L. Grossberg points out that ‘we were living in an organization of discursive and ideological power that could be described as “the regime of communication’” (1997, p. 27). As you can guess, what Grossberg has in mind is the transmission model of communication. By calling it ‘the regime of communication’, Grossberg does not intend to treat the transmission model as a legitimate description of a process or a phenomenon; rather, he treats it as a certain way of thinking and talking about communication, a particular conceptual framework that M. Reddy calls the ‘conduit metaphor’. Or, using M. Foucault’s terminology, it is only a particular discourse about communication. As a dominant discourse, the transmission model does have a tremendous hold over us. We are trapped in the reality created by this way of talking. The best strategy to escape the tight grip of the regime of communication created by the discourse of the transmission model is, I think, to deploy a different set of discursive resources for the articulation of communication: the hermeneutic discourse of communication that uses conversation, rather than transmission, as the central metaphor. The two primary hermeneutic discursive resources I will draw on are Gadamer’s conversation model of communication from his philosophical hermeneutics and Habermas’s discourse model of communication derived from his theory of communicative action. For reasons that will become clear later, I will refer to the new model of communication based on Gadamer’s and Habermas’s works as the dialogue model of communication.
Since Heidegger, in his Being and Time, announced his distaste for any notion of communication as mental sharing through transmitting information, no one in the Heideggerian heritance has any taste for communication as information exchange or thought transmission as described by the transmission model. Gadamer was not an exception. For Gadamer, the concept of communication no longer refers to a linear one-way transmission of some self-contained units of meanings—no matter which are ideas, thoughts, or propositional contents—from one person to another, from one language to another, or from one time or place to another, as if meanings could travel intact. Nothing ‘moves’ in hermeneutics. Since the term ‘communication’ had been so heavily associated with the transmission model, always appearing alongside terms such as ‘sender’, ‘receiver’, ‘encode’, ‘decode’, and ‘transmission’, Gadamer would prefer to discuss communication in the context of a different set of terms such as ‘understanding’, ‘interpretation’, and ‘conversation’.
In all his work, Gadamer had been drawn to what we can learn from Plato about Socratic dialogue or conversation, which is, to Gadamer, the clue to revealing the nature of substantive hermeneutic understanding. It is Plato who made us realize the hermeneutic priority of questioning in all experience, all knowledge, and discourse. Especially, there is a close relation between questioning and understanding that is ‘what gives the hermeneutic experience its true dimension’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 374). With Collingwood, Gadamer contends that, just as all knowledge starts from questions all understanding begins with questions. We can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer.
Thus a person who wants to understand must question what lies behind what is said. He must understand it as an answer to a question. If we go back behind what is said, then we inevitably ask questions beyond what is said. We understand the sense of the text only by acquiring the horizon of the question—a horizon that, as such, necessarily includes other possible answers. Thus the meaning of a sentence is relative to the question to which it is an reply, but that implies that its meaning necessarily exceed what is said in it. (Gadamer, 1989, p. 370; italics as original)
The real and fundamental nature of questioning is its openness. Questions always bring out the undetermined possibilities of a thing to be understood. This is the reason why understanding is always more than merely re-creating the author’s intention or the text’s original meaning. One’s questioning of a thing to be understood opens up possibilities of its meaning. What is meaningful passes into one’s own thinking on the subject in the context of one’s own horizon. The fullness of meaning is constantly in the process of being redefined and can be realized only during the dialectic of question and answer (Gadamer, 1989, pp. 373, 375).
Such a dialectic interplay of question and answer, which leads to genuine understanding, is actually a reciprocal relationship of the same kind as conversation. As such, genuine understanding turns out to be a process of reaching or coming to an understanding through conversation. A conversation partner does not receive completed meanings from another partner. Meanings are co-created and refined as both interlocutors immerge and engage in a live conversation through questioning and answering. In contrast to the traditional binary mode of understanding—one person understands something unilaterally since the person who performs understanding has no part in meaning creation and what is to be understood cannot speak back—Gadamer in essence pushes toward a tripartite model of understanding: one person comes to an understanding with another person about a subject matter through conversation, the dialectic interplay of questioning and answering.
