“This, Here, Now”
The Status of the Immediacy of Experience

in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

John Arthos

Indiana University
jarthos@indiana.edu

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-8129-0123

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21423/20maze44

Abstract

When Samuel Johnson kicked a stone to refute subjective idealism (“I refute it thus!”) he was defending the empiricist view that the direct and immediate experience of the senses is reliable evidence of reality. Few common-sense assumptions have endured a more thorough-going philosophical assault, and Gadamer certainly used the empiricist faith in direct, unmediated perception as a foil for the hermeneutic view that world-understanding is linguistic all the way down. It is nevertheless hard to pigeonhole his overall take on the immediacy of perception because he still had much use for it in a variety of important ways. He respected Aristotle’s appeal to immediacy in rhetoric and ethics, Kant’s grant of authority in his theory of aesthetic judgment, Husserl’s disciplined attention to phenomena, and Heidegger’s Augenblick as an important temporal structure of understanding. Most complex of all was Gadamer’s relationship to Dilthey’s appeal to the immediacy of understanding in experience. This paper explores Gadamer’s discriminating reading of immediate perception in its serpentine journey through modern Western philosophy, especially as it passes through the idealist and romantic debate on sensible intuition, which sets the stage for Dilthey’s turn to Erlebnisse as the foundation of human understanding. I conclude that Gadamer’s affirmation of what he called “mediated immediacy” crowns his delicate negotiation of the meaning of immediate experience in life.

Keywords: immediacy, intuition, sensation, experience, Fichte, transcendental idealism, Dilthey, Gadamer

Introduction

For Locke, our knowledge of the world comes directly from the impressions we receive from “external sensible objects.” [1] These sensible perceptions are the “great source of most of the ideas we have.”[2] Likewise for Hume, “the perceptions of the senses” are the original forms of knowledge, in comparison to which memory and imagination are weakened residues which merely “mimic or copy the perceptions of the senses,” and never “entirely reach the force and vivacity of the original sentiment.”[3] Kant threw a wrench into this faith in direct empirical experience with his proposal that there is no immediate given for understanding, since any worldly perception is pre-formed and organized by category structures in the mind.[4] Although the phenomenal world contributes to understanding, we only have access to it through mental rules that govern its forms, with the result that, as he put it, “the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be.”[5] This is the revolutionary claim of the first Critique as it rules out the immediate authority of sense perception as a given of understanding. Although our understanding begins “with experience,” it does not arise “from experience,” because the mind has to process the material world through its conceptual apparatus before we can understand it at all, and this robs direct empirical perception of its authority as unmediated truth.[6]

Now, the conceptual and categorical infrastructure that intervenes between mind and world in this Kantian vision is replaced eventually in later German thought by language and culture. It is our supple, plural, ambiguous, culturally inflected, historically developing linguistic schemas that debar us from immediate, direct intuition of worldly phenomena. But the loss of Locke’s intuitive, immediate certainty came at a cost and is still a problem for philosophy. In 1912 the American philosopher G. H. Bode called the concept of immediacy “the fundamental issue” for post-Kantian thought.[7] In hermeneutics, a version of this sticky problem appeared in David Carr’s debates with Paul Ricoeur in the 1980s, who, in line with Kant’s dictum that perception without conception is blind, described in Time and Narrative a pre-narrative experience of temporal reality that is “confused, unformed and, at the limit, mute.”[8] Seeing reality as “unformed” outside of a narrative apparatus would seem to take us back in the direction of an un-hermeneutic dualism.

Where does Gadamer stand on all of this? To be sure, the central tendency and through-line of his hermeneutics is aligned with—was indeed a significant part of—the 20th century linguistic turn that privileges mediation over immediacy. His stated purpose in Truth and Method is “to show that understanding is never a subjective relation to a given ‘object’ but to the history of its effect.”[9] He took aim at a close predecessor, Wilhelm Dilthey, for having put so much stock in the “pure intuition” in which “the object is itself given.”[10] If, in consequence of such an inherent mediation, “understanding belongs to the being of what is understood,” then “the natural givenness of the world” carries within it a permeating linguistic and cultural history.[11] But please notice the careful language here. In it there is a subtle re-registration of the problem that, yes, moves beyond Locke, Hume, and Kant, but also incorporates something from each. Clearly it deposes the absolute authority of both the empirical object and of the subjective a priori, but it also leaves room for what will turn out to be a complex and sensitive recognition of the claims of immediacy. That is what I wish to engage in this essay. I want to understand how this great 20th century proponent of linguistic mediation also places so much authority in the immediate recognition of the truth of a work or art or of any great text.

What I am going to track down is how this highly refined position on mediation and immediacy springs from a rich and deep soil that had been cultivated by generations of debate in the wake of Kant’s broadside against immediate perception. There is a stubborn current in that history in favor of immediacy that bears out in Gadamer’s exposition, which is why his position is so nuanced and complex. My gambit is that pulling out and sorting the various strands of that background will allow us to grasp the remarkable generosity of Gadamer’s position, and perhaps also point in future hermeneutic directions.

This essay has two parts. The first part sketches in a few summary strokes the idealist and romantic recuperation of immediate intuition as a critical rejoinder to the ascendancy of pure reason in early modernity, i.e., the privilege accorded to ratiocination at the peak of the Enlightenment by the French Encyclopédistes and to a qualified degree by Kant. My goal here is not at all to tell a full intellectual history that assigns each of the significant players an accurate place in this story,[12] but rather simply to locate a few basic coordinates of the theme of immediate intuition, so that we have a rough sense of the developing intellectual landscape that confronted those in the late nineteenth and twentieth century who sought to speak in hermeneutic terms on this theme. This first half itself splits in two, the immediate response of German idealists to promote what they called intellectual intuition over sensible intuition as the privileged source of human knowledge, and then the romantic rebellion against this prioritization to return immediate sensible intuition of nature and the material world as the necessary compliment to the feeling mind. This sketch sets the table for the second part of the essay, where I sort out Gadamer’s complex reception of this theme of immediate intuition, primarily in Truth and Method. I summarize his arguments against immediacy, for immediacy, and finally his compromise position of “mediated immediacy,” a notion he finds implicit in Wilhelm Dilthey’s late turn to hermeneutics.[13] I conclude that Gadamer’s modification of Dilthey’s individualist theory of experience was at the same time a sympathetic correction to the romantic recuperation of sensible intuition. If the later romantic thinkers gave the empirical world back to immediate intuition, Gadamer gave historical experience back to the intuitive understanding of the subject.

