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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUC ATION
KE Y THINKERS IN EDUCATION
Jon Nixon
Hans-Georg
Gadamer
The Hermeneutical
Imagination
123
SpringerBriefs in Education
Key Thinkers in Education
Series editor
Paul Gibbs, London, UK
This briefs series publishes compact (50 to 125 pages) refereed monographs under
the editorial supervision of the Advisory Editor, Professor Paul Gibbs, Middlesex
University, Nicosia, Cyprus. Each volume in the series provides a concise introduction
to the life and work of a key thinker in education and allows readers to get acquainted
with their major contributions to educational theory and/or practice in a fast and
easy way.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10197

Jon Nixon
Hans-Georg Gadamer
The Hermeneutical Imagination
123
Jon Nixon
The Education University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong
China
ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Education
ISSN 2211-937X ISSN 2211-9388 (electronic)
SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education
ISBN 978-3-319-52116-9 ISBN 978-3-319-52117-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52117-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963331
© The Author(s) 2017

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And what is hermeneutical imagination? It is a sense
of the questionableness of something and what this
requires of us (Gadamer 2001, 42).
Preface
The purpose of this book is to introduce readers to the work of Hans-Georg

Gadamer and to offer some reflections on how his thinking—and his particular
idiom—might impact upon education at every level: early years, primary, sec-
ondary, further and higher and continuing education. To expect from Gadamer’s
vast body of work, a set of educational guidelines or protocols would be to work
entirely against the grain of his thinking. To read Gadamer is to enter an ongoing
conversation in which we clarify the focus of that conversation through the gath-
ering of insights and formulation of questions. Gadamer can help us understand
what we are trying to do as educators and what our students might be trying to do as
learners. But there are no easy answers. There are, Gadamer quietly insists, only
meaningful questions to be gradually formulated and posed: questions that point a
way forward.
Chapter 1 provides a brief outline of Gadamer’s life and work. ‘[T]he work of a
man’, as Erich Auerbach put it in an essay first published in 1958, ‘is a fruit of his
existence, an existence which was once here and now’ (Auerbach 2014, 17). This
opening chapter explains how the body of work that constitutes Gadamer’s legacy
came to fruition. Chapters 2–4 focus on the dominant themes in Gadamer’s major
work: what we bring to the search for understanding by way of our prior under-
standings (Chap. 2); how we fuse our disparate understandings with a view to
achieving mutual understanding (Chap. 3); and why understanding cannot be bound
within the confines of a pre-specified method (Chap. 4). Across this primary the-
matic a number of subthemes are pursued across the three central chapters:
Gadamer’s emphasis on ‘tradition’, his preoccupation with ‘the question’ and his
insistence on the ethical and moral bases of human understanding. The final chapter
(Chap. 5) draws together the themes and subthemes in order to make explicit the
educational implications of Gadamer’s worldview. Thus, although each chapter can
be read as a stand-alone text, the overall argument achieves coherence across
chapters through the recapitulation and progressive gathering of core concepts and
ideas.
vii
viii Preface
Nowhere does Gadamer spell out comprehensively and systematically what he

sees as the educational implications of his philosophical position. His available
writings on education are restricted largely to occasional lectures and speeches
addressed in the main to academic audiences. What follows therefore are inferences
drawn from his major work, his later work on philosophical hermeneutics and
applied hermeneutics and his various conversations with fellow philosophers. The
central insight that informs the whole of Gadamer’s diverse corpus is that under-
standing, interpretation and application comprise one unified process. This intro-
ductory monograph is an attempt to elucidate some of the implications of this
insight for education generally, for the role of the teacher in particular, and for how
we conceive of teaching and learning across institutional settings. (Throughout I use
the term ‘student’ or ‘learner’ to refer to children, young people and adults
attending schools, colleges or universities.)
I would like readers to think of this book as a gateway into Gadamer’s own
deeply reflective mode of thought: an invitation to read, re-read and enter into
dialogue with his work. Given the range and sheer bulk of Gadamer’s publications,
knowing where to start can in itself present difficulties. My advice to anyone
coming new to Gadamer would be to start with his later and more accessible work.
Some of his later interviews in particular summarise his views and give a flavour
of the conversational nature of his own thinking (see Gadamer 2001, 2006). His
essays and lectures in the area of applied hermeneutics will be of particular interest
to those involved in the education and health professions (see Gadamer 1992,
1996). For those already familiar with Gadamer’s work, I hope this brief intro-
ductory text to his thinking will prompt them to return to his work anew.
The essays collected in Gadamer’s 1976 Philosophical Hermeneutics reflect
upon the key themes of his 1960 Truth and Method and offer a way into that major
text, the structure of which is at once beautifully simple but highly complex in its
detailed working through of the central argument regarding the nature of ‘truth’ and
‘the problem of method’ (see Gadamer 1977, 2004). In setting about reading his
magnum opus, the reader needs to have grasped the overall structure of the work:
three major parts, with the first two parts comprising two chapters each and the final
part comprising a single chapter. It is in the detail and complexity of the individual
chapters that readers may lose sight of the larger picture. So it is important to keep
reminding oneself of how each chapter and each subsection of each chapter relates
to the symphonic structure of the whole.
Indeed, the insistence within the hermeneutic tradition on the importance of
relating the part to the whole in any attempt at interpretation is a sure guide to
reading Gadamer’s work. Even more important is his own insistence on the need for
the interpreter to insert her or his own self into whatever it is that he or she is
interpreting. Reading Gadamer, we need constantly to ask: how does this work
relate to me with my own history and expectations? How does it connect to my own
personal and/or professional circumstances? What questions is it asking of me? We
must read Gadamer as if he were speaking to each and every one of us in our unique
situations—and must not be afraid to answer back from those situations and with
the opinions and beliefs we bring to the dialogue.
Preface ix
I have not included a full bibliography of Gadamer’s publications, which would

be beyond the scope of this brief introduction. However, a comprehensive bibli-
ography of Gadamer’s works in German and in English translation and of sec-
ondary works in English can be found in Robert J. Dostal’s The Cambridge
Companion to Gadamer (see Dostal 2002, 283–312).
Jon Nixon
References
Auerbach, E. (2014). Time, history, and literature: Selected essays of Erich Auerbach
(J.O. Newman, Trans.). Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Dostal, R. J. (Ed.). (2002). The Cambridge companion to Gadamer. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1977). Philosophical hermeneutics (Ed., D. E. Ling, Trans.). Berkeley, Los
Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1992). Hans-Georg Gadamer on education, poetry, and history: Applied
hermeneutics (D. Misgeld & G. Nicholson, L. Schmidt & M. Reuss, Trans.). Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1996). The enigma of health: The art of healing in a scientific age (J. Gaiger &
N. Walker, Trans.). Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (2001). Gadamer in conversation: Reflections and commentary (Ed.,
R. E. Palmer, Trans.). New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). 2nd Revised
Edn. London and New York: Continuum. (First published in Germany in 1960)
Gadamer, H.-G. (2006). A century of philosophy: A conversation with Riccardo Dottori
(R. Coltman & S. Koepke, Trans.). New York and London: Continuum.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paul Gibbs for suggesting that I contribute this monograph to
his series and for his encouragement and support throughout. Paul has a great gift
for understanding other minds—for knowing where people are coming from and
anticipating where they might want to go. That makes him a hugely supportive and
intuitive series editor. Indeed, he exemplifies many of the qualities that Gadamer
held dear. Thanks also to Bernadette Ohmer, Senior Publishing Editor, Springer, for
responding promptly and positively to queries and to smoothing the way through to
publication.
Some of the ideas discussed in the following chapters were first presented as
addresses or seminar papers at the American University in Cairo, the Education
University of Hong Kong, the University of Copenhagen and York St. John
University. I am grateful to those who invited me, to the institutions and organi-
sations that funded my visits and to all those who provided valuable feedback. My
thinking on education has, over the years, been informed and shaped by my
experience of working with some exceptional educationists: in particular, Stewart
Ranson and the late Jean Rudduck and Lawrence Stenhouse. I am especially
grateful to Stewart for his continuing and unfailing support and encouragement.
Finally, thanks to Pauline Nixon for providing a ‘free space’ within which to
complete this project.
xi
Contents
1 An Examined Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Childhood and Youth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 The Long Apprenticeship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.4 Internal Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.5 Coming Through . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.6 Late Flourishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2 The Acknowledged Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.2 From Vico to Gadamer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.3 ‘The Power of Prejudice’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.4 The Self-as-Questioner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.5 Becoming Ourselves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3 Mutual Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2 In the Footsteps of Hermes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3.3 ‘The Fusion of Horizons’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3.4 Question-and-Answer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
3.5 Becoming Attentive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
3.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
4 Beyond Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
4.2 Aristotelian Echoes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
xiii
xiv Contents
4.3 ‘The Problem of Method’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

4.4 The Primacy of the Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.5 Becoming Worldly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
4.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
5 Educational Imaginaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
5.2 Reclaiming the Humanistic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
5.3 Reasoning Together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
5.4 Individual Flourishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
5.5 Spaces of Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
5.6 Coda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
About the Author
Jon Nixon is an independent scholar and writer based in the UK. His most recently
published books include Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship
(Bloomsbury, 2015), Interpretive Pedagogies for Higher Education: Arendt,
Berger, Said, Nussbaum and their Legacies (Continuum, 2012), Higher Education
and the Public Good (Continuum, 2011) and Towards the Virtuous University
(Routledge, 2008). He is affiliated to the Education University of Hong Kong as an
honorary professor. A full list of his publications is available via his website: www.
jonnixon.com.
xv
Chapter 1
An Examined Life
In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long

before we understand ourselves through the process of self-
examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in
the family, society and state in which we live. (Gadamer 2004,
278)
1.1 Introduction
Hans-Georg Gadamer was born on 11 February, 1900, in Marburg, in Southern

Germany and died in Heidelberg on 13 March, 2002, at the age of 102. He lived the
full length of the long 20th century that had as its axis twin versions of totalitari-
anism—Nazism and Stalinism—and bore witness to all the major events that turned
on that axis: WWI; the rise of the Third Reich; WWII; the Cold War; the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany; the Yugoslav Wars; and,
as the long 20th century toppled into the 21st century, the catastrophe of 7/11 and
its geopolitical fallout. Notwithstanding the global ramifications of these historic
events, this was undoubtedly ‘the German century’ (Stürmer 1999).
Unlike some of his compatriots and near contemporaries—Hannah Arendt,
Jürgen Habermas, Karl Jaspers, etc.—he was not a public intellectual in the sense of
commenting upon the great events of his time. In that sense his own life was
remarkably unheroic: he never misused language to endorse the barbarity of the
Nazi regime, but nor did he use it in any direct exposure—or exposition—of that
barbarity. He kept his head well below the parapet and has been subjected to some
criticism for his seeming acquiescence to the rise of Nazism and its infiltration and
co-option of German universities during the 1930s.
The reasons for that acquiescence—if, indeed, it was such—are far from clear.
What is clear is that—at a time when philosophy was under attack from totalising
ideologies and when humanistic scholarship was being colonised and marginalised
by modes of technical rationality—Gadamer was increasingly concerned with the
© The Author(s) 2017 1

