Hans-Georg Gadamer Quotes on Truth
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode, 1960) gave twentieth-century continental philosophy its most influential systematic statement of philosophical hermeneutics. The central thesis is that truth in the substantive philosophical sense is not the decontextualized propositional correctness the modern scientific tradition had analyzed but the disclosive event in which the interpreter and the text or work meet within a fusion of their respective horizons — and the corresponding rehabilitation of the prejudgments (Vorurteile) the Enlightenment had treated as obstacles to truth recasts the proper understanding of historical and humanistic inquiry. The framework, drawing on Heidegger’s existential analytic and the German hermeneutical tradition descending from Schleiermacher and Dilthey, shaped subsequent debates with Habermas (over the critique of ideology), Derrida (over the metaphysics of presence), and the contemporary philosophy of 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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“The real being of language is what is said in it.”
Man and Language (1966) -
“The hermeneutic consciousness, which must be awakened and kept awake, recognizes that in the age of science philosophy's claim of superiority has something chimerical and unreal about it. But though the will of man is more than ever intensifying its criticism of what has gone before to the point of becoming a utopian or eschatological consciousness, the hermeneutic consciousness seeks to confront that will with something of the truth of remembrance: with what is still and ever again real.”
Foreword to the Second Edition, p. xxiv