GADAMER BY JESSICA FRAZIER

hands gear gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics has become the standard account of truth and meaning in the humanities it's an account that lets us know how language works and what it means to understand something and in many ways people study gadamer perhaps less now than they did twenty years ago simply because his ideas have been accepted as the best way to understand what happens when were reading a text and starting to assimilate its ideas or communicating with someone and learning what they have to teach us learning to adapt our view to the information they give or indeed when were coming to understand a whole culture or the world as a whole his idea of the fusion of horizons has become a standard idea that reminds us that truth is always something that is coming into being through the interactions of different people in each context but it's going to be important to remember that gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics works on two levels not only is it a hermeneutics of language it's also a philosophical idea it's something that is carrying on his teacher Martin Heidegger project of a fundamental ontology so that we're going to see hermeneutics as something that is really giving us accounts of not only language as a set of words but language is the very structure of reality language as something that cues us to the way in which we experience the world and even the way in which we exist as beings through embodiment through ideas he's trying to make us understand reality more and to point us forward in contributing to and helping to create ourselves as part of the world in which we live so it's going to be two dimensions in understanding the philosophical hermeneutics that he propounds now hans-georg gadamer himself is born in 1900 in Marburg and only miles away as he is born Friedrich Nietzsche is on his deathbed in Lima that gives us a little Q to how we should understand the cultural world into which he enters on the one hand nietzsche expresses the older german culture which is concerned which is critical about a lot of its past heritage and that's a language that's going to come forward through the 1910s and 20s with the First World War it's something that in gadamer's youth will be expressed through books like oswald spengler decline of the West and Theodore Lessing's Europe and Asia gaddama writes about a certain tension and anxiety for the future that was surrounding him in his generation and it's important to see hermeneutics as something that's going to want to avoid the intellectual sins of the past but gadamer also enters in in 1900 at the beginning of the 20th century in a Germany that is flourishing he grows up in Breslau a town which is successful reasonably affluent middle-class town it's cosmopolitan it has a university where Catholic and Protestant communities have United in a secular study of the sciences it has a one of Europe's most prominent rabbinical seminaries so the Jewish community is very much present and later when gaddama goes on to attend poetry readings and his studies women are present multiple communities the 20th century is a modernity that's looking positive in many ways for the young gaddama so he's going to inherit attention but also a sense that if one can produce a new philosophy and attitude that will guide people forward that the future could be very bright now gadamer's childhood is fascinating he depicts it as a world in which he's torn between two different forces between his father and his mother's family his father is a scientist he's a farmer too he's a pharmaceutical chemist and he was very proud I think of the work that he done in medicine for the concrete benefit of people gaddama himself later showed that he was very proud of his father's achievement I think he was a firm ative of the natural sciences from his father he inherited both an appreciation for nature that would come out later in his love of the life world his fascination with natural imagery and perhaps his appreciation for certain vitalist philosophers like Friedrich Ettinger he also inherited from his father a strongly secular background a very liberal secularism but one that had no particular place for religious institutions like the church had no place really for religious doctrines like the doctrine of immortality which his father sort of rejected on the whole and gadamer said he himself didn't really go along with this nevertheless it's important to see that his father's secular attitude was not contrary to spirituality his father admitted that there might be the possibility of a form of divinity that could coexist with the Natural Sciences and therefore it was a very liberal and open-minded secularism that he got from his father's side his mother died when he was very young and his brother was ill for much of his life so it was mostly it was gadamer and his father in dialog but his mother's family the give eases work German PI attests they had a strong a very mystical if you like spiritual heritage that gadamer felt strongly as he was growing up as well his mother had left him Baron von Forces leoben's Dietetics of the soul to read and also Mendelssohn's fight on and the Pyatt estera tidge instilled in him a sense of inner spirituality as something important of the cultivation of the soul of the self as a great lifelong project and also of the idea that one must remain modest humble in the face of the ongoing project of life and the call of the divine so while gadamer was not religious in a strong sense the spiritual dimension of human existence was an important balance to his father's secular scientism and that really shaped his worldview the spiritual side remained prominent as he grew up as a young man he loved poetry he joined in many poetry reading circles throughout his youth that continued