J. Nixon, Hans-Georg Gadamer, SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers
in Education, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52117-6_1
2 1 An Examined Life
continuity and very survival of what he saw as a great philosophical tradition

grounded in humanistic scholarship. He made it his life’s work to articulate and
elaborate that tradition and in doing so became not so much a public intellectual as
a public educator for whom the practice of philosophy increasingly took the form of
an ongoing dialogue with fellow philosophers and students and, in his later work in
particular, with practitioners working in the education and health professions.
Philosophy, for Gadamer, was not a subject of objective inquiry, but a peda-
gogical process in which each participant is both teacher and learner: an ongoing,
cross-generational process that Gadamer defined as ‘tradition’. Tradition inflects
both to the past and the future. Gadamer insisted in his magnum opus and in his
later writing on the futurity and unpredictability of tradition: its constant toppling
into the future, its constitutive argumentation, its capacity to hold difference.
Philosophy—for Gadamer—is what we do in fulfilment of our human agency not
what we accept as passive recipients.
But how he got there—from his deeply conservative and authoritarian origins—
is where our story begins.
1.2 Childhood and Youth
Gadamer was familiar with death from an early age. In 1902—just a month after the
family had moved from Marburg to Breslau (now Wrokław in Poland)—his sister
died. She was less than five months old. Shortly afterwards his mother suffered a
miscarriage, and two years later in May 1904, just after Gadamer’s fourth birthday,
she died of tuberculosis. Gadamer retained few memories of his mother, but in an
interview conducted in 1993 recalled that ‘[s]he had religious and meditative but
also artistic elements in her character’—in marked contrast to his father, Johannes
Gadamer, who was a natural scientist and ‘tried again and again for a very long time
to persuade me to take up the natural sciences’ (Quoted in Grondin 2003, 23–24).
The influence he exercised on his son was intensified by his extreme authoritari-
anism. He was, claimed Gadamer in 1997, ‘a man embodying the most draconian
model of authoritarian child-rearing in its worst form and with the best intentions’
(Quoted in Grondin 2003, 29–30).
Gadamer’s father cast a long shadow over Gadamer’s life and his early personal
and collegial relationships. In an essay published in 1985—when Gadamer was in
his 86th year—he commented:
As is the way with children, it was mainly the occasional subtle earnestness in the words of
my father that led me to feel that not everything was at its best in the world. So I will not
forget the moment of the outbreak of the war in 1914, when I enthusiastically cried out with
the frivolity of a curious child: ‘Oh that’s fine’ and my father with a furrowed brow replied:
‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’ (Gadamer 1992, 221–222)
1.2 Childhood and Youth 3
One might see Gadamer’s philosophical project as a response to that ‘You don’t
know what you’re saying’. His attempt to understand what he was saying—and
what others were saying—was central to that project. Hermeneutics as he defined
and developed it was concerned with how we understand one another and how—on
the basis of that understanding—we open up the possibility of agreement based on
the mutuality of respect. As he pointed out in an interview conducted in the same
year: ‘That is the essence, the soul of my hermeneutics: To understand someone
else is to see the justice, the truth, of their position. And this is what transforms us’
(Gadamer 1992, 152).
Less than a year and half after the death of Gadamer’s mother, his father married
Hedwig Hellich, a widow who had been a close friend of his first wife. Having no
children of her own Hedwig seemingly entered into the marriage on the under-
standing that she would take on full time care of Gadamer and his older brother,
Willi, while her new husband fulfilled his responsibilities as professor of phar-
macological chemistry at the University of Breslau. Willi was particularly in need
of care given that he had from early childhood suffered from epilepsy. Gadamer
also assumed the role of carer, accompanying his brother to and from the Holy
Ghost School which they both attended. Presumably he not only witnessed but was
also responsible for his brother during his frequent epileptic seizures—an experi-
ence that one can only imagine as having been traumatising for the young Gadamer.
1916 was—historically and personally—a pivotal year. It was the year of both
the Battle of the Somme, in which 267,000 German soldiers died, as well as the
Battle of Verdun. Both these battles represented a new mode of technological
warfare and mass murder that were to become emblematic of what Hobsbawm
(1995) has termed ‘the age of total war’: ‘total war’ being what he described as ‘the
largest enterprise hitherto known to man, which had to be consciously organized
and managed’ (p. 45). 1966 was also the year in which Gadamer’s father was
named Privy Councillor by the Kaiser and—at the personal and familial level—the
year in which he committed his elder son, Willi, to a sanatorium for the rest of his
life. There was, of course, no causal link between these events, but their sheer
contingency—the fact that they unforeseeably and unpredictably happened together
—must have baffled the mind.
Having lost his sister, his mother and now his brother, Gadamer was—at the age
of sixteen—left alone with his stepmother and father. By this time grief and loss
were layered into the brief chronology of his life. They formed the substratum of
those early years that were beyond adult memory. The departure of his older
brother, although perhaps in some ways a relief, must have resonated with those
earlier half-remembered losses. It requires a leap of what the older Gadamer was to
call ‘the hermeneutical imagination’ to begin to understand the sense of isolation
and hopelessness—the weight of accumulated grief, the sediment of sadness—
experienced by Gadamer during his adolescent years.
He survived, and—on leaving the Holy Ghost School in 1918—entered the
University of Breslau, where his long apprenticeship as a philologist and
philosopher began.
1.3 The Long Apprenticeship
Shortly after Gadamer embarked upon his university career, the Prussian monarchy
that had reigned for hundreds of years and ruled the whole of Germany for half a
century collapsed in a few short days. Even before the Armistice of 11 November
the mood of despondency had deepened with more than 4000 desertions to the
enemy in 1918. In early November demonstrations and general strikes occurred
across Germany and worker councils took power in most of the cities and large
towns. On 9 November hundreds of thousands of workers poured onto the streets of
Berlin led by, among other groupings, Spartakusbund. The German Revolution—
the ‘lost revolution’ as Harman (1997) termed it—had begun.
We know little if anything of what impact these events had on the eighteen year
old Gadamer. What we do know is that his decision to embark upon German
Studies was—while contrary to his father’s wishes—in accordance with the general
sense that scientific rationality had brought Europe to the brink of the abyss and that
other modes of reasoning needed opening up. From that perspective German
Studies offered what in the final sentence of Truth and Method he termed ‘a
discipline of questioning and inquiring, a discipline that guarantees truth’ (Gadamer
2004, 484). It allowed him during his three semesters at Breslau an introduction to
the full breadth of the humanities: ancient history, art history, English studies,
Islamic studies, philosophy, psychology, the Romance languages and Sanskrit.
It also brought him into contact with the first of several more senior academics
who influenced his thinking and adopted a caring and almost paternal attitude
towards him. Richard Hönigswald was some twenty five years older than Gadamer.
He taught that the prime task of philosophy is to illuminate the systematic condi-
tions of truth across disciplines. Philosophy, in other words, constitutes a kind of
higher court within which truth claims can be tested and validated. Given the range
of scholarly pursuits included within the field of German Studies, Hönigswald’s
argument regarding the systematising potential of philosophy no doubt provided a
much needed focus for Gadamer’s wide-ranging studies. Hönigswald’s influence
was indirect but highly formative in that it opened up the possibility of a philo-
sophical justification of the humanities.
Gadamer was still living at home and would continue to do so until 1923. So,
when his father took up a new senior academic post at the University of Marburg in
April 1919, the family followed him and Gadamer continued his studies at Marburg
—thereby returning to his birthplace. At Marburg philosophy and art history were
initially his main subjects: philosophy was taught by Paul Natorp, an authority on
Plato and the preeminent neo-Kantian of his generation, and Nicolai Hartmann,
whose philosophical interests focussed on ontology or the philosophy of being; art
history by Richard Hamann, a medievalist with a particular interest in the social
history of art. Later he was taught by Rudolph Bultmann, the highly influential
theologian and biblical scholar, and by Ernst Robert Curtius, one of the foremost
literary scholars of the 20th century. From both he gained not only an abiding
interest in philology but a keen sense that philology is not an end in itself. Rather, it
1.3 The Long Apprenticeship 5
was a means of accessing what Curtius (1990, x)—in the foreword to his European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages—called ‘the great intellectual and spiritual
tradition of Western culture as given form in language’.
Although Gadamer was influenced by each of these teachers, it was Hartmann
who proved to be the predominant influence. Like Hönigswald, Hartmann was in
mid-career and therefore closer in age to Gadamer than some of his senior col-
leagues, while sufficiently established to be able to offer support, encouragement
and guidance. Gadamer (1985, 12) later commented that Hartmann treated him ‘like
a half son’. ‘In his works and pictures too,’ suggests Grondin (2003, 76), ‘Hartmann
indeed comes across as a man of extraordinary strictness, even coldness. In con-
versation, however, he is said to have been quite the opposite.’ Perhaps, given his
upbringing, Gadamer needed both the extraordinary strictness and the equally
extraordinary openness to conversation: the latter provided by the conversation
circle that met regularly at Hartmann’s house between Thursday 9 pm and Friday 2
a.m.
Gadamer completed his doctoral thesis, ‘The Nature of Pleasure According to
Plato’s Dialogues’, in 1922 under Natorp’s supervision. Shortly afterwards, in April
1923, he married Frida Kratz who was two years older than Gadamer and more
gregarious and sociable. According to Grondin (2003, 59), ‘she contributed to
broadening Gadamer’s education in art and music, and in consequence widened the
distance from his parents while he, conversely, came increasingly under her
influence’. Between the completion of his doctorate and his marriage, he became ill
with polio and as a result was quarantined for several months. During his period of
convalescence he read, among other things, Husserl’s Logical Investigations and an
unpublished essay on Aristotle by a young assistant to Husserl in Freiberg, Martin
Heidegger.
The unpublished essay had a profound effect on Gadamer, who wrote to
Heidegger expressing his intention to come to Freiberg with a view to attending
Husserl’s lectures and the various courses Heidegger was teaching on Aristotle and
on ‘The Hermeneutics of Facticity’. That led to Gadamer and his new wife
spending the spring semester of 1923 in Freiberg and staying with Heidegger in his
hut in the Black Forest for several weeks during the summer. Thus began what
Dostal (2002, 16) describes as ‘a relationship that was difficult, complicated, and
decisive from the very beginning’.
It is worth bearing in mind that in 1923 Germany was experiencing hyperin-
flation with prices running out of control and the German currency becoming
almost worthless. Although Gadamer had received a trust fund from his father (on
the condition that none of it was to be used to purchase books), the inflation reduced
the fund’s value to nothing. Gadamer was, therefore, in extremely straightened
circumstances when he first encountered Heidegger. Although not financially
dependent on him, he was—as a young newly married academic without any secure
academic position—heavily reliant on the patronage and approval of his academic
mentors for any future preferment or promotion.
Gadamer would continue to be financially insecure until he finally gained a
professorial post in the late 1930s. In the meantime he returned to Marburg in
autumn 1923 where Heidegger had been appointed to an extraordinary professor-

ship in philosophy. Back in Marburg Gadamer was, to some extent, able to ease
Heidegger’s transition into his new academic setting. This was no easy task given
the hugely charismatic influence Heidegger exerted over students and his dismis-
sive attitude towards other faculty members. His deeply egoistical, uncompromising
and manipulative personality put an immense strain on any attempt at collegiality.
A year after Heidegger’s arrival in Marburg, Natorp died and the following year
Hartmann, somewhat embittered by Heidegger’s increasing influence, moved to
Cologne. As a result Gadamer was increasingly dependent on Heidegger.
He had hoped to move straight through, under Heidegger’s guidance, to his
habilitation, a major post-doctoral study required to qualify for an academic
position. However, Heidegger dashed any such hope by dismissing Gadamer in a
sharply worded letter of 1924 that accused him of lacking toughness. This was
particularly galling since Gadamer had originally wanted to work towards the
habilitation under Hartmann whose departure for Cologne had left him with no
alternative other than to seek the support of Heidegger. Later Gadamer was to see
this as a major turning point and generously credit Heidegger with having gal-
vanised him into serious scholarly endeavour. Nevertheless, his memory of the
incident, reported in an interview conducted in the very last years of his life,
suggests that he remained bruised by Heidegger’s deeply insensitive handling of the
affair: ‘Well, Heidegger said to me, “… you are simply not talented enough to do
philosophical work. You need to learn Latin and Greek so you can teach”’
(Gadamer 2006, 24). Following Heidegger’s rebuttal, he decided against an aca-
demic career in philosophy and instead focused on classical philology which could
have led to either a university or a secondary school career.
In 1927 he passed the state examination to qualify as a teacher of classics.
Heidegger was one of his examiners and—three years after his original rejection of
Gadamer—proceeded to do a volte face. He wrote to Gadamer inviting him to
undertake his habilitation with him. But, of course, it had to be on Heidegger’s
terms and, given that Heidegger had only one more year at Marburg before leaving
to take up Husserl’s chair in Freiberg, the terms included a swift completion of the
habilitation. Under immense emotional and financial pressure—Gadamer’s
daughter, Jutta, was born in 1926 and his father died in 1928 of cancer—he
completed his habilitation in 1929. The thesis appeared in revised form in 1931
under the title Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (see Gadamer 1991).
Gadamer’s tangled encounter with Heidegger proved strangely fortuitous. Had
he not read the early unpublished essay by Heidegger and gone to Freiberg to attend
his lectures on ‘The Hermeneutics of Facticity’, he may never have turned his mind
to philosophical hermeneutics. Similarly, had he not—as a result of Heidegger’s
refusal to support him working towards his habilitation—shifted his focus of
scholarly interest and thereby developed a deep understanding of classical philol-
ogy, he may never have made the imaginative leap into the field of applied
hermeneutics. While Heidegger moved increasingly towards an ontologically ori-
ented hermeneutics, Gadamer increasingly grounded his hermeneutics in the
occasion—the moment—of linguistic communication and expression.
1.4 Internal Exile 7
1.4 Internal Exile
Having successfully completed his habilitation Gadamer became a privatdozent