I. Immediate Intuition in the Romantic Period

In the pantheon of Western philosophers you might not think of David Hume, the no-nonsense 18th century Scottish empiricist, and Johann Georg Hamann, the devout 18th century German pietist, as close allies. Hume was an enemy of rhetoric and a religious skeptic who distrusted any system not based strictly on the evidence of the senses: “[B]elief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures.”[14] Hamann took up arms against atheistic materialism, believed that human language bridges the phenomenal and noumenal realms, and regarded poetry as “the mother-tongue of the human race.”[15] But Hume and Hamann were allies on one foundational issue. The starting point for both was the immediate evidence of their senses. In a letter to Jacobi, Hamann wrote: “I was full of Hume when I was writing the Socratic Memoirs . . . Our own existence and the existence of all things outside us must be believed and cannot be demonstrated in any other fashion.”[16] Hamann’s faith in the direct and immediate evidence of the senses came therefore from a very different set of motives than Hume’s empiricism. Hamann believed that God was in things at all times and everywhere, that truth is therefore in both matter and spirit inseparably, that insight into this relation springs from feeling rather than logical inference, that the truth is incarnate in the unique, particular, concrete, and individual experience of the world rather than in conceptual abstractions, and that no categorical system can master, encompass or classify this proliferating manifold.[17] Yet the return of these two disparate thinkers to the concrete and immediate evidence of the senses, one as a reaction to the mystifications of religion and the other as a reaction to that reaction, gives a sense of the convoluted path of this theme through early modernity. It will turn out that the difference between the empiricist and the pietist on this point of seeming agreement, as we can look back on it from a Gadamerian perspective, is the crux of the problem of immediate understanding.

The key to understanding Gadamer’s complex thought about the immediacy of the given as an index of truth, I propose, has to do with the idealist and romantic reaction to its place and function in Kant’s philosophy. If we bracket for the purposes of this discussion the inherited ancient and medieval background, and recognize that Locke’s empiricism and Descartes’s rationalism established the polar terms of the modern crisis, we can concentrate on the debate most directly influencing Gadamer’s perspective. Kant’s mediation of the debate (a) reinforced the distance between immediate perception and mental operations by debarring unmediated access to the material world, but (b) attempted some bridge-building to repair the break with empirical reality that skepticism had caused. This mediation for him is for the most part conceptual—permanent, universal, and a priori categories as rational constructs obtained from the cognitive faculties. He understood this conceptual apparatus to be the empirical world’s interpreter. Thus rational mediation becomes the inextricable modality within which the truth of reality is determined. As he developed this mediation further, he would eventually return immediate testimony to a place of qualified, regional authority; aesthetic understanding (the judgment of taste) is sensitive to the beauty of nature and art as an intuitive sense of the collaboration between our mental capacities and the world they interpret: “The beautiful pleases immediately.”[18] There is “no other way” for this judgment “to make itself known other than by sensation [Empfindung].”[19] Indeed the effect of sensation on the mind “is quickened by their mutual accord.”[20] Sensitivity to beauty is the special case of an intuition of “floating images” that intermediate the exchange of mind and world.[21] Kant is famously vague about how this mutual accord works in such “an intimate and obscure manner,” but he is clear that distinct from rational processes, there are also direct and immediate judgments that spring from sensible intuition.[22] Fichte will take and run with this demotion of deductive ratiocination. For him subjective intuition comes first, and works “not at all by means of an inference,” but “floats immediately before me, and is presented to my consciousness without any process of reasoning.”[23]

The double competence of pure reason and aesthetic judgment that Kant established set the agenda for what followed, which is what we need to zero in on. In a profound if now quite dated account of the “new temper” that entered into European thought in the late 18th century, Arthur Lovejoy describes how Kant’s hierarchic privileging of pure reason (Vernunft) over sensible understanding (Verstehen) in his Critique of Reason came to be challenged by a generation of thinkers who wanted to reverse that order of privilege, giving authority back to immediate intuitive sense. That reversal, according to Lovejoy, marked a kind of romantic revenge against Enlightenment rationalism.[24] However inaccurate Lovejoy’s intellectual history in the details, the basic thrust of his narrative is illuminating. The immediacy of felt experience becomes an organizing topos for a range of thinkers through the nineteenth century who are trying to get beyond the split between logical reasoning and intuitive judgment.

Intellectual Intuition

A strange knot in this story develops right at the outset, one that will be crucial for the subsequent history, when a transcendental impulse turns immediate intuition away from sense experience directly to the inner self! Fichte expresses this approach the most baldly: “Attend to yourself; turn your eye away from everything that surrounds you and toward your own inner self! This is the foremost demand philosophy places upon her student.”[25] Remarkably, the appeal to what comes to be called intellectual intuition posits that not only rational deduction but even empirical sensation is a detour from the immediate grasp of true knowledge, which is this encounter with the inner self (dein Inneres). Intellectual intuition is “the immediate presence of the I to itself, prior to and independently of any sensory content.”[26] At this apex of absolute idealism, nature and world are removed from the immediate intuition of what can be known: “[T]he purest image of my knowledge, is not seen, but is an intuitive possession of my own mind.”[27] Thus the concept of immediacy becomes the name for the absence of the impurity of time and space. The Fichtean Ego, its “innermost law,” is the complete transparency of self to self, in immediate intuition, as consciousness. We are at the peak of the subjectivism that Gadamer most abhorred. Here again is Fichte:

[T]here is no other thing than that of which thou art conscious. Thou thyself art the thing; thou thyself, by virtue of thy finitude—the innermost law of thy being—art thus presented before thyself, and projected out of thyself; and all that thou perceives out of thyself is still thyself only. This consciousness has been well named INTUITION.[28]

Friedrich Schelling, initially a close collaborator with Fichte, eventually broke with him on this point. For Schelling, the philosophical desire for systematic purity and autonomy still held a powerful magnetic pull against the transience, contingency, and heterogeneity of the material world, but that impulse worked against his aesthetic sensibility.[29] On the one side he speaks like Fichte: “The sole immediate object of transcendental concern is the subjective; the sole organ of this mode of philosophizing is therefore inner sense, and its object is such that it cannot even become . . . an object of outer intuition.”[30] The purpose of philosophy, “its highest object, must be, not something mediated through concepts nor laboriously put together into concepts, but that in man which is immediately present to himself alone.”[31] This belief leads to the quintessential romantic subjectivism: “In all of us there dwells a mysterious and wonderful power to withdraw ourselves form the changes of time into our innermost self, freed from all that comes to us from without, and to intuit the eternal in us under the form of immutability.”[32] But then here we see Schelling pulling in the opposite position: “It would be equally hard to understand how a realization of our purposes in the external world could ever be possible through conscious and free activity, unless a susceptibility to such action were already established in the world, even before it becomes the object of a conscious act.”[33]

