## 1. Biographical Sketch



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. 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'--see Gadamer 1997b, 7) 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 Freiburg
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 ('Plato's Dialectical
Ethics', [1991]), 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 (of his difficulties in
writing in the late 1940s, Gadamer commented that 'I had the terrible
feeling that Heidegger was standing behind me and looking over my
shoulder', Gadamer 1997b, 15).



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 travelled
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.



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 (see Wolin 2000 as well as the
reply in Palmer 2002; see also the discussion in Krajewski 2003,
169-306; for Gadamer's own comments on this issue see the
interview/conversation, 'The real Nazis had no interest in us at
all', Gadamer 2001).



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 (1989b). Gadamer's best known
publications almost all date from the period after *Truth and
Method* (which did not appear in English translation until 1975),
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 (also the year in which he began regular
visits to the United States). The important debates in which Gadamer
engaged with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida took place in
this latter part of Gadamer's philosophical career, and it was
not until the 1970s and 1980s that Gadamer's work began to
receive widespread attention in English.



Gadamer was twice married: in 1923, to Frida Kratz (later divorced),
with whom he had one daughter (born in 1926), and, in 1950, to
Kate Lekebusch. Gadamer received numerous awards and prizes
including, in 1971, Knight of the 'Order of
Merit'--the highest academic honor awarded in Germany.
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 (for a more detailed
biography, see Grondin 2003; see also Dostal 2021).


## 2. Hermeneutical Foundations


### 2.1 Dialogue and Phronesis



Gadamer's thinking began and always remained connected with
Greek thought, especially that of Plato and Aristotle. In this
respect, Gadamer's early engagement with Plato, which lay at the
core of both his doctoral and habilitation dissertations, was
determinative of much of the character and philosophical direction of
his thinking. Under the influence of his early teachers such as
Hartmann, as well as Friedlander, Gadamer developed an approach to
Plato that rejected the idea of any 'hidden' doctrine in
Plato's thought, looking instead to the structure of the
Platonic dialogues themselves as the key to understanding
Plato's philosophy. The only way to understand Plato, as Gadamer
saw it, was thus by working through the Platonic texts in a way that
not only enters into the dialogue and dialectic set out in those
texts, but also repeats that dialogic movement in the attempt at
understanding as such. Moreover, the dialectical structure of Platonic
questioning also provides the model for a way of understanding that is
open to the matter at issue through bringing oneself into question
along with the matter itself.



Under the influence of Heidegger, Gadamer also took up, as a central
element in his thinking, the idea of *phronesis*
('practical wisdom') that appears in Book VI of
Aristotle's *Nichomachean Ethics*. For Heidegger the
concept of *phronesis* is important, not only as a means of
giving emphasis to our practical 'being-in-the world' over
and against theoretical apprehension, but also as constituting a mode
of insight into our own concrete situation (both our practical
situation and, more fundamentally, our existential situation, hence
*phronesis* constitutes a mode of *self-knowledge*). The
way in which Gadamer conceives of understanding, and interpretation,
is as just such a practically oriented mode of insight--a mode of
insight that has its own rationality irreducible to any simple rule or
set of rules, that cannot be directly taught, that necessarily
implicates an understanding of self as well as other, and that is
always oriented to the particular case at hand. The concept of
*phronesis* can itself be seen as providing a certain
elaboration of the dialogic conception of understanding Gadamer had
already found in Plato, but it goes well beyond the Platonic account
alone.



Taken together, *phronesis* and dialogue provide the essential
starting point for the development of Gadamer's philosophical
hermeneutics. It is a starting point in which these two key elements,
*phronesis* and dialogue, can be seen as together founded in,
as well as being elaborative of, the idea of hermeneutical situation
or situatedness--an idea that has a Heideggerian provenance, but
which Gadamer also develops in his own terms. The idea of
hermeneutical situation is basic to Gadamer's approach and underpins
many of his key concepts even though it often remains in the
background. It is elaborated, sometimes implicitly, through notions of
event and encounter, and in a way that increasingly draws attention to
the role of the other (although the self-other relation figures
throughout Gadamer's thinking, see Dallmayr, 1993). It is an idea tied
to Gadamer's use of the notion of play as a key element in
understanding and to the character of understanding as always embedded
in an prior 'horizon' that is also fundamentally
historical.*Phronesis* and dialogue are thus aspects of a
hermeneutical situatedness that is *complex*,
*differentiated*, and *dynamic*.


