Gadamer’s Legacy

Gadamer lived a long and fruitful life.Born in 1900, the year that phenomenology itself was born-if one takes as a convenient sign-post the publication date of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen-Gadamer, a student of both Husserl and Heidegger, managed to bring phenomenology into the twenty-fIrst century.In so doing, he left us with a renewed and revitalized phenomenology, one stripped of its idealist elements (the old "metaphysics of presence") and, being fully postfoundationalist and postessentialist-in a word, postmodem-eminently suited to a new postmetaphysical age.This is his hermeneutical legacy, whose philosophical relevance to this new century it is incumbent on us, bis students, to demonstrate and, in so doing, to perpetuate and preserve.Gadamer's philosophizing was never of a formal, abstract sort; he always viewed philosopbical theory as being essentially practical, in the Aristotelian sense: scientia practica sive politica.As Richard Palmer says in his introduction to Gadamer in Conversation, "Philosophy is not just theory, it is practical, ernbedded in the matrix of everyday human activity, a matrix requiring decisions and action.~'lAs Gadamer makes clear in these conversations, he always had a keen sense for the concrete.He was in this regard a true phenomenologist: "[O]ne ought to work phenomenologically, that is, descriptively, creatively-intuitively, and in a concretizing manner" (Ge, 113).The thing that attracted bim most about Husserl's phenomenology, he says, was its "concreteness": "I went to Husserl's seminar, and when people spoke in a high-sounding manner he said: 'Not always the big notes!Small change, gentlemen!'I am the son of a natural scientist; I too dislike empty talk" (Ge, 105).One might say that concreteness and phronesis were the two imperatives shaping all his work. 2 "For as long aga as I can remember," he wrote in reflecting on bis pbilosophical journey, "I have been concemed not to say too much and not to lose myself in theoretical constructions which were not fully made good by experience."3Gadamer's life-Iong concern was to return to "the things themselves" and to philosophize (theorize) out of actual human experience.As a mode of practical thinking geared to "experience" or praxis,4 philosophy's task-as, precisely, a philosophy of practice-is to clarify the nature of the real-world challenges with wbich we are confronted and, if possible, to aid in their resolution.Gadamer's hermeneutics is of course a general theory of human understanding that lays claim (as does all genuine pbilosophizing) to universal validitY-but it is theory with practical intent.A theory of human understanding that was notof assistance in enabling us to better understand and come to grips with the difficulties of life would be of little value.A good interpretation of things-and a good interpretive theory of what makes for good interpretations-should have practical consequences.Gadamer's hermeneutical phenomenology is indeed, I would contend, of the utmost relevance to the difficult world situation we fmd ourselves in today.

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