Another of Fichte’s contemporaries and major participant in this debate, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, popularized the doctrine of immediate intuition, although in doing so seemed at times to conflate sensible and intellectual intuition. He wanted, in the first place, to invert Kant’s hierarchy of reason and understanding: “The purest and richest reason is what follows from the purest and richest sensation.”[34] Ratiocination, the process of working things through with the tools of logic, should take a back seat to ”the faculty of Sensibility, which is the true Sovereign.”[35] The seeker after truth “holds his intuitions firm with all his might; he senses, and then he senses some more, and by sense he brings the intuition ever closer to the eye of the mind.”[36] The philosopher’s wisdom for Jacobi “is not the power of distinguishing and comparing, of judging and inferring . . . but simply and solely the power of his sense.”[37] But here is where sensible intuition then makes a return. Vernunft “must be excited by nature, like all other sentiments; and must arise from the particular situation, in which the mind is placed at any particular juncture.” [38] Jacobi exhorted his reading audience to

strain your whole attention once more, I pray you, and collect your being at the point of a simple perception, so that you might become once and for all aware (and be unshakingly convinced, for your whole life) that the I and the Thou, the internal consciousness and the external object, must be present both at once in the soul even in the most primordial and simple of perceptions—the two in one flash, in the same indivisible instant, without before or after, without any operation of the understanding. [emphasis added][39]

In invoking these three idealist thinkers, I have only just scratched the surface of the discourse around intuition in the wake of Kant, but enough to show that within this appeal to direct and immediate intuition a tension developed between the desire for purity—abstraction from the sensible material world—and the desire to recognize the role of empirical sensation. The second of these desires will get a fuller hearing in what follows.[40]

Sensible Intuition

The tendency to reduce intuition to a kind of pure, radical subjectivism stirred this objection among otherwise sympathetic contemporaries. It was especially among the romantic poets of the time, but not exclusively, where the dignity of immediate, sensible intuition—especially as it came into contact with the outer natural world—was reasserted against the absolute supremacy of the pure Ego. I will reference only a few of those who moved in this direction, enough to give a sense of why this phase of the romantic movement would set the scene for the merging of phenomenological and hermeneutic tendencies at the end of the nineteenth century.

Perhaps most prominently Friedrich Schlegel, a close reader and contemporary of Fichte,[41] turned away from Fichte’s pure intellectualism because of his keen aesthetic and philosophical sense of the „coalescence and indivisibility of the ideal and the real.”[42] Not only is nature and the universe not “the impression of a transcendental ego,” the mind remains „immediately [unmittelbar] in contact with physical organs“ and develops itself in “the in-between space [Zwischenräumen] of nature.”[43] In Schlegel’s view the collaboration between mind and nature works actively from both ends. From one side, the encounter with nature “warms our entire being, and instils in our hearts and minds a powerful desire to create.“[44] From the other side, “matter is the sedimented condensation of the mind.”[45] He speaks often in the terms of analogy to get at this equal exchange: “Air, water, earth, and fire must find their analogue in humans.“[46]

Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg [Novalis], also a contemporary of Fichte, was sympathetic to the creative power that Fichte attributed to the inner self, but came to worry that this vision “has packed everything into the I.”[47] He joined the chorus of those seeking to return nature to a guiding ontological role: “Everything that surrounds us, daily incidents, ordinary circumstances, the habits of our way of life, exercises an uninterrupted influence on us.”[48] He believed the self can only return to itself through the world of sense in an active collaboration: “[T]he world is like a precipitate of human nature, [but ] no material precipitate without a spiritual sublimate.”[49] He summed up this retrieval of sensation in language that echoes Schlegel:

We have two sense systems which, however different they appear, are yet entwined extremely closely with one another. One system is called the body, one the soul. The former is dependent on external stimuli, whose essence we call nature or the external world. The latter originally is dependent on the essence of inner stimuli that we call spirit, or the world of spirits. Usually this last system stands in a nexus of association with the other system—and is affected by it. Nevertheless frequent traces of a converse relation are to be found, and one soon notices that both systems ought actually to stand in a perfect reciprocal relation to one another.[50]

Novalis’s denomination of “two sense systems” here is a fitting summary of the issue at hand in this tussle between what feels like the congenital difference between philosophical and aesthetic impulses, one toward the pure ideal of the soul in meditation, the other toward the romantic appreciation for the richness of nature and sensation.

One attempt at reconciliation of these opposite impulses was Schelling’s idea that mind and nature can act as analogues to each other. But de didn’t lay out exactly how this happens. It was Johann Herder who attempted to explain more concretely how “the use of analogy and ‘interpretation’ play a role in the development, expansion, and deepening of our understanding of the natural world.”[51] He did this by detailing how the exchange between understanding and nature works in the medium of language. He saw nature as a kind of orchestral expression, “and the human being’s song [as] a concerto of all these voices.”[52] He utterly rejected the purity of intellectual intuition and argued instead for the constitutive exchange of the sensible world with the sensing soul: “This is how little nature has created us as isolated rocks, as egoistic monads! Even the finest instrument strings of animal feeling . . . even these strings, whose sound and straining does not come from volition and slow deliberation at all . . . The struck string performs its natural duty: it sounds!, it calls to a similarly feeling Echo.”[53] This is less a correspondence-between than a continuum-through—what Herder described in incomparable language is an uninterrupted progression of intercommunication from out of the sensual kinship of nature and spirit: “Since the whole of nature resounds, there is nothing more natural for a sensuous human being that that it lives, it speaks, it acts,”[54]

Another monumental influence in the recuperation of sensible intuition for a theory of understanding was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who with his profoundly interdisciplinary instincts explored the “mutual interaction” of human and world in the “many different forms of existence” as they are “livingly interwoven in himself [lebendig durchkreuzenden Verhältnisse].”[55] In his genre-defying Theory of Colors, he broke into rhyme as a way to paraphrase the ancient Ionian belief in the ontological collaboration of sight, light, and thought:

Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,

Wie könnten wir das Licht erblicken?

Lebt’ nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft,

Wie könnt’ uns Göttliches entzücken?

Were the eye not of the sun,

How could we behold the light?

If God’s might and ours were not as one,

How could His work enchant our sight?[56]

The mystical correspondences in this formulation confuse the line between attribution and identification. The physical senses in the first couplet become in the second couplet simply an aspect of divine potency. Nature and mind are one.

