“The most passionate debates about Gadamer’s work in fact center on his rehabilitation of tradition. For him it is less a matter of rehabilitating prejudice per se than exposing the blanket prejudice against prejudice as an abstraction fostered by modern, methodological, Cartesian science. An unsituated consciousness does not exist. Our situatedness constitutes not so much an obstacle-though it certainly is that as well-as a condition of the possibility of understanding. We understand because and to the extent that we are ‘there’ and engaged. Even consciousness is more participatory than disengaged and in control. Just this is what makes it appropriate to speak of a ‘historically effected consciousness’. Gadamer’s expression is consciously ambiguous, as the important preface to the second edition [Truth and Method] explains: it means ‘at once the consciousness effected in the course of history and determined by history, and the very consciousness of being thus effected and determined.’

When his colleague Helmut Kuhn asked him whether it is possible to think with one’s own historicity, Gadamer replied in a letter of 12 February 1962: ‘To think with one’s own historicity-why should that be impossible? To know it-that’s what I think is impossible and I say it often enough: this is precisely what constitutes the nature of historical being, not being able to know oneself. But is the idea of knowing from oneself (von sich) merely vacuous reflection? I think it is the most real.’ Gadamer’s ‘historically effected consciousness’ that knows itself to be affected by history is therefore a reflexive and eminently critical consciousness. On the one hand, it punctures the pretension that we can ultimately ground our knowledge, whether it is a matter of creative scientific explanation or a final grounding in reflection of the kind originating in Idealism; on the other hand, it is most authentically realized in being open to the new experiences that can get us beyond the limits of our present horizons.

This explains the key role that dialogue plays in Gadamer’s general hermeneutics and his turn to language in the final, concluding section of the book. We understand only insofar as we see and find words to stammer out our understanding. ‘Being that can be understood is language’ is how Gadamer puts it in a memorable phrase, which is, however, open to misunderstanding. It hardly means that with language everything can be understood or that everything intelligible has to be expressible in words. The dictum is meant as a limitation: we understand only insofar as we find words for what is to be understood. But when is it that we can do that? Understanding means searching for words for everything that is to be understood and said. Here too taking part in meaning is more fundamental than being in control.

Thus Gadamer takes a highly critical position concerning the dominance of the ‘proposition’ in Western logic. The pure proposition designates something abstract in that it is decoupled from the speech situation, from person-to-person interaction, from need and necessity. What is to be understood is the sense that is carried along with the proposition and dependent on its actualization. Language is most realized not in propositions but in conversation where words are sought for what always remains to be said. This experience of conversation reminds us of a truth in which the unspoken part of what is said presents no hindrance but rather a condition of truth. Method can do little in such cases; taking part is everything. Thus Truth and Method closes with the sentence: ‘What the tool of method does not achieve must-and really can-be achieved by a discipline of questioning and inquiring, a discipline that guarantees truth” (Grondin 2003:288-289).

Grondin, Jean
2003 Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography. Joel Weinsheimer, trans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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