One may be wondering whether the above conversion model of understanding could be applied to understanding of written texts. Gadamer is, of course, aware of the differences between the conversation between two persons and the dialogue that we have with written texts. It is true that the text, as ‘enduringly fixed expressions of life’, does not speak to us in the same way as does a live interlocutor. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we cannot conduct ‘conversation’ metaphorically with the text. In fact, there are many common aspects shared by both situations (Gadamer, 1989, pp. 377-9, 387-8). First, interpreters can make a text speak to them by posing questions to it. Of course, the text can only ‘speak’ through the other partner, the interpreter. But interpreters cannot make the text speak anything they want it to speak. What the text really says ‘is not an arbitrary procedure that we undertake on our own initiative but that, as question, it is related to the answer that is expected in the text. Anticipating an answer itself presupposes that the questioner is part of the tradition and regards himself as addressed by it’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 377). Second, just as we try to understand what another person speaks to us in a person-to-person conversation, so also interpreters are trying to understand what the text is saying to them. Both involve a heavy dose of reinterpretative efforts on the interpreter’s part. ‘When a translator interprets a conversation, he can make mutual understanding possible only if he participates in the subject under discussion; so also in relation to a text it is indispensable that the interpreter participates in its meaning’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 388). Third, just as interlocutors are trying to reach agreement on some subject with their partners in terms of the fusion of horizons, so also interpreters are trying to reach agreement with the text by fusing their horizon with that of the text. Gadamer concludes that it is perfectly legitimate to speak of a hermeneutic conversation with the text. A reader does not receive a pre-determined meaning from a ‘dead’ text. Meanings are created and recreated as interpreters engage with the text. The text comes alive only in the context of this engagement.
If to understand means to come to an understanding with each other through conversation, then the further question is: What is the primary purpose of conversation? Or what does conversation enable us to achieve? For Gadamer, it is to reach agreement with one another on some subject matter.
Understanding is, primarily agreement. ... Coming to an understanding, then, is always coming to an understanding about something. Understanding each other is always understanding each other with respect to something. From language we learn that the subject matter is not merely an arbitrary object of discussion, independent of the process of mutual understanding, but rather is the path and goal of mutual understanding itself. ... In general one attempts to reach a substantive agreement—not just sympathetic understanding of the other person—and this in such a way that again one proceeds via the subject matter. (Gadamer, 1989, p. 180; my italics)
In fact, the German term Einverständnis, which is closely associated with the term Verstehen (understanding) means ‘understanding, agreement, consent’. ‘Coming to an understanding with someone on something’ means ‘coming to an agreement with someone on something’.
Conversation is a process of coming to an understanding. Thus it belongs to every true conversation that each person opens himself to the other, truly accepts his point of view as valid and transposes himself into the other to such an extent that he understands not the particular individual but what he says. What is to be grasped is the substantive rightness of his opinion, so that we can be at one with each other on the subject. (Gadamer, 1989, p. 385)
In order to reach substantive agreement with each other about some subject matters through conversation, one cannot either impose one’s own point of view or tradition onto the other (the projective understanding) or place oneself into the other’s horizon with the sole purpose of knowing ‘objectively’ the other’s horizon (the adoptive, ‘sympathetic’ understanding). Genuine conversation is not assimilation, neither to make the other like one nor to make one like the other. In both cases, one has stopped trying to reach a genuine agreement with one another. In the former case, one conceals the other’s otherness, thus one cannot reach agreement with the other. In the latter case, one absorbs one’s own horizon and tradition, which makes one who one is, into the other’s horizon and tradition so as to make one’s own standpoint ‘safely unattainable’ and one’s own self cannot be reached. Again, no genuine agreement can be reached between one and the other (Gadamer, 1989, p. 303). In contrast, to reach genuine agreement through authentic conversation, ‘both partners are trying to recognize the full values of what is alien and opposed to them. If this happens mutually, and each of the partners, while simultaneously holding on to his own arguments, weights the counterarguments, it is possible to achieve ... a common diction and a common dictum’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 387; my italics). The process of reaching such an agreement is what Gadamer calls the process of fusing horizons: a fusion between the horizons of two parties through conversation, whereby one party’s horizon is enlarged and enriched in terms of the engagement with the horizon of the other’s, not replaced by the other’s.
