World War I and, after studying with Heidegger in Freiburg,
became one of his nation’s best-known philosophers. His life-
time would span the century: he continued writing well into
his eighties and died in 2001 at age 101.
Gadamer was the world’s leading philosopher of her-
meneutics. Simply defined, hermeneutics is the study of inter-
pretation. (The word derives from Hermes, the Greek messen-
ger god.) And interpretation, according to Gadamer, is a kind
of conversation: the development of understanding that oc-
curs whenever two people talk to each other, or when a reader
confronts a book.
Gadamer, in sharp contrast to Derrida, was practical in
his rhetoric and his interests. His masterwork,Truth and Method
( 1960 ), can be readily comprehended by undergraduates. He
insisted throughout his career that the desire to understand
and to come to agreement with others is at the core of hu-
man life. Such an argument rankled Derrida, given the latter’s
emphasis on the distances implied in the words we speak. Der-
rida stayed rigidly opposed to Gadamer’s idea that meaning
unfolds gradually through the give and take of dialogue.^2 In-
stead, for Derrida, our statements remain fragmented and ran-
dom, and we ourselves are therefore intractably aloof. (The de
Man affair leads Derrida to his most pointed statement of this
position.)
Gadamer’s Paris speech in 1981 is a meticulous and ex-
pansive treatment of interpretation and understanding. Gada-
mer begins by asserting that “the ability to understand is a fun-
damental endowment of man, one that sustains his communal
life with others and, above all, one that takes place by way of
language and the partnership of conversation” (Dialogue 21 ).
Gadamerian conversation is based on the temptation, to which
most of us gladly yield, to compromise our habits and beliefs
Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 185