István M. Fehér
In a highly provocative chapter of his main work, Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer has undertaken what he called a rehabilitation, not only of authority and tradition, but of prejudice as well (Gadamer 1999, 277ff./GW 1, 281ff). Indeed, given the preliminary “recognition that all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice” (Gadamer 1999, 270), it follows that—as he wrote by way of introduction in the first paragraph of that chapter—“it is necessary to fundamentally rehabilitate the concept of prejudice” (ibid., 277). The arguments and considerations which Gadamer put forward here were to raise no small sense of uneasiness and to give rise to passionate debates for decades to come (see, first, Habermas 1971a, 48ff.; Habermas 1971b, 156ff.) The title of the chapter, “Prejudices as Conditions of Understanding,” is, in fact, a challenge in itself. In a succinct form, it formulates the highly controversial—indeed rather shocking and seemingly outrageous—thesis according to which prejudices are not to be regarded—as is commonly thought—as an obstacle, hindrance, or impediment for understanding. On the contrary, in actual fact, they are the very conditions that make understanding possible at all. This claim implies that: unless we had prejudices we would not be able to understand anything; the fact that we have them enables us to get around and cope with our world in terms of performing the specific operation called understanding. In short, while according to the modern view, in order to understand we have to be exempt/free from prejudices, according to Gadamer’s contrary view, in order to understand we have to possess prejudices.
In what follows, I propose to reconstruct and make sense of Gadamer’s position with regard to the concept of prejudice in its relation to several neighboring, that is, related concepts, such as, first of all, pre-understanding, with an eye also to his view of authority and tradition (the first two sections of this chapter). In the final step (the third section), I wish to show how Gadamer’s treatment of the issue was anticipated and indeed delineated by Heidegger.
From early on, the assumption has been formulated within Gadamerian scholarship that the “and” in the title of his masterwork has not so much the meaning of a linking together—as is obviously the case with, for example, Heidegger’s Being and Time—as rather of an opposition, so that truth is brought into play as something against method (see Tugendhat 1978). According to this view, “method is not the way to truth” (Palmer 1969, 163), and Gadamer’s work is to be read as “a tract against the very idea of method” (Rorty 1979, 360). According to yet another formulation, “the title of Truth and Method is ironic: truth requires … not just procedural methodology” (Sokolowski 1997, 227). In short, the “and” in the title has really the meaning of “or”: “Truth or Method” (Figal 2000, 335; see also Turk 1982; Feyerabend and Albert 1997, 30; Grondin 1999, 320).
However, upon a closer look, one may legitimately claim that Gadamer only rejects method in the modern sense, and in fact he certainly does use a method, namely, the method of “conceptual history” [Begriffsgeschichte], that is, the method of tracing the history of concepts.1 Indeed, Gadamer is not satisfied with explaining a concept through definitions but repeatedly goes back, in a quite methodical way, to investigate and reconstruct the history of a concept, and in this way he is able to establish his claim for a reconstituted meaning of the term. It is his reconstructions through the history of concepts which lend Gadamer’s philosophical concepts their specific meaning and flavor, and that is the task he expected to carry out in reference to them. This procedure is sufficiently clear with regard to what he is doing in the first chapter of his work concerning “the guiding concepts of humanism,” by offering detailed historical reconstructions of those concepts, namely, “Bildung,” “sensus communis,” “judgment,” and “taste” (Gadamer 1999, 9–42).
The method of clarifying the meaning of concepts through reconstruction of their history is based on a particular conviction or, more exactly speaking, a philosophical position. According to it, philosophical concepts are determined in their meaning not through a random choice to designate them with that word “but rather on the basis of their historical background,” and “legitimate philosophizing needs to be able to account historically for its own concepts” (GW 2, 91). As is explicitly stated toward the end of the Introduction, his investigation tries to “link as closely as possible an inquiry into the history of concepts with the substantive exposition of the themes of its topic.”2 In this sense, in virtue of its presence in the whole work, Begriffsgeschichte can even be claimed to be Gadamer’s “method.”
Now, we should realize that this is exactly the way Gadamer deals with the concept of prejudice. The specific sense of prejudice which underlies Gadamer’s rehabilitation of it is far from being its contemporary, allegedly self-evident, that is, mainly negative meaning. In fact, Gadamer is taking great pains to show the way the word has come to assume its contemporary negative meaning.