In his Truth and Method, Gadamer rarely uses the term ‘communication’ in discussing conversation for the reason mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, it should be clear that through his hermeneutic discourse of understanding, Gadamer not only presents a concept of understanding different from the notion of propositional understanding, but also, more precisely, he opens up a new discourse of communication that has ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’, instead of ‘transmission’, as its central metaphor.
What characterizes a dialogue, in contrast with the rigid form of statements that demand to be set down in writing is precisely this: that in dialogue spoken language— in the process of question and answer, giving and taking, talking at cross purpose and seeing each other’s point—performs the communication of meaning that, with respect to the written tradition, is the task of hermeneutics. (Gadamer, 1989, p. 368; my italics).
For Gadamer, the process of substantive hermeneutic understanding—the process of ‘coming-to-an-understanding’ and ‘coming-to-an-agreement’ through genuine conversation—is,’ in essence, communication. To distinguish it from the dominant standard discourse of communication as transmission (informative communication), I will call the new discourse about communication the hermeneutic dialogue model of communication, or briefly, dialogical communication. According to it, communication is a process of mutual creation of meanings in the flow of a live genuine conversation between two dialogists. The act of communication is co-created by both interlocutors acting and reacting to each other’s utterances, with each utterance creating the conditions for the next.
In fact, it is not accurate to call Gadamer’s conversation model of communication a new discourse. Historically, the transmission model came later than the dialogue model of communication. The standard transmission model was framed by Locke’s empiricist philosophy of knowledge in the seventeenth century, further supported by the invocation of unconsciousness (E. Hartmann, F. Myers, W. James, and S. Freud) during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, enhanced by the computer metaphor of an information processing paradigm dominant within the field of modern experimental, cognitive psychology since the middle of the twentieth century, and established as a dominant, legitimate scientific model of communication by the information theory (C. Shannon, W. Weaver, and N. Wiener) around the 1950s.1 The notion of communication theory, founded on the transmission model, is no older than the 1940s. In contrast, the dialogue model can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato’s discourse on the primacy of dialectic dialogue—the art of question and answer, objection and rebuttal, argumentation and persuasion—in seeking truth and knowledge. Plato’s discourse on dialogue started the exchange model of communication, according to which communication is supposed to involve interchange, mutuality, reciprocity, and engagement. Based on this Platonic tradition, a colloquial sense of communication calls for open and frank dialogue. It is not simply talk; it refers to a special kind of talk distinguished by disclosure and reconciliation: disclosing one’s oneness to the other and the other’s otherness to oneself (knowing oneself through knowing the other and knowing the other through knowing oneself), and reconciling oneself and the other.
Around the 1920s, we saw the revival and rehabilitation of the Platonic dialogue model in M. Heidegger’s metaphysics and J. Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy. Heidegger’s notion of communication is neither semantic (meaning exchange), nor pragmatic (action coordination), but ontological (world disclosing and otherness openness). Communication is, for Heidegger, the interpretive articulation of our ‘thrownness’ into a world together with people to whom we want to open ourselves to hear their otherness. ‘Communication as the revelation of being to itself through language resounds variously through those influenced by Heidegger—Sartre, Levinas, Arendt, Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, and many more’ (Peters, 1999, p. 17). With Heidegger, Dewey views language as a precondition of thought and dismisses a semantic view of language as interpersonal plumbing, carrying thought and meaning as a pipe carries water, which is the semantic foundation of the transmission model of linguistic communication. Unlike Heidegger, Dewey’s notion of communication is more pragmatically orientated: communication as partaking, namely, taking part in a collective world, not simply sharing the secret of consciousness or transferring meaning. Both Heidegger and Dewey saw the dialectic dialogue as a way out of the state of alienation between people of the time. J. Peters summarizes the social context of the 1920s in which the dialogue model emerges as follows:
Dewey took the disappearance or distortion of participatory interaction as the most alienating feature of the age. Heidegger’s notion of the fall from authentic encounter was not entirely different. The notion that grace is found in dialogue was widely shared in social thinkers of the 1920s: Buber wanted to replace I-It relationships with I-Thou ones; Heidegger called for authentic confrontations; Lukács called for a joyful reconciliation of subject and object. That face-to-face dialogue or at least confrontation offered a way out from the crust of modernity is one of the key themes in thinking about communication since the 1920s, in antimodern thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Arendt, and Levinas, all of whom recognize the ultimate impossibility of dialogue, and in a host of lesser figures who do not. (1999, p. 19)
Gadamer’s conversation model is a further development of this trend. It is in the hand of Gadamer that the dialogue discourse of communication reaches its maturity and universality.
