5 The Constellation of Understanding

It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all. (TM 297/GW1 302)

In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. (TM 276/GW1 281)

 

1. Understanding between Circles and Spirals

Gadamer emphasizes the breaks more than the continuities in his reconstruction of hermeneutics. The decisive break occurs with “Heidegger’s disclosure of the fore-structure of understanding” (TM 265/GW1 270). Heidegger conceives of understanding as the movement of Dasein itself, and he uncovers circularity as its basic character. Gadamer begins with Heidegger’s view, but reinterprets both the circle and understanding. He broadens the hermeneutic circle so fundamentally that it becomes the guiding thread of the entire middle section of Truth and Method.

What does “the fore-structure of understanding,” or “fore-understanding,” mean? Why does this amount to a new way of comprehending understanding? Romantic hermeneutics starts from the assumption of misunderstanding and nonunderstanding. Understanding, for Schleiermacher, defines itself negatively; it is based “on the fact of nonunderstanding.”¹ Understanding becomes for him the overcoming of misunderstanding and nonunderstanding—a kind of overcoming that, however, is condemned to fail unless a chimerical way out is found, such as empathic identification. Beyond such illusory moments of happiness, Romantic hermeneutics appears to stagnate in nonunderstanding.

What distinguishes philosophical hermeneutics, by contrast, is the reversal of these premises. In Being and Time understanding is the assumption from which Heidegger starts. Far from a private condition, understanding emerges as the originary phenomenon from which misunderstanding and nonunderstanding derive (BT 143/ SZ 153). Understanding is always already there, whereas misunderstanding and nonunderstanding occur only within the context of understanding. Only insofar as I understand, according to Heidegger, can I not understand or misunderstand. From this basis, hermeneutics is reformulated, and it takes up the task of reflecting on understanding in a new and more radical way.

Gadamer recalls that the depiction of understanding with the figure of the circle “stems from ancient rhetoric” (TM 291/GW1 296). The figure then made the transition from rhetoric to hermeneutics. The circle describes the movement from the parts to the whole and from the whole to the parts. The parts and the whole necessarily presuppose each other and influence each other reciprocally. Their circular relation is explained by the context, which ties the sentences to the entirety of a text: the understanding of an individual sentence presupposes the understanding of the text, but on the other hand, the understanding of the text can arise only from understanding the sentences. The principle of all understanding concentrates in this circularity, which was formulated for the first time by G. A. Friedrich Ast (1778–1841) during the Romantic period.²

Circularity excludes linearity. Circular interwovenness cannot be untied and leveled down. This insight causes Schleiermacher to reconsider the legitimacy of understanding, since the understanding, as the figure of the circle clearly shows, is compromised by the lack of a ground.³ Even if it proceeds through its parts, and is both motivated and justified by them, the understanding of the whole is groundless from the beginning. Seen in this way, the circle appears to be a methodological obstacle. As a result Schleiermacher wanted to replace the circle with the figure of the spiral—a figure that has recently been taken up again by some interpreters.⁴ With the spiral, circularity could resolve itself in linearity. For this, however, one would have to presuppose that the understanding of the whole is adjusted and integrated by the parts in an asymptotic process of approximation. Yet this model of understanding does not acknowledge that groundlessness remains in every turn of the spiral: it is inherent in the structure and thus impossible to overcome. What undoubtedly also contributed to Schleiermacher’s negative view of the circle was his way of comprehending nonunderstanding and understanding in dichotomous opposition to each other. Only when this opposition is relinquished can the circle, along with its groundlessness, acquire another meaning.

This is exactly what happens with Heidegger. He describes circularity as the way in which existence, which he calls Dasein—understands itself and exists understanding itself. Thrown into the world, Dasein projects itself in each case according to the anticipation of its understanding. In this way it cares for its own future, opening up to its own possibilities (BT 138/SZ 147). “We shall call the development of understanding interpretation,” Heidegger writes (BT 139/SZ 148). To interpret means not only to adopt an understanding, but also to develop and articulate it. The hermeneutic circle takes place here between understanding and interpretation: there is no interpretation where there is no prior fore-understanding. This is, however, a traditional example that could be misunderstood. That is why Heidegger says that he wants to move the circle beyond the “philological interpretation.” For him it is a matter of giving the circle an entirely new range, one that goes beyond the interpretation of a text, acquiring an “existential” value. Understanding is the way in which Dasein enacts its existence.

This view of understanding expands its importance and yields an entirely new reading of the circle. What is a circle, after all? It is well known that in logic, for example, the circle is always a circulus vitiosus, whose error is to presuppose what it needs to prove. The circularity of understanding appears to indicate this error directly. But Heidegger meets the logician’s objection in advance: he reverses the argument by emphasizing the circularity and primordiality of understanding, which uncovers the connection between them. Only from the Cartesian perspective of linearity can the circle appear as an “inevitable imperfection” (BT 143/SZ 153).⁵ The epistemological ideal of linear knowledge can be maintained, but only to the extent that one is aware it is secondary, derived from the primordial circularity of understanding. In this sense it would be useless to criticize the circle for its groundlessness and error. It carries its ground in itself and thereby grounds understanding in a figurative way, or better: it manifests the fundamental circularity of understanding. It follows, then, as Heidegger writes: “What is decisive is not to get out of the circle, but to get in it in the right way” (BT 143/SZ 153). The circle should not be reduced to a vicious circle, nor should it be taken as a mere obstacle, since within the circle there dwells the positive possibility of understanding, that is the primordial way in which Dasein enacts its existence.

2. All Understanding Is Ultimately Self-Understanding

Gadamer opens the systematic part of Truth and Method with the hermeneutic circle. This section bears the pregnant title: “Elements of a Theory of Hermeneutic Experience” (TM 265–379/ GW1 270–384). He emphasizes, almost in the words of Being and Time, that “this circle possesses an ontologically positive significance” (TM 266/GW1 271). At the same time he returns to the classical version of rhetoric and hermeneutics, to introduce the movement between the parts and the whole (TM 291–295/GW1 296–299). Is this a lapse back into a pre-Heideggerian conception of the circle? Or is something new introduced here?

Heidegger’s motivation was existential. Gadamer, by contrast, engages in a critique of the methodological ideal of objectivity, which threatens to reduce and distort the value of understanding. This difference also appears with the differences in the examples they give. Heidegger speaks of the interpretation of existence, whereas Gadamer refers to the interpretation of texts. For textual interpretation Gadamer proceeds from our “fore-meanings,” which anticipate the meaning of the whole text (TM 267/GW1 272). It would be a mistake, however, to draw the conclusion of Marquard that Heidegger’s “being-towards-death” is simply replaced by Gadamer’s “being towards text.”⁶

Gadamer is fully aware of the existential breadth that understanding gains in Heidegger’s description. But he does not limit himself to describing the structure of Dasein in terms of the “belonging” of the interpreter to what is interpreted (TM 264/GW1 268). Instead he proposes a critical version of “thrownness.” In Heidegger’s description of Dasein, which always understands itself by going beyond itself, the future is particularly emphasized. But the self-projection of Dasein, on the basis of its thrownness toward future possibilities, is only one dimension of understanding. The dimension of the past belongs, according to Gadamer, “just as originally and essentially to the historical finitude of Dasein” (TM 262/GW1 266). He elaborates: “Dasein that projects itself on its own potentiality-for-being has always already ‘been’” (TM 264/GW1 268). In order to project itself into the future, Dasein must proceed from what has already been understood. But what has been understood is past, it has already occurred. We cannot abstract from this dimension. What has been understood also affects the understanding; it is neither neutral and indifferent nor separable. If we try to separate our understanding from the past, then Dasein becomes isolated from the community to which it has always belonged. The circle of understanding, as Heidegger characterizes it, is actually much too abstract. This was Gadamer’s indirect criticism. The danger in Heidegger’s account is that an isolated Dasein without a past will emerge, and will approach the future with the same free abstractedness as its predecessor, the phenomenological subject. But the hermeneutics of facticity had already shown that, on the contrary, the boundaries of the “Da,” the “there” or the “here,” cannot be crossed. In fact, these boundaries both limit and enable the projections of Dasein.

