Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy Also available from Bloomsbury Ancient Sources, Modern Appropriations, Hans-Georg Gadamer The Beginning of Knowledge, Hans-Georg Gadamer Beginning of Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer A Century of Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer Forthcoming from Bloomsbury Ethics and Aesthetics in History: The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Volume II, Hans-Georg Gadamer Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Volume I By Hans-Georg Gadamer Edited and translated by Pol Vandevelde and Arun Iyer Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Bloomsbury 2016 All rights reserved. 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Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Contents Acknowledgements vii Translators’ Preface viii Translators’ Introduction: Hermeneutics at the Crossroads between History and Philosophy xvi Part 1 History as a Problem: On Being Historically Affected 1 Is There a Causality in History? (1964) 3 2 Historicity and Truth (1991) 13 3 The History of the Universe and the Historicity of Human Beings (1988) 25 4 A World without History? (1972) 43 5 The Old and the New (1981) 51 6 Death as a Question (1975) 59 Part 2 The Impetus for Thinking Hermeneutically: On the Task of Dilthey 7 The Problem of Dilthey: Between Romanticism and Positivism (1984) 73 8 Dilthey and Ortega: The Philosophy of Life (1985) 91 9 Hermeneutics and the Diltheyan School (1991) 103 Part 3 Confronting Other Intellectual Movements and Disciplines 10 Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity, Subject and Person (1975) 125 11 On the Contemporary Relevance of Husserl’s Phenomenology (1974) 139 12 ‘Being and Nothingness’ (Jean-Paul Sartre) (1989) 151 13 Heidegger and Sociology: Bourdieu and Habermas (1979/1985) 167 14 Hermeneutics on the Trail (1994) 179 vi Contents Part 4 Hermeneutics of Beginnings and Returns: The Case of Heidegger 15 Remembering Heidegger’s Beginnings (1986) 209 16 The Turn in the Path (1985) 221 17 On the Beginning of Thought (1986) 227 18 On the Way Back to the Beginning (1986) 247 Appendix: Glossary of German Terms 271 Glossary of Latin and Greek Expressions 279 Notes 281 Works Cited by Gadamer 315 Index of Names 329 Index of Subjects 334 Acknowledgements This edition and translation project started with discussions with David Avital, then editor at Continuum. We benefited from his suggestions and advice for finalizing the project. Sarah Campbell continued to support the project as editor and provided us with her ideas and encouragement. In the transition to Bloomsbury we worked very efficiently with Liza Thompson and her assistant, Frankie Mace. We also benefited from the advice, suggestions and support of James Risser, Jeff Malpas, and Helmut Gander, to whom we express our gratitude. Pol Vandevelde received a reduced teaching load during some part of this project thanks to the Way Klingler Humanities Fellowship from Marquette University. We are grateful to the director and staff of the Deutsche Literatur-Archiv in Marbach where Pol Vandevelde spent several weeks collecting information on Gadamer’s essays and where he was able to consult Gadamer’s personal library. We also want to thank Daniel Adsett for his excellent editorial skills, Peter Burgess for his work toward solving queries and bibliographical issues, and Sarah Kizuk for her help with the index. We benefited from the expertise of David Twetten for the Latin and Greek expressions. Finally, we are also thankful to the Seattle University philosophy department for their material support of this project. Translators’ Preface When it comes to a major philosopher like Gadamer a strong case can be made that scholars need to have all available essays in order to assess the different components of the philosopher’s theses, to measure the evolution of his thought through time, and to grasp all the intricacies of his views in the different contexts of their application. This is the aim of this edition. The present volume is part of a series of three that will, under the title The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, complete the English translation of Gadamer’s essays, included in his ‘Complete Works’.1 To date about 130 articles from Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke have been translated in various anthologies, collected works and edited volumes. To these we will be adding another fifty essays. Short addresses and book reviews were omitted along with some essays that did not contain anything of philosophical import not already included in the other essays selected. We have organized these fifty articles in three main collections, each corresponding to a volume devoted to a single theme: philosophy of history, ethics, and aesthetics. This division allows us to accentuate the common threads that run across Gadamer’s articles despite their covering disparate subjects. These essays give us a wider range of Gadamer’s views than some of his pronouncements in Truth and Method and other published books. They help consolidate how Gadamer is viewed in the English-speaking world where he, for the most part, has led a divided existence. We have the independent philosopher of Truth and Method. But we also have an original interpreter of ancient philosophy competing with other interpreters from the Anglo- American tradition. Apart from Truth and Method and some of his early works on Plato and Aristotle, the later texts of Gadamer have been sporadically trans- lated. This may give the English-speaking reader the skewed impression of there being either nothing much of importance in these essays other than repetitions and reformulations, or of his views changing drastically in his later works. By showcasing Gadamer’s works through the whole span of his intellectual life, encompassing his contributions as an independent thinker and an interpreter, this translation shows that his views did not change drastically in the 1980s and the 1990s, but the emphasis he puts on several topics and the nuances he Translators’ Preface ix introduces in them sometimes varied to a great extent. These essays collected in three volumes furnish readers with further evidence demonstrating the philo- sophical significance of his work beyond Truth and Method and integrate into a coherent whole the two aspects of Gadamer, as a philosopher and interpreter. The present first volume, titled Hermeneutics between History and Philosophy, contains articles pertaining to reflections that emerge from Gadamer’s herme- neutic studies on the problem of history as well as the history of philosophy. As Jean Grondin notes, Gadamer was born in 1900, which is technically the end of the nineteenth century, lived through the whole twentieth century, and died in 2002 in the twenty-first century, thus enjoying a life spread over three centuries.2 He was an observer of his century and an active participant in it, taking part in all the major philosophical debates, commenting on many of the epoch-making events of his time. More importantly, Gadamer also influenced these new trends and forcefully engaged their proponents, showing how philosophical herme- neutics situates itself in relationship with the work of the Diltheyan School, the existential ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre, sociological critique of Heidegger by Bourdieu and Habermas, the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, and the new interest in Heidegger’s early years. These essays fill the gap in Gadamer’s itinerary and indicate interesting twists in his views, changes of heart, signif- icant nuances to views presented elsewhere. The volume is organized into four sections: I. History as a Problem: On Being Historically Affected; II. The Impetus for Thinking Hermeneutically: On the Task of Dilthey; III. Confronting Other Intellectual Movements and Disciplines; and IV. Hermeneutics of Beginnings and Returns: The Case of Heidegger. The first section ‘History as a Problem: On Being Historically Affected’ contains essays that provide a clear glimpse of Gadamer’s own intellectual devel- opment and how the problem of history, the central motif of Truth and Method, assumed such a central place for him. The first essay ‘Is There a Causality in History?’, written in 1964, shortly after the publication of Truth and Method, is a welcome elucidation of what has already been taken up in Truth and Method, namely the way human beings experience history and are affected by it. It is the experience expressed by such words as ‘destiny’ and ‘fate’, however inchoately. In this essay Gadamer responds to the challenge posed by the natural sciences to any attempt at understanding history in its terms. He tries to salvage our experience of history, which he shows to be very different from the scientist’s experience of a causally determined nature. The article is written in the spirit of an invitation for a dialogue with philosophers from the rival tradition of analytic philosophy, who embrace naturalism in some form or other. Many