36 Quotes by Hans-Georg Gadamer

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 confront that will with something of the truth of remembrance: with what is still and ever again real.

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 what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.

Being that can be understood is language.

It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education – aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness – presented alienated forms of our true historical being.

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

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.

The long history of this idea before Kant made it the basis of his Critique of Judgment shows that the concept of taste was originally more a moral than an aesthetic idea.

The structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus frees him from the burden of taking the initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art.