Introduction

The name Hans-Georg Gadamer is intimately bound up with philosophical hermeneutics. Like only a few other contemporary currents, hermeneutics has exerted a widespread influence that goes well beyond the limits of philosophy and that has a depth and range difficult to evaluate. From aesthetics to literary criticism, from theology to jurisprudence, from sociology to psychiatry, there is almost no area of the “humanities” without a hermeneutic substratum. Not even epistemology has remained neutral. Assessing the widely differentiated, international effects of hermeneutics within philosophy is still more difficult. Gadamer was not only a witness of, but also an interlocutor for, the most important philosophical trends in the last century. Beyond the consequences of the many debates, his openness promoted the spread of hermeneutics in Europe and across North America. By virtue of this success, philosophical hermeneutics has become synonymous with “continental philosophy” in general.

A great number of books, essays, dissertations, conferences, debates, and films have been dedicated to Gadamer. His principal work, Truth and Method, has been translated into thirteen languages, including English, French, Spanish, and Italian, in addition to Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Few other philosophers have been so present on the public stage, and few have spoken so often on the most varied and topical issues. In an era that is becoming less and less philosophical, Gadamer bore witness to the necessity of philosophy as a critical vigilance and the unconditional freedom of questioning.

The difficulty of writing a monograph about Gadamer lies not only in giving an account of all this. In the course of his long life Gadamer wrote a great deal, as the ten volumes of his Collected Works indicate. Even his well-known book Truth and Method, a goal that he reached with difficulty, represents only one stage on his way from phenomenology to dialectics. The fullness of what he went on to produce, over more than forty years, should be neither neglected nor ignored, for if it is, the rich unfolding and differentiation of his philosophical perspective will be overlooked.

The importance usually attributed to Truth and Method has overshadowed not only the later writings, but also the earlier ones. Hence the decisive role that Greek philosophy plays for hermeneutics has not been sufficiently noted. There are only a few traces of Greek philosophy in Truth and Method, where the main concern is to outline a hermeneutic philosophy against the background of both classical hermeneutics and Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity. Nevertheless, Gadamer himself judged his work on Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, as well as his studies on Greek thought, as “the best and most original part” of his philosophical activity.¹ Considering the entire history of his work, it could be said that Gadamer’s magnum opus is perhaps the book he never wrote on Plato.

Gadamer would certainly also have wished to publish a more complete volume than the one that appeared in English under the title Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, and to elaborate on the many essays—more than twenty—that he dedicated to Heidegger, only some of which were included in the volume Heidegger’s Ways.

There is a further difficulty that a monograph on Gadamer should not avoid, and that is his tormented relationship to writing. In order to get around his Socratic resistance to writing, he preferred the form of the lecture, the talk, or the debate. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost everything he wrote is based on dialogue.

This inclination is also reflected in Gadamer’s style. His texts, above all those of the last period, are written in lucid and striking prose, which makes them accessible to a broad audience. Undoubtedly his texts suffer in the transition from the oral to the written form. However, his way of writing is always careful to interrogate everyday language and to avoid rigid terminology. Without being conceptually imprecise: everything Gadamer said could have been said differently; his texts remain evidently incomplete and open-ended.

Yet this open-endedness, which may cause irritation, is not a flaw for Gadamer. On the contrary, he justifies it theoretically. On closer inspection, the difficulty is not really a difficulty: his impatience with writing is dictated by both personal and philosophical motivations. It is impossible to say where the personal strays into the philosophical, since his philosophy bears the stamp of his individuality. The choice of dialogue is thus not at all arbitrary.

One cannot speak of “philosophical texts” in the same way one speaks of “literary texts.” The philosophical text, whose conceptual fixity may tend toward metaphysical rigidity, begins to speak anew through the word that, by questioning, interprets it. Hence dialogue becomes the form of philosophy for Gadamer. Here the Socratic inspiration of philosophical hermeneutics comes to light.

Gadamer remained faithful to this inspiration, not only for the sake of coherence but because it would not have been possible for him to be any other way. If, in order to philosophize, Heidegger needed to withdraw to the Black Forest, then Gadamer needed to go to the agor, to let himself be overtaken and surprised by the encounters with others. Gadamer could not think without an interlocutor, without the dialectic of question and answer. The labor of the concept was unimaginable for him without the word of the other. That is why his philosophy shows the traces of the dialogue from which it sprang, and differs according to the interlocutor, situation, and theme. “‘Hermeneutic’ philosophy”—Gadamer points out—“does not understand itself as an ‘absolute’ position, but as a path of experiencing.” For it “there is no higher principle than this: holding oneself open to the conversation” (RPJ 36/GW2 505). This is possible only for a philosophy of finitude that is aware of its finitude, yet does not renounce the infinite and makes infinite dialogue the very form of its philosophizing.

Without reducing the significance of Truth and Method or diminishing the value of the published writings, it is necessary to emphasize that Gadamer’s philosophy does not exhaust itself in its written form. This does not mean that there are esoteric doctrines. However, what he says of Plato can also be said of Gadamer himself: everything in his philosophy is protreptic; everything points beyond itself. Since nothing can be definitive, philosophical research must remain open and should neither become fixed nor find systematic form, at least within the limits of a written text. Philosophical research points back to dialogue, but also to the philosopher’s decisions and lived experience.

Whoever met Gadamer knows how true this description is, but also how difficult and yet necessary it is to render all of this in a monograph. Philosophy was never merely a profession for him. According to the close connection between theory and practice that guides hermeneutics, everything that Gadamer said and did, along with how he acted, formed a unity. This monograph will presume the Socratic harmony of logos and rgon, word and deed—in order to let the unity of his philosophy emerge—with the awareness that, despite the intervening distance, every portrait is an idealization.

Notes

1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Preface to the Italian Edition,” in Studi platonici, ed. Giovanni Moretto (Torino: Marietti, 1983), 11.