The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted. — Hans-Georg Gadamer Copy Share Image
It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education - aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness -… — Hans-Georg Gadamer Copy Share Image
It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition. — Hans-Georg Gadamer Copy Share Image
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… — Hans-Georg Gadamer Copy Share Image
“The individual case does not serve only to confirm a law from which practical predictions can be made. Its ideal is rather to understand the phenomenon itself in its unique and historical concreteness. However much experiential universals are involved, the aim is not to confirm and extend these universalized experiences in order to attain knowledge of a law—e.g., how men,… — Hans-Georg Gadamer Copy Share
For both art and the historical sciences are modes of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence comes directly into play. — Hans-Georg Gadamer Copy Share Image
“In the independent existence that work gives the thing, working consciousness finds itself again as an independent consciousness. Work is restrained desire. In forming the object—that is, in being selflessly active and concerned with a universal—working consciousness raises itself above the immediacy of its existence to universality; or, as Hegel puts it, by forming the thing it forms itself. What… — Hans-Georg Gadamer Copy Share
“The sense of taste is able to gain the distance necessary for choosing and judging what is the most urgent necessity of life. Thus… — Hans-Georg Gadamer Copy Share Image
The hermeneutic consciousness, which must be awakened and kept awake, recognized that in the age of science philosophy's claim of superiority has something chimerical and unreal about it. But though the will of man is more than ever intensifying its criticism of what has gone before to the point of becoming utopian or eschatological consciousness, the hermeneutic consciousness seeks to… — Hans-Georg Gadamer Copy Share
We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said...Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept… — Hans-Georg Gadamer Copy Share Image
