Gadamer Quotes & Sayings

The long history of this idea before Kant made it the basis of his Critique of Judgment shows that the concept of taste was originally more a moral than an aesthetic idea. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology ... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

Nothing exists except through language. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

The essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows from the self-forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

We learn to understand ourselves in and through it because the artwork is not a timeless present for a pure aesthetic consciousness (i.e., it is not an encounter with an object for which one can only express feelings of pleasure or displeasure), but rather, a real encounter with a world that presents itself historically. The self-understanding that occurs in relation to the experience of art, Gadamer tells us, is only possible when our experiencing is not discontinuous with "the unity and integrity of the other."17 — James Risser

The hermeneutic consciousness, which must be awakened and kept awake, recognized 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 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

All cities we have visited are precincts in this metropolis of the mind. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

The same thing is true of the experience of art. Here the scholarly research pursued by the "science of art" is aware from the start that it can neither replace nor surpass the experience of art. The fact that through a work of art a truth is experienced that we cannot attain in any other way constitutes the philosophic importance of art, which asserts itself against all attempts to rationalize it away. Hence, together with the experience of philosophy, the experience of art is the most insistent admonition to scientific consciousness to acknowledge its own limits. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

In fact, certainty exists in very different modes. The kind of certainty afforded by a verification that has passed through doubt is different from the immediate living certainty with which all ends and values appear in human consciousness when they make an absolute claim. But the certainty of science is very different from this kind of certainty that is acquired in life. Scientific certainty always has something Cartesian about it. It is the result of a critical method that seeks only to allow what cannot be doubted. This certainty, then, does not proceed from doubts and their being overcome, but is always anterior to any process of being doubted. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

History does not belong to us; we belong to it. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

Being that can be understood is language. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

The sense of taste is able to gain the distance necessary for choosing and judging what is the most urgent necessity of life. Thus Gracian already sees in taste a "spiritualization of animality" and rightly points out that there is cultivation (cultura) not only of the mind (ingenio) but also of taste (gusto). — Hans-Georg Gadamer

From Gadamer I learned that to understand a given thinker requires one to presuppose that he is right. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

A horizon is something towards which we move, but it's also something that moves along with us - Hans Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method) — John O'Donohue

In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

Unlike seeing, where one can look away, one cannot 'hear away' but must listen ... hearing implies already belonging together in such a manner that one is claimed by what is being said. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

The sensus communis plays no part in Kant - not even in the logical sense. What Kant treats in the transcendental doctrine of judgment - i.e., the doctrine of schematism and the principles - no longer has anything to do with the sensus communis.57 For here we are concerned with concepts that are supposed to refer to their objects a priori, and not with the subsumption of the particular under the universal. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

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

For both art and the historical sciences are modes of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence comes directly into play. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

The individual case does not serve only to confirm a law from which practical predictions can be made. Its ideal is rather to understand the phenomenon itself in its unique and historical concreteness. However much experiential universals are involved, the aim is not to confirm and extend these universalized experiences in order to attain knowledge of a law - e.g., how men, peoples, and states evolve - but to understand how this man, this people, or this state is what it has become or, more generally, how it happened that it is so. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said ... 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

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

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

If, however, we pursue what is expressed in the phrase 'the language of things', we are pointed in a similar direction. The language of things too is something to which we should pay better attention. This expression also has a kind of polemical accent. It expresses the fact that, in general, we are not at all ready to hear things in there own being, that they are subjected to man's calculus and to his domination of nature through the rationality of science. — GADAMER, HANS GEORG

The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

As in play, it rests on a common willingness of the participants in conversation to lend themselves to the emergence of something else, the Sache or subject matter which comes to presence and presentation in conversation. — 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

It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed") - e.g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to it. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

Human science too is concerned with establishing similarities, regularities, and conformities to law which would make it possible to predict individual phenomena and processes. In the field of natural phenomena this goal cannot always be reached everywhere to the same extent, but the reason for this variation is only that sufficient data on which the similarities are to be established cannot always be obtained. Thus the method of meteorology is just the same as that of physics, but its data is incomplete and therefore its predictions are more uncertain. — Hans-Georg Gadamer