A late-life collection of interviews with the philosopher of hermeneutics
What the Work Is
Gadamer in Conversation is a collection of interviews with the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, first published in 2001. The book belongs to the genre of the philosophical interview collection, presenting Gadamer’s thought in his own spoken voice rather than through formal treatise writing. It appeared when Gadamer was already past his hundredth year — he was born in 1900 and would live until 2002 — making it a late-career retrospective in which the philosopher looks back over a long life of thinking. The work is catalogued under subjects including interviews, philosophers, and German philosophy, and is identified in library records as dealing specifically with Gadamer as an interviewee.
What the Book Is About
At its core, Gadamer in Conversation presents the philosopher discussing the ideas that defined his career, most centrally his development of philosophical hermeneutics — the study of how human understanding works. Gadamer’s major statement on this subject was Truth and Method, published in 1960, which argued that understanding is shaped by history, language, and dialogue rather than by the application of objective method. The interviews in this volume give Gadamer occasion to revisit and elaborate on that central insight in a more conversational register, addressing how his thinking developed and how it relates to the broader philosophical tradition in which he worked.
Key Ideas and Themes
The interviews return repeatedly to the themes that animated Gadamer’s philosophical project. Central among these is the idea that “truth” and “method” stand at odds with one another — that the experience of art, for instance, provides truths that scientific methods cannot reach, and that this kind of experience extends across the whole domain of the human sciences. Gadamer was critical of approaches to the humanities that modeled themselves on the natural sciences, seeking to observe and analyze texts and artworks “objectively.” He was equally critical of older German hermeneutic traditions, such as those of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, which held that meaning could be located within a text through a particular procedure — whether by reconnecting with the author’s thoughts or by understanding the situation that gave rise to an expression of inner life.
Against both positions, Gadamer argued that meaning and understanding are not objects to be found through methods but are inevitable phenomena of human existence. Hermeneutics, in his view, is not a process for finding a particular meaning but a philosophical effort to account for understanding as an ontological process — a description of what we always do when we interpret things, whether we are aware of it or not. As Gadamer put it, his concern was not what we do or ought to do, but what happens to us beyond our wanting and doing.
A related theme is the concept of historically affected consciousness — the idea that people are embedded in the particular history and culture that shaped them, and that this embeddedness is not an obstacle but the very basis of our ability to understand history at all. Gadamer criticized Enlightenment thinkers for harboring a prejudice against prejudices, arguing that the traditions in which we stand establish preunderstandings that make interpretation possible rather than hindering it.
The interviews also explore Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons. Both a text and its interpreter exist within particular historical traditions, or horizons, each expressed through language. Because both belong to history and language, a common ground exists that makes understanding possible. When an interpreter seeks to understand a text, a common horizon emerges — not a full grasp of some objective meaning, but an event in which a world opens itself. Gadamer further described the hermeneutical experience as a dialogue, using Plato’s dialogues as a model. To be in conversation means taking seriously the truth claim of the other person, and the most important dynamic is the give-and-take of question and answer. Meaning emerges not as an object lying in the text or in the interpreter, but as an event resulting from their interaction.
Structure and Approach
The work takes the form of interviews, presenting Gadamer’s ideas through spoken exchange rather than systematic exposition. This format allows the philosopher to address his central concerns — hermeneutics, understanding, dialogue, and the relationship between truth and method — in a more accessible and personal register than his formal writings. The conversational setting also permits Gadamer to reflect on his intellectual development and on the philosophical conversations and debates that shaped his career.
Significance and Influence
Gadamer in Conversation holds value as a late-life testament from one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers of the continental tradition. Gadamer’s work on hermeneutics, particularly Truth and Method, became foundational for the field, and his ideas about dialogue and understanding have had lasting impact — including in applied fields such as communication ethics, where his theories have informed the development of dialogic approaches to mutual understanding. The interviews collected here offer readers a direct encounter with Gadamer’s thinking as he approached the end of a career that spanned nearly the entire twentieth century, providing a window into the mind of a philosopher whose ideas about how we understand texts, artworks, and one another continue to shape discussion in the humanities.
Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, the son of Johannes Gadamer, a pharmaceutical chemistry professor who later served as rector of the University of Marburg. He was raised a Protestant Christian and resisted his father’s urging to take up the natural sciences, becoming increasingly interested in the humanities. His mother, Emma Karoline Johanna Gewiese, died of diabetes when he was four years old, and he later noted that this may have had an effect on his decision not to pursue scientific studies. Jean Grondin describes Gadamer as finding in his mother “a poetic and almost religious counterpart to the iron fist of his father.” Gadamer did not serve during World War I for reasons of ill health and was similarly exempted from serving during World War II due to polio.
He studied classics and philosophy at the University of Breslau under Richard Hönigswald, but soon moved back to the University of Marburg to study with the neo-Kantian philosophers Paul Natorp, his doctoral thesis advisor, and Nicolai Hartmann. He defended his dissertation The Essence of Pleasure in Plato’s Dialogues in 1922. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Freiburg University and began studying with Martin Heidegger, then a promising young scholar who had not yet received a professorship. Gadamer became close to Heidegger and followed him to Marburg, where he became one of a group of students that included Leo Strauss, Karl Löwith, and Hannah Arendt. It was Heidegger’s influence that gave Gadamer’s thought its distinctive cast and led him away from the earlier neo-Kantian influences. Gadamer studied Aristotle both under Edmund Husserl and under Heidegger.