and thereby gained the right to lecture at the university. No salary was attached to
this position, but he could lecture and receive tuition fees from his students. In
addition he received a two-year grant from the German government to prepare his
habilitation thesis for publication. For the next twenty years he committed himself
almost entirely to teaching and published very little. During his early years as a
privatdozent he lectured on a wide range of philosophical issues including aes-
thetics, ethics and logic. His prime sources during this early period were Aristotle,
Husserl and Plato.
As he explained many years later in two interviews conducted between 1985 and
1986, ‘during the Third Reich, it was almost a matter of prudence not to be very
public. I tried to have a career, and I succeeded by publishing little. My publications
appeared in very specialized journals which were not very public.’ In the process he
developed what he called ‘a style of my own by speaking freely (not reading to an
audience) and teaching this way. I learned to develop the melody of my own thoughts
… the living voice behind the writing’. The writing emerged from the teaching and
the teaching was increasingly dialogical—‘not reading to an audience’, but engaging
students in the exploration of ideas and using the lecture as an exemplar of thinking in
action. ‘I am’, as he put it, ‘a dialogical being’ (Gadamer 1992, 66).
1933 was a pivotal year for both Germany and Gadamer. Hitler seized power at
the beginning of the year and shortly after Heidegger became rector of the
University of Freiberg using his inaugural address to announce his full commitment
to the Nazi regime. In an interview conducted in 1986, Gadamer remembers
receiving a copy of Heidegger’s address: ‘Heidegger sent me a copy of it with a
dedication “Mit deutschem Gruss” [that would be equivalent to saying “Heil
Hitler”]. I thought to myself, “Has he gone crazy” … From that moment on I gave
him up’ (Gadamer 1992, 10). In the same interview he acknowledges his own and
others’ failure to grasp the full import of Hitler’s seizure of power: ‘None of us
knew how far the anti-Semitism of Hitler went, how seriously to take it … My
Jewish friends almost entirely took the view that it was not serious. They could not
believe that it was seriously meant. And I, for my part, did not know that it was’
(Gadamer 1992, 9).
Although Gadamer avoided any explicit endorsement of Nazism and never
became a party member, two incidents that occurred during this period raise some
rather awkward questions. The first such incident relates to Gadamer’s name
appearing on a document of November 1933 entitled ‘Declaration of support of the
professors at German universities and colleges for Adolf Hitler and the National
Socialist state, presented at the National Socialist Teachers’ League
Germany/Saxony’. Gadamer was adamant that he had never seen the document,
although his signature is clearly on it. The question then arises as to how the
signatures were collected. In a letter written in 1989, Gadamer offered the following
explanation:
What is involved here is a signature that probably comes from that spring in Marburg, in an
assembly where we were asked publicly whether anyone was opposed, and where none of
us had the courage to say yes; for that would have meant emigration. That was then taken as
tantamount to a signature for this proclamation … I would guess that they [the organizers]
attached the signatures gathered by acclamation to the affirmation of Hitler. (Quoted in
Grondin 2003, 160)
The second incident relates to Gadamer’s voluntary attendance in the autumn of

1935 at what was in effect a political rehabilitation facility: the National Socialist
academy for docents (i.e. academic staff below the rank of professor). He did so in a
last ditch attempt to salvage his career, which was being blocked for reasons that
were unspecified but clearly of a political nature. Gadamer’s strategy proved suc-
cessful and he was duly named for an extraordinary professorship the following
year. Moreover, he fully acknowledged that the academy had been ‘very fruitful for
me. In particular it lessoned my scepticism about the new academic generation’
(Quoted in Grondin 2003, 160). This is no doubt understandable in the light of his
sense of academic isolation, his straitened financial circumstances, and the fact that
he was the prime source of income for his young family. Nevertheless, his decision
to attend the National Socialist academy raises question regarding the extent of his
willingness to compromise and his political acumen and foresight.
Critics also point to the fact that—prior to Gadamer’s clearance for being named
for an extraordinary professorship—he took up posts vacated by Jewish academics
forced from their university positions and their livelihoods. In each case Gadamer
was a friend of the colleague whom he replaced and was, according to Gadamer,
encouraged by each of them to assume the temporary position. This account of
events accords with Gadamer’s recollection that none of his contemporaries had
fully acknowledged the enormity of the political situation in which they found
themselves. It also accords with the fact that in 1935, when Karl Löwith (a lifelong
friend and fellow student of Heidegger) agreed to withdraw from his earlier com-
mitment to being the godfather of Gadamer’s daughter, Jutta, on the grounds that he
was a Jew and his continuation in the role of godfather may have compromised
Gadamer and his family, Gadamer adamantly refused his friend’s request.
Amidst this political turmoil and moral complexity Gadamer’s magnum opus
was beginning to take shape. As he pointed out much later in interviews already
alluded to, the first part of what was to become Truth and Method was based on
lectures he delivered between 1933 and 1934: ‘Then lectures on Husserl and
Heidegger became material for Part 2, and the same holds for Part 3 on “Language
and the World”. But then the whole thing grew together’ (Gadamer 1992, 64).
Gadamer was not aware of what precisely was growing. He was not writing to a
predetermined programme. Nevertheless, throughout these years of internal exile—
during which Gadamer chose not to be a public presence—he was developing a
dialogical idiom that was to find expression in one of the major philosophical works
of the 20th century.
1.5 Coming Through 9
1.5 Coming Through
Gadamer finally gained a permanent academic post in January 1939. Less than two
months after the Nazi atrocities of Kristallnacht and in preference to two other
candidates who were committed Nazis and had considerably more publications than
Gadamer, the University of Leipzig—to its great credit—appointed him to the post
of professor. He delivered his inaugural lecture later that year on the subject of
‘Hegel and Historical Spirit’. As a newly appointed professor he was Director of the
Philosophy Seminar and throughout the period of WWII lectured and led seminars
on the Western philosophical canon with a particular emphasis on Aristotle, Plato
and the pre-Socratics. He was now in a position to pursue his own philosophical
interests through his teaching while at the same time extending his international
reputation.
While he steadily pursued his philosophical enquires the war continued to take
its toll. In 1943 the centre of Leipzig was destroyed by Allied bombing with an
estimated 1800 people killed in the attack and large parts of the university reduced
to rubble (A little over a month later Gadamer delivered a public lecture entitled
‘Nicholas of Cusa and the Idea of Modern Science’). In 1944 he also suffered the
death of his brother Willi and in that same year—and again in 1945—further
bombing raids destroyed some of the main residential and industrial areas of
Leipzig. Throughout this period Gadamer doggedly pursued his philosophical
interests and dutifully fulfilled his teaching responsibilities. He was—unobtrusively
but determinedly—keeping alive a tradition of philosophical reflection and
humanistic dialogue that was in its own quiet way deeply subversive.
Following the failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944 the war came
perilously close to home. Gadamer’s student and assistant Käte Lekebusch was
denounced for derogatory comments she had allegedly made about Hitler. She was
tried before a People’s Court and threatened with a possible death sentence. The
charge was subsequently dropped, but Lekebusch was detained in prison.
Gadamer’s marriage was by this time unravelling and it is likely that he was already
entertaining strong feelings towards Lekebusch. In 1945—just before her assigned
deportation to Ravensbruck camp—American troops entered the bombed-out city
of Leipzig, her prison was thrown open, and Lekebusch was released.
The Soviet troops replaced the withdrawing Americans later that year. Having
survived the Nazi Third Reich, Gadamer now found himself in the communist
Democratic Republic of East Germany. In 1946 he agreed to lead the reconstruction
of the University of Leipzig and in 1947 delivered a rectoral address entitled ‘On
the Primordiality of Science’ (see Gadamer 1992, 15–21). Speaking within the
context of the new post-WWII soviet regime, this address was in marked contrast to
Heidegger’s rectoral address delivered in 1933 at the University of Freiberg as the
Nazi regime tightened its totalitarian grip on German universities. Dostal (2002, 23)
neatly summarises the contrast between these two public statements by leading
European philosophers: ‘In the name of science, Gadamer silently resisted the new
regime, while Heidegger embraced the new regime in his attempt to redefine sci-
ence as being one with the Führer and das Volk’.
Gadamer worked tirelessly with the Russians and the leaders of what would
become East Germany in an attempt to develop the University of Leipzig as an
institution acceptable both to the Soviet authorities and to what he saw as the
traditions of the German university. The difficulties were immense and extremely
time-consuming, not least because of some fundamental differences regarding the
ends and purposes of the university. Dostal (2002, 23) again identifies the key issue:
‘the Russians had a differing view of universities. For them research was for
research academies and institutes, and university teachers were not so different from
high school teachers. The German Humboldtian university with its mission to
combine teaching and research was foreign to them’.
These differences were, of course, symptomatic of deeper ideological and
political differences. As a liberal and a democrat Gadamer once again found himself
at odds with aspects of the regime within which he was operating. Notwithstanding
his efforts to work across the ideological divides he was—unsurprisingly—keen to
move to the West. The opportunity to do so arose in 1947 when he was offered a
post at the University of Frankfurt. He accepted the offer, although the move
necessitated some travel backward and forward between Frankfurt and Leipzig in
order for Gadamer to fulfil outstanding rectoral responsibilities while at the same
time establishing himself in his new post. On one occasion in these travels between
East and West his personal effects were seized and another he was arrested and
interrogated by a Russian officer. He was experiencing the increasingly sharp
East/West divide at first hand.
The main appeal of Frankfurt seems to have been that it offered an escape route
—and escape from the onerous and to some extent thankless administrative
responsibilities and an escape from the East. Frankfurt itself—the city, its
University and the philosophy department within which he worked—were far from
congenial. In 1949 he accepted the offer of a highly prestigious chair at Heidelberg.
The chair had been occupied by Karl Jaspers whose record of non-appeasement
with the Nazi regime was exemplary and whose lifelong friendship with Hannah
Arendt has become legendary. At Heidelberg he began to rebuild and consolidate
his academic career. He was also rebuilding his personal life: in 1950 he married
Käte Lekebusch his former student and assistant who had faced possible execution
by the Nazis. Heidelberg was to be Gadamer’s home for the rest of his life.
During the 1950s his major work, Truth and Method, began to coalesce. In a
series of lectures delivered at the University of Louvain in 1957—entitled ‘The
Problem of Historical Consciousness’—he outlined what were to become its main
themes. In late winter and early spring 1958–1959—during the first sabbatical of
his entire career—he completed the manuscript. As he approached his sixtieth
birthday he could entertain the hope that he was beginning to come through—that,
notwithstanding the unpredictability of the human condition, the worst of the long
20th century was over.
1.6 Late Flourishing 11
1.6 Late Flourishing
Truth and Method was first published in German in 1960, almost thirty years after
his 1931 Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. In the years between he had published aca-
demic papers but no book-length philosophical text. Discussing the title of the book
in a later interview, Gadamer remarked: ‘when my publisher asked for a title for my
book (later to be Truth and Method), I suggested Philosophical Hermeneutics. And
they asked “what is that”? My wife and I pondered a little … [and] we came up with
Truth and Method. Ambiguity is the secret to a good title’ (Gadamer 1992, 64). The
anecdote reminds us that Gadamer’s major work is largely responsible for intro-
ducing the term ‘hermeneutics’ into the mainstream of philosophical discourse.
Prior to its publication hermeneutics was the preserve of a relatively small group of
specialists. The anecdote also, as Gadamer emphasised in that same interview,
serves to remind us of the ambiguity implicit in its title: ‘Some would say that the
book discussed the method for finding truth, others said that I claimed that there
was no method for finding truth. The ambiguity of the title is its key element’
(Gadamer 1992, 64).
Truth and Method was not published in English translation until 1975, which
meant that it took some time for it to impact within the English speaking world.
That impact has been immense, but three critical responses in particular shaped its
reception:
• Jürgen Habermas’s review first appeared in 1970 (see Habermas 1977). In the
course of a thorough exposition of the work he took issue with what he saw as
its over-emphasis on ‘tradition’. From his ‘critical theory’ perspective, philo-
sophical hermeneutics as developed by Gadamer lacked the conceptual capacity
to fully interrogate its own imported assumptions (for a discussion of the
Habermas-Gadamer debate and its philosophical implications, see Bernstein
2002, 267–275, and Mendelson 1979).
• Eric Donald Hirsch, Jr., focused on what he saw as Gadamer’s failure to dis-
tinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’: the former defined in terms of the
author’s intended meaning and the latter in terms of what that intended meaning
signifies for the reader. In Hirsch’s view Gadamer had failed to clarify this dis-
tinction and had thereby drifted into relativism. Authorial intentionality was—
Hirsch maintained—the prime criterion of judgement (see Hirsch 1965, 1967).
• A meeting and exchange between Jacques Derrida and Gadamer took place in
Paris in 1981 under the auspices of the Goethe Institute. The exchange failed as
a full and frank exploration of the underlying issues, but did establish a clear line
between what might be seen as a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ as exemplified in
‘deconstructionism’ and a ‘hermeneutics of trust’ as exemplified in Gadamer’s
emphasis on understanding as agreement (for a discussion of the
Habermas-Derrida debate and its philosophical implications, see Bernstein
2002, 275–281, and Michelfelder and Palmer 1989).
Truth and Method did not fit easily into any of the available categories: it was,
from a Habermasian perspective, anti-Enlightenment in its recourse to tradition;
Hirsch, on the other hand, saw it as shading into postmodernist relativism; from a
deconstructionist perspective it was insufficiently critical of the Enlightenment pro-
ject. It was caught between several cross-currents within the broad field of inter-
pretive theory. But it held its own. And it did so largely because during the forty years
following the publication of Truth and Method Gadamer was able to elucidate his
central thesis in terms of both its philosophical precedents and its practical applica-
tions. In a series of lectures delivered at the Naples Institute for the Study of
Philosophy in 1988 he grounded his philosophical hermeneutics in a detailed study of
Plato and Aristotle and their pre-Socratic antecedents (Gadamer 1998). At the same
time he was focusing increasingly on the application of hermeneutics to specific fields
of practice such as education, health and the arts (see Gadamer 1986, 1992, 1996).
Gadamer was first and foremost a teacher: a teacher for whom the practice of
teaching was exercised through lectures, symposia and writing, but particularly
within the more informal and discursive to and fro of the seminar. As he later
explained, he grew gradually into his role as a teacher:
my work comes from my teaching … Writing is my secondary form of self-presentation, as
Plato thought it should be … I am a dialogical being. When teaching, I was very shy at first,
I never looked at the students. This was the case in lectures. But when I held seminars, I
myself was present from the first day: I had a real talent for listening and replying and
believe that that remains my talent: to listen even to the silent voice of an audience.
(Gadamer 1992, 65–66)
Teaching, for Gadamer, was premised on the belief that mutual understanding is
a possibility latent in all human exchanges: ‘Social life depends on our acceptance
of everyday speech as trustworthy. We cannot order a taxi without this trust. Thus
understanding is the average case, not misunderstanding’ (Gadamer 1992, 71).
Gadamer had throughout his career continued to communicate across ideological
and political divides—partly in the interests of self-survival, but also because he
saw no substitute for mutuality and reciprocity. He was—arguably—open to the
charge of acquiescence, accommodation, appeasement even. But he was willing to
risk that accusation in the interests of what—as a teacher—he judged it necessary to
profess: the commonality of understanding. To seek to understand is to acknowl-
edge that—for all our differences—we inhabit a shared world. And to acknowledge
that we inhabit such a world is to recognise ourselves as ethical beings who bear
moral responsibility for one another.
1.7 Conclusion
This chapter has located Gadamer’s life and work within the broad context of 20th
century history. The philosophical task he set himself was to understand what
constitutes human understanding. That task defined not only his academic career,
but also his personal dispositions: how he related to himself and others, how he
1.7 Conclusion 13
responded to events around him, how he defined his own ends and purposes, and
how, in particular, he defined himself as a scholar and a teacher. The following
three chapters (Chaps. 2–4) explore key themes in Gadamer’s work: ‘the power of
prejudice’, ‘the fusion of horizons’ and ‘the problem of method’. Each of these
chapters addresses its central theme with reference to Gadamer’s emphasis on
‘tradition’, his preoccupation with ‘the question’, and his insistence on the ethical
and moral bases of human understanding. The following chapter (Chap. 2) focuses
specifically on ‘the power of prejudice’ as the subjective element that Gadamer
claims is a constituent of all human understanding.
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Chapter 2
The Acknowledged Self
Understanding begins … when something addresses us. This is

