As outlined in the previous chapter, the debates between Gadamer and his critics about philosophical hermeneutics have brought little clarity to the question of relativism, because of their different interests within hermeneutics. Critics’ objections seem justified in details but suffer from the general weakness that they play the historicity principle against method and norms without much clarification. The discussions have turned into a contest about whether the epistemological questions of traditional hermeneutics have become obsolete in the development of an ontological hermeneutics, on the one hand, and about whether reason can rise above its historical and linguistic conditions through reflection, on the other.

Although the outcome of these discussions is not clear, the epistemological and metaphysical assumptions underlying the critics’ positions are detrimental to Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory. The critical debates have led to the spread of the belief that philosophical hermeneutics implies a form of relativism. In this chapter, we will demonstrate that this is not the case. In order to present our thesis, we will proceed in the following order. First, a summary of Gadamer’s response to the objection is presented. This will be followed by an analysis of the underlying general question that has not been articulated in the debates over particular problems of hermeneutic theory. In the remainder of the chapter, this general question is identified as being related to language as the universal condition of understanding and historicity as a matter of the temporality of human life and the experience of the continuity of history. This chapter concludes with an argument that only within the context of the central questions of the universality of language and the experience of temporality can the transcendental aim of philosophical hermeneutics be understood, and not in the context of the regional issues of the interpretation of texts or tradition and history.

Gadamer attempts to meet the first set of objections which are more specific to the practice of textual interpretation. The differences of opinion between Gadamer and his critics are related to the conceptions of interpretation and the relevance of the human sciences for human self-understanding. Gadamer denies the possibility of attaining absolute knowledge and achieving a complete self-transparency of the subject’s understanding of itself within the historicity of life.

Gadamer’s response to Betti focuses on two issues. The first concerns the distinction between a philosophical theory about interpretation and the methodological problems of a general theory of interpretation. Gadamer argues that his project is descriptive, and that he does not propose a method. He simply intends to discover the common elements of the experience of understanding, tht is to discover the conditions and the possibilities of understanding in general. The second issue concerns the charge of subjectivism. Gadamer contends that the validity of this charge depends on the validity of the epistemological scheme which is the basis of the subject-object distinction. Only on the basis of this model of interpretation can one consider the subject as confronting an alien object, and its cognitive activity as "subjective act." Hermeneutic understanding is a dialogical process which has the structure and logic of question and answer (which is the hermeneutic Urphänomenon).502 "Understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood."503

Against Betti’s criticism that he does not answer the quaestio juris, Gadamer insists that his philosophy is purely descriptive. Gadamer’s response to Betti is instructive, because he makes clear his implicit assertion: "Fundamentally I am not proposing a method; I am describing what is the case. That it is as I describe it cannot, I think, be questioned. . . . I consider the only scientific thing is to recognize what is, instead of starting from what ought to be or could be."504

Such a defense presents a difficulty that is not merely specific to Gadamer’s own position. As expressed by Michael Gelven, "Heidegger and other hermeneutic thinkers want to be true to both terms of their descriptive methodology: to let the facts speak for themselves; and at the same time to claim that there are no such things as uninterpreted facts—at least not in those cases where the hermeneutic method applies."505 As Kisiel points out, "Gadamer focuses on the ‘fact’ that the actual situation in which human understanding takes place is always an understanding through language within a tradition, both of which have always been manifest considerations in hermeneutic thinking."506

Gadamer evaluates Betti’s approach as a middle position between the extremes of objectivism and subjectivism. In asserting the autonomy of the text and the adequacy of the understanding to the object as normative principles, Betti seems to require that the subject-matter be the object of interpretation.507 However, this is not the case. On the contrary, the object of interpretation which Betti refers to is the meaning intended by the author. What concerns Gadamer in Betti’s theory is the fact that it remains an extension of the psychological method founded by Schleiermacher. Adhering to a view that hermeneutics is a "kind of analogy with psychological interpretation," the interpreter has to come to this creative path by "rethinking within himself."508

The main issue in Gadamer’s and Betti’s debate concerns the desire to maintain the objectivity of hermeneutic interpretation in the face of the Heideggerian critique of the epistemological model of the subject-object relationship.

The other issue between Betti and Gadamer concerns the notion of finitude. Betti holds a notion of knowledge which is free from any perspective. In his notion, there is the implicit belief that history can be transcended absolutely.

The strength, as well as the weakness, of philosophical hermeneutics lies in the role attributed to tradition and prejudice. What is not clear, however, is whether prejudice and tradition are co-extensive. Some of Gadamer’s remarks suggest that tradition and prejudice cannot be separated in their co-determination of understanding and self-understanding. On the other hand, he makes a distinction between prejudices coming from our interest in the subject matter and prejudices coming from the use of language. It is necessary to make this distinction if one wants to avoid the critics’ charges. Does Gadamer make this distinction? Hirsch, for one, believes that Gadamer does not do so. According to Hirsch, Gadamer supposes that prejudices are constitutive of understanding and that the elimination of unproductive prejudices is to be left to a temporal distance intervening between the interpreter and the subject matter. What Gadamer overlooks, Hirsch argues, is the fact that, while a short interval in time, for instance, between two speakers exchanging views does not threaten the homogeneity of prejudices and tradition, a long period of time does.

This is a perfectly legitimate objection and challenges Gadamer’s argument that temporal distance serves as a criterion of legitimate and illegitimate prejudices. For this reason, in later editions of Truth and Method Gadamer modified the categorical statement concerning temporal distance as a criterion to a probable statement.509

Still, not only temporal distance, but distance in general helps to distinguish the productive prejudices from the unproductive ones. Yet critics finds this insufficient as a criterion for objectivity. The gap opens up here between Betti and Hirsch on the one side and Gadamer on the other. In Gadamer’s understanding, the idea of an objectivity in the sense of a subject matter that can be made present to us in itself, such that nothing can remain hidden from us, is not possible. There are two sides to this. Objectivity can be understood, on the one hand, as the possibility of the pure representability of the object, and, on the other, as the possibility of an exhaustive knowledge of it. Gadamer argues that in either sense, such an ideal of objectivity cannot be applied to the human sciences. For this ideal is based on the theoretical orientation of science and does not conform to the practice of even the natural sciences themselves.

