In “Pain,” Hans-Georg Gadamer offers several reflections on the experience of pain and its importance for both modern medicine and hermeneutic thought. Having already celebrated his 100th birthday at the time of this lecture, Gadamer speaks of his own experience with polio and the pains of old age, and the influence that his friend and physician, Paul Vogler, had on his approach to the treatment of pain. In the year 2000, Gadamer is concerned with the dominance of technology and chemical (...) “pain management” in the professional medical community, which has largely forgotten the more natural or traditional healing methods in approaching pain and recovery. In light of this, what is crucial for Gadamer is that individuals approach the challenges of pain by taking an active part in their own recovery. For Gadamer, hermeneutics speaks to these encounters with pain and recovery as decisive for human life and understanding. (shrink)

Since Truth and Method, Gadamer’s account of language or linguisticality as the medium of hermeneutic experience has prompted an ever-recurring reflection and critical engagement with the interpretive implications of this claim. For Gadamer, there is no subject matter that comes to the fore without linguisticality, that is, without the possibility of the subject matter to come into language in the first place. However, in later essays, he briefly discusses what he calls ‘prelinguistic’ in hermeneutic expe­rience. In this essay, I offer (...) an account of the prelinguistic in Gadamer’s works that still maintains the primacy of language in his hermeneutic project. The prelinguistic marks not only a kind of precondition of linguisticality itself, but it also marks the fundamentally disclosive and demanding character of hermeneutic experience as such. As a precondition, the prelinguistic is not something beyond or outside of language, but is the very impulse or drive towards linguistic expression. (shrink)

Since Truth and Method, Gadamer’s account of language or linguisticality as the medium of hermeneutic experience has prompted an ever-recurring reflection and critical engagement with the interpretive implications of this claim. For Gadamer, there is no subject matter that comes to the fore without linguisticality, that is, without the possibility of the subject matter to come into language in the first place. However, in later essays, he briefly discusses what he calls ‘prelinguistic’ in hermeneutic experience. In this essay, I offer (...) an account of the prelinguistic in Gadamer’s works that still maintains the primacy of language in his hermeneutic project. The prelinguistic marks not only a kind of precondition of linguisticality itself, but it also marks the fundamentally disclosive and demanding character of hermeneutic experience as such. As a precondition, the prelinguistic is not something beyond or outside of language, but is the very impulse or drive towards linguistic expression. (shrink)