HANS-GEORG GADAMER'S HERMENEUTIC CONCEPTION

Gadamer's hermeneutics is among the most influential philosophical conceptions of our time and has provoked lively discussions beyond the German-speaking world. It regards itself as philosophical hermeneutics and thereby differentiates itself from the general hermeneutics, for example, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gadamer wants to build upon Heidegger's insights, especially upon his conception of understanding as “the original form of the realization of Dasein” (GW 1, 1960/1990, 264/2003, 259), as Heidegger worked this out in the “existential analytic of Dasein.” Gadamer thus neither intends “to offer a general theory of interpretation and a differential account of its methods” (GW 2, 1986/1993, 441/2003, xxxi) nor “to produce a manual for guiding understanding in the manner of earlier hermeneutics” (GW 2, 1986/1993, 438/2003, xxviii). Nor is it his intention “to investigate the theoretical foundation of work in [the human sciences] in order to put [the] findings to practical ends” (ibid.). Gadamer's “real concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing” (ibid.).

This philosophical claim has a transcendental character. The question raised in Truth and Method is “by no means merely” aimed “at the human sciences” (GW 2, 1986/1993, 439/2003, xxix). “Neither does it ask it only of science and its modes of experience, but of all human experience of the world and human living.