Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer (Marburg, 1900 - Heidelberg, 2002) was a German philosopher in the continental tradition, best known for renewing philosophical hermeneutics. His name is tied to Truth and Method (1960), where he argued that understanding is not a procedure that can be reduced to a fixed method but a basic feature of human existence, shaped by history, language and dialogue. His long academic life ran through the Nazi period, the postwar years and the division of Germany, and those experiences left a mark on both his career and some of his debates.

Gadamer was the son of a pharmaceutical chemist who later became rector of the University of Marburg. Against his father's wishes that he study the natural sciences, he turned to the humanities. He studied in Breslau with Richard Hönigswald and then in Marburg with the neo-Kantians Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann, and he completed his doctorate in 1922 with a dissertation on pleasure in Plato's dialogues. Shortly afterwards he met Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, then a promising young lecturer who had not yet gained a chair, and followed him to Marburg. Heidegger's influence moved Gadamer away from neo-Kantianism and gave his thought a distinctive direction. He habilitated in 1929 and taught in Marburg for much of the early 1930s.

The Nazi years are the most debated part of his story. Gadamer never joined the party and held no significant political office, but he joined the National Socialist Teachers League in 1933 and signed a vow of loyalty to Hitler that same year. Richard Wolin has pointed to a lecture given during the occupation of Paris on Herder's idea of the people, while Teresa Orozco has argued that his involvement was greater than previously assumed. Other scholars, such as Jean Grondin, have rejected such readings and stressed that there is no trace of antisemitism in his work. After the war he was judged not to have been compromised by the regime and held posts in Leipzig. In 1949 he moved to Heidelberg to succeed Karl Jaspers, and he stayed there until his retirement in 1968 and until his death.

In his view, human consciousness is formed by history, language and tradition, so every act of interpretation begins from prejudices or pre-understandings that the text itself can correct. He criticized the attempt to model the humanities on the natural sciences, and also the aim of Dilthey and Schleiermacher to recover the author's original intention. For Gadamer, interpreting means fusing horizons: the horizon of the text and that of the reader, each with its own history. His studies of Plato and Greek culture remained close to his hermeneutic work throughout.

His influence reaches literary theory, the history of ideas, theology, law and the study of the human sciences. His long debate with Jürgen Habermas about whether social criticism can stand outside tradition never reached a conclusion, but it led to a warm personal relationship. His encounter with Jacques Derrida bore less fruit, since the two thinkers had little common ground. Gianni Vattimo was among his students, and he carried hermeneutic thought forward in Italian philosophy.