Linguisticality and Lifeworld: Gadamer’s Late Turn to Phenomenology

The influence of Husserlian phenomenology on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has been the subject of some analysis in the secondary literature, with scholars emphasizing both Gadamer’s distance from traditional phenomenology as well as lamenting his insufficient phenomenological analyses. While Gadamer frequently cites Husserl’s later analysis of the lifeworld in Truth and Method, and subsequently devotes a series of articles to Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld, most commentators have either focused on Gadamer’s break with the spirit and letter of Husserlian thought or on his dialogically oriented endorsement of Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutics. Instead, this contribution will read Gadamer less as a variant of Heidegger, and will focus on Gadamer’s late turn to the phenomenology of the lifeworld in his analysis of ritual and linguisticality. The following will not only pursue the throughway from phenomenology to hermeneutics, but also the way from hermeneutics back to a phenomenology of the linguistic and pre-linguistic lifeworld of experience.