The Connections of Significance: Gadamer and the Vitality of Understanding

Abstract

Modern hermeneutics has contributed a powerful meditation on how existence is embroiled in historicity and language. Hans-Georg Gadamer is widely recognised as one of its most accessible and influential proponents, in his attempt to surpass conceptually the fundamental limitations he believes to have been introduced by a dualistic, Cartesian world-view and the dominance of the mind-set of the natural sciences. The rationalistic isolation of the thinking subject has had disastrous consequences, Gadamer claims, and his grand opus Truth and Method represents a tripartite attack on its dominion. Not only in the fundamentals of philosophical ontology, which is the main provenance of Gadamer’s enquiry, but also within the theory of art and the methodology of the human sciences, this work attempts to provide a new and non-Cartesian footing. Inevitably, it has weighty ancestors — among other things, Gadamer is engaged in a continuation, albeit a transformative one, of romanticism. At the same time, he manifests considerable resistance to the romantic heritage, as is evident in his problematical relationship to figures such as G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey in particular.