Is the philosophical hermeneutics expounded by Gadamer a theory about interpretation as practiced in the humanities, or a philosophical theory concerning the epistemological conditions of human experience in general? In the preceding chapters, the issues have been dealt with from these points of view. Two major questions emerge from Gadamer’s thesis that understanding is an historical process. First, if understanding is historical, then interpretations of texts from the past would remain relative to historical conditions in which the interpreter studies. Second, if the historicity of understanding signifies the mutual relation between the subject and history, then understanding history, as well as any theory about historical understanding, would remain relative to an historical tradition and to its effects on the present understanding. Thus, Gadamer’s theory faces objections from those who require a method and norms for the objectivity of textual interpretation, as well as from those who wish to establish critical norms for understanding history.

The critique of philosophical hermeneutics made by Betti concerns the method and norms of interpretation. Betti’s objections center on the role of the historicity of understanding, that is to say, on the application of understanding to the interpreter’s present situation. Betti construes the principle of historicity as the historical conditionedness of all processes of interpretation. Therefore, in Betti’s view, because of Gadamer’s emphasis on how every understanding must apply to the interpreter’s situation, Gadamer falls into subjective relativism; and because of his doctrine of the historical conditionedness of interpretation, Gadamer falls into historical relativism. Hirsch, following Betti, has raised objections against philosophical hermeneutics from similar points of view. However, Hirsch goes even further, claiming that Gadamer’s theory implies not only an historicist relativism, but also a hermeneutic nihilism. Hirsch’s critique focuses mainly on the role of tradition and historical distance operative in understanding and the possibility of the fusion of the horizon of the text with the present horizon of the interpreter.

Habermas and Apel take issue with Gadamer precisely on the question of the possibility of reflectively transcending the historicity of the subject in order to subject tradition to a critical evaluation. These critics are not only concerned with the possibility of transcending the historicity of the subject, but also with transcending the historical horizon of tradition so that a critique of historical tradition becomes possible. In their view, Gadamer fails to articulate norms for the critique of tradition because of his reliance on the pre-reflective conditions of understanding which lie in tradition and history. They also recognize the central role of language as the ground of the transcendental conditions of historical understanding, as well as the basis of the hermeneutic claim to universality. Critical theorists are themselves forced into finding cases limiting the universality of linguistic understanding in order to establish the norms of justification for the normative validity of critical hermeneutics.

From the point of view of critical theory, philosophical hermeneutics deals only with the pre-scientific, pre-reflective conditions of understanding and, hence, ignores the conditions of reflectively establishing the normative validity of the human sciences’ knowledge claims. From the perspective of the critical theorist, the hermeneutic principle of the historicity of understanding and the dependence of pre-reflective understanding on tradition as mediated through language must be supplemented with a transcendental reflection on the intersubjective validity of rationality. Therefore, the failure of philosophical hermeneutics to provide norms for objectivity, as well as norms for critique, leads Gadamer to fall into either a blind conservatism or into historical, relative idealism. Gadamer’s theory must presuppose either a universal historical standpoint or a linguistic idealism concerning the achievements of the past.

In the following chapter, we will examine the critical objections against Gadamer’s hermeneutics, particularly the charges concerning the relativist and historicist implications of philosophical hermeneutics. Two aporia of hermeneutics, the question of method and the question of the critical norms of understanding, define these debates. First, we present the objections from the point of view of methodological hermeneutics and then from the point of view of critical theory. Then we conclude with a brief evaluation of counter arguments in defense of philosophical hermeneutics against the charges of relativism.

Betti has raised significant objections against Gadamer’s hermeneutics from the standpoint of the hermeneutic tradition extending from Schleiermacher and Dilthey. He defends the thesis that the object of interpretation in the humanities is the meaning intended by the author and the historical agents. The meaning is entrusted to meaningful forms that are the objectification of human thought. These representative forms of the objectification of human thought mark the spontaneity of human experience as the concretization of human spirit in enduring manifestations. The objectivity of these representative forms of human spirit and one’s approach to them guarantees the capacity to know the human mind that gave them expression.

Knowledge here is taken primarily according to the model of intuition, as the immediate grasp of what is present, what is given to one’s experience. What is enduring in history as the objects of the human sciences are given in language, something present in speech in the form of a text and present in conduct as the actions that are the object of interpretation. For Betti, it is primarily through the objective forms of language and the structure of behavior that the interpreting subject encounters another mind.

For Betti, hermeneutics is a method applied to interpretation in the humanities to guarantee the objectivity of the results. By employing correct methods and interpretive canons, an interpreter is able to reach out beyond his own historical conditions to understand the meaning of a text as intended by the author. The rules and canons guiding the interpretation are universally applicable to any text.

Betti articulates four canons, dealing with the object and the subject of interpretation. The first is the "hermeneutic autonomy of the object." This autonomy means that the object "should be judged in relation to the standards immanent in the original intention."352 The second canon of interpretation concerns the "coherence of meaning." It is Betti’s version of the hermeneutic circle353 signifying the internal relationship between the particular parts and the whole of a text. These two canons specify the object of understanding as the meaning intended by the author and its internal coherence.

The third canon deals with the "actuality of understanding," which corresponds to Gadamer’s concept of fore-understanding. It concerns the fact that the reconstruction of the meaning intended by the author can take place only in terms of the subjectivity of the interpreter. The fourth canon deals with the "meaning-adequacy in understanding." It requires that the interpreter must bring his subjectivity into harmony with the stimulations of his object.354 Betti recognizes the fact that the interpreter could understand the subject matter in terms of his own experience, but he must make every effort to control his "prejudices" and subordinate his own knowledge to the meaning of the object conveyed in the text."355 

From the methodological point of view, according to Betti, Gadamer’s theory fails for the following reasons: first, the dialogical approach to interpretation undermines the "autonomy of the object of interpretation" by inserting the subjective fore-understanding into the process of interpretation. This inevitably leads to subjectivism.356 The second objection pertains to the question of the "objectivity" of interpretation. It concerns the determination of the object of understanding which is the meaning of the text.

According to Betti, Gadamer’s emphasis on the role of pre-judgments in interpretation leads him to confound the subjective conditions of understanding with the conditions of objectivity defined by the methodological canons and the rules of hermeneutics. Thus, the consequence of philosophical hermeneutics is to put "into doubt the objectivity of the results of interpretative procedures in all the human sciences."357 In Betti’s view, Gadamer’s reliance on the a priori historical conditions of understanding leads him to historical relativism. According to Betti, by also including "application" as an integral part of hermeneutic process of understanding, Gadamer succumbs to subjectivism.

