In brief: On the contrary – the philosophical hermeneutics of the twentieth century is not to be had without Hegel. Gadamer devoted a book of his own to him and took his central concepts from him. What hermeneutics denies is not Hegel’s procedure but his ending: absolute knowing.
What hermeneutics has from Hegel
Three pieces, and they are not small ones.
The concept of experience. Gadamer’s determination of experience as that on which an expectation founders, and through which the one experiencing becomes another, is expressly taken from the Phenomenology. Hegel calls the course of consciousness there „the path of doubt, or more properly … the path of despair“ – experience is in both a loss, not a gain.
Effective history. That we never read a text without presuppositions but out of a situation which the text’s own effect helped to produce is the hermeneutical version of what Hegel says in the Preface to the Groundlines: philosophy is its time grasped in thoughts, and nobody leaps over his time.
The doctrine of prejudice. The rehabilitation of prejudice as a condition of understanding is directed against the Enlightenment, not against Hegel. Hegel’s own critique of immediate knowledge and of „one’s own breast“ as the source of right (§ 2 note) points in the same direction.
Where hermeneutics contradicts
At one point, and it is decisive: for Hegel spirit arrives at itself in the end – absolute knowing is the standpoint from which the whole path is recognised as necessary. For hermeneutics there is no such standpoint. Understanding remains finite, historical, always under way; a point at which interpretation would come to a close is in principle unreachable.
That is no dispute over details. If there is no close, Hegel’s system loses its keystone – and with it the claim that the series of stages is necessary and not merely plausible in retrospect.
What this means for the philosophy of right
Astonishingly little. § 1–§ 340 do not presuppose the close; they claim that each stage hangs on a problem of the preceding one. That can be tested without absolute knowing playing any part.
At the end, by contrast, it becomes relevant. § 341–§ 360 claim a direction of world history and a standpoint from which this direction is recognisable. It is exactly there that the hermeneutical objection takes hold – and it strikes the same thing as the objection to § 347, which declares the spirits of other nations to be without right.
And the practical yield
For reading this edition hermeneutics is a tool and not a competitor. That a paragraph of 1820 is written against opponents one has to know; that the transcripts of the hearers are something other than the printed text; that the history of the work’s effect – Haym, Marx, Popper – reads along when one reads today: these are hermeneutical insights, and this edition is built on them.
Hegel has not, then, become superfluous. He has become an author one reads with the means he himself helped to produce.
Sources. Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction (the experience of consciousness) and chapter VIII. – Groundlines, Preface; § 2 note, § 3 note, § 341–§ 360. – Literature. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, Tübingen 1960 (there the concept of experience and effective history), and Hegels Dialektik. Fünf hermeneutische Studien, Tübingen 1971; Michael Theunissen, Sein und Schein, Frankfurt a. M. 1978. – In the glossary: Absolute Knowing, The Owl of Minerva, World History.