The circle thus remains the model for understanding in hermeneutics, but now it is conceived more in terms of sharing and participating, where the one who understands is always already involved in what is to be understood. Due to the ontological co-belonging of the one who understands and the understood, it is evident within the circularity that the one who understands projects itself onto possibilities that have always belonged to it. Gadamer formulates the point in one of the most significant theses of his philosophical hermeneutics: “all such understanding is ultimately self-understanding” (TM 260/GW1 265).

This thesis had already been suggested in Being and Time, where Heidegger argues that Dasein, on the basis of its care-structure, cannot help but understand itself (BT 53/ SZ 57). But from Gadamer’s perspective it is a mistake to separate the understanding of oneself from the understanding of another, since it is the same process. Already in the everyday understanding of things that are “at hand,” as for example when we reach for the doorknob in order to open the door, it is clear that understanding (Verstehen) is always a form of “know how” (Sich-Verstehen-auf), that is, less a form of knowledge than an ability. Here Dasein understands itself by understanding the things it encounters in the lifeworld. These things are never simply given in their naked exteriority, to which our understanding adds a bit of color, but always already exist for our anticipation and are to a certain extent fore-understood. If Dasein understands itself by understanding the other, then it cannot understand itself when it does not understand the other or others.

Gadamer follows the way opened by Heidegger, but tries to overcome the duality between oneself and the other. Understanding is always already given in self-understanding. In order to avoid a possible misunderstanding, it is important to emphasize here that “self-understanding” does not mean “understanding oneself as a self.”⁷ The latter would be the self-consciousness that is unshakably certain of itself—to hermeneutics this is an empty chimera. For hermeneutics there is no self in understanding that would exclude the other. Understanding involves understanding the self and other simultaneously, since self-understanding can articulate itself only through the understanding of the other. The distinction at stake here is not between self and other, but between what was already understood and what is not yet understood. In this way hermeneutics, following Heidegger’s teaching, takes its start from understanding and bypasses the previously insurmountable transition from nonunderstanding to understanding. Yet, following Schleiermacher’s teaching, it contains the other within itself from the very beginning.

3. The “Fore-Conception of Completeness”

There are still many open questions regarding the hermeneutic circle and the way understanding enacts itself. Gadamer chooses phenomenological description to address these questions. Rather than formulate normative prescriptions, hermeneutics tries to bring to light what happens in the practice of understanding. But this lack of prescriptions and norms should not be equated with a lack of criteria. Hermeneutics does not encourage interpretive arbitrariness; it insists instead on a critical conception of interpretation. Conscious of its presuppositions, such an interpretation avoids blindly taking up its own assumptions and gives itself over—as Heidegger had already suggested—to the “things themselves” (BT 142/SZ 152). This last expression, which Gadamer also recuperates, is inherited from phenomenology and needs to be clarified (TM 267/GW1 272). That the interpreter must give him- or herself over to “the things themselves” does not at all imply the ideal of objective knowledge. One should not confuse the “thing” (Sache) with the “object” (Objekt). In the context of hermeneutics, the “thing” is neither the “thing in itself” of Kant nor the “thing itself” of Husserl. Following the etymology, “thing,” or Sache in German, means “the matter for debate” (Streitsache), in much the same way as cosa does in Italian or chose in French, which stem from the Latin causa. The “matter” or “issue” (Sache) is that which is to be debated, whatever people address and discuss.⁸ One is always implied and seized by the matter at issue.

What is important in this dialogical model is that the interpreter legitimizes his anticipations in accord with the issue that concerns him. But he should not let himself be led by his anticipations alone, for this would amount to arbitrariness. Here is an example: I have decided to review a book about Plato. If I write only about my own thoughts in the review, without considering the views in the book, the result will be a bad review. Neither an impossible neutrality nor self-forgetfulness is expected from the interpreter. What is expected is “openness” towards the alterity of the text, in other words the ability to allow the text to speak (TM 269/GW1 273). In this we can recognize “a hermeneutically trained consciousness” (TM 269/GW1 273). The interpreter, who is conscious of their own anticipations and their own biases, allows the text to assert its own truth.

This is the only criterion that hermeneutics indicates explicitly. Gadamer calls this the “fore-conception of completeness” (TM 294/GW1 299). Put succinctly, completeness is projected onto the text to be interpreted. One presupposes, in other words, that the text has a truth and a coherence with which it puts forth its truth. To return to the circle: the coherent unity of the whole becomes the presupposition that guides the understanding of the parts; while the harmony of all the parts with the whole, which bears witness to this coherence, becomes the criterion of correctness. Only when what is interpreted does not correspond to the fore-conception of completeness, when a coherent truth is unable to appear, does the interpretation get displaced from the text to the author and hence become psychological. For Gadamer this is further confirmation that understanding means understanding on the bases of the “thing,” and only subsequently does it mean understanding an author.⁹

4. We Are Distorting Mirrors: On Prejudice

The fore-understanding, from which the understanding proceeds, contains the complex of one’s own “prejudices” (TM 268–271/GW1 272–274). With this Gadamer describes the hermeneutic circle more precisely. If Heidegger shows that understanding is based on what is already understood, Gadamer makes clear that what has already been understood, or the fore-understanding, is a pre-judice. In order to radicalize the hermeneutic question and develop its ultimate consequences, it is important to recognize that “all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice” (TM 270/GW1 274).

With this thesis Gadamer wants above all to rehabilitate prejudice, which he pursues through his critique of the Enlightenment. If we look at the Latin word preiudicium and its juridical use, then “prejudice” has neither a negative nor a positive meaning. It has acquired a negative connotation only since the Enlightenment, which it still has to this day, indicating an “unfounded judgment” (TM 271/GW1 275). This semantic passage is important: prejudice is considered false because it has not been legitimated by a secure and objective foundation. But the presupposition that the Enlightenment uses to discredit prejudice is also a prejudice, actually a “‘prejudice against prejudices’” (TM 272/GW1 275). It is completely paradoxical to claim that one can free thought from prejudices by means of another prejudice! Isn’t it necessary to clarify and revise this new prejudice?

Still within the spirit of the Enlightenment, Gadamer criticizes Enlightenment prejudice and exposes it as the inheritance of Cartesian doubt. With its devotion to the ideal of scientific knowledge founded on methodological doubt, Enlightenment prejudice distorts the reality of historical understanding. Here there emerges the question of the ultimate foundation, which begins to shows itself as impossible in light of the finitude of human existence. Whether prejudice stems from respect for others’ authority or from one’s own “hastiness,” in any case the Enlightenment demands that tradition should be judged without prejudice before the tribunal of reason. By taking up this abstract alternative between tradition and reason, Romanticism strengthens belief in the overcoming of myth by logos, though it does this in an opposite direction, hence traditionalist and conservative.¹⁰

Historical science, which claims to know the world of the past objectively, takes its start from the Romantic reaction, but ultimately also from the Enlightenment. This convergence “simply indicates that the same break with the continuity of meaning in tradition lies behind both traditions” (TM 275/GW1 280). One believes in the possibility of a subject who forgets that the interpreter belongs to what is being interpreted and elevates itself above history, above historical tradition, and above its own prejudices. In such a way, the subject, becoming a mirror of itself, would know and judge with objective rationality. Yet this would mean not wanting to admit that human reason—as Kant has had taught us—far from being absolute, is finite and historical.

“Subjectivity is only a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being” (TM 276–277/GW1 281).

For Gadamer, rehabilitating prejudice does not mean praising prejudice. We can and should become conscious of our own prejudices. However much consciousness is critically trained, it can never be perfected. If this were not this case, one would fall back into the errors of the Enlightenment. Can a distinction at least be made between true and false prejudices? Truth and Method raises this question, but it remains unanswered because it is posed badly and still suffers from the epistemological paradigm of knowledge. If a criterion for distinguishing prejudice can be found, then it follows that prejudice can be eliminated. Ultimately the negative connotation of prejudice has an impact on Gadamer’s argument, too, and prevents him from designating it as a positive limit. Although it is a key concept in Truth and Method it is scarcely mentioned later, and his treatment of prejudice does not open the way to a radically new interpretation of the limits.