Betti criticizes Gadamer’s hermeneutics in terms of the question of the method of interpretation. The question is how Gadamer’s hermeneutics could adjudicate between correct and incorrect interpretation. Betti writes: "The obvious difficulty with the hermeneutic method proposed by Gadamer seems to lie, for me, in that it enables a substantive agreement between text and reader—i.e., between the apparently easily accessible meaning of a text and the subjective conception of the reader—to be formed without, however, guaranteeing the correctness of understanding."358 

In Betti’s view, turning from the "‘existential’ foundation of the hermeneutic circle" to the circularity of textual interpretation is an intrusion into the study practices of the humanities.359 For Betti, Gadamer’s ontological concept of understanding endangers objectivity precisely because of Gadamer’s emphasis on the subjective conditions of interpretation in the form of fore-understanding and pre-judgments.

Betti admits that every interpreter is bound to a particular point of view. Only as a participant (Beteiligter) and an historical being can one understand history.360 However, the historicity of the interpreter plays a minimal role in understanding. Understanding may depend on the perspective adopted by the interpreter and the same phenomenon may be seen from different points of view, but one should not derive from this situation any conclusion concerning the objectivity of understanding.361 Insofar as one means by fore-understanding the expertise of the investigator in the subject matter, it is admissible.362 In Betti’s view, Gadamer’s emphasis upon the fore-understanding in the constitution of interpretation entails the "loss of objectivity."363 Betti intends to protect and to demonstrate the epistemological possibility of objectivity in the humanities.364

Betti takes Gadamer’s concept of the historicity of understanding to be the "historical conditioning of the process of interpretation."365 For Gadamer, understanding always requires interpretation. Since understanding is an historical process, temporal distance is the only criterion for the objectivity of meaning. Its correlate from the subjective side is the "fore-conception perfection" as the criterion of the objectivity of understanding.366 In Betti’s view, Gadamer is concerned only with the internal coherence and conclusiveness of the desired understanding. This entails that the interpreter can claim a monopoly on truth. Hence, it endangers the apprehension of the meaning as other.367 Since, for Gadamer, anticipation of meaning includes the "whole of tradition," Betti argues that Gadamer confuses the possibility concerning the totality with the being-in-itself of historical phenomena.368

Betti finds that hermeneutic understanding is for Gadamer guided only by present concerns and applications.369 The transposition of the meaning of the text into the present is, however, completely out of the question.370 Objectivity can be attained with the self-effacement of the subject and with a determined overcoming of one’s prejudices.371 If self-knowledge and the responsibility for the future become essential to historical understanding, lack of self-knowledge and meaning-inference abandons one to the relativity of historical conditions.372 

The other aspect of Betti’s critique involves the normative goals of hermeneutics. Betti argues that the hermeneutic problem cannot be restricted to the quaestio facti, but must also answer the quaestio juris.373 Gadamer answers that hermeneutics cannot pretend to be methodologically neutral and reminds us that the descriptive aim of hermeneutics is limited to showing the possibility of understanding, not to prescribing necessarily what it ought to be. Still, the question remains whether Gadamer can avoid the problem that pertains to the relation between description and the application of the rules revealed in such a description to the concrete practices of the interpretation of texts. If Gadamer did not also claim that the relations he describes are universal in all understanding, there would no question of a purported normativity in his theory.

Betti seems to be dissatisfied with Gadamer’s reply. Richard Palmer summarizes the result of this exchange: "For Betti, Gadamer is lost in a standardless existential subjectivity."374 The debate between Betti and Gadamer surrounds the issue of what description entails. Is it at all possible to distinguish the meaning of the text in itself from the meaning as one understands it as it appears to a subject in any particular time in history? Although the issue is genuine and unavoidable, one cannot answer this without considering the historical conditioning of hermeneutic understanding in a given tradition.

The Betti-Gadamer dispute has its source in two different conceptions of the relations between understanding and interpretation. For Betti, understanding follows as a consequence of interpretation.375 Betti maintains that the same prerequisites of knowledge are common to both the natural and the human sciences, although he distinguishes them on the grounds of the respective differences of the objects of these sciences, and on their interpretive procedures.376

Betti argues that Gadamer’s denial of the requirement of a method of interpretation is a threat to the objectivity and the validity of understanding. In fact there is no possible resolution to their disagreement. For Betti the object of understanding is the meaning of a text as intended by the author. Meaning is fixed permanently by virtue of forms of representation. These forms are formally unchanging and can be receptacles of meanings intended by a human mind.377 For Betti these meaningful forms represent the objectification of mind, and interpretation is a process in which the meaningful forms are apprehended as the objectification of another mind, a process which reproduces the original creative activity of the author.378 

Yet how could Betti’s own views in the objectivity of interpretation withstand historical change? Does objectivity here mean an understanding of the complete and absolute truth of the text? For Betti the hermeneutic task is also never completed in a perfect enlightenment. But he accepts Dilthey’s notion of productive life as the ground of the possibility of the infinite manifestations of meaning. According to Betti, "The meaning contained within texts, monuments, and fragments is constantly reborn through life and is forever transformed in a chain of rebirths."379 Although the empirical subject depends on the contingent conditions of history, transcendental subjectivity is free from the effects of history.380

Betti criticizes Gadamer by arguing that textual meaning is determinate and that it is what the author actually intended. While Betti asserts that an interpretation must fully correspond to the meaning intended by the author, at the same time he commits himself to the view that the task of interpretation is always open and cannot fulfil the required correspondence. He himself fails the test that he requires of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Hirsch’s attempt to carry out Betti’s distinction between meaning and significance runs into a similar difficulty.381

In his critical review of Truth and Method, Hirsch has summarized the most controversial issue concerning Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory in this statement: "If we cannot enunciate a principle for distinguishing between an interpretation that is valid and one that is not, there is little point in writing books about texts or about hermeneutic theory."382 The debate concerning the method and the validity of interpretation, which Riceour called "the central aporia of hermeneutics,"383 is defined by the possibility of reproducing the original meaning of a text. The impasse defined by Betti and Hirsch’s objections to philosophical hermeneutics has emerged from differences in their views of the object of interpretation. Betti and Hirsch maintain that reproduction of the author’s meaning is the sole object of interpretation, and it is the sole criterion for the validity of understanding. Hirsch’s critique of philosophical hermeneutics is based on the doctrine that the meaning intended by the author must be the criterion for the correctness of interpretation.384

In Hirsch’s view, since Gadamer does not accept the meaning intended by the author as a criterion for the correctness of interpretation, and denies the possibility of adopting the historical categories of another historical period, Gadamer cannot establish the horizon of a text such that the interpreter’s own horizon could merge with it. Therefore, the interpreted text can only be a new creation, not the pure expression of the meaning inherent in the author’s text.385 In the absence of a determinate criterion or a regulative norm, Hirsch asserts that Gadamer must acknowledge a "nihilistic" indeterminacy of meaning.386 

Hirsch distinguishes the meaning of a text from the significance it may have for different interpreters or different historical periods.387 Even if the text is interpreted as bearing different significance, the meaning is determinate in the sense intended by the author. However, Hirsch asks whether there is a difference between historical distance with a temporal gap between a distant past and present, and a short temporal distance between the subjects communicating in the present. Hirsch reduces the temporal distance to the personal differences of individuals.

