Table Of ContentYale Studies in Hermeneutics
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Yale Studies in Hermeneutics
Joel Weinsheimer, editor
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Zygmunt Bauman
Robert Bernasconi
Gerald Bruns
Fred R. Dallmayr
Ronald Dworkin
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Clifford Geertz
Frank Kermode
Richard Rorty
Mark Taylor
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PRAISE OF THEORY
Speeches and Essays
HANS-GEORG GADAMER
translated by Chris Dawson
Yale University Press New Haven and London
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Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.
This book originally was published as Lob der Theorie:
Reden und Aufsiitze by Hans-Georg Gadamer,
copyright © 1983 by Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main).
Copyright© 1998 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole
or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108
of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission
from the publishers.
Set in Caslon type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1900-
[Lob der Theorie. English]
Praise of theory : speeches and essays / Hans-Georg Gadamer :
translated by Chris Dawson.
p. cm. - (Yale studies in hermeneutics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-07310-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Philosophy. 2. Theory (Philosophy) 3. Hermeneutics. 4. Reason.
5. Science and the humanities. I. Title. II. Series.
B3248.G3t3L6313 1998
193-dc21 98-7II5
CIP
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines
for permanence and durability of the Committee
on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of
the Council on Library Resources.
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CONTENTS
Foreword/ vii
Translator's Introduction/ xv
CHAPTER I
Culture and the Word / I
CHAPTER 2
Praise of Theory/ I6
CHAPTER 3
The Power of Reason / 37
CHAPTER 4
The Ideal of Practical Philosophy/ 50
CHAPTER 5
Science and the Public Sphere / 6z
CHAPTER 6
Science as an Instrument of Enlightenment / 7I
CHAPTER 7
The Idea of Tolerance 1782-1982 / 84
CHAPTER 8
Isolation as a Symptom of Self-Alienation / IOI
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CHAPTER 9
Man and His Hand in Modern Civilization:
Philosophical Aspects / II4
CHAPTER IO
The Expressive Force of Language: On the Function of
Rhetoric in Gaining Knowledge/ 123
CHAPTER II
Good German / 135
Notes/ 143
Glossary / 167
Bibliography/ qr
Index/ 174
vii Contents
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FOREWORD
To put it the way jaspers did, we wanted to grasp in what way
reason was incarnate in existence itself. And it is that search which
has determined my entire philosophical work. Right to my very last
of
years that impulse has held through. . . . We were in search a
of
way to think in which we could see the truth things, to discover
the truth that was there in each thing before us in the world. And
this meant that we were utterly distancedf rom ... efforts to control
things, to make things, to manage things.
Thus Hans-Georg Gadamer recently described his life's project
from 1930 to the present. Praise of Theory confirms this self
assessment. Here, first translated in its entirety, thanks to the
care and commitment of Chris Dawson, the essays and lectures
of the late 1970s and early 1980s that Gadamer collected in
Praise of Theory represent his ongoing effort to understand how
reason is incarnate in existence itself and why it is impossible,
for that very reason, to rationalize our existence.
The second, critical aspect of Gadamer's project is more ac
cessible because more familiar. In Praise of Theory Gadamer
sounds a warning against the dominant superstition of our
time: the unwarranted belief that the life-world can and should
be rationalized, that is, reordered according to a technological
model of applied knowledge. "Technical thinking," he fears,
"is beginning to expand into a universal view of the world." On
that view, it is not just the business world that should be ratio-
vii
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nalized by "efficiency experts"; all worlds are best run scientifi
cally, by discovering the laws governing them, and then altering
these worlds in calculable ways that will ultimately benefit us
all. This kind of rationalization appeals not only to bureaucrats
who use "expert opinion" to avoid taking responsibility and ex
ercising judgment; it appeals to everyone who believes that the
life-world can and should be managed scientifically to the end
of bettering it. In this fantasy, social engineers join forces with
all those obsessed with emancipatory utopias-indeed with all
who believe that homo faber is blessed with infinite possibility.
A new Enlightenment is needed, Gadamer argues, to over
come the old Enlightenment superstition that we can make our
world anything we would have it.
What has made this superstition credible is the seemingly
unbounded power of natural science. Within the physical
world, science has worked miracles, and there seemed every
reason to believe its successes could be replicated in the human
world simply by transferring its method. In Praise of Theory, as
in Truth and Method, Gadamer means by scientific method the
formal procedure of inquiry by which "reality gets made into
an object" so as "to break down the resistance of 'objects' and
to dominate the processes of nature." Objectification enables
control, and such dominion constitutes the proof and fruit of
understanding. The only questions are whether human domin
ion has any limits, whether there is anything that precludes
objectification, and whether a form of non-objectifying ratio
nality exists that therefore cannot be subsumed under method.
For Gadamer, we know, it is above all the human sciences
that show why method cannot be the universal paradigm of
rationality, and that in turn explains why his work in concep
tualizing these sciences has made him skeptical, as he says, of
"efforts to control things, to make things, to manage things."
The life-world studied by the human sciences cannot be objec-
viii/F oreword
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tified-and hence it cannot be controlled, made, or managed
because we belong to it. The belonging endemic to the human
sciences hardly proves that, not being susceptible of method,
these sciences are not rational-indeed not sciences. Qyite the
contrary, the human sciences represent a kind of "reason in
carnate in existence," a kind of knowledge - Gadamer calls
it practical knowledge-that comes from participation rather
than distanciation. The importance, indeed the daily necessity,
of practical knowledge implies that method has no monopoly
on truth. It is in fact quite blind to the truths that lie beyond
the horizon of the technological worldview, the truths of the
human sciences.
What then is "the human" that is the subject matter of the
human sciences? Among the several defining characteristics of
the human to which Gadamer has given his attention over the
years-language, in particular-the one to which he returns
in Praise of Theory is the beautiful. Perhaps this is not en
tirely unexpected, given his suspicion of "making." "Is human
society possible at all when work produces only the necessities?"
Gadamer asks. "It is worth considering to what extent what the
Greeks called to kafon, the beautiful in the broad sense of a free
surplus and superfluity, is that whereby human society satis
fies itself as human." Elsewhere he speaks of "a whole domain,
beyond animal self-preservation and beyond nature-the-artist's
inexhaustible play of forms. The clever, deliberate creations of
free human being bring a constant surplus into human life:
play, imitation, rite, ceremony, and all those things that, un
necessary as they are stimulating, we call the beautiful. This is
obviously a list that could be extended further, and it enumer
ates the opportunities that follow from the non-specialization
of being human."
What is distinctively human is not "making" -production
that serves the end of self-preservation - but rather superfluity
Foreword/ ix
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