Hans-Georg Gadamer

The enigma of health : the art of healing in a scientific age

Preface. 1. Theory, Technology, Praxis. 2. Apologia for the Art of Healing. 3. The Problem of Intelligence. 4. The Experience of Death. 5. Bodily Experience and the Limits of Objectificaton. 6. Between Nature and Art. 7. Philosophy and Practical Medicine. 8. On the Enigmatic Character of Health. 9. Authority and Critical Freedom. 10. Treatment and Dialogue. 11. Life and Soul. 12. Anxiety and Anxieties. 13. Hermeneutics and Psychiatry. Index.

Hermeneutics and Social Science

asked to describe from my own point of view the role and relevance of hermeneutics for the problem of society and social life. I shall begin with a consideration of the conditions and the historical constellation under which the social sciences in our epoch are organized and working. In our century, particularly in the second half of our century, the social sciences have been given a special challenge. When one compares the impact of both philosophy (notably British Empiricism and German Idealism) and the social sciences in the same epoch, one is forced to say that the influence of the former was extremely weak. Of course, there was the development of theoretical economics and the first steps toward a thematization of society as burgerliche Gesellschaft. In general, however, this theoretical work did not have much influence upon the practical organization of our society. The basis of our social life in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century had been sustained by the Christian tradition, its secularization and the consequent secular formation of society. However, by the middle of our century, the breakdown of these traditions caused by the two wars and the connected shift in the balance of power and the political equilibrium fostered a new desire and inner longing in our society to find in science a substitute for lost orientations a very dangerous situation. While the serious scientist knows the restrictive conditions of his thematization of social appearances and givens, the makers of public opinion can distort the real work of scientists in view of the inner needs and

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

In proposing to discuss the hermeneutics of suspicion, I clearly had in mind the usage of Paul Ricoeur; Ricoeur who never opposes without somehow reconciling, could not avoid opposing — at least in a first approach — hermeneutics in the classic sense, of interpreting the meaning of texts, to the radical critique of and suspicion against understanding and interpreting. This radical suspicion was inaugurated by Nietzsche and had its most striking instances in the critique of ideology on the one hand, and psychoanalysis on the other. Now it is necessary to examine the relationship between traditional hermeneutics, its philosophical situation, and this radical form of interpretation, which is almost at the opposite end of the spectrum of interpretation — because it challenges the claims to validity of ideas and ideologies. I should begin by saying that the problem of hermeneutical suspicion can be understood in a more radical or wider sense. Is not every form of hermeneutics a form of overcoming an awareness of suspicion? Husserl himself tried to found his own phenomenology on the basis of the Cartesian way of doubting the appearances of reliability of first impressions. That was a consequence of the modern sciences, so there is no question that the problem of suspicion has also this place in our context.

Classical and Philosophical Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is a mantic art involved in the translation of the unintelligible into the intelligible. However, within modern contexts the term possesses a more methodological sense - ‘a universal doctrine for the interpretation of signs’. This conception of hermeneutics was given impetus during the Renaissance with the quest for theological objectivity, but it was with Schleiermacher and other philosophers of the Romantic movement that hermeneutics was viewed as a universal ‘dialogical’ condition. The Romantic conception of hermeneutics was psychologized by Dilthey and re-founded upon the principle of consciousness. With Heidegger became conceived as an ontological phenomenon identical to Existenz itself. For Gadamer, hermeneutics criticizes the ‘pale abstractions’ of Enlightenment conceptions of philosophy for neglecting the work of concepts in philosophy; concepts that have their origins in the self-critical communicative movement of human interpretation.

Subjectivity and intersubjectivity, subject and person

The concept of intersubjectivity has become a familiar problem in the larger Husserlian program of a transcendental phenomenology. In Husserl’s later thought, it plays almost the role of an “experimentum crucis.” It is not only that the bulk of manuscripts on this theme have by now been published in three enormous volumes; but more importantly, it is exactly this problem which actually led to new developments under the heading “phenomenology of the life-world.” This began already at the end of the forties, when Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz envisioned in the concept of the lifeworld a shift away from the principle of transcendental subjectivity and a promising approach towards entirely new developments. They sought to make the concept of ‘lifeworld’ fruitful for a foundation of the social sciences ‐ a concept which had been taken up in various ways in American social philosophy. Thus we have good reason to pay particular attention to the theme of intersubjectivity. There are, however, also good reasons to want to recognize the Husserlian program of transcendental phenomenology for its consistency and radicality. Yet one must be critical of the use that Husserl himself made of the approach to the problem of intersubjectivity for the phenomenology of the life-world. 2 And one must not forget that the later Husserl never spoke of turning away from transcendental idealism. He held, rather, that the real achievement of phenomenology lay in the foundation of transcendental philosophy. In opposition to the leading school of Neo-Kantianism, the Marburg school, he of course insisted with great confidence that his phenomenological work would furnish an effective foundation for the transcendental system of thought. It is now quite clear to us that Neo-Kantianism, despite its own selfunderstanding, was in truth never a real return to Kant. This became clear from the further development and dissolution of Neo-Kantianism. Neo-Kantianism was much more a return to Fichte, and thus could in the end lead to Hegel, and make the concept of a “system of philosophy” familiar in