the first condition of hermeneutics. (Gadamer 2004, 298)
2.1 Introduction
Hermeneutics is primarily concerned with the question of how we understand the

human world and its relation to the natural world. Its primary response to that
question is that understanding necessarily involves an element of interpretation.
Understanding, in other words, is not about reception and revelation, but about how
we interpret what we have received and are receiving and what has been and is
being revealed. Starting from this premise, hermeneutics developed as an important
branch of interpretive methodology—whereby the principles upon which textual
miss-readings might be identified and valid readings ratified—were established and
applied in the interpretation of, in particular, religious texts within the Judeo-
Christian canon but also more generally within the Western and European
humanistic canon.
Philosophical hermeneutics was shaped by this largely Eurocentric outlook, but
was premised on a further and more universal assumption; namely, that interpre-
tation is part of the human condition. We are born into a world that requires us to
make sense of it. That is what defines our common humanity. There is, then, a clear
link between hermeneutics as a philosophical field of enquiry and ontology as the
field of philosophical enquiry devoted to the nature of being and becoming. For
Gadamer, this link was vitally important and one which he built on to establish the
ethical bases of hermeneutics: it is by making sense of the world—and of ourselves
in the world—that we realise our full human potential as ethical agents.
The main theme pursued in this chapter—the acknowledged self—represents one
of a triad of themes that provides the underlying structure for Chaps. 2 and 3. In this
chapter the emphasis is on the need to acknowledge the subjective or personal ele-
ment in human understanding. Understanding opens up the possibility of new
beginnings, but those new beginnings, argues Gadamer, are grounded in the partic-
ularity of our origins. In thinking about the nature of human understanding—which is
© The Author(s) 2017 15

J. Nixon, Hans-Georg Gadamer, SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers
in Education, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52117-6_2
16 2 The Acknowledged Self
precisely the task we set ourselves when we enter the field of hermeneutics—we are
necessarily thinking about what we should make of ourselves, how we should live,
how we might become more truly ourselves. It is this emphasis on becoming our-
selves that gives to Gadamerian hermeneutics its distinctive ethical strain.
2.2 From Vico to Gadamer
In mid-18th Century Milan an obscure professor of rhetoric named Giambattista

