Comrades

Gabriel Marcel

Gabriel, mon ami. I had a deep friendship with this guy that began in 1934 and continued up to his death in 1973. Gabriel embodied the Friday-night party scene, hosting informal but intensely fun gatherings of philosophers.

That's not an oxymoron: we'd get together to argue about philosophy, as concretely as possible; Gabriel didn't care for abstractions, and he encouraged us to keep our philosophizing situated in real world events and experiences.

I joined the "Friday evenings"—as we called them—back in '34. If you joined the fun, you'd have a chance of running into Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Wahl, or Jean-Paul Sartre. Good times.

Now, I never actually became a disciple of Gabriel Marcel, or of anyone else for that matter (source). His thinking was too unstructured for my liking, but he got me into philosophy. He also helped me appreciate the "situatedness" of all thought—i.e., he made me realize that we're always thinking within a specific context.

Marcel was also a playwright, and I appreciate the kinship he saw between theater and philosophy. He was an ideas guy, but for him ideas needed to be alive and incarnate. He was totally down to earth.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

I've remarked before that Hans-Georg Gadamer lived in texts (source). The man knew Greek tragedy and German poetry with a depth few could even dream of possessing. This guy knew it all.

I did the hermeneutic thing for years, and I consider myself pretty adept at it, but Gadamer was and remains the master. If you want to know anything about hermeneutics, you've gotta start with his Truth and Method.

I have some quibbles with what I read as Gadamer's opposition between truth and method (others disagree with my reading), but, in my estimation, he's the go-to guy for understanding the themes, arguments, and history of hermeneutics.

Martin Heidegger

The great Martin Heidegger sure had his groupies. How could you not have groupies after writing Being and Time?

Heidegger helped get the hermeneutic circle off the ground by coming up with this metaphor for how interpretation happens: the whole of a work has to be understood in terms of its parts and the parts of a work have to be understood in terms of the whole. Heidegger called this the Hermeneutischer Zirkel, or hermeneutic circle. It sounds so impressive in German, doesn't it?

This image had been around for a while, but Martin helped give it some good old German philosophical authority. Needless to say, Heidegger's work became very important to me after I turned from phenomenology to hermeneutics.

Rivals

Jürgen Habermas

I don't really think of people as rivals. I like bringing opposing views in dialogue in the hope of expanding horizons, so I keep an open mind. Even so, I guess you could call Jürgen Habermas, that impressive cultural theorist, a rival of mine. He's a rival of Gadamer, at least.

I kind of got stuck in the middle of a debate between Habermas and Gadamer. Long story short: Habermas criticized Gadamer for being too uncritical of tradition. For my part, I argued for a critical hermeneutics—a hermeneutics that could be both respectful and suspicious of tradition.

I don't know if my taking this route endeared me to either of these guys.

Jacques Derrida

I sometimes get categorized with Derrida as an "anything goes" relativist who doesn't think texts have any meaning. You'd think we were Death Eaters or minions of Loki. The description is untrue for both of us, though Derrida goes much further than I do in trying get beyond a traditional reading of texts.

Derrida's focus also differs from mine: he was always intent on interpreting texts with an eye for what meaning they exclude, structurally or otherwise. A lot of my students were quite taken with the guy, and I never could compete with his popularity. C'est la vie.

Jacques Lacan

My philosophical analysis of Freud didn't go over well among the major psychoanalytic figures of my time, particularly Jacques Lacan. There was some controversy at the time that I had pretty much ripped off Lacan's interpretation of Freud without crediting him. Some people even called me a thief.

But I say that's nonsense. If you look at the development of my own reading of Freud before I published Freud and Philosophy, you'll see that I stole nothing from Lacan. Besides, as I mention in Critique and Conviction, I didn't even understand Lacan. Embarrassing, I know: I attended seminars with him and was still completely lost. His way of thinking just isn't mine, and, regrettably, despite my efforts, I couldn't make sense of him.