Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography (review)

When Gadamer recounted his own early years, he would often mention his father, a natural scientist who lost no occasion for belittling his son's attraction to literature and art. Evidently Gadamer saw this as one origin of his own need to explain the humanities and especially their claim to truth. And he often recounted his initiation into philosophy at the hands of an icy epistemologist whose clarity about concept-formation left out of account virtually all worthwhile human experience. It was with delight, then, that he became exposed at the University of Marburg to the magical poetry of Stefan George, the Platonic researches of Natorp and Friedländer, the phenomenology of Heidegger, and many more of the exhilarating ventures that were undertaken in those days at Marburg, a vital centre of Weimar culture.

This basic outline of Gadamer's early life is also what appears in the first seven chapters of Jean Grondin's new biography - but with a difference. In his own memoirs, Gadamer would treat his many encounters as occasions of learning, his intellectual horizon being widened through all the brilliant people he met, but he always left his own person veiled. Grondin draws away the veil obscuring this youth and young man. We learn how early he had come to doubt the certainties of the age of science: the sinking of the Titanic left a profound and lasting impression on him. With the First World War, his faith in European civilization was undermined. Death and disability haunted his family, and, after his own severe bout with polio, he raced into a hasty marriage mainly, it seems, to escape his paternal home. Poverty and hunger stalked most students and teachers in Germany in the 1920s. Grondin lets us see how a brilliant generation of young academics preserved their courage through their friendships and their high ideals. They were men and women, Jews and Gentiles, Marxists and conservatives, who, along with their teachers, shaped the intellectual framework in which we still live.

Later, in a classic brief chapter on Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960), Grondin opens our eyes to some of its hidden depths, pointing to its 'passionate, resonant sentences that reflect the suffering of a thinker deeply wounded by the horrors of an inconceivably tempestuous half-century.' The passages of Gadamer that Grondin is citing here do not only refer to his personal experience but principally to the history of the terrible times in which he was immersed: 'In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it ... The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the current of historical life.' The gruesome Third Reich is never lost to view in Grondin's narrative. Jewish academics were suspended and emigrated; virtually all Gadamer's Jewish friends were forced to leave; he himself was passed over for academic posts because he would not toe the political line; he was estranged from Heidegger after 1933. Grondin shows with convincing documentation that, while Gadamer never joined any resistance group, his demeanour throughout the whole period was that of an outsider, on the margin of official academia, who communicated wherever possible with other marginalized outsiders. As he said in later interviews, it was clear to him after June 1934 that the Nazi party could not be defeated from within because it had gained the support of the German Armed Forces. In Gadamer's own case, an obscure, non-political paper that he published on ancient Greek atomic theory came to the attention of Werner Heisenberg, who helped him gain an academic appointment at Leipzig in 1938, where he was to become rector under the Russian occupation of eastern Germany.

Grondin treats the postwar years fully, up through Gadamer's debates with Habermas in the 1970s and Derrida in the 1980s, encounters that began with polemic and, characteristically, ended in friendship. The English text concludes with an epilogue that covers the last few years of Gadamer's life (1999-2002), especially...