Hans-Georg Gadamer Quotes on Knowledge
Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960) gave twentieth-century hermeneutics its most influential systematic statement. The principal thesis is that the methodological self-understanding of the natural sciences — disinterested observation by an unsituated subject of an objectively given reality — cannot be the model for the genuine understanding of historical, literary, philosophical, and legal texts that the human sciences pursue. Understanding is the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) between interpreter and text; prejudice (Vorurteil) — the situated tradition the interpreter brings to the encounter — is not the obstacle to understanding it appears in the methodological model but its enabling condition; and the dialogical structure of the question and answer through which living tradition is appropriated is the proper philosophical model for the human sciences.
Quotes
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Attributed to Hans-Georg Gadamer:
“All understanding is interpretation.”
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Attributed to Hans-Georg Gadamer:
“Language is the medium in which substantive understanding and agreement take place between two people.”
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Attributed to Hans-Georg Gadamer:
“Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that they inevitably distort the truth.”
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Attributed to Hans-Georg Gadamer:
“It is not so much our judgments as our prejudices that constitute our being.”
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Attributed to Hans-Georg Gadamer:
“Understanding is always more than merely re-creating someone else's meaning.”
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“The real being of language is what is said in it.”
Man and Language (1966) -
“Man and Language (1966)”
The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows that from the forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it. What is said in it constitutes the common world in which we live. … The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it — what is said. -
“Man and Language (1966)”
Aristotle established the classical definition of man, according to which man is the living being who has logos . In the tradition of the West, this definition became canonical in a form which stated that man is the animal rationale , the rational being, distinguished from all other animals by his capacity for thought. Thus it rendered the Greek word logos as reason or thought. In truth, however, -
“Foreword to the Second Edition, p. xxiv.”
What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself. -
“Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.”
Aesthetics and Hermeneutics (1964) | p. 102