Experience as Recovery of tradition sense in Benjamin and Gadamer

Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s thought is guided by the notion of history as it aims to implode history’s usual concept as a succession of linear facts elected as the “official history”. This critical relation with the official history involves a productive retrieval of past, of tradition, as the essential element of historical experience. In this sense, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics also search a renewed contact with the past, not anymore in terms of reconstruction of the past, but as a fusion of horizons between past and present, tradition and interpreter, the Self and the Other. This article intends to show how close these philosophers concerning the concept of experience, as for them experience only shows itself useful when opened to and when it renews tradition.