Heidegger's Ways

    (The combination of author and subject matter found here m...)

    1994
  • Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato

    (This book is a virtual case study in the application of h...)

    1980
  • The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays

    (This volume explores some of the more important of Hans-G...)

    1986
  • The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy

    (The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy ...)

    1978
  • The Beginning of Knowledge

    (The Beginning of Knowledge brings together almost all of ...)

    1999

Religion

Hans-Georg Gadamer was raised in a Protestant Christian family.

Politics

During the 1930s and 1940s, Gadamer was able to accommodate himself, on his account, reluctantly, first to National Socialism and then briefly, to Communism. While Gadamer did not identify himself strongly with either regime (he was never a member of the National Socialist Party, although he did belong to the affiliated National Socialist Teachers Union), neither did he draw attention to himself by outright opposition. However some have seen his stance as too acquiescent, and others have argued that he was indeed supportive of the Nazi dictatorship or of some aspects of it. Gadamer never joined the Nazi party, and (perhaps because of polio he had contracted as a student) was able to avoid all military commitments. Nevertheless, the Nazis forced him, as they did all surviving academics, to jump through various more or less degrading hoops (notably at "camps" for members of the National-Socialist Lecturers' Club).

Views

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a leading Continental philosopher of the twentieth century. His importance lies in his development of hermeneutic philosophy. Hermeneutics, "the art of interpretation," originated in biblical and legal fields and was later extended to all texts. Martin Heidegger, Gadamer’s teacher, completed the universalizing of the scope of hermeneutics by extending it beyond texts to all forms of human understanding. Hence philosophical hermeneutics inquires into the meaning and significance of understanding for human existence in general.

Gadamer was influenced by Heidegger’s interest in the "question of Being," which aimed to draw our attention to the ubiquitous and ineffable nature of Being that underlies human existence. "Being" refers to something like a "ground" (although not in the modern sense of “foundation”) or, better, background, that precedes, conditions, and makes possible the particular forms of human knowing as found in science and the social sciences. Gadamer developed Heidegger’s commitment to the ubiquitous and fundamental nature of Being in three related ways.

First, Gadamer wanted to elucidate the historical and linguistic situatedness of human knowing and to emphasize the necessity and productivity of tradition and language for human thought. For example, when Gadamer wrote that "Being that could be understood is language," he meant that Being underlies, exceeds, and makes the possible language.

Second, Gadamer sought to contend against the hubris of twentieth-century positivism by demonstrating that truth is not reducible to a set of criteria, as is suggested by promoters of there being a scientific method. Just as Heidegger set out to uncover the way in which Being makes beings possible, so Gadamer aimed to demonstrate that truths derivable from method require a deeper, more extensive Truth. In order to extend truth’s domain beyond that of method (and note that Gadamer was never against method or science - only their totalizing tendencies), Gadamer explicates truth as an event. Truth is not, fundamentally, what can be affirmed relative to a set of criteria but an event or experience in which we find ourselves engaged and changed. These first two points form the emphasis of his magnum opus, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode).

The third way of understanding Gadamer’s defense of the ubiquity of Being can be seen in the practical trajectory of Gadamer’s hermeneutics that arises from his interest in Plato and Aristotle. From Plato, Gadamer discerns the centrality of dialogue as the means by which we come to understanding. Dialogue is rooted in and committed to furthering our common bond with one another to the extent that it affirms the finite nature of our human knowing and invites us to remain open to one another. It is our openness to dialogue with others that Gadamer sees as the basis for deeper solidarity. With Aristotle, Gadamer affirms the commitment that all philosophy starts from praxis (human practice) and that hermeneutics is essentially practical philosophy. We must not allow knowing to remain only on the conceptual (that is, distanced and theoretical) level; we must remember that knowing emerges from our practical quest for meaning and significance. Gadamer’s hermeneutics elucidates how Being makes human existence meaningful, where Being refers to commonality we all share.

Gadamer’s many essays and talks on ethics, art, poetry, science, medicine, and friendship, as well as references to his work by thinkers in these fields, attest to the ubiquity and practical relevance of hermeneutic thought today.

Quotations: "In truth, history does not belong to us but rather we to it."

"A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a "secular saviour" for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes."

"What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself."

"It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition."

"The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said."

"Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live."

"I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old."

Membership

On January 12, 1996, Hans-Georg Gadamer was appointed an honorary member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig.

• 

  Honorary member

  Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities , Germany

  1996 - 2002

Interests

• Hermeneutic theory, classical thought, technology (especially medicine)

Connections

Gadamer was twice married: in 1923, to Frida Kratz (later divorced), with whom he had one daughter (born in 1926), and, in 1950, to Käte Lekebusch.

Father:

Johannes Gadamer

Johannes Gadamer urged Hans-Georg to take up the natural sciences.

Mother:

Emma Karoline Johanna Geiese

Spouse:

Käte Lekebusch

ex-spouse:

Frida Kratz

Friend:

Martin Heidegger

Acquaintance:

Jacques Derrida

Friend:

Jacob Klein

References

• Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography
  1999
• Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer
  2003
• The Democratic Theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer
  2016
• Hans-Georg Gadamer
  2015