Reactionary wind-bag

Je me demande pourquoi cette vieille canaille de Gadamer jouit toujours d'une plus grande indulgence que son maître Heidegger chez les herméneutes continentaux (alors que j'aurais tendance à trouver Gadamer encore pire de vacuité en fait). Gadamer est né en 1900, dix ans après Heidegger, et il n'a jamais eu la carte du Parti nazi mais il fut très loin d'être un opposant.

C'est pourquoi ça me fait plaisir de lire ce texte de Raymond Geuss, sur des souvenirs sur le pragmatiste Richard Rorty, mort l'été dernier.

Dick [Rorty] happened to mention that he had just finished reading Gadamer's Truth and Method. My heart sank at this news because the way he reported it seemed to me to indicate, correctly as it turned out, that he had been positively impressed by this book. I had a premonition, which also turned out to be correct, that it would not be possible for me to disabuse him of his admiration for the work of a man, whom I knew rather well as a former colleague at Heidelberg and whom I held to be a reactionary, distended wind-bag.

Over the years, I did my best to set Dick right about Gadamer, even resorting to the rather low blow of describing to him the talk Gadamer had given at the German Embassy in occupied Paris in 1942, in which Gadamer discussed the positive role Herder could play in sweeping away the remnants of such corrupt and degenerate phenomena as individualism, liberalism, and democracy from the New Europe arising under National Socialism.

Cela dit, personne n'est parfait, Geuss aime bien Adorno, qui doit être quand même ce qu'on fait de plus obscur et prétentieux dans l'Ecole de Francfort.