The discussion of prejudice, together with that of authority and tradition, is found in chapter II of Part II of Gadamer’s work, with the title “Elements of a Theory of Hermeneutic Experience.” Part I of Truth and Method is dedicated to a discussion of the work of art and its philosophical discipline, aesthetics, and is articulated in such a way that a mainly negative, that is, a historical-critical treatment of the relevant theories is followed by Gadamer’s elaboration of his own positive (or systematic) considerations under the title “The Ontology of the Work of Art,” whereby the positive considerations are destined to provide and legitimate the criteria of the previously sketched criticisms. Part II, whose theme is the human sciences and which subsequent to the “emergence” (opening up = “Freilegung”) of the question of truth in the “experience of art” contains an “extension” (“Ausweitung”) of the same question to the human sciences, proceeds in much the same manner: a first critical exposition called “Historical Preparation” is followed and integrated by a positive treatment under the title “Elements of a Theory of Hermeneutic Experience.” By situating the discussion of prejudices within the frame of these “elements,” Gadamer clearly suggests that prejudices—no less than authority and tradition—constitute part and parcel of our access to history and to what the human sciences are generally about. The initial sections of this chapter are here, incidentally, not as “systematic” as in Part I, but combine “systematic” or positive considerations with historical-critical remarks all the way through, and this is the case with the discussion of prejudices (as well as of authority and tradition) too (Gadamer 1999, 265–307). The end of the historical-critical remarks is indicated both in Part I and Part II by a chapter in whose title in both cases the concept of “Wiedergewinnung” occurs (in the English edition figuring as “Retrieving” in the first case, and “Recovery” in the second, respectively; see Gadamer 1999, 81, 307). What is meant is this: only what has previously been lost (and that it has is claimed to have been shown by his previous criticisms) can and must be “retrieved” or “recovered” or “regained.” What has, however, first and foremost been lost, in aesthetic or art theory no less than in the human sciences, is nothing other than “truth.”
Gadamer begins his exposition of a theory of hermeneutic experience by evoking Heidegger’s treatment of the hermeneutical circle. He thus emphasizes the point that Heidegger’s treatment “is not primarily a prescription for the practice of understanding, but a description of the way interpretive understanding is achieved” (Gadamer 1999, 266; italics added). Indeed, as part of his hermeneutically central concepts, Heidegger had worked out what he called the “fore-structure,” characteristic of understanding and interpretation. This structure consists of three components: “fore-having,” “fore-sight,” and “fore-conception” (“Vorhabe,” “Vorsicht,” “Vorgriff,” see Heidegger 1979, 150/191). Interpretation operates, first, in such a way that what we set out to interpret is something we always already possess in advance (fore-having or also pre-possession). Interpreting is then being carried out, second, “under the guidance of a point of view,” through which and with the help of which we perceive or, as it were, first catch sight of what we are interpreting. This kind of sight is the “fore-sight,” in that it proceeds with care, caution, carefulness, wariness, circumspection, and prudence (the German term, “Vorsicht,” means originally “caution”). Interpretation, finally, with its “fore-having,” and “fore-sight,” is always already moving ahead (or reaching out) in the direction of—having always already decided in favor of—a certain conceptuality, being thereby in the state of a certain intermediate or pre-conceptuality, and this is the “fore-conception.”
The insight that Heidegger derives from his characterization of the fore-structure, and the point of his whole analysis is the recognition that “[a]n interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us” (Heidegger 1979, 150/192). This recognition includes the provocative claim that, regarding the kind of interpretation which directs itself to texts, it is illusory to refer as a decisive proof to what “stands there” in the text. For, provided the talk about “standing there” makes sense at all, what first and foremost “stands there” is not so much the text itself as “the obvious undiscussed prior assumption [Vormeinung] of the person who does the interpreting” (Heidegger 1979, 150/192; trans. modified). These “obvious undiscussed prior assumptions”—undiscussed and mostly also unconscious, in any case, simply taken for granted—are in fact present (“stand there”) and very much at work at the very beginning of each and every interpretation as something that as soon as, and as long as, there are interpretations, is also “given” together with them.
What in Being and Time is developed under the designation of “fore-structure” has various anticipations in Heidegger’s path of thinking in the 1920s. An early and quite elaborate version is to be found in his so-called Natorp report written in 1922, where the relevant discussion is addressed in terms of a description of the “hermeneutical situation” (see GA 62, 345ff.). In both cases, Heidegger emphasizes that, without proper consideration and account of the “fore-structure” or the “hermeneutical situation” in which every interpretation finds itself, one cannot ever hope to attain any kind of “objectivity” in interpretation (Heidegger 1979, 153/195; GA 62, 347). If the talk about “objectivity” in interpretation makes sense at all, it is surely not to be attained through ignoring the interpreting subject but is to be achieved through focusing on it, that is, on his/her undiscussed prior assumptions. To ignore the fore-structure means not so much getting rid of it as assuming it uncritically, “by fancies and popular conceptions” (Heidegger 1979, 153/195).