Also, Gadamer argues against the distinction between the meaning and the significance of a text, as well as between understanding and interpretation. He argues further that the text cannot be conceived of as other than its realization in interpretation. As he states: "Despite all the differences which separate . . . the interpretation from the substance of reading, there is no intention to place the realization of the text aside from the text itself. On the contrary, the ultimate ideal of appropriateness seems to be total self-effacement because the meaning [Verständnis] of the text has become self-evident."510

In his reply to his critics, more specifically his reply to Apel’s charges of relativism, Gadamer argues that unless an absolute knowledge or a notion of progress to a final truth is admitted to be available, one cannot speak of a danger of relativism.511 This also relates to Betti’s criticism that the application of understanding to different situations becomes the only criterion for the hermeneutic process. Gadamer argues that considering application as part of the understanding process is not tantamount to a naive, uncritical acceptance of tradition. However, it must be admitted that a true historical consciousness includes the possibility of a confirming, as well as of a critical appropriation of tradition. Gadamer claims, contrary to the views of Apel and Habermas, that "the hermeneutic reflection is limited to revealing the possibilities of knowledge which would otherwise remain unperceived. However, the hermeneutic reflection itself is not a criterion of truth."512 

The point of disagreement between Gadamer and the critical theorists is related to the question of whether the self-understanding of the interpreter takes place within the orientations of the present or whether it can be affected by the continuity of the past in the present. Both Habermas and Apel start from the premise that the hermeneutic concept of historicity leads either to a blind conservatism or to a subjective relativism, unless a criterion of criticism is found and based on a more intersubjective foundation. Apel and Habermas propose a contingent criterion of correctness, a criterion whose application depends, according to Habermas, on the realization of an ideal of free communication, so that history and tradition could be understood more objectively; or whose application is, according to Apel, contingent upon the formation of a consensus of interpreters.

In his reply, Gadamer points out that Apel’s ideal of progress and a "consensus in the long run" makes the legitimacy of the agreement of the free community of interpreters questionable.513 The consciousness of historical effects implies both limitedness and the fallibility of consciousness. Since finitude is for Gadamer logically prior to the possibilities presented to consciousness through reflection, the counter-factual situation of eventual agreement cannot be supported as the condition for discourse. This hypothetically universal and "counter-factual"514 agreement is not the actual condition of a reasonable dialogue. Rather, the true condition is the concreteness of historicity in the form of language and tradition.

There are two different conceptions of language operating in this debate. Gadamer maintains that every experience that can be called extra-linguistic still must be articulated and mediated by language if these experiences are to be brought to our attention. In other words, even if we accept a form of non-linguistic experience, this experience becomes a subject of our consciousness through language. This would be called an interpretation and, as such, falls under linguistic constraints. Not only the understanding of culture but everything is included in the realm of understanding.515 Gadamer declares: "There is no societal reality, with all its concrete forces, that does not bring itself to representation in a consciousness which is linguistically articulated."516 In contrast to this, Habermas believes that a critical reflection is possible which escapes the constraints of everyday language.

The universality of language means here that language carries everything understandable within it, including the world of science and its procedures and methodology. Not only moral and practical activities but also scientific activities take place in a linguistically constituted universe. Habermas questions this conception and points out the non-linguistic domains of consciousness.

Gadamer responds to Habermas’s claim that Gadamer fails to recognize the power of reflection: "My objection is that the critique of ideology overestimates the competence of reflection and reason. Inasmuch as it seeks to penetrate the masked interests which infect the public opinion, it implies its own freedom from any ideology; and that means in turn that it enthrones its own norms and ideals as self-evident and absolute."517

Against this practice, Gadamer argues that critical reflection itself is limited by the constraints of language and the finitude of our existence. Tradition is not a proof and validation of something. Nor is it obvious that reflection always demands validation. As Gadamer appropriately asks: "Where does reflection demand proof? Everywhere?" He rejects the absolute reflection on the grounds of the "finitude of human existence and the essential particularity of reflection."518 Gadamer calls Habermas’s position pure Romanticism which "creates an artificial abyss between tradition and the reflection that is grounded in the historical consciousness."519 

At the core of Habermas’s critique lie the different approaches to the role and the aim of reflection exercised in cognitive activity. Gadamer’s own views of nature and the role of reflection have received scant attention. His arguments against the natural scientific conception of objectivity and its application to the human sciences are also based on an understanding of the role and the scope of reflection in knowledge. Gadamer reminds us that Dilthey formulated the human possibility of reflective thought as the "free distance toward oneself."520 But the possibility of reflection is mistakenly identified as being the same as the objectivity of knowledge achieved through scientific method. In the introduction to the English translation of The Problem of the Historical Consciousness, Gadamer amends his position on the role of tradition and prejudices with a clarification of Truth and Method. There he states: "It is true that the prejudices that dominate us often impair true recognition of the historical past. But without prior self-understanding, which is prejudice in this sense, and without readiness for self-criticism —which is also grounded in self-understanding—historical understanding would be neither possible nor meaningful. Only through others do we gain true knowledge of ourselves. Yet this implies that historical knowledge does not necessarily lead to the dissolution of tradition in which we live, it can also enrich this tradition, confirm or alter it—in short, contribute to the discovery of our own identity." 521 

Responding to Habermas and Apel, Gadamer reiterates his answer that emphasis on the determining function of tradition in our understanding of the past is not tantamount to "uncritical acceptance of tradition and sociopolitical conservativism." He declares that "whoever reads the present sketch of . . . hermeneutic theory will recognize that such an assumption reduces hermeneutics to an idealistic and historical self-conception. In truth the confrontation of our historic tradition is always a critical challenge of this tradition. . . . Every experience is such a confrontation."522 

The model of dialogue serves to describe the mediation of the otherness of tradition challenging our prejudices, and the assimilation of it in confirming the claims of truth revealed in any confrontation with tradition. Since language constitutes the foundation of our experience of tradition and our dialogue with it and about it, Gadamer asserts that the hermeneutic claim to universality refers to nothing but the linguistic constitution of understanding.523 

But Habermas and Apel can be accused of deferring the judgment of validity to a future probability of agreement or free communication. Gadamer asserts that the "question cannot be resolved in favor of the quickly obsolete new, nor in favor of that which has been."524

Hermeneutic reflection itself is not "a criterion of truth."525 The conception of reflection here in question concerns the role assigned to reflection by Habermas and Apel as a means of transcending the hermeneutic situation and applying a criterion to the result of interpretations. For Gadamer reflection is an immanent component of understanding, but reflection here does not take us out of the totality of the hermeneutic situation. In other words, hermeneutic reflection is effective only negatively in opening up new possibilities of understanding an object by enabling us to discriminate the unproductive prejudices, but reflection on the outcome of understanding does not lead us to an absolute point from which we might judge the result.

Gadamer has responded against these critics both by redefining his position and by laying bare their presuppositions. Against Habermas’s and Apel’s charges that Gadamer advocates a passive acceptance and submission to the authority of tradition, Gadamer responded by restating that openness to tradition is not a blind obedience to it, but an openness to the possibility that it may contain truth. The recognition of the superiority of authority does not always imply an obedience, but it may involve the acknowledgement of its knowledge.526 The view that authority always remains authoritarian and confining and critical reflection must always free us by dissolving the false appearances of tradition itself appears dogmatic.527

Gadamer also questions Habermas’s contention that psychoanalytical dialogue would serve as a model for communicative social dialogue. In the psychoanalytical model, the power relation between patient and therapist is not one of equality. In this relationship, the patient submits to the authority of the therapist and his trust in the psychoanalytic techniques. Nor can this dialogue be conceived outside the common social world they share, so the whole complex of relations does not depend on anything other than the linguistic world. Thus, the model Habermas offers as a limiting case of the universality of linguistic understanding fails as an example of emancipatory and critical reflection.

