Hans-Georg Gadamer asks how scientific knowledge and technical power relate to the traditions that make human understanding possible. Moving from Greek thought and the rise of modern science to questions of democracy, public opinion, law, education and the natural world, he argues that scientific method cannot settle questions of value or replace practical judgment. Tradition is treated as a living inheritance through which societies interpret their past and orient their future.
Hans-Georg Gadamer — 2 recordings in the archive.
Related reading: Reason in the Age of Science by Hans-Georg Gadamer.
And you know this world, barbarians, form your legs. This pure opposite to people, which speaks like men. And that is great. The barbarians and the Greeks, that meant all the other people and the own civilization and culture, what one has to defend. And so one has to add to this. first step, certainly, as the most important and irrelevant was a western, western civilization, as a second step to the economic, ecumenic, interprise or message of christianism, the First time, I think, when we abstract from the Roman Empire, what at the same time made with efforts to expand its own imperial and its own worshipping of the emperor to the whole habitated world, I think the Christian message was the first really universalistic address to mankind. This missionary thought in the message of Christianism opened, therefore, the whole tradition of Western civilization as a unity of Greek and Christian heritage. So I think we can realize that we are encountered today with the crisis or even with the dissolution of the unity of this Greek Christian tradition in the modern era. I refer you to some facts as, for example, the end of a binding esthetic style since the beginning 19th century. It was exactly the dissolution of the unity of humanistic and Christian era with the the common content, the common commitment of the people in the whole tradition of art. And it is another fact, which is closely tied with this end of an unbroken and ongoing, self-evident tradition. I mean the last of the 9 and innocent in a civil issue of the past to the present. That is a life of tradition, that one is not traditional, that one is not aware of the fact that one has to defend and conserve something, but that one is so deeply determined by this chain of ancestors and experiences of former life that one thinks one does nothing else than to continue to pursue the same way, and with the greatest negative, one assimilates the past to their own customers. I kind of give you an illustration of a famous painting of the German painter, Alta the battle of Alexander describes the battle between the Greeks and the Persians in the uniforms and in the weapons of his own time and nobody finds something disturbing in this It is not an inequality, but it is…