Hans Georg Gadamer was born in 1900. He became professor in philosophy 1949, in Heidelberg. He were able to foster confidence in people interested in the humanistic sciences in a world dominated by natural science and mathematical rationality - he reinvented hermeneutic philosophy and always held Art as the main tool of understanding the world and in trying to guide those who misunderstand this the same world and life itself, while not listening to what people around you say.
Listen - and you'll learn how to live a true life in dialog, seem to have been the credo of Gadamer, who recently died, 102 years of age. 

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Gadamer as Theorist of Science

and Philosopher of Language 

Johan Lindstrom

Those readers who started their studies in Hermeneutics  by trying to read Heidegger might have got such a deterrent reaction, that they will never try “that stuff” again. That would be a pity, because Gadamer keeps himself within the frames of a more ordinary usage of language, which makes his texts readable. But, nevertheless, Gadamer is famous for his “Truth and Method”, which is puzzling to many. From one of his interpreters, Richard R. Palmer, i will quote his penetrating analysis of this basic thought pattern in Gadamer’s philosophy. 

                     Gadamer begins his examination of the hermeneutical experience by
                     criticizing the prevailing concept of experience (my italics), which he finds
                     too much oriented toward knowing as a perceptual act and knowledge as
                     a body of conceptual data. In other words, we tend today to define
                     experience in a way that is completely oriented toward
                     scientific knowledge and heedless of the inner historicality of experience. 
                     In doing so, we unconsciously fulfill the goal of science, which is “so
                     to objectify experience that no kind of historical moment clings to it”^[1] .
                     Through rigorous methodological arrangement, the scientific 
                     experiment takes the object out of its historical moment and restructures it 
                     to suit the method. An analogous goal is sought, says Gadamer, in theology
                     and philology with the “historical-critical method”, which in some ways
                     reflects the scientific rage to make everything objective and verifiable^[2]. 
                     Insofar as this spirit prevails, only what is verifiable is real; no place ^[3]  1969)

In the above quoted section Gadamer shows how he means that the scientific — or perhaps, rather, the scientistic perspective, is distorting the data from the human-linguistic sector of the world. In this case, Gadamer agrees with Habermas. The positivistic psychologists  believe that their “empirical data” are more reliable and  precise than the “subjective interpretations” made by hermeneutic psychologists (examples of some of those, see footnotes below!). Here both Gadamer and Habermas could retort, that the positivistic data are artifacts with no substance, and as such hanging in the air, lacking an anchorage in factors seen on the meta-level, esp. the view of Man, and, at the same time, with a reference to nonphysical facts in our experience: thought, words, meanings.

One scholar of Gadamer was  the Norwegian philosopher Hans Skervheim (Bergen), who coined the term “objectivism^[4] ”. In an  article he shows that he is inspired by Gadamer, not only by the quoted word, but also by talking about the “historicity” of the human being and language. This means that human life =>

1) is developing in a network  of communicative actions between human subjects, transcending the mechanistic robot level, and

2) contains the accumulation (“tape recording”) of  the memories of those actions, which take active part of the internal system of knowledge formation.

Point 2 is the basis of Gadamer’s conception/theory of “Working History (Wirkungs-geschichte). That station in the mind has the effect, that “the past is not (completely) past^[5] ”,  but hangs on, still actively influencing our present day thinking. This principle has been applied in psychoanalysis^[6]  from its beginning, and in other forms of psychodynamics, esp. Grof^[7] ,  with his  theory of the birth trauma, and transaction analysis^[8] .

  A  Philosophy, Treating the Structure of our Everyday (Inter)Actions

“True experience^[9] ”, Gadamer asserts, “is experience of one’s own historicality”. In experience  man’s powers to do and his planning reason come up against their limits. Man, standing and acting in history, gains through experience the insight into the future within which expectation and plans are still open to him.

Here Gadamer is on line with Zen Buddhism and Freud by putting focus on everyday life.

                Buddhist student: “What is the Tao?”
                   (“Tao” literally means “the path” [of  life] )
                
                Zen master : “Everyday life — that is the path”.

  THE STRUCTURE OF QUESTIONING IN HERMENEUTICS

The dialectical character of experience is reflected in the movement and encounter with negativity found in all true questioning. Gadamer goes so far as to say that “in all experience, the structure of questioning is presupposed. The realization that some matter is other than one had first thought presupposes the process of passing through questioning^[10] .” The openness of experience has the structure of a question: “Is it thus or thus?”.  - - - - - - -

To question genuinely, says Gadamer, means to “place in the open” because the answer is not yet determined. Consequently a rhetorical question is not a true question, for there is no genuine questioning when the thing spoken of is never really “questioned”. “In order to be able to question one must will to know, and that means, however, to know that you do not know”.  When one knows he does not know, and when he does not therefore through method assume that he only needs to understand more thoroughly in the way he already understands, then he acquires that structure of openness characterizing authentic questioning. Socrates sets the pattern with his playful exchanges of question and answer, knowing and not knowing, which probe the subject-matter itself for an appropriate access to its true nature.