Critics of philosophical hermeneutics approach the question with different concerns: one from the point of view of objectivity and method of textual interpretation; the other from the point of view of norms of objectivity and method in the social sciences. Habermas and Apel accept the hermeneutic thesis of the historicity of understanding, but differ on the question of whether hermeneutics provides us with any critical norm to transcend the historical and linguistic conditions of knowledge. Their own respective theories, based upon the ideal of communicative interest proposed by Habermas and the regulative ideal of a community of interpreters suggested by Apel, naturally extend the sphere of hermeneutics.

The question of the historicity of understanding concerns the question whether the norms for the validity of interpretation are given in such a way that the understanding of the meaning of a text from the past is not effected by the historical position of the interpreter or whether normative principles of interpretation must be postulated in such a way that they must govern the conditions of the objectivity of understanding that will only be fulfilled at some eventuality in the future. From the standpoint of the former perspective, philosophical hermeneutics surrenders the ideal of a correct and valid understanding of the texts to the present contingencies of the interpreter and, thus falls, into a subjective and historicist relativism. From the latter perspective, Gadamer makes tradition the measure of the truth of meaning and the validity of interpretation, and, hence, falls into a conservatism and even an idealist relativism.

The source of this conflict lies in the different conceptions of history held by Gadamer and his critics. For Gadamer, historical process consists of an integration of the old with the new. He describes historicity and the linguistic nature of understanding as the conditions of this integration and the mediation of the historical distance. Gadamer intends to show that historical continuity and the mediation of tradition through this continuity are the conditions of understanding. It is not only temporal distance but also other factors, such as the "fixity of writing and the sheer inertia of permanence," that serve as distancing factors.528 Thus, Gadamer proposes historicity and language as hermeneutic principles to explain the mediation of historical meanings.

It is argued that the historicity thesis is susceptible to the same paradoxical self-referentiality as that to which relativism is vulnerable. If all knowledge claims are historically conditioned, this must apply to the historicity thesis itself. Gadamer’s own account must be the product of this historical development, and hence it is relative to its own historical conditions and cannot be described as universally valid. For Gadamer, such a critique is based on the assumption that philosophical knowledge only has significance and validity as the expression of a historical world view. On the contrary, Gadamer’s account of historicity is not a metaphysics of history either. "‘Historicity’ is a transcendent concept."529 Gadamer responds to this by pointing out the distinction between statements of fact and logical statements. He writes: "Thus we cannot argue that a historicism that maintains the historical conditionedness of all knowledge ‘for all eternity’ is basically self-contradictory. This kind of self-contradiction is a special problem. Here also we must ask whether the two propositions—‘all knowledge is historically conditioned’ and ‘this piece of knowledge is true unconditionally’—are on the same level, so that they could contradict each other. For the thesis is not that this proposition will always be considered true, any more than that it has always been so considered. Rather, a historicism that takes itself seriously will allow for the fact that one day its thesis will no longer be considered true—i.e., that people will think ‘unhistorically.’ And yet not because asserting that all knowledge is conditioned is meaningless and ‘logically’ contradictory."530

The logical difficulty of this argument points to the same situation inherent in all logical paradoxes. An appeal to the distinction between a logical statement and a meta-statement about it does not solve the problem, given the fact that a meta-language cannot explicate the content of the statement, but can only signify something about the statement itself.

For Gadamer, historicism necessarily implies an absolute position from which the knowledge of the past is judged. Historicism presupposes an ideal present, in the light of which the past, in its totality, is revealed. Is Gadamer able to avoid historicism by denying the possibility of an absolute knowledge by emphasizing human finitude? Is the only argument possible against historicism the denial of an absolute knowledge? Gadamer’s arguments rather depend on the concept of time as multi-dimensional, not as a linear concept of a movement of moments. For Gadamer, historical knowledge cannot be described as a matter of applying a privileged perspective of the present to the past, as naive historicism implies. "Historical thinking has its dignity and its value as truth in the acknowledgement that there is no such thing as the ‘present,’ but rather constantly changing horizons of future and past. It is by no means settled (and can never be settled) that any particular perspective in which traditionary thoughts [überlieiferte Gedanken] presents themselves is the right one."531 We notice that it is not the subject-matter itself or traditional thought that is indeterminable. Rather, of the perspectives in which "inherited thoughts" are presented, one cannot be determined as the right one.

Gadamer has acknowledged that hermeneutic theory entails a certain form of historicism, but not a relativistic historicism. Gadamer calls this version of historicism a "transcendental historicism."532 Another difficulty arises from the hermeneutic emphasis on the revealing character of language at the expense of the declarative function of statements. There is a similar problem concerning the conclusion drawn from the interpretive nature of understanding and objectivity and the dialogical use of language and the lessening of the importance of the assertive function of language.

It is claimed by many critics that the historicity of understanding expresses the fact that human understanding is the product of the social and historical conditions in which individuals and communities live. To characterize the hermeneutic thesis in this way is not only inaccurate, but also misleading.

Many critics agree on the issue that, in a certain way, Gadamer juxtaposes truth and method against each other. Gadamer suggests that he is pointing to the fact that by focusing on method, truth and true knowledge become almost equated with knowledge and the experience of the sciences. Philosophical hermeneutics aims to prove that this exclusive limitation on truth is unjustified. Gadamer’s work is "concerned with truths that go essentially beyond the range of methodological knowledge."533 This is not an invitation to arbitrariness and the indeterminateness of hermeneutic claims to truth, as critics claim. In order to explore this controversial issue, we should pay close attention to the negative task of explicating the limitations of methodological knowledge before turning to the alternative mode of knowledge presupposed by hermeneutic theory.

For Gadamer, hermeneutics cannot be based on the self-consciousness of subject; rather it must be based on the objectivity of life.534 Truth and Method is not intended to express the fact that the antithesis of truth and method should be mutually exclusive.535

Gadamer avoids giving a definition of truth; instead, he describes the forms of experience in which truth is experienced. Objections against Gadamer’s theory concerning the lack of criterion for objectivity and criticism imply that, for Gadamer, truth is itself relative. Rather, their contention is about the supposed lack of criteria for determining the truth or validity of any interpretation or the experience of historical phenomena. Even if it is granted that the historicity thesis engenders a conception of truth that changes according to the historical conditions of human experience, does this entail that truth itself is relative? How does one infer, from Gadamer’s denial of an a-historical knowledge, to the relativity of truth? Such an approach to the implication of the historicity thesis for the concept of truth simply raises a negative point, that the hermeneutic concept of truth does not conform to the traditional view of truth as a-temporal.