### 2.2 Ontology and Hermeneutics



Traditionally, hermeneutics is taken to have its origins in problems
of biblical exegesis and in the development of a theoretical framework
to govern and direct such exegetical practice. In the hands of
eighteenth and early nineteenth century theorists, writers such as
Chladenius and Meier, Ast and Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was
developed into a more encompassing theory of textual interpretation in
general--a set of rules that provide the basis for good
interpretive practice no matter what the subject matter. Inasmuch as
hermeneutics is the method proper to the recovery of meaning, so
Wilhelm Dilthey broadened hermeneutics still further, taking it as the
methodology for the recovery of meaning that is essential to
understanding within the 'human' or
'historical' sciences (the
*Geisteswissenschaften*). For these writers, as for many
others, the basic problem of hermeneutics was methodological: how to
found the human sciences, and so how to found the science of
interpretation, in a way that would make them properly
'scientific'. Moreover, if the mathematical models and
procedures that appeared to be the hallmark of the sciences of nature
could not be duplicated in the human sciences, then the task at issue
must involve finding an alternative methodology proper to the human
sciences as such--hence Schleiermacher's ambition to
develop a formal methodology that would codify interpretive practice,
while Dilthey aimed at the elaboration of a 'psychology'
that would elucidate and guide interpretive understanding.



Already familiar with earlier hermeneutic thinking, Heidegger
redeployed hermeneutics to a very different purpose and within a very
different frame. In Heidegger's early thinking, particularly the
lectures from the early 1920s ('The Hermeneutics of
Facticity'), hermeneutics is presented as that by means of which
the investigation of the basic structures of factical existence is to
be pursued--not as that which constitutes a 'theory'
of textual interpretation nor a method of 'scientific'
understanding, but rather as that which allows the self-disclosure of
the structure of understanding as such. The 'hermeneutic
circle' that had been a central idea in previous hermeneutic
thinking, and that had been viewed in terms of the interpretative
interdependence, within any meaningful structure, between the parts of
that structure and the whole, was transformed by Heidegger, so that it
was now seen as expressing the way in which all understanding was
'always already' given over to that which is to be
understood (to 'the things themselves'--*die
Sachen selbst*). Thus, to take a simple example, if we wish to
understand some particular artwork, we must already have some prior
understanding of that work (even if only as a set of paint marks on
canvas), otherwise it cannot even be seen as something to be
understood. To put the point more generally, and in more basic
ontological terms, if we are to understand anything at all, we must
already find ourselves 'in' the world 'along
with' that which is to be understood. All understanding that is
directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based
in a prior 'ontological' understanding--a prior
hermeneutical situatedness. On this basis, hermeneutics can be
understood as the attempt to 'make explicit' the structure
of such situatedness. Yet since that situatedness is indeed prior to
any specific event of understanding, so it must always be presupposed
even in the attempt at its own explication. Consequently, the
explication of this situatedness--of this basic ontological mode
of understanding--is essentially a matter of exhibiting or
'laying-bare' a structure with which we are already
familiar (as well as a structure that is present in every event of
understanding) and in which we are already embedded. In this respect,
hermeneutics becomes one with phenomenology, itself understood, in
Heidegger's thinking, as just such a 'laying bare'
(it also takes the form, given the focus on situation and
situatedness, of what Heidegger later calls a 'topology'
(*Topologie*) or a 'saying of place'--see
Malpas 2014).



It is hermeneutics, in this Heideggerian and phenomenological sense,
that is taken up in Gadamer's work, and that leads him, in
conjunction with certain other insights from Heidegger's later
thinking, as well as the ideas of dialogue and practical wisdom, to
elaborate a philosophical hermeneutics that provides an account of the
nature of understanding in its universality (where this refers both to
the ontologically fundamental character of the hermeneutical situation
and the all-encompassing nature of hermeneutic practice) and, in the
process, to develop a response to the earlier hermeneutic
tradition's preoccupation with the problem of interpretive
method. In these respects, Gadamer's work, in conjunction with
that of Heidegger, represents a radical reworking of the idea of
hermeneutics that constitutes a break with the preceding hermeneutical
tradition at the same time as it also reflects back on that tradition.
Gadamer thus develops a philosophical hermeneutics that provides an
account of the proper ground for understanding, while nevertheless
rejecting the attempt, whether in relation to the
*Geisteswissenschaften* or elsewhere, to found understanding on
any method or set of rules. This is not a rejection of the importance
of methodological concerns, but rather an insistence on the limited
role of method and the priority of understanding as a dialogic,
practical, situated activity.