into his older age and a world in which together with other young people he explored poetry as an insight love this was spiritual poetry German Romantic poetry the work of Rilke the work of Haman HESA the work of Jean Paul or of course Stephan George all of this was directing him in his generation towards inner concerns but outside of a dogmatic doctrinal religious context it's important to see the way in which this spiritual secularism shaped him for someone like Martin Heidegger there was a complicated tense perhaps relationship between his Catholic heritage his Protestant side and even a certain secularism that seemed embedded in his philosophical work for someone like Rudolf Bultmann there was an explicit desire to reshape Christian doctrine in the face of modernity or for max Scheler the phenomenologist for which for whom gaddama had a great personal respect there was an intense inspiration from Catholic ideas and experiences gadamer was not religious in any of those ways in some ways I think he was a very modern figure in his secular spiritual way of doing these things but it's important to see that his secularism was not the secularism of contemporary modernity which seems to be in tension with the religious gadamer's work is always going back to the idea that the spiritual and the scientific the realist the positive side of a modern progressive liberal cosmopolitan world can go together to make a very fruitful form of contemporary society now gadamer has a quiet upbringing he's a thoughtful young man he doesn't go into the First World War because he partly because he contracts polio at a young age he would walk with a cane for the rest of his life he marries very young an older woman an educated intelligent cosmopolitan middle-class woman and it's soon time for him to choose his career his father wants him to become a natural scientist but he himself doesn't want to do that his compromise is to go into classics which is seen as a fairly robust historical study and classics actually would turn out to be a world that was his anchor for the rest of his life he studies the porn they talk he comes to love the work of Plato the pre-socratics Aristotle and the world of classics later when he goes to study with Martin Heidegger and with other phenomenologist s-- with Edmund Husserl and with mcshale er with Nicola Hartman all of those people were fascinating for him but often led him to doubt his own abilities Heidegger could be quite a hard teacher and it was often back to his classical training that gadamer looked for a sense of his strengths he loved the work of Plato and I think as time went on he held up Socratic dialogue and the Platonic world as something that was an anchor for him ethically as well he felt that that was a worldview that he could enjoy and appreciate and in a Germany that in the 30s was becoming increasingly charismatic dominant in terms of the discourses through which people propounded their philosophies as Heidegger was encouraging him to hurry up and formulate a doctrine of his own gadamer hearkened back to the Socratic dialogues that he was reading and thought I don't want to develop a doctrine and force it onto others I want time to let the truth emerge gradually from within a community of equal minded discussants he speaks about the importance of philosophical discussion he speaks about his teachers in that way and the wonderful book that he wrote later called philosophical apprenticeships in which he describes as many teachers each of them seems as a sort of a Socrates who lets the truth emerge rather than forcing their doctrine upon you this is going to be important as the second world war looms gadamer described the 30s is a time in which everyone was being called to commit to some philosophy some character carrot boom charismatic thinker or other and that means that he kind of backs away from this call people like Heidegger who want him to engage more concretely people who want him to engage of course politically and he's very cautious of committing himself to national socialist ideas he writes about the way in which teachers were being encouraged to inspire and indoctrinate their students and his Greek ideal of Education warns him that this is not the way for words this is the Sophists not the true philosopher and so his caution actually turned out to be a virtue in many ways as Heidegger becomes embroiled in the national socialist movement starts to incorporate Nazi ideology into his very thinking gadamer tries to keep this at bay as much as possible and this would actually be very beneficial for him because after the war when Heidegger and others were effectively shamed and had to go through processes of indoctrination were in many ways sort of penalized academically for their political views gadamer was seen as a relatively safe set of hands indeed he was given important positions in different universities as rector and that was a way in which he was able to continue his guardianship of the philosophical sphere of discussion when others were at a disadvantage it was precisely this situation that gave him the space and the time to start to develop gradually in his 50s his own set of ideas and it's after the war throughout the 1950s when he finally has a concrete position that gives him security for him and his wife and his children that he's able to start to write his magnum opus truth and Method so over the course of years gadamer writes truth and Method and it's a difficult process to train himself into actually making concrete statements about what he thinks he'd been very cautious about Heidegger's method of expressing his philosophy he says Heidegger was amazing in lectures where he's communicating directly but he's not sure that heidegger's writing gets across the essence of his new account of the nature of being it should be inspiring and it is