Hans-Georg Gadamer

by

Steve Thomason

A Term Paper

Presented to Dr. Craig Van Gelder

Luther Seminary

As a Requirement in

Course LD8910 The Hermeneutics of Leading in Mission

St. Paul, Minnesota

2011
 Introduction

Hans-Georg Gadamer was born in 1900 and died in 2002. One could say that he

was truly a man of the 20th century. This is fitting since his life and work demonstrated

the transitional nature of the 20th century as the academic disciplines made a turn from

Enlightenment thinking to a postmodern sensibility. Gadamer’s presentation of

philosophical hermeneutics was one of the pivotal contributions that brought about that

turn.

His Life and Work

A Biographical Sketch

Gadamer spent his early years in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) which was one

of the biggest cities in Germany.1 World War I raged around him during his adolescence,

but he lived far from the fronts and was physically removed from the worst of it.2 He did

not know the physical trauma of war firsthand, but, at age 18, during the final year of the

Great War, he encountered the shattered world of German idealism. He graduated from

the Holy Spirit Gymnasium in Breslau and enrolled in the Breslau University.3 His father,

Johannes, was a prominent chemistry professor and in 1919 accepted an appointment at

1
Robert J. Dostal, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, Cambridge Companions to
Philosophy (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14.
2
Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, On Gadamer, Wadsworth Philosophers Series (Australia; Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth Thompson Learning, 2000), 2.
3
Hans-Georg Gadamer and Lewis Edwin Hahn, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, The
Library of Living Philosophers (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1997), 3.

1
 2

Marburg University. Hans-Georg followed his father to Marburg and settled in on a

philosophy major, much to his father’s chagrin.4

Gadamer was a young student surrounded by many new voices that sought to

make sense of a world shattered by war. He was influenced by teachers like Paul Natorp,

Max Scheler, and Nicolai Hartmann. The intellectuals at Marburg “lived in the

expectation of a new philosophical orientation, which was particularly tied to the dark,

magical word, ‘phenomenology.’5 The intellectual world was buzzing with new voices

like Barth in theology, Freud in psychology, Marx and Weber in sociology, and Nietzche

in philosophy. It was only when Martin Heidegger stepped into the picture that Gadamer

was able to start making sense of things. Heidegger realized that it was necessary to

abandon the neo-Kantians with their concept of self-consciousness, and the Hegelians

with their need to create a unifying system, and see things in light of the historicity of

human knowledge. Gadamer would become a student of Heidegger for many years.

It is interesting to note that Gadamer began his academic career as a philologist.

His doctoral dissertation was titled Das Wesen der Lust nach den platonischen Dialogen

(The Essence of Pleasure in the dialogues of Plato). He received his doctorate in 1922—

but felt he was far too young to have earned it—and spent much of his career studying

Greek thought and culture. Gadamer worked as a dozent (similar to an assistant professor

in the United States) with Heidegger at Marburg from 1924-1938. The rise of the Third

Reich in 1933 disrupted Gadamer’s career development. It became difficult for him to

work at Marburg with the rising pressure to capitulate to Hitler. He did not want to be a

4
Dostal, 15.
5
Gadamer and Hahn, 7.
 3

martyr and he did not want to leave Germany. Gadamer learned to play the political game

and walk a thin line that kept him alive. He was able get a faculty position at Leipzig.

The years at Leipzig saw the fall of the Third Reich, an American Occupation,

and the subsequent Russian occupation. He was able to avoid ties to the Nazis, and

because of this, became the Rector of Leipzig under the American occupation. The

Russians were distrustful of most people and Gadamer had to learn how to be play their

political game. He helped many people leave Leipzig and find positions that would

ensure their freedom. Eventually he was able to convince the Russians to let him go to

Frankfurt to pursue his love of his country’s literature.6

He spent two years in Frankfurt and then assumed Karl Jasper’s chair at

Heidelberg in 1949. Gadamer felt that this post at Heidelberg marked the beginning of his

truly academic life. He was able to untangle himself from the mess of politics both

outside and inside the university and focus on his own plans of work. It is not surprising

that Gadamer’s philosophy included the ability to accommodate multiple perspectives in

humble dialogue. His experience prepared him and framed his perspective for this

important philosophical move. This process reached its first conclusion with the

publication of Truth and Method in 1960.7

It is important to pause this chronological account at this point and make an

observation. Gadamer was sixty years old when he published Truth and Method. It could

be stated that this monograph is the single most important contribution that he made to

the field of hermeneutics—perhaps even the catalyst for the hermeneutical turn itself.

