HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

Volume 24, Number 3, July 2007

AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM

GADAMER ON HERDER, SCHLEIERMACHER, AND
THE ORIGINS OF MODERN HERMENEUTICS

Kristin Gjesdal

O ver the past decade, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method

(1960) has enjoyed a renaissance. The so-called Gadamer-Habermas
debate, with its concern for the question of validity in interpretation,
has faded into the background. So has the discussion between Gadamer
and Derrida over the usefulness of hermeneutics versus deconstruction.
When philosophers such as Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Robert
Brandom turn to Gadamer, it is in order to find support for the notions
of Bildung and the linguistic nature of reason.
These notions are also an integral part of the philosophical vocabulary
developed by Johann Gottfried Herder in the 1760s and 1770s.1 This is
what made him a recurring interest of liberal historians and philoso-
phers such as Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor.2 Gadamer, however,
has surprisingly little to say about this eighteenth-century philosopher.
In his work, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century herme-
neutics remains identified with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s romantic
theory of interpretation. And to Gadamer, Schleiermacher’s theory of
interpretation, developed about twenty to thirty years after Herder’s
first hermeneutic reflections in the 1760s, offers little but an unwanted
aesthetic humanism, a position that ought to be overcome by a more
viable political humanism—i.e., by Gadamer’s own hermeneutics.

I.
Gadamer does not pay much attention to Herder in Truth and Method.
Yet the only book that Gadamer published over the almost 30 years
between Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, his habilitation-work from 1931,3
and Truth and Method is a short and somewhat superficial study of
Herder. Based on a paper he presented at the German Institute in
Paris in 1941, this text is among the more embarrassing chapters of

275
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Gadamer’s activities during the Second World War.4 So embarrassing

is it that the text, even though it was published as a separate volume
in 1942,5 is not included in his Gesammelte Werke. Or, more precisely,
it is included, but the nationalistic rhetoric is weeded out and Volk und
Geschichte im Denken Herders now appears under the more neutral
title “Herder und die geschichtliche Welt.” This revamped version of
the essay first appeared as a postscript to Klostermann’s 1967 edition
of Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie.6
In the original 1941 lecture, Herder emerges as one of the greatest
European voices brought forth by Germany (VG, 5). His critique of
French culture is placed in the foreground from the very start. Strangely,
though, this critique is not explained in light of Herder’s increasing
doubts about the classicists’ appeal to timeless, aesthetic norms.7 What
matters for Gadamer in 1941–1942 is simply that Herder could only
develop an adequate notion of the German folk and state through break-
ing with the historical and cultural standards of the French (VG, 5).
Prescribing a way beyond the twin fallacies of abstract enlightenment
and subjectivist romanticism, Herder turns to historical meaning (VG,
10). However, as Gadamer retrieves this notion of Herder’s, historical
reality is but the work of powers (Kräften) (VG, 15). Reflecting on how
these powers get branched into different cultures and folks, Herder came
to provide the nascent East-European nations with a notion of national
self-understanding. Yet, Gadamer goes on, these countries did not realize
the full potential of Herder’s thinking. Instead of sticking, as it were,
to the Herderian script, they looked to the rest of Europe. Hence they
missed the way in which the German notion of Volk offers a promising
alternative to the democratic paroles of the West (VG, 23).8 According to
Gadamer of the early 1940s, the political-philosophical legacy of Herder
consists in making us see the contrast between the democratic paroles
of the West and the true politics of power, Volk, and nation-building.
The 1967 postscript is little but a fixed-up version of this early
encounter with Herder.9 That is, in spite of Gadamer later describing
the Herder text as “a purely scholarly study,”10 he must have felt like
offering a more palatable interpretation of Herder’s hermeneutics. The
discomforting political rhetoric is toned down, and it is possible to extract
from this text something like a systematic, if still sketchy, picture of
Herder’s notion of historical meaning. While retrieving Herder’s notion
of historicity, Gadamer highlights three particularly relevant points.
(a) In contradiction to his own celebration of German culture in the
1940s, Gadamer now acknowledges that Herder warns against judging
history in light of our own cultural ideals. Against what Gadamer takes
to be the usual habit of eighteenth-century historiology, Herder proposes
 AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 277

that each culture entertains its own notion of happiness, so that different
cultures cannot be compared in light of one universal criterion.
(b) In contradiction to his previous emphasis on the Germanic tenors
of Herder’s philosophy, Gadamer recognizes how Herder himself had
criticized Winckelmann’s tendency to hypostatize, as an ideal of all art,
the aesthetic proportions of ancient Greek sculpture (HgW, 325–326).
Herder’s rejection of normative comparison between cultures allows
for no celebration of one culture as superior to others, or as the source
of universal standards, be they artistic, epistemic, or ethical-political.
On Gadamer’s reading, Herder warns against an ahistorical cultivation
of ancient Greek culture. Furthermore, he questions the very idea of
progress in history. As Gadamer retrieves this point of Herder’s, any
progress is at the same time a loss.11
(c) Finally, Gadamer finds that even though Herder emphasizes the
individuality of each historical culture or period, he does not fail to ad-
dress the basic metaphysical problem of the philosophy of history: the
question as to whether there is an overall meaning in history. Gadamer
proposes that the young Herder sees in history the realization of a divine
plan or purpose. Later on, in Ideen, Herder stages humanity as the telos
of history, even if this notion of humanity is, on Gadamer’s reading, not
abstract and ideal but intrinsically related to the notion of power.
This is as much of a systematic treatment of Herder as we will ever
find in Gadamer’s work. At stake in the 1967 version of the Volk und
Geschichte essay is a recognition of Herder’s importance for the histori-
cal sciences, yet with no genuine effort to engage with his contribution
to the development of modern hermeneutics.
Schleiermacher, by contrast, appears in almost every text that Ga-
damer has ever written about hermeneutics.12 However, in Gadamer’s
retrieval of the history of modern hermeneutics, Schleiermacher’s ro-
mantic theory of interpretation represents the point where it all goes
wrong. The period from the late 1790s, and all the way through Droysen,
Ranke, and Dilthey, appears by and large as a historical cul-de-sac. Only
when Heidegger enters the scene in Freiburg in the mid 1910s is there
again hope for hermeneutics.
Why, then, does hermeneutics, on Gadamer’s account, derail with
Schleiermacher? Before Schleiermacher, Gadamer reckons, figures such
as Vico, Spinoza, and Gracián cultivated a humanistic interest in culture,
Bildung, and tact, and they acknowledged the close relation between
taste and morality. Schleiermacher turns his back on this tradition.
Instead of drawing on the humanistic legacy, he is influenced by Kant’s
aesthetics. Indeed, on Gadamer’s understanding, Schleiermacher’s
hermeneutics is but a radical appropriation—or, more correctly, one
278 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

colossal misunderstanding—of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Like the