too many but I think gadamer felt that it wasn't always altogether clear truth and Method adopts its own methodology for trying to express the nature of truth as it should be understood in the modern world the first thing he does is to create a giant historical story that lets us know why we have to regain truth and the methods through which we should do so he tells the story basically as a tale of the loss of truth and it's slow regain the idea is that in the beginning there was a much more holistic attitude to truth and we can see this in Plato for whom the forms actually Express both the world around us and the world of the mind and also incorporate values Beauty truth goodness mathematics as well as ideas are all united in this rich world of the forms and in a way we are a part of that as well we can see it in Aristotle who has not one kind of truth but many technical truths epistemic awarenesses poesis poetic creations of truth phronesis practical wisdom of truth Alafaya the discovery and revelation of the truth around us so there's a rich world a rich way of understanding the reality in which we live gaddama sees that it play at various points in history the Renaissance thinkers also reclaim this he speaks highly of people like Leonardo da Vinci for whom science and arts kind of go together he speaks highly of Francis Bacon and also Wilhelm von Humboldt for whom for whom the Natural Sciences have to be mirrored by human sciences Sciences of the Spirit as it is in German the guises visit often so for gaddama there is a heritage that gets it right but the problem is that Western culture becomes obsessed with a calculator ball regulatable mathematic grasp uncertainty and this comes from various sources already we can see an anxiety about it in the classical thinkers but by the medieval period it's become much stronger and he isolates for instance the aqua mists William of Occam's followers in Paris who said that really we need to use empirical observation carefully calculated to identify what is real and that continues in the skeptical impulse behind Descartes who is looking for certainty about the external world it continues in Newtonian physics which mathematize is reality and doesn't seem to leave much room for other forms of truth and of course modern science picks this up in a radical way so that contemporary scientific truths appear now to be the only kind of real robust truth there's ethics and art and these fluffy ideas on the side but then there's reality which is governed by the sciences gaddama gives a micro history that tries to give us a deeper insight into how this happens so in the first section of truth and method he talks about GM batista Rico's idea of the census communis a communal sense in any community of people or indeed in any context of what is right of how things work so if I enter into a particular community and I learn their language I get a sense of the meanings of the words of the customs of what their ethics and values and modes of behavior are that's my sentence communists' my communal sense and indeed if I move to a different culture I will slowly acquire their census communis truth is created by the context in that kind of account but kademan notices the way that as that idea progresses things change so that by the time we get to can't Kant has an idea that our perception of reality a physical reality is one thing determined in a certain way and our perception of the worlds of ethics and aesthetics are quite different it's not a census communis but rather taste the notion of taste that is shaping what is right for us and gadamer says wait notice that taste is a very subjective idea it's my personal taste relative only to me it's a kind of truth that doesn't seem robust at all anymore indeed it's wholly private I can't really properly communicate taste based truth I'm not very effectively and gadamer goes on and says this subtle divide is continued in Katz aesthetics where he says that nature has its own form of creativity natural creativity that's causal and biological something we can observe whereas human creativity he expresses through the idea of genius it's a unique different kind of creative action completely separate from nature and again gaddama says notice what's happened here we've divided the human and the mental from the physical and the natural and said they're subject to two different kinds of truth and because the natural one is more mathematically capture all remember akka mites and Descartes and Newton looking for easily regular forms of communicative or data that is the truth that gets all the attention meanwhile ethics and aesthetics and the other kinds of truths and realities in which we live actually of mind and culture appear to be lost they drift away and become subsidiary sciences gadamer points out that this is a deep problem that undercuts fundamental tensions and anxieties about meaning and value in the world around us and the later sections of truth and Method are devoted to trying to express ways to reclaim a more holistic idea of truth through the study of history historical hermeneutics through textual hermeneutics and through aesthetics and that's really what he sought phenomenology as doing as well now truth in method has at its core while it offers a whole historical genealogy of truth in which he locates his philosophy it has at its core a small section which offers gadamer's own analysis of how he sees language meaning and reality itself and that's found in a short section that talks about play as a model for ontological explanation the word ontological there reminds us that he's doing something more now than just talking about history or hermeneutics in this section he says think about the notion of play let's say playing a game when we play lots of different people or elements come together and follow certain rules