"I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old"
About this Quote
A throwaway brag, a methodological manifesto, and a little trap for the modern ego all in one. When Gadamer says he basically only reads books over 2,000 years old, he’s not performing antique fandom; he’s telegraphing a suspicion that the newest ideas are often the least tested. It’s a line with the dry confidence of someone who spent a century watching intellectual fashions rise, peak, and vanish on schedule.
The intent is polemical: yank “serious reading” away from novelty and back toward sources that have survived not because they’re old, but because they keep generating arguments. Plato, Aristotle, the tragedians - these texts don’t deliver information so much as durable problems: justice, persuasion, desire, civic life. Gadamer’s hermeneutics hinges on the idea that understanding isn’t a clean download of meaning; it’s a conversation across time in which our prejudices (in his neutral sense: our starting assumptions) meet a tradition that pushes back. Old books are the most demanding interlocutors because they are simultaneously familiar (they built the vocabulary) and alien (they refuse our categories).
The subtext is a critique of modernity’s self-flattery: the belief that being later automatically makes us wiser. “Over 2,000 years” isn’t an exact threshold; it’s a rhetorical gauntlet. He’s implying that contemporary culture reads to confirm itself, while the classics force a kind of productive humiliation. Context matters: writing after wars, ideological catastrophes, and the scientistic turn in the humanities, Gadamer positions tradition not as nostalgia, but as ballast - a way to think without mistaking the present for the whole world.
The intent is polemical: yank “serious reading” away from novelty and back toward sources that have survived not because they’re old, but because they keep generating arguments. Plato, Aristotle, the tragedians - these texts don’t deliver information so much as durable problems: justice, persuasion, desire, civic life. Gadamer’s hermeneutics hinges on the idea that understanding isn’t a clean download of meaning; it’s a conversation across time in which our prejudices (in his neutral sense: our starting assumptions) meet a tradition that pushes back. Old books are the most demanding interlocutors because they are simultaneously familiar (they built the vocabulary) and alien (they refuse our categories).
The subtext is a critique of modernity’s self-flattery: the belief that being later automatically makes us wiser. “Over 2,000 years” isn’t an exact threshold; it’s a rhetorical gauntlet. He’s implying that contemporary culture reads to confirm itself, while the classics force a kind of productive humiliation. Context matters: writing after wars, ideological catastrophes, and the scientistic turn in the humanities, Gadamer positions tradition not as nostalgia, but as ballast - a way to think without mistaking the present for the whole world.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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