A new biography fuels debate over the relationship between Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophy and the Nazi era
Students compared him to Socrates, and not just because he looked ancient.
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Conversing With Gadamer
When Hans-Georg Gadamer lectured on philosophy -- as he continued to do until shortly before his death, last year, at the age of 102 -- he attracted crowds as large as a thousand people. They were drawn by his renown as the author of Truth and Method (1960), a dense and sizable volume that explored the very foundations of the humanities and social sciences. In it, Gadamer emphasized “hermeneutics,” the art of interpretation. Once an obscure theological term, it caught on as part of the common stock of scholarly ideas.
Listeners who expected something severe and ponderous were often surprised to find that Gadamer was a relaxed speaker, improvising his talks rather than delivering them from on high. He seemed not so much to analyze Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger as to hold conversations with them -- as if he were able to hear the questions posed by their writings, and to ask them questions in turn. It was hermeneutics in action. Those who eavesdropped on one of Gadamer’s dialogues with the illustrious dead often refer to it as the greatest pedagogical experience of their lives.
“He spoke freely,” recalls Jean Grondin, a professor of philosophy at the University of Montreal, “and an audience always finds that engaging. It was a habit Gadamer developed in the 1930s, when he had to teach the entire spectrum of philosophy at the University of Leipzig.”
An English translation of Mr. Grondin’s Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography is just out from Yale University Press. When the German edition appeared, in 1999, it became part of a bitter controversy -- one that shows every sign of continuing on this side of the Atlantic. For there are some awkward questions about just what Gadamer was doing in Germany during the 1930s, besides developing a memorable classroom presence. And those questions, in turn, raise troubling concerns about his influential work in philosophy.
Scholars began looking into Gadamer’s activity under the Third Reich during the late 1980s, following a prolonged debate over the Nazi Party membership of his mentor, Martin Heidegger. Mr. Grondin’s professed intent is to clear Gadamer of any charge of totalitarian sympathies. “Gadamer was part of an older generation of university professors that was apolitical,” he says. “To delve into politics is to go down into a realm that is a bit messy.” For a “mandarin” scholar such as Gadamer -- who once prided himself on never reading a book that was less than 2,000 years old -- Heidegger’s enthusiasm for Hitler “was not criminal,” says Mr. Grondin. “it was just embarrassing.”
Yet in tracing Gadamer’s career throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, Mr. Grondin also documents just how adept the philosopher was at turning the darkest period of the 20th century to his own professional advantage. While Jewish friends and colleagues were being “furloughed,” as the official euphemism had it, Gadamer moved into positions they left vacant. He never joined the Nazi Party. But he did enroll in a Nazi indoctrination camp in 1935, once it became clear that doing so would open certain academic doors.
His career had been undistinguished until that point. Within a short time, however, he was turning down several offers for full professorships, and also getting to travel. In 1941, Gadamer went to occupied Paris to lecture defeated French officers on the German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder’s interpretation of the Volk, a nationalistic concept dear to the Nazis. When the Nazis were defeated, the fact that Gadamer had never joined the party turned to his advantage. The American authorities approved his election as rector at Leipzig in 1945. A few months later, when Soviet troops took over, Gadamer’s lectures began to make enthusiastic references to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
To an unsympathetic eye, it all looks like opportunism of the basest sort. But Mr. Grondin sees things otherwise. “Gadamer knew what he had to do to survive with the Nazis and then with the Communists,” he says. “He wanted to promote philosophy, poetry, his love of the Greeks. You could show you were not a Nazi by giving classes on Rilke, or by refusing to participate in the usual Nazi ‘racial studies.’ Gadamer kept his distance, but he also had a sense of what was doable. That could be seen as a political virtue. Today we’d call it pragmatism.”
Careerism or Complicity?
Mr. Grondin’s biography had barely reached American bookstores last month when a scathing critique appeared in Bookforum magazine. The reviewer, Richard Wolin, is a professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Like Mr. Grondin, he is a former student of Gadamer’s. Indeed, Mr. Wolin’s recollection of a seminar with the elderly philosopher at McMaster University, in Ontario, in the mid-1970s strikes a familiar note. “Gadamer’s love of dialogue was palpable,” he writes. “He struck me as a latter-day Socrates who had missed out on his true calling in the agora of Periclean Athens by some 2,500 years.”
