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HISTORY DOES NOT
BELONG TO US BUT
WE BELONG TO IT
HANS-GEORG GADAMER (1900–2002)
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of historyAPPROACH
HermeneuticsBEFORE
Early 19th century German
philosopher Friedrich
Schleiermacher lays the
groundwork for hermeneutics.1890s Wilhelm Dilthey, a
German philosopher, describes
interpretation as taking place
in the “hermeneutic circle.”1927 Martin Heidegger
explores the interpretation
of being, in Being and Time.AFTER
1979 Richard Rorty uses
a hermeneutic approach in
his book Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature.1983–85 French philosopher
Paul Ricoeur writes Time
and Narrative, examining
the capacity of narrative to
represent our feeling of time.by reading it carefully in the light
of our present understanding. If
we come to a line that seems strange
or particularly striking, we might
need to reach for a deeper level of
understanding. As we interpret
individual lines, our sense of the
poem as a whole might begin to
change; and as our sense of the
poem as a whole changes, so might
our understanding of individual
lines. This is known as the
“hermeneutic circle.”
Heidegger’s approach to
philosophy moved in this circular
fashion, and this was the approachWe understand
the world through
interpretation.We cannot understand
things outside of these
prejudices and biases.This always takes place within
a particular historical era,
which gives us particular
prejudices and biases.History does
not belong
to us, but we
belong to it.G
adamer is associated in
particular with one form of
philosophy: “hermeneutics”.
Derived from the Greek word
hermeneuo, meaning “interpret”,
this is the study of how humans
interpret the world.
Gadamer studied philosophy
under Martin Heidegger, who said
that the task of philosophy is to
interpret our existence. This
interpretation is always a process
of deepening our understanding by
starting from what we already
know. The process is similar to how
we might interpret a poem. We start