One of the criteria that Gadamer mentions to distinguish between true and false prejudices is “temporal distance” (TM 296/GW1 301). For him, an interpretation becomes generally accepted over time on the basis of its fruitfulness. How should one distinguish otherwise between authentic art and art that only corresponds to the taste of the moment? But even if temporal distance plays a role in understanding, it cannot be seen as the only criterion of distinction—Gadamer himself later changes his thesis and the text accordingly.¹¹ What had been overvalued was the filter formed by temporal distance. Gadamer is right when he does not conceive of temporal distance as an abyss to be jumped over, but rather as a type of continuity that makes understanding possible. Temporal distance does not, however, solve the question of the legitimacy of judgments and prejudices regarding contemporary works. Indeed, it can actually have the opposite effect and consolidate the less valid interpretations while obscuring the more valid ones. Thus in past times entire passages were stricken from classical works because they were seen as inappropriate, not to mention the stories of peoples that exist only orally, or generations from which not even a memory remains. Tradition can also have a concealing effect.

5. The Voices of Tradition

What is tradition in the first place, and what role does it play in understanding? The rediscovery of tradition is perhaps the most misunderstood chapter of hermeneutics. It is quite possible that the way in which Gadamer describes it in Truth and Method, where he connects the concept of “tradition” with “authority” and the “classical,” has led to many mistaken misunderstandings (TM 277–290/GW1 281–295).

In his argument Gadamer further describes the hermeneutic circle. With the term “prejudice” Gadamer names the fore-understanding from which understanding takes its start. It is clear, however, that other fore-understandings must come into play in the circle, not only those of the one understanding, but also those of the one being understood. To be sure, it is not easy to make a clear distinction between the one and the other, because prejudices are for their part a form of tradition, often the very form that tradition takes in understanding.

As is the case with prejudice, the rehabilitation of tradition by no means includes an apology for or a defense of its effects. It would be a grave misunderstanding to take Gadamer’s position as mere traditionalism.¹² Rather, by “tradition” one should understand the immemorial present in understanding, and this refers to two meanings that are bound together. On the one hand, it points to the impossibility of the one understanding to freely avail itself of the immemorial, which is made up of all the fore-understandings sedimented in the tradition. On the other hand, it refers to the lack of an ultimate foundation. The very enduring influence of tradition shows how superfluous the notion of an ultimate foundation is outside the framework of logical-mathematical knowledge. “This is precisely what we call tradition: the ground of their validity” (TM 281/GW1 285). Here Gadamer does not claim that what happens according to tradition has a grounding validity. This would be a traditionalist position. On the contrary, he wants to say that not everything that has been done according to tradition can be brought back to an ultimate foundation. In every founding act tradition always plays a role, insofar as that which belongs to the act has a groundless validity. The foundation presupposes the tradition—not the reverse. As we will see, language, the form in which tradition takes shape and is transmitted, not only shows this clearly but also calls into question every claim for an ultimate foundation.¹³

How can tradition assert itself, though, if it does not have rational validity arising from an ultimate foundation? It is true that tradition can assert itself without being more closely tested by reason—at least not consciously. But it is just as true that it would be a mistake to see tradition as an irrational and authoritarian power. Tradition appears this way only when it is opposed, as in the Enlightenment, to abstract reason. Gadamer disputes precisely this opposition. He disputes it in the first place because such an opposition does not consider how much tradition there already is in human reason, which is finite and historical. In addition, the opposition between reason and tradition does not take into account how much reason flows in tradition. In this regard Gadamer writes of a tradition “freely taken over” (TM 280/GW1 285). He is not referring to the gesture of a separated consciousness that appropriates tradition, taking it up as an object, and submitting it to the critical examination of instrumental reason. For this kind of reason, which claims it can control and dominate the order of things as well as history, tradition counts as a corrective. And this is because it marks its limits. Considered more closely, however, the one cannot do without the other. Reason cannot do without tradition, because it is precisely tradition that forms the most fundamental ground of all rational projects and all linear foundations. Tradition cannot do without reason, either, because it needs the free assent of reason in order to perpetuate itself. Its “inertia” alone will not suffice (TM 281/GW1 286).¹⁴ In this sense we should speak of a rationality of tradition, which persists insofar as it renews itself through reason.

Continuity is not at all self-evident and requires confirmation again and again. Many examples of this could be given, yet it should suffice to think of the consent we give to traditional forms of greetings or thanks. When an English speaker says, “You’re welcome,” he not only uses a formula but carries on a tradition whose rationality he recognizes and supports, even if only unintentionally and almost by chance. It is an exaggeration to speak of this recognition as an “act,” since it almost never occurs as a conscious act. Gadamer wants to emphasize that reason has an effect not only by renewing or overthrowing, but also by preserving. Preservation is simply less striking than renewal or overthrow. Thus, for example, whatever is preserved enjoys a certain authority. This is something that, according to Gadamer, neither Jaspers nor Krüger had seen. Just as personal authority is recognized by an act of freedom and reason, so too “an authority that is nameless,” that is, tradition, is also recognized (TM 280/GW1 285). There is no irrationality here: instead the authority of tradition is accepted insofar as the transmission process continues. A tradition whose authority appears to be questionable will soon die out, unless it can maintain itself with repressive restoration or as a kind of folklore.

The importance hermeneutics gives to the concept of “transmission,” in relation to “tradition,” should be clear. For hermeneutics there is no tradition without transmission, since a tradition that cannot be transmitted will rigidify and perish. Tradition should not be understood as static, because it is the historical process of transmitting the past.¹⁵ The accent lies on the dynamic relationship that binds the past to historical consciousness. Gadamer writes: “we are always situated within traditions” (TM 282/ GW1 286). This means that we partake in an uninterrupted dialogue through which tradition can perpetuate itself; and secondly, that even our Being is defined by this participation, or shown to be finite. What runs through our historical consciousness is a “variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard” (TM 294/GW1 289). Our consciousness, as historical, is not intimate and private but deeply foreign, because of the voices from the past that we harbor within. On the other hand, we can participate in the dialogue of tradition only by articulating these voices from the past anew, again and again. In this way we concretize the past, which, according to Gadamer, exists only “in the multifariousness of such voices” (TM 284/GW1 289). In determining the concept of transmission Gadamer also determines the concept of participating, which he calls “participating in a common meaning,” and particularly in terms of a linguistically articulated and articulable meaning (TM 292/GW1 297). In this way he shows the always open mediation between “familiarity and strangeness,” “the play” between familiarity and strangeness, as “the true locus of hermeneutics” (TM 295/GW1 300).

In order to illuminate how the mediation between the past and the present is to be understood, Gadamer chooses the example of the classical. The concept of the classical, taken from Hegel but also from Curtius, carries both a normative and a historical value. Classical is what has reached such a perfection that it becomes a model to be imitated. This normative value has to a large extent been erased by historicism, which emphasizes only its historical value. Without adopting the solution from historicism, but also without falling back into an unhistorical way of thinking, Gadamer stresses that a normative element always remains in historical consciousness. Yet the normative value of the “classical” is never “suprahistorical”: even if it cannot be identified with an epoch or with a style, what reaches its peak in the classical is “a notable mode of being historical” (TM 287/GW1 292).

In the destructive passing of time the classical retains something that is not past from the past with an ever-renewing preservation, and raises it to a timeless present that is contemporary to every time. In bearing witness to the past, but also turning to the present, the classical mediates between past and present. Here Gadamer asks whether the classical, beyond the liminal case that it represents, does not reveal the mediation between past and present that lies at the base of all understanding: “Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated” (TM 290/GW1 295).

6. Wirkungsgeschichte: The Blind Labor of History

The concept of effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) is the central point around which the theoretical part of Truth and Method turns. After he overcomes the instrumentalism of historical consciousness, Gadamer spends the rest of the book exploring the consequences for historical and linguistic experience that arise from the new consciousness of effective history.

