Frasi di Hans-Georg Gadamer

„Per il vero umanista, l'autore classico non è certo uno la cui opera si possa comprendere meglio di quanto egli stesso l'abbia compresa. Per l'umanista, cosa che non bisogna mai dimenticare, lo scopo supremo non è, originariamente, quello di "comprendere" i modelli classici, ma di uguagliarli o di superarli. Il filologo non è dunque legato ai suoi modelli anzitutto solo come interprete, ma come imitatore, quando non addirittura come rivale.“

Origine: Verità e metodo, p. 20

„Chi vuol comprendere un testo deve essere pronto a lasciarsi dire qualcosa da esso. Perciò una coscienza ermeneuticamente educata deve essere preliminarmente sensibile all'alterità del testo. Tale sensibilità non presuppone né un'obiettiva "neutralità" né un oblio di sé stessi, ma implica una precisa presa di coscienza delle proprie pre-supposizioni e dei propri pregiudizi.“

Origine: Verità e metodo, p. 235

„La comprensione non va intesa tanto come un'azione del soggetto, quanto come l'inserirsi nel vivo di un processo di tramissione storica, nel quale passato e presente continuamente si sintetizzano.“

Origine: Verità e metodo, p. 316

„L'autentica esperienza è quella in cui l'uomo diventa cosciente della propria finitezza.“

Origine: Verità e metodo, p. 340

„Il linguaggio è il medium in cui gli interlocutori si comprendono e in cui si verifica l'intesa sulla cosa.“

Origine: Verità e metodo, p. 413

„Chi ha linguaggio, "ha" il mondo.“

Origine: Verità e metodo, p. 442

„L'essere che può venir compreso è linguaggio.“

Origine: Verità e metodo, p. 518

„La cultura implica un senso di misura e di distacco da se stessi, e di conseguenza un innalzamento al di sopra di sé verso l'universalità.“

Origine: Verità e metodo, p. 542

„[Su Eraclito] Egli parla del fiume, di come tutto in esso scorra. E questo è stato interpretato, molto probabilmente, in maniera piuttosto unilaterale dai pensatori successivi. Secondo loro Eraclito avrebbe insegnato la dottrina dello scorrere di tutte le cose. Se consideriamo però i Frammenti vediamo che egli ha insegnato la paradossalità secondo cui l'acqua sempre diversa, che scende scorrendo lungo il letto del fiume, è sempre una e una stessa corrente.“

Verità e metodo

„It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed")—e. g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion.“

Origine: Da Eraclito: panta rei http://www.raiscuola.rai.it/articoli/eraclito-panta-rei/6463/default.aspx, raiscuola, rai.it.

„The work of art that says something confronts us itself. That is, it expresses something in such a way that what is said is like a discovery, a disclosure of something previously concealed.“

— Hans-Georg Gadamer, libro Verità e metodo

Origine: Truth and Method

„The free artist creates without a commission.“

Origine: Aesthetics and Hermeneutics (1964), p. 101 http://books.google.com/books?id=7RP-TggufEEC&pg=PA101 (quotation is from Goethe)
Contesto: The work of art that says something confronts us itself. That is, it expresses something in such a way that what is said is like a discovery, a disclosure of something previously concealed. The element of surprise is based on this. "So true, so filled with being" [So wahr, so seiend] is not something one knows any other way. Everything familiar is eclipsed. To understand what the work of art says to us is therefore a self-encounter.

„The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it — what is said.“

— Hans-Georg Gadamer, libro Verità e metodo

Origine: Truth and Method (1960), p. 76
Contesto: The free artist creates without a commission. He seems distinguished by the complete independence of his creativity and thus acquires the characteristic social features of an outsider whose style of life cannot be measured by the standards of public morality. The concept of the bohemian which arose in the nineteenth century reflects this process. The home of the Gypsies became the generic word for the artist's way of life.
But at the same time the artist, who is as "free as a bird or a fish," bears the burden of a vocation that makes him an ambiguous figure. For a cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the "standpoint of art" can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a "secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.

„A kind of anticipation of meaning guides the effort to understand from the very beginning.“

Man and Language (1966)
Contesto: The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows that from the forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it. What is said in it constitutes the common world in which we live. … The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it — what is said.

„In fact history does not belong to us but rather we to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self awareness of the Individual is only a flickering in the closed circuit of historical life. That is why the prejudices of an individual are — much more than that individual's judgments — the historical reality of his being.“

Origine: Aesthetics and Hermeneutics (1964), p. 101 http://books.google.com/books?id=7RP-TggufEEC&pg=PA101
Contesto: We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said. It would be an inadmissible abstraction to contend that we must first have achieved a contemporaneousness with the author or the original reader by means of a reconstruction of his historical horizon before we could begin to grasp the meaning of what is said. A kind of anticipation of meaning guides the effort to understand from the very beginning.

„Aristotle established the classical definition of man, according to which man is the living being who has logos.“

— Hans-Georg Gadamer, libro Verità e metodo

Origine: Truth and Method (1960), p. 289
Variant translation: In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to history. … The focus of subjectivity is a distorted mirror. Individual self-reflection is merely a flickering in the closed circuit of historical life. That is why the prejudices of an individual are —much more than that individual's judgments — the historical reality of his being.
As quoted in Tom Neton, "Hermeneutical Truth and the Structure of Human Experience: Gadamer's Critique of Dilthey" in The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics (1995) edited by Lawrence Schmidt.

„The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it.“

Man and Language (1966)
Contesto: Aristotle established the classical definition of man, according to which man is the living being who has logos. In the tradition of the West, this definition became canonical in a form which stated that man is the animal rationale, the rational being, distinguished from all other animals by his capacity for thought. Thus it rendered the Greek word logos as reason or thought. In truth, however, the primary meaning of this word is language.... The word logos means not only thought and language, but also concept and law.

„What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now.“

„Everything depends on how something is said.“

— Hans-Georg Gadamer, libro Verità e metodo

Foreword to the Second Edition, p. xxiv.
Truth and Method (1960)
Contesto: What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.