To conclude my brief precis of the romantic attack on the purity of intellectual intuition, I will site one of the clearest voices against “the monkish Cell of Fichtean pan-egoistic Idealism.” [57] Samuel Taylor Coleridge became first drawn to, then repelled by German idealist thought. Once he turned against it, he waxed eloquent about the emptiness of its abstracted egoism: “Let us boldly look into the phrase—I contemplate myself. If it does not mean my body, or a series of thoughts—is there any thing really objective in the “myself”—is there any real synthesis, aught added to the single word, I?”[58] He asserted passionately that experience requires an empirical world to give it substance: “The perpetual and unmoving Cloud of Darkness, that hangs over this work to my ‘mind's eye’, is the absence of any clear account of what experience is. What do you mean by a fact, an empiric Reality, which alone can give solidity (Inhalt) to our Conceptions?”[59]

I hope you have sensed in this second phase of the recuperation of nature for intuition how the ground was being laid for Lebensphilosophie and phenomenology in the next generation. The British empiricists thought of sense and sensation mainly in terms of the most rudimentary perceptual operations—the color red, the heat of the stove. By contrast, romantics like Coleridge invoked their own personal “experience” when they referred to the world of perception: “I shall write as truly as I can from Experience—actual individual Experience.”[60] He and his romantic colleagues not only gave a new dignity to perception by identifying it with the richness of personal experience, but they found in this connection the basis for a new metaphysics: “It is the poetry of all human nature, to read it likewise in a figurative sense, and to find therein correspondences and symbols of the spiritual world.”[61] This new dimension of romanticism had an extraordinary life in the following years, and set the table for Gadamer’s approach to the immediacy of truth.[62]

II. Gadamer and the Place of Sensible Intuition

Gadamer acknowledges and respects the immediacy of experience in a full range of philosophical, aesthetic, and anthropological aspects—in the non-temporal sense of animal instinct,[63] in direct testimony (“what has been seen with one’s own eyes”[64]), in the aesthetic and practical tact of a judgment (“die Unmittelbarkeit der Sinne”[65]), as insight based on sense and sensibility rather than ratiocination (“the immediate living certainty that all ends and values have when they appear in human consciousness”[66]), and in the sense of a commonly shared language that requires no intermediation, no “Vermittlung,” so that we are able to have direct access to its being (“das Dasein dessen, was durch sie dargestellt wird”).[67] He pays great respect to the wonderful paradoxes of immediacy, as for instance in the historicist sense in which a “fleeting present moment . . . includes within itself a full and immediate sense [ein volles und unmittelbares Gefühl]” of relation to the continuity of history.[68]

However, Gadamer takes direct critical aim at the prestige vested in the immediacy of experience in a number of closely allied philosophical currents, in order to clear the way for a non-subjectivist hermeneutics more closely aligned with his mentor Heidegger. Interestingly, Gadamer’s main targets are not the obvious candidates—Cartesian intellectualism or Humean empiricism—but the German idealists in the circle of Fichte, the German historicists who could not fully break away from a transcendental orientation, and the residue of their influence in the phenomenology and hermeneutics leading up to Heidegger. Gadamer focuses especially on Wilhelm Dilthey, who plays a key structural role in Truth and Method as a fulcrum between the idealist currents we have been tracing and the anti-subjectivism of Heidegger and Gadamer.

Gadamer explicitly identifies the “immediate certitude” of “indivisible consciousness” that Dilthey inherits from “the speculative postulate of idealism” as the critical issue.[69] What Dilthey famously calls an Erlebnis is precisely, as Gadamer explains it, “where immediate certitude is to be found, for experience is no longer divided into an act (a becoming conscious) and a content (that of which one is conscious). It is, rather, indivisible consciousness [Hier ist unmittelbare Gewißheit. Denn was Erlebnis ist, ist nicht mehr unterschieden in einen Akt, etwa das Innewerden, und einen Inhalt, das, dessen man inne wird. Es ist vielmehr ein nicht weiter auflösbares Innesein.]“[70] Here for comparison is Dilthey’s account from the Aufbau: “[T]he certainty of lived experience requires no further mediation. It can accordingly be called immediate. Every assertion about what is experienced is objectively true if it is brought to adequation with the lived experience. [Die Gewißheit des Erlebnisses bedarf keiner weiteren Vermittelung, und so kann dasselbe als unmittelbar gewiß bezeichnet werden. Jede Aussage über Erlebtes ist objektive wahr, wenn sie zur Adäquation mit dem Erlebnis gebracht ist.]“[71]

Because I want to understand accurately Gadamer’s generous but nuanced approach to the immediacy of understanding in experience, I have disambiguated the three ways it comes into his work and placed them in order: as a pernicious standard of truth that has to be eliminated, as a positive attribute of experience that has to be appreciated, and finally as a mixed philosophical concept that has to be carefully calibrated.

Against Immediacy

Right from the beginning of Truth and Method Gadamer centers the topos of immediacy. First this is in terms of the rupture from instinctual life in nature: “Man is characterized by the break with the immediate.”[72] Human communication evidences a reflective distance in the capacity to take into account differences of perspective. Communication is therefore “not simply the immediate manifestation of thought.”[73] Gadamer sees this reflective rupture from the instinctual order of nature at the origin for what Hegel calls “rising to the universal.”[74] If we can think to a degree from the position of the other, we can start to see conceptually what is in common.

Allied to this instinctual immediacy is a second category, the unreflective self-absorption in a purely ontic existence that we distance ourselves from with a kind of seeing (Gr. theorein) that fosters ethical awareness and civilized habits. Bildung is “distancing from the immediacy of desire, or personal and private interest.”[75] This distancing work has both temporal and conceptual dimensions. It brings us to a form of temporal and historical awareness insofar as we connect “with something that is not immediate, something that is alien, with something that belongs to memory and to thought.”[76] But it also encourages a shift from the particular to the abstract in “the development of theoretical interests.”[77] Thus distance from subjective immediacy is necessary for civilized life.

Gadamer’s third major critique of immediacy features the way the 19th century cult of genius and the aestheticist absorption in the moment isolates subjective experience from history. Here we have a conceptual twist, since immediacy gets attached to an unhappy form of dis-continuity—the doctrine of “pure immediacy and discontinuity” that valorizes an imaginative truth that dissolves all ties to historical continuity carried within the work of art.[78] Such an “absolute discontinuity” culminates in the “aesthetic nihilism” of the decadent movement (think of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebour). Whether fair or not, Gadamer points this critique at Dilthey: “The appeal to immediacy, the instantaneous flash of genius, to the significance of ‘experiences’ [Erlebnisse], cannot withstand the claim of human existence to continuity and unity of self-understanding.”[79]

Gadamer associates a fourth problematic mode of immediacy with Edmund Husserl, a near-contemporary of Dilthey with overlapping philosophical interests. Husserl’s “modes of givenness” are coordinating operations of a “lifeworld” that is constantly renegotiating its horizonal perspective.[80] The immediately given (something that can be analyzed in phenomenological reductions) is the product of schematizing operations that develop historically, fungible operations developed and redeveloped through history as “anonymous ‘productions’ of life.”[81] Just as with Dilthey’s modest steps away from pure reason, the Husserlian concept of “lifeworld” is an effort to get beyond universal constitution toward a more historical evolution of universal conditions of possibility. Nevertheless, Gadamer judges that Husserl’s lifeworld is still anchored in “the pregiven basis of all experience,” remaining “essentially related to subjectivity,” and debarred from genuine historicity.[82]