Gadamer habilitated in 1929 and spent most of the early 1930s lecturing in Marburg. Unlike Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and continued as a member until the party was dissolved following World War II, Gadamer was silent on Nazism and was not politically active during Nazi rule. He did not join the Nazis and did not serve in the army because of the polio he had contracted in 1922. He joined the National Socialist Teachers League in August 1933 and in 1933 signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. In April 1937 he became a temporary professor at Marburg, then in 1938 received a professorship at Leipzig University. From an SS point of view, Gadamer was classified as neither supportive nor disapproving in the SD-Dossiers über Philosophie-Professoren set up by the SS-Security-Service. In 1946, he was found by the American occupation forces to be untainted by Nazism and named rector of the university.
The level of Gadamer’s involvement with the Nazis has been disputed in the works of Richard Wolin and Teresa Orozco. Orozco alleges, with reference to Gadamer’s published works, that he had supported the Nazis more than scholars had supposed. Gadamer scholars have rejected these assertions: Jean Grondin has said that Orozco is engaged in a “witch-hunt,” while Donatella Di Cesare said that “the archival material on which Orozco bases her argument is actually quite negligible.” Di Cesare and Grondin have argued that there is no trace of antisemitism in Gadamer’s work, and that he maintained friendships with Jews and provided shelter for nearly two years for the philosopher Jacob Klein in 1933 and 1934. Gadamer also reduced his contact with Heidegger during the Nazi era.
After the war, Gadamer left for West Germany, accepting first a position at Goethe University Frankfurt and then the succession of Karl Jaspers as the philosophy chair at the University of Heidelberg in 1949, retiring in 1968. He remained in this position, as emeritus, until his death in 2002 at the age of 102. He was also an Editorial Advisor of the journal Dionysius. It was during this time that he completed Truth and Method and engaged in his famous debate with Jürgen Habermas over the possibility of transcending history and culture in order to find a truly objective position from which to critique society. The debate was inconclusive but marked the beginning of warm relations between the two men. It was Gadamer who secured Habermas’s first professorship at the University of Heidelberg.
In 1968, Gadamer invited Tomonobu Imamichi for lectures at Heidelberg, but their relationship became very cool after Imamichi alleged that Heidegger had taken his concept of Dasein out of Okakura Kakuzo’s concept of das in-der-Welt-sein expressed in The Book of Tea, which Imamichi’s teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed lessons with him the year before. Imamichi and Gadamer renewed contact four years later during an international congress. In 1981, Gadamer attempted to engage with Jacques Derrida at a conference in Paris, but it proved less enlightening because the two thinkers had little in common. A last meeting between Gadamer and Derrida was held at the Stift of Heidelberg in July 2001, coordinated by Derrida’s students Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly. This meeting marked, in many ways, a turn in their philosophical encounter. After Gadamer’s death, Derrida called their failure to find common ground one of the worst debacles of his life and expressed, in the main obituary for Gadamer, his great personal and philosophical respect. Richard J. Bernstein said that “[a] genuine dialogue between Gadamer and Derrida has never taken place. This is a shame because there are crucial and consequential issues that arise between hermeneutics and deconstruction.”
Other Works and Recognition
Gadamer also added philosophical substance to the notion of human health. In The Enigma of Health, he explored what it means to heal, as a patient and a provider; in this work the practice and art of medicine are thoroughly examined, as is the inevitability of any cure. In addition to his work in hermeneutics, Gadamer is well known for a long list of publications on Greek philosophy. While Truth and Method became central to his later career, much of his early life centered on studying Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle specifically. In the Italian introduction to Truth and Method, Gadamer said that his work on Greek philosophy was “the best and most original part” of his career. His book Plato’s Dialectical Ethics looks at the Philebus dialogue through the lens of phenomenology and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
Truth and Method was published twice in English, and the revised edition is now considered authoritative. The German-language edition of Gadamer’s Collected Works includes a volume in which Gadamer elaborates his argument and discusses the critical response to the book. Finally, Gadamer’s essay on Celan, entitled “Who Am I and Who Are You?”, has been considered by many — including Heidegger and Gadamer himself — as a “second volume” or continuation of the argument in Truth and Method.
Gadamer received honorary doctorates from the University of Bamberg, the University of Wrocław, Boston College, Charles University in Prague, Hamilton College, the University of Leipzig, the University of Marburg (1999), the University of Ottawa, Saint Petersburg State University (2001), the University of Tübingen, and University of Washington. Among his prizes and awards were the Pour le Mérite and the Reuchlin Prize in 1971; the Great Cross of Merit with Star of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1972; the Sigmund Freud Prize for scientific prose and the Hegel Prize in 1979; the Karl Jaspers Prize in 1986; the Great Cross of Merit with Star and Sash of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990; and the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1993. On 12 January 1996, he was appointed an honorary member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig.
On 11 February 2000, the University of Heidelberg celebrated Gadamer’s 100th birthday with a ceremony and conference. His last academic engagement was in the summer of 2001, at the age of 101, at an annual symposium on hermeneutics organized by two of his American students. On 13 March 2002, Gadamer died at Heidelberg’s University Clinic at the age of 102. He is buried in the Köpfel cemetery in Ziegelhausen.