other Jena romantics, Schleiermacher was fascinated by Kant’s third
Critique, but, again like the other Jena romantics, he misses the point of
the Critique of Judgment.13 The romantics read the Critique of Judgment
as a philosophical account of the distinction between art and non-art.
There may not be anything wrong with that strategy per se, Gadamer
concedes, but because the romantics bracketed the dimension of taste,
they focused naively on the notion of unmediated genius. The roman-
tics ended up celebrating the idea of the original individual, unaffected
by schooling and education, through whom nature could express itself
within the sphere of culture, and whose creativity would escape any
attempt at conceptual determination or post-festum reconstruction of
creative guidelines or rules.
On Gadamer’s reading, Schleiermacher’s theory reflects the general
shortcomings of romantic aesthetics in two closely related ways: its focus
on individuality and its call for an immediate method of divination.
According to Gadamer, Schleiermacher takes as his point of depar-
ture a problematic metaphysics of individuality.14 He postulates a lack
of fit between the shared symbolic resources of a given community and
the constitutive uniqueness of each of its members. What matters,
when understanding an individual expression, is whatever is behind
language or behind the work of art. On Gadamer’s understanding,
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is an effort to reach back and reconstruct
the individual intentional state of mind in the act of creation. Texts are
not approached in terms of their propositional content, but understood
as “purely expressive phenomena” (TM, 196; WM, 200).
Facing a state of monadic individualities, hermeneutics, on Gadamer’s
reading, cannot respond by referring to the common horizon or culture
to which the artist or language-user belongs. What is required, rather,
is a grasp of the constitutive originality of the utterance. The inter-
preter needs to develop some sort of congeniality, to feel his or her way
into the original feeling of the other. Understanding is reduced to an
immediate leap—Einfühlung or divination—into the creative mind of
another individual. Only an immediate leap of this kind can overcome
the difference between interpreter and author. In Schleiermacher’s
philosophy, Gadamer argues, hermeneutics is reduced to “an immedi-
ate, sympathetic, and congenial understanding” (TM, 191; WM, 194).
This, in short, is Gadamer’s reading of Schleiermacher—and it is on this
background that he calls for a “move beyond” the framework of romantic
theory of understanding (TM, 197; WM, 201).
Since Peter Szondi’s first efforts to rehabilitate Schleiermacher’s
theory of interpretation in the early 1970s,15 many attempts have been
 AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 279

made to reclaim the relevance of his hermeneutic philosophy. Gadamer’s

student Heinz Kimmerle tried to show that Schleiermacher started
out with a theory that is not at all unlike Gadamer’s own, and that
he only gradually drifted toward an aesthetic hermeneutics.16 Others,
such as Manfred Frank, have kept Szondi’s original focus, suggesting
that Schleiermacher’s romantic theory of understanding is indeed
an aesthetic hermeneutics, only Gadamer does not understand what
an aesthetic hermeneutics amounts to; that is, he does not see how
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics reflects the proto-modernist sentiments
of Jena romanticism and is therefore particularly fit to illuminate the
question of literary style and aesthetic form.17 The problem with both of
these lines of criticism is that while accepting Gadamer’s aesthetization
thesis, they only call for a reinterpretation of its extension (Kimmerle)
or its meaning (Szondi and Frank).18 This is not a sufficiently radical
approach when criticizing Gadamer’s misreading of Schleiermacher in
particular and his misconstruction of eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury hermeneutics in general.
At this point Herder becomes important. Gadamer makes no con-
nection between Herder and Schleiermacher. Herder is pulled in the
direction of a theory of Volk, culture, and historicism; Schleiermacher is
deemed a hopeless example of aesthetic humanism. However, in order
to pay full justice to the origins of nineteenth-century hermeneutics,
Herder and Schleiermacher should be read together.19 When doing so,
it gets clear that Herder’s hermeneutic relevance does not consist in his
more problematic theory of Kraft and Volksgeist, but in his reflections
on the problems of practical historical and philological work. Schlei-
ermacher, likewise, defends no hermeneutic subjectivism of the kind
that Gadamer ascribes to him, but develops a theory that emphasizes
the potential otherness of the text at stake and the need for a critical
reflective procedure in interpretation.

II.
In his reading of Schleiermacher, Gadamer singles out for criticism the
notion of individuality and the appeal to divination. Both these notions
are traced back to the quasi-Kantian framework of romantic aesthet-
ics, and ultimately to its misunderstanding of Kant’s theory of genius.
The reason Gadamer has to explain this in light of a misunderstand-
ing of Kant’s theory of genius is that Kant himself does not speak of
individuality, Einfühlung, or divination, at least not in the sense that
Schleiermacher does. In fact, his concern is not with a theory of inter-
pretation at all.20 Herder, by contrast, addresses a number of central
hermeneutic problems, although he does not, like Schleiermacher,
write this up as a systematic study of the conditions of possibility for
280 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

understanding. In the works where Herder addresses hermeneutic is-

sues, terms such as individuality and Einfühlung (divination) play an
important role—at least as important as the more general, historiological
points that Gadamer extracts from Herder in his postscript to Auch eine
Philosophie. Both the notion of individuality and the idea of Einfühlung
need to be discussed in some more detail.
For Herder, the development of a robust notion of individuality is not
simply a task of theoretical importance, but one that has the gravest
practical consequences for the self-understanding prevailing in German
literature and letters. Let us take, as an example, Herder’s engagement
with Shakespeare in the three versions of the essay “Shakespear” from
the period of 1771–1773.
Herder read Shakespeare eagerly throughout the late 1760s. Both in
France (with Voltaire) and in Germany (with Gottsched), Shakespeare
had been discredited because he was breaking with the predominantly
Aristotelian conventions of classicist theater.21 However, within Herder’s
own environment, Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg had pointed out
that if we only proceed to read the Poetics in a more generous way than
the classicists had done, Shakespeare’s work would indeed prove to fit
in. In the first draft of his essay on Shakespeare (1771), Herder argues
that the reference to Aristotle is not itself a valid criterion for the as-
sessment of Shakespeare’s drama and, furthermore, he does not find
von Gerstenberg’s interpretation of Aristotle convincing in the first
place.22 In the next draft, produced less than a year later, he grafts onto
his negative point about the Aristotle-Shakespeare connection a more
positive claim: Shakespeare needs no Greek Aristotle. What he needs
is his own Aristotle, somebody who could do for him what Aristotle did
for Sophocles, i.e., conceptually articulate the intrinsic Maßstab of his
drama.23 Finally, in the last version of the essay, Herder makes his
argument even more poignant. Shakespeare’s work, he now claims, can-
not be compared to Sophoclean tragedy. Sophocles’ world is no longer
Shakespeare’s. And if the two have anything in common, this is not a
set of shared experiences or timeless aesthetic forms, but the capacity
to reflect their own historical world in an individual or original way.24
To critically define “the borders of an author’s past world, own time,
and world of posterity—what the first supplied to him, how the second
helped or harmed him, how the third developed his work,” was precisely
what Herder, only five years earlier, had described as “the foundation
for a history of the sciences and of the human understanding.”25
The nineteenth-century notion of individuality cannot, as Gadamer
does, automatically be traced back to a romantic misunderstanding of
Kant’s theory of aesthetic genius—opposed, as it allegedly is, to tradi-
 AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 281