  The Noninstrumental Character of Language^[11]

Gadamer’s critique of traditional linguistics.

Fundamental to Gadamer’s conception of language is the rejection of the “sign” theory of the nature of language. Over against the emphasis on form and instrumental functions of language, Gadamer points to the character of living language and our participation in it. The transformation of word into sign, Gadamer contends, lies at the base of science, with its ideal of exact designation and unambiguous concepts. So familiar and self-evident has the conception of words as signs become that “it requires a feat of mental gymnastics to remember that outside the scientific ideal of unambiguous designation, the life of language itself goes its way unaffected”.

To see words as signs is to rob them of their primordial power and make them mere instruments or designators. “Everywhere that word is seen in its mere sign function, the primordial relationship of speaking and thinking is turned into  an instrumental relationship^[12] .” The word becomes the tool of thinking and stands over against thinking and the thing designated.

 - - - - - - - - - -

                The linguistic word is not a “sign” which one lays hold of; it is also no existing
                thing  that one shapes and endows with a meaning, making a sign to render 
                some other thing visible. Both possibilities are wrong; rather, the ideality of 
                the meaning lies in  the word itself. Word is always already meaningful.
                                                 (Gadamer, WM, page 394)

  - - - - - - - - - -  

LANGUAGE AS THE DISCLOSURE OF THE WORLD 

It is an error to think of this “world” as basically a possession or property of subjectivity; this is the mistake typical of modern subjectivity-oriented thinking. 
Rather, world and language both are transpersonal matters, and language is made to fit the world, and therefore it is ordered to the world rather than to our subjectivity. In this sense (but not in the scientific sense) language is objective:  

                  Out of the commensurateness of language to world follows its
                  peculiar objectivity [Sachlichkeit], a situation or matter that behaves so and
                  so — therein lies the recognition of self-sufficient otherness that presupposes 
                  its own distance between the matter and the speaker. 
                  On the basis of this distance, something like “situation” can come to
                  definition and ultimately be capable of becoming the content of a statement
                  that another can un derstand. Since the open space in which man exists is the
                  realm of shared understanding created  by language as world, man clearly
                  exists in  language.
                  Language is not just a fixture which man finds in his world; rather, in and
                  through it comes the possibility of having a world at all.
                                                 (Gadamer, p 419) 

This is to say that language and world transcend all possibility of being fully made into an object. One does not, in some kind of knowing or reflection, transcend language or the world; rather “the linguistic experience of the world is absolute^[13] .“

                Our own language world, this world in which we live, is not a tight enclosure
                that hinders the knowing of things as they are; rather, it encompasses basically
                everything which our insight is able to broaden and lift up. Certainly one
                tradition sees the world differently from another. Historical worlds in the 
                course of history have differed from each other and from today. At the same
                time, however, the world is always a human, and this means a linguistically
                created, world which is presented in whatever heritage it may be.
                                      (Gadamer,  ibid, p 423) 

THE UNIVERSALITY OF HERMENEUTICS^[14]

In the development of a questioning position designed to move beyond the confines of the subject–object schema, Gadamer’s hermeneutics suggests a new kind of objectivity
[Sachlichkeit] grounded in the fact that what is disclosed constitutes not a projection of subjectivity but something which acts on our understanding in presenting itself.

The principle of resisting the fixed  givenness of statement is applicable not merely to the hermeneutical experience , but to experience generally. The idea that the dialectic presents us with a possibility of moving away from seeing experience as an activity of the subject and toward seeing it as an act of the subject–matter or situation itself — that is, that this dialectic makes it possible to see experience speculatively, as a movement that grasps the speaker — is of more than merely methodological significance. In a meningful paragraph at the close of his book, Gadamer summarizes his argument and the way it leads up to the assertion of a more comprehensive hermeneutics:

                 We perceive now that the speculative movement [of going from being as a
                 whole and being led by things rather than subjectivity] was what we had
                 in wiew when we were led by our analysis og hermeneutical experience to 
                 a critique of æstetic as well as historical consciousness. 

                - - - - - - -  - -

                For the historical consciousness includes in itself actually a mediation of past
                and  present. Now, in that we broadened the vantage of our questioning
                [unsere Frage–stellung] from its starting point — i. e, the critique of æstetic
                and historical consciousness — to comprize a universal direction for
                questioning.