6
Johnson, 7.
7
Gadamer and Hahn, 16.
 4

And yet, it came just eight years before his retirement from the academy. The fact of this

delayed contribution is indicative of Gadamer’s philosophy and style. He states,

regarding this,

“In fact, the rise of my ‘hermeneutical philosophy’ must be traced back to nothing
more pretentious than my effort to be theoretically accountable for the style of my
studies and my teaching. Practice came first. For as long ago as I can remember, I
have been concerned not to say too much and not to lose myself in theoretical
constructions which were not fully made good by experience.”8

Despite his monumental contribution to the field of hermeneutics, Gadamer was

first and foremost a teacher. He never traveled much while he was teaching, and turned

down numerous invitations to travel abroad as a guest lecturer, because he felt too

responsible to his students to be gone from class.9

Gadamer retired from full-time teaching in 1968 and began a whole new life. His

retirement afforded him the opportunity to accept invitations to lecture in the United

States. The opportunity to grow and interact in the English language—heretofore only

experienced in written form—helped Gadamer grow in the practical experience of his

own theory that truth and meaning are found in the process of the interaction of language.

Gadamer was as active as a scholar during the thirty years of his retirement as he was

when teaching. Now he was free to travel, write, and engage in dialogue with the ever-

growing number of post modern thinkers that emerged in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

8
Ibid., 16.
9
Ibid., 18.
 5

A Conceptual Lineage

Patricia Johnson traces a brief and helpful conceptual lineage that links

Gadamer’s philosophy to that of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Martin

Heidegger.10 A brief synopsis of each of these thinkers will help to build a conceptual

frame for understanding Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.

Schleiermacher (1768-1834) believed that there was a general hermeneutic that

was based in the universal ability of humans to learn and understand language. He

distinguishes two types of understanding that form the basis of his hermeneutics. The first

is the grammatical. Human beings learn language and come to understand the meaning of

words. The second is psychological. Schleiermacher used a divinatory method in which

one individual is able to get inside the perspective of another individual based upon the

common elements of humanity shared by all individuals. Gadamer gleaned the idea of the

universality of hermeneutics from Schleiermacher’s legacy.

Dilthey (1833-1911) was also deeply influenced by Schleiermacher. However,

Dilthey rejects Schleiermacher’s reliance on intuition and feeling as the mean to access

the inner aspects of life and proposes the historicality of human life instead. Human

beings live in temporal space and create expressions of their lived experiences. The best

way to understand the inner human life is to engage in the object of human creation, such

as a work of art. Gadamer built heavily upon Dilthey’s notion of historicality.

Heidegger (1889-1976) was Gadamer’s teacher and mentor for many years.

Heidegger believed that understanding was ontological. It is the way that humans exist in

the world. It is not the understanding of another’s mind, like Schleiermacher supposed,

10
Johnson, 9-15.
 6

rather it is the understanding of self and grasping the possibilities of becoming what we

are. Gadamer took Heidegger’s recognition of self-understanding to be the basic starting

place for the entire process of understanding.

Summary of Gadamer’s Contribution to the Field of Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics as an identified discipline is relatively new in the philosophic

discussion. However, it has truly been at the core of the philosophy since Plato and

Aristotle. The archetypal debate has revolved around the locus of meaning. Is meaning

externally located in a universal reality, as Plato believed? Or, is meaning formulated

internally within the experience of the observer, as Aristotle postulated?

The debate has taken on many flavors throughout its various historical iterations,

but has essentially fluctuated between these two poles. Gadamer’s philosophical

hermeneutics finds its place in the tension between them. He—being a student of Plato

and sympathetic to the romantic deconstruction of German Idealism—held to the

intuition that there is an external reality. However, he recognized the limitation of human

finitude and built his hermeneutic on the idea that all understanding begins within the

dialogue between the human and the world.