For Hirsch, interpretation is possible because reproducibility is a quality of verbal meaning.388 Hirsch suggests that reproducibility is the reason that verbal meaning is also a shared meaning.389 Hirsch recognizes that the meaning intended by the author must be determined, so that it can be reproduced as well as remain comprehensible and shared by others; otherwise the meaning intended by the author would be only a mental property. He distinguishes meaning into willed types and shared types.390 The reproduction of determinate or willed meaning is possible through the mediation of the shared meaning. Hirsch, without acknowledging it, construes the circular relation between reproduction and shareability of meaning in a way that resembles the circularity of the individual belonging to history and the historicity of understanding in Gadamer’s hermeneutics.

Hirsch, too, cannot escape from the mediation of history in interpretation. In order to construe the intended meaning, the interpreter must start from the shared meaning; then he must determine the willed meaning as the meaning chosen from a particular sphere of shared meaning. But the question that arises is how to establish the textual meaning as determinate if the willed meaning has been chosen by the author from among the possible range of shared meanings. This brings us back to a central problem underlying historicism: In order to understand a text the whole context to which the text belongs must be known.

Since Hirsch recognizes that this task as impossible, he realizes that the "fusion of horizons" is not based on the differences of individuality between the author and the interpreter.

Hirsch evaluates Gadamer’s work as oscillating between skepticism and nihilism because of the central role of the doctrine of the historicity of understanding. Since Gadamer denies the author’s prerogative for determining the meaning of the text, he must appeal to tradition and history for the determination of the meaning. For Hirsch, Gadamer tries to save the validity of interpretation from the "ruins of historicity"391 by appealing to tradition, effective history and the fusion of horizons.

According to Hirsch, the principle of historicity is introduced in order to explain the differences between the meaning of a text in the present and the past. A distinction between the text’s meaning and its significance would explicate this situation better. Without this distinction, Gadamer cannot rescue interpretation from the "indeterminacy of textual meaning." This leads Gadamer to the untenable position of "hermeneutic nihilism."392

Hirsch understands the concept of historicity in the sense of the historical determination of the subject. The historicity of understanding expresses the notion that the meaning of a text from the past is inscrutable to us except from the present perspective. In fact, the sense Hirsch attributes to historicity is quite contrary to what it means for Gadamer. According to Hirsch, the doctrine of historicity is introduced by Gadamer for the purpose of explaining why a text produced in the past does not have the same meaning in the present. Therefore, Hirsch infers, understanding is limited to the meaning of texts in the present. After all, in this sense, every expression becomes temporally distant from the present moment as soon as it is uttered.

In his later work, Aims of Interpretation, Hirsch attempts to evaluate the implication of historicism in Gadamer’s theory from another angle. Hirsch recognizes that Gadamer makes an attempt to deal with the problems of historicism. But Hirsch claims that Gadamer entertains the notion that the past is inscrutable. We must either reconstruct the past in its own perspective or interpret it from our own perspective. Since Gadamer denies the possibility of reconstructing the past, he chooses to specify the conditions of "revitalizing" the past from the perspective of the present. By presenting both the doctrine of historicism and Gadamer’s theory of the historicity of understanding in this way, Hirsch not only inverts historicism but also denies the central principle of Gadamer’s approach, that not historical alienation but rather familiarity is the basis of a historical hermeneutics. The principle of the historicity of understanding in Gadamer’s theory is suggested to account for the individual’s relation to historical continuity.

Hirsch is also of the opinion that Gadamer’s hermeneutics entails another fallacy of historicism: that the past has its own homogeneous horizon.393 For Hirsch, from Gadamer’s concept of a homogeneous past, Gadamer effects a transformation into the notion of a homogenous present as tradition. Therefore, according to Hirsch, Gadamer recommends "that we revitalize the inscrutable texts of the past by distorting them to our own perspective."394 Hirsch asserts that as a "skeptical counter-proposal" on the premises of historicism, Gadamer argues that "it is far better to distort the past in an interesting and relevant way than to distort and deaden it under the pretense of historical reconstruction."395 Therefore, both the historical reconstructionist and "Gadamer in his historical vitalization are extreme historicists and perspectivists."396

From the standpoint of the premise of historicism that the past has its own homogeneous horizon, it might be quite reasonable to describe an historical period as sharing a certain cultural perspective.397 According to Hirsch, in order to deal with this fallacy, Gadamer "assumes a present that has its own peculiar deadness."398 The notion that the present has its own homogeneity is just as much an artificial construction as are reconstructions of the past.399 Hirsch argues that: "The distance between one culture and another may not in every instance be bridgeable, but the same is true between persons who inhabit the same culture. Cultural perspectivism . . . forgets that the distance between one historical period and another is a very small step in comparison to the huge metaphysical gap we leap to understand the perspective of another person in any time or place."400 It must be noted that Hirsch reduces Gadamer’s concept of the temporal distance to the differences between individuals, and thus returns to the metaphysics of individuality of the sort that is criticized by Gadamer in the context of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics.

Hirsch argues that a theory of interpretation should not mix the descriptive and normative elements of interpretation; rather these two should be disengaged. The descriptive aspect of hermeneutics deals with the nature of interpretation, while the normative element concerns the goal of interpretation. The goals of interpretation are, according to Hirsch, determined by "value-preferences."401 Since there are value preferences involved in interpretations, these are not arbitrarily chosen, but impose ethical choices.402 But deriving the normative from the descriptive aspect of interpretation is circular and tautological.403 According Hirsch: "Interpretative norms are not really derived from theory, and that theory codifies ex post facto the interpretive norms we already prefer."404 Hirsch reminds us that Schleiermacher upholds the universal canon of interpretation against anachronistic interpretation: "Everything in a given text which requires fuller interpretation must be explained and determined exclusively from the linguistic domain common to the author and his original public."405

Hirsch seems unconvinced by his own argument concerning the "fusion of horizons," since he comes back to the issue in terms of perspectivism in The Aims of Interpretation. He describes perspectivism in terms of the Kantian concept of transcendental and empirical subject. "Perspectivism is a version of the Kantian insight that man’s experience is pre-accommodated to his categories of experience."406 Dilthey has transferred these categories from science to the historical sphere of experience. Dilthey called these categories "life-categories," that establish the possibility of historical experience. For Hirsch, these cultural categories are not universal in the same way that the categories of scientific experience are universal, but change and differ according to changing cultures. Therefore, verbal meaning is completely relative to historical subjectivity. "Cultural subjectivity is not innate, but acquired; it derives from a potential, present in every man, that is capable of sponsoring an indefinite number of culturally conditioned categorical systems."407 Hirsch revives the dictum of historicism by claiming that "every interpretation of verbal meaning is constituted by the categories through which it is constructed."408 So "verbal meaning can exist only by virtue of the perspective which gives it its existence."409

Hirsch argues that the interpreter can and must adopt the categories within which the author produced the meaning intended in his text. This is possible because man has the ability to adopt different cultural categories in "reflective thought."410 An interpretation that is complete could not be interpretation, but a kind of absolute knowledge which is not possible given the finitude and the temporality of human understanding. Hirsch recognizes that a concept of complete hermeneutic understanding is self-contradictory. He offers an alternative formulation of the hermeneutic circle, which he calls "corrigible schemata."411

Hirsch’s conception of the hermeneutic circle as "corrigible schemata" is almost similar to fore-understanding and also a similar concept of the fusion of horizons. In the context of hermeneutic understanding, corrigible schemata signify the notion that knowledge already acquired is not a mass of accumulated information, but rather consists of organized patterns that we make use of in the acquisition of new knowledge. These schemata play a role in assimilating new experiences into already acquired knowledge. They are not fixed, but open to change, and, hence, corrigible.