tion as well as critical judging and reflection. Within Schleiermacher’s

intellectual circles, the notion of genius occurs prior to and independent
of Kant’s theory—and if there is a chain of influence here, it could easily
be from Addison, Young, Hutchinson, Home, and Pope to Herder and,
later on, Kant and Schleiermacher, rather than simply being a question
of romanticizing a Kantian idea.26 The discussion of individuality has
been part of modern hermeneutics and philosophy of history from its
very beginning. At stake is not, as Gadamer argues, an appeal to the
inner, psychological state of mind of a given artist or individual, but
an effort to do justice to the uniqueness of a given individual work or
a given individual culture, so as to maintain the notion of plurality in
historical understanding.
Within this framework—within this budding aesthetic philosophy,
articulated, as it later was, in Die Kritischen Wälder27—Herder provides
a set of guidelines for a practical interpretative approach to art and
historical texts. Where he writes about these issues, he recommends
a movement back and forth between the individuality of the work and
its context, hence viewing it as a unique expression of the shared cul-
tural resources of a given historical community.28 Furthermore Herder
suggests that feeling or divination is the best way to grasp the work as
individual, whereas a broader genetic approach yields comprehension
of the work within its culture.
In his 1768 praise of Thomas Abbt, Herder speaks about the way in
which Abbt feels his way into every area of culture, and the way in which
he “sensed them as though through a divination.”29 This side of Abbt’s
mind is, Herder claims, for him “the holiest.”30 Herder, at this point, does
not suggest that Abbt aestheticizes each and every symbolic expression.
Nor does he claim that Abbt feels his way into some psychological layer
of meaning that is beyond the realm of symbolic mediation. Rather, what
Herder has in mind is the way in which Abbt pays justice to works of
art in their particularity. Unlike, say, Winckelmann, Abbt does not ap-
proach other cultures looking for expressions of the timeless norms and
genre definitions of classical Greek antiquity. He asks, rather, how a
particular expression stands forth as unique: “How can we understand
this particular expression or this particular culture in its own right?”
This is the subtext of Herder’s engagement with Abbt in particular and
the motivation for his appeal to Einfühlung and divination in general.
Herder wants to question the hegemony of classicist aesthetics and the
normative assumptions it yields with regard to other cultures, periods,
and artistic genres.
It is this kind of thinking—attentiveness to the individuality of
symbolic expression as it lends voice to a larger cultural context—and
282 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

not an inadequate romantic misreading of Critique of Judgment that

establishes the intellectual background against which Schleiermacher’s
hermeneutics must be understood. The point here is not, as Gadamer
claims, to aestheticize the work or to tear it away from its larger, cultural
context. At stake, rather, is a willingness to grasp it as a unique mani-
festation of the shared symbolic and cultural resources of the time and
hence, by implication, to emphasize the limits of a universal poetics. As
soon as we situate Schleiermacher within such a framework, it becomes
clear that Gadamer misunderstands both his notion of individuality and
his appeal to divination.
When Schleiermacher, in his hermeneutics, speaks about the in-
dividuality of an expression, he does not have in mind some kind of
psychological, inner feeling that is torn loose from the shared symbolic
resources of a given community. Schleiermacher claims that the indi-
viduality of a given work of art (or of a given symbolic utterance) must
be understood as the individual combination or application of the shared
symbolic or cultural resources of a given community.31 This is the reason
why, according to Schleiermacher, the reflected interpreter needs to pay
attention to both the culture in which the author lives, the linguistic-
symbolic resources she has at her disposal, and the individual way in
which she applies them—that is, to what Schleiermacher, with a twist
on the traditional division of biblical hermeneutics into a grammatical
and a spiritual part, rephrases as the grammatical and the technical
aspects of interpretation.32
On this interpretation, Schleiermacher’s notion of divination emerges
in a new light as well. Divination and comparison—or rather contex-
tualization—emerge as equally needed, and one cannot replace the
other.33 Schleiermacher’s point, when introducing this notion, is that
if the work (the symbolic expression) is seen as individual, one simply
cannot understand it by contextualization alone. Contextualization can
only lead to an understanding of the features that one work (or symbolic
expression) shares with another, or how it differs from any other work
(or symbolic expression)—and cannot, as such, provide understanding
of the work in its own right. Hence contextualization/comparison must
be accompanied by divination, a hypothesis formation that, in turn,
begs confirmation through a comparison of the individual paragraph
or text at stake with other paragraphs, texts by the same author, or
with other authors of the period. This is Schleiermacher’s version of the
hermeneutic circle: a back and forth movement between bold hypothesis
formation and the gradual revision of this hypothesis in light of careful
philological work. At stake is no headless, romantic process of divin-
ing one’s way into the immediate feeling that the work expresses, but
attentiveness to the fact that linguistic rules beg application, and that
 AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 283

this opens for a dimension of individuality that, after Schleiermacher,

has often been overlooked in hermeneutics.
By reading Herder and Schleiermacher together, it becomes clear,
first, that Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is not a problematic philosophy
of aesthetic individuality and immediacy. Second, and equally impor-
tant, Herder’s contribution to hermeneutics is not only, as Gadamer
suggested in his revised, 1967 version of “Volk und Geschichte,” a gen-
eral philosophy of history and power, but also an ambitious, systematic
effort to deal with the concrete problems of historical and philological
work—it is indeed one of the very earliest theories, perhaps even the
earliest theory, in which hermeneutics turns philosophical, that is, in
which it is no longer seen as a tool for classicists or theologians, but as
an independent branch of philosophy itself.