These Heideggerian considerations may be regarded as the starting point of Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice. It follows from them unequivocally that there is no disregarding or overlooking the interpreting subject. S/he is, in a certain sense, prior to and precedes the interpreted texts. Gadamer’s contribution to Heidegger’s initiative consists in adding and elaborating the historical context of what appears in Heidegger as a more or less strictly phenomenological (that is, nonhistorical) description of the fore-structure.
It is scarcely without significance that when the term “prejudice” occurs in Gadamer’s discussion of it in the chapter under consideration for the first time, it does so in conjunction with the concept of “Vormeinung,” applied also by Heidegger (Gadamer 1999, 271: “fore-meanings and prejudices,” in the original: GW 1, 274: “Vormeinungen und Vorurteile”). “Vormeinung” on its part appears somewhat earlier in conjunction with “Vorverständnis,” that is, “fore-” or “pre-understanding” (Gadamer 1999, 270/GW 1, 272f.). “Vorurteil” and “Vorverständnis,” that is to say, prejudice and pre-understanding, accompanied by the mediation of “Vormeinung,” point to the same direction; they indicate opinions (“Meinungen”) or judgments (“Urteile”) which interpreters previously possess, namely, prior to coming to adopt a conscious or autonomous view of the matter, and which in the course of a closer scrutiny or examination may be verified, falsified, or modified. It is because we have them that we are able to subject them to critical scrutiny and eventually come to form a view able to be accounted for. (On the connection of prejudice and pre-understanding with a view to truth, see Gander 2007, 113f.) But whereas pre-understanding is a technical term having no colloquially negative sense or connotation (indeed, hardly any colloquial use whatsoever), prejudice is colloquially meaningful and certainly does have a clearly negative and pejorative meaning.
It is at this point of his discussion that Gadamer draws on, or takes recourse to, the method of “conceptual history.” “An analysis pertaining to the history of concepts shows,” he writes [“Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Analyse zeigt”; in the English translation: “the history of ideas shows”]
that not until the Enlightenment does the concept of prejudice acquire the negative connotation familiar today. Actually ‘prejudice’ [Vorurteil] means a judgment [Urteil] that is rendered before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally examined. In the procedure of the judiciary, the administration of justice [Im Verfahren der Rechtssprechung] a ‘prejudice’ is a provisional legal verdict [Vorentscheidung] before the final verdict [Endurteil] is reached.
(Gadamer 1999, 270 [trans. modified] / GW 1, 275)
As a provisional or prior judgment, as a “prejudgment,” “prejudice” means not necessarily “false judgment.” It may have both a positive and a negative value. Gadamer’s reference to the judiciary, the administration of justice offers a good example to elaborate on. A prejudgment of a case on the part of a judge—for example, after a first examination of written documents—may considerably help him to form a provisional view of the case and thereby give him ideas of how to proceed: for example, which witnesses to summon and precisely what questions to ask them. The subsequent phase of the process may then verify or falsify or modify his prejudgment. A prejudgment is harmful only when a judge seems not to be ready to revise it. Otherwise it is not only helpful, but is explicitly furthering and beneficial—indeed, indispensable when one wants to proceed conscientiously. In the absence of a prejudgment, the procedure a judge selected would be doomed to remain quite random and haphazard, and the chances of arriving at a good decision would be conspicuously reduced.
It was the Enlightenment that fundamentally modified the meaning of prejudice by restricting it to something like false and “unfounded judgment.” Indeed, the requirement of founding statements became the major criterion for their truth, and this implies the ascendancy of method over subject matter. The “truth” character of key concepts of the human sciences, such as tradition, authority, and prejudice, were thereby discredited and exiled from the realm of scientific knowledge. Only what can rationally be “founded,” “accepting nothing as certain that can in any way be doubted,” can count as possible truth. Gadamer stresses “how difficult it is to harmonize the historical knowledge […] with this ideal,” formulated “on the basis of the modern conception of method” (Gadamer 1999, 273). This constitutes, incidentally, the starting point of Truth and Method, the justification of Gadamer’s claim that truth can be attained not exclusively, and not primarily, by method in the modern sense.