Despite this frontal critique of Husserl, it is Dilthey’s attachment to the immediacy of experience that serves at the end of both the first and second parts of Truth and Method as the climactic foil for Heidegger’s ontological breakthrough. The self-sufficiency of personal experience as the unmediated understanding of life in Dilthey’s Erlebnis-theory sets the stage for an ontology unbound by the limits of subjectivity at the end of Part One. The “mystery of the person that is ultimately unfathomable by research . . . comes to a climax with Wilhelm Dilthey” at the end of Part Two, setting the scene for a radical rethinking of the relation of historical fact to understanding.[83]

Gadamer offers some disclaimers for his critique of Dilthey. In the first place, the situation Dilthey faced in engaging the debate between empiricism and idealism was, in Gadamer’s estimation, “utterly complicated,” and for Gadamer this was not a bad thing, since Dilthey had deep roots in the humanist and romantic traditions as well as the research sciences of his time.[84] As Dilthey himself put it, no “real blood runs in the veins of the cognitive subject that Locke, Hume, and Kant constructed.”[85] Dilthey’s humanist side inclined him toward a disciplinary framework that encompasses “whole and concrete human beings in their vitality and fullness” against the bloodless intellectualism that philosophy had threatened to become.[86] This means that when Dilthey introduces the idea that truth can be known in a certain immediate way, he does so in contrast to the immediacy of intellectual intuition as it was proposed by Fichte. Immediate understanding is a collaboration from the start: “[A] self without an other and something internal without something external are meaningless words.”[87] “The self and the other, the I and the world are there for each other. . . . they are correlates.”[88] The opposite of bloodless, at the root of Dilthey’s epistemology is the concept of lived experience (das Erlebnis), “a distinctive and characteristic mode in which reality is there-for-me.”[89] This “there-for-me” gives Erlebnis an existential weight and complexity far more human than the flatly conceived perception of the empirical object or the pure intuition of the constitutive Ego.

The flesh-and-blood quality of Erlebnis also carries a temporal aspect. To say that an experience “is a reality that manifests itself immediately” is not a kind of presence that exists in isolation, but an event of understanding that sounds very much like the experience of beauty in Gadamer’s theory of the work of art.[90] It has something of a hermeneutic structure: “[L]ived experience is not merely something present, but already contains past and future within its consciousness of the present.”[91] An Erlebnis says in its powerful immediacy that it is a meaningful event in one’s whole life.

And despite the excessive weight Dilthey placed on such life experiences as the basis for an entire trans-disciplinary matrix, we should not miss the richness of its character as a product of his sensibility as a humanist with a classical German education. Lived experience accesses “whole and concrete human beings in their vitality and fullness,” which means that an Erlebnis “is not an objective given. It is a reality for me in the sense that it becomes part of me and somehow belongs to me without any distance.”[92] The power of an Erlebnis for understanding springs from its “being filled or ful-filled with reality”; it carries within itself augurs of the future and mementos of the past.[93] In any almost Proustian vein Dilthey describes the capacity of subjective experience to gather, refract, and portend the events of life “like motifs . . . in a symphony.”[94] When we go to a familiar museum or friend’s house, the “lived experience of our last visit contains the fullness of the earlier visits.”[95]

Whether Gadamer’s interpretation of Dilthey in Truth and Method is fair, it is important to recognize that Gadamer saw Dilthey less as a latter-day representative of the idealist error and more as an imperfect precursor of hermeneutic ontology burdened by idealist presuppositions. Dilthey was only a part of Gadamer’s broadside against the philosophical overreliance on subjective immediacy. But what we will see in the next section is that using Dilthey as the main critical springboard for a hermeneutic ontology allows some of the sympathetic resonances that Gadamer obviously felt with Dilthey’s project to make this relationship far from a simple divorce.

For Immediacy

Against the attacks I have just enumerated, Gadamer concedes to immediacy several crucial functions. Ironically the most hermeneutic of Gadamer’s attachments to immediacy is its role in the dialogic alterity of historical understanding: “When we understand a text, what is meaningful in it captivates us just as the beautiful captivates us. It has asserted itself and captivated us before we can come to ourselves and be in a position to test the claim in meaning that it makes. . . we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe.”[96] This description would seem on its face to set hermeneutics wholly on the romantic side of immediate experience, except that we know Gadamer understands it to work within the structure of play, a process that is only set in motion by this unprepared surprise: “[W]e recognize that even the phenomenon of art imposes an ineluctable task on existence, namely to achieve that continuity of self-understanding which alone can support human existence, despite the demands of the absorbing presence of the momentary aesthetic impress.”[97] Nevertheless, it is crucial to note the centrality of this moment, the force of which works, by Gadamer’s own emphatic assertion, outside of reflective awareness. This shows just how undogmatic his position is within the history of that debate. For all his remonstrances, the immediacy of experience sits at the heart of Gadamerian hermeneutics.

A second prominent category of positive immediacy is what he places in the realm of rhetoric, which he understood, from his classical training, mainly as an oral tradition of public argument. The root of Gadamer’s concession is Plato’s concern for “the loss of oral immediacy.”[98] In writing things down, the word loses a great deal (“modulation, gesture, intonation”), and it is only in reading that the word is brought to life again.[99] Now, Gadamer of course believes that, far from being “a weakened word,” the break with its first situation gives the textual word the chance always to mean more.[100] The fact that the word gets passed down (brings all its variations in passing through different perspectives) means that it can enrich itself. The point I want to direct attention to, though, is that reawakening ultimately comes back to the word in the immediacy of speech or reading. Orality is for Gadamer an uncomplicated instance of positive immediacy: “Thus people usually understand each other immediately.”[101] This kind of agreement is possible because of the many “essential things that unite human beings” in their daily lives together.[102] This immediacy of understanding is only “disturbed” when there is misunderstanding or a serious difference of perspective (181). In fact, the “breakdown of the immediate understanding of things in their truth,” Gadamer notes, “is the motive for the detour into history.”[103]

A close extension of immediacy to rhetorical competence is what Aristotle establishes in the Nicomachean Ethics as phronesis, the deliberative skill of the citizen. This is often, in the assembly or the public square or the law courts, a face-to-face process. In Aristotle’s account of the practical arts, “when the matter is important, we take others into our deliberations, distrusting our own capacity to decide.”[104] The skill of phronetic judgment, according to Gadamer, lies in “the immediacy of the senses” that “knows how to make sure distinctions and evaluations in the individual case without being able to give its reasons.”[105] Just as with rhetorical debate and argumentation, public deliberation does not have the luxury of distanced reflection but must make practical decisions in the moment.

