Gadamer, Hans-Georg

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) was one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century. He developed philosophical hermeneutics, a philosophy that elucidates the self-understanding of human beings in encounter with one another and the world. This entry outlines his life history and major philosophical contributions, focusing on the relevance of his body of work for action research.

Born in Marburg, Germany, at the beginning of a tumultuous European century, which he outlasted, he had a lonely and difficult childhood. His mother died when he was just 4 years old. His father, a professor of chemistry, was a strict disciplinarian and was always disappointed in his son. Although only 14 years old at the outbreak of the First World War, Gadamer came of age at a time of German defeat, when many around him were in despair at the horrors of unbridled modernity. He joined a circle of students clustering around the poet Stefan George. The poetry renounced the quotidian world and transported its adherents into a realm of higher spirit and eroticism. The strands of his later work began to emerge—history and its unavoidable effect, scepticism regarding the universality of science and appreciation of language and aesthetics.

Gadamer studied under Martin Heidegger in the twenties. Heidegger published his great work Being and Time in 1927, in which he proposes the ‘hermeneutics of facticity’. Humans, he says, being aware of themselves and their inescapable mortality, care before all else for their own being. We interpret the world with concern for our own future. As such, being, or ‘Dasein’, is positioned and seeks to understand. While Heidegger later abandoned the study of hermeneutics, his student Gadamer continued to work on it, and after many years of teaching and quiet development of his understanding of understanding, he published his great work Truth and Method in 1960. A brilliant and thorough book, Truth and Method explores philosophical hermeneutics from its roots in Aristotle and Greek philosophy, through its role in European religious exegesis and romantic historicism between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, to its present-day illumination of the phenomenology of human understanding. In his ramble through education, art, history, language and the whole of the Western philosophical tradition, Gadamer demonstrates how we always come too late to know everything and how method is always second to pre-existing understanding. He protested at those who rashly tried to turn philosophy into sociology and method into the way of finding truth.

Truth and Method is written in clear and conversational language, remaining always true to its argument of coming to understanding through conversation. It begins with challenging the use of scientific method in sociology, arguing instead for a humanistic stance which recognizes how all of us see humanity from our inescapable standpoints. Science is dazzling and useful, but it can only methodologically control a small proportion of life. The point is not to discover a method for understanding life but to understand the nature of experience. Experience pulls us up short and makes us rethink. We bring to each encounter our own historically affected consciousness, which is provoked by the encounter, and our horizons may grow a little—we learn something beyond our present standpoint. In this event, we become aware of our differences as well as our commonalities, and we pay attention to the truths of affects like language, sympathy and love.

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