 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Profile Travel Books Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Interpreting the world
By Ernest Wolf-Gazo
Gadamer is among the few thinkers in the last century that made a difference. Not only as a thinker and master interpreter of philosophic, literary, and poetic texts, but also as a live witness to the historical events of the 20th century, Gadamer's star shines bright. February 11, 2000, marks his birthday. He relates in his autobiographical writing that the first shock he got in life was when he heard, as a 12-year-old boy, that the Titanic had sunk. His belief in the inevitability of progress was shattered. It took some time, for the succeeding generations, to catch up with the insight of young Gadamer.
In 1995 his collected works, in 10 volumes, were published. He was the subject of the international series The Library of Living Philosophers in 1997, joining such luminaries as Dewey, Whitehead, Santayana, Radakrishnan, Cassirer, Russell, Quine and, for the year 2000, the first Muslim, S H Nasr. An excellent biography of Gadamer was published by the Canadian Jean Grondin in 1999, reinforcing the view that Gadamer is, indeed, one of the great personalities of the 20th century.
Ironically Gadamer's fame arrived late, with the publication of his major work Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method) in 1960, at an age when many colleagues think about retirement. Not so Gadamer: it was especially after the slow but steady recognition of his work, that he embarked on a second career in the US, giving lectures at various universities.
His work was being translated and achieving the recognition it deserves. Any American graduate student who knows Adorno, Blumenberg or Habermas also knows Gadamer. The honours and prizes he has received are too numerous to list, but the honourary doctorate of Prague University in March 1997 was a symbolic act of reconciliation between the Czech people and Germany.
Let me review, in brief, some stations of a rich and fruitful life.
Gadamer's life spans the transition period of Wilhelminian Germany to the First World War, covers the breakdown of the Weimar Republic, the tyranny of National Socialism, Stalinist East Germany, the founding of the Federal Republic, with its capitol in Bonn, and, finally, the reunification of Germany in 1989.
Born in the small university town of Marburg, Gadamer spent his youth in Breslau, Saxony, where his father was a university professor of pharmaceutical chemistry. Later, he was to become president of Marburg University, to which young Gadamer would transfer his studies from Breslau. He was to spend a few semesters at Munich and Freiburg universities. As was the custom in those days a student would shop around to find a suitable teacher, or mentor, to research his doctorate. Later Gadamer was to hold professorships at Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, and succeed the great philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg University.
Gadamer's intellectual good fortune includes teachers such as Honigswald and Guttman in Breslau, Woelfflin in Munich, the Plato scholar Friedlaender, as well as such leading members of the Neo-Kantian school of philosophy as Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann, not to forget Edmund Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology.
Among his student friends he can count Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith and Lorenz Kruger. He wrote his dissertation under Paul Natorp in 1922 on Plato and his Habilitation (the professional license to teach at university) was completed under Martin Heidegger, considered by many the master philosopher of the 20th century.
Gadamer's intellectual discourse in the 1920s and 30s included the Russian-French Hegel interpreter Alexandre Kojeve, Leo Strauss, Kurt Rietzler, Emmanuel Levinas, and not least, Herbert Marcuse, hero of the 1960s generation in California, Paris, and Berlin where they chanted: Mao, Marx, Marcuse; make love, not war.
Gadamer survived the Nazi period, with some luck and without unduly compromising himself. He found himself rector of Leipzig University in 1946. He had to resign his rectorship and moved on to Frankfurt University, where he was visited by the American philosopher Charles Hartshorne, who celebrated his 103rd birthday recently. In 1949 he succeeded Jaspers in Heidelberg and formed, along with his friend Lowith, who had returned from his Japanese exile, a brilliant philosophic team. It was Gadamer who launched Habermas's carrier at Heidelberg, before the former was promoted by Adorno in Frankfurt, becoming associated with the so-called Frankfurt School. Habermas was always grateful to Gadamer for this mentorship. Following a long period of silence, Gadamer publishes his major work, "Truth and Method" in 1960.
Gadamer was one of the first commentators of the dark and metaphysical poetic diction of Paul Celan. A well known debate ensued between Gadamer and his former student Habermas on the problem of the universality of interpretation during the 1970s, while he entered a much commented debate with Derrida in Paris during the late 1980s. To encounter Gadamer is to encounter the intellectual and philosophic world of the 20th century.
At the 17th German Philosophy Conference in Leipzig in 1996 Gadamer was honoured for his philosophic and cultural contribution to the German-speaking world. I had the honour of meeting the master himself during a dinner at the conference, together with Habermas and Hans Lenk, philosopher and gold medal winner in the 1960 Rome Olympics. My mind's eye still sees Gadamer and Habermas discoursing, the former in a fatherly fashion, the latter as pupil and benign critic.
What constitutes Gadamer's philosophic achievement? The best way I can convey his sense of philosophy is to let him speak for himself:
"For my experience has been that my own power of judgment finds its limits, and also its enrichment, whenever I find someone else exercising his own power of judgment. That is the very soul of hermeneutics."
Now we find ourselves in the eye of the storm: hermeneutics. This curious term, derived from the Roman god Hermes, the messenger, turned into a modern version of interpretation, especially of literary and philosophic texts. In the later part of the 20th century hermeneutics has advanced to the idea of interpreting the world. Marx, of course, insisted that the task was changing the world, not just interpreting it. The circular idea here is that in order to change a world we must first understand it.
Without understanding the world, how, and in what way, can we change it? Many, especially in the Anglo-American world, have problems with hermeneutics. I am reminded of a Turkish colleague, during the 1980s, who pointed out to me that when he first heard of hermeneutics he thought it was a new disease from the West. We laughed together and understood that such a tongue twisting word is forbidding. But contrary to fashion, Gadamer made hermeneutics a household world.
The process of human understanding and interpreting human meaning is a very complex matter. It was Gadamer who pointed out that it is in the area of Art that we find the testing ground for this type of process. It is the universal characteristics of human understanding in terms of art that human kind finds itself, not exclusively in an epistemological situation, but in a metaphysical one.
Understanding is not simply an act of logic, or "getting it", but is the very existential situation of us as human beings. Without understanding. only the animal will prevail, not the human aspects of our being. With the help of Plato and his teacher Heidegger, Gadamer devised a way of how to make both relevant, not in political terms, but by retrieving the long forgotten practice of dialoguing and coming to terms with ourselves in the very act of interpreting the world. Being in the world, to use Heidegger's language, means to Gadamer interpreting the world, as interpretative living, and not existing and interpretation. Without interpretation there is no meaningful existing.
This is a simple truth we find in Gadamer's hermeneutics. Interpreting another human being means, in an existential situation, "fusing" the horizons of presuppositions, in which both are anchored, in such a way as to come to terms with the other's difference and uniqueness. The creative renewal of the dialogue, as an infinite and ongoing process of understanding and interpretation of life, in terms of Aristotle's rational animal, is the very heart of Gadamer's achievements. May we take this opportunity, again, to congratulate the sage not just on his longevity, but for another chance to reconcile ourselves with the world, in a more kind way, than was possible last century.
The writer is a professor of philosophy at the American University in Cairo.
