Hans-Georg Gadamer Quotes

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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.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
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, the primary meaning of this word is language.... The word logos means not only thought and language, but also concept and law.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
The language of art is constituted precisely by the fact that it speaks to the self-understanding of every person, and it does this as ever present and by means of its own contemporaneousness. Indeed, precisely the contemporaneousness of the work allows it to come to expression in language. Everything depends on how something is said.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
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.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said. It would be an inadmissible abstraction to contend that we must first have achieved a contemporaneousness with the author or the original reader by means of a reconstruction of his historical horizon before we could begin to grasp the meaning of what is said. A kind of anticipation of meaning guides the effort to understand from the very beginning.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
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.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education - aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness - presented alienated forms of our true historical being.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.

Hans-Georg Gadamer
Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

Hans-Georg Gadamer