The Enlightenment has not only discarded or dismissed and ruled out the concepts of prejudice, authority, and tradition but in parallel with it has also discredited them. It did so by redefining them in a way that placed them in an unfavorable light. Discarding and redefining these concepts were going hand in hand; they complemented each other. The originally neutral concept of prejudice assumed the character of a partiality that prevents objective consideration of something or of an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand without good justification. All three concepts, in one way or another, seemed to suggest lack of autonomy, self-determination, and freedom. This is shown even by contemporary linguistic use. The expression “to fall prey to prejudices,” for example, suggests clearly loss of self-determination; a person who falls prey to something or somebody is a victim robbed of his or her freedom; to be a prey is to be a victim, a pitiful and deplorable state nobody would like to find oneself in. As far as tradition is concerned, it is, as Gadamer writes, “still viewed as the abstract opposite of free self-determination.” In denigrating and discarding all authorities, the Enlightenment shifted the main emphasis onto a one-sidedly negative character. Giving credit to, trusting, or following what the authorities said had come to assume the meaning of relating to them with “blind obedience” (Gadamer 1999, 279). What the Enlightenment proposes is “a mutually exclusive antithesis between authority and reason” (ibid., 278), an antithesis tacitly shared also by the romantic critique of the Enlightenment. In fact, by opting for authority and tradition over against the weakness of human reason, the romantic opponents reversed the Enlightenment’s presupposition. They took over “the schema itself as a self-evident truth” (ibid., 275) and did not question it, thereby tacitly acknowledging the validity of the opposition. Something being sufficiently old was reason enough for the Enlightenment to dismiss it—and reason enough for Romanticism to accept it. Both agreed on the basic presupposition that authorities and tradition are not accessible to reason and mutually exclude one another.
However, Gadamer convincingly shows that “there is no such unconditional antithesis between tradition and reason. … The fact is that in tradition there is always an element of freedom and of history.” Not only “innovation and planning,” change and subversion, are free acts; “preservation” is no less an “act of reason” (ibid., 282).
If prejudice means, in a pejorative sense, partiality or bias that prevents objective consideration of something or of an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand without good justification, it is easy to see that the Enlightenment, for all its claim to dismiss all prejudices, still retained one, namely, the “prejudice against prejudices” (ibid., 274); indeed, “the fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself” (ibid., 273). For the fact that prejudices may contain elements of truth was not even considered; the dismissal of them, together with that of authorities and tradition, was blind, not argued for. Rather than following from careful and serious preliminary examination, it was an a priori assumption, wholly unaccounted for, and, accordingly, in the sense given to it by Enlightenment, “unfounded.”
If Gadamer’s basic attempt consists in showing that there is no “mutually exclusive antithesis between authority and reason,” he nevertheless does not fail to stress time and again (influenced by and following Heidegger) that reason must be conceived within strictly human limits. Prejudices, authorities, and tradition do indeed have significance only for a finite being. It is for a finite or, more precisely, a finite-historical, being that they are sources of knowledge. Here we come across a further prejudice of the Enlightenment. Given “the finitude which dominates not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness,” Gadamer writes, “[t]he overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, [proves] to be a prejudice.” In fact, if to be human means being limited, then “the idea of an absolute reason is not a possibility for historical humanity” (ibid., 277).
For finite beings, there is no absolute zero point of understanding—and only for finite beings is there something such as understanding in terms of an event (Gadamer’s work was originally entitled “Verstehen und Geschehen,” and it is one of its central claims that understanding is not so much our own doing as something that happens to us). We always already understand something, and only because we do can this understanding be grown and developed into an articulate interpretation. Without pre-judgments (Vorurteile), pre-understanding (Vorverständnis) in this sense, there are no judgments (Urteile); without antecedent opinions (Vormeinungen), no subsequently formed independent opinions (Meinungen): therein lies the positive side as well as the significance of Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudices.3
In light of the hermeneutical critique, the claim of the Enlightenment to suspend all presuppositions, prejudices, or prejudgments appears to be an impossible requirement, the fruit of wishful thinking. Were something of the sort possible, such a suspension would amount to something like a total brainwashing, a point of no return to a conscious and reasonable mental state or judgment. Should a return, a way back from the suspension be possible, it would only mean that the suspension had not really been total enough, that something had been surreptitiously maintained in safety from doubt. This is precisely what Heidegger repeatedly undertook to show in reference to Descartes (see, e.g., GA 17, 197, 225, 281, Heidegger 1961, Vol. II, 152, Descartes’ anticipation of the exclusion of historical science from the realm of knowledge ibid., 213; GA 29/30, 30, 84, etc.). For a finite being, traditions, similar to authority and prejudice, are not necessarily deplorable; they may also be a source of truth. Their assumption need not necessarily imply lack of freedom. “They are freely taken over but by no means created by a free insight or grounded on reasons. This is precisely what we call tradition: the ground of their validity [to be valid without being grounded]” (Gadamer 1999, 280f. / GW 1, 285; in the fourth edition: “Der Grund ihrer Geltung”; in the fifth and the GW edition: “ohne Begründung zu gelten”). That “tradition has a justification that lies beyond rational grounding” (ibid., 281) shows again that the Enlightenment’s demand to ground/found everything that is to count as being scientific and to lay claim to truth through methodological justification can scarcely be met by the human sciences.
