The philosopher’s writings on the poetry of Paul Celan, gathered in English
What the Work Is
Gadamer on Celan is a 1997 collection that brings together, in English for the first time, all of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s published writings on the poetry of Paul Celan. Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his work on hermeneutics and for Truth and Method (1960), which argues that understanding is shaped by history, language, and dialogue rather than by the application of objective method. The volume is significant within his output as his only book-length commentary on a poet, and it includes a translation of the essay Who Am I and Who Are You?, described in the source material as the centerpiece of his most important philosophical project since Truth and Method.
What the Book Is About
The book gathers Gadamer’s commentaries on Celan’s poetry, written explicitly for a general audience rather than for specialists. Its subject is the encounter between philosophy and poetry — specifically, how a reader might come to listen to Celan’s work. The source material frames the collection as a demonstration of Gadamer’s thinking on the relationship between philosophy and poetry, using Celan as its best example. It also situates Celan’s poetry within a broader reception: his work has drawn the attention of many well-known figures, including Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabès, Otto Pöggeler, and George Steiner.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central idea running through the collection is the continuity between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and the act of reading poetry. The essay Who Am I and Who Are You? has been regarded by many — including Heidegger and Gadamer himself — as a “second volume” or continuation of the argument developed in Truth and Method. That argument holds that meaning and understanding are not objects to be recovered by method, but events that arise from an interaction between text and interpreter. Gadamer described his concern as philosophical rather than prescriptive: not what we do or ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.
Several concepts from that argument bear directly on how the book approaches Celan. Gadamer held that interpreters possess a historically affected consciousness — they are embedded in the history and culture that shaped them, and they do not come to a text without some form of preunderstanding established by that historical stream. The tradition in which a reader stands establishes “prejudices” that shape interpretation; for Gadamer these are not obstacles but the very basis of our ability to understand history at all, and he criticized Enlightenment thinkers for harboring a prejudice against prejudices.
Understanding, on this account, involves a fusion of horizons: both text and interpreter stand within a particular historical tradition, or horizon, each expressed through language, and as the interpreter seeks to understand, a common horizon emerges. This is not the recovery of an objective meaning but an event in which a world opens itself, yielding a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Gadamer further modeled hermeneutical experience as dialogue, using Plato’s dialogues as a model for engaging written texts. Genuine conversation requires taking seriously the truth claim of the person with whom one converses, and the interpretation of a text changes depending on the questions the interpreter asks of it. Meaning emerges neither as an object lying in the text nor in the interpreter, but as an event resulting from the interaction of the two.
Applied to Celan, these ideas frame the commentaries as an effort to help readers listen to poetry of considerable difficulty and radicality. Steiner’s remark, quoted in the source material, that it will take a long time for our sensibilities to apprehend poetry of these dimensions and this radicality, captures the challenge the book addresses. The commentaries are presented as an aid to that listening rather than as a decoding of the poems.
Significance and Influence
The source material identifies Who Am I and Who Are You? as the centerpiece of Gadamer’s most important philosophical project after Truth and Method, and notes that both Heidegger and Gadamer himself regarded the Celan essay as a continuation of that earlier work’s argument. The collection is also presented as testimony to Celan’s growing importance in world literature since the Second World War, and as an example of Gadamer’s thinking on the relationship between philosophy and poetry. Beyond this, the sources do not describe the book’s reception or influence in further detail.
Hans-Georg Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany, on 11 February 1900. His father, Johannes Gadamer (1867–1928), was a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry who later served as rector of the University of Marburg. Gadamer was raised a Protestant Christian. He resisted his father’s urging to take up the natural sciences and became increasingly interested in the humanities. His mother, Emma Karoline Johanna Gewiese (1869–1904), 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.
Gadamer 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 (Das Wesen der Lust nach den Platonischen Dialogen), 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 when Heidegger received a position at Marburg, Gadamer followed him there, becoming 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.
Academic Career
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 he 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 Gadamer became a temporary professor at Marburg, then in 1938 he 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 Gadamer 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 Gadamer 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 his magnum opus, Truth and Method (1960), 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 (to be in the being in the world) 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.”
Later Life, Death, and Honors
On 11 February 2000, the University of Heidelberg celebrated Gadamer’s 100th birthday with a ceremony and conference. Gadamer’s 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.