However, Hirsch finds the concept of pre-understanding that is adapted from Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics and applied to textual interpretation by Gadamer as radically unalterable. "Unlike one’s unalterable and inescapable pre-understanding in Heidegger’s account of the hermeneutic circle, a schema can be radically altered and corrected."412 Gadamer explains, however, that fore-understandings are always "worked out," modified in respect to the "things themselves," which is the "first, last and constant task" of understanding.413 Gadamer states that "the working out of this fore-projection" is constantly "revised in terms of what emerges." This constant process of new projection constitutes the "movement of understanding and interpretation."414

Yet, Hirsch’s concept of schema remains primarily psycho-linguistic. He only transforms this basic cognitive concept into hermeneutics and claims that the "most elementary aspects of verbal interpretation follow the same ground rules as our perception and interpretation of the world." It also applies to speech formation. "Our semantic intentions seem to be matched against preformed schemata which we either use as previously formed, or, later, to better match our semantic intentions."415 With these, Hirsch realizes that he comes very close to Gadamer’s position and acknowledges this convergence.416 

Two common threads runs through the critiques of Betti and Hirsch. They believe that there can be only one invariable meaning for a text, and this meaning is determined by its author and cannot be changed even if a correct understanding of this meaning cannot be accomplished in the present. The task of the interpreter is to bring this meaning into the open by employing specific methods and canons of interpretation. The validity of understanding can be established on the basis of whether the interpreter uses proper or improper methods in interpretation or evaluates the relevant evidence concerning the conditions in which the text came into being.

Their objections concern the fact that Gadamer’s hermeneutics fails to take into account the fact that the text might not fulfil the pre-understanding, but still remains meaningful in its unity and completeness. What would happen when the expected unity and completeness does not yield to understanding, and the supposedly established parity between the fore-understanding and the meaning of the text breaks down? These critics believe that Gadamer’s theory entails that when a disparity arises between the fore-conception of completeness and the texts itself, parity of understanding must always be restored in favor of the interpreter’s fore-conceptions, because Gadamer does not specify any criterion of the correctness of an interpretation. For Betti and Hirsch, a text has its own autonomy as the unique expression of another mind. The disagreement between Betti, Hirsch and Gadamer cannot be reconciled, because they all adhere to quite opposite metaphysical presumptions concerning the subject and the object of interpretation.

In addition to the criticisms of "Gadamer’s alleged subjectivism and relativism"417 made from the point of view of methodological hermeneutics, Habermas accused Gadamer of "dogmatism" and relative idealism.418 Habermas’s objections against philosophical hermeneutics focus on three points: the relation between rationality and tradition, the problem of the methodology of the social sciences, and the universality of hermeneutic experience based on language. Habermas draws on philosophical hermeneutics for his own project of developing a critical theory of the social sciences.

Habermas values hermeneutic theory, inasmuch as it reveals the historical conditions of all knowledge and the possibility for developing a critique of the especially positivist theory of sciences. In addition, Gadamer’s emphasis on language as the medium of the continuity of tradition, as well as the intersubjective ground of understanding in which both natural and the social sciences operate, furnishes a means to access the objects of the social sciences. The historically effected consciousness that requires an awareness of prejudices and controls our fore-understandings is more positive than the naive objectivism that falsifies the foundation of the social sciences.

However, Habermas’s interest in hermeneutics is guided by his own project of developing a critical theory of the social sciences. He places hermeneutics within this project for a critical theory, which is an attempt to establish the ideal conditions of an unconstrained communication.419 As a practical theory, critical hermeneutics "is designed to guarantee, within cultural traditions, the possible action-orienting, self-understanding of individuals and groups, as well as reciprocal understanding between different individuals and groups. It makes possible the form of unconstrained consensus and the type of open intersubjectivity on which communicative action depends."420

Habermas’s critical theory requires a quasi-objective methodological reflection capable of emancipating reason from the domination and authority of tradition to establish the normative ideal of a neutral, prejudice-free communicative situation. Critical theory, then, is an attempt to transcend the so-called false consciousness of tradition and ideology, in order to attain conditions of objectivity and action. This cannot be achieved insofar as philosophical hermeneutics remains bound to the universality of the linguistic nature of understanding, to tradition as the pre-reflective condition of understanding, or to the concrete universality of practical reason. As such, philosophical hermeneutics remains an obstruction for the critical theorists’ activist program of emancipation through reflection upon the limitations of language and history. Thus, Habermas criticizes hermeneutics’ claim to universality and its implication for a philosophy of history.421

Habermas argues that tradition, for Gadamer, is the only ground for the validity of prejudices.422 According to Habermas, philosophical hermeneutics fails to provide a critical norm as a requirement for overcoming the uncritical acceptance of tradition. The emphasis on tradition as a continuous process which cannot be objectified as a whole covers over the fact that tradition is also the ground for the methodological activity of the social sciences.

Does Gadamer’s hermeneutics point beyond the constraints of tradition, as pre-reflective conditions for understanding through reflection, to an emancipation from these constraints; or is this critical reflection itself bound to the conditions of hermeneutics? In other words, is it possible to take a reflective stand against tradition, to reproduce the original conditions in which the authority and power structures may be discovered, so that tradition may be assimilated and transformed into more objective forms in hermeneutic experience? In asserting the fusion of living tradition and hermeneutic research in a single point—understanding as part the process of tradition— Gadamer shifts the balance between authority and reason in favor of the former.

Habermas asserts that the antithesis between reason and tradition cannot be overcome by Gadamer’s sole emphasis upon cultural, linguistically constituted tradition. Habermas asserts that in addition to cultural tradition, the system of labor and domination, as well as language, are to be recognized as being constitutive of the "objective context in terms of which alone social action can be understood."423

For Habermas, the relationship between language, labor and power is dialectical; any change in labor and power relations changes the categories of intersubjective communication. Thus, not only cultural tradition but also the social world as whole, consisting of labor and power relations, is characterized as sign-controlled and stimulus-produced. A one-sided emphasis on the linguistic constitution of understanding leads to a linguistic idealism; if one fails to consider the cultural tradition as part of a social process, then one relativizes it as labor, system and authority.424 Accordingly, Habermas reasons, Gadamer only recognizes the change within the self-understanding of the subject in the latter’s encounter with tradition and not as a change in tradition itself. Hence, Habermas charges that it is incumbent upon Gadamer to maintains that hermeneutic reflection, in appropriating tradition, changes it, or else Gadamer can be accused of setting hermeneutic experience as something absolute and always bound to the stability of tradition.