Vico claimed to have uncovered ‘the order of all progress from its first origins’. He
elaborated this ‘order of progress’ in terms of what he termed ‘the course of nations’
central to which was ‘the recurrence of human institutions’: ‘at first there were
forests, then cultivated fields and huts, next small houses and villages, thence cities,
and at last academies and philosophers’ (Vico 2001, 15). Implicit in his argument is
that these human institutions are historically situated, but that they constitute a
category that is sustainable across history. Writing both within and against the
Enlightenment that had illuminated the scientific potential of the natural world,
Vico was exercised by the idea that the divinely ordained natural world can only be
understood in the light of the human world that had evolved and was still evolving
in time. (Erich Auerbach’s essays on Vico—written between 1932 and 1958—
remain an invaluable introduction to Vico’s significance within the hermeneutical
tradition. See Auerbach 2014, 3–55).
That world, Vico sought to show, could only be understood chronologically.
History was, as he saw it, the key to worldly understanding. He set out to establish
an understanding of the evolution of human societies that was as revolutionary in its
time as Darwin’s application of the notion of ‘evolution’ to the life sciences over a
hundred years later. He lay the foundations of what we now categorise as ‘the
humanities’ and of what is now practiced as ‘anthropology’, ‘cultural studies’,
‘history’, ‘sociology’, etc.—but never lost sight of the partiality of human under-
standing. ‘There is always’, as the literary and cultural critic Said (2004, 12) put it,
‘something radically incomplete, insufficient, provisional, disputable, and arguable
about humanistic knowledge that Vico never loses sight of’.
However, the impact of Vico’s New Science extends beyond ‘the humanities’.
His studies were, maintained Gadamer (1977, 63), ‘a true prototype of
hermeneutics’. The third edition of this work published in the year of his death—
and, as stated on the cover page of that edition, ‘thoroughly corrected revised, and
expanded by the author’—shows how all human knowledge is historically located
and therefore open to interpretation. The ‘rules’ of science, as developed by con-
temporaries such as Newton, were not—he implied—absolute and for all time.
They were necessarily relative to their age and, as such, open to question. They
were interpretable. Vico routed the tradition of hermeneutic enquiry—that was as
old as Socrates—into the modern age of scientific enquiry. The world, he sug-
gested, is not entirely given, but made through our own understanding of it; and, as
2.2 From Vico to Gadamer 17
Marx went on to argue, if the world is what we make of it, then we can struggle to
make of it a better world. Vico’s great, sprawling, and (by our contemporary
standards) unscholarly work is the hinge upon which the hermeneutic tradition turns
towards historical consciousness.
Two insights in particular form the basis of that tradition. The first insight is that
in any attempt at interpretation we are interpreting that which has already been
interpreted. The object of our interpretation is a construct that we inherit from the
historical layering of countless prior interpretations and re-interpretations. There is
no blank page of history upon which we can inscribe our entirely original under-
standings. History is a palimpsest of layered inscriptions and layered commentaries.
The second insight follows from the first. If all understanding is always already
interpretation, then the interpreter is part of what is being interpreted. The subject
that interprets is implicit in the object of interpretation. Notions of ‘objectivity’ and
‘neutrality’ as the privileged criteria of rationality become increasingly difficult to
justify in the light of this second insight. ‘Objective’ reality is the inter-subjective
space of human understanding: the in-between space in which our ‘subjective’
understandings encounter one another. ‘Our very mode of being’, as Pippin (2002,
232) puts it, ‘is interpretive; we exist “understandingly,” in an always already
“understood” world.’
These two insights were implicit—rather than explicit—in New Science. Vico
was feeling his way towards a new world view that was still embryonic. He was
fascinated by pre-history and how, prior to a chronological and sequential notion of
time, people nevertheless located themselves historically. He understood that the
past was another country which had to be understood on its own terms rather than
on our terms. His formulation of the ‘epochs of world history’ into ‘the ages of
gods, heroes, and men’ may seem strange and esoteric to us, but in its time it was
path breaking in its insistence on past epochs as interpretive constructs expressed in
terms of mythology, political constitutions, and legal frameworks. History is what
we make of it and what we make of it is inextricable from how we understand it.
These were ideas that would inspire and inform the work of, among others, Karl
Marx and James Joyce. At the time, however, Vico was still finding a language and
form within which to express and elaborate them.
A third insight follows from the first two and was developed in particular by
Gadamer. Interpretation, he saw, is not a supplement to understanding, but is ‘the
explicit form of understanding’ such that ‘understanding is always interpretation’
(Gadamer 2004, 306). So, if understanding is made manifest through interpretation
and the interpreter is inevitably implicated in what is being interpreted, then all
understanding necessarily involves an element of self-understanding. Gadamer
elaborated this insight with reference to the notion of ‘application’, which he
understood as being implicit in all understanding from the moment of its inception.
It is not that understanding is achieved and then applied, but that the application is
intrinsic to the process of understanding: ‘in all understanding an application
occurs, such that the person who is understanding is himself or herself right there in
the understood meaning. He or she belongs to the subject-matter that he or she is
understanding … Everyone who understands something understands himself or
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décida que la durée du carême était de quarante et non de
cinquante jours[241]. Il rendit obligatoire la fête des Rogations,
récemment instituée à Vienne en Dauphiné par saint Mamert, et qui
de là s'était répandue rapidement dans le reste de l'Église. Il voulut
que les trois jours qu'elle durait fussent des jours de jeûne et
d'abstinence; il décida que les esclaves des deux sexes seraient
dispensés de tout travail afin de pouvoir assister aux processions, et
il donna pouvoir à l'évêque de punir le prêtre qui refuserait d'y
participer[242]. Ainsi continuait au sein de l'Église la floraison
liturgique; chaque génération en s'écoulant ajoutait un joyau au
diadème de ses fêtes, et le cercle enchanté de ses prières se nouait
en guirlandes parfumées autour de toute l'année chrétienne.
[240] Canon, 26, Sirmond, I, p. 182; Maassen, p. 8.
La discipline ecclésiastique était peut-être, de tous les sujets, celui
que l'Église soignait avec le plus de sollicitude; aussi ne s'étonnera-
t-on pas d'y voir consacrer un grand nombre de canons. Il faut parler
d'abord des attributions réservées aux évêques en leur qualité de
chefs de diocèse. Le diocèse était dans l'Église primitive, et avant le
mouvement de concentration qui s'est fait autour de la chaire
romaine, l'organisme par excellence de la vie religieuse, et l'évêque
était le centre et la source de toute autorité et de toute discipline. Le
lien qui rattachait les fidèles à leur évêque était le lien le plus fort qui
les rattachât à l'Église elle-même: il fallait veiller, s'il y avait lieu de
l'élargir, à ce qu'il ne pût jamais être défait ou rompu. Voilà pourquoi
l'on faisait aux fidèles dispersés dans les paroisses rurales
l'obligation d'affirmer par intervalles l'unité diocésaine, en venant
assister aux offices de la cathédrale aux fêtes de Noël, de Pâques et
de Pentecôte. Le concile d'Orléans renouvela cette prescription[243].
Il rappela aussi aux fidèles que toutes les églises qui se
construisaient dans le diocèse, que ce fût dans le domaine d'un
particulier ou ailleurs, restaient sous la juridiction de l'évêque[244]:
mesure d'une importance capitale, qui sauvegardait l'unité
religieuse, et constituait la barrière la plus solide que la féodalité
envahissante ait rencontrée sur son chemin. Le concile consacra
l'autorité de l'évêque sur toutes les personnes comme sur tous les
biens de son église; il lui en subordonna les religieux comme les
laïques; il ne permit ni à ses prêtres ni à ses moines d'aller trouver le
roi pour lui demander un bénéfice sans la permission de l'évêque
diocésain; celui qui contreviendrait à cette défense devait être privé
de son rang et de la communion jusqu'à ce qu'il eût satisfait[245].
Mais en même temps qu'il veillait à conserver intacte l'autorité
épiscopale, le concile voulut que l'évêque se souvînt aussi de ses
devoirs: il exigea que tous les dimanches, sauf empêchement, il
assistât aux offices de l'église la plus voisine[246]; il ne lui permit pas
de manier l'arme de l'excommunication contre un laïque qui
revendiquerait les biens d'une église ou d'un évêque[247]. Il est
intéressant de constater ces restrictions que les évêques eux-
mêmes apportent à leur pouvoir: rien ne montre mieux l'action
modératrice des conciles.
[243] Canon 25, Sirmond, I, p. 182; Maassen, p. 8.
[244] Canon 17, Sirmond, p. 181; Maassen, p. 6.
Plusieurs autres dispositions des conciles antérieurs furent
renouvelées en ce qui concernait la vie du clergé. Telle fut en
premier lieu celle qui défendait aux clercs de tout rang, tant aux
évêques qu'aux prêtres et aux diacres, d'avoir dans leur maison
d'autres femmes que leurs parentes les plus proches[248]. Il fut
interdit aux veuves de clercs de se remarier; celles qui avaient
contracté mariage furent contraintes de rompre leur union, sous
peine d'excommunication tant pour elles que pour leurs
complices[249]. Enfin il fut décidé que le prêtre ou diacre coupable
d'un crime capital serait privé de son office et exclu de la communion
des fidèles[250].
Tout cet ensemble de mesures était relatif au clergé séculier; il faut y
ajouter celles qui concernaient le clergé régulier. Quatre importants