It is a big leap from the Athenian assembly to Kant’s Third Critique, but Kant’s concession to aesthetic judgment as a form of knowing that does not rely on verification has a similar character of immediacy. In Gadamer’s paraphrase of Kant, beautiful things in the world “present themselves as beautiful immediately and of themselves, and hence do not require that any concept or purpose be consciously disregarded.”[106] It is in this context that Gadamer invokes the pietist Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, who wrote of “the vivid and penetrating perception of objects evident to all human beings, from their immediate contact and intuition, which are absolutely simple.”[107]

Gadamer’s debt to Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment opens up the most significant Gadamerian allegiance to immediacy, which is the ontological relation of beauty to truth and the good developed in the last pages of Truth and Method. Commentators have noted that something new and strange happens in these closing pages.[108] What seems to some like an unlikely detour into Platonic idealism is I would argue instead Gadamer’s attempt to square Plato with Heidegger, the two guiding lights of his own philosophy. He makes some surprising moves to do this, and perhaps the most important one is his recasting of Plato’s idea of the beautiful as a demonstration of the positivity of human finitude. This is what he calls the “special advantage of the beautiful” over the good.[109] By this way of thinking, the beautiful, which “disposes people in [the good’s] favor immediately,” is not itself the good but what motivates us to search for it.[110] The difference between the good and the beautiful is that, unlike the “fundamentally intangible” good, the beautiful “can be grasped.”[111] Gadamer explicates the currents of the long metaphysical tradition that lie behind this distinction; they start with Plato’s theory of participation and the Neoplatonist metaphysics of light. True beauty is never mere appearance or false gold, but rather “self-attestation,” the immediate evidence of what is true.[112] The metaphysis of light passed down through Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, and Nicholas of Cusa, sees beauty as visible evidence (einleuchtend) of the truth. The structural character of this mode of appearance is that, although it is “immediately evident,” it is only so as a mediation.[113] The doctrine of methexis means that we will never know perfect goodness, although we feel its presence when we witness beauty. This means also, however, and this is the key point, that beauty serves as an index of finitude. That is what Figal and others did not recognize about Gadamer’s ontological turn when they essentially accuse him of idealism.[114] Beauty envisions an order which cannot be fulfilled; it acts only as what Heidegger called a formal indication. Beauty is the compensation to humans for being denied the absolute. So there are two sides to Gadamer’s claim that beauty cannot “be experienced by an infinite mind.”[115] The other side of the human’s special advantage is that we fragile creatures will only ever be able to search for the good in the company of the beautiful.

You can see there in that bivalent interpretation of beauty what I meant when I said that Gadamer has a complicated relationship to the immediacy of the given, whose positive dimensions that I have just enumerated will now be seen to inform the compromise he makes with Dilthey on the subject, which I will close with.

“Mediated Immediacy”

The theory of beauty introduced in the last pages of Truth and Method is worked out more fully in Gadamer’s later writings on art. The most important of these later writings, “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” shows—rather ironically—that the work of art has the structure of an Erlebnis. Great art confronts us with “a claim that we cannot renounce: namely, the fact that everything we see stands there before us and addresses us directly as if it showed us ourselves.”[116] This quintessentially romantic idea is that in “the beautiful presented in nature and art, we experience [a] convincing illumination of truth and harmony, which compels the admission: ‘This is true’.”[117] Beauty’s truth does not need to be verified by some external criterion, nor is its function the evidence of some general principle. Its immediacy grants authority to experience as a self-evident source of knowledge.

The immediacy of this intuition for Gadamer, however, is only the first step. It is an intimation, an invitation to know more. And to work out this processive way of knowing he borrows, essentially, the structure of the Erlebnis—a sudden interruption, captivation, recognition and transformation—an event in life that simultaneously arrests time in the present and opens it out to eternity. I need to go back for a moment to Gadamer’s account of this structure in the first part of Truth and Method because it is there that he develops most fully the paradoxical temporality of the Erlebnis, which is both the transient, isolated burst and “the permanent content of what is experienced.”[118] It is “like a yield or result that achieves permanence, weight, and significance from out of the transience of experiencing. Both meanings obviously lie behind the coinage Erlebnis: both the immediacy, which precedes all interpretation, reworking, and communication, and merely offers a starting point for interpretation—material to be shaped—and its discovered yield, its lasting result.”[119] It is because an Erlebnis by definition is “taken out of” the regular stream of daily living that it can shed light, like the search beam from a tower, by using the insight it has gained in a transcendent moment to appreciate, to see, what all the other insignificant moments were leading up to. It redeems all the boredom and triviality by transmuting them, by their very contrast, into service of the achievement, for “a fullness of meaning”:

Every experience is taken out of the continuity of life and at the same time related to the whole of one’s life. It is not simply that an experience remains vital only as long as it has not been fully integrated into the context of one’s life consciousness, but the very way it is “preserved and dissolved” (aufgehoben) by being worked into the whole of life consciousness goes far beyond any “significance” it might be thought to have. Because it is itself within the whole of life, the whole of life is present in it too.[120]

What I need you to see in this account is that Gadamer credits to Dilthey’s Erlebnisse the same paradoxical temporal relation that Gadamer will later give to a reader’s participation in textual history. An Erlebnis experience is in fact itself a mediation, a view (Augenblick) onto a larger vista, a premonition of the whole opening up before it. It is inherent in the nature of an Erlebnis that it has to be integrated into a life by being “worked into [durch seine Verarbeitung im] the whole,” which for both Dilthey and Gadamer will always be unfinished, but simply on a different scale—in Dilthey’s case, the whole of a life, in Gadamer’s case, the whole of human history.[121]

So I am arguing that we should also see Gadamer’s troubled relation to Dilthey as a vital collaboration. A fundamental debt Gadamer owed to Dilthey, despite the shortcomings and errant directions of Dilthey’s overall programmatic project, was the work Dilthey did in returning the concept of experience, which philosophy had drained of life since Locke, to its classical and humanist roots. Fed by the romantic and existential currents of the time and along with the other Lebensphilosophen, Dilthey saw immediate experience as more than the raw data of sense-perception.[122] He returned flesh and blood to “the veins of the cognitive subject that Locke, Hume, and Kant” had drained.[123]

If Gadamer never fully acknowledged his debt to Erlebnis theory, he conceded quite a bit in a 1983 lecture that he gave in Italy in response to the charge that he had been unfair to Dilthey, and in the process of doing this gave a name to their common cause. The lecture refashions the inherent hermeneutic character of Dilthey’s later writings by softening the subjectivist character of “lived experience,” shifting focus from Dilthey’s idealist conception of an “immediacy of the being-inner” to an incipient historicity in which such an Innesein “has its significance in the totality of the course of life.”[124] Experience becomes, in this new sense, what Gadamer calls a “mediated immediacy [eine vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit].“[125]