III.
There are, to be sure, many ways to illuminate Gadamer’s misreading
of Schleiermacher and Herder. Yet if one does not want to get drawn
into more biographical speculation, one way to explain this is to bring
in the broader intellectual framework of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, as it
developed in the early 1930s—a framework that has been surprisingly
absent in the discussion of Gadamer’s work both within German and
Anglophone contexts.
Today the very title Truth and Method is more or less synonymous
with philosophical hermeneutics. However, when Gadamer initially
started working on Truth and Method in the early 1930s, he did not
intend to dedicate the next thirty years of his life to a discussion of the
problems of understanding and interpretation. To the young Gadamer,
art was a lot more important.34 Humanism, he claims, has become stifling
and irrelevant.35 It has lost touch with the spirit of the classical tradition
and its emphasis on judgment, sensus communis, tact, and the relation
between taste and morality. Nowadays, Gadamer complains, we no lon-
ger have a relation to the past as a living and integrated dimension of the
present. The past is aestheticized. The experience of traditional works
of art culminates in mere aesthetic enjoyment. No self-understanding
is involved. No truth is at stake in this experience. It is as if the entire
tradition is turned into a museum—be it real or imaginary. In the hu-
man sciences this is reflected in a certain kind of scientism: tradition
is turned into an object that can have no genuine influence on the way
we live today. What we face, Gadamer worries, is a situation in which
the humanities are ridden with a harmful combination of romanticism
and positivism.36 The situation is ripe for change—and Gadamer, in the
1930s, is prepared to take on the challenge.
284 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

Wanting to combat the aesthetic attitude of the 1930s,37 Gadamer

does not seek to abandon humanism as such. Instead he wants to mus-
ter, against the aesthetic humanism of the time, what he, somewhat
idiosyncratically, calls a political humanism. Gadamer never offers a
clear-cut definition of political humanism. Yet he makes it clear that
a political humanism would take into account the truth of art and of
tradition. It would take into account how our historical being in the
world is acted out in our engagement with the works of the past—be
that works of art or works of philosophy. Vaguely defined as it is, this
political humanism, although rarely noted by the commentators, is the
driving force of Gadamer’s work in the period when the bulk of Truth
and Method was drafted and also in his later work, especially the later
essays on art.
Jürgen Habermas is one of the few to have paid attention to Gadamer’s
call for a political humanism.38 In his portrait of Gadamer, in Political-
Philosophical Profiles, Habermas stages a contrast between the allegedly
more rural sensitivities of Gadamer’s teacher Martin Heidegger and
Gadamer’s own “urbanizing of the Heideggerian province.”39 Although
there are obvious differences between the two philosophers—some of
them deriving from Gadamer’s affinities with the classicist environment
in Marburg, some of them stemming from his affinity with Hegel, it is
important to see that they cannot be explained in light of Gadamer’s
appeal to a political humanism.40 Gadamer’s political humanism is pre-
cisely where he is at his most Heideggerian (even though humanism,
as such, is not a term that Heidegger himself would use to describe the
project of fundamental ontology).
When addressing Heidegger’s importance for the development of
twentieth-century hermeneutics, one often rushes to mention Being
and Time, his opus magnum of the early years in Freiburg and Mar-
burg. It is in Being and Time that Heidegger speaks of hermeneutics as
an “interpretation of Dasein’s Being,”41 and of the methodology of the
human sciences as hermeneutics only in a “derivative sense” (BT; SZ,
38). It is here that he acknowledges how hermeneutics, in the primary
meaning of the term, always moves in a circle: Only by presupposing
Dasein’s average self-understanding can Dasein’s being be ontologically
analyzed (BT; SZ, 8), which means that the apparent circle in reality
is “a remarkable ‘relatedness backward or forward’ which what we are
asking about (Being) bears to the inquiry itself as a mode of Being of
an entity” (BT; SZ, 8). Finally, it is in Being and Time that Heidegger
delivers his famous critique of Dilthey, claiming that in Dilthey’s critique
of historical reason “everything centers in psychology” (BT; SZ, 398), so
that he is almost bound to miss “the authentic disclosedness (‘truth’) of
historical existence” (BT; SZ, 397).
 AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 285

Gadamer is clearly influenced by Heidegger’s ontological herme-

neutics. In Truth and Method, he explicitly claims that it is first and
foremost by the standards (Maß) of Heideggerian philosophy that he
“desires to be measured” (TM, xxv; WM, 5), and he repeatedly stresses
that more than anything else it was the encounter with Heidegger,
and in particular Heidegger’s teaching of the early 1920s, that came to
determine the path of his own thinking. Hence, in order to spell out the
hermeneutic import of Heidegger’s thinking, one ought to go back to the
period before Being and Time and especially to his famous seminar on
Aristotle from the early 1920s—a seminar that Gadamer himself takes
to be the single most important intellectual experience of his youth,42
and which he also claims that he was “later to justify in theory and to
represent.”43
Heidegger, who had been teaching Aristotle on several occasions,
infuses his reading of this philosopher with a more general criticism of
our relation to history and tradition at large. In the 1921–1922 lecture
course Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger claims
that we no longer relate to the tradition as relevant and alive. The
tradition is perceived as dead, irrelevant, as an object to be studied at
a disinterested distance. Wanting to mend this situation, Heidegger
proposes a salvaging destruction of the past: an effort to rescue the
works of tradition from the conservative, sometimes even petrifying
tendencies of tradition itself—a return to the (truth of the) works in
themselves, as it were (BT; SZ, 21). Against philology, which allegedly
loses the big questions out of sight, Heidegger calls for a direct engage-
ment with historical texts. The historical aspect of philosophy, he claims,
“is visible only in the very act of philosophizing. It is graspable only as
existence.”44 It is a misunderstanding, he claims (referring to Dilthey),
“to maintain that we would come to an understanding if we do justice
to history in . . . calmness and Objectivity.”45 Calmness and objectivity
are not desirable qualities, but the result of “weakness and indolence.”46
Against this Heidegger advocates “the intention to confront [Ausein-
andersetzungstendenz].”47 Only such an intention “has its own radical
power of disclosing and illuminating.”48 What matters, when relating
to the philosophical works of the past, is not their aesthetic, formal, or
stylistic attire, not the historical-philological context in which they were
written, but their relevance for us here and now.
This is the context in which Gadamer’s philosophy—and his recon-
struction of nineteenth-century hermeneutics—must be seen. Gadamer,
too, wants to rescue the past from the twin specter of aestheticizing
and objectivizing attitudes; he, too, wants us directly to confront the
words of the great poets and philosophers. Indeed his first work on
Plato is driven by such an ambition. In this work he tried, in his own
286 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