canons furent consacrés à la vie monastique, et il faut remarquer
qu'ils ont pour caractère général le renforcement de l'autorité
épiscopale sur le clergé régulier. Les abbés des monastères, se
souvenant, dit le concile, de l'humilité dont leur profession leur faisait
un devoir, eurent à reconnaître l'autorité de l'évêque, et celui-ci
garda sur eux un droit de correction. Tous les ans ils devaient se
réunir à l'endroit où il leur avait donné rendez-vous. Eux-mêmes, de
leur côté, voyaient confirmer leur autorité sur leurs moines. Le
religieux qui, contrevenant à sa règle, possédait quelque chose en
propre, devait en être dépouillé par l'abbé; celui qui s'évadait de son
monastère devait y être ramené et mis sous bonne garde, avec
l'aide de l'évêque. L'abbé lui-même était déclaré coupable s'il n'usait
pas de son droit de correction, ou s'il accueillait un moine fugitif[251].
Il fut défendu aux moines de quitter leur monastère pour se bâtir des
cellules à part, à moins qu'ils n'eussent l'aveu de leur évêque et de
leur abbé; les Pères du concile voyaient dans cette tendance à
s'isoler une preuve de vanité et d'outrecuidance[252]. Ils fermèrent
l'accès de tout grade dans l'ordre ecclésiastique à quiconque, après
avoir professé la vie religieuse en prenant le manteau de moine,
l'avait ensuite quittée pour contracter les liens du mariage[253]. Enfin,
descendant jusque dans le détail, ils réglèrent de menues questions
de costume monastique[254].
Les simples fidèles s'entendirent rappeler une des défenses les plus
impérieuses de cette époque: celle du mariage entre beaux-frères et
belles-sœurs, et il faut remarquer que par belle-sœur on devait
entendre, au sens du concile, aussi bien la femme du frère que la
sœur de la femme[255]. Deux canons, le onzième et le douzième,
furent consacrés aux pénitents, classe de fidèles toujours
nombreuse, et qui comprenait plusieurs catégories. Il y avait ceux
que l'Église avait condamnés à la pénitence pour expier leurs fautes;
il y avait aussi ceux qui se l'étaient imposée spontanément et par
ferveur de contrition. Ceux-ci étaient tenus de respecter leur vœu et
ne pouvaient retourner à la vie du siècle, sinon ils étaient exclus de
la communion, et nul fidèle ne pouvait les admettre à sa table sans
s'exposer à partager leur sort. Toutefois, si un prêtre ou un diacre
avaient, par pénitence, abandonné le service de l'autel, il leur fut
permis, par égard pour le salut des âmes, d'administrer le sacrement
de baptême en cas de nécessité[256].
Dans les mesures qu'il prit par rapport aux biens ecclésiastiques, le
concile, comme dans tout l'ensemble de ses dispositions, ne fit
qu'étendre, confirmer ou interpréter des canons antérieurs. Tous les
biens immeubles de l'église, ainsi que les esclaves et le bétail,
devaient être à la disposition de l'évêque, qui en faisait l'usage
prescrit par les canons. Si, dans une vue d'humanité, il abandonnait
pour un temps déterminé à des prêtres ou à des moines
l'exploitation de champs ou de vignes, aucune prescription ne
pouvait jamais éteindre son droit de propriété, et les dispositions de
la loi civile ne pouvaient pas être invoquées contre lui[257]. Quant
aux offrandes en nature que les fidèles faisaient sur l'autel, si c'était
dans la cathédrale, elles devaient se partager par moitié entre
l'évêque et le clergé de cette église[258]. Dans les églises rurales,
l'évêque avait droit à un tiers seulement, les deux autres tiers
appartenaient au clergé local[259]. Une question toute neuve, c'était
celle de la répartition des biens que l'Église devait à la libéralité de
Clovis, ou qu'elle en attendait encore. Fallait-il les soumettre aux
règles ordinaires, ou l'évêque pouvait-il en disposer à son gré? Le
concile répondit en rappelant les principes canoniques sur l'emploi
des revenus de l'Église: un tiers revenait au clergé pour sa
subsistance, un tiers aux pauvres et au rachat des captifs, un dernier
tiers à l'entretien des églises et du culte. Cette clause semblait dure
à certains prélats, qui, paraît-il, auraient voulu regarder les libéralités
royales comme des faveurs personnelles. Mais le concile s'éleva
avec force contre cette prétention; il menaça l'évêque récalcitrant
d'une réprimande publique de la part de ses comprovinciaux; s'il ne
se soumettait, il devait être exclu de la communion de ses frères
dans l'épiscopat[260]. Loin de pactiser ainsi avec l'égoïsme et
l'avidité de ses propres membres, l'épiscopat franc leur rappela dans
un canon spécial toute l'étendue de leur devoir de charité: L'évêque,
dit le seizième canon, doit, dans la mesure du possible, fournir les
aliments et les vêtements aux pauvres et aux infirmes que leur santé
empêche de travailler de leurs mains[261]. On sait quelle riche
variété d'œuvres charitables couvre l'ampleur magnifique de cette
formule, qui mettait dans la clientèle de l'Église toutes les misères et
toutes les souffrances d'ici-bas.
[261] Sirmond, p. 181; Maassen, p. 6.
Avant de se séparer, les évêques, Cyprien de Bordeaux et les autres
métropolitains en tête, signèrent les actes et en adressèrent une
copie au roi, avec une lettre ainsi conçue:
«A leur seigneur, fils de la sainte Église catholique, le très glorieux
roi Clovis, tous les évêques à qui vous avez ordonné de venir au
concile. Puisque un si grand souci de notre glorieuse foi vous excite
au service de la religion, que dans le zèle d'une âme vraiment
sacerdotale vous avez réuni les évêques pour délibérer en commun
sur les besoins de l'Église, nous, en conformité de cette volonté et
en suivant le questionnaire que vous nous avez donné, nous avons
répondu par les sentences qui nous ont paru justes. Si ce que nous
avons décidé est approuvé par vous, le consentement d'un si grand
roi augmentera l'autorité des résolutions prises en commun par une
si nombreuse assemblée de prélats[262].»
[262] Sirmond, p. 177; Maassen, p. 2.
Cette lettre était un acte de déférence de l'épiscopat envers la
majesté royale, ou, pour employer l'expression du concile lui-même,
c'était sa réponse au questionnaire de Clovis. On se tromperait si,
de la formule respectueuse de la fin, on tirait la conclusion que les
canons d'Orléans avaient besoin de la confirmation royale. L'Église,
chez les Francs mérovingiens, légiférait avec une souveraineté
absolue dans son domaine; ses canons étaient obligatoires en
conscience pour tous les fidèles, y compris le roi lui-même, et nul
n'aurait pu, sans se charger d'un péché grave, y contrevenir en
quelque matière que ce fût. Elle n'avait donc pas à demander à
Clovis une confirmation dont elle pouvait se passer; ce qu'elle
désirait, c'est qu'en se montrant disposé à y obéir lui-même, il
augmentât le prestige et l'autorité des résolutions conciliaires. D'en
faire passer la substance dans le droit civil, cela ne vint à l'esprit de
personne: c'est plus tard seulement, et dans une mesure d'abord
très restreinte, que les dispositions du droit ecclésiastique
commencèrent à y pénétrer. En attendant, les résolutions du concile
d'Orléans avaient force de loi pour l'Église franque, même celles qui
auraient été en contradiction avec le code[263].
[263] Voir Lœning, Geschichte des deutschen Kirchenrechts, t. II, pp. 150 et suiv.
Nous ne quitterons pas la mémorable assemblée de 511 sans faire
un rapprochement qui se sera sans doute présenté à l'esprit du
lecteur. C'est une œuvre législative qui a ouvert les annales des
Francs, et c'est une œuvre législative qui ferme le règne de Clovis.
Mais depuis les séances des quatre prud'hommes qui délibèrent
sous les chênes de Salaheim jusqu'à celles des trente-deux pontifes
qui siègent sous les voûtes du sanctuaire d'Orléans, quel chemin
parcouru! La loi salique est le code d'un petit peuple païen; les
canons de 511 sont la charte d'une grande nation chrétienne. Là, on
arrêtait le bilan de la barbarie; ici, on continue l'œuvre de la
civilisation. Là, un certain nombre de dispositions purement pénales
résument l'activité négative du passé; ici, les prescriptions positives
d'une loi morale supérieure font pénétrer dans le droit public les
influences fécondantes de l'avenir. L'histoire de la fondation de la
monarchie franque est comprise entre ces deux dates, et toute la
philosophie de cette histoire tient dans ce simple rapprochement.
VII
CLOVIS ET L'ÉGLISE
Il serait d'un haut intérêt, après avoir envisagé les sommets de
l'histoire de Clovis, de jeter un coup d'œil dans ses replis, et de
l'étudier dans la menue activité de la vie quotidienne. Combien elle
s'éclairerait pour nous, si nous pouvions joindre, à l'histoire de ses
exploits militaires, au moins quelques aperçus de son administration
et de son gouvernement! La pénurie de nos documents nous réduit
à ne presque rien connaître de ces sujets, qui prennent une place
capitale dans l'histoire de tant de souverains. C'est là ce qui rend la
vie de Clovis si difficile à écrire: elle finit chaque fois au retour d'une
campagne, c'est-à-dire là où les exigences de l'esprit moderne
voudraient la voir commencer.
Nous essayerons du moins, dans les pages qui vont suivre, de
grouper tous les renseignements qu'il a été possible de recueillir. Ce
sera la faute des matériaux et non celle de l'auteur, si le tableau
produit l'effet d'une mosaïque formée d'une multitude de fragments
rapportés.
De l'administration civile de Clovis, nous ne savons absolument rien.
Deux anecdotes, d'ailleurs fort légendaires, nous le montrent
conférant le duché de Melun à un de ses fidèles nommé
Aurélien[264], et le comté de Reims à un autre du nom d'Arnoul[265].
On n'a d'ailleurs pas besoin de ces indications pour admettre que
l'institution des ducs et des comtes de l'époque mérovingienne est
aussi ancienne que la dynastie elle-même.
[264] Eo tempore dilatavit Chlodovechus amplificans regnum suum usque
Sequanam. Sequenti tempore usque Ligere fluvio occupavit, accepitque Aurilianus
castrum Malidunensem omnemque ducatum regionis illius. Liber historiæ, c. 14.
Je ne garantis pas tout ce passage, que la présence du fabuleux Aurélien rend
justement suspect; mais j'admets, contre Junghans, p. 30, et Krusch, note de son
édition du Liber historiæ, p. 260, que l'auteur aura eu souvenance d'un comte de
Melun nommé Aurélien, et qu'il l'aura identifié avec le personnage de la légende.
Cet Aurélien historique était-il un contemporain de Clovis? On n'en peut rien
savoir.
[265] Ex Vita sancti Arnulfi martyris (dom Bouquet, III, p. 383).
Législateur, Clovis occupe dans les traditions de son peuple une