This notion of the traditional concept of truth is itself mistaken on two accounts. First, the traditional notion of truth signifies not an a-temporal quality but the intelligibility of Being. Second, the traditional concept of truth as correspondence to the being of the object is not denied by Gadamer. Rather, Gadamer returns to language as the medium in which this correspondence is verified. However, this correspondence cannot be due entirely to the fact that the self-presentation of the object in language cannot be fixed in a definite way. The Being of the object is as much present in language as it is disclosed through language.

Thus, the implications of Gadamer’s concept of historicity do not entirely confirm traditional metaphysics, but this is because Gadamer does not want to use the concepts and language of metaphysics. Abandoning the concepts of substance, subject, object, perception, etc. may require a different account of the relation between being and truth, even though this relation remains the same on another level.

Unless one denies the finitude of human existence and appeals to a "consciousness as such" or "intellectus archetypus" or a "transcendental ego," the question of how this thinking as transcendental is empirically possible can be avoided. Gadamer believes that such a difficulty does not arise in his hermeneutic theory.536 He writes: "It seems to me that it is essential for taking finitude seriously as the basis of every experience of Being that such experience renounce all dialectical supplementation. To be sure, it is ‘obvious’ that finitude is privative determination of thought and as such presupposes its opposite, transcendence, or history or (in another way) nature. Who will deny that? I contend, however, that we have learned once and for all from Kant that such ‘obvious’ ways of thought can mediate no possible knowledge to us finite beings. Dependence on possible experience and demonstration by means of it remains the alpha and omega of all responsible thought."537 In the demands for a method and criterion for objectivity, Gadamer finds a reflection on modern science’s refusal to acknowledge a limit. Precisely in this refusal lies the desire to exclude everything that eludes science’s own methodology and procedures. In this way science proves to itself that it is without limits and free from self-justification. Thus, science "gives the appearance of being total in its knowledge." The universality of hermeneutic reflection emerges from the acknowledgement of its "own limitations and situatedness."538

To make a choice between absolute knowledge based on the notion of a transcendental subject and finite knowledge is not an option, but a necessity. Reflective thinking is only limited to reflection on the particularity of our own understanding. It is not possible to think "through the end of ourselves as thinking beings."539 As finite beings this is "an idea of which thinking itself can hardly lay hold." What Gadamer means by understanding as self-understanding is "not the perfect self-transparency of knowledge but the insight that we have to accept the limits posed for finite natures."540 

Gadamer responds to all critiques that hermeneutics should be applicable to the actual practice of textual interpretation. "The theoretical giving-an-account of the possibilities of understanding is not an objectifying reflection that makes understanding something capable of being mastered by means of science and methodology."541 The universality of hermeneutics is a claim that "is subject to the indissoluble problematic of its rational application." In this sense, the universality of hermeneutics has the same character of the universality of practical rules. "Like practical philosophy, philosophical hermeneutics stands beyond the alternatives of the transcendental reflection and the empirical pragmatic knowledge."542 

However, every universal rule is in need of application, but, as we learn from Kant, there is no rule for the application of rules.543 Absolute knowledge is not relevant. Gadamer asserts that belonging to tradition does not "include becoming partisan for what has already been passed down. Just as much, it grounds the freedom for criticism and for projecting new goals in social life and action."544 

In addition, it is implicit in the critics’ arguments that the historicity thesis must have an application to the actual practice of the historical sciences. For Gadamer, phenomenological description concerns the self-presentation of subject-matter, the way Being presents itself to human understanding. Our description of phenomena is based on this revelation.

But the question is whether the phenomena disclosed in the phenomenological description thus warrant a point of view from which the current practices can be criticized. Even if it is granted that the form of historicism implicit in Gadamer’s theory is of a transcendental kind, how can this keep it exempt from effective history?

This issue has to do with the conception of history as a changing process whose unchanging element is expressed by the historicity of human existence. Historicism stresses the change in history, and every change requires something changing. But science or knowledge require something to be the same or identical with itself throughout the change.

To think either that language is part of, and a creation of, history, or that history belongs to the linguistic constitution of the social process determines the way we understand history. In Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, both language and history perform significant roles. The evaluation of philosophical hermeneutics is determined by the answer to the question of whether Gadamer’s attempt to deal with the historical and linguistic nature of human experience is intended to develop a philosophical theory without appeal to any supra-temporal, absolute, a priori foundation, or whether he is committed instead to a certain metaphysical, ontological point of view.

In order to demonstrate that the charges of relativism implied by philosophical hermeneutics cannot be sustained, we must prove that Gadamer maintains a conception of history and language totally contrary to the opinions held by his critics. In other words, their critique depends on a conception of language and history that is not Gadamer’s. There are essentially two diverse interpretations of Gadamer’s doctrine of the linguisticality of understanding. On the one hand, critical theorists declare that Gadamer’s hermeneutics presupposes a linguistic idealism. In critical theory, the status of language is reduced to a social convention which can be formed or dissolved according to the changing material conditions and the increase in the knowledge of nature. In their instrumentalist view of language, critical theorists cannot trust the natural order of the development of language, because they find language to be exploitable by the individual. At the same time, critical theory wants to base itself on the intersubjective and action-oriented function of linguistic communication. In other words, language becomes a tool whose use imposes upon everybody who uses it the acceptance of a defined goal.545 They consider language a matter of social convention and, even if it is not an instrument that any single individual can exploit, nevertheless, a class or group can.

Take, for instance, Apel’s notion that a community of interpreters consists of classes formed according to a division of labor.546 A class would have to contend with its role, for instance, dealing only with objective research, while another group would be dealing with the normative value of the results of this research. Gadamer’s position is close to neither of these views.

Although they are not always clear and not completely free from ambiguities of their own, Gadamer’s views on the nature and relation between language and reality, and the relation between language and thought, are embedded in an ontological doctrine of a dialectical relationship of being, language and thinking.

It has become clear that the problem of relativism associated with the historicity thesis presents us with several issues concerning the foundations and validity of hermeneutic theory itself. In the absence of a detailed analysis of the concept of temporality and of language as the medium of historical understanding, the problem of relativism cannot be examined in the context of philosophical hermeneutics.

Gadamer’s conception of language remains the least explored aspect of his hermeneutic theory. Despite his insistence that hermeneutic phenomena must be viewed in the reverse order of their presentation in Truth and Method, the fact remains that this is not pursued in its full implications. The best we can achieve here is to give a sketch of possible ways of altering the common understanding of hermeneutics.

Language, considered as the medium of hermeneutic understanding, constitutes the central theme of Part III of Truth and Method. The analysis of the linguistic nature of understanding is concerned with an ontological analysis of language as the ground of the dialectical relationship between the finitude of human experience and the infinitude of Being.