### 2.3 Aesthetics and Subjectivism



In 1936 Heidegger gave three lectures on 'The Origin of the Work
of Art'. In these lectures, not published until 1950 (but which
Gadamer heard at the time of their original presentation, see Gadamer
1997b, 47), Heidegger connects art with truth, arguing that the
essence of the artwork is not its 'representational'
character, but rather its capacity to allow the disclosure of a world.
Thus the Greek temple establishes the 'Greek' world and in
so doing allows things to take on a particular appearance within that
world. Heidegger refers to this event of disclosure as the event of
'truth'. The sense of truth at issue here is one that
Heidegger presents in explicit contrast to what he views as the
traditional concept of truth as 'correctness'. Such
correctness is usually taken to consist in some form of correspondence
between individual statements and the world, but so-called
'coherence' accounts of truth, according to which truth is
a matter of the consistency of a statement with a larger body of
statements, can also be viewed as based upon the same underlying
notion of truth as 'correctness'. While Heidegger does not
abandon the notion of truth as 'correctness', he argues
that it is derivative of a more basic sense of truth as what he terms
'unconcealment'. Understood in this latter sense, truth is
not a property of statements as they stand in relation to the world,
but rather an event or process in and through which both the things of
the world and what is said about them come to be revealed at one and
the same time--the possibility of 'correctness'
arises on the basis of just such 'unconcealment'.



It is important to recognize, however, that the unconcealment at issue
is not a matter of the bringing about of some form of complete and
absolute transparency. The revealing of things is, in fact, always
dependent upon other things being simultaneously concealed (in much
the same way as seeing something in one way depends on not seeing it
in another). Truth is thus understood as the unconcealment that allows
things to appear, and that also makes possible the truth and falsity
of individual statements, and yet which arises on the basis of the
ongoing play between unconcealment *and* concealment--a
play that, for the most part, remains itself hidden and is never
capable of complete elucidation. In the language Heidegger employs in
'The Origin of the Work of Art', the unconcealment of
'world' is thereby grounded in the concealment of
'earth'. It is this sense of truth as the emergence of
things into unconcealment that occurs on the basis of the play between
concealing and unconcealing that is taken by Heidegger as the essence
(or 'origin') of the work of art. This idea of truth, as
well as the poetic language Heidegger employed in his exposition, had
a decisive effect on Gadamer's own thinking. Indeed, Gadamer
described his philosophical hermeneutics as precisely an attempt
"to take up and elaborate this line of thinking from the later
Heidegger" (Gadamer 1997b, 47)



There are two crucial elements to Gadamer's appropriation of
Heidegger here: first, the focus on art, and the connection of art
with truth; second, the focus on truth itself as the event of prior
and partial disclosure (or more properly, of
concealment/unconcealment) in which we are already involved and that
can never be made completely transparent. Both of these elements are
connected with Gadamer's response to the subjectivist and
idealist elements in German thought that were present in the
neo-Kantian tradition, and, more specifically, in romantic
hermeneutics and aesthetic theory. As Gadamer saw it, aesthetic theory
had, largely under the influence of Kant, become alienated from the
actual experience of art--the response to art had become
abstracted and 'aestheticised'--while aesthetic
judgment had become purely a matter of taste, and so of subjective
response. Similarly, under the influence of the
'scientific' historiography of those such as Ranke,
together with the romantic hermeneutics associated with Schleiermacher
and others, the desire for objectivity had led to the separation of
historical understanding from the contemporary situation that
motivates it, and to a conception of historical method as based in the
reconstruction of the subjective experiences of the author--a
reconstruction that, as Hegel made clear, is surely impossible (see
Gadamer 1989b, 164-9).