The question involves whether Gadamer’s insight concerning the dependence of understanding in its prejudgment structure (Vorurteilstruktur) upon tradition serves for the justification of prejudices, as such. Is the interpreter able to escape the constraints of the prejudices embedded in tradition and language? According to Habermas, philosophical hermeneutics is one-sided in the sense that it does not acknowledge the possibility that the outcome of a present understanding could be better than the traditional understanding, or it could be independent of the past as opposed to being "subordinate to a tradition."425 Gadamer does not distinguish the truth claim of the text from the rational examination of this claim.426 In addition, Gadamer does not recognize the ability of historical consciousness to develop a criterion for the critique of tradition, independent of the effects of history. Habermas claims that the thesis of the historicity of understanding presupposes a transition to "the universal history in which these conditions are constituted."427 

Habermas wants to supplement hermeneutic understanding with the objective method of the sciences. He is concerned with the epistemological implications of hermeneutic theory. For Habermas, Gadamer’s critique of the absolutist methodology of the sciences is effective in all sciences or not at all.428 Thus, Habermas takes an attitude against the ontological claims of philosophical hermeneutics in favor of method and procedures, and external constraints of rationality as opposed to Gadamer’s position concerning the internal limitations of rationality.

In Gadamer’s reluctance to propose a method of the social sciences, Habermas finds evidence that Gadamer "involuntarily makes concessions to the positivist devaluation of hermeneutics."429 Gadamer’s assertion that the hermeneutic experience "transcends the domain of [the control of] scientific method"430 leads to this conclusion. Gadamer creates an abstract and unnecessary opposition between truth and method, hermeneutic experience and methodological requirement.431 

Habermas contrasts scientific explanation with hermeneutic understanding, on the basis of the differences between the formal language of science and the everyday language of dialogical hermeneutics. Ordinary language allows the expression of individual phenomena, no matter how ineffable they may be, while scientific language requires the confirmation of the expression of individual experiences, according to a pre-established universality of theory.432 

For Habermas, the technical language of the natural sciences and the everyday language of communication are different in that while the former is monological, the latter is dialogical. The fact that the activity of the sciences depends on natural language cannot warrant the claim that the linguisticality of understanding is universal. In scientific communication "linguistic expressions appear in an absolute form that makes their content independent of the situation of communication."433 The hermeneutic claim to universality is challenged by the existence of non-linguistic or pre-linguistic situations of understanding. Thus, hermeneutics discovers its own limitations: "Hermeneutic consciousness does . . . emerge from a reflection upon our own movement within natural language, whereas the interpretation of science on behalf of the life-world has to achieve a mediation between natural language and monological language systems. This process of translation transcends the limitations of a rhetorical-hermeneutic art."434

Habermas argues against the claim concerning the universality of hermeneutics by showing its limits in the cases of pre-linguistic understanding. From this, Habermas draws the conclusion that hermeneutic theory deals with the pre-reflective conditions of understanding, rather than with the validity and legitimation of the results of this understanding.

For Habermas, language alone cannot provide the objective structure for social action. He states that the "linguistic infrastructure of a society is a moment in a complex that, however symbolically mediated, is also constituted by the constraint of reality."435 These constraints are natural as well as social. For Habermas, social and natural reality precede language. These two categories of constraints, Habermas claims, are not only "behind the back of language", but they also "affect the grammatical rules in accordance with which we interpret the world."436 The technological, economical and political factors always distort language and hence limit the possibility of objectivity in ordinary communication and interpretation.

In Habermas’s view, Gadamer ignores the power relations in social life, power relations that may affect individual as well as social consciousness by repressing and converting what is considered to be an unacceptable expression or behavior under a given circumstance. The model provided by psychoanalysis may serve hermeneutics as an example of how to unveil the coercion involved in ordinary language. In the patient-therapist relation, the doctor does not take the patient’s expressions in their everyday sense but by distancing and incorporating them to his theory, he reconstructs the pre-linguistic distortions in the patient’s consciousness.437 For Habermas, this is one of those pre-linguistic understandings that does not require dependence on the hermeneutics of everyday understanding but can bypass it. Therefore, against the naive trust implicit in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, Habermas proposes a "depth-hermeneutics"438 to carry out a critique of ideology.

Critical hermeneutics fills out the space left behind by philosophical hermeneutics by turning to a meta-hermeneutic reflection on linguistic communication. Critical reflection promotes emancipation by uncovering the distortions and false-consciousness built into ordinary understanding. According to Habermas, Gadamer fails to recognize the role of reflection and simply ends up accepting the piecemeal result of reflection, leading him only to a "relative idealism."439 Philosophical hermeneutics leads only to reducing action to the interpretative achievements of the subject, and interaction to conversation.440 The difference between Gadamer and Habermas concerns the question of whether intersubjective communication is based on the already tacit agreement between subjects or is rather the result of communication. It is also a question of whether historical understanding is possible on the basis of the past or only according to a future goal. Habermas takes his starting point from the presupposition that alienation and not agreement is at the base of historical life. Critical theory aims at establishing the transcendental norms for the validity of communicative action.441 

The idea that the methodological principles of a theory of interpretation must also have a normative role is shared by all critics of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. For instance, the canon of appropriateness of understanding makes the meaning intended by the author into the normative criterion of objectivity and validity of interpretation. Critical theory makes the same demand: any principle guiding understanding must have a normative value.

Habermas holds that his regulative principle of rational discourse is only an anticipation and its final justification, and cannot be based on experience. Thus, although the norm of critique should be empirically tested in order to serve as the standard of rationality and truth, it is a only a formal anticipation. Yet this can serve as a counterfactual criterion of correctness for actual practices and be regarded as normatively valid for the communicative practices in the life-world.442 He grounds the critical social sciences on the universal validity claims implicit in communicative action. Yet, since they are relative to a "highly differentiated world view," it is not easy to derive from these "a universal core."443

Habermas’s critique of philosophical hermeneutics is based on a cross section of positions held by the theorists of a methodological hermeneutics. Still, he agrees with Gadamer that the reproduction of meaning is not the ultimate aim. For Habermas, tradition is not only the ground of knowledge, but it is also the subject of this knowledge and reflection. Habermas agrees with Betti that tradition and authority belong to the pre-reflective level and cannot be suspended without methodological reflection.

