Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer, philosopher: born Marburg, Germany 11 February 1900; Professor of Philosophy, University of Leipzig 1939-47; Professor of Philosophy, University of Frankfurt am Main 1947-49; Professor of Philosophy, University of Heidelberg 1949-68 (Emeritus); married (two daughters); died Heidelberg, Germany 14 March 2002.

The life of Hans-Georg Gadamer is synonymous with a century of German philosophy, from Neo- Kantian origins to his apprenticeship with his brilliant but flawed mentor Martin Heidegger and to the formulation of an influential new approach to a philosophy of understanding (hermeneutics), from moderate German nationalism to socialism and a critical stance towards globalisation.

His life is also distinguished not only by his own magnum opus, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method, 1960), but also by his facility in practising the personal and philosophical dialogue he had preached in his relations with his many pupils, many of whom, Jürgen Habermas among them, came to great prominence themselves.

The stations of Gadamer's biography seem undramatic, all the more so since he himself was always reluctant to talk about himself. He was born in 1900, as son of a professor of chemistry, in Marburg, the stronghold of Neo-Kantianism, a philosophical school then at the height of its popularity. After studying in Breslau and Munich, he returned to the place of his birth to write his doctorate under Paul Natorp, an eminent philosopher and Plato scholar.

In 1923, however, Gadamer came under the influence of Marburg's most brilliant mind, the young Martin Heidegger. Having worked as his assistant, Gadamer wrote a second doctoral dissertation under Heidegger and remained in Marburg as a Privatdozent, an external member of the university faculty entitled to teach but without permanent position.

In 1937, after a year teaching in Kiel, Gadamer was made extraordinary professor in Marburg. Two years later he moved to Leipzig. Having been a moderate German nationalist, he stayed aloof of politics and of the Nazi regime and became rector of the university in 1946. The following year he accepted an invitation to teach in Frankfurt am Main, and in 1949 he moved to Heidelberg, where he stayed until his retirement in 1968. He continued to teach and to lecture in Germany, the United States, Canada, and other countries.

Such a chronology omits personal difficulties, the early death of his mother, caring for a handicapped brother, and his own disability after a polio infection: Gadamer was famously so reluctant to talk about himself that he paradoxically chose as the motto of his Philosophische Lehrjahre (Philosophical Apprenticeships, 1977) a Latin sentence, "De nobis ipse silemus", "We keep quiet about ourselves". As a philosopher and as a man Gadamer was interested in other people, and his philosophy seems quintessentially a dialogue, to be recast and reformulated every time anew, not writ in stone. It is this dynamic, the nature of dialogue and communication, of understanding and interpretation, that formed his main philosophical interest.

While Gadamer's mentor Heidegger was notorious for impenetrable language which overwhelmed the reader with neologisms and etymological imagination, his pupil, who had started his career as a classicist, kept his style conversational and comprehensible, always aware that the message was useless unless it could be understood. Adapting his language to his listeners, Gadamer astounded his audiences with the flexibility of his mind. What he said, though, remained constant and was demonstrated by his way of communicating, of listening, of evoking and reviving a Socratic way of philosophising. The fact that everyone had to find his or her own way of understanding what Gadamer had to say was not just an educational trick, it was the essence of his philosophy.

Truth as the experience of meaningfulness (very different from the truth as correspondence of utterance and fact posited by Anglo-Saxon philosophy of language), can exist only outside a method and definition, only in dynamic metaphors like poetry and art which are reinterpreted time and time again. Seen like this, truth is the ultimate function of experience, a moment of unity of tradition and the present that has to be relived by every individual and every generation in their own horizon. Outside mathematical thought, in history for example, we are always already historical beings, bringing to every question our own experience and perspective. Real understanding therefore depends on dialogue, on the awareness of the past as much as an alertness to what is happening today, an implicit rejection both of the boundless hope of renewal of our Enlightenment heritage, and of the Romantic (Heideggerean) veneration of origins and authenticity.

His belief in the importance of understanding and of accepting our historical conditioned-ness made Gadamer (whose mind was as acute at 102 as it had ever been) an eloquent critic of globalisation. The ideology of globalisation, he said in a recent interview, overlooks that there are borders everywhere, and that these borders are defined not by lines on a map but by death, suffering, and illness. The project of globalisation, he said, is flawed because it depends on technology.

A society which has abandoned the idea of true education and of living dialogue in favour of unlimited information harbours its own destruction: "If I am already informed I no longer think I have to understand. Our reliance on technology engenders a new sort of slavery."

Philipp Blom