We have argued that the relationship between propositional understanding and informative communication is not symmetric as to the direction of message transmission. The process of informative communication (the transmission model) consists of the act of communicating (a message is put forward from the speaker to the interpreter) and the act of understanding (the message put forward by the speaker is taken in by the interpreter). Thus, propositional understanding is necessary but not sufficient for informative communication. Nevertheless, informative communication amounts to, in essence, propositional mutual understanding since both the act of communicating and the act of understanding are by nature a one-way linear transmission of message. In contrast, the relationship between Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding and dialogical communication is symmetric: The process of hermeneutic understanding {Verstehen)—the process of ‘coming-to-an-understanding’ and ‘coming-to-an-agreement’—is essentially conversation or communication {Mitteilung). On the one hand, we can reach understanding only through conversation or communication; on the other hand, to communicate is to understand through conversation. We can say, to a certain extent, that while communication is, in the transmission model, reduced to (mutual propositional) understanding, (hermeneutic) understanding is, in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, elevated to (dialogical) communication.
Although Gadamer does not want to differentiate communication from understanding and interpretation, he does try to distinguish his dialogical communication, which he calls ‘authentic dialogue’, from ‘inauthentic dialogue’, such as oral examination, certain kinds of therapeutic conversation between doctor and patient, the interrogation of a criminal, cross-language dialogue via translation, and idle talks. In all those cases, the goal is to either merely know others as particular individuals or kill time, not to reach genuine agreement on some subject matters through fusion of horizons. For example, having to rely on translation is tantamount to two people giving up their independent authority and making their own horizons and traditions unavailable. In this case, hermeneutic communication (as usual, Gadamer uses the term ‘conversation’ to refer to hermeneutic communication) does not really take place between two translators. This is because ‘understanding how to speak is not yet of itself understanding and does not involve an interpretative process; ... Thus the hermeneutical problem concerns not the correct mastery of language but coming to a proper understanding about the subject matter, ... Mastering the language is necessary precondition for coming to an understanding in a conversation’ (Gadamer, 1989, p. 385). This is exactly the case that our bilinguals Ms Jones and Mr Wong have faced repeatedly when they try to communicate through dialectic dialogue to resolve their differences. Although both of them can master the other’s language, they cannot communicate effectively since they cannot engage in a productive conversation.
But why? Why cannot even two bilinguals from two distinct P-languages, who obviously understand (in the propositional sense) one another’s P-language as any native speakers do, engage in a genuine/authentic dialogue—the interactive dialectic interplay of question and answer, objection and rebuttal, argumentation and persuasion—in order to reach agreement, reconciliation, or at least to effectively pin down the exact disagreement? The question can be reformulated into a less loaded one: Can two interlocutors from two incompatible P-languages communicate fully (conducting authentic conversation)? Alternatively, put into a Kantian style: Is full cross-language conversation (communication) possible in abnormal discourse? If not, does it have something to do with some semantic obstacles between two P-languages involved?