Against this, Gadamer argues that critical reflection itself is limited by the constrains of language and the finitude of our existence. The question involves whether the interpreter is able or unable to escape the constrains of power and authority embedded in tradition and language. Habermas emphasizes the epistemological advantages of hermeneutic theory over its ontological claims. In Habermas’s view, the hermeneutic circle has a pragmatic application.444 The hermeneutic circle, for Habermas, forms the basis for developing new methods for social sciences. Habermas’ concern with hermeneutics is epistemological, whereas Gadamer emphasizes the ontological aspect of hermeneutics. Habermas’s critique of Gadamer shows his attitude in favor of method and procedures and external constrains of rationality as opposed to Gadamer’s position concerning the internal limitations of rationality.

The dispute between Gadamer and Habermas has brought out the second impasse of hermeneutics concerning the role of language, tradition and the norms of understanding. Habermas advocates a more ambitious task for hermeneutics than that envisioned by Gadamer. Apel recognizes the difficulty involved in Habermas’s project of the transition from linguistic communication to practical action. Apel thus shifts critical theory’s perspective on philosophical hermeneutics. He asserts that "it is far more imperative to take recourse to the consistently undebatable presuppositions of discourse qua argumentation, which are upheld even by the skeptic and relativist as long as he argues, and to ‘reconstruct’ these as the transcendental-pragmatic ultimate presuppositions of every empirical hermeneutic reconstruction of social and spiritual history."445

Apel himself envisions a transcendental grounding of the normative validity of knowledge. His claim that Kant’s transcendental conditions of knowledge should be transformed into a project of the transcendental validity of knowledge is a stronger argument against Gadamer than that raised by Habermas. We will next examine Apel’s critique of philosophical hermeneutics in this respect.

On almost all major points Apel and Habermas hold parallel views that intersect and supplement each other. Instead of repeating those objections of Apel which are similar to those of Habermas, I will point to certain issues that Apel emphasizes in his critique. Apel takes a critical position against hermeneutics from the point of view of the transcendental ideal of communicative agreement, from the point of view of the logic of the sciences, and, finally, from a practical-pragmatic orientation which he shares with Habermas.

Apel’s own theory differs from Habermas’s in that Apel bases his project on the Kantian concept of the transcendental conditions of knowledge. Apel projects a transformative transcendental philosophy in the sense of an anthropological epistemology and later a transcendental philosophical hermeneutics446 based on the a priori status of language as the medium of the disclosure of the world. Language acts as the precondition of facts and events.447 The transcendentality of language consists in "providing the necessary preconditions for perceiving the objects of knowledge and hermeneuticly allowing meaning to appear."448 Transcendental hermeneutics concerns the conditions of intersubjective validity claims.449 These validity claims cannot be accounted for by recourse to the contingent a priori of the life world or to pre-understanding as a quasi-ontological concept of "meaning-event" or "truth-event."450 It must appeal to the complementary non-contingent a priori of the ideal, universally valid presuppositions of arguments, that is, the argumentative discourse as constituting an ideal, unlimited communication community that is always counter-factually presupposed.451

According to Apel, Gadamer’s hermeneutics provides an alternative to historicism from the point of view of the Heideggerian hermeneutics of existence. But existential hermeneutics can hardly provide a foundation for understanding meaning in the human sciences.452 Apel finds the strength of philosophical hermeneutics in the critique of the objectivistic methodological ideal of historicism, but he also entertains the notion that hermeneutic abstraction from the methodological problems of the social sciences involves an abstraction from the problem of truth.453

It is true that the historicity of understanding is a condition of knowledge in the human sciences, and the knowing subject is not isolated from its involvement in the tradition. Tradition presents the interpreting subject with his own possibilities of being.454 By denying the determination of understanding in tradition, the social scientist fails to achieve a de-dogmatization of the understanding of meaning and, thus, contributes to a hidden ideologization by repressing the unavoidable determination of his understanding by its historical engagement.455

Apel makes a distinction between pre-reflexive engagement and a reflexive distancing. In the case of philological hermeneutics a methodological abstraction is already suggested in the pre-scientific realm by the interpreter’s situation. He is not expected to mediate meaning in the context of practical situations in life.456

Apel believes that for Gadamer application is the only criterion for determining the meaning.457 In the first place, Apel presupposes philosophical hermeneutics as surrendering the "regulative ideal of a progress in understanding," in the sense of the Kantian concept of a moral "practical progress."458 The example set by Kant’s moral philosophy introduces a notion of progress that involves a normative value. Despite the fact that empirical conditions of life have a limiting effect on our efforts, in principle, it is possible to hold a "morally grounded idea of a practical progress."459 

Apel’s argument that normativity is already implicit in the concept of a moral duty is itself abstract. For Gadamer, when the question is raised in concrete cases demanding moral action, the possibility of moral action and the normative rule guiding actions are always co-determined in the practical situation. These normative rules cannot be postulated in abstraction. Gadamer at least accepts an ethics of phronesis, as a communally accepted practical ethics, but without a claim to universal validity or to serving the progress of humanity.460 According to Apel, however, without a normative-regulative ideal, this synthesis of an empirical morality and the establishment of it in tradition as a conservative notion cannot be synthesized with a view of seeing the conditions and the validity of understanding in the historicity of understanding, i.e., the context-dependency of understanding.461 

Apel agrees with Betti that interpretation and application are different. The historical study of legal rules requires that the interpreter must presuppose a possible application; the normative interpretation of a judge, on the contrary, presupposes an actual application. These two cannot be the same.462

Apel also agrees with the view of traditional hermeneutics, contrary to Gadamer, that the intention of an author is "in fact a crucial criterion for the understanding of meaning in any kind of communication."463 Thus, the hermeneutic circle serves as the "basic model of all concrete, situation dependent understanding." But this can, itself, be expressed with a universal validity. But the question, for Apel as for Habermas, is how one enters the circle in the case of the critical social sciences, i.e, how one can accept both the historical conditions of knowledge and the claim to universal validity. Apel refers to the first as concrete hermeneutics and the second as transcendental hermeneutics. These are presented as irreconcilable alternatives between which a choice must be made. This presents itself as the question of methodically entering the circle in the right way, as formulated by Heidegger. This is resolved in the hermeneutic claim that any empirical or concrete hermeneutic task is always incomplete, even incompletable, which can be understandable only as long as we hold that truth is the truth of the subject matter we are studying and eliminate the false idea that methodological clarifications get us closer to Apel’s anthropological criteria of "universal consensual truth."464 Truth is a quality of being. The incompleteness of our knowledge is the result of finitude, not the result of historical distance from a future state of consensus concerning truth. Thus, in Apel’s view, Gadamer disregards the question of the standards and rules for differentiating between the meaning of truth and the truth of meaning. Apel moves toward overcoming of relativism and historicism entailed by hermeneutic theory by means of his own version of a transcendental hermeneutics.

