Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Reading Group

Reading group: Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Part Two, on prejudice and the fusion of horizons

Henrike Vogel Fellow
· 5 replies
Meaning & languageContinentalHermeneuticsFriedrich SchleiermacherHans-Georg GadamerMartin HeideggerPaul Ricoeur#fusion-of-horizons#hermeneutic-circle#prejudice#reading-group
Follow

I taught German literature for thirty years without ever reading Wahrheit und Methode (1960) from cover to cover, which is a confession. I would like to read the central part of it slowly with anyone willing.

I propose the second part, the sections on understanding, in four weeks. I will read the German; for English I suggest the revised translation by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (2nd edition, 1989), which most libraries have.

  • Week 1. The hermeneutic circle, from Schleiermacher to Heidegger's "fore-structure" of understanding. What changes when the circle stops being a method and becomes a description of how understanding works at all?
  • Week 2. Prejudices as conditions of understanding; the rehabilitation of authority and tradition. This is where Gadamer is most provocative.
  • Week 3. Temporal distance. Does time help us understand a text, as he claims?
  • Week 4. Effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) and the fusion of horizons.

A question to carry through all four weeks: Gadamer does not want a method that guarantees correct interpretation. So what, on his account, makes one reading better than another? If the answer is "nothing", the book fails on its own terms. If there is an answer, I want us to find it.

LikeReply
Follow5 replies

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

5 replies

  1. Johanna Reinhardt

    Fellow

    Week 1. The contrast with Schleiermacher was sharper than I remembered. Schleiermacher wanted to reconstruct the author's thought, in principle to understand the author even better than the author did. Gadamer drops reconstruction as the goal. The text is not a window onto a mind but a voice in a conversation that we are already inside. Heidegger supplies the reason: we never come to anything without a fore-understanding, so the circle cannot be escaped, only entered in the right way.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    Week 2, and the phrase that stopped me was Gadamer's charge that the Enlightenment had a prejudice against prejudice itself. In German it is clearer than in English: a Vorurteil is literally a pre-judgement, a verdict given before all the evidence is in. Every reader brings them. His point is that some are productive and some are blind, and we only find out which by putting them at risk in the encounter with the text. That is at least a partial answer to my question: a better reading is one whose prejudices have survived exposure.

  3. Khady Sène

    Fellow

    Week 2, from Dakar, with discomfort. I teach Senghor and Descartes on the same exam paper. When Gadamer rehabilitates tradition and authority, I want to ask: whose tradition, and whose authority? Colonial readings of African texts were full of prejudices that felt productive to the people holding them. This is roughly Habermas's objection in their famous exchange: hermeneutics needs a critique of ideology, or it will mistake power for tradition.

    Helpful · 1
  4. Lin Pei-shan

    Fellow

    Week 3. Temporal distance made immediate sense to me as a teacher of classical Chinese. My students read the Analects through Zhu Xi's commentary without knowing it, because his commentaries became the basis of the civil service examinations from the early fourteenth century, and so they shaped how the text was heard for six hundred years. That is Wirkungsgeschichte exactly: the history of a text's effects is part of what the text now is for us. The hard part is that Wang Yangming then reads against Zhu Xi, and his reading is also part of that history.

    Helpful · 2
  5. Mateo Quispe

    Fellow

    Week 4. I think Khady's worry is answered better by Ricoeur than by Gadamer. Ricoeur called Marx, Nietzsche and Freud the masters of suspicion and argued that interpretation must move between suspicion and recovery: first ask what the text hides, then let it say what it says. Reading the conquest chronicles in Lima, I need both. Gadamer's fusion of horizons is beautiful, but some horizons were imposed, and a fusion that forgets that is not understanding.

    Helpful · 3