What exactly is such a mediated immediacy? Gadamer would accuse of naivete anyone who called the mediated experience of art secondary or once removed or representational, because his view of course is that all forms of experience are already caught up in layers of interpretation: “[T]he way we experience one another, the way we experience historical traditions, the way we experience the natural givenness of our existence and of our world, constitute a truly hermeneutic universe.”[126] Importantly, Gadamer acknowledges “natural givenness” here, but only insofar as it is caught up in the weaving loom of historicity. And despite his comprehensive embrace of all these modalities of experience, Gadamer gives the experience of a work of art pride of place, precisely because it enacts our historicity. So, on the one hand, “mediated immediacy” for Gadamer describes all experience, but on the other hand, if hermeneutic experience has an Erlebnis-structure, it is because it builds community across time and is therefore of much greater significance than any one small person’s subjective experience. For Gadamer the ongoing mediation of texts and works across generations adds up to something more than what any individual can understand.

What this transposition of the Erlebnis-structure onto history does in the context of the longer philosophical narrative I have sketched in this essay is simply enormous. I do not think it is too much to say that it refits a theory of immediacy in the post-Kantian tradition for a hermeneutic future. As an improvement on Dilthey’s existential innovation, transposing the Erlebnis-structure to history mirrors the romantic repudiation of the idealist preferment of intellectual over sensible intuition. In Gadamer’s version, the analog to recuperating sensible intuition as a collaborating partner with intellect in the search for truth is the extension of life experience to and through historical texts and works of art. Where Schlegel, Novalis, Coleridge and others returned sensible intuition to its deserved place alongside intellectual intuition, Gadamer installs the play of truth in the work that proposes to and withdraws from the consciousness of generations.[127] If the later romantic thinkers gave the empirical world back to immediate intuition, Gadamer gave historical experience back to the intuitive understanding of the subject. Gadamer’s account of the immediacy of the given in the experience of the historical text and the work of art is his correction to the course of corrections that have unfolded since Locke’s cramped account of the perceptual given.

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  1. John Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” in Great Books of the Western World, 35: Locke, Berkeley, Hume, ed. Mortimer J. Adler (University of Chicago Press, 1952), 121. ↑

  2. Locke, 121. ↑

  3. David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” in Locke, Berkeley, Hume, ed. Mortimer Adler (University of Chicago Press, 1952), 455. ↑

  4. John Kitcher disaggregates and explicates the many meanings of the a priori in Kant in his essay “A Priori,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, ed. Paul Guyer (University Press, 2006) 28–60. ↑

  5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman K. Smith (Macmillan 1968), 82 [A42/B59]. ↑

  6. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 41 [B1]. ↑

  7. Boyd H. Bode, “The Concept of Immediacy,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 9, no. 6 (1912), 141. ↑

  8. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (University of Chicago Press, 1984), xi. ↑

  9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013; hereafter, TM), xxviii. ↑

  10. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 3: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton University Press, 2010), 55. ↑

  11. Gadamer, TM, xxxi, xxiv. ↑

  12. Any such attempt would be treacherous. Such efforts have been made by the likes of Isaiah Berlin (see for example, “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy [Viking Press, 1980], 162–87) or Arthur Lovejoy The Reason, the Understanding, and Time (Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), and they make for fun reading but are not very reliable. This is partly because none of the principals in the debate were consistent or unambiguous, all of them evolved differing positions over time, and each of them misunderstood the other, so sorting all of that out would be a massive project. In this paper I just want to indicate the central thematic tendencies. ↑

  13. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Dilthey: Between Romanticism and Positivism,” in Hermeneutics Between History and Philosophy, The Selected Writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Vol. 1, ed. Pol Vandervelde and Arun Iyer (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 79. ↑

  14. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,183. ↑

  15. Hamann, Johann G., Writings on Philosophy and Language, trans. Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 63. ↑

  16. Johann G. Hamann, Socratic Memorabilia, trans. James C. O’Flaherty (Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 41. ↑

  17. I have summarized Isaiah Berlin’s portrait of Hamann in his essay “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Viking Press), 167–70. ↑

  18. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James C. Meredith (Clarendon Press, 1952), 224. ↑

  19. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 60. ↑

  20. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 60. ↑

  21. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 79. ↑

  22. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 224. ↑

  23. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, The Vocation of Man, trans. William Smith (Open Court, 1931), 72. ↑

  24. Lovejoy, The Reason, the Understanding, and Time, 1. ↑

  25. “Merke auf dich selbst: kehre deinen Blick von allem, was dich umgiebt, ab, und in dein Inneres — ist die erste Forderung, welche die Philosophie an ihren Lehrling thut.” This is the first line of an early draft (1797) of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre,“ in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1, ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte (Veit und Comp., 1845), 422. ↑

  26. Dan Breazeale, “Johann Gottlieb Fichte,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Fall 2024 Edition, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/johann-fichte/. ↑

  27. Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 71. ↑

  28. Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 70. ↑

  29. For example, Breazeale in the Stanford entry on Fichte admits: “Given the subsequent abuse of this term by Schelling and the romantics, as well as the confusion that one sometimes finds among expositors of Fichte on this issue, it is crucial to recognize systematic ambiguity of the term “intellectual intuition” in Fichte’s own writings.” ↑

  30. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Michael Vater (University Press of Virginia, 1978), 13. ↑

  31. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, 67. ↑

  32. Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, 180. ↑

  33. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays, trans. Fritz Mari (Associated University Presses, 1979), 213–14. ↑

  34. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 321. ↑

  35. Jacobi quoted in Lovejoy, The Reason, the Understanding, and Time, 3. ↑

  36. Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings, 321. ↑

  37. Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings, 321. ↑

  38. Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings, 270. ↑

  39. Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings, 277. ↑

  40. Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood, “Introduction,“ in J. G. Fichte/F. W. J. Schelling: The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800–1802), ed. and trans. Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood (SUNY Press, 2012), 3–4. ↑

  41. For a close analysis of Schlegel’s movement toward a nature philosophy, see Allison Stone, “Friedrich Schlegel, Romanticism, and the Re-enchantment of Nature,” Inquiry 48, no. 1 (2005), 3–25. ↑

  42. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre 1769–1806, Erster Teil (Ferdinand Schönigh, 1963),155; fragment 388. ↑

  43. Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre 1769–1806,151, 152; fragments 337 and 351. ↑

  44. Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre 1769–1806, 150; fragment 327. ↑

  45. Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre 1769–1806, 155; fragment 383. ↑

  46. Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre 1769–1806, 156; fragment 397. ↑