Gadamer’s conversation model applies to both intra- and inter-language communication. To see how Gadamer would answer our question, we need to specify some significant necessary condition of cross-language conversation. The goal of conversation is, to Gadamer, to come to an agreement and consensus on some subject matter. But what is the precondition of reaching agreement on some subject matter between the speakers of two distinct languages? To begin with, for Gadamer, what makes conversation on any subject matter possible is language (the linguisticality of dialogue), which provides the Mitte, the ‘medium’ or ‘middle ground’, the ‘place’ where conversation takes place. Language is the Vermittlung, the communicative mediation that establishes common ground. This seems to be plain enough. However, not any language can serve as ‘the medium’ and ‘middle ground’. Certainly, it cannot be one of the languages involved in a conversation. For Gadamer, it has to be a common language.
Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, creates a common language. Hence reaching an understanding on the subject matter of a conversation necessarily means that a common language must first be worked out in the conversation. To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were. (Gadamer, 1989, pp. 378-9)
At first glance, Gadamer appears to bring us back to the age of logical positivism in seeking a common language underlying different scientific languages. This is not the case. The common language underlying different scientific languages that logical positivists seek is some pre-existing, fixed given language, such as a universal observation language underneath two competing theoretical languages, or an uninterpreted formal language underscoring two interpreted scientific languages, which is logically presupposed by and goes beyond the two languages involved. Such a common language is believed by logical positivists to be necessary for theory evaluation, justification, and comparison, for measurement of scientific rationality and scientific progress, and for commensurability. In contrast, although Gadamer does somehow share with logical positivism a dream of the Archimedean point, Gadamer’s common language cannot be something fixed, given, and pre-existing in advance before the conversation. It cannot be established by any explicit agreement or ‘social contract’ that could be negotiated before conversation takes place or by any purely psychological processes of ‘empathy’ or ‘sympathy’. Moreover, one side cannot simply accommodate the other side by adopting the other’s language; nor can one side force their own language onto the other. For Gadamer, a common language can only emerge or be ‘worked out’ during the process of the conversation itself. As Gadamer puts it in clear terms:
Thus it is perfectly legitimate to speak of a hermeneutical conversation. But from this it follows that hermeneutical conversation, like real conversation, finds a common language, and that finding a common language is not, any more than in real conversation, preparing a tool for the purpose of reaching understanding but, rather, coincides with the very act of understanding and reaching agreement. ... I have described this above as a ‘fusion of horizons’. We can now see that this is what takes place in conversation, in which something is expressed that is not only mine or my author’s, but common. (1989, p. 388; italics as original)
In fact, the process of working out a common language during a conversation is nothing but the very process of what Gadamer speaks of as a ‘fusion of horizons’. As discussed in chapter 13, Gadamer’s ‘horizon’ is as broad as ‘tradition’: one’s particular viewpoint formed by one’s culture, language, and history, or ultimately one’s whole lifeworld. Gadamer also contends that a language, more precisely, a P-language, is a worldview. One’s tradition or lifeworld is essentially linguistic; it is linguistically constituted and transmitted. In this way, ‘horizon’ functions somewhat like ‘language’; or more precisely, each language, especially our P-language, provides a unique horizon. A language is by essence perspective, ‘the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.’
Thus, Gadamer’s ‘common language’ required for successful cross-language conversation turns out to be a ‘common horizon’. Such a common language or horizon can be achieved through a fusion between two initially distinct horizons belonging to two interlocutors of a conversation, when one or both horizons undergo a shift such that a horizon is extended and enriched to make room for the object that before did not fit within it. We have thus identified a significant necessary condition for full cross-language communication according to Gadamer:
An undistorted full cross-language communication is possible only if a common language can be formed through a fusion of horizons.
By identifying a common language via a fusion of horizons as a necessary condition of successful cross-language conversation, Gadamer certainly puts a strict constraint on undistorted cross-language communication. Obviously, whether cross-language communication in abnormal discourse is possible depends upon whether a common language formed through a fusion of horizons is possible between two incompatible traditions, horizons, or P-languages. However, speaking of ‘a common language’ through ‘a fusion of horizons’ in such a loose way does not help us much. We need to be more specific about the degree of fusion of horizons in order to grasp the full meaning of the common language required by Gadamer.
