Life[edit]

Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany,[1] the son of Johannes Gadamer (18671928)[2] a
pharmaceutical chemistry professor who later also served as the rector of
the university there. He resisted his father's urging to take up the natural sciences and
became more and more interested in the humanities. His mother, Emma Karoline Johanna
Geiese (18691904) died of diabetes while Hans-Georg was four years old, and he later
noted that this may have had an effect on his decision to not pursue scientific studies. Jean
Grondin describes Gadamer as finding in his mother "a poetic and almost religious
counterpart to the iron fist of his father".[3] Gadamer did not serve during World War I for
reasons of ill health[4] and similarly was exempted from serving during World War II due
to polio.[5]
He grew up and studied philosophy in Breslau[6] under Richard Hnigswald, but soon
moved back to Marburg to study with the Neo-Kantianphilosophers Paul Natorp and Nicolai
Hartmann. He defended his dissertation"The Essence of Pleasure according to Plato's
Dialogues" (Das Wesen der Lust nach den Platonischen Dialogen)in 1922.[7]
Shortly thereafter, Gadamer moved to Freiburg University and began studying with Martin
Heidegger, who was then a promising young scholar who had not yet received a
professorship. He and Heidegger became close, and when Heidegger received a position
at Marburg, Gadamer followed him there, where he became one of a group of students
such as Leo Strauss, Karl Lwith, and Hannah Arendt. It was Heidegger's influence that
gave Gadamer's thought its distinctive cast and led him away from the earlier neo-Kantian
influences of Natorp and Hartmann. Gadamer studied Aristotle both under Edmund
Husserl and under Heidegger.[8]
Gadamer habilitated in 1929 and spent most of the early 1930s lecturing in Marburg.
Unlike Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and continued as a member until
the party was dissolved following World War II, Gadamer was silent on Nazism, and he was
not politically active during the Third Reich. Gadamer did not join the Nazis, and he did not
serve in the army because of the polio he had contracted in 1922. He joined the National
Socialist Teachers League in August 1933.[9] In April 1937 he became a temporary
professor at Marburg,[10]then in 1938 he received a professorship at Leipzig.[11] From
an SS-point of view Gadamer was classified as neither supportive nor disapproving in the
"SD-Dossiers ber Philosophie-Professoren" (i.e. SD-files concerning philosophy professors)
that were set up by the SS-Security-Service (SD).[12] In 1946, he was found by the
American occupation forces to be untainted by Nazism and named rector of the university.
The level of Gadamer's involvement with the Nazis has been disputed in the works
of Richard Wolin and Teresa Orozco.[13] Orozco alleges, with reference to Gadamer's
published works, that Gadamer had supported the Nazis more than scholars had
supposed. Gadamer scholars have rejected these assertions: Jean Grondin has said that
Orozco is engaged in a "witch-hunt"[14] while Donatella Di Cesare said that "the archival
material on which Orozco bases her argument is actually quite negligible". [15] Cesare and
Grondin have argued that there is no trace of antisemitism in Gadamer's work, and that
Gadamer maintained friendships with Jews and provided shelter for nearly two years for
the philosopher Jacob Klein in 1933 and 1934.[16]Gadamer also reduced his contact with
Heidegger during the Nazi era.[17]
Communist East Germany was no more to Gadamer's liking than the Third Reich, and he
left for West Germany, accepting first a position in Frankfurt am Main and then the
succession ofKarl Jaspers in Heidelberg in 1949. He remained in this position, as emeritus,
until his death in 2002 at the age of 102.[18][19][20] He was also an Editorial Advisor of the
journal Dionysius.[21] It was during this time that he completed his magnum opus, Truth
and Method (1960), and engaged in his famous debate with Jrgen Habermas over the
possibility of transcending history and culture in order to find a truly objective position
from which to critique society. The debate was inconclusive, but marked the beginning of
warm relations between the two men. It was Gadamer who secured Habermas's first
professorship in Heidelberg.

In 1968, Gadamer invited Tomonobu Imamichi for lectures at Heidelberg, but their
relationship became very cool after Imamichi alleged that Heidegger had taken his
concept of Dasein out of Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das in-der-Welt-sein (to be in
the being in the world) expressed in The Book of Tea, which Imamichi's teacher had offered
to Heidegger in 1919, after having followed lessons with him the year before. [22] Imamichi
and Gadamer renewed contact four years later during an international congress. [22]
In 1981, Gadamer attempted to engage with Jacques Derrida at a conference in Paris but it
proved less enlightening because the two thinkers had little in common. A last meeting
between Gadamer and Derrida was held at the Stift of Heidelberg in July 2001, coordinated
by Derrida's students, Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly.[citation needed] This meeting
marked, in many ways, a turn in their philosophical encounter. After Gadamer's death,
Derrida called their failure to find common ground one of the worst debacles of his life and
expressed, in the main obituary for Gadamer, his great personal and philosophical
respect. Richard J. Bernstein said that "[a] genuine dialogue between Gadamer and Derrida
has never taken place. This is a shame because there are crucial and consequential issues
that arise between hermeneutics and deconstruction".[23]
Gadamer received honorary doctorates from the University of Bamberg, the University of
Breslau, Boston College,[24] Charles University in Prague, Hamilton College, the University
of Leipzig, the University of Marburg (1999) the University of Ottawa, Saint Petersburg
State University (2001), the University of Tbingen and University of Washington.[25]
On February 11, 2000, the University of Heidelberg celebrated Gadamer's one hundredth
birthday with a ceremony and conference. Gadamer's last academic engagement was in
the summer of 2001 at an annual symposium on hermeneutics that two of Gadamer's
American students had organised. On March 13, 2002, Gadamer died at Heidelberg's
University Clinic. He is buried in the Kpfel cemetery in Ziegelhausen.[26]