“The unsurpassable concept of the fusion of horizons endows the theory of prejudice with its most peculiar characteristic: prejudice is the horizon of the present, the finitude of what is near in its openness towards the remote. This relation between the self and the other gives the concept of prejudice its final dialectical touch: only insofar as I place myself in the other’s point of view do I confront myself with my present horizon, with my prejudices. It is only in the tension between the other and the self, between the text of the past and the point of view of the reader, that prejudice becomes operative and constitutive of historicity.

The epistemological implications of the ontological concept of historical efficacy are easy to discern. They concern the very status of research in the social sciences: that is what Gadamer wanted to show. Forschung-inquiry-scientific research does not escape the historical consciousness of those who live and make history. Historical knowledge cannot free itself from the historical condition. It follows that the project of a science free from prejudices is impossible. History poses meaningful questions to the past, pursues meaningful research and attains meaningful results only by being from a tradition which interpellates it. The emphasis on the word Bedeutung [meaning] leaves no doubt: history as science receives its meanings, at the outset, as well as the end of research, from the link which it preserves with a received and recognized tradition. The action of tradition and historical investigation are fused by a bond which no critical consciousness could dissolve without rendering the research itself nonsensical. The history of the historians (historie) can only bring to a higher level of consciousness the very flow of life within history (Geschichte): ‘Modern historical research itself is not only research, but the transmission of tradition’. Man’s link to the past precedes and envelops the purely objective treatment of historical facts. It remains to be seen whether the ideal of unlimited and unconstrained communication, which Habermas opposes to the concept of tradition, escapes from Gadamer’s argument against the possibility of a complete knowledge of history and, along with it, of history as an object in itself. Whatever the outcome of this argument against the critique of ideology, hermeneutics ultimately claims to set itself up as a critique of critique, or a meta-critique” (Ricoeur 1998:75-76).

Ricoeur, Paul
1998[1981] Hermeneutics & the Human Sciences. John B. Thompson, ed. & trans. Paris: Cambridge University Press.

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