If a properly unbiased and unprejudiced appraisal of prejudices leads to the conclusion that “[t]he overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, [proves] to be a prejudice,” and if “the fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power,” then underlying Gadamer’s criticism and considerations is obviously a phenomenologically redefined concept of prejudice, no more understood in a purely negative sense. One important element of this is the attempt to approach prejudices in the way they present themselves to us in concrete everyday contexts, thereby contextualizing the Enlightenment’s abstract demand to be free of all prejudices. In his considerations, Gadamer formulates the following questions:
Is it not the case that unprejudicedness is always qualified/conditional/related [bedingt]? Has this claim not always the polemical sense that we should be free from this or that prejudice? Does, moreover, the claim to be unprejudiced … not conceal the stubborn obstinacy with which prejudices obscurely dominate us? (GW 2, 34)
An anticipation of these questions is to be found in Heidegger’s first Marburg lecture 1923–24. What Gadamer formulates in a reserved, cautious manner as a series of questions emerges from Heidegger’s lecture note, not destined to be published, in robust immediacy and unequivocalness:
Not absence of prejudice, which is a utopia. The idea of having no prejudice is itself the greatest prejudice. Mastery in the face of each possibility of something establishing itself as prejudice. Not free from prejudices but free for the possibility of giving up a prejudice at the decisive moment on the basis of a critical encounter with the subject matter. That is the form of existence of a scientific human. (GA 17, 2/2)
From a hermeneutic perspective, exemption from prejudices as a requirement is only reasonable in well-defined, clear-cut contexts. It resists being generalized and made abstract, or, as Heidegger would say, being made “free-floating.” It is not reasonable unless referred to concrete cases. The hermeneutical critique shows this requirement in its abstractness not only to be something not to be met (for humans as finite beings are always born into a heap of prejudices, and it is owing to blindness and ignorance that they succumb to the illusion of being free from them), but it attempts to show its genesis. This, in fact, lies in an unjustified generalization of well-defined cases. Gadamer’s critique suggests that the Enlightenment’s urge to be free from all prejudices is a rhetorical exaggeration behind which the claim to be free from one particular set of prejudices is concealed, namely, that to get rid of the past (the authorities, the church). The particular prejudice we are urged to liberate ourselves from is the assumption that past ages knew (or may have known) better how things were than we do—indeed, this would be the paradigmatic and single most important prejudice to be dismissed. The opposite assumption, by contrast, that it is we who know better than they did, that we are superior to them, was not so alien to the Enlightenment; it tended to treat it favorably and take it for granted as a self-evident assumption; this prejudice was for the Enlightenment much more fascinating and flattering.
The only coherent way of being unprejudiced is then, in this hermeneutical perspective, the urge not to be prejudiced against anything, even and inclusive of, prejudices themselves, that is to say, not to reject them blindly but submit them to critical examination. And since we cannot examine each of them one by one—we do not even know their number, do not know where one prejudice ends and another begins—it is only a finite number of prejudices that we can place under scrutiny from time to time. The measure of scrutiny is the subject matter itself. When during examination they prove to be a source of knowledge or truth, we should not be unwilling, or should not hesitate, to accept and “rehabilitate” them. The only coherent attitude toward prejudices is one that does not discredit them, together with authorities and traditions, in advance. For without prejudices in terms of pre-understanding and pre-judgments, there is no understanding at all. At least for finite beings.4
This research was supported by the European Union and the Hungarian state, co-financed by the European Social Fund in the framework of TÁMOP 4.2.4. A/1-11-1-2012-0001 National Excellence Program, as well as by the Herder Foundation.
Bibliographical Remark: The volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe and of Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke are cited with the abbreviations GA and GW followed by the volume number, comma, and page numbers.