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121 7 Two Contrasting Heideggerian Elements in Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics Richard E. Palmer I wish to discuss two important contrasting Heideggerian elements in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The first is the finite universality of Gadamer’s focus on understanding (based on Heidegger’s existential ontology of Dasein).1 The second is the specificity of his focus on truth and the experience of art (based on Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” [“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”]).2 1. The universality of philosophical hermeneutics owes much to the early Heidegger, with whom Gadamer was an assistant in Marburg from 1923 to 1928 and under whom he successfully completed his habilitation on Plato’s Philebus in 1929, as Heidegger was leaving town.3 But earlier in the 1920s Gadamer wanted to keep from totally falling under the sway of the powerful interpretations of Greek philosophy by Heidegger, so during that same period he studied under Paul Friedländer for certification in Greek classical philology. Gadamer did not want just to parrot Heidegger’s interpretations of ancient Greek philosophers; he wanted a defensible standpoint of his own. In the late 1930s, he finally got a full-time permanent job teaching ancient philosophy (including the pre-Socratics) in Leipzig.4 This position functioned as an unobtrusive way to escape the attention of the Nazis. Who could suspect subversion from an expert in ancient Greek philosophy? But during the period in the 1920s when he was studying with Heidegger, he was impressed by the hermeneutical possibilities of the ontology of Dasein in Being and Time (1927). As Gadamer explains in response to Emilio Betti’s complaints about Truth and Method, his philosophical hermeneutics is not a methodology but a description of what always happens in understanding, quite aside from our willing.5 122 R I C H A R D E . P A L M E R As a description of the process of understanding in the Being of Dasein , hermeneutics is universal. It is not a methodology for understanding religious texts, or legal texts, or literary texts. Nor is it an allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (general methodology of the human sciences ), as Wilhelm Dilthey had envisioned it in 1900, following the lead of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is not a methodology of any kind, but a description of what happens “always and in spite of our wishes” when we understand something. It does not offer clever new methods that actually leave virtually unchanged the perspective that the interpreter has of his task. Instead, it starts from ontology , the description of the universal being-process of every factical being, as Heidegger described it in his early (1923) lectures now published as Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity.6 Understanding for Heidegger and Gadamer is no longer just a practical problem in an interpreter’s discipline but a process of the being of factical Dasein (of the being-there of the finite human being). It is a process always and before any action by a human being; it is an ontological and universal process occurring in every human being. But Gadamer went on to describe this understanding process as an ontological process— not as one sort of understanding among others, but the understandingprocess of a human being as such. The first point about this process is that it is always situated; it has a past and future and a place in time. This is the temporality of being-in-the-world and being in time. History has been and is being made. A human being lives historically; this is the historicity (Gadamer called it Geschichtlichkeit) of human being-in-the-world. But there is another aspect of understanding, according to Gadamer: Sprachlichkeit—linguisticality. This does not mean just using language as a tool; it means understanding in and through language. To understand is to understand in language, as Heidegger had suggested in the “Letter on Humanism” (“Humanismusbrief”). According to Heidegger in this famous letter, we live in and through language the way a fish exists in and through water. Indeed, a 2001 homage volume to Gadamer, with essays by Rüdiger Bubner, Günter Figal, and others, was titled Being That Can Be Understood Is Language (Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache).7 This title points to the universal dimension of hermeneutics that Gadamer owes to Heidegger’s existential ontology. Language for Heidegger and for Gadamer is not a tool of man; it is the medium through which we live and have...

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