The dynamic relation between finitude and the infinity of Being is given in the speculative character of language. Language has the same structure as history. The conditions of historical life precede the consciousness of being conditioned, as such.547 Often the reflection on this conditionedness is confused with rising above history. Distancing oneself from historical effects is made possible only by taking a particular situation into reflection. But the totality in which this reflection takes place transcends the capacity of individual reflection. This is the reason why critical theorists have suggested a communicative community, a larger group, as the transcendental subject of historical consciousness.

In the same way that the historical process is not controlled by any single individual consciousness, language is not under the domination of any particular individual. Yet, every individual has a linguistic capacity or competence with different degrees of sophistication. The universality of language is at the same time the universality of reason. However, the relation between reason and language is one of immanence, not transcendence.

The human relation to language has an ambiguity similar to that of human freedom. The conception of freedom includes its opposite, i.e., un-freedom, the lack of freedom which can only be conceived through restoring it into freedom, and vice versa. In the same way, language contains pre-linguistic, non-linguistic or even meta-linguistic phenomena within its confines, without violating either its concrete reality, or its ideality. The non-linguistic can only be understood linguistically. Every cognition, every reflection on a subject matter, takes place in language.

Thus, the universality of language has as its correlative the universality of reason. In this way, Gadamer elevates language to its proper place by formulating the traditional metaphysical notion of the transcendental unity of being, truth and the good according to the speculative relation between language and being. Language itself is speculative, i.e, it reflects objects within the universality of the relation of language to Being. But Being itself is not universal. Corresponding to the universality of language, knowledge or rationality is dialectical. To have knowledge of something is to grasp an object as it is mirrored in the universality of its being.

The universality of knowledge, through the medium of language, is possible because the knowledge of the object is attained neither according to the empirical universality, nor according to the abstract universality of an object, but according to the concrete universality of the word in language. A word presents the thing in the mirror of the universality of the relation between language and reality. Since this reality is not given in its totality, the reality that is represented in the word is the universality of language.

There is here, of course, a danger of falling into a linguistic positivism. Linguistic reality, or the universality of language, seems to be identical with the totality of all there is. Hence, the ineffable, what cannot be expressed, is excluded from the realm of language and of knowledge.548 Here Gadamer does not commit the mistake of identifying the limits of reality with the limits of language. Rather, the universality of language is the only infinite that we can experience. Whatever remains ineffable in this sense belongs to the infinity of language, even though such a type of infinity is a "bad infinity,"549 —i.e., indefinite. This simply means that totality or the infinity is not given to an individual consciousness, but only through language.

As has already been pointed out, the experience of language contains the limits of individual consciousness, as well as the possibility and the orientation toward infinity, totality and the universal. The concrete universality we mentioned earlier finds its genuine reality in language. Every word in a language and every language in its totality, in their reference to reality, have within themselves a potentiality for infinite relationships. Again, every individual has a potentially infinite capacity for the use of a particular language at his disposal. But individuals’ linguistic competence can never reach to a point of an absolute dominance over the potentials of language itself. It is significant that Gadamer’s thesis takes this situation into account.

Gadamer states that the hermeneutic phenomenon he is describing is "a special case of the general relationship between thinking and speaking, whose enigmatic intimacy conceals the role of language in thought. . . . The linguisticality of understanding is the concretion of historically effected consciousness."550 

The hermeneutic claim to universality is based on the universality of the relation between language and reason. Language is, for Gadamer, "not just one of man’s possessions in the world; but rather, on language depends the fact that man has a world at all. The world as world exists for man as for no other creature that is in the world. But this world is verbal in nature."551 

Now, it is necessary to point out that Gadamer’s conception of language is entirely different from those of Habermas and Apel, who always speak of language as the foundation of intersubjective communication and the symbolic givenness of the world. For instance, Apel talks about the revealment of the world in language. What he means by this is not the revealment of the world through language in an ontological sense, but in the naturalistic sense that language reveals our relation to the world. This naturalistic sense is shown in Apel’s assertion that language can change according to the possible increase of our scientific knowledge of the world and the consensus on the truth. Apel adheres to a conventionalist conception of language. The regulative ideal of the agreement of a community of interpreters includes an agreement about the linguistic representation of the objects of the world.552 In other words, consensus includes the agreement about the objective referents of words, and language is to be used to represent the things in the world.

Linguistic change always exits in language, it is not a change of language. Other theories often take the particular change within language to be a change in the nature of language’s capacity to express reality. But from Gadamer’s point of view linguistic change belongs to the capacity within language to express reality in a new way. The titles of different sections of Part III of Truth and Method provide us with ample evidence for this assessment.

In the context of a discussion concerning the notion of language as reflecting the world view of linguistic communities that was developed by the German linguist, Humboldt, Gadamer tries to save this notion from the apparent danger of linguistic relativism. While others are ready to infer a relativistic world view from Humboldt’s concept of "language as Weltanschauung" or language as world view, Gadamer draws attention to the fact that the multiplicity of languages and language views presents clear evidence of man’s freedom for transcending the natural and social environment surrounding him.553

The concept of environment must be noted here. Although it may appear similar to Heidegger’s notion of environment, Umwelt, Gadamer speaks of environment more in the sense of the interdependence of language and the world. Specifically it is the human world constituted through this interdependence encompassing both the natural and social life of human beings. The interrelationship between language and the world characterizes the verbal and linguistic nature of hermeneutic experience. Gadamer writes: "Language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to language within it. Not only is the world world only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it. Thus, that language is originarily human means at the same time that man’s being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic."554

The primordiality of the linguisticality of human understanding signifies the ontological constitutions of the human experience of the world. From an epistemological point of view the question arises as to how to account for the relation between experience and the world. This question concerns the fundamental capacity of human reason to have a cognitive comportment towards the world. Traditional philosophy dealt with this in terms of self-evident principles of knowledge, and had the sense of Being as the organizing principle of the chaotic nature of human experience. Heidegger’s approach is to explain this comportment in terms of the fore-structures of the understanding of Being. Understanding does not takes place in a theoretical, distanced attitude towards the world, but in the practical concerns with our immediate surroundings. The world exists for man not primarily as object to gaze at in wonder, but as a world in which one finds one’s way around in concernful inspection.

