Gadamer, Truth and Method.

Gadamer is interested in developing a phenomenology of understanding in which (unlike the Romantics) he is not concerned with aiming at some sort of transcendental truth but instead at a description of how understanding actually occurs (ontology of understanding). He critiques the notion that the human sciences must explain truth through the scientific method or other standard central to the natural sciences. Truth is something more than this and thus he pursues the task of philosophical hermeneutics to offer a way beyond method (objective, distanced, neutral) in what will become the dialectical journey (hermeneutical circle) towards a reformulated account of truth. He begins by showing that truth is possible in the experience of art for a piece of art "cannot be defined as an object of an aesthetic consciousness" but "it is part of the event of being that occurs in presentation and belongs essentially to play as play. (115)" In other words, there is the possibility of an interaction between a spectator and a work of art in which the work of art "becomes an experience that changes the person." There is a play between them in which the player loses him/herself. Another puts this well:

The experience of a game thus exists in the space between the players. Such, Gadamer argues, is the nature of human experience in general. Our experiences unfold in shared historical time and against the background of tradition, and are as limited by that context as players are by the rules of the game. Detached subjectivity _ that is, the position from which one can study objects distinct from oneself _ is impossible. (link)

This is a description of the process of understanding, the ongoing striving in which our attempts at interpretation are also acts of re-creation. There of course can be no universal, correct interpretation for all work is shot through with mediation that is continually adjusting meaning. Thus, Gadamer concludes that aesthetics must be absorbed into hermeneutics and that "understanding must be conceived as a part of the event in which meaning occurs, the event in which the meaning of all statements is found and actualized."

Two options identified in the names of Schleiermacher and Hegel present ways forward at this point. Schleiermacher and the historicists attempt to reconstruct the original context in which a text, piece of art, etc., was produced. True meaning comes in this original form and only by recreating the context can the interpreter rediscover the "nodal point" in the artist's mind. Schleiermacher goes so far as to argue that we can understand a writer better than the writer himself for in our reconstruction of the production, we are more conscious of such things as grammatical/literary constructions, etc. Gadamer rejects this attempt to re-enter the 'original' author’s mind for it fails to recognize the importance of history in situating all attempts at interpretation. In our situated, specific locations in history, we approach texts with particular expectations in mind or what Gadamer terms "fore-meanings." These assumptions are necessary for any understanding for they are that which prompts us toward the process of questioning when "we are pulled up short by the text." In other words, it is not that we are called to shed fore-meanings (not extinction of self) before attempting understanding but that we are aware of these assumptions in our encounter with the alterity of a text. For Gadamer, all understanding requires prejudice and the Enlightenment's great mistake was the prejudice against prejudice. Only in the Enlightenment does prejudice acquire its negative connotation. The drive against prejudice is of course impossible for all human existence is qualified and limited as it is the very prejudices of an individual that "constitute the historical reality of his being."

Instead of attempting either to shed prejudices or re-enter the author's mind, Gadamer asserts that we must launch ourselves into the perspective within which the author formed his views. We attempt to understand how what the author is saying could be right and further attempt to make his arguments even stronger. In this process, we begin to understand the meaning of what the speaker was saying when she said the words she said. We begin the process of hermeneutics, the clarifying of the miracle of understanding _ the sharing of common meaning. For Gadamer, the task of hermeneutics is to establish agreement in context (292). In this attempt to understand what is other, there is a back and forth process between part/whole, tradition/interpreter. Only in this back and forth of play that creates a bond between the interpreter and that which they are attempting to understand, can the separation of enabling and disabling prejudices occur. Thus, the 'real' meaning of the text does not depend on the author's psychological mindset and the reception of the original audience but is always co-determined by the location of the interpreter. The meaning of a text then always goes beyond the author and understanding is continually an act of production (think about the preaching act here!). Understanding is an infinite process that never reaches final conclusions for history always prevails even we attempt to deny our historicity. We stand not from a neutral position but within a limited horizon, a range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. This horizon is never totally stable but is fluidly adjusting to our life experiences at every moment. When we encounter another text, our horizons meet and fuse in the process of understanding.