Yet what does “effective history” mean? The expression was already widespread in the literary criticism of the nineteenth century. It refers to the auxiliary discipline that deals with the reception of a work and, above all, with the interpretations that have arisen in the reception.¹⁶ The various ways in which—in the course of the century—texts have been read and events interpreted demonstrate the productivity of history. Every text, every event, takes on a new meaning and shows a new side, each time according to the expectations raised by the historical context but also according to the previous interpretations. Let me provide a few examples. We do not know, of course, exactly how Hegel assessed Plato, but we certainly view Plato differently now on the basis of Hegel’s readings. And we look with different eyes, more with the eyes of the vanquished than of the victor, on an experience like the conquest of America. In short: in order to study a work or an event it is necessary to take into account its effects in history. Thus historicism has a great interest in the history of effect and its effectiveness. But historicism is led by the naive intention of separating the original work from its reception, in order to study it in a completely objective manner.

Historical consciousness seems more enlightened on this point than the Enlightenment. It renounces the belief in progress and drops the aim of understanding the course of history rationally, since the course of history is to a certain extent foreign to reason. Instead it proceeds from the viewpoint of historical consciousness. Gadamer uses his principle of effective history to criticize the presumptuousness of this way of thinking.

In order to understand this turning point in philosophical hermeneutics, one must dwell on the complex meaning of this phrase, “effective history.” It is important in the first place to recognize that “effective history” means not only the “history of effects,” or the history of the reception, which is studied and known as such. Gadamer is trying to assert something far more fundamental with his concept. In order to grasp it, one should consider that an “effect” (Wirkung) is not only the result of an activity, but also refers to the activity itself. “Effect” is a synonym for “having an effect” or “bringing something about”—in the sense of operating or working (Wirken). “Effective history” thus has a double meaning. On the one hand, it points to a product: for example the various interpretations of the Bible, which can be seen as the effects of history or as the product of its work completed over the course of centuries.¹⁷ On the other hand, it also points to an activity, in particular to the blind and quiet workings of history, which has no telos and which often remains unnoticed and concealed, nearly unconscious or in any case “more being than consciousness” (GW2 247/RHT 329). The work of history gathers Hegelian negativity into itself, which is a kind of suffering and undergoing, a labor like that of birth. But from this very negativity, history brings forth unexpected fruits that carry the traces of the negative within them. In its work history is constantly active, writing and inscribing the traces that make the past legible, and nevertheless irrevocably absent.

It is along this path that history reaches us; we do not remain unscathed. The workings of history penetrate us far more deeply than our consciousness can absorb. This is what “effect” means: that history works above and beyond the consciousness we can have of it. To put it differently: history subjects us to its effects and contaminates us in our supposed intimacy, so that what is our own appears foreign, and what is foreign appears to us as our own (TM 301/GW1 306). Effective history is the constant “interweaving” of history and effects. Consciousness is drawn into and embedded in this process. The web woven by history also works when we neither sense nor even suspect anything. Consciousness will never be able to detach itself from such an impenetrable entanglement, for it actually penetrates consciousness itself and is its substance. For this reason, consciousness is never transparent and pure, but rather opaque and contaminated. It is historically effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtseins), that is, a consciousness that knows that it has been produced, worked out, and tormented by history (TM 302/GW1 307). It cannot withdraw from the multiple effects of history because it can never reach the outside of history, from which it might observe the process. More than acting, it seems to be a suffering, dragged and drawn into that “interplay” which Gadamer has described as the hermeneutic circle (TM 293/ GW1 298).

In order to articulate the concept of historically effected consciousness more closely, it is necessary to distinguish at least two different meanings. The first meaning is determined by the objective genitive. This consciousness knows of its historicity; it knows that it is always situated. It involves a “consciousness of the hermeneutic situation” (TM 302/GW1 307). The existential nuance can be heard quite clearly here and is underscored by the concept of the “situation,” which Gadamer adapts from Jaspers’s philosophy. Such consciousness knows both that it belongs to the horizon of an epoch and that it finds itself at a particular point in time and space: the site of its own situation, which it can leave only by moving to another situation, without being able to overcome its situatedness. Here it is not a matter of objective knowledge but rather of “illumination,” to use another word from Jaspers. Proceeding from its own situation, this consciousness knows that: “To be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete” (TM 302/GW1 307). Complete self-knowledge is impeded by history, since history never lets itself be integrated into an absolute subject. Historically effected consciousness knows, in other words, that in every understanding, especially in all self-understanding, history is at work. It is not only determined, limited, and defined by history, but also delivered over to the infinity of understanding. But what limits consciousness is at the same time its opportunity. The work of history does not lock us into the one-sidedness of an insurmountable point of view. At the same time that it spins us into the web, which it is ceaselessly weaving, it opens consciousness to the possibility of an endless dialogue with tradition.

The second meaning of “historically effected consciousness” concerns the subjective genitive. In this case one can say metaphorically that history has consciousness of itself, in as much as consciousness is the result of its working. Here Hegel’s conception of history can be perceived, and has led to the suspicion that Gadamer ontologizes history: as if history were a kind of autonomous power, a gigantic consciousness meant to encompass all other consciousness, like a new version of Heidegger’s history of Being. Read this way, the history of effects would be a long monologue, culminating in the absolute spirit. On the contrary, Gadamer would rather “retrace the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind” (TM 302/GW1 307). The metaphorical meaning of the genitive refers to a communal consciousness that is produced by the work of history and that, therefore, goes beyond subjective consciousness. To the latter is not denied a dialogical interaction, but its beyond is also its limit. Here is perhaps the most important effect produced by the workings of history: to indicate the limit of modern consciousness, that is, its impossibility of being self-consciousness.

Perhaps one should give this consciousness, which knows less about itself but more about its own limits, another name. This would have the advantage, among other things, of avoiding the idealistic connotations that remain in the concept of consciousness. The name that Gadamer suggests and develops, above all in his later writings, is “vigilance” (Wachsamkeit). Instead of being-conscious (Bewusst-Sein), philosophical hermeneutics chooses to speak of being-vigilant (Wachsam-Sein).¹⁸

Already in the first edition of Truth and Method Gadamer spoke of a “task” that he related to a “process of understanding.” It is the task of combining past and future, which occurs in history as the “fusion of horizons” (TM 306–307/GW1 311–312). Yet the word “task” has given rise to numerous mistaken interpretations. Many interpreters have spoken of a “task of understanding,” as if understanding were a methodological exercise or a moral duty for hermeneutics. But in the 1986 edition, Gadamer made a major alteration: the word “task” (Aufgabe) is replaced by the word Wachheit, or “alertness” (TM 307/GW1 312; the English retains “task”). Consciousness that knows about the work of history, and knows that history works within it, is alert and awake to the fusion of horizons.

With the concepts of “vigilance” or “alertness” it becomes possible to clarify what Gadamer means by his “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung). Situatedness means to be bound to a point in time and space, which limits our vision. As Husserl first showed, followed by Heidegger and Jaspers, the word “horizon” from the Greek refers to the movable circle that limits everything that is visible to be seen from a particular point. It characterizes the limit that moves with us when we move. Thus one speaks of more or less limited horizons, the range of horizons, and the opening of new horizons (TM 302–307/GW1 307–308). Understanding can be seen as the encounter, inscribed into a particular historical constellation, between two horizons. Historicism conceptualizes this encounter as the self-transposition of consciousness into the past. It claims to be able to step out of the horizon of the present, in order to transpose itself into the horizon of the past, and appropriate that horizon to itself. In this way, whoever understands appears to have reached a position of objective neutrality. Gadamer’s doubts about such a view concern not only this position but also the very possibility of separating horizons from each other, as if they were closed horizons. For him, all this is nothing more than an abstraction. On the one hand, the horizons move and we move with them, so that even the horizon of the past does not lie fixed but moves in the articulation of a new present. On the other hand, the boundaries between them are certainly not clear. One horizon fades into another and thus forms a movable horizon, which encompasses the depth of history out of which human life is lived and which can be defined as “heritage and tradition” (TM 304/GW1 310). Thus, horizons are not separable, but simply distinguishable. Their encounter emerges as a “fusing of horizons,” which for Gadamer has not only a horizontal but also a vertical dimension (TM 307/GW1 312). As such, it is a “rising to a higher universality,” in which the boundaries of each horizon are surpassed or expanded, and thereby elevated as well (TM 305/GW1 310). The movement of eyes, which rise from what is close by to look into the distance, exemplify well this rising in which we take up a new point of view. Here both horizons, one’s own and the other’s, are changed.¹⁹

