The Problem of Historical Consciousness
15
Mar
In 1957 Hans-Georg Gadamer was invited to lecture for a quarter at the 
University of Louvain, in 1963 he appeared in French under the title Le probleme de la conscience historique, and there was still no major work of the hermeneutic philosopher “Truth and Method”.
After it appeared in 1969 an Italian version of the text, but it was in the English version of 1975, that according to Gadamer he “rediscovered with himself” reviewing the original text for publication in English, of this edition was made the translation into Portuguese, like 1st edition in 1998, and the edition I read is from 2006, 3rd. Edition made by FGV (Getúlio Vargas Foundation, Brazil).
The book is therefore a powerful preamble for anyone who wishes to read Truth and Method, where the problem of historical consciousness and its relation to the method goes back to Schleiermacher and his retelling by Dilthey, Gadamer being “his ideal is to decode the Book of History” (Gadamer, 2006, p.11).
The lectures of Gadamer, which were the basis of this booklet, reflect the “problem of introducing the hermeneutic problem from the perspective of Husserl and Heidegger” (page 10), a problem which was therefore treated in a special way in Germany, where thanks to Wilhelm Dilthey and what is called his Lebensphilosophie “(idem), the philosophy of life.
The problem of interpretation according to the laws of nature, in german Geisteswissenschaften (Human Sciences), Gadamer clarifies that in Truth and Method he deliberately began to invoke another example, “represented by the experience of art and the hermeneutic dimension, which certainly intervenes in the study Art scientist, but above all in the experience of art “(page 10).
He goes with this to distance himself from Dilthey, who set out to construct an epistemic base for the Geiteswissenchaften, but was not seen as the philologist clarifies, but as “a theorist of the method of a school history who did not see” the understanding of texts and other fragments of the past as their ultimate goal”, Gadamer wrote quoting Dilthey.
What Dilthey hoped was to reconcile the interpretive sciences with their scientific objectivity, the initial idea was to give hermeneutics a universal method.
Gadamer clarifies his position: “to show that self-understanding in relation to the sciences is not really consonant with his fundamental position in terms of Lebensphilosophie” (page 12), and clarifies that the human possibility of reflective thinking “does not coincide in Truth with the objectification of recognition through the scientific method. “(Idem)
It will clarify that the connection between “life” when one speaks of consciousness and reflexivity and “science” (he put in brackets), to develop from life is one of possibilities.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” in “H.-G. Gadamer,” special issue, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 5:1 (1975) (the number of pages is Brazilian edition).
