For a while, I've been intending to write about Hans-Georg Gadamer, and never quite getting round to it. I've started more than a few articles about the man, but today realised that the only way I will ever publish anything about Gadamer is through my blog. I have had difficulty putting thoughts to paper. I hope that my blog will have more transience, and have more opportunity for conversation about the late Professor Gadamer's work. An ongoing conversation is, of course, more interesting than a dead article - and hopefully publishing my thoughts will purify them in a way that my notebook cannot.
Gadamer is an interesting 'character' - if that word is appropriate to describe a philosopher. I don't want to provide a cartoon version. There are good biographical accounts out there. Start with Wikipedia and then work up to Grondin's biography.
When I was first introduced to Gadamer's work, I was sceptical. It looked like nothing but another chapter in the ostentatious pomp that is an unfortunately large swathe of "Continental philosophy". From this early introduction, I kept 'accidentally' finding myself working on Gadamer's writings again and again. Essay after essay. And it became clearer and clearer, although it is unlikely to ever completely click inside my head. Like a lot of good things, it takes a long time to appreciate it properly.
Gadamer's prose is not at all bad. He grasps clarity more often than a lot of philosophers, and his style even occasionally soars. Gadamer's magnum opus (and it is certainly not cheesy to say that) is his 1960 book, Truth and Method. It deals with the broad subject of how we understand language, and how we interpret. Gadamer's philosophical project is a lot more conservative than many other modern philosophers - although a broad subject, he does not engage in the sort of free-flowing radicalism that we have seen from some left-wing philosophers in the last fifty years. There are few of the sort of self-referential language games that we see in his peers. This gives it a certain attractiveness in English, where tricksy language is not nearly as welcome.
Where shall we start? How about what it is to do philosophy, or to be a humanist. Gadamer here seems to pine for a previous generation of humanism. Gadamer tries to reintroduce us to some concepts that can seem quite alien to modern ears - the concept of Geist, on which Hegel's famous Phenomenology is a study of, is one of these. Geist is a word that does not translate to English well, and can mean both a 'spirit' or 'ghostly' type presence, but also can signify 'mind', and more broadly 'motivation' or 'drive'. Gadamer claims to criticise the natural sciences (the Naturewissenschaft) for an overreliance on the inferential method. The problem with inference, then, is that it lets us say a lot of interesting things about large groups of people, but does not help us say interesting things about individual things - specifically work by individual human beings. There is a particular, idealistic perspective that the concept of Geist can give us. You don't have to agree with this concept, but to drink it in and try to understand it is potentially a useful way to understand the path ahead.
Two of the skills that the humanist must have are an appreciation of culture and the skill of judgment. Judgment is the more difficult of these to fully comprehend, and it's one which we shall return in the future as we hop around inside Gadamer's work. Here, though, in the prefaratory remarks, a short remark from Gadamer will hopefully set the tone. Judgment, Gadamer writes, "cannot be taught in the abstract but only practiced from case to case" (p. 27). Again, we have something interesting going on here. There is some distance to be travelled here, and we shall move on to it soon. As for culture, this is another interesting point. Gadamer writes of culture as a process of formation, but not a universal one. It is necessarily bound to the context of time, and is a similarly developing trait to judgment.
We shall go on from here in the future. The process of blogging about Gadamer is to try and straighten my thoughts out about his work. They will not be at all like academic essays, nor like blog entries to any real extent, but kind of meandering personal notes. No guarantee is placed on their accuracy or on them being an accurate reflection of the work of Gadamer. They are an exploration. Hopefully, I shall have another chapter up soon.
Right, I'm done. You can go back to your Twittery, Web 2.0, hyper-spherical thingy now.