7. Understanding Means Application

What role does application play? Gadamer looks to the history of classical hermeneutics for his answer. Prior to Schleiermacher, application was an integrating component in the process of interpretation. Gadamer refers to Pietism, in particular to Johann Jacob Rambach (1693–1735)—where a subtilitas applicandi is placed side by side with the subtilitas intelligenti and the subtilitas explicandi.²⁰ Gadamer draws attention first to the word subtilitas, which can be translated as a “finesse of mind” (TM 307/GW1 312). With this phrase he wants to emphasize that understanding is not a procedure governed by rules, but rather an ability that in rhetoric might be called subtlety or, better, astuteness. As Vico taught, these qualities of mind go hand in hand with tradition and common sense.²¹ In the hermeneutics of sacred texts the moment of understanding requires a moment of interpretation, and interpretation for its part requires application. How would it be possible to understand sacred texts, or even to interpret them, without applying them to the contemporary situation? Is it not precisely the application that provides evidence of the enacted understanding?

Gadamer has a twofold aim: first he would like to recuperate application, which was excluded by Romanticism and even more so by post-Romantic epistemology. Second, he wants to depict understanding, interpretation, and application not as separate but as constitutive moments of a unified process.²² Application does not simply come after, but is rather the cornerstone of, understanding. “Understanding here is always application” (TM 309/GW1 314).²³ If it cannot be translated into practice, then the understanding is no understanding at all. Gadamer’s return to the concept of applicatio, or application, entails a paradigm shift in hermeneutics: the cognitive value becomes secondary, as the practical value of understanding comes to the fore. This paradigm shift also leads to a change in which discipline becomes the paradigm, since it is no longer the historical-philological form of interpretation but the theological and legal forms of hermeneutics that matter. The case of the interpreter who interprets sacred texts by applying them to the present is by no means a limit case. On the contrary, this approach exemplifies every form of understanding. For Gadamer, recuperating the concept of application means to proceed from theological and legal hermeneutics in order to rethink philology and historiography. This new model should show, once and for all, that hermeneutics is not a form of domination or mastery but a form of service. This is shown in the application of the divine word or the will of the law. All these are forms of interpretation in which application involves applying oneself, a concentration or dedication that almost involves a devotional attitude to what ought to be given in its validity (TM 311/GW1 316).

8. The Exemplary Practice of Legal Hermeneutics

“Practical” hermeneutics makes clear on the one hand the relation between the universal and the particular in the processes of interpretation and application, and on the other hand the value of application. Yet legal hermeneutics has been separated from the other hermeneutic disciplines because—if taken merely as an auxiliary discipline to the law—it has little to do with historical understanding. Gadamer questions this separation. What is the difference between the lawyer or the judge and the legal historian? Gadamer refers here to Betti, who had emphasized the difference between these examples (TM 325–328/GW1 330–332).

In contrast to the legal historian, whose primary task is to grasp the original meaning of a law, the judge, according to Betti, applies the law to the individual case. The assumption here is that the original meaning is self-evident, and that it is just as self-evident that the meaning could be applied to various circumstances. The starting and end points are, to be sure, different respectively, but the hermeneutic path is the same. The judge begins with the individual case, and operates with practical or normative aims in mind. The historian does not proceed from an individual case, but attempts to capture the meaning of the law with a theoretical or descriptive aim.

At the same time, though, the lawyer should also behave like the historian and the historian like the lawyer. They have in common the understanding of the law, which, on the basis of the historicity of the understanding, always mediates between past and present, in other words always involves an application. Even the historian cannot avoid mediating between past and present when studying a law—whether it is in effect or not—simply because the interpreter cannot ignore their own situatedness. Beyond that, the historian cannot avoid the question of application in understanding the law. The so-called meaning of the law is not an abstract, self-identical universal; it is the meaning that the law has acquired through the diverse concrete cases in which it has been applied. For this very reason the historian should take into account all the applications of the law, up to and including the present ones. But in applying the law to the present, the historian is doing nothing different from what the lawyer does. For his part, the lawyer, applying the law to the individual case, understands its sense hitherto, thus mediating between past and present. The lawyer also always behaves, in other words, like a historian.

Understanding means “to concretize the law,” and in this way involves its application (TM 329/GW1 335). In light of legal hermeneutics it becomes clear that application should not be confused with a “kind of logical technique of subsumption,” which would subsume the particular under the universal.²⁴ It is rather the case of a concretization that amounts to a “creative supplementing of the law” (TM 329/GW1 335). Because it is not a logical-mathematical procedure, but rather a historical event, the application proves to be productive or creative; it always involves a reproductive overcoming. It moves from the universal to the particular, from the identical to the different, from the abstract to the concrete. Here the application can be seen in close proximity to art, for example music, where the reproductive interpretation is inseparable from the work.²⁵ It is not by chance that Gadamer introduces in this context a “hermeneutic identity,” which is open to the future and occurs only in the temporality of its ongoing self-differentiation. Application is thus simply another, more comprehensive, designation for what is called performance in art.

9. The Creativity of Application and the Unity of Hermeneutic Disciplines

In these ways Gadamer expands the limits of understanding. His intention is to restore the unity of the hermeneutic disciplines. Where should such a unity be found? It appears neither in the universality of the process of understanding nor in historical consciousness, and even less so in the objective considerations of philology. The application, as the “task of mediating between then and now, between the Thou and the I,” is the thread that joins hermeneutic disciplines to each other (TM 333/GW1 339).²⁶

Even in theological hermeneutics the kerygma, or the proclamation of the Gospel, must be repeated in order to be effective, just like the concretization of the law. In other words, “the proclamation cannot be detached from its fulfillment.” However, there is the important distinction that in the relation of the human to the divine law the latter retains its “absolute priority” in interpretation (TM 331/GW1 336).

Application is at work in every understanding, even those of philological and historical hermeneutics. From this perspective Gadamer criticizes not only the view of objectivity that dominates the historical-philological realm, but also the claim to universality in historiography. In the course of the nineteenth century, historiography relied on the philological model that understanding could be achieved by moving from the individual to the whole, and as a product of the whole—even though the whole is never given in history. If we can speak of the philologization of historiography, we could just as well speak of the historicization of philology. “The philologist is a historian” (TM 337/GW1 342). He interprets texts not by following what they want to express, but by looking for what their expression “betrays”: the texts are “understood in terms of not only what they say, but what they exemplify.” In other words, they are read as the testimonies of a great narrative of history (TM 336/GW1 342).

The model of objectivity thus becomes inappropriate both for philology and for historiography, because in both cases understanding involves application. The philologist reads texts for what they say to him, and this reading is a reproductive interpretation—just as every reading is always an application. The same goes for the “fact,” which the historian examines in its meaning, which obviously arises from its historical effect (TM 340/GW1 344). In short: the past, which presents itself to the historian, is already the result of the work of history; it is the result of an application that not even the historian can escape. Where would his questions come from, if not from their belonging to a past to which he would like to give voice? The historian, too, performs an application that is not, however, related to the individual text but to the collective unity of historical tradition. Here we might return to the metaphor of reading. The historian reads “the great book of world history” by mediating with the present time of his own life, which is just as understood or transformed as the book itself (TM 339/GW1 345). “Understanding proves itself to be a kind of effect [Wirkung] and knows itself as such” (TM 341/GW1 346). In the historically effected consciousness common to all understanding, Gadamer sees the possibility of restoring the unity of the hermeneutic disciplines.