words, “to lay aside all scholarly knowledge for once and take as [his]
point of departure the phenomena [i.e., Plato’s Philebus] as they show
themselves to us.”49 For should it not, he asks rhetorically, “be possible
. . . to see Greek philosophy, Aristotle and Plato, with new eyes—just as
Heidegger was able in his lectures on Aristotle to present a completely
uncustomary Aristotle, one in whom one rediscovered one’s own pres-
ent-day question in startlingly concrete form?”50
This type of hermeneutic rationale not only characterizes Gadamer’s
own hermeneutic practice in the 1920s and 1930s, but also his general
hermeneutic position—his so-called political humanism—in Truth and
Method and later works. The greatness of the works of the past, their
truth, cannot be acknowledged if we turn them into objects of human
studies in the narrow meaning of the term. Instead we ought to expose
ourselves to their sublime, existential bidding. This existentialist drive
of Gadamer’s hermeneutics surfaces in his discussion of the classical. In
modernity, Gadamer claims, the term ‘classical’ is “reduced to a mere
stylistic concept” (TM, 285; WM, 290). Partly due to Hegel, who saw
the classical as a period rather than as a way of “being historical” (TM,
287; WM, 292), the idea of the classical has lost its normative force.
Against this, Gadamer proposes a return to the early modern notion of
humanistic education, which, he claims, embodies the idea of the classi-
cal as “more than a concept of a period or of a historical style, and yet it
nevertheless does not try to be a supra-historical value” (ibid.). As part
of a liberal education, the classical refers to the capacity perpetually to
allow “something true to come into being” (ibid.). The classical represents
a historical authority that is preserved and handed down prior to all
reflection (ibid). It does not need to prove its authority; its authority is
always already proved because the meaning of the work extends into
and forms the beliefs and practices in terms of which we understand
ourselves. As such, the classical discloses a historical reality to which
consciousness belongs (zugehört) and is subordinate (untersteht) (TM,
288; WM, 292–293).
Understood as classical, the works of the past, Gadamer claims, ought
to address us with an imperative like the one extruding from the Apollo
sculpture in Rilke’s poem “Archaïscher Torso Apollos”: “Thou must al-
ter thy life.”51 These works do not beg criticism. On the contrary, every
“genuine artistic creation stands within a particular community, and
such a community is always distinguishable from the cultured society
that is informed and terrorized by art criticism.”52 Nor do classical works
beg historical or philological scholarship. What they ask of us, rather,
is self-examination—self-examination because we live in a culture that
is no longer able to respond adequately to the call of the past, i.e., to
our own historicity. Hence the challenge we face, living under the twin
 AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 287

shadow of aesthetic humanism and a quasi-scientific objectification of

the past, is to be able, again, to take on authentically our historical
being-in-the-world. This is what is ultimately at stake in Gadamer’s
hermeneutics: it is not, as it is often claimed, an effort to carve out an
epistemology that allows for a position beyond relativism and objectiv-
ism,53 but to take hermeneutics from a discussion about the validity of
the historical sciences to a phenomenological analysis of our historical
being in the world.
This detour through the phenomenological-existentialist roots of
Gadamer’s hermeneutics should put us in a better position to see, first,
why Gadamer (for systematic, philosophical reasons and not just for
personal reasons having to do with his disgraceful Paris talk) leaves
Herder almost entirely out of his discussion of past hermeneutics, and,
second, why he misreads both Schleiermacher and Herder. What Ga-
damer wants is not so much to get the history of modern hermeneutics
right. What he sets out to do, rather, is to explain philosophically how
it was that aesthetic humanism—the general aesthetization of the
past—came about, so that he, having analyzed its historical roots and
contemporary symptoms, can prescribe the right cure. If Herder does
not fit into this picture, he may as well be ignored. At stake is not an
effort to systematically explore the possible alternatives to Heideggerian
hermeneutics, but to show that given the unproductiveness of subjec-
tivist-psychologist hermeneutics, which he ascribes to Schleiermacher,
there are simply no alternatives to Heidegger’s and his own ontological
turn in hermeneutics.
There is nothing contingent about Gadamer’s misreading of Schlei-
ermacher and Herder—the misreading, by the main advocate of
hermeneutics in the twentieth-century, of two of the main advocates of
hermeneutics in the nineteenth. It is not as if Gadamer’s misunderstand-
ing of Schleiermacher and his overlooking of Herder’s hermeneutics
are simply accidents, and that he, in this particular case, happens to
be a bad advocate for a theory that is in itself in good shape. Rather, in
Gadamer’s hermeneutics, the whole question of validity, philological
justification, and objectivity is sublated into the understanding of truth
in terms of authenticity and self-understanding. It does not really mat-
ter whether he gets Herder and Schleiermacher right. What matters is
to make us understand the alienation from history and tradition that
marks our modern predicament. This, I think, is the point at which we
need to return to nineteenth-century hermeneutics and ask what kind of
resources Herder and Schleiermacher offer, given that their hermeneutic
theories do not aspire to a full-fledged critique of modernity but respond
to, somewhat more modestly, the question as to how we can understand
288 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

and interpret the expressions from cultures that are geographically,

temporally, or culturally distant from that of the interpreter.

IV.
A return to the Herder-Schleiermacher line in hermeneutics need not
undermine the basic worries that initially motivated Gadamer’s political
humanism—the worries about the impacts of a problematic aesthetic
humanism. However, having argued that neither Schleiermacher nor
Herder can be placed within the category of naïve, aesthetic human-
ism, but that they nonetheless do not follow Gadamer in conducting an
ontological turn in hermeneutics, I cannot see why the call for a critique
of an aesthetic humanism necessarily leads to a position of the kind
that Gadamer is defending. On the contrary, from the point of view
of Herder and Schleiermacher’s theories of interpretation, it would be
reasonable to worry that Gadamer’s own existential-ontological turn
in hermeneutics does not itself succeed in overcoming the fallacies of
aesthetic humanism. Instead of appearing as the hermeneutician to get
beyond the aesthetic paradigm, Gadamer emerges as the representative
of a reinforced, ontologized version of aesthetic humanism—one that is
at least as problematic as the one he initially wanted to question.
When criticizing aesthetic humanism, Gadamer’s main concern is
that it tends to reduce the experience of art to a question of subjective
feeling and immediacy. Truth and knowledge are not given any role to
play within the sphere of art and artistic experience. Against this, Ga-
damer emphasizes the artwork’s capacity for world-disclosure, its ability
to present us with the truth about our own way of being (as historical
Daseins) and hence trigger a potentially more authentic and fulfilling
existence. The truth of art is a momentary flash of self-understanding,
an epiphany in which we all of a sudden see the power of the tradition
in which we are situated, hence recollecting in a quasi-Platonic sense
what we already knew but did not, as it were, reflectively contemplate.54
This is what Gadamer has in mind when describing understanding as
an “event of being [Seinsvorgang]” or an event (ein Gescheen) (TM, 144;
WM, 148, see also TM, 309; WM, 314), and it is this event (of being) that
makes up the fabric of his so-called political humanism. It is an account
of the humanities that, wanting to move beyond the call for a method
that is on par with the ones applied in the natural sciences, returns to
art’s capacity to stage a kind of world-disclosive awakening in which
not just the given, historical work, but the entire relationship between
the interpreter and the tradition in which he or she is situated, is expe-
rienced in a new and more truthful way. When authentically perceived,
the interpreter does not stand toward tradition as a subject toward an
object. On the contrary, this way of perceiving the hermeneutic situation
 AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 289