It will be helpful to decipher Gadamer’s philosophy by defining two key terms:

horizons and linguisticality.

Gadamer introduces the concept of horizons:

“Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of ‘situation’ by
saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence an
essential part of the concept of situation is the concept of ‘horizon.’ The horizon
is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular
vantage point…. A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far
enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. Contrariwise, to have an
horizon means not to be limited to what is nearest, but to be able to see beyond it.
A person who has an horizon knows the relative significance of everything within
 7

this horizon, as near or far, great or small. Similarly, the working out of the
hermeneutical situation means the achievement of the right horizon of enquiry for
the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition.”11

The fact that each human being is limited to a unique horizon leads to the second

term. Linguisticality is the idea that humanity is limited within the horizon of language.

Language sits at the core of Gadamer’s hermeneutic. Human beings cannot understand

the world without the use of language, and yet, language itself is limited. “All human

speaking is finite in such a way that there is within it an infinity of meaning to be

elaborated and interpreted. That is why the hermeneutical phenomenon also can be

illuminated only in the light of this fundamental finitude of being, which is wholly

linguistic in character.”12

Here we see the conceptual lineage of Gadamer’s thought listed above come

together. The human attempt to understand both the outer world of the object and the

inner world of the subject meets in the expandable limitation of language.

…it is the context of problems surrounding the indissoluble connection between

thinking and speaking which compels hermeneutics to become philosophy. One
must always think in a language, even if one does not always have to think in the
same language. Hermeneutics cannot evade claiming universality because
language as linguisticality—Sprachlichkeit—constitutes a human capacity
inseparably linked with rationality as such.13

What is hermeneutics, then? If the human is bound by limited horizons within the

confines of language, how does one come to understanding? Gadamer explains,

The hermeneutical task becomes automatically a questioning of things and is

always in part determined by this. This places hermeneutical work on a firm basis.

11
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975), 269.
12
Ibid., 416.
13
Gadamer and Hahn, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 25.
 8

If a person is trying to understand something, he will not be able to rely from the
start on his own chance previous ideas, missing as logically and stubbornly as
possible the actual meaning of the text until the latter becomes so persistently
audible that it breaks through the imagined understanding of it. Rather, a person
trying to understand a text is prepared for it to tell him something. That is why a
hermeneutically trained mind must be, from the start, sensitive to the text’s
quality of newness. But this kind of sensitivity involves neither ‘neutrality’ in the
matter of the object nor the extinction of one’s self, but the conscious assimilation
of one’s own fore-meanings and prejudices. The important thing is to be aware of
one’s own bias, so that the text may present itself in all its newness and thus be
able to assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings.”14

One of the most common examples that Gadamer uses to demonstrate his

hermeneutic is in the field of art. When a piece of art is created, be it visual or linguistic

art, the piece has a reality—a horizon—of its own. The viewer of the art has her own

horizon. She brings to the art her language, experience, and expectation of the piece. As

the viewer addresses the art, the two horizons come together. The art informs the viewer,

but the viewer also informs the art. Here we find the most well-known expression of

Gadamer’s philosophy. When the art and the viewer meet there is a fusion of horizons. It

is impossible for the viewer to interpret the meaning of the art that is latent in the art

itself. Gadamer says this is true because “in my analysis of the universal linguisticality of

man's relation to the world, the limitations of the fields of experience from which the

investigation took its start should unwittingly predetermine the result.”15

The fusion of horizons happens in every aspect of life as we attempt to interpret

everything around us. It is true for art, science, and even biblical literature. Gadamer

refers to the interpretation of historical texts (including scripture),

14
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 238.
15
Hans Georg Gadamer, "On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection," Continuum
(Chicago, IL) 8, no. 1-2 (1970): 78.
 9

It is true that the historical ‘worlds’ that succeed one another in the course of
history are different from one another and from the world of today; but it is
always, in whatever tradition we consider it, a human, ie a linguistically
constituted world that presents itself to us. Every such world, as linguistically
constituted, is always open, of itself, to every possible insight and hence for every
expansion of its own world-picture, and accordingly available to others.16

A Critique

There are two contributions that Gadamer makes to the missional church. The

first is that of humble dialogue. The second has to do with the Holy Spirit.