that shape the game itself that unites these different people into a shared activity and they are in a sense taken up sublimated almost as in a Hegelian dialectic into a shared complex activity which has a life of its own each of the players he says becomes the play of the game they don't lose their individuality but they contribute in their individuality into a dynamic new reality he says that's true of games it's true of other kinds of play as well and quite a lovely passage he talks about the play of light in which shadow and light moved together to create a pattern the play of waves the play of gnats or animals or the play of musical notes in all of which we see a kind of a dialectical model of different elements coming together to shape a new pattern that image is central to gadamer it expresses the nature of language it expresses for him the way in which we inhabit reality so I am not so much an individual who sees the world I am one part of a dialectical complex at which is the play of the world itself I'm taken up into that and gadigal wants us to see ourselves within being within language and culture within community and within being itself as players within this larger game so there are two important entailments of that model of language meaning and reality one is that truth is not therefore completely relative truth in fact depends on the particular rules that are bringing together all these different elements into a shared language or world that means that I can't simply choose a word from Spanish if I'm speaking in German it means in the physical world I can't simply expect to fly if I'm in fact abiding by the rules of physics it means that reality is robust we don't simply change things at will and the idea the kind of postmodern specter of a radical relativism in which we get to choose any truth that we like is clearly given the lie by this model so if I expect anyone to if I expect to interact with my context of people or objects in a successful way I'm going to have to respect the rules and this is important for countering later criticisms but it's also important for gadamer that this leaves open a huge space for creativity it game he says is created by the players it's not simply something that determines them each play is the creation of the elements that make it up and he wants to remind us that language and community and reality are all dynamic phenomena so if you imagine a piece of music each note is creating the piece of music at each moment it has to follow the overall structure of the piece in order to work as a piece of music and yet it's always mutating it into something fresh and that's going to account for the way in which gadamer's account of truth is not in fact something that merely prioritizes past traditions but is there to empower everyone who is involved in the game of language or of life at each moment truthin method took a while to break on to the philosophical scene because it was such a complicated and difficult text many people did not have the historical references or the understanding of the intellectual history that he was referring to to be able to untangle the argument that he was making and he himself admitted that he would often get tied up in historical narratives without being to shape very clearly exactly what he was trying to say philosophically it was partly because he had been skeptical about much of Heidegger style of writing and not sure that that had been the best way to express his ontological insights but this meant the truth and Method took a while to be understood however it's published in 1960 and over the course of the 70s greater understanding comes it would be eventually translated in 1975 into English and hit a much wider world so that much praise and appreciation would come to gadamer in the 70s and 80s but of course with praise and appreciation and understanding came also criticism one of the main critiques came from his colleague Jurgen Habermas habermas was influenced by Marx's critical theory and he was appreciative of what Gavin was trying to do but also concerned that it was an essentially conservative set of ideas gadamer's account of the prejudices the as it were past experiences that shape our understanding of the world seem together seem to sorry Harbor mass like an idea that would predispose people towards the past make it difficult for people to develop new ideas and that meant for habermas that gadamer was not allowing enough possibility for future transformation for young generations to affect revolutionary change gaddama countered this he said no no of course we bring the past into the present but even the revolutionary is rebelling against something so that radical change can only in fact be affirmed enabled by an understanding of the past background set of ideas that make new formulations possible on the other hand gadamer was criticized by someone like Emilio Betty who is an Italian legal hermeneutics scholar he said goodness gadamer you've lost all of our sense of concrete and robust truths so if truth is a fusion of different people communicative world's cultures languages or contexts where can we ever come to an agreement something that's essential for law for instance and gadamer again said no there is clearly a structure that emerges out of any particular context that in the process of agreement is the only structure that can really function to answer all the needs of that community so agreement a best-fit solution is always possible there may be more than one but indeed if the more you understand the context and the needs of the circumstance appropriately the more you will be able to find the truth that fits the moment in many ways understanding gadamer's approach to truth makes him sound a bit more like someone like yugioh de leurs a philosopher who's trying to affirm the creative generative ever