place qui n'est pas indigne du fondateur de l'État. La loi salique
n'existait jusqu'à lui que dans le texte germanique, arrêté par les
quatre prud'hommes de la vieille patrie. Selon le prologue de ce
célèbre document[266], il en fit faire, après son baptême, une
recension nouvelle, qu'il aura dépouillée de tout caractère païen.
Cette rédaction écrite en latin, sans doute à l'usage des habitants de
la Gaule romaine, a fait entièrement oublier l'ancienne version
germanique, et est seule arrivée jusqu'à nous, avec son escorte de
textes dérivés ou remaniés au cours des âges. Chose curieuse, pour
la Lex salica de Clovis, la terre franque, c'est le pays situé entre la
Loire et la forêt Charbonnière, c'est-à-dire la Gaule chrétienne et
civilisée qui était sa récente conquête. La France primitive, le pays
des vrais Francs germaniques, la terre de Clodion, de Mérovée et de
Childéric, ne compte plus, et l'on dirait quelle n'existe pas. Faut-il
donc croire que le roi des Francs soit devenu à tel point un étranger
pour sa propre race, qu'il n'ait plus même pris la peine de légiférer
pour elle? Non certes, et s'il n'est fait aucune mention de la mère
patrie dans le texte latin de la loi, c'est apparemment qu'elle restait
en possession de l'ancien texte germanique arrêté par les quatre
prud'hommes.
[266] V. la note suivante.
Le code élaboré par Clovis marque une nouvelle étape dans la voie
du progrès social chez les Francs. Il n'est pas la reproduction pure et
simple du texte germanique; il ne se contente pas non plus d'en
biffer les dispositions qui sentent trop l'idolâtrie, il le tient au courant,
si je puis ainsi parler, du développement total de la nation, devenue
un peuple civilisé depuis son introduction dans la Gaule romaine et
son baptême. «Ce qui était obscur dans le pacte, Clovis l'éclaira; ce
qui y manquait, il y pourvut[267].» Cette formule sommaire mais
expressive de la Loi salique nous laisse deviner une activité
législative qui a dû être considérable, mais que nous devons nous
résigner à ne connaître jamais.
[267] At ubi Deo favente rex Francorum Chlodeveus torrens et pulcher et primus
recepit catholicam baptismi, et quod minus in pactum habebatur idoneo per
proconsolis regis Chlodovechi et Hildeberti et Chlotarii fuit lucidius emendatum.
Prologue de la Loi salique. Pardessus, Loi salique, p. 345; Hessels et Kern, Lex
salica, p. 422.
Elle indique aussi ce que les monuments contemporains nous
montrent, à savoir, un prodigieux accroissement de la puissance
royale chez les Francs. Est-ce l'influence naturelle de ses conquêtes
et de ses victoires, est-ce la proximité de l'influence romaine, est-ce
le caractère sacré donné au pouvoir royal par la doctrine chrétienne,
ou bien plutôt ne sont-ce pas toutes ces raisons à la fois qui ont
placé le roi si haut au-dessus de son peuple? Il n'est plus le prince
tel que l'a connu la vieille Germanie; il est un maître dont le pouvoir
n'a pas de limites dans le droit, il est armé du ban, qui est la sanction
redoutable donnée par des pénalités spéciales à chacune de ses
volontés, il remanie et complète la législation avec une autorité
souveraine, et son præceptum suffit pour lui garantir l'obéissance.
Voilà la place conquise par le roi dans la vie du peuple franc. Celle
qu'il prend dans l'Église a un caractère spécial; il y exerce une
influence qui n'est égalée par nulle autre. Sans doute il n'est pas,
comme l'empereur, placé au-dessus d'elle pour la dominer, ni,
comme les rois ariens, en dehors d'elle pour la combattre. Il en fait
partie à la fois comme simple fidèle et comme souverain; fidèle, il
obéit à ses lois, il croit à sa doctrine; roi, et roi catholique, il écoute
les conseils de ses prélats, il la protège selon ses forces, il a sur sa
vie une action et une autorité qu'elle ne lui dispute pas.
Nous l'avons vu investi du droit de convoquer les conciles; mais ce
n'est pas tout. La première de ces assemblées qui se soit tenue
depuis sa conversion a subordonné à la volonté royale l'entrée des
hommes libres dans le clergé. En matière d'élections épiscopales,
sans jouir d'aucun droit canonique d'intervention, il dispose en fait
d'une influence considérable. Sans violer ni contester le libre
recrutement du sacerdoce, il y intervient avec une autorité à laquelle
tout le monde défère. Quand le roi catholique a dit quel homme il
veut voir mettre sur un siège épiscopal, il ne se trouve personne
pour être d'un autre avis, et de fait ce sera lui qui nommera l'évêque.
Le roi n'est-il pas lui-même membre de l'Église, et, si l'on peut ainsi
parler, son pouvoir électoral ne doit-il pas être en proportion des
intérêts qu'il représente? Nous le voyons, lors de la vacance des
sièges épiscopaux de Verdun et d'Auxerre, jeter les yeux sur des
hommes qu'il respecte, et leur offrir ces hautes charges, et c'est leur
refus seul qui empêche que sa volonté se fasse, mais en combien
d'autres occurrences elle aura eu force de loi! Ce qui semble pouvoir
être affirmé, c'est que, dans aucun cas, un siège épiscopal n'aurait
pu être donné contrairement à sa volonté. Au dire du biographe de
saint Sacerdos, ce prélat fut élevé au siège épiscopal de Limoges
par l'élection du clergé, aux acclamations du peuple, avec le
consentement du roi Clovis[268]. Voilà bien, désormais, les trois
éléments distincts qui constituent l'élection d'un évêque.
[268] Ex vita sancti Sacerdotis (dom Bouquet, III). Cette formule semble
empruntée au canon 10 du Ve concile d'Orléans en 549: cum voluntate regis, juxta
electionem cleri aut plebis (Maassen, Concilia p. 103). Mais il est manifeste que le
concile d'Orléans ne put que consacrer un état de choses antérieur, et il est
impossible de supposer que cet état de choses ne remonte pas au règne de
Clovis.
Un épisode bien authentique va nous montrer de fort près cette
situation de la royauté en face de l'Église, et la nature de l'influence
qui lui est reconnue. Sur la recommandation de Clovis, saint Remi
de Reims avait conféré les ordres sacrés à un certain Claudius. Cet
individu était probablement déjà suspect; après la mort du roi, il
donna un grand scandale. On voit qu'entre autres il avait
frauduleusement dépouillé de ses biens un nommé Celsus, et saint
Remi convient lui-même qu'il était coupable de sacrilège.
Néanmoins il intervint en sa faveur et demanda qu'il fût admis à la
pénitence, alors qu'aux termes du concile d'Orléans il devait être
excommunié. Cette indulgence lui valut d'amers reproches de la part
de trois évêques, Léon de Sens, Héraclius de Paris et Théodore
d'Auxerre. Autant qu'il est possible d'entrevoir leur attitude, ils
rendirent l'évêque de Reims responsable des fautes de son protégé;
ils lui firent notamment un devoir de rechercher et d'indemniser lui-
même les créanciers de Claudius; enfin, ils lui rappelèrent que si ce
malheureux avait pu jeter le discrédit sur sa robe, on le devait à la
pusillanimité de Remi, qui l'avait ordonné à la prière du roi et
contrairement aux canons. Dans sa réponse, qui nous a été
conservée, le saint se défend assez mollement sur la question du
fond; il convient d'ailleurs d'avoir déféré au désir de Clovis et
continue sur un ton énergique:
«Oui, j'ai donné la prêtrise à Claudius, non à prix d'or, mais sur le
témoignage du très excellent roi, qui était non seulement le
prédicateur, mais encore le défenseur de la foi. Vous m'écrivez que
sa demande n'était pas conforme aux canons. C'est le maître du
pays, c'est le gardien de la patrie, c'est le triomphateur des nations
qui me l'avait enjoint[269].»
[269] M. G. H., Epistolæ merovingici et karolini ævi, p. 114.
On ne prendra pas au pied de la lettre cette dernière expression,
inspirée au saint vieillard par le sentiment d'une détresse morale qu'il
ne parvient à cacher que d'une manière imparfaite à ses
contradicteurs. L'âpreté même de leurs reproches et la faiblesse de
ses excuses nous permettent de nous rendre un compte exact de la
situation qui est l'objet de cette correspondance. Clovis avait obtenu
de saint Remi un acte contraire à la législation canonique. On peut
mettre une bonne partie de la condescendance de l'évêque de
Reims sur le compte de ses relations spéciales avec Clovis. Le
pontife avait pour son royal filleul la tendresse d'un père, avec le
respect presque religieux qui lui faisait voir en Clovis l'instrument
manifeste de la Providence. C'était sa conquête à lui, c'était sa
gloire, c'était le fruit de ses sueurs. Toute sa pensée gravitait autour
de l'homme providentiel: qu'aurait-il refusé à son fils, à son
néophyte, à son roi? Il y a quelque chose de touchant à le voir, après
cinquante-trois ans de pontificat, obligé de défendre sa conduite
auprès de collègues plus jeunes que lui, et qui, comme il le leur
rappelle, lui devaient leur ordination. Mais ces confrères avaient pour
eux la lettre des canons, et ce débat entre évêques au sujet de
l'intervention du roi marque bien la distance qu'il y avait entre le droit
strict qui ne lui accordait rien, et la déférence qui lui cédait tout[270].
[270] Sur les élections épiscopales sous les Mérovingiens, il faut lire le bon
mémoire de M. Vacandard dans la Revue des Questions Historiques, t. LXIII
(1898), où est citée, p. 321, n. 1 et 2, la bibliographie antérieure.
Souvent même, c'est l'Église qui allait au-devant du roi, et qui le
sollicitait de trancher des questions, le prenant pour arbitre et
l'honorant de sa confiance. Lorsque saint Fridolin fut élu abbé de
Saint-Hilaire, à Poitiers, il hésita longtemps, nous dit son biographe,
à accepter cette dignité, malgré les instances de l'évêque saint
Adelfius; finalement, vaincu à demi par les prières de l'évêque, il lui
propose d'aller ensemble trouver le roi, pour qu'une affaire de telle
conséquence ne fût pas entreprise sans son concours. Et les voilà
qui partent tous les deux pour le palais royal, l'évêque à cheval,
comme l'exigeait son rang, l'abbé à pied, comme il faisait
d'habitude[271]. Ne voit-on pas comme un tableau en raccourci de
toutes les relations entre l'Église et l'État dans cet évêque et cet
abbé qui vont amicalement trouver le roi, pour le prier de les mettre
d'accord sur une question qui n'est pas de son ressort, mais qu'ils lui
soumettent par déférence et par respect?
[271] Ex vita sancti Fridolini (dom Bouquet, III, p. 388).
Un pareil degré de condescendance de la part de l'Église ne
s'expliquerait guère, si l'on ne savait qu'il était réciproque de la part
du roi. C'est la confiance qui formait la base des relations mutuelles.
Au lieu de délimiter anxieusement leurs frontières, les deux pouvoirs
semblaient s'inviter mutuellement à les franchir. Clovis convoquait
des conciles et intervenait dans les élections épiscopales; mais lui-
même, jusqu'à quel point ne se laissait-il pas inspirer, guider,
conseiller par les évêques? Toute sa politique intérieure, toute son
attitude vis-à-vis des indigènes, c'est l'épiscopat qui l'a dictée, et l'on
a vu plus haut que ce sont des évêques qui ont suggéré la
convocation du concile national. En un mot, son action sur l'Église a
pour contrepoids une action non moins énergique de l'Église sur
l'État. Les évêques composaient son conseil: saint Remi resta
jusqu'à la fin en grand crédit auprès de lui, et on nous dit que saint
Mélaine, évêque de Rennes, compta également parmi ses
conseillers les plus écoutés.
Toute l'hagiographie du temps est remplie des marques de respect
qu'il donna aux évêques. Les récits qui nous en ont gardé le
souvenir n'ont pas tous le degré d'authenticité nécessaire pour
s'imposer à la croyance du lecteur; mais dans l'impuissance où nous
sommes d'y faire le partage exact du vrai et du faux, quoi de plus
légitime que de les reproduire dans leur simplicité, comme des
documents qui ont droit tout au moins à l'attention de l'histoire? C'est
pour cette raison que nous avons cru devoir réserver une place, sur
ces pages, aux épisodes suivants.
Étant en Aquitaine, Clovis entendit parler des vertus de saint
Germier, évêque de Toulouse. Il le fit venir auprès de lui, l'invita à sa
table, et prit grand plaisir à sa conversation. Le saint distribua des
eulogies au roi et à ses grands; eux lui confessèrent leurs péchés et
écoutèrent ses exhortations à la pénitence. Le roi, voyant la sainteté
du prélat, le supplia de prier pour lui, et lui dit:
«Demandez-moi ce que vous voudrez de mes biens, et mes
serviteurs vous accompagneront pour vous le donner.
—Donnez-moi seulement, reprit le saint, dans le territoire de
Toulouse, autant de terre que mon manteau pourra en recouvrir
auprès de Saint-Saturnin, pour que je puisse dormir en paix sous la
protection de ce patron céleste.»
Mais le roi ne voulut pas se laisser vaincre en générosité: il donna
au saint la terre d'Ox avec six milles à la ronde, et, pour son
tombeau, il lui accorda tout le territoire que sept paires de bœufs
pourraient labourer en un jour. Toutes ces libéralités furent
consignées dans des chirographes que le roi et ses grands
scellèrent de leurs sceaux. Le roi y ajouta cinq cents sicles d'or et
d'argent, des croix d'or, des calices d'argent avec leurs patènes, trois
crosses épiscopales en or et en argent, trois couronnes dorées, et
autant de voiles d'autel en byssus. C'est ainsi qu'après être resté
avec le roi pendant une vingtaine de jours, le saint partit chargé de
trésors: le roi l'embrassa en lui faisant ses adieux, et se
recommanda à lui comme un fils[272].
[272] Ex Vita sancti Germerii (dom Bouquet, III, p. 386). Voir l'appendice.
Auch, la vieille cité métropolitaine de la Novempopulanie, a
enveloppé dans un récit aux couleurs bibliques le souvenir qu'elle a
gardé du héros franc. Lorsqu'il approcha de cette ville, dit une
tradition, l'archevêque saint Perpet alla à sa rencontre, et lui
présenta le pain et le vin, comme autrefois Melchisédech à
Abraham. Le roi récompensa magnifiquement le vieux pontife: il lui
donna toute la ville d'Auch avec ses faubourgs, et plusieurs églises;
il offrit également à l'église Sainte-Marie sa tunique et son manteau
de guerre; il lui offrit encore une aiguière d'or, et cent sous d'or pour
faire des couronnes de lumière; il lui assigna de plus un revenu de
cent douze sous d'or à toucher sur le fisc royal; il lui donna enfin
l'église royale de Saint-Pierre-de-Vic. Reconnaissante de tant de
libéralités, l'Église d'Auch célébrait tous les ans, au 3 juin, l'office
double de sainte Clotilde[273].
[273] La plus ancienne attestation de ce récit se trouve dans un acte de 1292,
consigné au registre des enquêtes du parlement de Paris et reproduit par R.
Choppin, De jure monachorum, p. 307; il figure aussi dans un extrait du cartulaire
du chapitre d'Auch, nº 132, reproduit en appendice, nº 7, dans de Brugèles,
Chronique ecclésiastique du diocèse d'Auch, Toulouse, 1746. Voir aussi Baiole,
Histoire sacrée d'Aquitaine, Cahors, 1644, p. 332; Loubens, Histoire de l'ancienne
province de Gascogne, Paris, 1839, pp. 90-91; Monlezun, Histoire de la
Gascogne, Auch, 1846, t. I, p. 189; Lafforgue, Histoire de la ville d'Auch, Auch,
1851. Selon Monlezun, l. c., une des couronnes faites avec l'or offert par le roi a
subsisté jusqu'en 1793; on l'appelait la couronne de Clovis.
