Abstract
First delivered in Dresden in January 1944, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “Prometheus und die Tragödie der Kultur” approaches the myth, whose origin has merged with its reception, not as an object of mythography but as a medium of Western cultural self-understanding. This paper shows how its comparison of Hesiod and Aeschylus discloses the tragic structure of culture, whose enabling deed is inseparable from transgression and suffering. At its centre stands hope, which, by suspending the anticipation of death, makes room for practical foresight, deceiving each individual yet sustaining humanity as a whole. Cultural consciousness thus proves “always already cultural critique”. The paper argues that Gadamer, subordinating Nietzsche’s racial reading to a meditation on finitude and closing with the self-limiting Prometheus of Goethe’s Pandora, shifts the emphasis from heroic self-assertion towards measure, which acquires polemical force when read against National Socialist appropriations of the Titan. The myth becomes the mirror in which instrumental reason may recognise its forgotten finitude. What emerges is an image of the human being willing to be bound anew by shared life, by finitude and by the claims of “other spiritual worlds”, and a sober hope beyond what the will can secure: not an answer, but a question.