Gadamer modeled—both in his personal manner and in his philosophical

hermeneutics—a core value that reflects the heart of Jesus’ teaching. He was humble. His

humility caused him to listen to the other. Gadamer was known for his quiet spirit and his

propensity to actively engage in those with whom he was having a dialogue—even a full-

on debate—to the point that he would stop and question himself.17 Gadamer’s

hermeneutics taught that “there are no rules for interpretation other than the seriousness

of an interpretation that continuously questions itself to the point of conviction that one

has reached something essential. However, one should never think that one has reached

any kind of objective interpretation in which the text, the subject, and the historical

period resolve themselves completely.”18

One of the common critiques of the missional and/or postmodern church is that it

gives way to moral relativism and has no core truth on which to stand. Gadamer offers

the missional leader a place between the poles of objective and subjective truth where one

16
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 405.
17
Hans-Georg Gadamer and Riccardo Dottori, A Century of Philosophy (New York: Continuum,
2003), 3.
18
Ibid., 12.
 10

can hold firmly to conviction while offering authentically open, humble dialogue with the

other. Gadamer says,

“I believe I have shown that, in understanding, a ‘subject’ does not stand over
against an ‘object’ or a world of objects. Rather something plays back and forth
between the human being and that which he or she encounters in the world….
Through an encounter with the other we are lifted above the narrow confines of
our own knowledge. A new horizon is disclosed that opens onto what was
unknown to us.”19

Our world is increasingly multi-perspectival and the leaders of the missional

church must be able to enter into a Gadamerian style of humble dialogue with the other in

order to truly be lifted to a broader horizon and discern what God is doing in the world.

Missional leadership is the art of praxis. Gadamer says,

“What I taught above all was hermeneutic praxis. Hermeneutics is above all a
practice, the art of understanding and of making something understood to
someone else.… In it what one has to exercise above all is the ear, the sensitivity
for perceiving prior determinations, anticipations, and imprints that reside in
concepts.”20

Finally, Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons contributes to the

conversation around missional pneumatology. The linguisticality of humanity is

connected to the pluriform, polycentric nature of the Holy Spirit that Welker proposes.21

It is impossible for the finite human mind to grasp the wholly other, infinite God. Yet, the

infinite God is distributed in creation through the spirit and realized through the dialogue

19
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Carsten Dutt, and Richard E. Palmer, Gadamer in Conversation:
Reflections and Commentary, Yale Studies in Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 49.
20
Gadamer and Hahn, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 17.
21
Michael Welker, God the Spirit, 1st English-language ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994),
228-239.
 11

that the human has with art, poetry, creation, and the other.22 The missio dei that is

manifest in the polycentric spirit defies singular definition in dogma, but continually

draws all of humanity into humble dialogue to encounter the divine. As Gadamer says,

“only in the light of the divine can the human be understood.”23

22
Walter Lammi, Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Continuum Studies in Continental
Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2008), 16-17.
23
Ibid., 116.
 12

Bibliography

Dostal, Robert J. The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer Cambridge Companions to

Philosophy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. London: Sheed & Ward, 1975.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, and Riccardo Dottori. A Century of Philosophy. New York:

Continuum, 2003.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Carsten Dutt, and Richard E. Palmer. Gadamer in Conversation:

Reflections and Commentary Yale Studies in Hermeneutics. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, and Lewis Edwin Hahn. The Philosophy of Hans-Georg

Gadamer The Library of Living Philosophers. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1997.

Gadamer, Hans Georg. "On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection."
Continuum (Chicago, IL) 8, no. 1-2 (1970): 77-95.

Johnson, Patricia Altenbernd. On Gadamer Wadsworth Philosophers Series. Australia;

Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Thompson Learning, 2000.

Lammi, Walter. Gadamer and the Question of the Divine Continuum Studies in
Continental Philosophy. New York: Continuum, 2008.

Welker, Michael. God the Spirit. 1st English-language ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1994.