“Aber dies produktive Bilden der Einbildungskraft ist am reichsten nicht dort, wo sie schlechthin frei ist (..) sondern dort wo sie in einem Spielraum lebt, den das Einheitsstreben des Verstandes ihr nicht so sehr als Schranke aufrichtet, wie zur Anregung ihres Spieles vorzeichnet.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke 1, Hermeneutik 1, Wahrheit und Methode, Mohr/Tübingen 1990, p. 52.
(amateuristic English translation (note: I already have issues with the original German): “But this productive force of the imagination is not the most rich where she is just merely free (..) but where she lives in a playing field that was set up by the leveling force of reason – not so much as a boundary but as a stimulus.”)
There was a time, not so long ago, that I thought I would never read something written by somebody like Gadamer. It was a time where I thought things needed to be clean, well ordered and to the point – a time of solutions and a time for science, and hence there was no time for common sense nor could it still be a time of pseudo-problems.
Since then I made a half circle, winding up not just reading Gadamer but also agreeing with a lot of it (but not loving it – no, not loving it at all: I fear he writes more or less as awkwardly as I do; but, at least, he does not write pretentiously). In a nutshell: he resists rationalism for the right reasons without falling into some form of particularism or relativism and reserving a non-mystical place for common sense as a sense (as an intuition).
Enough blablabla, to the quote!
Quoughts 