Apel radicalizes Gadamer’s position so that his critique would be seen as appropriate. According to Apel, Gadamer follows Heidegger’s temporal interpretation of the being of humans in the sense of the temporal determination of understanding in tradition as a "fusion of horizon."465 Apel finds that the radicality of Gadamer’s conception of hermeneutics "lies in the supposition that the meaning of words or sentences is not timeless in a strict sense, but rather subject to the ‘history of being’ as history of the linguistic disclosure of the meaning of being."466 Apel also claims that because of Gadamer’s "philosophy of being there is no normative orientation-point for the constitution of meaning and truth beyond time."467 Apel agrees with Hirsch that Gadamer represents a radical version of historicism and hermeneutic skepticism.468

Apel holds that the principle of historicity, considered as the possibility for and condition of objectivity and knowledge cannot serve Gadamer’s desired goal to overcome the difficulties of historicism. Rather it fosters historicism.469 Gadamer’s solution for this is found in his appeal to Hegel’s "absolute mediation of history and truth," a position from the standpoint of reflection that is "not to be overturned."470 

Apel claims that Gadamer, under the influence of the dogmatism of a metaphysical position, does not allow his own claims into the process of validation. He argues that Gadamer resigns from the position of holding it necessary or even possible to argue for a "paradox free solution to the historicity problem."471 By simply demonstrating that reflective and speculative arguments against the validity of a hermeneutic claim to universality are merely formal and self-refuting, Gadamer tries to prove the validity of his own position.472 Apel argues that by considering formal arguments as not addressing the real problem, one still cannot escape the necessity for an argumentative reason.473

In Apel’s view, Gadamer’s position amounts to the belief that the refutation of relativism-historicism cannot be held without self-contradiction. According to Apel, Gadamer fails to develop a counter argument against relativism because he trusts in the success of certain paradigmatic cases. Apel argues that Gadamer takes his models from the speculative-dialectical victory over the "philosophy of reflection" in the manner of Hegel or from the formal reflective philosophy of a neo-Kantianism that does not take into account the historicity of understanding.474 

He argues that Gadamer easily capitulates to non-argumentative reason. Against the success of relativism and skepticism, we cannot simply claim that they are only negative and self-contradictory. For Apel these are not the only alternatives to "reflective philosophy."475 In effect, Gadamer offers us only three alternatives: a) appeal to the standpoint of the end of history or absolute knowledge; b) a formal reflection without taking historicity into account, or c) understanding reason as a contingent product of history and, thereby, giving up the claims of philosophical arguments to universal validity.476 From this point of view Gadamer "makes a virtue of the aporia of historicism-relativism."477 Only a normative hermeneutics can do justice to the internal relationship between hermeneutics and practical philosophy.478

According to Apel, instead of "seeking a mediation ‘ex-post-reflection’," Gadamer’s theory remains under the presuppositions of a priori structures of facticity and historicity.479 Apel asserts that philosophical hermeneutics "culminates in the idea of a historical process or respectively happening of truth and meaning." Hermeneutic understanding must be supplemented with a normative turn which would substitute Gadamer’s view of "understanding differently" with the "idea of progressively deeper understanding."480

Apel claims that the demand for consciousness of historicity by the interpreter is a demand that can only be understood as normatively relevant. If one denies this ontological embeddedness, Gadamer’s theory comes very close to an objectivistic description of the behaviorist type, such as Wittgenstein’s language-game theory. Without postulating a methodologically relevant normative goal, we cannot explicate historicity as an ontological principle. Interpretative understanding in the historical sciences is, unlike natural scientific understanding, not merely subject to natural laws, but must be developed by ourselves in a responsible manner.481 According to Apel, philosophical hermeneutics surrenders "normative hermeneutics to a relative historicism."482 

Apel contrasts Gadamer’s position on the mediation of tradition with a "progressive, methodological approximation to the ideal of objectivity."483 For Apel, the sciences increase our objective knowledge of the objects that are referred to in communicative speech. In this case, a "regulative idea" of a "possible progress in hermeneutic truth" should be intertwined with the historicity of understanding.484 Such a regulative idea is the postulate that a final consensus of an indefinite community of interpretation and its application to social praxis is possible "in the long run."485 Like Habermas, Apel emphasizes a future possibility against Gadamer’s reliance emphasis on the factual and concrete relation between understanding and tradition.

The only agreement between critical theory and philosophical hermeneutics is the existence of limitations on the earlier concept of objectivity, not only in the human sciences but also in the natural sciences. According to Apel, Gadamer’s hermeneutics has the advantage of revealing the "objectivistic methodological ideal of historicism." But Apel asserts that Gadamer goes too far in disputing the plausibility of methodological hermeneutics’ abstraction from the question of truth.486 However, it is only on the basis of Apel’s anthropological concept of truth that such a criticism can be validly made of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics.

It is not consensual truth but ontological truth that is the implicit ideal under which the question of the relationship between the hermeneutic methods of the human sciences and the mathematical natural sciences and the quasi-nomological social sciences can be resolved.

It cannot be conceived from the critical perspective, based on logical positivism, in which hermeneutic methods are ranked with scientific methods of formal certainty and empirical certainty, or by applying hermeneutics to the methodology of all sciences. Apel’s critique is based on his assumption that Gadamer’s approach to the hermeneutic sciences take into account "only the side of subject."487 Description of the knowledge from the point of view of the subject lies also at the foundations of efforts to defend hermeneutic theory as a doctrine of perspectivism. We will next briefly discuss the interpretations of Gadamer’s theory in terms of perspectivism.

On the basis of the belief that there is no criterion of truth in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, some commentators have tried to defend his theory from the point of view of perspectivism. We choose Jean Grondin’s and David Hoy’s writings on the subject as examples to represent this point of view.

Grondin offers an interpretation of philosophical hermeneutics that denies the possibility of relativism in hermeneutic understanding. His understanding is based not on the grounds of the existence of a definite criterion of truth, but on the claim that relativism is itself indefensible.

For Grondin, the concept of the "enlightening of experience of the subject-matter" is a "criterion for interpretation."488 According to Grondin, the "true is the immediate enlightening. The experience of truth has nothing to do with the application of a criterion."489 Having argued that the lack of a criterion does not lead to an unchecked relativism, Grondin considers the notion of "subject matter," the Sache, as the criterion for distinguishing correct and incorrect understanding.490 But considering the fact that "the thing-in-itself" cannot be discovered, the subject matter becomes the measure of correct understanding, only in the sense of the "subject-matter as it appears to us (die Sache wie sie sich uns zeigt)."491 He then argues that hermeneutic understanding is necessarily and always only probable.492 Due to the essential human condition, we are enclosed within the possibility of an enlightening evidence only, not that of a timeless point of view.

David Hoy also defends Gadamer against charges of "subjective relativism," and, thus, reminds us of the importance of the "subject matter," the Sache, for determining the correctness of interpretation. Hoy, nevertheless, concludes with a note that philosophical hermeneutics proposes a certain kind of perspectivism or contextualism.493 "The only judge of the appropriateness of the context of one interpretation may be another interpretation, and perhaps ‘truth’ in these matters is closely connected to (although it can never entirely be reduced to) ‘success’—that is, intersubjective agreement on the usefulness of the interpretations and their assumptions."494

Implications of perspectivism in Gadamer’s theory might be considered in terms of textual interpretation. How a correct interpretation of a text can be distinguished from an incorrect interpretation may depend on the evaluations of perspectives within which these interpretations approach the text. However, Gadamer strongly objected to limiting philosophical hermeneutics to the particular issues of textual interpretation. Then the question arises concerning the philosophical justification of his theory in terms of its own temporal conditionedness.

