Gadamer

Works

One long book carries the argument; the essays and the Plato studies carry the rest.

• Truth and Method (1960) is the statement: fore-judgement, horizon, effective history, play, application, and the primacy of the question.
• Philosophical Hermeneutics (English 1976) collects the shorter essays, including the pieces around the exchange with Habermas.
• The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (1986) develops play, festival and symbol as the structure of the artwork's claim on a viewer.
• The Plato studies are a large part of the corpus and are also where the political reading of his 1930s work is contested.

Central ideas

Six moves, each reversing an assumption about what interpretation is for.

• Fore-judgements: what the Enlightenment called prejudice is the structure of anticipation that makes reading possible. The prejudice against prejudice is itself one. The work is not to suspend anticipations but to expose them to a text that can refuse them.
• Fusion of horizons: understanding is not entering another mind but enlarging one's own range of vision until it takes in the other's. Neither horizon survives unchanged, which is why it is not the same as agreement.
• Effective history: an interpreter stands inside the history of a work's reception and cannot step outside it. Historically effected consciousness is awareness of that condition, not escape from it.
• Play: in a game or an artwork the movement has primacy over the players — they are carried by it rather than authoring it. Meaning is an event that happens between, not a property either party owns.
• Application: understanding always includes applying to one's own situation. Legal and theological interpretation are the model cases rather than the awkward exceptions.
• The primacy of the question: to understand a text is to grasp the question it answers, and to let it put a question to you.

Distinctive vocabulary

Four terms whose ordinary English senses invert the argument.

• Prejudice (Vorurteil): a fore-judgement, a structure of anticipation, and in his usage not pejorative. Reading it as bias reverses the claim.
• Horizon: the range of vision available from a standpoint, which moves as the standpoint moves. Not a boundary that shuts a reader in.
• Fusion of horizons: the alteration of both parties' range of vision. Not consensus, not common ground found, and not the interpreter absorbing the other.
• Play (Spiel): the structure of an event that carries its participants. Not entertainment, not pretence, and not something a player does.

Debates and disagreements

Three live arguments, one of them still open.

• Habermas argued that a tradition can be systematically distorted, so an interpreter needs a critical standpoint that hermeneutics does not supply. Gadamer replied that critique also takes place inside language and tradition and has no outside to occupy. The exchange is unresolved and is the most consequential objection to the position.
• E. D. Hirsch argued that severing interpretation from the author's meaning leaves no criterion for calling a reading wrong, and proposed the distinction between a text's meaning and its significance to preserve one.
• The 1981 Paris encounter with Derrida, sometimes called the improbable debate, questioned whether the good will to understand is itself a metaphysical commitment. The two largely failed to meet, and the failure is part of the record.

Intellectual relationships

He stands inside a hermeneutic tradition he is also arguing against.

• Heidegger was his teacher, and the fore-structure of understanding in Being and Time is what Gadamer extends from a person's self-understanding to the reading of texts and traditions.
• Schleiermacher is the predecessor he criticises: recovering an author's mental act psychologises interpretation and mistakes its object.
• Dilthey is the other predecessor he criticises, for seeking a method that would give the human sciences the standing of the natural ones — the ambition the book's title rejects.
• Ricoeur is the adjacent hermeneut who holds trust and suspicion together, which is precisely where he departs from Gadamer.
• Habermas is the principal critic, and the exchange defined the position's limits more than any defence of it did.

How it changes this reading

Gadamer carries more placements in this work than any other reference: the Hermeneutic lens, four claim lineages, three frameworks, five through-lines and three readings.

• The lens borrows his core: reading is situated, the reader's anticipations are the condition of it, and correction arrives from the text's resistance rather than from a neutral standpoint anyone could occupy.
• For the claims about profiles, machine interpretation and answerable depth he supplies the same load-bearing point in three registers — a reading that cannot be questioned by what it reads has stopped being interpretation, which is why unfinishedness follows from the account rather than from modesty.
• For the claim about showing up he supplies play: the event carries both parties, so a performer can be altered by being seen without the room deciding what the performance becomes.
• They are not evidence that any reading occurred, was correct, or was received as intended.

Useful comparisons

The Hermeneutic lens names three figures who do not agree with one another.

• Gadamer treats understanding as a situated event and denies that any method could secure it.
• Ricoeur holds a hermeneutics of suspicion beside a hermeneutics of trust, and adds distanciation and narrative identity.
• Schleiermacher aims at the author's meaning, including a divinatory grasp of the author's individuality — the position Gadamer names as psychologism.

Where the ideas meet

All three refuse the same picture of reading.

• None treats a text's meaning as immediately available to a competent reader.
• All three hold that understanding is achieved through work rather than received.
• Each treats interpretation as answerable to the text rather than free over it.

Where they part

This lineage contains a live disagreement rather than a shared doctrine.

• Schleiermacher makes the author's meaning the target of understanding and Gadamer denies it is the target at all. Citing the two as one tradition erases the argument that produced the position.
• Ricoeur's suspicion reads a text's self-presentation as concealing; Gadamer's account rests on a good will to understand, which suspicion suspends. A reading has to say which it is doing.
• Habermas's objection stands outside all three: none of them supplies a standpoint from which to judge a tradition distorted rather than merely inherited.

Limits

• An account of how understanding works establishes nothing about any particular reading being right.
• A fusion of horizons is an event between a reader and a text; it cannot be verified from a record, and claiming one occurred is not something the theory licenses.

Criticisms

The objections are philosophical, and one concerns his conduct.

• His record under National Socialism is a serious blemish and belongs in the entry. He remained in Germany and advanced academically after 1933, joined the National Socialist Teachers League, and lectured in occupied Paris in 1941 under German Institute auspices. He never joined the party, defenders record assistance given to colleagues, and critics hold his own later accounts evasive. The dispute is whether a philosophy that rehabilitates tradition and authority is implicated in that record or merely coincident with it. Both readings are in print and this entry does not settle them.
• Habermas's charge that hermeneutics supplies no critical standpoint has not been answered to his critics' satisfaction.
• Hirsch's determinacy objection: without the author's meaning the theory explains unfinishedness better than it explains wrongness.
• The rehabilitation of tradition and authority is charged with political quietism independently of his biography.
• The prose is dense and its key terms have circulated as slogans detached from the argument that earned them.

Common misreadings

Five uses these placements do not license.

• Using fusion of horizons for agreement reached or common ground found, which loses the claim that both horizons are altered.
• Using prejudice in its ordinary pejorative sense, which inverts the argument exactly.
• Citing him for the view that any reading is as good as another; the account has correction built into it through the text's capacity to refuse a reading.
• Citing him and Schleiermacher together as a single position on the author's meaning.
• Treating philosophical hermeneutics as a method for producing correct interpretations, which is what the book denies is possible.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish that any interpretation is correct or that any understanding took place.
• It cannot convert an account of understanding into a fact about a reader or about an author.