It has become common wisdom that any language (both natural and P-language) is an open linguistic system, open to possible modification, expansion, and evolution (both syntactically and semantically). This makes a fusion of horizons possible. In addition, for human contact between two distinct languages to be possible, some kind of point of contact or overlap between them has to be established. This makes a fusion of horizon desirable. Nevertheless, all these points only prove that a partial fusion of horizons between two languages is always possible, no matter how distant one is from the other.
To be more specific, let us consider two distinct P-languages PL1 and PL2. At the initial contact, the horizons of the two P-languages are distinct, H1 and H2, such that mutual understanding between the speakers of PL1 and PL2 is distorted and communication impeded. To understand the other, the speaker of PL1 starts to extend the horizon from H1 to H1(H2) so as to make room for new concepts, new objects, and new beliefs that are beyond H1’s limit. Suppose that the speaker from PL2 does the same, extending their horizon from H2 to H2(H1). With tremendous effort, patience, and sufficient time, the two moving horizons H1(H2) and H2(H1) may become fairly close such that both sides can understand one another pretty well. This process may be better seen as a fusion rather than just as an extension of horizons. At the same time the speaker of PL1 introduces a modified language PL1(H2) to talk about the beliefs of the speaker of PL2 that represents an expansion in relation to PL2. So the new language used here, PL1(H2), opens a broader horizon, extending beyond both the original ones and in a sense combining them.
We have concluded that a partial fusion of two distinct horizons is not only possible and beneficial, but also feasible. Consequently, we have two partially shared languages, PL1(H2) and PL2(H1) respectively. This seems not to be controversial. The real question at stake is this: Can two radically distinct horizons determined by two incompatible P-languages be fully fused into a common language in which both sides can agree to talk undistortively of each other? Gadamer apparently believes that it is possible. He is so convinced that
When our historical consciousness transposes itself into historical horizons, this does not entail passing into alien worlds unconnected in any way with our own; instead, they together constitute the one great horizon that moves from within and that, beyond the frontiers of the present, embraces the historical depths of our self-consciousness. Everything contained in historical consciousness is in fact embraced by a single historical horizon. (1989, p. 304; my italics)
Again:
Transposing ourselves consists neither in the empathy of one individual for another nor in subordinating another person to our own standards; rather, it always involves rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other. (1989. p. 305; my italics)
Unlike Davidson who attempts to establish the possibility of universal communication—especially communications between alleged incommensurables or between two radically distinct conceptual schemes, if any—through an outright rejection of the idea of a conceptual scheme, Gadamer takes a more moderate road by admitting the existence of radically distinct conceptual schemes, horizons, traditions, or language-views. Nevertheless, this is as far as Gadamer is willing to go with conceptual relativism. As I see it, Gadamer’s attitude toward conceptual relativism is of two minds. On the one hand, with conceptual relativists, he believes in conceptual diversity and novelty. This I think marks the superiority of Gadamer’s vision over Davidson’s. On the other hand, against relativism and with objectivism, Gadamer is still dreaming of an Archimedean point, an overarching common language shared between two radically distinct P-languages or traditions (although this shared language itself evolves, and changes with the contexts of interaction between the two P-languages). For Gadamer, cross-language communication in abnormal discourse is certainly different from that in normal discourse; compared with the latter, the former involves a much more delicate dialectic interplay and back-and-forth negotiation between two P-languages or traditions (the hermeneutic circle), and will eventually work out ‘the one great horizon’ ‘embraced’ by the two distinct horizons. No matter how difficult it is, Gadamer is somewhat convinced (but not well argued) that such a common ground is attainable. Essentially, Gadamer reaches a conclusion similar to Davidson’s: the universality of cross-language communication.