Rüdiger Bubner approaches philosophical hermeneutics in terms of a philosophical theory reflecting on its own historical perspective. Bubner observes that Gadamer’s concept of historicity requires him to adhere to a certain idea of history, but, because of the Hegelian implications of such a philosophy of history, it seems undesirable, and Gadamer avoids it. Therefore, according to Bubner, this question cannot be avoided by simply introducing historicity as signifying the a priori conditions of understanding. Instead, we must take historicity as the reaction of philosophy to "its time." For Bubner, "to say this is to say nothing specifically about philosophy as long as this connection with time does not make it possible to recognize any feature which is relevant for the philosophical task of rational understanding. But it is this which must be meant by the hermeneutic category of historicity."495

As Bubner points out, in contemporary debates three senses of hermeneutics are thrown together. Hermeneutics in the sense of a contingent process of coming to an understanding; hermeneutics in the sense of rules of interpretation; and finally hermeneutics in the sense of a philosophical theory of understanding. The question arises where Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics stands within these distinctions. Although these different uses of hermeneutics are justified, they are not totally unrelated to each other, but rather converge in a center. According to Bubner, Gadamer’s Truth and Method represents an attempt to broaden the scope of the experience of a successful understanding to a universal theory of hermeneutics.

Here we should note Bubner’s comments concerning the role of critique and reflection. Bubner suggests that critical and hermeneutic reflections are complementary and presuppose each other. Bubner is one of those few authors who recognize that the question of the hermeneutic claim to universality and the possibility of a critique of tradition and ideologically conditioned communication practices have their sources in two different attitudes toward the role of reflection. Thus, the debate between Gadamer and Habermas focuses on a mutual misunderstanding concerning the limits and functions of reflection in hermeneutic understanding.

By formulating the central theme of Gadamer’s hermeneutics in this way, Bubner indicates the existence of two unsatisfying results of hermeneutics: the fact that the critical aspect is neglected, and that from a one-sided emphasis on the successful understanding we cannot derive a philosophical theory. Bubner puts some of the blame on Gadamer in overemphasizing the requirement of proof demanded in the methodological procedures of sciences and opposing the hermeneutic experience of truth to demands for proof. This might give the impression that hermeneutic theory denies the relevance of a theory of science. Therefore, Bubner demands certain amendments to hermeneutic theory so that it can meet the requirements of a theory of science.

One of the reasons for the misunderstanding of hermeneutics is the perception that it preserves the dualism of the natural sciences and the human sciences. It is true that hermeneutics seems to protect the human sciences from the one-sidedness of natural scientific methodology. But does that also mean that hermeneutics adheres to a dualistic conception of science? According to Bubner, it does not. Hermeneutics opposes the inherent claim to absoluteness in any methodological trust in philosophical comprehensiveness.

Hermeneutics counters the naive conception of a comprehensive and absolute knowledge with the finitude and the limits set to knowledge in historical life. Bubner acknowledges that the model for such a concept of knowledge is provided by the older forms of theological and humanistic hermeneutics.496 The posited supremacy of a text, whether sacred or classical, is as a matter of principle, an acceptance of a truth claim which "limited all possibilities of knowledge which might come later."497

Bubner rightly observes —probably against Habermas’s critique that Gadamer has been stuck with this outmoded form of theological and philological interpretation498 — that this is nothing more than a model, but adequately illustrates the structure of the possible increase of human knowledge. This case is expressed in the concepts of fore-understanding and effective history. "Both categories reflect the fact that to acquire knowledge always presupposes that some knowledge is already given which can never be obtained from the knowledge acquired."499 By formulating the problem this way, Bubner makes hermeneutics seem very close to the Kantian project of transcendentalism. What we need to account for is the a priori synthetic knowledge which adds to our already accumulated knowledge.

Bubner does not commit the common mistake of identifying this prior knowledge with history or tradition, but rather with the medium of language which carries, as well as changes, the content of historical tradition.

Although Bubner is right to insist that hermeneutic theory must be considered as a transcendental inquiry, his attempt to show that it is fails. The reason for this is the following: if the transcendental conditions of knowledge are to be sought in social and historical practices, then the question concerning the possibility of understanding as it becomes explicit in philosophical reflection remains without an answer. Husserl has faced the same problem of accounting for the constitution of the "life-world" preceding all experience, the problem of how it would be possible to explain the constitution of the social and practical world that transcends the individual consciousness. Against Bubner’s approach to the problem of the transcendence of hermeneutic theory, we point out Emerich Coreth’s interpretation of the transcendental dimension of the hermeneutic theory of understanding.

As Coreth correctly observes, the circularity of understanding is recognized precisely because "the understanding subject itself is being seized and comprehended by this circular process of its own understanding."500 But this continuous movement of understanding as a perpetual circular relation of the subject to the particular object takes place within the totality of the horizon of Being.501

We have emphasized hermeneutic philosophy’s transcendental project of dealing with an understanding of Being, insofar as Being manifests itself in temporality and language. In the conception of methodology is hidden the idea of what counts as legitimate knowledge and, thus, as a limit set on the experience of truth. Also, critics of philosophical hermeneutics treat the sciences’ limit, on knowledge and limits of human understanding on the same level and, thus, commit the mistake of identifying the finite nature of human knowledge with the relativity of knowledge.

Especially Habermas and Apel read Gadamer as a strict follower of the Hegelian notion that what is actual is rational, and what is rational is actual. Against Gadamer, they suggest that Gadamer sacrifices the empirical actuality of history not only to rational forces but also to forces of domination and work. They do not suggest that rationality should be abandoned in favor of this empirical actuality of history, but rather that the rational ideal should be posited as the goal of the actuality. They see such a goal in free communicative communities of interpretation and communication. Critical theory itself is based upon an idealist position in which it sets a rational goal for human action. Thus, Gadamer’s critics are returning to an Enlightenment notion of progress and historical advancement.

But the question for Apel, as for Habermas, has to do with how one enters the circle in the case of critical social sciences. In this regard, both accept the historical conditions of knowledge and the claim to universal validity. In the debates on philosophical hermeneutics, we have noted the critics’ concerns with the concrete problems of hermeneutics but also pointed out that hermeneutics is, in fact, describing the transcendental conditions of human understanding. The truth, revealed in hermeneutic experience, is the truth as a quality of being. The incompleteness of our knowledge is the result of finitude, not a result of empirical obstacles to consensus concerning truth.

But this observation can itself be expressed with reference to the universal relation between language and reality and the validity of historical knowledge within the continuity of history. As a response to these critiques, in the following chapter we will examine the transcendental aspect of hermeneutics.