The twentieth century began in times of great hope and deep doubt about the future. Nietzsche’s call for renewal echoed alongside Spengler’s prophecy of the decline and fall of the West. Yet Phenomenology seemed to carry the insights of past thinkers forward, establishing a modern movement with solutions to the oldest problems of philosophy. This chapter situates Gadamer as a child of that time, galvanised by competing senses of crisis and possibility. He gradually took up the task handed down to him by thinkers like Natorp, Husserl and Heidegger. But he also tried to chart a path forward towards a society lived in accordance with new conceptions of truth, Being, ethics and selfhood. Bringing a new appreciation of finitude and infinity, uncertainty and ceaseless-becoming as positive values, Gadamer suggests a ‘sublime’ ethos that resonates with the older ideas of Burke and Kant in the way it positions us in a limitless reality on which we depend and which calls us to awe. Yet it tried to replace fear and paralysis in the face of vast visions, with a distinctively modern form of sublimity: Gadamer encourages us to relish our place in the world’s ever-expanding fabric of ideas, arts and experience, cultivating our own unique contribution to it.