  47. Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg [Novalis], Fichte Studies, trans. Jane Kneller (Cambridge University Press, 2003), xviii; fragment 5. ↑

  48. Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg [Novalis], Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret M. Stoljar (SUNY Press, 1997), 54; fragment 27. ↑

  49. Hardenberg [Novalis], Philosophical Writings, 41; fragment 95. ↑

  50. Hardenberg [Novalis], Philosophical Writings, 61; fragment 70. ↑

  51. Dalia Nassar, “The Hermeneutics of Nature: Herder on Animal and Human Worlds,” in Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt (Oxford University Press, 2022), 55. ↑

  52. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” in Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 104. ↑

  53. Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” 65–66. ↑

  54. Herder, “Treatise on the Origin of Language,” 101. ↑

  55. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Collected Works, vol. 12 (Suhrkamp, 1989), 20. ↑

  56. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre (Carl Hanser Verlag, 1989), 20; Goethe, Collected Work. Vol. 12, 164. A good source for Goethe’s understanding of the reciprocities of mind and world is Astrida O. Tantillo, The Will to Create: Goethe’s of Nature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). ↑

  57. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 4, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen (Routledge, 1989), 224, note 4839. ↑

  58. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 5, ed. Karl L. Griggs (Clarendon Press, 1971), 14, note 5286. ↑

  59. This bit of text was discovered in 1927 written on the flyleaf of a copy of Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft in Coleridge’s library, reprinted in Willem Schrickx, “An Unnoticed Note of Coleridge’s on Kant,” Neophilologus 42, no. 1 (1958), 148. ↑

  60. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Animae Poetae: From the Unpublished Note-Books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest H. Coleridge (William Heinemann, 1895), 129. ↑

  61. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual (Gale and Fenner, 1816), xiii. ↑

  62. I have not mentioned Hegel in this overview for the reason that as a first-hand witness to the turmoil of the idealist debates, he attempted a grand synthesis, providing what Gadamer called “a thoughtful mediation” (TM, 169), which Hegel himself described as “a middle term between purely objective indigent existence and purely inner ideas.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Clarendon Press, 1975), 163. Whether he clarified or complicated the situation is an open question, the intervention advances beyond my sketch of the basic positions that animated the debate. ↑

  63. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, Hermeneutik I, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Mohr Siebeck, 1985),17–18, hereafter GW 1; Gadamer, TM, 121–3. ↑

  64. Gadamer, TM, 212. ↑

  65. Gadamer, GW 1, 22. ↑

  66. Gadamer, TM, 238. ↑

  67. Gadamer, GW 1, 139. Gadamer moves insensibly back and forth between immediate in the temporal sense of right-here-and-now, and un-mediated in the more generic sense of that which has no intervening medium of translation, no third term. ↑

  68. Gadamer, TM, 200; GW 1, 206. For Droysen, Gadamer notes in passing, historical knowledge acquired by deep research is “both an infinite mediation and an ultimate immediacy” (TM, 211). ↑

  69. Gadamer, TM, 218; GW 1, 227. ↑

  70. Gadamer, TM, 218; GW 1, 227. ↑

  71. Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. 3, 47–48; Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7: Der Aufbau der Geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, ed. Bernhard Groethuysen (B. G. Teubner, 1958), 26. ↑

  72. Gadamer, TM, 11. ↑

  73. Gadamer, TM, 187. ↑

  74. Gadamer, TM, 11. ↑

  75. Gadamer, TM, 12. ↑

  76. Hegel quoted in Gadamer, TM, 12. ↑

  77. Gadamer, TM, 12. ↑

  78. Gadamer, TM. 83. ↑

  79. Gadamer TM, 84. Robert Bernasconi devotes his editor’s Introduction to The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays to just this assertion of continuity over discontinuity that separates Gadamer’s theory of art from Heidegger’s. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Robert Bernasconi and trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge University Press, 1986), xi–xxi, henceforth, RB. ↑

  80. Gadamer, TM, 236. ↑

  81. Gadamer, TM, 240. ↑

  82. Gadamer, TM, 239. ↑

  83. Gadamer, TM, 212, 214. ↑

  84. Gadamer, Hermeneutics Between History and Philosophy, 76. ↑

  85. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 1: Introduction to the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton University Press, 1989), 50. ↑

  86. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 2: Understanding the Human World, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton University Press, 2010), 68. ↑

  87. Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 2, 63. ↑

  88. Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 2, 75. ↑

  89. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 5: Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton University Press, 1985), 223. ↑

  90. Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 5, 224. ↑

  91. Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 5, 225. ↑

  92. Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 2, 68. ↑

  93. Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 5, 225. ↑

  94. Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 5, 227. ↑

  95. Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 5, 227. ↑

  96. Gadamer TM, 484. ↑

  97. Gadamer TM, 96. ↑

  98. Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” Man and World 18 (1985), 246. ↑

  99. Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” 246. ↑

  100. Gadamer, “Philosophy and Literature,” 247. ↑

  101. Gadamer, TM, 180. ↑

  102. Gadamer, TM, 180. ↑

  103. Gadamer, TM, 182. ↑

  104. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Harris Rackham (Harvard University Press, 1926), 37. ↑

  105. Gadamer, TM, 15. ↑

  106. Gadamer, TM, 40. ↑

  107. Oetinger in Gadamer, TM, 25. ↑

  108. Günter Figal, “The Doing of the Thing Itself: Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Ontology of Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. Robert J. Dostal (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 102. ↑

  109. Gadamer, TM, 475. ↑

  110. Gadamer, TM, 475. ↑

  111. Gadamer, TM, 475. ↑

  112. Gadamer, TM, 483. ↑

  113. Gadamer, TM, 476. ↑

  114. Figal, “The Doing of the Thing Itself,” 121. ↑

  115. Gadamer, TM. 480. ↑

  116. Gadamer, RB, 11. ↑

  117. Gadamer, RB, 15. ↑

  118. Gadamer, TM, 53. ↑

  119. Gadamer, TM, 53. ↑

  120. Gadamer, TM, 61, 60. ↑

  121. Gadamer, TM, 60; Gadamer, GW 1, 75. ↑

  122. A useful guide to this inheritance is Frederick Beiser’s Philosophy of Life: German Lebensphilosophie (Oxford University Press, 2023). ↑

  123. Gadamer, Heremeneutics Between History and Philosophy, 50. ↑

  124. Gadamer, “The Problem of Dilthey: Between Romanticism and Positivism,” in Hermeneutics Between History and Philosophy, 79; Gadamer, GW 4, 413. ↑

  125. Gadamer, “The Problem of Dilthey: Between Romanticism and Positivism,” 413. ↑

  126. Gadamer, TM, xxiv. ↑

  127. Gadamer, TM, 484. ↑