Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy: The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Volume I

385 Pages·2016·3.71 MB·English

by  Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hermeneutics between
History and Philosophy
Also available from Bloomsbury
Ancient Sources, Modern Appropriations, Hans-Georg Gadamer
The Beginning of Knowledge, Hans-Georg Gadamer
Beginning of Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer
A Century of Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer
Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer
Forthcoming from Bloomsbury
Ethics and Aesthetics in History: The Selected Writings of
Hans-Georg Gadamer: Volume II, Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hermeneutics between
History and Philosophy
The Selected Writings of
Hans-Georg Gadamer:
Volume I
By Hans-Georg Gadamer
Edited and translated by
Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 9781441158444
ePDF: 9781474274999
ePub: 9781474275002
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Translators’ Preface viii
Translators’ Introduction: Hermeneutics at the Crossroads between
History and Philosophy xvi
Part 1 History as a Problem: On Being Historically Affected
1 Is There a Causality in History? (1964) 3
2 Historicity and Truth (1991) 13
3 The History of the Universe and the Historicity of Human
Beings (1988) 25
4 A World without History? (1972) 43
5 The Old and the New (1981) 51
6 Death as a Question (1975) 59
Part 2 The Impetus for Thinking Hermeneutically: On the Task of Dilthey
7 The Problem of Dilthey: Between Romanticism and Positivism (1984) 73
8 Dilthey and Ortega: The Philosophy of Life (1985) 91
9 Hermeneutics and the Diltheyan School (1991) 103
Part 3 Confronting Other Intellectual Movements and Disciplines
10 Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity, Subject and Person (1975) 125
11 On the Contemporary Relevance of Husserl’s Phenomenology (1974) 139
12 ‘Being and Nothingness’ (Jean-Paul Sartre) (1989) 151
13 Heidegger and Sociology: Bourdieu and Habermas (1979/1985) 167
14 Hermeneutics on the Trail (1994) 179
vi Contents
Part 4 Hermeneutics of Beginnings and Returns: The Case of Heidegger
15 Remembering Heidegger’s Beginnings (1986) 209
16 The Turn in the Path (1985) 221
17 On the Beginning of Thought (1986) 227
18 On the Way Back to the Beginning (1986) 247
Appendix: Glossary of German Terms 271
Glossary of Latin and Greek Expressions 279
Notes 281
Works Cited by Gadamer 315
Index of Names 329
Index of Subjects 334
Acknowledgements
This edition and translation project started with discussions with David Avital,
then editor at Continuum. We benefited from his suggestions and advice for
finalizing the project. Sarah Campbell continued to support the project as
editor and provided us with her ideas and encouragement. In the transition to
Bloomsbury we worked very efficiently with Liza Thompson and her assistant,
Frankie Mace.
We also benefited from the advice, suggestions and support of James Risser,
Jeff Malpas, and Helmut Gander, to whom we express our gratitude.
Pol Vandevelde received a reduced teaching load during some part of this
project thanks to the Way Klingler Humanities Fellowship from Marquette
University.
We are grateful to the director and staff of the Deutsche Literatur-Archiv in
Marbach where Pol Vandevelde spent several weeks collecting information on
Gadamer’s essays and where he was able to consult Gadamer’s personal library.
We also want to thank Daniel Adsett for his excellent editorial skills, Peter
Burgess for his work toward solving queries and bibliographical issues, and
Sarah Kizuk for her help with the index. We benefited from the expertise of
David Twetten for the Latin and Greek expressions.
Finally, we are also thankful to the Seattle University philosophy department
for their material support of this project.
