Hans-Georg Gadamer quotes
Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher, best known for his work in hermeneutics and philosophical interpretation. His most influential book, "Truth and Method," reshaped modern understandings of how we interpret texts and traditions. He had a profound impact on philosophy, literary theory, and the humanities worldwide. Here are 25 of his quotes:
The hermeneutic consciousness, which must be awakened and kept awake, recognizes that in the age of science philosophy's claim of superiority has something chimerical and unreal about it. But though the will of man is more than ever intensifying its criticism of what has gone before to the point of becoming a utopian or eschatological consciousness, the hermeneutic consciousness seeks to confront that will with something of the truth of remembrance: with what is still and ever again real.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
In fact history does not belong to us but rather we 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. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self awareness of the Individual is only a flickering in the closed circuit of historical life. That is why the prejudices of an individual are - much more than that individual's judgments - the historical reality of his being.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed")-e. g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows that from the forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it. What is said in it constitutes the common world in which we live. ... The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
The work of art that says something confronts us itself. That is, it expresses something in such a way that what is said is like a discovery, a disclosure of something previously concealed. The element of surprise is based on this. "So true, so filled with being" [So wahr, so seiend] is not something one knows any other way. Everything familiar is eclipsed. To understand what the work of art says to us is therefore a self-encounter.
Hans-Georg Gadamer