Uno specchio frammentario. La soggettività umana in H. G. Gadamer tra determinazione storica e responsabilità al singolare

The research aims to analyse the terms in which Hans Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics considered the idea of human subjectivity. The way that has been developed at first took up again the fundamental gadamerian text, Truth and Method, finding in it the lines of an overcoming the subjectivity and of its heterodetermination by the historical and sociocultural context in the first place. The principal and more characteristic concepts of the gadamerian thought (play, prejudice, the consciousness of historical determination, the history of effects, and so on), have been treated again, just according to the peculiar key of interpretation of the subjectivity. Special attention has been given to the language, since through it an accurate diachronic analysis was possible about this theme in the author’s writing. Subsequently to this founding part we have outlined the subject of a social reason, understood as a collective concrete matter which inserts itself in the social dialogue and the culture and then becomes a heritage of contents and ideas that are a background for every individual reflection and action. In a third section the presence of some elements in Gadamer’s hermeneutics has been detected, especially through the examination of a series of short essays written in his “second philosophical youth”, which can be traced back to a conception of liberty of the subjectivity of man, glimmers that express themselves mainly in the moment of decision, with its solitude, and are synthesized in the extreme formula of a responsibility which, though raised on a base of communitarian ethos, continues to be an irrevocable principle of singularity.