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 the University of Washington. His prizes and awards include: 1971, Pour le Mérite and the Reuchlin Prize; 1972, Great Cross of Merit with Star of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany; 1979, Sigmund Freud Prize for scientific prose and Hegel Prize; 1986, Karl Jaspers Prize; 1990, Great Cross of Merit with Star and Sash of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany; 1993, Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany; and on 12 January 1996, appointment as an honorary member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig.
Further Aspects of Gadamer’s Work
Gadamer’s philosophical project, as explained in Truth and Method, was to elaborate on the concept of “philosophical hermeneutics,” which Heidegger initiated but never dealt with at length. Gadamer’s goal was to uncover the nature of human understanding. In Truth and Method, Gadamer argued that “truth” and “method” were at odds with one another. For Gadamer, “the experience of art is exemplary in its provision of truths that are inaccessible by scientific methods, and this experience is projected to the whole domain of human sciences.” He was critical of two approaches to the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). On the one hand, he was critical of modern approaches to the humanities that modeled themselves on the natural sciences, which simply sought to “objectively” observe and analyze texts and art. On the other hand, he took issue with the traditional German approaches to the humanities, represented for instance by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, who believed that meaning, as an object, could be found within a text through a particular process that allowed for a connection with the author’s thoughts that led to the creation of a text (Schleiermacher), or the situation that led to an expression of human inner life (Dilthey).
However, Gadamer argued meaning and understanding are not objects to be found through certain methods, but are inevitable phenomena. Hermeneutics is not a process in which an interpreter finds a particular meaning, but “a philosophical effort to account for understanding as an ontological—the ontological—process of man.” Thus, Gadamer is not giving a prescriptive method on how to understand, but rather is working to examine how understanding, whether of texts, artwork, or experience, is possible at all. Gadamer intended Truth and Method to be a description of what we always do when we interpret things, even if we do not know it.
As a result of Martin Heidegger’s temporal analysis of human existence, Gadamer argued that people have a so-called historically affected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein), and that they are embedded in the particular history and culture that shaped them. However, the historical consciousness is not an object over and against our existence, but “a stream in which we move and participate, in every act of understanding.” Therefore, people do not come to any given thing without some form of preunderstanding established by this historical stream. The tradition in which an interpreter stands establishes “prejudices” that affect how he or she will make interpretations. For Gadamer, these prejudices are not something that hinders our ability to make interpretations, but are both integral to the reality of being, and “are the basis of our being able to understand history at all.” Gadamer criticized Enlightenment thinkers for harboring a “prejudice against prejudices.”
For Gadamer, interpreting a text involves a fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). Both the text and the interpreter find themselves within a particular historical tradition, or “horizon.” Each horizon is expressed through the medium of language, and both text and interpreter belong to and participate in history and language. This “belongingness” to language is the common ground between interpreter and text that makes understanding possible. As an interpreter seeks to understand a text, a common horizon emerges. This fusion of horizons does not mean the interpreter now fully understands some kind of objective meaning, but is “an event in which a world opens itself to him.” The result is a deeper understanding of the subject matter.
Gadamer further explains the hermeneutical experience as a dialogue. To justify this, he uses Plato’s dialogues as a model for how we are to engage with written texts. To be in conversation, one must take seriously “the truth claim of the person with whom one is conversing.” Further, each participant in the conversation relates to one another insofar as they belong to the common goal of understanding one another. Ultimately, for Gadamer, the most important dynamic of conversation as a model for the interpretation of a text is “the give-and-take of question and answer.” In other words, the interpretation of a given text will change depending on the questions the interpreter asks of the text. The “meaning” emerges not as an object that lies in the text or in the interpreter, but rather an event that results from the interaction of the two.
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.
Gadamer’s Truth and Method has become an authoritative work in the communication ethics field, spawning several prominent ethics theories and guidelines. The most profound of these is the formulation of the dialogic coordinates, a standard set of prerequisite communication elements necessary for inciting dialogue. Adhering to Gadamer’s theories regarding bias, communicators can better initiate dialogic transaction, allowing biases to merge and promote mutual understanding and learning.
Gadamer also added philosophical substance to the notion of human health. In The Enigma of Health, Gadamer 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 also well known for a long list of publications on Greek philosophy. Indeed, while Truth and Method became central to his later career, much of Gadamer’s 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.
