The essence of the question is the opening up, and keeping open, of possibilities.
Hans-Georg GadamerRead
The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Translation is key to understanding the world and communicating socially.
In this quote, Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasizes that translation is not merely a linguistic exercise but a profound mechanism through which individuals comprehend their environment and engage with one another. He suggests that the act of translating ideas and cultures reveals the underlying truths of human experience and fosters meaningful dialogue across diverse contexts.
Themes
TranslationUnderstandingCommunicationHuman ExperienceSocial Interaction
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on intercultural communication, you can use this quote to highlight the importance of translation.
More from Hans-Georg Gadamer
All quotes βIt is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art. There is no doubt that the leaders of the creative artists of the last 50 years concentrated their efforts mainly on eliminating that distance.
Hans-Georg GadamerRead
For both art and the historical sciences are ways of experiencing in which our own understanding of existence is immediately brought into play.
Hans-Georg GadamerRead
We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said...Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.
Hans-Georg GadamerRead
It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.
Hans-Georg GadamerRead
A cultured society that has fallen away from its religious traditions expects more from art than the aesthetic consciousness and the 'standpoint of art' can deliver. The Romantic desire for a new mythology... gives the artist and his task in the world the consciousness of a new consecration. He is something like a 'secular saviour' for his creations are expected to achieve on a small scale the propitiation of disaster for which an unsaved world hopes.
Hans-Georg GadamerRead
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