is the very root of the problem. At stake, rather, is a situation where the
interpreter encounters a totality that is more authoritative than him
or herself, a totality that one cannot reflectively master or objectify but
only deal with to the extent that one participates and subjects to it. Ga-
damer expounds on this experience by exploring the metaphor of games
and game playing, which he deliberately wants to take back from the
Kantian-Schillerian tradition. The play involved in our encounters with
tradition is not about exercising critical reflection.55 It is, rather, about
belonging. And it is important to see that the attraction of this experience
is not, as such, linked up with subjective pleasure (be it disinterested or
not) but rests with the relationship between the self and its tradition to
such an extent that Gadamer, even in texts that are written well after
the Second World War, is comfortable calling for a rehabilitation of the
aesthetic-philosophical relevance of the notion of Volk.56
By ontologizing the process of understanding, Gadamer gets beyond
what he takes to be the subjectivist implication of nineteenth-century
hermeneutics. However, given his insistence on the “event of under-
standing,” he does not get beyond the aestheticizing of the hermeneutic
process as such. If, on Gadamer’s model, our relation to tradition is not
about subjective aesthetic feeling, it is nonetheless about a kind of ex-
perience that is paradigmatically expressed in the encounter with the
work of art.57 In Gadamer’s model, it is tradition itself that has taken
over the sublime authority of romantic genius. And whereas Gadamer
accuses the romantics of taking over a Kantian theory of genius (but
without seeing how genius, for Kant, is closely related with taste), he
himself, at least when judged from a perspective like that of Herder
and Schleiermacher, falls prey to a similar fallacy, except that genius
is no longer linked up with the individual’s capacity for transcending
aesthetic rules and conventions but with tradition itself. The experience
of tradition is all about being played (TM, 104, 109; WM, 110, 115); it is
all about being “carried away [hingerissen]” (TM, 125; WM, 130), and
it is all about “ecstatic self-forgetfulness [ekstatischen Selbstverges-
senheit]” (TM, 128; WM, 133). A critical-reflective attitude would here
miss the point of the political humanism that Gadamer takes himself
to be representing.
Against this, Herder and Schleiermacher call for hermeneutic re-
flexivity. This is not because they bracket our situatedness in history.
Quite to the contrary, according to their way of thinking, it is precisely
because we are historically situated beings that we need to try to work
out some hermeneutic standards, some reflective procedures, in light
of which we can critically assess our engagement with the past. Nor do
Herder and Schleiermacher represent an appeal to a naïve methodology,
culminating in an immediate congeniality or divination. Both Herder
290 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

and Schleiermacher deny that a final, complete understanding is within

the reach of the individual interpreter.58 However, the very point that
Schleiermacher and Herder keep reiterating is this: The fact that we
are historical creatures, the fact that we cannot as individual scholars
reach the one and sole truth about the meaning of a given historical
text or event, does not mean that we should let go of the aspiration to
question the validity of our prejudices and grasp the text in its histori-
cal uniqueness. The prejudices of tradition are not simply true because
they express the truth about our world. That is, understanding our
own world is something Herder and Schleiermacher would surely
encourage. Moreover, they would underline that more often than not,
self-understanding takes place through the encounter with other. What
they would deny, though—and this is the main difference between their
positions and Gadamer’s—is that understanding, on a most fundament
level, is about authentic self-understanding or authentically taking over
our own tradition. Understanding, from their point of view, is all about
understanding another—be it another person, another text, or a culture
that is geographically, temporally, or culturally distant from our own.
In fact, given the emphasis that understanding the meaning of the text
is to understand it as an individual expression of a shared historical
culture, understanding would include all of the above.
At this point, the term political humanism acquires a new meaning.
For Gadamer, this concept is related to notions of authenticity and a
truthful appropriation of the eminent texts of our own tradition.59 If
Herder and Schleiermacher were ever to use such a concept, it would have
to be about understanding the other as other, of not reducing that which
is other to that which is mine. This does not mean that we necessarily
have to accept as true or right whatever another person is saying or doing.
What it implies, however, is that we must be prepared to search for the
rationality of the acts, claims, or expressions we face, asking how they
could plausibly make sense within a context that is no longer ours.
This, it seems to me, is a much healthier form of political humanism
than the one we find within post-Heideggerian hermeneutics. Empha-
sizing that understanding others, be they geographically or culturally
distant from ourselves, is not simply an event into which we are drawn.
It is a process that requires hard work, critical skills, and a mixture of
philological knowledge and sympathetic imagination. A rigid method to
guarantee the successful outcome of this process does not exist. Neither
Herder nor Schleiermacher would claim that. What they would claim,
however, is that without philological, historical, and critical-reflective
standards, our understanding of others potentially lapses into a projec-
tion of our own idea of the other—be it in the form, so aptly described in
the work of Edward Said, of a naïve endorsement of the “exotic,” or in the
 AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 291

shape of an equally naïve rejection of other cultures because they do not

seem to meet a particular Western, post-enlightened notion of rational-
ity and knowledge. This is the legacy of the Herder-Schleiermacher line
in interpretation theory. And this is why their line in hermeneutics, as
opposed to the Heidegger-Gadamer paradigm, is deserving of a renais-
sance within contemporary philosophy and social thought.

Temple University

NOTES

I would like to thank Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Michael Forster, Paul Guyer,
John Zammito, and the other participants of the “Herder and Anthropology”
workshop at the University of Oslo, May 2006, for their comments on an earlier
version of this paper.
1. In particular the 1764 Von der Ode and the 1768 essay on Thomas
Abbt. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Von der Ode, Werke in zehn Bänden, hrsg.
Martin Bollacher et al., Bd. I, Frühe Schriften, 1764–1772, ed. Ulrich Gaier
(Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), pp. 57–99; and “Über
Thomas Abbts Schriften. Der Torso von einem Denkmal, an seinem Grabe er-
richtet,” Werke im zehn Bänden, Bd. 2, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur,
1767–1781, ed. Gunter E. Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1993), pp. 565–608. English translation of the Abbt text (selections) in
Herder, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Michael Forster (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 167–177.
2. See Isaiah Berlin, “Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European
Thought,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pim-
lico, 2003), 70–90 and Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder,
ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 168–248. See
also Charles Taylor, “The Importance of Herder,” and “The Politics of Recogni-
tion,” in Philosophical Arguments (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1995),
79–100 and 225–257.
3. Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, trans. Robert M. Wallace (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); Platos Dialektische Ethik, Gesam-
melte Werke, Bd. 5, Griechische Philosophie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1999),
pp. 3–163.
4. Gadamer retrieves his visit to Paris in Philosophical Apprenticeships
in the following way: “I went abroad twice during the war. I did not fully rec-
ognize that thereby one was being used for purposes of foreign propaganda, for
which a political innocent was sometimes suitable.” See Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1985), p. 99; Philosophische Lehrjahre. Eine Ruckschau (Frankfurt am
Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), p. 118.
292 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