possible a new feature of meaning and of life itself this was an important point when gadamer went into dialogue with Jacques Derrida they met 80s there was a famous encounter in which they both spoke to these issues but it was it didn't quite go as the organizers had expected gadamer gave an account of his hermeneutic approach and Derrida came in with a desire to radically challenge gadamer I think like harbor mas he saw gadamer as a conservative figure as old guard and it's also possible that Derrida didn't feel quite at home in the german-speaking world he wasn't a good speaker of the language and perhaps was not as familiar with the wide range of German historical backgrounds but gadamer refers to in truth and method Derrida sought to challenge the idea that truth can always be an agreement can always be something that creates a new under standing in fact he says perhaps it never can perhaps truth is always deferred infinitely there is never true agreement and perhaps often when people claim agreement what it actually is is one party trying to impose their understanding on to the other so issues of infinite difference deconstruction and also infinite issues of power relations come into play in Derrida's approach gadamer expresses in his response a fascinating approach to the question he was I think disappointed he had seen he and Derrida saying essentially the same thing but emphasizing perhaps different sides of the nature of truth what we do see is gadamer saying to Derrida that he had mistaken the very nature of meaning itself he points out that in making a critique in a questioning gadamer's approach in asking him to question whether there even is an understanding happening Derrida is asking gadamer to understand him but he's asking his ideas to be comprehended and that he's trying to change gadamer's mind and this is important says gadamer in any true dialogue both parties enter not hoping to impress their view upon the other but rather wanting to be persuaded by the other person's argument the idea is that the other person is persuasive makes a good argument then as long as you yourself have been rigorous in your thinking that is because their ideas are true and of course if the other person's ideas are true then it is right to be changed and to adopt them gaddama says that is the approach that one should take into any dialogue and I think he's chastising Derrida a bit here but he also is using this as a way of trying to remind Derrida and the listeners around them that the goal of communication is to be willing to be changed to be willing to transform your own views into something else this is a wonderful example not only of the kind of dialogue and debate that went on between different people who inherited Heidegger's tradition it's also an important example of how gadamer understood the nature of dialogue and interaction and communication in general something that can be applied in which I hope I think he hoped would be applied to political dialogue and to religious dialogue the idea that people bring their different thought worlds together but they bring it together precisely for the purpose of challenging of growing of changing the other person's ideas but also their own goes to the heart of what hermeneutics means as not only a description of truth but a practice of self transformation and this is perhaps a hidden side of philosophical hermeneutics that people don't always remember the idea that the fusion of horizons is something we should seek it's not only something that's happening to us all the time it's precisely these kinds of ideas that help gadamer to enter in his very later years of his work into a stronger ethical program for discussing the nature of ethics discussing the nature of human flourishing the nature of health and of happy cultures I think of productive political worlds as well and finally I think of giving us a program for an understanding of human spirituality it's in his later work that all of these different themes come into action for much more website this interactive multimedia tightline explores the relationship between theology and modernity beginning with the Enlightenment and moving through the centuries up to the present day key philosophical works and intellectual milestones are featured at the top and theologies and theologians below behind many of these featured works are richly Illustrated videos by specialists on those seminal thinkers from Humes Heidegger from Darwin to Derrida and much in between not only are individuals explored in this timeline but also philosophical movements and theological traditions this project is also available on iPad style tablets so this timeline has the potential to develop into a chronological the video encyclopedia of faith and thought [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] this multimedia interactive video time explores the New Testament and Christian origins with key texts figures and events clearly placed within their historical context many of these are then introduced and surveyed by scholars with expertise in that particular area by selecting a highlighted text a menu of illustrated video commentary appears including maps references and on location pictures and footage all of this then adds up to a multimedia interactive scholarly yet accessible introduction to New Testament faith and thought in its historical context you [Music]

Channel: Timeline Theological Videos

Views: 55,435

Rating: 4.9085488 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Y58NKaQXaA8

Length: 36min 9sec (2169 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/KingThallion]

This St. Johns Nottingham's videos, their videos are okay, better overviews than say, The School of Life. But they are a very religious, continental school in the UK. Let me know what you think, I only know a little about Gadamer.