10. The Magic Spell of Hegelian Reflection and the Remains of Finitude

When we speak of historically effected consciousness there are many questions that gather around the word “consciousness.” Gadamer himself asks: “But what sort of consciousness is this?” (TM 341/GW1 347). The question inevitably brings up the problem of reflexivity, which seems to be implied in every form of consciousness. At this point a confrontation with Hegel and his “reflective philosophy” becomes unavoidable (TM 341–346/GW1 346–351).

Hegel’s particular contribution should be recognized: he saw that history is not only the object of research, but the constitution of consciousness itself. Consciousness develops its own effective history and in the process becomes self-consciousness. Hermeneutics, too, culminates in historically effected consciousness reflecting on itself. Should we thus understand hermeneutic consciousness as a new version of Hegelian self-consciousness? Facing this question, Gadamer is forced to take a decisive position in order to preserve “the truth of Hegel’s thought” against the reflexive and totalizing aspirations of his system (TM 342/GW1 348). In a word, he must break the “magic spell” of reflective philosophy.

The concept of “reflective philosophy” refers to Hegel’s claim to cancel, preserve, and elevate history in consciousness. But the expression “reflective philosophy” is ambiguous and says even more. Hegel had already used it to reproach Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte for having remained within the domain of subjectivity. Gadamer, for his part, turns this criticism against Hegel, arguing that Hegel overlooked the effects history has on consciousness. For Gadamer, Hegel resolved history in the truth of absolute consciousness. It is this “absolute mediation of history and truth” that hermeneutics wants to escape (TM 341/GW1 347). The danger lies in the absoluteness of a consciousness whose reflection solves and resolves any immediacy opposed to it, thereby achieving a complete identification of history with historical consciousness. By contrast, the hermeneutic concept of historically effected consciousness avoids such an absolute identification. In historically effected consciousness, the immediacy of historical conditions is never transformed by reflection to the point of transparency. With his description of a consciousness that cannot be self-transparent but must instead remain vigilant, Gadamer develops his effective history as a way of limiting the “omnipotence of reflection” in Hegel (TM 342/GW1 348).

Here appears the question of the limit, which runs through all of philosophical hermeneutics and which makes hermeneutics a philosophy of infinite finitude.²⁷ The question arises with the search for the “Archimedean point” that allows us to unhinge reflective philosophy (TM 344/GW1 349). In this respect one should underline the distance separating Gadamer from other philosophers in the twentieth century who pursue a similar aim. It suffices to mention the tradition of Jewish philosophy that runs from Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) to Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–95). For Gadamer, the “Archimedean point” does not lie in the difference between “the I and the you” that this tradition emphasizes. According to Gadamer, Hegel had already met the objections later used against him, through the form of Spirit described in the Phenomenology. There seems no position that cannot immediately be integrated into the absolute mediation of reflection: none of the examples of immediacy—whether of being, the body, you, or the relations of production—have immediacy in themselves. They all involve a process of reflection. The lever to unhinge Hegel’s philosophy would not be, for Gadamer, simply another kind of immediacy. Rather, it would be the remnant that remains unresolved between history and historical consciousness, which arises for finite human consciousness seeking a path to infinity—to that “bad infinity” which Gadamer, who remains true to Hegel here, understands not only as “an untruth” but also as “a truth” (RAS 40/GW4 465; TM 344/GW1 350). Here Gadamer must read Hegel against the grain and reawaken a need in Hegelian philosophy that had been silenced by Absolute Spirit. It is finitude that breaks the magic spell of reflective philosophy by introducing a rift into total dialectical mediation. Finitude prevents totalization, blocks perfection, forbids the completion of becoming, and denies both the absolute and absolutism. The concept of infinite finitude is the line that delimits Gadamer’s with respect to Hegel’s.²⁸

11. Relativism and Self-Contradiction: Attempts to Take Philosophy by Surprise

Hermeneutics has drawn two fundamental criticisms: one of relativism and the other of self-contradiction. Taken together, according to Gadamer, both simply represent new forms of the old reflective philosophy. They amount to reflective philosophy in a new guise. This explains, at least in part, why he treats these criticisms with a certain nonchalance. Of course behind this nonchalance there is perhaps irritation, insofar as hermeneutics had already answered these objections. In reality, hermeneutics understands itself as asking the prior question, which aims to dismantle the foundation on which these criticisms have been built.

The charge of relativism can be easily summarized: if historically effected consciousness can never be separated from its own historicity, is it not fundamentally relative? From this position it is a short step to the claim that, for hermeneutics, everything is relative. It would be an even shorter step to the assumption that everything is excusable. According to the charge, hermeneutics exposes itself to a dangerous risk. Yet the real aim of the accusation is to sow anxiety and uneasiness, so that the consequences of abandoning an absolute standpoint might be highlighted over adopting a relative one. Here lies a mistake that hermeneutics cannot accept. The abandonment of the absolute in no way implies the absolutism of the relative. Whoever affirms this view simply proceeds from an absolute and absolutistic conception of truth, which actually derives from an ultimate foundation. The charge of relativism can be raised only from the position of absolute truth. The reason why this is so irritating is because it overlooks the actual hermeneutic project: to call into question the very idea of an ultimate foundation. Whoever does not dispense with a fundamentum inconcussum denies finitude, suppresses all its forms, and sees in them only a limit that should be overcome on the way to absolute truth. As against this negative view of the limit, however, hermeneutics posits a positive one. The limit is not only what concludes and brings to a conclusion, but also what opens the horizon of a new truth.²⁹ It is a grave misunderstanding to take the basic experience of historicity as mere relativism. To put it more radically: the charge of relativism can arise only within reflection. Refuting the charge would already mean buying into the empty dizziness of its mirages. By contrast, hermeneutics opens up a path that leads to the dismantling of the metaphysical idol of absolute truth.

The second charge claims that hermeneutics ends in self-contradiction because it emphasizes the historicity of understanding. Yet this is simply a newer version of the classical argument against the skeptic. The victorious tone of those who raise this objection is just as irritating as the derisory tone of those who level the charge of relativism. In both cases, which are closely linked to each other, one presumes to dispense with a philosophy on the basis of two sentences. The charge of self-contradiction, especially, is raised in a very unphilosophical way that recalls what Heidegger and then Gadamer, too, called an “attempt to bowl one over” (BT 210/SZ 229; the English has it as “overturn”; TM 344/GW1 350). It is very doubtful whether philosophy has anything to do with victories of this kind. Although the argument is formally uncontroversial, it rebounds not only on the one who argues this way but also on the truth claim of the corresponding argumentation. In reality, it dispenses with all philosophical development. Gadamer compares such “empty reflection” to sophism, in particular to the plausible but sterile conclusions of the Sophists. It takes refuge in formalism in order to avoid seeing the historical character of understanding. Yet at the same time it fails to notice that, when it negates historicity, historicity is actually being recognized and confirmed in its universality. The ultimate goal of an absolute claim to truth is to cling to a truth outside of time and space, a truth that is absolute because it has been freed from every condition that would condition it, from every limit that would delimit it, and from every barrier that would constrain it or show it to be finite. But the truth that it claims is absolute only because it absolutizes its own limits. It claims its own standpoint as the unconditioned viewpoint: it is the truth of one’s reflection that reflects itself to itself, and mirrors itself back to itself.

Hermeneutics certainly does not strive for absolute truth. It insists, rather, on human finitude. Can it really escape its own finite conditionality, by recognizing that it cannot maintain itself without contradiction, as the argument from reflective philosophy would have it? Obviously not. If this were the case, then finitude would have to become a new absolute, an absolute that, however, cannot guarantee absolute truth. But does one really fall into self-contradiction by remembering finitude? Speaking of finitude in no way eliminates the finite. The argument from reflection is not “in place,” for it is not a matter of logical relation but of the “relationships of life” (TM 448/GW1 452). It is precisely for this reason that hermeneutics does not fall into a contradiction: it simply limits itself to speaking of finitude with the finite tenses and words in which the experience of truth occurs for people. A truth that does not satisfy this condition humana no longer contains any truth for us. This also holds for the truths of the sciences, for in order to be understandable, even these truths must be articulated in the language of a certain epoch. Hermeneutics, for its part, knows very well that it cannot escape finitude, and it also knows that it is nothing more than a temporary answer to the question of absolute truth posed by its age. Since it does not abstract itself from the constellation in which it was written, and does not look away from its own historicallinguistic context, hermeneutics does not try to formulate this conditionality in theoretically universal assertions. Instead it prefers to unfold itself within the limits of the dialogue in which it takes part. Only dialogue suits a hermeneutic consciousness that does not forget its finitude and holds itself open for what is beyond its own limits, that is, for the other.