5. Gadamer, Volk und Geschichte im Denken Herders (Frankfurt am Main:

Klostermann, 1941). Further references to this work will be abbreviated VG.
6. Gadamer, “Herder und die geschichtliche Welt” (1967), Gesammelte
Werke, Bd. 4, Neuere Philosophie II (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), pp.
318–335. Further references to this work will be abbreviated HgW.
7. See Herder, “Shakespeare,” trans. Joyce P. Crick, in German Aesthet-
ics and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller,
Goethe, ed. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.
165; Herder, “Shakespear” (1773) in Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Schriften
zur Ästhetik und Literatur, p. 504.
8. The full quote is: “Dies unpolitische Erahnen und Vorbereiten des Kom-
menden war überhaupt das deutsche Schicksal seiner Epoche, und vielleicht
ist das Schicksal solcher politischen Verspätung die Voraussetzung dafür, daß
der deutsche Begriff des Volkes im Unterschied zu den demokratischen Parolen
des Westens in einer veränderten Gegenwart die Kraft zu neuer politischer und
sozialer Ordnung erweist” (VG, 23).
9. The essay was originally given as a lecture for French officers in a camp
for prisoners of war in Paris. Gadamer briefly refers to this talk in “Selbstdarstel-
lung Hans-Georg Gadamer,” WM II, 490 and in Philosophical Apprenticeships,
p. 99; Philosophische Lehrjahre, p. 118.
10. Ibid.
11. This is a too weak interpretation of Herder’s point. Although Herder, like
Hegel, emphasizes that progress always means leaving something behind, the
young Herder, in addition, questions the very idea of a progress in history as such.
See for example the 1767/68 Older Critical Forestlet, where Herder criticizes the
idea of retrieving history as a “doctrinal structure [Lehrgebäude].” Older Criti-
cal Forestlet (excerpts), Philosophical Writings, pp. 257–258; Älteres kritisches
Wäldchen, Die kritischen Wälder zur Ästhetik, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Litera-
tur, 13. Later on, Herder does indeed characterize Winckelmann’s work, with its
teleological retrieval of the Ancient cultures, as such a Lehrgebäude. Ibid., 23.
In later texts, however, Herder offers a more ambiguous account of progress
in history. In This Too a Philosophy, i.e., the text which Gadamer’s 1967 essay
accompanies, one finds, in spite of the subtitle “Beitrag zu vielen Beiträgen des
Jahrhunderts,” examples of an almost Hegelian notion of teleology. This Too a
Philosophy (1774) (Excerpts), in Philosophical Writings, 299; Auch eine Philosophie
der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, Werke, Bd. 4, Schriften zu Philosophie,
Literatur, Kunst und Altertum 1774–1787, ed. Jürgen Brummack und Martin
Bollacher (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994), pp. 41–42.
12. Along with the discussion of Schleiermacher throughout Truth and
Method, two central essays are “The Problem of Language in Schleiermacher’s
Hermeneutics,” trans. David E. Linge, in Schleiermacher as Contemporary:
Journal for Theology and the Church 7, ed. Robert Funk (New York: Herder &
Herder, 1970), pp. 68–84; “Das Problem der Sprache bei Schleiermacher” (1968),
Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 4, pp. 361–373; and “Schleiermacher als Platoniker”
(1969), Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 4, pp. 374–383.
 AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 293

13. For an alternative interpretation of Schleiermacher’s affiliation with the

Jena romantics, see Reinhold Rieger, Interpretation und Wissen. Zur philoso-
phischen Begründung der Hermeneutik bei Friedrich Schleiermacher und ihrem
geschichtlichen Hintergrund, Schleiermacher-Archiv, Bd. 6 (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1988).
14. Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall
(New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 190; Wahrheit und Methode, 2. vols., Gesam-
melte Werke, vol. 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1990), p. 193. Further references
to Truth and Method/Wahrheit und Methode will be abbreviated TM; WM. Un-
less explicitly noted, the WM pagination refers to vol. 1 of this work.
15. Peter Szondi, “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics Today,” in On Textual
Understanding and Other Essays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 95–113; first published as “L’herméneutique
de Schleiermacher,” trans. S. Buguet, Poetique 2 (1970), pp. 141–155.
16. Heinz Kimmerle, “Introduction,” in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Herme-
neutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James
Duke and Jack Forstman (Montana: Scholars Press, 1977), p. 27; “Einleitung,”
Hermeneutik. Nach den Handschriften, ed. Heinz Kimmerle (Heidelberg: Carl
Winter, 1974), p. 14.
Kimmerle’s approach has later been subject to criticism. See Wolfgang
Virmond, “Neue Textgrundlagen zu Schleiermachers früher Hermeneutik.
Prolegomena zur kritischen Edition,” Schleiermacher-Archiv, Bd. 1 (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1985), p. 578ff.
17. Manfred Frank, Das individuelle Allgemeine (Frankfurt am Main: Surh-
kamp Verlag, 1977). See also Frank’s edition of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics:
Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1993) and the largely overlapping Hermeneutics and Criticism, ed. and
trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
18. A couple of more recent readings of Schleiermacher’s work deviate
from this tendency: Gunter Scholtz, Ethik und Hermeneutik. Schleiermachers
Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Ver-
lag, 1995); and Christian Berner, La Philosophie de Schleiermacher (Paris: Les
Éditions du Cerf, 1995).
19. The fact that I want to read Herder and Schleiermacher together does not
mean that I would deny that there are also important differences between their
positions. For a discussion of these differences, see Michael Forster, “Friedrich
Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter
2002 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2002/
entries/schleiermacher/.
Furthermore, it is the point of this essay to argue that the strength of
Herder’s hermeneutics is related to the points at which he goes beyond and
challenges the framework of Gadamer’s hermeneutics rather than, as Hans
Dietrich Irmscher suggests, Herder representing an early version of Gadame-
rian philosophy. See Hans Dietrich Irmscher, “Grundzüge der Hermeneutik
Herders,” Schaumburg Studien, Heft 33, Bückeburg, 1973, pp. 17–57.
294 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