By turning back to the direct experience of art, and to the concept of
truth as prior and partial disclosure, Gadamer was able to develop an
alternative to subjectivism that also connected with the ideas of
dialogue and practical wisdom taken from Plato and Aristotle, and of
hermeneutical situatedness taken from the early Heidegger. Just as the
artwork is taken as central and determining in the experience of art,
so is understanding similarly determined by the matter to be
understood; as the experience of art reveals, not in spite of, but
precisely because of the way it also conceals, so understanding is
possible, not in spite of, but precisely because of its prior
involvement. In Gadamer's developed work, the concept of
'play' (*Spiel*) has an important role here.
Gadamer takes play as the basic clue to the ontological structure of
art, emphasizing the way in which play is not a form of disengaged,
disinterested exercise of subjectivity, but is rather something that
has its own order and structure to which one is given over. The
structure of play has obvious affinities with all of the other
concepts at issue here--of dialogue, *phronesis*, the
hermeneutical situation, the truth of art. Indeed, one can take all of
these ideas as providing slightly different elaborations of what is
essentially the same basic conception of understanding--one that
takes our finitude, that is, our prior involvement and partiality, not
as a barrier to understanding, but rather as its enabling condition.
It is this conception that is worked out in detail in *Truth and
Method*.


## 3. Philosophical Hermeneutics


### 3.1 The Positivity of 'Prejudice'



One might respond to Gadamer's emphasis on our prior hermeneutic
involvement, whether in the experience of art or elsewhere, that such
involvement cannot but remain subjective simply on the grounds that it
is always determined by our particular dispositions to experience
things in certain ways rather than others--our involvement, one
might say, is thus always based on subjective *prejudice*. Such
an objection can be seen as a simple reiteration of the basic tendency
towards subjectivism that Gadamer rejects, but Gadamer also takes
issue directly with this view of prejudice and the negative
connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather
than closing us off, our prejudices are themselves what open us up to
what is to be understood. In this way Gadamer can be seen as
attempting to retrieve a positive conception of prejudice (German
*Vorurteil*) that goes back to the meaning of the term as
literally a *pre-judgment* (from the Latin
*prae-judicium*) that was lost during the Renaissance. In
*Truth and Method*, Gadamer redeploys the notion of our prior
hermeneutical situatedness as it is worked out in more particular
fashion in Heidegger's *Being and Time* (first published
in 1927) in terms of the 'fore-structures' of
understanding, that is, in terms of the anticipatory structures that
allow what is to be interpreted or understood to be grasped in a
preliminary fashion. The fact that understanding operates by means of
such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves
what Gadamer terms the 'anticipation of
completeness'--it always involves the revisable
presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something
that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a
coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.



Gadamer's positive conception of prejudice as pre-judgment is
connected with several ideas in his approach to hermeneutics. The way
in which our prejudgments open us up to the matter at issue in such a
way that those prejudgments are themselves capable of being revised
exhibits the character of the Gadamerian conception of prejudgment,
and its role in understanding, as itself constituting a version of the
hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutical priority Gadamer assigns to
prejudgment is also tied to Gadamer's emphasis on the priority
of the question in the structure of understanding--the latter
emphasis being something Gadamer takes both from Platonic dialectic
and also, in *Truth and Method*, from the work of R. G.
Collingwood. Moreover, the indispensable role of prejudgment in
understanding connects directly with Gadamer's rethinking of the
traditional concept of hermeneutics as necessarily involving, not
merely explication, but also *application*. In this respect,
all interpretation, even of the past, is necessarily
'prejudgmental' in the sense that it is always oriented to
present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and
interests that allow us to enter into the dialogue with the matter at
issue. Here, of course, there is a further connection with the
Aristotelian emphasis on the practical--not only is understanding
a matter of the application of something like 'practical
wisdom', but it is also always determined by the practical
context out of which it arises.



The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we
understand, we are necessarily involved in a dialogue that encompasses
both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at
issue (and there is, it should be added, an essential alterity that
obtains even in those cases where our engagement is primarily
textual). In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the
fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is
to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in
that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they
can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn. While
Gadamer has claimed that 'temporal distance' can play a
useful role in enabling us better to identify those prejudices that
exercise a problematic influence on understanding (Gadamer
acknowledges that prejudices can sometimes distort--the point is
that they do not always do so), it seems better to see the dialogical
interplay that occurs in the process of understanding itself as the
means by which such problematic elements are identified and worked
through. One consequence of Gadamer's rehabilitation of
prejudice is a positive evaluation of the role of authority and
tradition as legitimate sources of knowledge, and this has often been
seen, most famously by Jurgen Habermas, as indicative of
Gadamer's ideological conservatism--Gadamer himself viewed
it as merely providing a proper corrective to the over-reaction
against these ideas that occurred with the Enlightenment.