Hermeneutics Versus Science? Three German Views

1. On the circle of understanding / Hans-Georg Gadamer -- 2. Mythopoetic inversion in Rilkes Duino elegies / Hans-Georg Gadamer -- 3. Walther von der Vogelweides lyric of dream-love and Quasar 3C 273 / Wolfgang Stegmeuller -- 4. Literary-critical interpretation--psychoanalytic interpretations / Ernst Konrad Specht.

Language and Understanding(1970)

Understanding is a ‘language event’ founded upon a ‘silent agreement’ between participants in a conversation. This silent agreement, built up of conversational aspects held in common, is what makes social solidarity possible and shows that the methods of science are an inappropriate starting point for our self-understanding. However, with the advent of industrial technical civilization, the question arises whether understanding has come under the control of a centrally steered communication system where language is a consciously wielded instrument of politics with a corresponding loss of free insight and critical judgement. Only via a hermeneutic logic of words, which begins from recognition that words get their meaning from the open space of living conversation, can critical judgement be defended in the face of the authority of science and technology.

The Science of the Life-World

Although the science of the life-world is the most discussed part of the doctrine of the late Husserl, there seems to be a permanent necessity to examine what is novel in this doctrine. Does it open new paths of investigation or is it only a new and clearer outline of the programmatic intentions phenomenology had from the beginning? It is a specific character of the Husserlian style of thinking to correct himself and to repeat himself in such a manner that they are indistinguishable. Therefore the introduction of the concept of Lebenswelt wavers between a mere description of the authentic approach which Husserl chose for his phenomenological investigation, and which distinguished him and his philosophical interest from the dominant Neo-Kantian and positivistic scientism, and a new self-criticism which may not attain the great goal for which Husserl longed throughout all his work, namely to found philosophy as a rigorous science, but which would make this goal appear attainable. To this we may add that the self-interpretation of Husserl is by no means a trustworthy canon for the understanding of his meaning, because his self-interpretation oscillates between continually renewed self-criticism and teleological self-interpretation, to such a degree that, for example, Husserl pretends that his own psychological approach in the Philosophy of Arithmetic would be the prefiguration of phenomenological investigation of what he calls constitution.

Looking Back with Gadamer Over his Writings and their Effective History A Dialogue with Jean Grondin (1996)

In this interview with Jean Grondin, Gadamer discusses the meaning ‘linguisticality’ and acknowledges his intellectual debt to Heidegger, Augustine, Vico and classical Greek philosophy. Heidegger’s influence on Gadamer can be seen in Gadamer’s awareness of pernicious ontological effects of the Latinization of European language, his awareness of the centrality of technology to the understanding of contemporary philosophical problems and the idea that ‘language speaks’. From Augustine, Gadamer derived his theory of the word as that which cannot be known and brought under control; from Vico the idea that language is rhetorical; and from classical philosophy the Aristotelian idea of phronesis and the Platonic idea that the idea of beauty is inseparable from the idea of the good. Gadamer concludes the interview with a discussion of the need for humanity to overcome its present fascination with technology.

Artworks in Word and Image: ‘So True, So Full of Being!’ (Goethe) (1992)

The arts, taken as whole, govern the metaphysical heritage of the western philosophical tradition. The arts possess absoluteness in that in the experience of art we recognize something as ‘aright’, as true. Art also possesses absoluteness because it transcends all historical differences between eras. Art - and philosophy - possess a contemporaneity in that they attune themselves to the present time. Art is thus not a refined pleasure but something that shows us a world that is there for itself and as such. The significance of art therefore cannot be understood aesthetically but only through Plato’s theory of ‘the exact’ and the Aristotelian conception of energeia as a motion without a path or a goal.