Translators’ Preface
When it comes to a major philosopher like Gadamer a strong case can be made
that scholars need to have all available essays in order to assess the different
components of the philosopher’s theses, to measure the evolution of his thought
through time, and to grasp all the intricacies of his views in the different contexts
of their application. This is the aim of this edition. The present volume is part
of a series of three that will, under the title The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg
Gadamer, complete the English translation of Gadamer’s essays, included in his
‘Complete Works’.1
To date about 130 articles from Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke have been
translated in various anthologies, collected works and edited volumes. To these
we will be adding another fifty essays. Short addresses and book reviews were
omitted along with some essays that did not contain anything of philosophical
import not already included in the other essays selected. We have organized
these fifty articles in three main collections, each corresponding to a volume
devoted to a single theme: philosophy of history, ethics, and aesthetics. This
division allows us to accentuate the common threads that run across Gadamer’s
articles despite their covering disparate subjects.
These essays give us a wider range of Gadamer’s views than some of his
pronouncements in Truth and Method and other published books. They help
consolidate how Gadamer is viewed in the English-speaking world where
he, for the most part, has led a divided existence. We have the independent
philosopher of Truth and Method. But we also have an original interpreter
of ancient philosophy competing with other interpreters from the Anglo-
American tradition. Apart from Truth and Method and some of his early works
on Plato and Aristotle, the later texts of Gadamer have been sporadically trans-
lated. This may give the English-speaking reader the skewed impression of there
being either nothing much of importance in these essays other than repetitions
and reformulations, or of his views changing drastically in his later works. By
showcasing Gadamer’s works through the whole span of his intellectual life,
encompassing his contributions as an independent thinker and an interpreter,
this translation shows that his views did not change drastically in the 1980s
and the 1990s, but the emphasis he puts on several topics and the nuances he
Translators’ Preface ix
introduces in them sometimes varied to a great extent. These essays collected in
three volumes furnish readers with further evidence demonstrating the philo-
sophical significance of his work beyond Truth and Method and integrate into
a coherent whole the two aspects of Gadamer, as a philosopher and interpreter.
The present first volume, titled Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy,
contains articles pertaining to reflections that emerge from Gadamer’s herme-
neutic studies on the problem of history as well as the history of philosophy. As
Jean Grondin notes, Gadamer was born in 1900, which is technically the end of
the nineteenth century, lived through the whole twentieth century, and died in
2002 in the twenty-first century, thus enjoying a life spread over three centuries.2
He was an observer of his century and an active participant in it, taking part in
all the major philosophical debates, commenting on many of the epoch-making
events of his time. More importantly, Gadamer also influenced these new trends
and forcefully engaged their proponents, showing how philosophical herme-
neutics situates itself in relationship with the work of the Diltheyan School,
the existential ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre, sociological critique of Heidegger
by Bourdieu and Habermas, the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, and the
new interest in Heidegger’s early years. These essays fill the gap in Gadamer’s
itinerary and indicate interesting twists in his views, changes of heart, signif-
icant nuances to views presented elsewhere.
The volume is organized into four sections: I. History as a Problem: On Being
Historically Affected; II. The Impetus for Thinking Hermeneutically: On the
Task of Dilthey; III. Confronting Other Intellectual Movements and Disciplines;
and IV. Hermeneutics of Beginnings and Returns: The Case of Heidegger.
The first section ‘History as a Problem: On Being Historically Affected’
contains essays that provide a clear glimpse of Gadamer’s own intellectual devel-
opment and how the problem of history, the central motif of Truth and Method,
assumed such a central place for him. The first essay ‘Is There a Causality in
History?’, written in 1964, shortly after the publication of Truth and Method, is
a welcome elucidation of what has already been taken up in Truth and Method,
namely the way human beings experience history and are affected by it. It is the
experience expressed by such words as ‘destiny’ and ‘fate’, however inchoately.
In this essay Gadamer responds to the challenge posed by the natural sciences
to any attempt at understanding history in its terms. He tries to salvage our
experience of history, which he shows to be very different from the scientist’s
experience of a causally determined nature. The article is written in the spirit
of an invitation for a dialogue with philosophers from the rival tradition of
analytic philosophy, who embrace naturalism in some form or other. Many