Gadamer seems to retain this practical concern within his concept of the linguistic comportment to the world. Human beings are born into the world with the capability of immediately utilizing things in their environment for their practical needs, which are provided by parents, society, etc. Thus, what we first learn is not how to use them and for what purpose they are used, but rather first we learn to distinguish the objects that present themselves to our visual horizon in a chaotic manner through the way they are articulated in language. Gadamer expresses this fact as a world orientation (Verhalten): "To have an orientation toward the world, however, means to keep oneself so free from what one encounters of the world that one can present it to oneself as it is. This capacity is at once to have a world and to have language."555

Gadamer’s conception of the relation between language and reality appropriates Hegel’s analysis of the speculative logic of philosophical propositions and Heidegger’s treatment of the logic of propositions in Being and Time.556 Gadamer argues that the speculative proposition "does not state something about something, rather it presents the unity of the concept."557 Truth comes into being in the activity of language. For this reason language has the character of an "event," that is to say, the truth of the object comes into being through the process of articulation. "Language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs."558

To a certain extent Truth and Method depends on and broadens Heidegger’s explication of language as an "event," describing the role of language in the dialectical play of Being as concealment and un-concealment. Gadamer applies the notion of "event" or "happening" to historical understanding and defines the role of language as a mediation of the "finite and historical nature of man to himself and to the world."559 

There are a few questions to be asked concerning Gadamer’s view of language. First of all, one might ask, as did Habermas and Pannenberg, whether it is legitimate to draw an ontological significance from the equation of language and understanding.560 This objection is raised against the hermeneutic doctrine of language on the basis of the assumption that we cannot assimilate pre-linguistic or non-linguistic modes of experience under the universality of language. Gadamer acknowledges that what can be called non-linguistic experiences do exist. But there is no question of experiencing the content of experience without linguistic mediation.

The linguistic nature of experience refers to the fact that whenever something is experienced, it is always set against something else. Words function in the role of a mirroring of the content of the experience against something else. In the final analysis, the content of non-linguistic experience is conceived in terms of the internal dialogue of the soul with itself. Non-linguistic experience, too, is something which "looks to an ever-possible verbalization."561

However, one probably would argue that an ontological universality of understanding is not adequate to account for the universality of language. From the point of view of the universality of understanding, one might question the universality of language. The possibility of verbalization may explain the power and range of language, but this does not prove that language has a universal mode. Furthermore, it is even questionable whether an ontological account of language is adequate for the development of a theory of language.562

Only from an absolute position can one raise the criticism that even a theory asserting language as the ontological conditions of understanding is unable to avoid the actual historical situation in which its transcendental conditions are constituted. Such a criticism maintains that every theory requires its own completion in history. Habermas’s own thesis demands that we must achieve a historical position in which all communication is free. Pannenberg also has argued that the historicity thesis implies its completion in a universal history.563 From a different point of view, Pannenberg asserts that Gadamer’s attack on the sufficiency of propositional statements to express the truth disregards the methodological fact that hermeneutics "can only begin from an exact grasp of what is stated."564

Gadamer avoids following Hegel and Plato all the way to the claim that speculative dialectics conceals reality (Plato’s position), or discloses the infinite and absolute.565 The concept of the speculative nature of language as presenting the dialectic of finite and infinite that lies at the center of the thesis concerning the linguisticality of understanding leads Gadamer beyond even Hegel and Heidegger.

If we remember that the second volume of Heidegger’s Being and Time was projected to be on the subject of the relationship of Being and beings, one might say that this is taken up in the analysis of language in Truth and Method under the title, "language as the determination of the hermeneutic object."566 The universal function of language as revealed in the phenomenon of understanding shows, according to Gadamer, the solution to the "great dialectical puzzle" of the relationship between unity and multiplicity.567 "All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is within it an infinity of meaning to be elaborated and interpreted."568

We mentioned above the way the interpreter belongs to his text and described the close relationship between tradition and history that is expressed in the concept of historically effected consciousness. The interpreter’s belonging to tradition can be defined "more exactly as the idea of belonging on the basis of the linguistically constituted experience of the world."569 

According to Gadamer, language has the speculative dialectical function of leading us "behind itself and behind the facade of overt verbal expression that it first presents." The critical function of hermeneutics is rooted in this. "Language is not coincident, as it were, with that which is expressed in it, with that in it which is formulated in words. The hermeneutic dimension that opens up here makes clear the limit to objectifying anything that is thought and communicated."570

Linguistic expressions are not simply inexact, and in need of refinement, but always necessarily fall short of what they evoke and communicate.571 In speaking, there is always an implied meaning that is imposed on the medium of expression which will lose its meaning when it is raised to the level of what is actually expressed.572

Gadamer distinguishes two forms in which speaking extends behind itself. Speaking presents also something that is unsaid "in that which for all practical purposes is concealed by speaking."573 The first form in which speaking conceals something belongs to occasionality or the dependence of speech upon a situation. Gadamer claims that "such a dependency upon situation is not itself situational" in the sense of the formal dependency of semantic expressions like "here" and "this." Rather, it is the case that "such occasionality constitutes the essence of speech."574 Gadamer explains this as the hermeneutic problem of question. All speech is motivated, in the sense that its motivation lies in the question to which the statement is an answer. Therefore "no statement has an unambiguous meaning based on its linguistic and logical construction."575 

In certain cases, questions cannot be determined solely on the basis of answers, but must be referred to an action as the context of the question to which it is an answer.576 In the case of a literary text whose meaning is not motivated by a particular occasion, but claims to be understandable ‘anytime’, this means that it is not only an answer, but raises a question.577 These are forms of the concealment of language, a concealment inherent in linguisticality itself.

The second form of this kind of concealment is that which Strauss called the relation between persecution and the art of writing.578 Lie and error are good examples for concealment through language. Although error is not a semantic or hermeneutic phenomena, both are present in it. A correct assertion conceals one way, as indicated, whereas mistake or error is a ‘correct’ expression of the erroneous opinion. As such, they are not opposed to the expression of correct opinions.579

The first form of concealment belongs to the structure of language, while the second belongs to concealment through language. The border phenomena, such as lie and error, belong to linguistic concealment. A lie is a linguistic phenomenon which "presupposes the truth value of speaking," either in the case of intentional deceitfulness, or personal deceitfulness, in which a feeling for what is true and for the truth of any kind has been lost. Deceitfulness and falsity deny their own existence and secure themselves against "exposure through talking per se [Reden selbst]."580 Gadamer claims that idle talk presents the model for self-alienation to which the linguistic consciousness is susceptible and that needs to be resolved by hermeneutic reflection.581 This is the case in situations in which the other person (in whose speaking the deceitfulness is recognized) excludes himself from the communication, because he does not stand behind his statements.582 Gadamer asserts that unrecognized prejudices have a similar function, i.e., if one does not take responsibility for one’s prejudices, one does not really participate in a dialogue.

Gadamer argues that prejudices represent the most powerful form of concealment through language that determines our relation to the world. He refers to this as the "tacit demands of prejudices."583 Thus, it belongs to the border position where speaking is guided by these "fore-conceptions and fore-understanding" that remain hidden and of which we become conscious only when there is an interruption in meaning of what one intends to say. "This generally comes about in a new experience. Foremeaning becomes untenable."584 But the conscious form of concealment through language exists in the sense that self-securing prejudices take a form of language as the "unyielding repetitiousness characteristic of all dogmatism."585 Thus, Gadamer claims that even the claim to presuppositionless freedom from prejudices may take such forms as a language of a self-evident certainty.