But Mr. Wolin has become one of the thinker’s most outspoken critics. In 2000, he wrote a review of several recent volumes by and about Gadamer, including the German edition of Mr. Grondin’s biography. Mr. Wolin contended that the philosopher had been guilty of more than careerism -- and that his work in hermeneutic theory reflected elements of a worldview that made him susceptible to the appeals of the Nazi movement.
Although Mr. Wolin draws on the work of other researchers who have written about Gadamer’s career during the Nazi era, that 2000 essay provoked an especially strong reaction. In 2001, when the editors of the International Review for Philosophy, a German publication, translated the essay and organized a symposium about its arguments, some editors protested, and one resigned. Late last year, another publication, the International Journal for Philosophical Studies, published a rejoinder to Mr. Wolin by Richard E. Palmer, a professor emeritus of philosophy at MacMurray College, in Illinois, who had written some of the earliest studies of Gadamer in English.
Mr. Wolin’s thesis is that Gadamer, by claiming the mantle of disinterested scholar-teacher who never bothered himself with the rough-and-tumble of politics, escaped some hard questions about his conduct. The notion of “inner emigration” among German academics (the claim to have gone into spiritual exile amid all the turmoil) is a specious alibi, he says. Mr. Wolin cites recent work by historians that the Nazis in fact cultivated the support -- but not the party membership -- of “apolitical” professors such as Gadamer. Their aura of high culture lent legitimacy to the regime. Besides which, they were essential to the smooth functioning of the educational system; storm troopers might be useful on the battlefield, but not in university administration.
“In Gadamer’s case, though he wasn’t a Nazi, he willfully played along with the regime, which, practically speaking, was in many ways just as bad,” says Mr. Wolin. “Subtract the tacit support of the Gadamers of the world, and Hitler and company would never have made it.”
Tradition Lives
The discussion grows much more complex when critics of Gadamer begin to ask about the link between his activity during the 1930s and ‘40s and his philosophical work. At first glance, those look like completely unrelated matters -- and not just because Gadamer’s interest in high culture is remote from the political lowlife of the Nazi era.
Gadamer was a late bloomer as a thinker. He published very little before Truth and Method, which did not appear until he was 60 years old. By that point, he had relocated from the Soviet zone and become a respectable, if by no means prominent, figure in West German academe. While embarrassing details from earlier decades had been forgotten, so had Gadamer himself.
“The feeling was that he was not someone who would make a substantial impact,” says Mr. Grondin. “He was regarded as sound, he was appreciated, but no one thought of him as a major philosopher.” That changed with the appearance of his masterpiece, which Gadamer had spent 10 years writing. It took about that long for other scholars to absorb the book’s impact. By the 1970s, Gadamer had emerged as one of the most influential postwar German thinkers.
Gadamer offered a rich, if demanding, analysis of the humanities and the social sciences -- the Geisteswissenschaften, or “sciences of spirit” -- as a distinct form of knowledge. It is not purely subjective, but neither does it bear any resemblance to the knowledge pursued by science, which gives human beings a degree of mastery over nature.
“Gadamer renewed the idea that our basic knowledge is not grounded in technology at all,” says Mr. Grondin, “but on tradition, on the language that we speak, on the great works of art. If you read today a book on physics or medicine that’s a hundred years old, it’s not usable any more. But you can still watch a play by Sophocles or Shakespeare, and it’s not grown old. Gadamer’s question is ‘What is this truth that remains, and that is compelling, of which the artwork is an example?’”
Gadamer’s answer, unfolding across hundreds of closely argued pages, involved a careful analysis of what we mean by “understanding” a work of, say, literature. It is not simply a matter of possessing facts. Knowing that Shakespeare lived between 1564 and 1616 is utterly distinct from understanding Hamlet; they represent different kinds of knowledge. Coming to understand a piece of literature, a philosophical argument, or a historical period is, Gadamer argued, a process of dialogue with the past. It requires a “fusion of horizons” between the world embodied in the work and the contemporary world.
But such “fusion” is never really a meeting of equals. For Gadamer, the “knowledge” available through the Geisteswissenschaften ultimately derives from what he calls “tradition.” The world of meanings found in art, philosophy, and history is far wider and deeper than anything the contemporary interpreter is able to imagine. We are, in effect, a product of that tradition. Even when arguing with it, we use concepts and language inherited from tradition. The most radical-sounding denunciations of Western thought may well be, upon inspection, echoes of Nietzsche -- whose work, in turn, involves an unrelenting argument with Plato.
