For both art and the historical sciences are modes of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence comes directly into play.
The long history of this idea before Kant made it the basis of his Critique of Judgment shows that the concept of taste was originally more a moral than an aesthetic idea.
As in play, it rests on a common willingness of the participants in conversation to lend themselves to the emergence of something else, the Sache or subject matter which comes to presence and presentation in conversation.
Being that can be understood is language.
Nothing exists except through language.
The essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities.
It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.
Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.
The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.
The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.
History does not belong to us; we belong to it.
I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.
The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.
All cities we have visited are precincts in this metropolis of the mind.
The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows from the self-forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it.
It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education – aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness – presented alienated forms of our true historical being.
The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it – what is said.
From Gadamer I learned that to understand a given thinker requires one to presuppose that he is right.
A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the ‘standpoint of art’ can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a ‘secular saviour’ for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.
The structure of play absorbs the player into itself, and thus frees him from the burden of taking the initiative, which constitutes the actual strain of existence.