"Being that can be understood is language"586 is an assertion that has created much confusion. Gadamer explains this assertion by appealing to a formula made by Goethe: "Everything is a symbol."587 For Gadamer, this does not mean that all reality is only understood through symbols, but rather "everything is a symbol" means that totality is always construed symbolically. The totality of something is not given as such.

"‘Everything’ is a symbol" is not an assertion about each being, indicating what it is, but an assertion about how human understanding encounters everything. It means that there is nothing that cannot mean something to human beings. It also means that "nothing comes forth in the one meaning that is simply offered to us. The impossibility of surveying all relations is just as much present" in this concept "as is the vicarious function of the particular for representation of the whole."588 Despite the finitude and the historicity of human existence, human understanding is not cut away from the infinite and the universality of the relation to the being of reality. For Gadamer this is the meaning of his assertion concerning the universality of language. As he writes: "For only because the universal relatedness of being is concealed from human eyes does it need to be discovered. . . . For the distinctive mark of the language of art is that the individual art work gathers into itself and expresses the symbolic character that, hermeneuticly regarded, belongs to all being. In comparison with all linguistic and nonlinguistic tradition, the work of art is the absolute present for each particular present, and at the same time holds its word in readiness for every future."589 

It is true that language has attained a central position in contemporary philosophy. But where does the importance of language for human studies lie? According to Gadamer, it does not lie in the attempt of old fashioned language studies to derive the world view of a society from its linguistic peculiarities, which must end up in a linguistic relativism. Nor is it a matter of making a comprehensive claim of the general science of language, that is, linguistics in the fashion of linguistic analytics.

Our being in language does not mean being absolutely pre-determined by language to the extent of having no freedom at all. Gadamer takes considerable care to emphasize the freedom of the individual in using language. This is not an absolute freedom over language in the sense that an individual, or even a group for that matter, can have a total control over language. Rather, language allows us this freedom, without being totally controlled by a speaker. Absolute freedom appears abstract in the face of the fact that the contradiction between what is real and what would seem to be rational is "ultimately indissoluble"; even this fact itself testifies to our freedom. In this sense, Gadamer restricts the sense of un-freedom neither to "natural necessities nor to the causal compulsion" determining our thinking. What we intend and hope for moves in the space of freedom, but this free space is not the space of an "abstract joy in construction but a space filled with reality by prior familiarity."590 Therefore, Gadamer’s contribution lies in his effort to find a resolution to the problem that Heidegger has stressed as the question of "truth as comprehended, not from the subject, but from Being."591 

Since understanding has the structure of dialogical experience, and since the otherness of the object always asserts itself against the experiencing consciousness, this phenomenon needs to be explored in the context of the linguistic nature of experience. Gadamer explains the role of language in the following: "Wherever it [language] is doing what it is supposed to do (which is to actuate its communicative function), it does not work like a technique or an organon for reaching agreement with oneself, but it is itself this process and content of coming to agreement, even to the point of the buildup of a common world in which we can speak an understandable—no, the same—language with one another. This is the linguistic constitution of human life."592

The emphasis on the linguistic nature of understanding does not, however, constitute the sole force of Gadamer’s arguments. Language is not merely an immutable sign system set aside from the cognitive capabilities of human beings, but rather language is the embodiment of the movement of the finite and the infinite within the historical dimension of life.

Therefore, the finite nature of understanding does not necessarily coincide exactly with the full potentialities of language. Hence, the universality of hermeneutic experience is derived from the linguistic character of understanding. But this does not depend on a particular spoken language, but rather on the phenomenon of language itself. The real correspondence between understanding and language lies in the interrelatedness of being and thinking, as well as of being and language. Human reason is linguistic in the utmost sense of the word: thinking, in short, is always discursive.

The dialectical character of the mediation of the past and future in the present belongs essentially to the speculative nature of language in which the transmission of tradition and the understanding of it take place. The interpreter’s historical existence, his historical conditionedness, is modified by the understanding of tradition precisely because of the linguistic nature of understanding. It is accomplished by the reflective act of historically-effected consciousness. The consciousness effected by history can raise itself above the historical effects of the object, but consciousness cannot overcome the otherness of the being of the object itself. But again, since understanding belongs as much to the object as it belongs to the subject, understanding cannot sublate, in the Hegelian sense, effective history. Actually, this limitation is the condition for the possibility of listening to the voice of the things themselves. Every understanding contributes something to effective history, either by bringing an aspect of the subject matter into a new light, or by confirming a quality in its historical timelessness.

It is precisely in the linguistic structure of understanding that the dialectical tension of history and the historicity of understanding are relieved from their self-referentiality. The hermeneutic experience moves within the primordiality of language as the fundamental element of all human experience. In language there are embedded the infinite potentialities of human understanding while at the same time the particularity belonging to any linguistic expression of reality discloses the limitedness of historical understanding. Being becomes manifest through linguistic expressions that may satisfy the anticipation of the completeness of the meaning of an object, an anticipation that initiates the movement of understanding; yet, it does not exhaust the meaning of the subject matter.

Gadamer contends that the experience of history and especially the experience of art serve as the model of integration and assimilation of the meaning from the past, based on the experience of temporality. The experience of time acquires a new significance here. Truth and Method does not provide us with a systematic exposition of the ontological sense of historicity. Yet, in the context of the discussion concerning the experience of art, Gadamer draws attention to the necessity of a different concept of time,593 not only in order to distinguish the natural sciences from the human sciences, but also in order to explain the historicity belonging to experience and life. In some of his writings Gadamer attempts to deal with the problem of time in order to clarify the hermeneutic problem of transcendence and immanence. Gadamer’s starting point is to overcome the Hegelian dialectic of absolute knowledge through the relation of the concept and time.

The experience of time brings out two aspects of the problem of historicity as it relates to the hermeneutic theory of understanding. First, the concept of historicity refers to the temporality of human existence and to the continuity of the experience of life. Second, the historicity of understanding is related to the constitution of objects as historical in the study of history.

For Gadamer, the primary issue concerning historicity involves the experience of the continuity of life.594 The ontological meaning of historicity signifies "something about the mode of being of man."595 The experience of time reveals something about human self-understanding and about the being of understanding. How do human beings experience the temporality of their own existence?

Gadamer answers this question through an analysis of the problems involved in the conception of time as a flow of moments. The central point in all discussions concerning the nature of time concerns man’s understanding of his own existence.596 This is an existential issue because the experience of life is multi-dimensional, and this experience takes place in time.

The ordinary conception of time is derived from Aristotle’s notion of time as the measurement of spatial motion. However, the other aspects of the experience of time are not totally absent in the traditional discussions. Aristotle, who gave this definition of time as the measure of spatial movement, was also aware of the being of time itself. Aristotle’s long neglected concept of time, in which time exists according to the soul measuring it, is of great interest. Aristotle emphasizes the emptiness of time when it is defined in terms of a future expectation; time itself is the empty vessel that is fulfilled by the expected occurrence. Still the essence of time remains problematic, because time is still defined in terms of the things present in time.

