Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, born in Marburg, Germany, on 11 February 1900 and living through more than a century of European intellectual and political change. He is best known for his 1960 magnum opus on hermeneutics, Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode), a book that made his name closely tied to questions of interpretation, history, and understanding.

Gadamer grew up in a Protestant Christian household. His father, Johannes Gadamer, was a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and later rector of the University of Marburg. His mother, Emma Karoline Johanna Gewiese, died of diabetes when Hans-Georg was four. Gadamer later noted that this loss may have affected his decision not to pursue scientific studies. He resisted his father’s urging to enter the natural sciences and became increasingly drawn to the humanities.

His education took him first into classics and philosophy at the University of Breslau under Richard Hönigswald, then back to Marburg, where he studied with Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann. In 1922 he defended his dissertation, The Essence of Pleasure in Plato’s Dialogues. Soon afterward he moved to Freiburg University to study with Martin Heidegger, and then followed Heidegger to Marburg. There he belonged to a circle that included Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, and Hannah Arendt. Heidegger’s influence gave Gadamer’s thought its distinctive cast and led him away from the neo-Kantian influences of Natorp and Hartmann. Gadamer also studied Aristotle under both Edmund Husserl and Heidegger.

Gadamer habilitated in 1929 and spent much of the early 1930s lecturing in Marburg. During the Nazi period he did not join the Nazi Party, though he joined the National Socialist Teachers League in August 1933 and signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. His degree of involvement has been disputed by later scholars. In 1946, American occupation forces found him untainted by Nazism and named him rector of the university. He had not served in World War I because of ill health and was exempted from service in World War II because of polio contracted in 1922.

After the war, Gadamer moved to West Germany, first accepting a post at Goethe University Frankfurt and then succeeding Karl Jaspers as chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1949. He retired in 1968 but remained there as emeritus until his death. At Heidelberg he completed Truth and Method and entered into a well-known debate with Jürgen Habermas over whether one can transcend history and culture to find a truly objective position from which to critique society. The debate was inconclusive, yet it began warm relations between the two, and Gadamer later secured Habermas’s first professorship at Heidelberg.

Gadamer received honorary doctorates from universities including Bamberg, Wrocław, Boston College, Charles University in Prague, Hamilton College, Leipzig, Marburg, Ottawa, Saint Petersburg State University, Tübingen, and Washington. The University of Heidelberg celebrated his 100th birthday with a ceremony and conference in 2000. His last academic engagement came in the summer of 2001, at age 101, at an annual symposium on hermeneutics organized by two of his American students. He died on 13 March 2002 at Heidelberg’s University Clinic, aged 102. Readers still come to Gadamer because his work keeps asking how understanding happens, how history shapes thought, and how conversation can open a path between minds.