### 3.2 The Happening of Tradition



Inasmuch as understanding always occurs against the background of our
prior involvement, so it always occurs on the basis of our
*history*. Understanding, for Gadamer, is thus always an
'effect' of history, while hermeneutical
'consciousness' is itself that mode of being that is
conscious of its own historical 'being effected'--it
is 'historically-effected consciousness'
(*wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein*). Awareness of the
historically effected character of understanding is, according to
Gadamer, identical with an awareness of the hermeneutical situation
and he also refers to that situation by means of the phenomenological
concept of 'horizon'
(*Horizont*)--understanding and interpretation thus always
occurs from within a particular 'horizon' that is
determined by our historically-determined situatedness. Understanding
is not, however, imprisoned within the horizon of its
situation--indeed, the horizon of understanding is neither static
nor unchanging (it is, after all, always subject to the effects of
history). Just as our prejudices are themselves brought into question
in the process of understanding, so, in the encounter with another, is
the horizon of our own understanding susceptible to change.



Gadamer views understanding as a matter of negotiation between oneself
and one's partner in the hermeneutical dialogue such that the
process of understanding can be seen as a matter of coming to an
'agreement' about the matter at issue. Coming to such an
agreement means establishing a common framework or
'horizon' and Gadamer thus takes understanding to be a
process of the 'fusion of horizons'
(*Horizontverschmelzung*). In phenomenology, the
'horizon' is, in general terms, that larger context of
meaning in which any particular meaningful presentation is situated.
Inasmuch as understanding is taken to involve a 'fusion of
horizons', then so it always involves the formation of a new
context of meaning that enables integration of what is otherwise
unfamiliar, strange or anomalous. In this respect, all understanding
involves a process of mediation and dialogue between what is familiar
and what is alien in which neither remains unaffected. This process of
horizontal engagement is an ongoing one that never achieves any final
completion or complete elucidation--moreover, inasmuch as our own
history and tradition is itself constitutive of our own hermeneutic
situation as well as being itself constantly taken up in the process
of understanding, so our historical and hermeneutic situation can
never be made completely transparent to us. As a consequence, Gadamer
explicitly takes issue with the Hegelian 'philosophy of
reflection' that aims at just such completion and
transparency.



In contrast with the traditional hermeneutic account, Gadamer thus
advances a view of understanding that rejects the idea of
understanding as achieved through gaining access to some inner realm
of subjective meaning. Moreover, since understanding is an ongoing
process, rather than something that is ever completed, so he also
rejects the idea that there is any final determinacy to understanding.
It is on this basis that Gadamer argues against there being any method
or technique for achieving understanding or arriving at truth. The
search for a methodology for the *Geisteswissenschaften* that
would place them on a sound footing alongside the 'sciences of
nature' (the *Naturwissenschaften*)--a search that
had characterized much previous hermeneutical inquiry--is thus
shown to be fundamentally misguided. Not only is there no methodology
that describes the means by which to arrive at an understanding of the
human or the historical, but neither is there any such methodology
that is adequate to the understanding of the non-human or the natural.
Gadamer's conception of understanding as not reducible to method
or technique, along with his insistence of understanding as an ongoing
process that has no final completion, not only invites comparison with
ideas to be found in the work of the later Wittgenstein, but can also
be seen as paralleling developments in post-Kuhnian philosophy of
science.


### 3.3 The Linguisticality of Understanding



The basic model of understanding that Gadamer finally arrives at in
*Truth and Method* is that of dialogue or
*conversation*. A conversation involves an exchange between
conversational partners that seeks agreement about some matter at
issue; consequently, such an exchange is never completely under the
control of either conversational partner, but is rather determined by
the matter at issue. Conversation always takes place in language and
similarly Gadamer views understanding as always linguistically
mediated. Since both conversation and understanding involve coming to
an agreement, so Gadamer argues that all understanding involves
something like a common language, albeit a common language that is
itself formed in the process of understanding itself (and that, one
might argue, is also constantly formed and reformed in that very
process). In this sense, all understanding is, according to Gadamer,
interpretative, and, insofar as all interpretation involves the
exchange between the familiar and the alien, so all interpretation is
also translative. Gadamer's commitment to the linguisticality of
understanding also commits him to a view of understanding as
essentially a matter of conceptual articulation. This does not rule
out the possibility of other modes of understanding, but it does give
primacy to language and conceptuality in hermeneutic experience.
Indeed, Gadamer takes language to be, not merely some instrument by
means of which we are able to engage with the world, but as instead
the very medium for such engagement. We are 'in' the world
through being 'in' language. This emphasis on the
linguisticality of understanding does not, however, lead Gadamer into
any form of linguistic relativism. Just as we are not held inescapably
captive within the circle of our prejudices, or within the effects of
our history, neither are we held captive within language. Language is
that within which anything that is intelligible can be comprehended,
it is also that within which we encounter ourselves and others. In
this respect, language is itself understood as essentially dialogue or
conversation. Like Wittgenstein, as well as Davidson, Gadamer thus
rejects the idea of such a thing as a 'private
language'--language always involves others, just as it
always involves the world.



