Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Gadamer 2000 PDF
Gadamer 2000 PDF
© 2000 KluwerSUBJECTIVITY
Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY , SUBJECT AND PERSON 275
HANS-GEORG GADAMER*
Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
*Translated by
Peter Adamson and David Vessey
276 HANS-GEORG GADAMER
Luther, too, was effective in this direction. He connected the concept of person
most closely with that of fides, the rule of belief, and thus also with the role of
conscience, though not at all with the concept of the theoretical self-conscious-
ness. Ebeling has shown this in his studies of Luther. But it is then even more
remarkable that in philosophical conceptual language, the conceptual shift we
have outlined from substance to the modem concept of subjectivity won the
upper hand. For Descartes, as for Leibniz and John Locke, the concept of per-
son is defined through the reflective concept of self-consciousness, without the
Other coming into consideration at all. New paths were only opened up by
Kant’s philosophy at the time of the French Revolution, in that Kant placed the
freedom of personhood and its accountability above the subjectivity of
self-consciousness. Here, for the first time, we come to the concept of “sub-
ject” in the political sense. This also had its impact upon the theological de-
bates. The concept of Person finds new receptions both in the Lutheran tradition,
through Schleiermacher, and also in the renewal of the Thomistic tradition in
the Catholic philosophy of our own century. Schleiermacher straightforwardly
took up the banner of “Personalism,” in order to eliminate all pantheistic ten-
dencies in the theology of the Trinity. The same goes for the reception of Per-
sonalism in the Catholic philosophy of our century, particularly due to the
influence of Max Scheler and the fruitful distinction he made in his philosophi-
cal analyses between the private sphere of the person and the social function of
person. Of course, this led to a new interpretation of the concept of Christian
love (throughout both main denominations), and in particular a new inter-
pretation of the third Person of the Trinity.
Later on, after his abandonment of the transcendental self-conception
to which he held so strongly in Being and Time, Heidegger left behind the
dimension of subjectivity and also the structure of care in Dasein even
more fundamentally, even eliminating the concept of understanding and
of hermeneutics from his thought after the “turn.” Those of my own works
which are oriented towards the primacy of speech, and which found their
first expression in the sketch of the third part of Truth and Method, were
an attempt to move in this direction. Who thinks of “language” already
moves beyond subjectivity.
Notes
1. This essay was first presented in 1975 in Dubrovnik, and first published in Vol. 10 of
Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke as “Subjectivität und Intersubjektivität, Subjekt, und
Person,” pp. 87–99.
SUBJECTIVITY AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY, SUBJECT AND PERSON 287
2. Compare this and what follows to “Die Phänomenologische Bewegung” in Gesammelte
Werke Vol. 3, No. 6, above all the second and third sections. [This piece has been trans-
lated as “The Phenomenological Movement” is published in Philosophical Hermeneutics
(tr. and ed. David Linge, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 130–181).]
3. Cf. the work on Hegel in the Gesammelte Werke Vol. 3, p. 47ff. [Translated as “Hegel’s
Dialectic of Self-Consciousness” and published in Hegel’s Dialectic (tr. P. Christopher
Smith, New Haven: Yale University press, 1976, pp. 54–74).]
4. Cf. in this volume p. 50ff. [This footnote refers to Gadamer’s yet untranslated essay
“Heidegger und die Soziologie: Bourdieu und Habermas” in Vol. 10 of Gesammelte
Werke, pp. 46–57.]
5. Now in Gesammelte Werke Vol. 2, No. 2 [“Das Problem der Geschichte in der neueren
deutschen Philosophie” pp. 27–36, untranslated].
288 HANS-GEORG GADAMER