We have been following Gadamer step by step so far, but I have to part from him here. I agree with Gadamer that a common language is indeed necessary for a full, undistorted cross-language conversation, if not for other reasons, at least for the following logical reason. Recall that, for Gadamer, the primary goal of conversation is to ‘reach a substantive agreement’ through the art of conversation— argument, question and answer, objection and refutation (Gadamer, 1989, p. 180). I do not know how two interlocutors can engage in a constructive back-and-forth argumentation without first agreeing on some fundamental rules of inquiry (the rules of a language game), including logical rules and modes of justification—such as what are legitimate justifications, what are legitimate questions and acceptable answers, and so on. Furthermore, to reach a substantive agreement entails that both sides, at end, have to agree on the truth claims put forward by the other side, or at least agree on the fact that the other side has said or asserted something (to be either true or false). Therefore, a common linguistic framework consisting of those common beliefs on truth, logic, and justification has to be in place in order to carry out Gadamer’s full communication as defined.
It can be argued that, unfortunately, there will never be a full fusion of horizons between two incompatible P-languages. Based on Gadamer’s concept of meaning, meaning is always coming into being through the ‘happening’ of conversation, and conversation always happens within certain contexts. This determines that hermeneutic conversation is an open-ended process, which can never achieve finality. Accordingly, a so-called common horizon is a moving target, the ideal goal of an authentic conversation. Like conversation, a fusion of horizons is an open-ended process, which evolves with the back-and-forth interplay between the horizon of the interpreter and that of the interpreted. A fully fused horizon may never be truly actualized. But this only means, Gadamer would claim, that a common horizon is not feasible, not impossible in principle.
To me, a common language through a full fusion of the horizons of two incompatible P-languages is neither feasible, nor possible in principle. There is a certain limit as to how far one horizon can be extended to accommodate the other horizon without losing its own identity. For example, can the horizon of the Leibnizian language Lz (chapter 5) be expanded to accept the existence of Newtonian absolute space and time? Can the horizon of Western medical language be enriched by the yin-yang cosmology underlying traditional Chinese medical language? As I have argued all along, those core presuppositions of each P-language are logically incompatible. They cannot be woven into one coherent theoretical framework. There is no common language possible between them. Moreover, whenever we try to understand others in a conversation, as Gadamer argues convincingly, we always carry our own tradition along. No matter how much our own horizon H1 is fused with the other horizon H2, the new horizon H1(H2) is always a horizon affected by my tradition. The same happens to my interlocutor. The new fused horizon formed by her, H2(H1), is a horizon affected by her tradition. No matter how closely the two fused horizons move toward one another, H1(H2) is not H2(H1). They can never merge into one common horizon H(H1&H2).
To the best of my knowledge, Gadamer does not offer us many positive arguments for his conviction of the possibility of a common language through a full fusion of horizons between any two languages except the following argument from the universality of language. We can identify two aspects of Gadamer’s thesis of the universality of language. First, we have the universal understandability of language: As an object of understanding, any human language, and any linguistically constituted and transmitted tradition and horizon, can be understood, no matter how alien it is to us. To be a language is to be understandable. This is, in effect, the conclusion we have reached at the end of chapter 13, that is, the openness of the incommensurables: Although the conceptual distance between two incommensurables (P-language, cultural or research traditions, paradigms, forms of life) does cause some difficulty in mutual understanding, it by no means makes mutual understanding between them impossible.
Second, we have the universal function of language. In Gadamer’s view, virtually everything is linguistic, ranging from our lifeworld, experience, to our worldview, tradition, and horizon, as well as from thinking to understanding. In particular, understanding is possible only with the help of language. Understanding is in essence linguistic understanding. I think this is not controversial either. But to reach the conclusion of the possibility (or the universality) of a common language, Gadamer needs to, much more provocatively, stretch the skin of language further to make it cover all the territories supposedly controlled by universal reason:
Its [referring to language] universality keeps pace with the universality of reason. Hermeneutic consciousness only participates in what constitutes the general relation between language and reason. If all understanding stands in a necessary relation of equivalence to its possible interpretation, and if there are basically no bounds set to understanding, then the verbal form in which this understanding is interpreted must contain within it an infinite dimension that transcends all bounds. Language is the language of reason itself. (Gadamer, 1989, p. 401; my italics)
After identifying language with universal reason, Gadamer is only a small step away from his dream of a universal common language. Against the relativistic-minded philosophers of language (such as B. Whorf) who insist on the uniqueness of each human language, Gadamer believes that
In actual fact the sensitivity of our historical consciousness tells us the opposite. The work of understanding and interpretation always remains meaningful. This shows the superior universality of reason can rise above the limitations of any given language. The hermeneutic experience is the corrective by means of which the thinking reason escapes the prison of language, and it is itself verbally constituted. (Gadamer, 1989, p. 402)
Since universal reason can soar above any limited languages, which is only a dim reflection of the light of universal reason, the reason can build for us a common language above any two limited languages, no matter how remotely related they are.
