A LOOK INTO THE PAST
In what follows I seek to illuminate Gadamer's philosophical writings during the period of National Socialism by focusing on two important essays.[6] In light of the reception that has been awarded to Gadamer's thought there may seem something provocative about the goals of this enquiry. Gadamer himself has addressed the issue of his career under National Socialism, both in autobiographical writings and in recent interviews. The picture seems to be clear and the relevant facts already known. In contrast to his teacher and to various other colleagues, Gadamer is happy to present himself in this context as someone who was ready to accommodate himself to circumstances.
This external accommodation in turn gave Gadamer the opportunity to pursue philosophical work in a spirit of pure “scholarship” even under National Socialism. Unlike Karl Lowith, Gadamer argues for a strict division between the scientific and political domains. And this implies that there were both accommodationists and Nazis who were otherwise thoroughly responsible scholars, such as Martin Heidegger, Kurt Hildebrandt, Erich Rothacker, Wolfgang Schadewaldt, Felix Kriiger, Helmut Berve, Richard Harder, and Gerhard Fricke. The claim to “scientific excellence” provided the means by which the academic community could constitute itself internally and at the same time insulate itself from the influence of National Socialism externally. What this view fails to take into account is that this appeal to “scientific excellence” may well have been the very form in which the knowledge and skills of the human sciences could be employed in the service of National Socialism. Today, Gadamer also emphasizes his contacts with the “national conservative” resistance to Hitler. Together with other members of the Goerdeler circle, to which he belonged in the last phase of fascism during the war period, he shared an open opposition to the Weimar Republic as well as admiration for Hitler's foreign policies, which still seemed highly promising during the so-called “Blitzkrieg.” Gadamer was not a Nazi and for this reason he was elected rector of the University of Leipzig by the occupying Soviet powers in 1947. Later he transferred to the University of Frankfurt and finally, as successor to Karl Jaspers, to the University of Heidelberg.
Such clarity concerning the facts would seem to render the questions I am pursuing here superfluous. Nonetheless, the crucial problem from which I started out was to arrive at a more substantial and exact definition of the concept of “national conservatism” by focusing on those philosophers who belonged to the so-called “black faction.” Despite the fact that these philosophers entered into a clear and solid alliance with the Nazis that endured almost until the end of the Nazi period, it has long remained unclear exactly what contribution this faction made to the consolidation and perpetuation of National Socialism. The key to interpreting this contribution is not to be found in the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944. According to the self-understanding of the national conservative opposition, as articulated for example by Gadamer's friend Eduard Spranger in 1947, “it was not National Socialism that led us into catastrophe but
It was in this context that I began to investigate Gadamer's texts from the period 1933 to 1945. Amongst other things I came across interpretations of Plato in which Nazism was never explicitly referred to. Gadamer's articles were entirely in keeping with then current research and did not appear to represent anything unusual. His goals did not extend to such ambitious projects as the question of the meaning of being or revolutionizing the discipline of philosophy. As a young university lecturer he worked unassumingly on texts of ancient philosophy, above all on a reading of Plato's Republic. During the course of my research, however, I discovered that this reading was multilayered, and this in turn opened up a new way of looking at Gadamer's writings of the period.
My first concern was to reconstruct the connection between what was said and the context in which it was written, to document what for us has now fallen silent. Or, to put it in Gadamer's own language, I sought to establish the historical basis on which other hermeneutic approaches could be developed and to discover the fusions of horizon between past and present that were possible at that time. In the course of my investigations I was able to give more precision to the often overgeneralized and inexact use of the notion of “context” through employing the concept of “relations of response” to Plato. We can use this concept to describe how in the process of fascization various ideas were articulated through readings of Plato: National Socialism was identified as a task that had already been laid out in antiquity. These ideas resonated not only within the domain of academic discourse but also within other fields of practice such as the National Socialist Party's policies on health, justice, education, and art.[12]
Around 1933, despite differences in interpretation, there emerged a common point of convergence: the destruction of the self-understanding of universalist humanism. This expression signified the humanism of European modernity and of Weimar classicism; above all, that humanism that was articulated through the ideals of the French Revolution. Disqualified as “apolitical” under the cipher of aesthetic humanism and identified with the “age of liberalism,” it became the hegemonic critical target for the new reception of antiquity. At the basis of the denunciation of the Enlightenment as developed within the humanist camp itself, which was in opposition to the Weimar Republic, lay a new conception of law that aimed at strictly controlling society, and that attacked as “sophistic” the old human dream of a society based on self-determination and autonomy. The process of fascization supported an unparalleled project of bourgeois modernization, to