Gadamer’s Debt to Husserl

Abstract

1. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “From the Preface to the 1982 Reprinting of the First Edition,” in Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus, tr. Robert M. Wallace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), xxxii ff.; Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Foreword to the Second Edition,” Truth and Method, tr. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1993), xxxvi (hereafter referred to as TM); “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” tr. Richard E. Palmer, from The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Library of Living Philosophers Vol. XXIV, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 12. See also “Bodily Experience and the Limits of Objectification,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Enigma of Health, 70: “... the philosophical tradition to which I too belong, both as a student of the Marburg School and as a phenomenologist and student of Husserl and Heidegger. ...” 2. See, for example, James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-Reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 26; Jean Grondin, Sources of Hermeneutics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 43; Brice R. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being: Gadamer’s Post-Platonic Hermeneutical Ontology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 55–56. 3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Subjectivität und Intersubjektivität, Subjekt und Person,” in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 10 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1987), 92 (hereafter referred to as GW). See also “The Phenomenological Movement,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, tr. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 135; “Martin Heidegger — 75 Years,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, 18. However, Gadamer also points out that with Husserl phenomenological description was a “highly refined” art that Heidegger exploded with the vitality of his own extreme language. See Gadamer, “Destruktion and Deconstruction,” in Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer, eds., Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 103. 4. He speaks of Husserl’s “dazzling phenomenological analyses” in his Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. “Kant and the Hermeneutical Turn,” in Philosophical Hermeneutics, op. cit., 52. 5. “A Conversation with Hans-Georg Gadamer,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 26, No. 2, May 1995, 124.