The working out of the hermeneutical situation means the achievement of the right horizon of enquiry for the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition. Person A and person B exchange their ideas and opinions within a conversation. People come from different places have different opinions and this difference in background creates a set of prejudice and bias which provides various intrinsic values and meanings while the conversation are carrying on. By receiving the information from person A, a fusion of person B's vision limitation are taking place and consequently, it broadens person B's range of horizon. In other words, "the totality of all that can be realized or thought about by a person at a given time in history and in a particular culture" widens and enriches. (link)

In the process of understanding, there must be a "logical structure of openness that characterizes hermeneutical consciousness." It is here that Gadamer emphasizes the metaphor of conversation and expresses the importance of questioning. Those not in genuine dialogue cannot even ask the right questions for in order to ask, one must want to know and in order to want to know, one must know that one does not know! Questioning is revealing the questionability of what is questioned, it is the bringing into indeterminacy, the opening of a matter. This is not an infinite opening for our horizons limit this in some way but is an honest opening up towards that of which our limited horizons have not yet experienced. This move towards open and honest questioning opens up the art of dialectic which unsurprisingly is not about winning arguments but about preserving an orientation towards openness. In this type of dialogue leading toward understanding, one does not attempt to argue another down but consider the weight of another's opinion and hence "make all possibilities fluid." Gadamer argues that it is not the move toward discovering the weakness of what is said but in bringing out the strength of another's argument. In this use of conversation as metaphor (and more than metaphor), Gadamer places language and concept within the original movement of conversation and attempts to "protect" words from dogmatic abuse. To understand another, one must "question what lies behind what is said" so that they understand a statement as an answer to a prior question (see Meyer). This is how a text SPEAKS to us, through offering questions related to the answers in the text itself.

In conversation, interlocuters become bound to one another in a "new community." Gadamer writers, "To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one's point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were." (371)

Gadamer argues that rather than conducting a conversation, we must often "fall" into them. No one knows in advance the outcome of this "event." Conversation is coming to an understanding as each person opens himself to another and this opening is achieved through language. All interpretation presupposes language. Bullock fleshes this out and then notes some implications for preaching (link):

Gadamer's perspective claims that words, that is, talk, conversation, dialogue, question and answer, produce worlds. In contrast to a traditional, Aristotelian view of language where spoken words represent mental images and written words are symbols for spoken words, Gadamerian linguisticality emphasizes a fundamental unity between language and human existence. Interpretation can never be divorced from language or objectified. Because language comes to humans with meaning, interpretations and understandings of the world can never be prejudice-free. As languaged beings, humans cannot step outside of language and look at language or the world from some objective standpoint. Language is not a tool which human beings manipulate to represent a meaning-full world; rather, language forms human reality. "Being that can be understood" cannot be separated from wor[l]d, from language.

Note a critique from pragmatism (link):

But the inclusion of application in interpretation seems mistaken, and is one place where pragmatism has much to offer hermeneutics. There are a great number of texts and ideas that could be perfectly well understood and could still be seen as wrong. It may be helpful to ask ourselves how something could be true in the process of interpretation, but seeing it as true should not be a criterion for a correct interpretation. Gadamer overstates the requirements of successful interpretation when he says that interpreting "consists in subordinating ourselves to the text’s claim to dominate our minds" (Gadamer, 1989, p. 311). Moreover, by focusing on interpretations that speak to us we run the risk of anachronistic interpretations. We ask, for example, how Aquinas’s views might contribute to debates between internalism and externalism. In doing so, for the sake of generating currently relevant insights, we use anachronistic terminology; the results, insightful as they may be, are not the same as an interpretation of Thomas. In general, reading texts and considering ideas in their context seems at odds with reading them for the sake of generating insights for us. At least we shouldn't insist that the two would automatically converge, as Gadamer does. Nor should they be forced to converge by granting, in principle, that the text to be interpreted is always true.