Tournai racontait un épisode non moins intéressant. Attiré par la
réputation de l'évêque, saint Éleuthère, Clovis serait venu revoir la
vieille capitale de ses ancêtres, et assister à la prédication du prélat.
Mais une inspiration divine révéla au saint le tourment secret du roi:
il avait péché après son baptême, et il n'osait confesser sa faute.
Profondément ému, le roi essaya vainement de contester la vérité de
cette révélation que l'évêque lui communiqua; il versa des larmes, et
le supplia de prier pour lui. Et voilà que le lendemain, pendant que
l'évêque célébrait le divin sacrifice aux intentions de Clovis, un ange
du Seigneur lui apparut au milieu d'une lumière éblouissante, et lui
annonça que ses prières étaient exaucées. En même temps il lui
remettait un écrit contenant la faute secrète du roi. Clovis rendit des
actions de grâces à Dieu et à saint Éleuthère, et ne quitta Tournai
qu'après avoir comblé l'évêque de ses pieuses largesses[274].
[274] Vita sancti Eleutherii auctior dans les Acta Sanctorum des Bollandistes, 20
février, t. III, pp. 183-190, et Ghesquière, Acta Sanctorum Belgii, t. I, pp. 475-500.
Cette attitude vis-à-vis de l'épiscopat s'expliquerait déjà à suffisance
par des raisons d'ordre politique supérieur. C'étaient les évêques qui
avaient aidé le roi des Francs à établir son pouvoir; c'est par eux et
avec eux qu'il gouvernait. Il le savait, et sa déférence pour eux était
antérieure à sa conversion. Mais, après le baptême, des motifs de
piété s'ajoutèrent aux considérations de la politique pour augmenter
son respect envers les évêques. Il vit en eux des hommes qui
avaient reçu l'Esprit-Saint, et qui étaient les dispensateurs des
faveurs célestes. Leur science, leur sagesse, leur piété, leurs vertus,
la majesté de cette vie sacerdotale qui les élevait au-dessus de la
terre et qui faisait d'eux des hommes surnaturels, tout cela agissait
puissamment sur son âme, religieuse et impressionnable comme
toute âme de barbare. Il se sentait plus rapproché du Dieu qu'il
adorait dans leur société, et il comptait sur leurs prières comme sur
le moyen le plus efficace d'arriver au ciel. L'épiscopat, qui était le
point d'appui de sa politique, était aussi la sûre direction de sa
conscience de chrétien. Comme sa vie publique, sa vie privée
semblait la vérification de cette parole qu'il prononça un jour: «Où
serait l'espoir de vaincre, si nous offensions saint Martin?» Entendez
ici, par saint Martin, l'épiscopat de la Gaule.
Les mêmes sentiments, au dire de la légende, dictaient la conduite
du roi vis-à-vis de toutes les personnes qui, sans occuper un rang
dans la hiérarchie ecclésiastique, se distinguaient par l'éminence de
leurs vertus. Il croyait, avec tous ses contemporains, à l'efficacité de
leurs prières; il était convaincu qu'elles avaient le don d'opérer des
miracles. Lui-même, au dire d'un hagiographe, fut favorisé d'une
guérison miraculeuse obtenue par l'intercession d'un vénérable
solitaire. C'était la vingt-cinquième année de son règne, celle qui
allait être rendue mémorable par la conquête de l'Aquitaine. Il y avait
deux ans qu'il était en proie à la maladie, et ni les prières de son
clergé ni les soins de ses médecins ne parvenaient à le soulager.
Enfin, l'un de ces derniers, nommé Tranquilinus, conseilla au roi de
faire venir Séverin, abbé de Saint-Maurice en Valais, homme doué
de l'esprit de Dieu, et dont les prières obtenaient une multitude de
guérisons miraculeuses. Aussitôt le roi fit partir son chambellan
Transoarius pour Agaune, et le saint, déférant à ses prières, apparut
au chevet du royal malade comme plus tard saint François de Paule
auprès du lit de Louis XI. Après avoir adressé au ciel de ferventes
prières, il ôta son manteau, en revêtit le roi, et à l'instant la fièvre
abandonna le malade. Clovis, plein de reconnaissance, tomba aux
pieds du saint, et le pria de prendre dans son trésor toutes les
sommes qu'il voulait pour les distribuer aux pauvres; il lui offrit aussi
de faire relâcher tous les coupables qui se trouvaient enfermés dans
les prisons[275]. On veut que l'église Saint-Séverin de Paris, qui est
sous le patronage de l'abbé d'Agaune, ait été élevée en souvenir de
cet heureux événement.
[275] Ex Vita sancti Severini Abbatis Agaunensis (dom Bouquet, III, p. 392.) Ce
récit est loin d'être garanti, bien qu'il en soit souvent fait état même par des
historiens peu tendres à l'endroit des légendes, notamment par Junghans, p. 77,
n. 1, par W. Schultze, Das Merovingische Frankenreich, p. 72, et en dernier lieu
par Arnold, Cæsarius von Arelate, p. 242. Voir l'Appendice.
D'autres saints personnages, au dire de la légende, ont été en
rapports intimes avec Clovis. Saint Fridolin de Poitiers, admis à sa
table, a réparé miraculeusement une belle coupe de verre, qui s'était
cassée en tombant des mains du roi au moment où il la présentait
au saint[276]. Un saint ermite du nom de Léonard, qui demeurait
dans la forêt de Panvain, près de Limoges, fit la connaissance du roi
dans des circonstances fort dramatiques. Clotilde, qui était venue
résider avec son époux dans le château de cette forêt, était
menacée de périr dans les douleurs de l'enfantement, et Clovis au
désespoir implora le pieux solitaire de venir à son aide. Léonard se
mit en prières, et la reine fut sauvée par miracle[277].
[276] Ex Vita sancti Fridolini (dom Bouquet, III, p. 388).
[277] Arbellot, Vie de saint Léonard, solitaire en Limousin, Paris, 1863. Les pages
277-289 contiennent le texte d'une vie inédite de saint Léonard, d'après plusieurs
manuscrits dont un du onzième siècle.
Sans doute, la plupart de ces récits ont été embellis par la pieuse
imagination des hagiographes, et il n'est pas interdit de croire que
les épisodes qui sont à la fois les plus extraordinaires et les moins
prouvés appartiennent au domaine de la fiction pure.
Ce qui se dégage des plus authentiques, c'est l'intimité des rapports
entre le roi et les saints, c'est la justesse de l'instinct qui poussait la
royauté à se rapprocher de ceux qui représentaient le mieux les
aspirations chrétiennes de leur peuple. Avec un admirable sentiment
des vrais intérêts de sa couronne, Clovis se mêlait familièrement,
sans crainte de compromettre son prestige, aux hommes humbles et
pauvres revêtus d'une majesté supérieure par le respect public, et le
nimbe de leur sainteté jetait une partie de son éclat sur le front du
souverain. Rien n'a plus contribué à sa popularité que l'amitié des
saints. Les actes de clémence qu'ils lui inspiraient affermissaient son
pouvoir en lui ouvrant les cœurs. Bien des fois, saint Remi et sainte
Geneviève arrachèrent au rude justicier la grâce des malheureux qui
remplissaient les prisons publiques. Parmi ceux que menaçait sa
vengeance, il y avait un grand seigneur du nom d'Euloge, qui se
réfugia dans l'église Notre-Dame de Reims: à l'intercession de Remi,
le roi lui laissa la vie et la possession de ses biens[278]. Au dire d'un
hagiographe, l'évêque aurait même obtenu du roi que chaque fois
qu'il passerait par la ville de Reims ou par son territoire, tous les
prisonniers seraient aussitôt mis en liberté, et, ajoute-t-il, cet usage
se conserve encore aujourd'hui[279].
[278] Hincmar Vita sancti Remigii, dans les Acta Sanctorum des Bollandistes, 1er
octobre, t. I, p. 153 A.
[279] Vie de saint Léonard, éditée par le chanoine Arbellot, c. 3.
Les vastes ressources de la couronne permirent au roi de témoigner
de la manière la plus efficace sa bienveillance à l'Église en la
comblant de ses dons, en venant à son aide dans ses œuvres de
charité et dans ses créations de tout genre. Il faut se souvenir que la
générosité était la première vertu d'un roi germanique. Sa main
devait toujours être ouverte, excepté quand elle brandissait l'épée. Il
passait sa vie à faire des cadeaux, à distribuer à ses amis l'or
travaillé sous forme de bracelets à tours multiples, dont il détachait
les morceaux, et, pour la poésie barbare, il était avant tout le briseur
d'anneaux. Lorsqu'avec les pièces de métal précieux entassées
dans ses trésors, il put disposer aussi des domaines sans nombre
que la conquête avait fait tomber entre ses mains, alors il eut de
nouveaux moyens d'être généreux, et la série des donations de
terres commença. L'Église fut au premier rang des amis qui
participèrent à ces libéralités. On peut dire, sans crainte de se
tromper, que tous les diocèses eurent leur part[280]. Après la
conquête de la Gaule romaine, après celle de la Gaule visigothique,
il s'ouvrit comme deux phases d'abondance qui furent employées à
prodiguer les richesses aux églises. Les actes du concile d'Orléans
parlent expressément des libéralités royales faites ou promises à
tous les diocèses[281]. L'hagiographie ne nous mentionne pas une
seule fois les relations du roi avec quelque saint sans nous faire
connaître les cadeaux dont il le combla. Nous l'avons vu prodiguer
ses dons aux églises Saint-Martin de Tours et Saint-Hilaire de
Poitiers; nous l'avons vu enrichir aussi généreusement saint Germier
de Toulouse et saint Perpet d'Auch; nous savons avec quelle
libéralité il aida saint Eptade à racheter les captifs. Il ne fut pas
moins prodigue envers saint Mélaine de Rennes, qui put faire une
multitude de bonnes œuvres avec les ressources que le roi mettait à
sa disposition[282]. L'église de Vannes se glorifiait de devoir à ses
pieuses largesses le trésor de reliques qu'elle conservait depuis les
jours de saint Paterne, son premier évêque[283]. L'église de Nantes
montrait avec orgueil, dès le douzième siècle, la charte contenant
les faveurs dont l'avait comblée le premier roi de France[284]. Ce
serait une tâche fastidieuse que de relever, dans les biographes et
les chroniqueurs, les récits souvent légendaires qui nous ont
conservé la trace de toutes ces générosités, et il suffit de dire d'une
manière générale que Clovis partagea largement avec l'Église les
richesses considérables qui affluaient de toutes parts dans son
trésor et dans son domaine.
[280] Illi (il s'agit surtout de Clovis) monasteria et ecclesias ditaverunt; isti (il s'agit
de ses petits-fils) eas diruunt ac subvertunt. Grégoire de Tours, iv, 48.
[281] De oblationibus vel agris quos domnus noster rex ecclesiis suo munere
conferre dignatus est, vel adhuc non habentibus Deo inspirante contulerit, ipsorum
agrorum vel clericorum immunitate concessa, id esse justissimum definimus ut...
Sirmond, Concilia Galliæ, I, p. 179; Maassen, Concilia ævi merov., I, p. 4.
[282] Vita sancti Melanii, dans les Acta Sanctorum des Bollandistes. Sur les divers
textes de cette vie, voir l'Appendice.
[283] Un sermon prêché dans la cathédrale de Nancy au douzième siècle et
conservé dans le manuscrit 9093 latin de la bibliothèque nationale à Paris contient
le passage suivant: Circa initia etiam hujus nascentis ecclesiæ, divinæ
misericordiæ dulcor in hoc se aperuit quod Clodovæus rex Francorum
illustrissimus per beatum Paternum patronum nostrum transmisit huic ecclesiæ
desiderabilem thesaurum videlicet etc. Suit une énumération de reliques. V. A. de
la Borderie, Histoire de Bretagne, t. I. p. 204. note 2 et p. 331.
[284] V. dans Dom Morice, Mémoires pour servir de preuves à l'histoire de
Bretagne, t. I, p. 547, le texte de la charte de Louis-le-Gros, datée de 1123, dans
laquelle sont rappelées les libéralités de Clovis; on y lit: «Quoniam vir venerabilis
Bricius Namneticæ sedis episcopus præsentiam nostram non absque magno
labore itineris humiliter adiit et præcepta antiquorum et venerabilium Francorum
regum Karoli, Clodovæi et filii ipsius Clotarii attulit et ostendit, etc. L'authenticité de
cette charte, contestée par Travers, Histoire de la ville et du comté de Nantes, I, p.
244 et par M. C. Port, Dictionnaire de Maine-et-Loire, t. II, s. v. Loué, est défendue
par M. L. Maître, Étude critique sur la charte du roi Louis VI, Rennes 1887, et par
M. A. Luchaire, Louis VI le Gros, Annales de sa vie et de son règne, pp. 153, 323
et suivantes. Au surplus, les défenseurs de l'authenticité ne sont pas d'accord sur
la personne de ce Clovis, père de Clotaire, car cette désignation convient aussi
bien à Clovis II qu'à Clovis Ier; bien plus, si l'on admet qu'ici Clodovæus équivaut à
la forme Hludovicus usitée au onzième siècle, on peut penser à l'une des séries
royales Charlemagne, Louis le Débonnaire et Lothaire, ou encore Charles le
Simple, Louis d'Outre-Mer, Lothaire. M. Luchaire penche pour une de ces
dernières hypothèses, M. Maître, o. c. et M. Orieux (Bulletin de la Société
archéologique de Nantes, t. 39, 1898, p. 59), pensent à Clovis Ier. Selon moi, le
rédacteur de l'acte, authentique ou non, n'a pu penser qu'à un Clovis, et je suis
porté à croire que c'est Clovis Ier.
De tous les prélats sur lesquels il fit pleuvoir ainsi les preuves de sa
munificence, le plus favorisé fut naturellement saint Remi de Reims.
Dès le neuvième siècle, nous entendons la tradition énumérer les
dons qu'il tenait de son généreux filleul. Ils consistaient surtout en
domaines territoriaux, répartis dans plusieurs provinces de la
France. Le saint ne voulut en garder que quelques-uns, situés dans
la partie orientale du royaume, et distribua le reste aux autres
églises, pour qu'on ne pût pas lui reprocher de faire de l'amitié du roi
une source de profits[285]. Toutefois l'église de Reims gardait dans
son trésor un encensoir et un calice émaillé provenant, selon la
tradition, d'un grand vase en argent que Clovis avait donné à saint
Remi, pour en faire ce qu'il voulait[286].
[285] Hincmar, Vita sancti Remigii, 66, dans les Bollandistes, p. 149 C.

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Hans Georg Gadamer The

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More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10197

ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic)

© The Author(s) 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

The purpose of this book is to introduce readers to the work of Hans-Georg

Nowhere does Gadamer spell out comprehensively and systematically what he

I have not included a full bibliography of Gadamer’s publications, which would

4.3 ‘The Problem of Method’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long

Hans-Georg Gadamer was born on 11 February, 1900, in Marburg, in Southern

© The Author(s) 2017 1

continuity and very survival of what he saw as a great philosophical tradition

1.2 Childhood and Youth

1.3 The Long Apprenticeship

autumn 1923 where Heidegger had been appointed to an extraordinary professor-

1.4 Internal Exile

Having successfully completed his habilitation Gadamer became a privatdozent

The second incident relates to Gadamer’s voluntary attendance in the autumn of

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1.6 Late Flourishing

Bernstein, R. J. (2002). The constellation of hermeneutics, critical theory and deconstruction. In R.

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Hermeneutics is primarily concerned with the question of how we understand the

© The Author(s) 2017 15

2.2 From Vico to Gadamer

In mid-18th Century Milan an obscure professor of rhetoric named Giambattista

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