Gadamer claims that language is the universal horizon of hermeneutic
experience; he also claims that the hermeneutic experience is itself
universal. This is not merely in the sense that the experience of
understanding is familiar or ubiquitous. The universality of
hermeneutics derives from the existential claim for hermeneutics that
Heidegger advanced in the 1920s and that Gadamer made into a central
idea in his own thinking. Hermeneutics concerns our fundamental mode
of being in the world and understanding is thus the basic phenomenon
in our existence. We cannot go back 'behind'
understanding, since to do so would be to suppose that there was a
mode of intelligibility that was prior to understanding. Hermeneutics
thus turns out to be universal, not merely in regard to knowledge,
whether in the 'human sciences' or elsewhere, but to all
understanding and, indeed, to philosophy itself. Philosophy is, in its
essence, hermeneutics. Gadamer's claim for the universality of
hermeneutics was one of the explicit points at issue in the debate
between Gadamer and Habermas (see Ormiston & Schrift [eds.] 1990);
it can also be seen as, in a certain sense, underlying the engagement
between Gadamer and Derrida (see Michelfelder & Palmer [eds.]
1989), although in Derrida's case this consisted in a denial of
the primacy of understanding, and the possibility of agreement, on
which hermeneutics itself rests.


## 4. Philosophy and the History of Philosophy



Gadamer's commitment to the historically conditioned character
of understanding, coupled with the hermeneutic imperative that we
engage with our historical situatedness, means that he takes
philosophy to itself stand in a critical relation to the history of
philosophy. Gadamer's own thought certainly reflects a
hermeneutical commitment to both philosophical dialogue and historical
engagement. His public debates with contemporary figures such as
Habermas and Derrida, although they have not always lived up to
Gadamer's own ideals of hermeneutic dialogue (at least not in
respect of Derrida), have provided clear evidence of Gadamer's
own commitment to such engagement. The dialogue with philosophy and
its history also makes up a large part of Gadamer's published
work and, while that dialogue has encompassed a range of thinkers, its
primary focus has been on Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Heidegger.



In the case of Plato and Aristotle (see Gadamer 1980, 1986a, 1991),
Gadamer has argued for a particular way of reading both thinkers that
attends to the character of their texts, that takes those texts to
display a high degree of consistency, and that, particularly in the
later work, also views Plato and Aristotle as holding essentially
similar views. In *The Beginning of Philosophy* (1997a),
Gadamer also takes Plato and Aristotle as providing the indispensable
point of entry to an understanding of Pre-Socratic thought. When it
comes to Hegel (see Gadamer 1971), although there is much that Gadamer
finds sympathetic to his own hermeneutic project (particularly
Hegel's attempt to move beyond the dichotomy of subject and
object, as well as aspects of Hegel's revival of ancient
dialectic), Gadamer's commitment to a hermeneutics of finitude
(and so to what Hegel terms 'bad infinity') places him in
direct opposition to the Hegelian philosophy of reflection that aims
at totality and completion. It is with Heidegger, however, that
Gadamer had his most significant, sustained and yet also most
problematic philosophical engagement (see especially Gadamer 1994a).
Although Gadamer emphasized the continuities between his own work and
that of Heidegger, and was clearly gratified by those occasions when
Heidegger gave his approval to Gadamer's work, he can also be
seen as involved in a subtle reworking of Heidegger's ideas. On
a number of points, that reworking has a rather different character
from that which is explicit in Heidegger. In particular, Gadamer
argues that Heidegger's attempts, in his later thinking, to find
a 'non-metaphysical' path of thought led Heidegger into a
situation in which he experienced a 'lack of (or need for)
language' (a *Sprachnot*). Gadamer's own work can
thus be seen as an attempt to take up the path of Heidegger's
later thought in a way that does not abandon, but rather attempts to
work with our existing language. Similarly, while Heidegger views the
history of philosophy as characterized by a 'forgetting'
of being--a forgetting that is inaugurated by Plato--Gadamer
takes the history of philosophy to have no such tendency. In this
respect, many of the differences between Gadamer and Heidegger become
clearest in their differing readings of the philosophical tradition,
as well as in their approaches to poets such as Holderlin.