12. Experiencing the Limit: The Openness of Hermeneutic Consciousness

In order to clarify the openness that characterizes hermeneutic consciousness in contrast to the closed quality of reflective philosophy, Gadamer devotes many pages of Truth and Method to the concept of “experience” (Erfahrung) (TM 346–362/GW1 352–368).³⁰ Later he repeatedly highlights these pages as offering the “key position” for the entire work (TM xxxv/GW2 445). Reconstructing the conceptual history becomes for him the occasion for a confrontation with many philosophers: from Aristotle to Bacon, from Hegel to Husserl and Heidegger.³¹ But it is a verse from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon that provides an exemplary model for the hermeneutic concept of experience: páthei máthos, “learning through suffering” (TM 356/GW1 362).³² What does experience mean for hermeneutics? Why does every experience amount to a hermeneutic experience?

Experience should first be distinguished from a scientific experiment: to experience does not mean to experiment. An experiment is carried out in a laboratory according to an inductive method and is controlled, verified, and confirmed—until proven otherwise. Its success lies in its confirmation, which depends on the possibility of repeating it, but which also suppresses all historicity. The enforcement of the scientific paradigm has relegated experience to an experiment, and it is precisely this relegation that Gadamer criticizes. Husserl had already grasped the idealization of the experiment, but he then outlined a genealogy of experience within the lifeworld that comes very close to the scientific experiment. At least since Bacon and his experimental method, scientific experience has been seen from a teleological perspective: the télos, the goal of experience lies only in whether “it ends in knowledge” (TM 350/GW1 355).

In order to escape this perspective, one has to look for other philosophical models. Gadamer finds them in Aristotle and Hegel. When Aristotle describes experience, empeiría, he uses the famous image of a fleeing army that gradually comes to a standstill and listens again to the arché—here one should bear in mind the dual meaning of the Greek word: as “principle” and as “command.”³³ Our perceptions form a river like the fleeing army. Although they are fleeing and isolated at first, they repeat themselves, finally coming to a standstill and unifying themselves around the new command that science represents. This image illustrates the transition from perception to the universal truth of the concept. Experience plays a mediating role between perception and concept, and it is experience that ultimately leads to the transition. Experience retains perceptions on the basis of what they have in common—the empeiría is always bound up with the mnéme, which is in turn linked to the lógos. Experience unifies perceptions and concepts into universality, which actually foreshadows the universality of science. But it differs from the universality of science, too: it is a universality at once open to and inseparable from experienced perceptions. This universality, which must be distinguished from the abstract, universal concept of science, shows the constitutive openness of experience, which is always changing and transformable (TM 350–353/ GW1 356–358).³⁴

Yet this image has one defect: it proceeds from the assumption that, before fleeing, the army had been standing still. It does not account, however, for the process of experience. Aristotle describes it this way because he has in mind not the process but the final result, or in other words: science. This defect can be turned into an advantage, because it allows a previously overlooked particularity of experience to emerge, namely, its unpredictability. Experience is an event that nobody can control, and that happens in a sudden and inexplicable way.

Here Gadamer introduces his new conception of experience, which is not to be understood as a positive development, neither affirming nor confirming, but as a “negative process” (TM 353–354/GW1 358–359). Experience for him is negation. In the first place, it is the negation of our expectations. Of course this does not mean that there cannot be experiences that meet our expectations, by for example correcting false generalizations. Incidentally, this is the basic principle of trial and error that Karl Popper (1902–94) formulated. Gadamer seems quite close to Popper in this regard; but the distance between them, and this should not be overlooked, lies in the voluntaristic character of Popper’s concept of experience, which robs experience of its “impassioned” and rebellious side.³⁵ Negative experience, which for Gadamer is the “actual” one, is quite different (TM 353/GW1 359). Instead of mastering our experiences we are mastered by them, and in the end we are not so much deranged by them as disoriented. Thus we say, for example: “I had to go through this experience, too.” This means: “I did not expect it and I had to learn.” Perhaps I have learned that things were not quite the way I believed them to be. In a moment everything is changed—and I, too, am changed. I became different in a world become different—I am somewhere else. The etymology of the German word Erfahrung, or “experience,” includes the word Fahrt, or “journey,” which points to this meaning. To have an experience, in German, implies a sort of journeying. Heidegger already identified this connection when he wrote: “To undergo an experience with something—be it a thing, a person, or a god—means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us.”³⁶

The negativity that constitutes experience in this sense is radically different from theoretical knowledge. In order to make this clear, it was necessary for Gadamer to come to terms with Hegel. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, experience is famously described as a “reversal of consciousness itself.”³⁷ Here it is precisely a matter of the transformation produced by an unexpected experience. Hegel views the reversal as a dialectical movement in which consciousness, after it has recognized itself in the other, returns to the certainty of itself. Experience is thereby transcended in absolute self-consciousness. Even when Gadamer, with Hegel, thinks of consciousness dialectically, he cannot follow Hegel’s way, which would bring experience to an end. Gadamer remains consistent in his defense of bad infinity and holds fast to the moment of negativity that translates for him into the constant “openness” (Offenheit) of experience. Precisely because it manifests a constitutive negation, experience remains open and can never, so long as it does not become annulled, end in scientific knowledge (TM 355/ GW1 361).³⁸

On the one hand the openness is the site where experience fulfills itself, but on the other hand it is experience that reestablishes openness: the negative character of experience necessarily brings forth new experiences. “That is why a person who is called experienced has become so not only through experiences but is also open to new experiences” (TM 355/GW1 361). Experience is certainly nothing one can withdraw from in life. Nevertheless, different forms of comportment can be adopted: there are those who will shy away from their experiences by closing off their own horizon; there are others who will accept their experiences, abandon themselves to them, and affirm their situation with the openness to which their finitude has determined them.

Yet if experience is negative, what does one learn? The answer lies in the dictum of Aeschylus: we learn our own limits from experience; we learn to see the limits of our own finitude. “Thus experience is experience of human finitude” (TM 357/GW1 363). Those who are conscious of their own limits know that they are not the masters of their time and future. They know it is not the case that every moment is the right moment, and it is even less the case that everything can be resolved and remedied. They also know that not everything is foreseeable or goes according to plan, because every plan made by a finite being is finite and limited (TM 357/GW1 363).

The more one opens oneself to experience, the more differentiated the consciousness of one’s own finitude becomes, and the more one cultivates one’s judgment. Hermeneutic consciousness is nothing more than the consciousness of one’s own limits. Those who close themselves off from experience, those uneducated ones who make their own standpoint absolute, become satisfied with their own limited horizons, do not see their own limits, and are thus unable to bring themselves beyond their limits. Such people cannot recognize the other and do not need the other. By contrast, hermeneutic consciousness perceives its own limits and is thereby driven to overcome them, which is possible only in and with the other. Reciprocity is thus indispensable for hermeneutic experience. The close connection between openness and finitude becomes especially clear from a positive conception of limit, which is always read as the beyond of the other.³⁹

The experience of the you that Gadamer describes is thus neither the tragic experience of the failure of human finitude nor the moral experience of accepting the other under a communal law. Rather, openness to the otherness of the you is a necessity for hermeneutic consciousness, since for this consciousness the other is the beyond of its own limit, the way out of its own finitude.

Understanding reaches its greatest extension with the concept of experience after that of application. It is no wonder that experience is also involved with tradition and in this context Gadamer speaks of “hermeneutical experience” (TM 358/GW1 363). To understand the past means to experience it in the event of transmission, as a present that has something to say to the future. Historically effected consciousness articulates itself in the enactment of hermeneutic experience and its openness, which in this case is the openness toward tradition. Just as it is important to give voice to the you, so too is it important to listen to the voices of tradition.

