Hans-Georg Gadamer - Truth and Method

Truth and Method

TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES

Aesthetic Theory , Theodor W. Adorno

On Religion , Karl Barth

The Intelligence of Evil , Jean Baudrillard

In Defence of Politics , Bernard Crick

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy , Manuel DeLanda

A Thousand Plateaus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Anti-Oedipus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Taking Rights Seriously , Ronald Dworkin

Discourse on Free Will , Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther

Education for Critical Consciousness , Paulo Freire

To Have or To Be? , Erich Fromm

Truth and Method , Hans Georg Gadamer

All Men Are Brothers , Mohandas K. Gandhi

Eclipse of Reason , Max Horkheimer

After Virtue , Alasdair MacIntyre

Time for Revolution , Antonio Negri

The Politics of Aesthetics , Jacques Ranciere

An Actor Prepares , Constantin Stanislavski

Building a Character , Constantin Stanislavski

Creating a Role , Constantin Stanislavski

Some titles are not available in North America.

Truth and Method

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

www.bloomsbury.com

Copyright 1975 and 1989 by Sheed & Ward Ltd and the

Continuum Publishing Group

First published 1975: second edition 1989; revised second edition 2004.

This paperback edition first published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Academic

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ePub ISBN: 978-1-7809-3658-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 19002002.

[Wahrheit und Methode. English]

Truth and method/Hans-Georg Gadamer First paperback edition/translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-78093-624-6 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-78093-658-1 (epub) ISBN 978-1-78093-600-0 (epdf) 1. Humanities-Methodology. 2. Hermeneutics. 3. Aesthetics. I. Weinsheimer, Joel. II. Marshall, Donald G., 1943- III. Title.

BD241.G313 2013

121dc23

2013004330

Catch only what youve thrown yourself, all is
mere skill and little gain;
but when youre suddenly the catcher of a ball
thrown by an eternal partner
with accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your center, in an arch
from the great bridgebuilding of God:
why catching then becomes a power
not yours, a worlds.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Contents

Truth and Method is one of the two or three most important works of this century on the philosophy of humanistic studies. The book is powerful, exciting, but undeniably difficult. Published when Gadamer was sixty, it gathers the ripe fruit of a lifetimes reading, teaching, and thinking. Because it is immersed in German philosophy and scholarship, the book is even more challenging for an American reader. An emerging body of commentary in English as well as the many shorter essays Gadamer has, happily, lived to write and which are increasingly available in translation provide additional means of access to his thought. Truth and Method , however, remains his magnum opus , the comprehensive and integrated statement of his rich and penetrating reflections.

The first edition of 1960 was revised and the footnotes updated for the second and again for the third edition, and then for the last time for inclusion in Gadamers ten-volume Gesammelte Werke. An English translation based on the second edition appeared in 1975. Gadamer teaches us that the idea of a perfect translation that could stand for all time is entirely illusory. Even apart from the inevitable mistakes that reflect limits of erudition or understanding, a translation must transpose a work from one time and cultural situation to another. Over the past decade, both philosophical and literary study have become increasingly interested in the thinkers and issues that figure prominently in Gadamers work. This altered situation presents difficulties, but also opportunities for bringing Gadamers thought more fully into the contemporary cultural dialogue. We have undertaken a thorough revision of the earlier translation of Truth and Method , based on the German text for the Gesammelte Werke , but using the fourth edition to correct some obvious errors. We have aimed at accuracy, not according to an abstract standard, but specifically to help his contemporary American readers understand Gadamer more fully; and we have tried to make our translation as readable and often powerfully eloquent as Gadamers German. We have no illusion that our revised translation will speak clearly into every future situation, but we have been conscious that our version will have to stand for an indefinite length of time and have therefore aimed always to serve as a bridge, not an obstacle, between Gadamer and his readers.

Some notes on important German terms and our translation of them will be helpful. The impossibility of translating even key terms the same way every time they occur is not due simply to the obvious fact that the range of meanings of the German word does not match precisely the range of any single English word. More telling is the fact that Gadamers language resists hardening into a terminology, a technical language with stipulated, univocal meanings. He remains always responsive to the flexible usage of actual words, not simply in their ordinary meanings, but as they respond to the movement of thinking about particular subject matters.

Bildung is translated by culture and related forms such as cultivation, cultivated. In Part One, I.I.B.i., Gadamer defines Bildung as the properly human way of developing ones natural talents and capacities. The term has the flavor of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and played a key role throughout German-speaking Europe. Gadamer uses the term throughout the book, but he is not uncritically taking up the whole mode of thought the term conveys. Specifically, he questions it in its association with the aesthetic taken as an ideal of life. And in other writings, he has made clear that we cannot simply ignore the fact of later critiques of the concept, particularly the suspicion that culture and cultivation are simply instruments of bourgeois domination. What remains important is the concept that a self can be formed without breaking with or repudiating ones past and that this formation cannot be achieved by any merely technical or methodical means.

Gadamer notes that within Bildung is the root word Bild , form, image, and more particularly, picture. Cultivation is a process of forming the self in accordance with an ideal image of the human. Art, as a general capacity to form images or representations of experience, played a special role in the conception of Bildung. Gadamer appropriately turns to a consideration of the aesthetic and especially, at the end of Part One, the picture. The interrelations of Urbild , original; Vorbild , model; Abbild , copy; Bild , picture; and Einbildungskraft , imagination, cannot be reproduced in English. The conceptual argument is clear enough, but what is missed is not simply some verbal pyrotechnics, but an example of what Gadamer in Part Three describes as the preparatory conceptual work ordinary language accomplishes through the formation of word families and other devices.