## 5. Literature and Art



Over and above his concern with aesthetics as a philosophical theme,
the engagement with literature and art has been a continuing feature
throughout Gadamer's life and work and, in particular, Gadamer
has written extensively on poets such as Celan, Goethe,
Holderlin, and Rilke (see especially Gadamer 1994b, 1997c).
Gadamer's engagement with art is strongly influenced by his
dialogue with the history of philosophy, and he draws explicitly on
Hegel as well as Plato. At the same time, that engagement provides an
exemplification of Gadamer's hermeneutics as well as a means to
develop it further, while his hermeneutic approach to art itself
constitutes a rethinking of aesthetics through the integration of
aesthetics into hermeneutics (on Gadamer's aesthetics in general, see
Athos, 2013; Davey, 2013; Nielsen, 2023).



In contrast to much contemporary aesthetics, Gadamer takes the
experience of beauty to be central to an understanding of the nature
of art and in the final pages of *Truth and Method*, he
discusses the beautiful as that which is self-evidently present to us
(as 'radiant') exploring also the close relationship
between the beautiful and the true. Of particular importance in his
writing about art and literature are the three ideas that appear in
the subtitle to 'The Relevance of the Beautiful' (1986b):
art as play, symbol and festival. The role of play is a central notion
in Gadamer's hermeneutic thinking generally, providing the basis
for Gadamer's account of the experience both of art and
understanding (see
 Aesthetics and Subjectivism
 above). The symbolic character of the artwork is seen, by Gadamer,
not in terms of any form of simple 'representationalism',
but instead in terms of the character of art as always showing
something more than is literally present to us in the work (this
aspect of art as referring outside itself is also taken up by Gadamer
elsewhere in relation to the character of art as
'imitation'--*mimesis*). The artwork, no
matter what its medium, opens up, through its symbolic character, a
space in which both the world, and our own being in the world, are
brought to light as a single, but inexhaustibly rich totality. In the
experience of art, we are not merely given a 'moment' of
vision, but are able to 'dwell' along with the work in a
way that takes us out of ordinary time into what Gadamer calls
'fulfilled' or 'autonomous' time. Thus the
artwork has a festive, as well as symbolic and playful character,
since the festival similarly takes us out of ordinary time, while
opening us up to the true possibility of community. Gadamer returned
specifically to the question of art in his late essay (from 1992)
'The Artwork in Word and Image: "So True, So Full of
Being"'(Gadamer, 2007, pp. 192-224) in which he draws out the
character of interpretation as not something additional to the work or
art, but that in which the artwork is itself realized. In so doing,
Gadamer also enlarges and expands the idea of interpretation that was
evident in his earlier works, drawing on the experience of reading in
a way that not only shows the richness of textual engagement, but also
brings out the dynamic, performative, and essentially
other-involving-character of all interpretation.



Although much of Gadamer's writing on art focuses on poetry, as well
as the visual arts, he has also addressed questions of music (see
Gadamer 2021, 2022), and Gadamer's work is increasingly evident in
contemporary philosophy of music, especially in discussions of musical
performance and improvisation (see eg. Benson, 2003; McAuliffe, 2023;
Nielsen, 2023). Gadamer's emphasis on the dynamic and performative
character of understanding has an obvious relevance to music, but
music itself provides a valuable source for thinking about the
character of art and understanding in general.