Notes

1. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Allgemeine Hermeneutik von 1809/10, ed. Wolfgang Virmond, in Kurt-Viktor Selge, ed., Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongress, Berlin 1984, vol. 2 (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1985), 1270–1310, 1271.

2. Georg Anton Friedrich Ast, “Hermeneutik,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gottfried Boehm, Seminar: Philosophische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1979), 111–130, 116–117.

3. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik, 144.

4. See the essay by Werner Hamacher, “Hermeneutische Ellipsen—Schrift und Zirkel bei Schleiermacher,” in Ulrich Nassen, ed., Texthermeneutik: Geschichte, Aktualität, Kritik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1979), 113–148; see also Jürgen Bolten, “Die hermeneutische Spirale,” Poetica 17 (1985): 355–371; Jean Greisch, “Le cercle et l’ellipse. Le statut de l’herméneutique de Platon à Schleiermacher,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 73 (1989): 161–164.

5. See John Tate, “The Hermeneutic Circle vs. The Enlightenment,” Telos 110 (1998): 283–296; Jaako Hintikka, “Gadamer: Squaring the Hermeneutical Circle,” Revue internationale de philosophie 54 (2000): 487–498.

6. See Odo Marquard, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), 130. Gadamer responded to this position in his essay on “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Ideology-Critique” (RHT 313–334/GW2 232–250). See also the footnote added later at TM 311/GW1, 316–317.

7. Gadamer used both “self-understanding” and “understanding oneself as a self,” which is “misleading,” as he himself admitted. See Gadamer, “Letter to Dallmayr,” in DD (93–101, 97): “Here lies, it seems to me, a false conception of self-understanding. ‘Understanding oneself as a self’ is perhaps a misleading expression, which I have used and which I naturally found in connection with Protestant theology—but also in Heidegger’s linguistic tradition”; “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik” (1988), GW10 138–147 at 142. He had already referred to the religious or Pietistic undertones of this conception of self-understanding. See Gadamer, “Zur Problematik des Selbstverständnisses. Ein hermeneutischer Beitrag zur Frage der ‘Entmythologisierung,’” (1961), GW2 121–132; 125 and 130. The concept of “understanding oneself as a self,” which is “inherited from transcendental idealism,” does not mean a “sovereign, self-mediated being with itself for self-consciousness”; it is rather based on the fact “that we do not understand ourselves, unless before God.” See on this Petra Plieger, Sprache im Gespräch. Studien zum hermeneutischen Sprachverständnis bei Hans-Georg Gadamer (Vienna: WUV, 2000), 207–208.

8. Gadamer later made the significance of “thing” or Sache more precise. See Gadamer, Lesebuch, ed. Jean Grondin (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck [UTB], 1997), 280–295, 285. See also Pavel Kouba, “Die Sache des Verstehens,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 2 (1996): 185–196; 189–190.

9. See in this volume chapter 4, part 2.

10. See in this volume chapter 3, part 10.

11. In the first edition of Truth and Method it reads, “It is only temporal distance . . .,” whereas in the fifth edition from 1986 it says, “Often temporal distance. . . . ” (Compare TM 298 and GW1 304).

12. See in this volume, chapter 10, part 2.

13. See in this volume chapter 8.

14. For some of the problematic contexts in this regard see Bernd Auerochs, “Gadamer über Tradition,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 49 (1995): 294–311.

15. See Hans-Helmuth Gander, “In den Netzen der Überlieferung. Eine hermeneutische Analyse zur Geschichtlichkeit der Erkenntnis,” in Günter Figal, Jean Grondin, and Dennis E. Schmidt, eds., Hermeneutische Wege (Tübingen: Mohr Verlag, 2000), 257–268. See also James Risser, “Interpreting Tradition,” Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology 34 (2003): 297–308.

16. See Karl Robert Mandelkow, “Probleme der Wirkungsgeschichte,” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik 2 (1970): 69–78, 71.

17. See Jean Grondin, “La conscience du travail de l’histoire et le problème de la vérité en herméneutique,” in L’horizon herméneutique de la pensée contemporaine (Paris, Vrin, 1993), 213–233.

18. See in this volume chapter 9, part 5.

19. To be sure: the word “fusion” was not a successful choice. It has led to many criticisms—some justified—since it can cause misunderstanding. In particular, the “fusion” of horizons suggests a process of understanding through which the identity of those who understand, no less than those being understood, can be lost—and obviously, too, the difference between them. This paradigmatic criticism was raised by Stanley Rosen, “Interpretation and Fusion of Horizons: Remarks on Gadamer,” in Rosen, Metaphysics and Ordinary Language (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 182–201; see also Marina Vitkin, “The Fusion of Horizons on Knowledge and Alterity,” Philosophy and Social Research 21 (1995): 57–76.

20. Rambach speaks of applicatio only in the last part of his work. See Johann Jacob Rambach, Institutiones hermeneuticae sacrae, vol. 4, chap. 3: “De sensus inventi adplicatione” (Jena: Hartung, 1723), 804–805. See also Jean-Claude Gens, “La révaluation par Gadamer du concept piétiste d’application,” L’art de comprendre 4 (1996): 24–37.

21. See in this volume chapter 2, part 2.

22. Betti, for example, argued that a text would have to be understood objectively at first and could only then be applied. See in this volume chapter 10, part 1.

23. See Joel C. Weinsheimer, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutic,” 184–199.

24. Gadamer, “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy” (RAS 88–112, 96); “Hermeneutik als praktische Philosophie,” in Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1976), 78–109, 88. See Anthony Kerby, “Gadamer’s Concrete Universal,” Man and World 24 (1991): 49–61.

25. See in this volume chapter 3, parts 6 and 8.

26. Hegel’s influence in this context should not be underestimated. Compare Jeff Mitscherling, “Hegelian Elements in Gadamer’s Notions of Application and Play,” Man and World 25 (1992): 61–67.

27. See in this volume chapter 9, parts 3–4.

28. See in this volume chapter 7, part 6; chapter 9, part 4.

29. See in this volume chapter 9, part 6.

30. See his response to the essay by Robert Sokolowski in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 235. On the concept of “experience,” see John Hogan, “Gadamer and the Hermeneutical Experience,” Philosophy Today 20 (1976): 3–12.

31. For a comparison between the empirical and the hermeneutic concepts of experience, see Friederike Rese, “Expérience et induction chez Aristotle, Bacon et Gadamer,” in Guy Deniau and André Stanguennec, eds., Expérience et herméneutique, Colloque de Nantes, June 2005 (Paris: Le Cercle Herméneutique [Collection Phéno], 2006), 59–78.

32. Compare Aeschylus, Agamemnon: “Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled” (v. 177).

33. See Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, II, 19.

34. On the complexity of the relation between experience and hermeneutics, see Deniau and Stanguennec, Expérience et herméneutique, 191–202.

35. See on this point the remark added by Gadamer at TM 353 and GW1 359. See also Gadamer, “Philosophy or Theory of Science?” (RAS 151–167, 162) and “Philosophie oder Wissenschaftstheorie?” in Vernunft im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft, 125–149, 142–143.

36. Heidegger, “The Nature of Language” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971), 57–108, 57; Unterwegs zur Sprach (Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske, 1959), 149.

37. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 55; Phänomenologie des Geistes. Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1980), 61. On the concept of “experience” between Hegel and Gadamer, see Luis Eduardo Gama, Erfahrung, Erinnerung und Text. Über das Gespräch zwischen Gadamer und Hegel und die Grenzen zwischen Dialektik und Hermeneutik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 42–125.

38. In this way we can speak of the tragic element of hermeneutic experience, but only as long as it remains wordless. See Gerald L. Bruns, “On the Tragedy of Hermeneutical Experience” (RHT 73–89).

39. This close link has been overlooked, for example, by Bormann. See Claus von Bormann, “Die Zweideutigkeit der hermeneutischen Erfahrung,” in Karl Otto Apel, ed., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1971), 83–119.