For Gadamer’s critics, the notion of a powerful and inescapable tradition sounds suspiciously authoritarian. So does his complaint that modern thought (which begins, for Gadamer, with Descartes) made a fatal mistake in trying to abolish “prejudice.” Gadamer argues that we never approach the world with a blank slate. The process of understanding always begins with some established understanding already in place. Mr. Wolin points to this “rehabilitation of prejudice” as a particularly troubling element in the thought of a German philosopher of Gadamer’s generation.
His defenders point out that Gadamer is not so much advocating prejudice as recognizing a fact of hermeneutic life. Prejudice must be accepted before it can be challenged through a “fusion of horizons” between the contemporary interpreter and the cultural tradition.
“There is an unqualified commitment in Gadamer’s thought to an openness which works against any form of closure, mastery, or authority,” says Dennis Schmidt, a professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, who edits a series of books on contemporary European thought that has included several volumes of Gadamer’s work. “Tradition, for Gadamer, is one name for the burden of history, for that which we need to confront and think. It is not an authority to which we need to defer.
“I sometimes wish that that Gadamer had a more profound sense of the darker side of tradition,” says Mr. Schmidt, “but I have never had the sense he was an apologist for tradition.”
Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutics as a form of “conversation” might be treated as a counterweight to the more authoritarian-sounding implication of his theory. But it is not a defense that Gadamer’s critics accept.
In an essay appearing in the recent collection Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Robin May Schott, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, questions just how open-ended and inclusive Gadamer’s notion of “conversation” really is. In his autobiographical writings, she points out, his female colleagues seem to disappear into the background. Likewise, his philosophical reflections never quite get around to considering the catastrophe of German politics -- remaining, instead, on a lofty plane, above such pedestrian topics. “When one’s conversational partners are drawn from an exclusive club of like-minded men,” she writes, “it is easier to display the hermeneutic generosity of spirit that assumes the openness to one’s opponents’ positions and the probability that they are right.”
What Would Socrates Do?
Coming to terms with Gadamer’s work is, in effect, a hermeneutic conversation. That the discussion is being stimulated by a book about his life would not have pleased the philosopher. “Gadamer had a lot of misgivings about biography,” says Mr. Grondin. “He doesn’t think you can understand the work out of the person’s life.
“I would say you cannot reduce the work to the life,” Mr. Grondin adds, “but it is certainly an interesting angle, especially if that person lived through all the identity changes that Germany went through, throughout the entire 20th century, until today.” Despite the philosopher’s distaste for the genre, Mr. Grondin sees his own book as a properly Gadamerian project: a “fusion of horizons” between the biographer and his subject.
The result, Mr. Wolin says, is a whitewash. In his review for Bookforum, he quotes a passage in which Mr. Grondin sympathetically describes Gadamer’s decision to take one of the opportunities offered by the turmoil in German academe: “In his situation,” the biographer writes, “he could only think about getting along himself.” Mr. Wolin’s anger is unmistakable. Mr. Grondin, he writes, “seems not to understand that philosophy’s distinctiveness as a vocation is that in such situations it acts on the basis of principle, rather than self-interest or survival.”
The argument will undoubtedly continue. Was Gadamer really like Socrates? Or did he lack the courage that made the Greek drink poison rather than submit to the mob? Gadamer himself is not around to respond, of course, but by his own account, his answer would not be definitive. As he wrote in a famous passage of Truth and Method: “The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life.”
CONVERSING WITH GADAMER
Works by Gadamer
- Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, translated by P. Christopher Smith (Yale University Press, 1980)
- Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, translated by Richard E. Palmer (Yale, 2001)
- Heidegger’s Ways, translated by John W. Stanley, with an introduction by Dennis J. Schmidt (State University of New York Press, 1994)
- Truth and Method, second revised edition, translated by Joel Wiesenheimer and Donald G. Marshall (Continuum, 1995)
Books about Gadamer
- Lorraine Code, editor, Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Penn State University Press, 2003)
- Robert J. Dostal, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
- Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography, translated by Joel Weisenheimer (Yale, 2003)
- Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher, editors, Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (MIT Press, 2002)
- Richard Wolin, The Seductions of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2004)
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 45, Page A14