## 6. Practical Philosophy



There is, according to Gadamer, a continuity between a hermeneutics
'that is aware of its philosophic implications' and 'the great
tradition of practical philosophy' (Gadamer, 2007, p.245), and such a
claim would already seem to be implicit in the idea that
interpretation and application are tied together through the
embeddedness of interpretation in the hermeneutical situation. Gadamer
has himself engaged, however, in direct reflection on a range of
concrete contemporary issues (see Gadamer 1976a, 1989a, 1993b, 1998b,
1999, 2001, see also Krajewski 2003). Gadamer's discussion of
these issues draws directly upon his more theoretical discussions of
hermeneutics elsewhere, sometimes serving to provide further
elaboration and illumination of the ideas at work in those
discussions. A central concern in many of Gadamer's essays is
the role of Europe, and European culture, in the contemporary
world--something that was especially pressing for Gadamer with
the advent of German reunification and the expansion of the European
community (see especially Gadamer 1989a). Here, however, a number of
other closely connected issues also come into view: the nature and
role of modern science and technology (see especially 1976a, 1998b),
and together with this, the role of the humanities; the question of
education and, in particular, of humanistic education (1992); the
issue of understanding between cultures, and especially between
religions, and the issue of world literature (see especially George
2020). In addition, Gadamer has written on matters concerning law,
ethics, the changing character of the modern university, the
connection between philosophy and politics, and the nature of medical
practice and the concept of health (see especially Gadamer 1993b, see
also see Aho 2022).



In almost all of these areas, Gadamer's approach is
characterized, not by the attempt to apply pre-existing theory to the
domain in question, but rather by the attempt to think from within
that domain, and in a way that is attentive to it, that also entails a
reciprocity between the theoretical and the applied. As Gadamer
comments in *Truth and Method*, 'application is neither a
subsequent nor merely an occasional part of the phenomenon of
understanding, but co-determines it as a whole from the
beginning' (Gadamer 1989b, 324). Theory and application do not
occur, then, in separation from one another, but are part of a single
hermeneutical 'practice'. The interdependence of
philosophical theory and practical application, often in the form of
an interdependence between theoretical engagement in one domain and
engagement in another, is evident to a degree in some of the very
early responses to Gadamer's work by thinkers from outside of
philosophy who had interests in the implications of hermeneutic
thinking within their own specific domains. Thus Gadamer's work
was famously taken up in the 1960s by the Italian jurist Emilio Betti
(see Betti, 2021[1964], pp. 45-61), and Betti's work was also
drawn upon by E. D. Hirsch whose concerns came from the direction of
literary theory (see Hirsch, 1965, 1967). Theology was another area
where Gadamer had an early impact (see eg. Robinson. and Cobb, 1964),
partly reinforced through connections between his work and that of the
theologian Bernard Lonergan (see Lawrence, 1984).



Gadamer's thinking has continued to be influential in legal
theory and jurisprudence (see Mootz 2007), in literary theory (see
Weinsheimer, 1991), and theology (see Lawrence, 2006), but the
interconnection of philosophical and practical hermeneutics that is
evident in Gadamer's own work has itself been reflected in the
way that work has been taken up in relation to practical and applied
issues within many other domains--within, for instance, health
and medical practice (see e.g., Svenaueus 2003), intercultural studies
(see e.g., Garfield 2002, Lammi 2008)), education (see e.g., Fairfield
2012), environmental education and ecology (see e.g., Grun
2005),architecture (see e.g. Snodgrass and Coyne 2006), and political
theory (see e.g. Walhof, 2022)(on many of these topics, see also the
various chapters in Malpas & Gander 2014). Gadamer's work
has also seen application, though not uncontentiously, within feminism
(see Homan, 2022) and contemporary race theory (Botts, 2022).



That practical engagement is an essential element in Gadamer's
thinking implies that it cannot be seen to stand aside from questions
of ethics. Gadamer never developed a book-length treatment that
addresses such questions, but there is clearly an ethical current that
runs throughout his thinking, and that is discernible, for instance,
in his emphasis on the conversational character of hermeneutic
engagement as well as his later reflections on the relation to the
other (including on themes of friendship and solidarity) (see Gadamer
1999). It is also clearly evident in the engagement with Aristotle
that runs throughout Gadamer's work as well as his engagement
with Plato (notably Gadamer, 1991). Despite the absence of a fully
developed account, Gadamer has addressed the matter of ethics directly
in, most notably, 'On the Possibility of a Philosophical
Ethics' (Gadamer, 1999, pp. 18-36 and 2007, pp. 274-289), in which
Gadamer argues against Kantian formalism in favor of a more
Aristotelian approach. The issue of the ethical dimension in
Gadamer's thought and in hermeneutics more generally has also
been taken up in the work of others (see especially Schmidt, 2015;
George, 2020).