Permanecer junto a los griegos

Ética, dialéctica y política en la filosofía temprana de Hans-Georg Gadamer

Facundo Bey

For nearly half a century, Gadamer’s reception has been governed by the towering presence of Wahrheit und Methode (1960), whose ascendancy across philosophy, theology and the human sciences consigned his earliest writings to the status of a prelude. Permanecer junto a los griegos sets out to reverse that neglect. Its title borrows Gadamer’s leitmotif: to remain with the Greeks even while awakening to their alterity, finding in their being-other truths buried yet perhaps still at work. Reconstructing Gadamer’s itinerary from 1918 to 1942, it argues that the questions animating his mature hermeneutics were already taking shape, with an autonomy and a political urgency of their own, long before the book that made his name.Working from little-read essays, the Gesammelte Werke, archival material, correspondence and unpublished documents, Bey proceeds across four chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter situates the young Gadamer between the Neo-Kantianism of Natorp and Hartmann, Scheler’s phenomenology and the seismic encounter with Heidegger, tracing his mistrust of systematism and his sense of the historicity of philosophical questioning. The second follows his turn to philology as a strategy of emancipation: Friedländer awakens him to the rhetorical and scenic texture of the Platonic dialogue, while the quarrel with Jaeger over the Aristotelian Protreptikos yields a first critique of terminological language at the expense of the living lógos, and a phrónēsis recovered before its Aristotelian fixation. The third reads ‘Praktisches Wissen’ (1930) as a phenomenology of practical knowledge irreducible to téchnē and epistḗmē — with, Bey notes, an unremarked Kierkegaardian resonance in its account of the ethical instant. The fourth turns to Platos dialektische Ethik (1931), Gadamer’s first book, organised around a single question — how is dialectic ethical? — and the wager that Plato’s dialectic furnishes the theory of the objective possibility of dialogue; here dialectic and hermeneutics converge as existential and political praxis. The epilogue carries the wager into the years when the polis stood over the abyss: reading ‘Plato und die Dichter’ (1934) and ‘Platos Staat der Erziehung’ (1942), Bey shows the Republic construed as a deliberate utopia whose force lies in its refusal of any earthly realisation, and dikaiosýnē as an existential formation no state, actual or projected, can supply. Bey’s intention was to release these texts from the teleological projections that reduced them to juvenilia, and to restore to them their own voice. The result rewards anyone who would think with Gadamer — and beyond him.