Time in the sense of measurement seems to imply that time itself is "empty," because time, as measurement, refers to time only as something which makes temporal measurement possible. Time can be separated from what is measured. Starting with Aristotle, almost all traditional conceptions of time reveal a unique feature: time itself is experienced as "empty time which we fill up."597 It means that time is primarily the sense for something in the future, not for something in the present.598 According to Gadamer, "St. Augustine’s reflections on the question of time in Book 10 of the Confessions represents a concrete example of the problems involved in accounting for such an experience of time. According to Gadamer, St. Augustine believes that the concept of time considered as a one-dimensional flow of moments, is incompatible with the experience of time in the human soul, with the multidimensional experience of time as present, remembered and foreseen time."599 Human self-understanding moves back and forth through several temporal dimensions. But the traditional concept of time as the movement of ‘nows’ in a linear flow toward an indeterminate future cannot explain human self-experience, much less the experience of time itself.

The problem of understanding historical continuity is similar to the difficulty of explaining the reality of time according to a flow of moments. The ontological problem that arises from the concept of time as a flow of ‘nows’ is that the identity that is asserted of the Being of time cannot be explained. The solution Gadamer suggests requires that the problem must be formulated in terms of a metaphysics of becoming. In this perspective, the continuity of history can be explained organically.

Historical process moves in such a way that "in spite of all transitoriness there is no perishing without a simultaneous becoming."600 So the contents of a tradition fill up the emptiness created by the passing of time that marks disappearance and becoming in the historical process. This is the way hermeneutic consciousness understands the continuity of history. This differs from an explanation of the being of the historical object as arising out of the endless flow of changes.601 "The temporality of history is also not originally measured time, and where it is as such, it is not an arbitrary co-ordination of events to the periodicity of nature or of heaven."602 Here lies the root of historicism and its form of relativism.

The historicist assumes the existence of an a-temporal standpoint from which perishing and becoming are observed, from which events are distinguished and articulated. In Gadamer’s view this would lead to arbitrary decisions concerning the significance of events, thus reducing the differences of discontinuous events as a relative "fall and rise," "becoming and perishing."603 Instead Gadamer explains the continuity of history in terms of the temporality of life, while preserving discontinuity in the concept of forgetfulness as a constituent element of the memory of the past.

The historical object acquires its meaning in its mediation through language. Considering language as part of the continuous movement of history resolves the problem of the relation between the infinity of potential world experiences and the finitude of the human understanding. It is this continual process of change that is the essence of the "historical movement of life itself."604

Historical continuity is constituted not by the linear movement of ordinary time, but through the unity of those turning points. History is a process of the continuity of the discontinuous moments that are united in being intended in the present as the memory of the past and the projection toward the future. In intending the significance of events, the time of these events is co-intended. The discontinuity of history is as genuine a phenomenon as its continuity, because what makes an event historical is not its occurrence in the flow of history, but its unique character. The real historical event is unique and, as such, it ultimately remains the source of discontinuity. The primary experience of history is a "sort of original experiencing of the time span of an epochal breakpoint (Epocheneinschnittes)."605

This means that historical events and historical meanings structure their own temporal pattern carved into the continuity of life-time. Therefore, the reality of history lies in our experience of things as changed, which points to discontinuity, and this experience "represents our encounter with the reality of history."606

The emphasis on fulfilled time changes the role of the "temporal consciousness of passing time, which conceives both dimensions of future and past as the infinite continuation passing time."607 For Gadamer, the temporal experience of life has the structure of a change; unlike the changing successive moments of the continuous flow of time, its temporality has a discontinuity of a peculiar kind. The experience of life-time, experienced as the discontinuous experience of change, points back to "non-change, to an undifferentiated union of the ‘present’ in which that which life ‘maintains’ itself. This ontological status of the present belongs to the Aion in one’s life time as such, without detriment to all changes which form one’s ‘course of life.’" 608 Gadamer describes the concept of Aion as the "temporal structure of that which endures as one and the same in every alteration of life’s phases, namely liveliness." It is not necessary to presuppose the givenness of a self-identical ego; it is "rather the complete identity of life with itself, which fulfills the Present by the constant virtuality of possibilities."609

Life experience moves within the awareness of the end which is not given as such. Is it possible to ground the "temporal character of historical experience" on the temporal character of life-experience?610 The relation between time and the consciousness that is aware of time should not be decided in favor of one or the other.

By stripping the present of its privilege of being the sole moment of historical experience, the conflict (within the individual) of immediate experience with the mediated tradition is not resolved in favor of the one or the other. Rather, Gadamer argues that both change in the process. The finitude and historicity of understanding mean that the individual is able to "open himself to a more inclusive nature and a more inclusive tradition."611 

In hermeneutic investigation, history is neither a closed horizon of the past, nor is history the projected end of a process in the future. Rather, hermeneutic experience transforms the historical continuity measured as the continuity of change into a continuity of disjunctive moments united with reference to the totality intended, yet never given. The temporal distance in the sense of the passing of time, considered by historicism as an obstacle for understanding the past, is transformed into an infinite possibility for meaning through the mediation of the past into the present in language.

In conclusion, from these we can infer that the doctrine of historicity developed from being a methodological concept in human studies and then acquired an ontological sense. Gadamer expounds the ontological significance of historicity by applying it to the problem of understanding in the human sciences. Therefore, the historicity of understanding as a hermeneutic principle should not be taken as an epistemological category.

Since understanding has this significant character of belonging to the ontological structure of human existence, human self-understanding takes place only within the continuity of life experience and within the continuity of history. Gadamer’s theory dealing with the problem of historical understanding presupposes an ontological notion of the experience of the continuity of life and the experience of the continuity of history. Since the unity of the experiences of life cannot be explained in terms of a reflectively self-conscious subject, Gadamer introduces historicity to account for the ground of the continuity of both the experience of life and of the experience of the continuity of history. Gadamer shows the existence of transcendence within the temporality of life by holding to the universality of hermeneutic experience constituted through language. The transcendental view is also dissolved in the openness of historical process, effective history or Wirkungsgeschichte. Gadamer acknowledges that our thinking process does not originate from a self-consciously determined point of view, but rather arises in a manner determined by the otherness of the historical object in a dialogical situation. Gadamer maintains the universality of understanding in the face of the temporality of human existence. He advances this thesis in two senses.

In the first sense, interpretation as the explication of understanding is a linguistic experience which is set in opposition to the universality of understanding. Interpretation must be taken back into the process of understanding as a limiting case. In the second sense, this means that historical understanding cannot be thought of from the point of view of abstract universality.

Despite the fact that the critics of Gadamer have certain valid points, we have shown that the charges of relativism cannot stand, because they are based on an abstract concept of the universality of knowledge. As we have pointed out throughout this investigation, Gadamer’s thesis is not free from its own ambiguities, but its strength lies in the transcendental claim of philosophical hermeneutics.