20. At least not a theory of interpreting the texts of the past. For a read-
ing of the broader hermeneutic implications of the third Critique, see Rudolf
Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import
of the “Critique of Judgment” (Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1990).
21. See John Pemble, Shakespeare Goes to Paris (London: Hambledon and
London, 2004); Friedrich Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin:
Georg Bondi, 1920), pp. 185–358; and Hertha Isaacsen, Der junge Herder und
Shakespeare (Berlin: Verlag von Emil Ebering, 1930), pp. 13–49.
22. Herder, “Shakespeare. Erster Entwurf (1771),” Schriften zur Ästhetik
und Literatur, pp. 522–523.
23. “Shakespear. Zweiter Entwurf (1771),” Schriften zur Ästhetik und Lit-
eratur, p. 548.
24. Herder, “Shakespeare,” p. 172; Herder, “Shakespear (1773),” Schriften
zur Ästhetik und Literatur, p. 515.
25. Herder, “On Thomas Abbt’s Writings,” p. 173; Herder, “Über Thomas
Abbts Schriften,” p. 580.
26 See also John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s “Critique of Judgment”
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 28ff.
27. Herder, Die Kritischen Wälder zur Ästhetik, Schriften zur Ästhetik und
Literatur, pp. 9–443; a selection of this work (the first and the forth grove) is
translated in Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Gregory
Moore (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 51–291.
28. Or, as Hans Dietrich Irmischer puts it, as “historisch bedingt und zu-
gleich ursprünglich.” “Grundzüge der Hermeneutik Herders,” p. 25.
29. Herder, “On Thomas Abbt’s Writing,” p. 174; “Über Thomas Abbts
Schriften,” p. 605.
30. Ibid.
31. Even though there can, as Schleiermacher claims, be no “concept of style
[Von keinem Stil läßt sich ein B[egriff] geben],” he maintains that “[t]here is
nothing in style but the composition and treatment of language [Komp[osition]
und Sprachbehandlung].” Hermeneutics and Criticism, pp. 96–97; Hermeneutik
und Kritik, pp. 172, 174.
32. Hermeneutics and Criticism, p. 8; Hermeneutik und Kritik, p. 78;
Hermeneutics, p. 68; Hermeneutik, p. 56; and Hermeneutics and Criticism, p.
91; Hermeneutik und Kritik, p. 168.
33. Hermeneutics, pp. 68–69; Hermeneutik, p. 56.
34 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Writing and the Living Voice,” in Hans-Georg
Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme
Nicolson, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (New York: State Uni-
versity of New York Press, 1992), p. 63.
35. In Gadamer’s words, “For the philologists, the text, and especially a poetic
text, is there . . . like a fixed given.” Gadamer, “Reflections on my Philosophi-
 AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL HUMANISM 295

cal Journey,” in The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lewis E. Hahn,

Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 24 (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), p. 54.
36. The expression, which is Gadamer’s own, is taken from his discussion
of Dilthey in “Wilhelm Dilthey nach 150 Jahren (Zwischen Romantik und Posi-
tivismus),” in Dilthey und die Philosophie der Gegenwart, ed. Ernst Wolfgang
Orth (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1985), pp. 157–182.
37. Gadamer, “Reflections on my Philosophical Journey,” p. 27.
38. Another exception is Robert Sullivan, who writes in his introduction to
Philosophical Apprenticeships: “Philosophical hermeneutics was first of all a
different way of doing politics.” “Translator’s Introduction,” Gadamer, Philo-
sophical Apprenticeships, p. xvi.
39. Jürgen Habermas, “Hans-Georg Gadamer: Urbanizing the Heidegge-
rian Province,” trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1983), pp. 196–197; “Hans-Georg Gadamer. Urbanisierung der Heideggerschen
Provinz,” Philosophisch-politische Profile (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Ver-
lag, 1981), pp. 400–401.
40. Habermas, “Urbanizing the Heideggerian Province,” p. 194; “Urbanisier-
ung der Heideggerschen Provinz,” p. 397.
A similar point of view can be found in Robert Sullivan’s introduction to the
English translation of Philosophical Apprenticeships, where it is claimed that
“Heidegger’s contribution to Gadamer’s thinking was mainly negative: It helped
push the young Gadamer away from the dominant Western philosophical tradi-
tion” (“Translator’s Introduction,” Philosophical Apprenticeships, p. x), and in
Jean Grondin’s proposal that “[t]o put it bluntly, Gadamer is a humanist and
Heidegger isn’t.” Jean Grondin, “Gadamer on Humanism,” The Philosophy of
Hans-Georg Gadamer, p. 157.
41. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Ed-
ward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962); Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer, 1993), p. 38. Further references to this work will be abbreviated BT;
SZ, with page numbers referring to the German standard pagination.
42. “Selbstdarstellung Hans-Georg Gadamer,” WM II, p. 485.
43. Philosophical Apprenticeships, 49; Philosophische Lehrjahre, p. 216.
44. Martin Heidegger, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994); Wahrheit und Methode, 2
vols., Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1990).
45. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initia-
tion into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 3; Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu
Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Gesamtausgabe,
Bd. 61, hrsg. Walter Bröcker and Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns (Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann, 1985), p. 1.
46. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, p. 4; Phänomenologische
Interpretationen zu Aristoteles, p. 2.
296 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, p. xxxii; Platos dialektische Ethik, p. 161.
50. Ibid.
51. “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics” (1964), Philosophical Hermeneutics,
ed. and trans. David E. Linge (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986),
p. 104; “Ästhetik und Hermeneutik,” Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 8, Ästhetik und
Poetik I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), p. 8.
52. Gadamer, “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem” (1966),
Philosophical Hermeneutics, vol. 5; “Die Universalität des hermeneutischen
Problems,” WM II, p. 221.
53. Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (London: Black-
well, 1983).
54. Gadamer, “Reflections on my Philosophical Journey,” p. 24.
55. Drawing on the Dutch anthropologist Johan Huizinga and his Homo
Ludens (1938), Gadamer claims that we enter the play with an almost “sacred
seriousness [heiliger Ernst]” (TM, 102; WM, 107), that is, with a willingness to be
directed by the rules or rhythms of the game itself. Like the religious ceremony,
play proper presupposes that “the player loses himself in play [der Spielende
in Spielen aufgeht]” (TM, 102; WM, 108). The play takes place without the full
control of the players; the “to and fro movement” of the game “follows of itself”
(TM, 104; WM, 110). The play “draws him into its domination and fills him with
its spirit,” as Gadamer puts it (TM, 109; WM, 115). Hence, “the actual subject
of the play is . . . the play itself” (TM, 104; WM, 110, emphasis added).
See also Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in
Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955), 55ff.
56. As late as 1966, Gadamer claims that “we cannot deny that the idea of art
being bound to a people [(die) Rede von der volksverbundenen Kunst] involves a
real insight [auf etwas Wirkliches hinweist].” “The Universality of the Hermeneu-
tical Problem,” p. 5; “Die Universalität des hermeneutischen Problems,” p. 221.
It is interesting to note in this context that Herder, whose name is frequently
associated with this kind of thinking (as he is in Gadamer’s 1941 essay), criticizes
what he takes to be a narrow notion of national art. See, for example, “Denkmal
Johann Winkelmanns,” Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literatur, p. 669.
57. Particularly relevant in this context is Gadamer’s account of pre-modern
art, which, on his understanding, relies on “a community of meaning which
linked the work of art with the existing world” (TM, 134; WM, 138) so that its
obligatoriness (Verbindlichkeit) is self-evident.
58. See Hermeneutics and Criticism, p. 96; Hermeneutik und Kritik, p. 172;
and “Denkmal Johann Winckelmanns,” p. 655.
59. In the “Afterword” in Truth and Method, Gadamer concedes that “[w]hat
has occupied me for years . . . are the special problems of eminent texts” (TM,
576; WM II, 475).