I have to admit that I do not fully understand Gadamer’s notion of universal reason, maybe because I am dazzled by the bright light of his ‘superior universality of reason’. All I can see from his glorification of universal reason is the long shadow (since I am dazzled, I can only see the shadow) cast on us from modernity, especially from the dark side of the Enlightenment legacy—their desperate (and failed) attempts to discover some permanent foundations and basic constraints underneath all becoming, diversity, and temporality. Universal reason has been provoked by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel to be such an Archimedean point for justification, understanding, and knowledge. As R. Rorty (1980) has pointed out correctly, despite his own critiques of modernity and many dark sides of the Enlightenment legacy (such as Gadamer’s famous critique of the Enlightenment’s prejudice against prejudice), Gadamer somehow seeks to recover and preserve part of the legacy that he thinks is most vital, such as universal reason. This fits right into Cartesian rationalism and places Gadamer back in the camp of objectivism with which he has no intention of being associated. Consequently, ‘despite Gadamer’s incisive critiques of epistemology and the Cartesian legacy, Gadamer unwittingly is a victim of the very Cartesian legacy that he is reacting against’ (Bernstein, 1983, p. 199).
When the pretension of universal reason as a universal language is unmasked, it turns out to be just another version of what has been the foundation for modern epistemology—the assumption that ‘all contributions to a given discourse are commensurable’. However, hermeneutics is ‘largely a struggle against this assumption’ (Rorty, 1980). With Heidegger, Gadamer’s hermeneutics emphasizes human finitude and facticity of hermeneutic existence, as well as historicity, contextuality, and fallibility of human knowledge and understanding. He wanted to break the modern dream of an objective, rational method that could guide understanding toward the ultimate reality and truth. Despite Gadamer’s repeated protestations that the essential question of hermeneutics is not a question of such a method of understanding, Gadamer fails to be persistent with the basic spirit of his hermeneutics when he falls into the trap of universal reason. Such a move is retrogressive and does not resonate well with the rest of his hermeneutics.
We have to conclude that there is no full fusion of two distinct horizons between two incompatible P-languages. A common language above two incompatible P-languages is another modern myth, whose fate is no better than the common language dreamed by logical positivism. If a common language through a full fusion of horizons between two P-languages is required by undistorted, full communication or conversation, as it should be, then we reach the same conclusion as we did in chapter 14 from the transmission model of cross-language communication: Cross-language communication in abnormal discourse is inevitably partial.
One may be wondering how the above conclusion about communication breakdown in abnormal discourse can be reconciled with what I have argued in chapter 13, namely, the universality of hermeneutic understanding and the openness of the incommensurables. Hermeneutic cross-language understanding is in essence coming to an understanding and agreement through conversation between the interpreter from one language and the interpreted from another. Both sides could come to an understanding through conversation only in terms of a fusion of horizons. If a full fusion is unattainable in abnormal discourse, then can understanding even be possible? But we have argued, with Gadamer, that hermeneutic understanding in abnormal discourse is possible. What is going on here? This apparent inconsistency of my positions on hermeneutic understanding and on dialogical communication dissolves so long as one realizes that what we need for hermeneutic understanding is partial fusion of horizons. No full fusion of horizons is possible, nor is one needed. Accordingly, it is a partially shared language, not a common language, that makes cross-language understanding, and thus partial dialogical cross-language communication, possible.
1 G. Radford traces the historical and conceptual development of the transmission model of communication in his 2005.