As we have seen in the first chapter, the discussion of the problem of the historicity of knowledge is still dominated by the opposition between empirical and idealist approaches to the experience of the human sciences. In Part I of Truth and Method, Gadamer deals with this problem through an analysis of the concepts dealing with the moral, aesthetic and historical experience that cannot be ascertained by means of the inductive and deductive logic of the sciences. In this chapter, we will examine those forms of the experiences of life which are subject neither to empirical certainty, nor to the certainty of the abstractly constructed deductive method. Gadamer argues that the experience of certainty in life cannot be measured by the criteria of the objectivity of scientific methods.

The hermeneutic analysis of understanding as the basic mode of human experience is the subject of our inquiry. Most commentators focus on particular aspects of Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the context of discussions concerning the practice of textual interpretation. By contrast, our focus is historical life or hermeneutic experience as it is treated by Gadamer in art, moral life and the temporality of experience itself.

Gadamer’s analysis of these forms of experience aims at clarifying the nature of understanding in the hermeneutic disciplines. It must be borne in mind that Gadamer is a post-Heideggerian philosopher who writes within the space emptied by the critique of the concept of substance. Hermeneutic analysis has to walk the thin line between historicism and historical nihilism. It must also avoid falling into an idealism by replacing the particular historical individual with an historical transcendental substance, or into historical positivism by collapsing the human experience into concrete stages of historical process. Gadamer makes a subtle move away from Hegel’s substance as subject endowed with self-consciousness to the substance of historical life that supports the individual subject. He has to demonstrate that the unity of substance and subject is based on the commonality of human life without thereby falling into historical determinism. In order to accomplish this, Gadamer argues that establishing the certainty of knowledge upon the self-consciousness of the individual leads to the separation of theory and practice, and ultimately to the abandonment of any justification of the rationality of practice, thereby consigning practical life to something that is irrational and theoretically irredeemable.

Gadamer’s theory of understanding as a philosophical hermeneutics is about the conditions of all human experience. It is an attempt to give an account of the universal conditions of those forms of knowledge that are justified on grounds other than scientific experience. For this reason, Gadamer’s analysis of the structure of experience and understanding is very important for a comprehensive grasp of the hermeneutic claim to universality. Hence, we will first examine Gadamer’s concept of hermeneutic experience.

In the first part of Truth and Method, in which Gadamer discusses aesthetic experience, he makes the distinction between immediate experience (Erlebnis) and mediated hermeneutic experience (Erfahrung). At the end of the analysis of historical understanding, he explicates experience again (Part II, II.3.B). Therefore, in this section we will first point out certain issues related to the hermeneutic concept of experience and then, toward the end of this chapter return to the discussion of experience.

The kind of experience to which Erfahrung refers is not something like the sedimented moments of the elements of experience in the consciousness of a subject, but rather it is a continuous process of integration and negation. Erfahrung is something the subject undergoes and suffers. In his review of Truth and Method, Fred Lawrence states that Gadamer deconstructs the "taken for granted self-understanding" in order to clear the way for a conception of the limits of authentic human experience.220 He also points out that the "realized experience" (Sein als Erfahrung)221 "assumes a systematic key place."

Gadamer develops the hermeneutic notion of experience, first, in the context of a critique of the scientific concept of experience and the metaphysical assumptions underlying it. The experience of the human sciences reveals an approach to truth that is not confined to the limits of the scientific method. An alternative view of experience that explains the problem of understanding in the human sciences reveals the problematic character of the "notion of cognition" prevailing in modern philosophy.222 

Gadamer observes that the notion of experience as the pure grasp of an object lies at the basis of the scientific ideal of knowledge. The validity of experience is held to be determined by an external measure; i.e., the object itself and the purpose it will serve. The ideal of objectivity implicit in this notion of cognition aims at achieving a knowledge validated by the conditions set by the object as it presents itself to human experience. In this regard, the scientific approach places its real objective in the results of knowledge. However, science regards the determination of the value of these results, or their relative placement within the context of the totality of human ends, as being outside of the scope of its task.

In the human sciences, on the other hand, determining the value of the results of their activity is always the main issue. What will be the objective of knowledge in the human sciences, and how the validity of their results should be determined, are the questions that appear problematic. Hermeneutic experience describes the forms of experiences of human life that are not based primarily on alienating distantiation (Verfremdung)223 but rather on those in which the relation of belonging lies at the basis of understanding. The experience of the human sciences differs from the experience in the natural sciences, because understanding belongs primordially to its subject matter.

Some of the problems in Gadamer’s hermeneutics emerge from his views concerning scientific method, knowledge and experience. The universal claim of the scientific method and its encroachment upon the human sciences are subjected to critique by Gadamer. It is beyond the scope of our study to determine whether this critique is successful. However, certain elements of this critique are relevant to the discussion concerning the universal and transcendental aspect of hermeneutic theory.

Gadamer argues that, despite the scientific method’s claim to universal validity, it limits experience and knowledge to those verifiable by the criterion of methodic certainty, and thus leaves out the search for truth and knowledge that goes beyond it.

Gadamer also argues that within the limits of scientific method, the question concerning the transcendental conditions of human experience and of speech and communication cannot be raised.224 Some of the problems related to the application of scientific method to the human sciences arise from the fact that the scientific method cannot account for human praxis according to the ideal of objectivity. The concept of experience becomes restricted to the certainty of the results of knowledge.

The search for certainty also gives rise to a biased emphasis on methods of verification, exactness, etc. From the methodological perspective, historical understanding remains in opposition to the ideal of a-temporal knowledge. Hermeneutics becomes a philosophical subject precisely because it concerns "the transcendental conditions of the possibility of all experience."225 

Gadamer tries to argue against the universality of experience as it is posited in the scientific concept of experience. The universality of scientific experience is posited in the sense that the validity of knowledge is measured by the general validity of its results. The goal toward which the experience is oriented find its unity in the fact that the results of experience acquire a determinate status over the process.

This kind of universality might be called the unity of the concept or true universality of concepts in the Hegelian sense.226 Scientific experience tries to move from individual experience to the unity that gives rise to and transcends the particularity of the object. Gadamer points out that this description is true in the sense of the process of induction as described by Aristotle. Gadamer clarifies this, using an explanation in which Aristotle: describes how various perceptions unite to form the unity of experience when many individual perceptions are retained. But what sort of unity is this? Clearly it is the unity of the universal. But the universality of experience is not yet the universality of science. Rather, according to Aristotle, it occupies a remarkably indeterminate intermediate position between the many individual perceptions and the true universality of the concept. Science and technology start from the universality of the concept.227

What is clear here is that the unity of experience cannot be reduced to the unity of the diverse moments of experience. Gadamer explicates the process of arriving at the unity of experience based on the contingency of observation in Aristotle’s example of fleeing army coming to stop.228

The universality of the experience can be asserted in spite of the contingency of its constituent. Experience is valid in a "really universal way" because of the principle—which fills the role of the commander in Aristotle’s example.229 For Gadamer this "image illustrates the way in which the unprincipled universality of the experience . . . eventually leads to the unity of the arche (which means both ‘command’ and ‘principle’)."230 Gadamer points out that even if we postulate "the universality of the concept" as "ontologically prior" to the movement of experience, the "co-ordination" and determination of the individual observation are "ultimately incomprehensible."231 Even when the principle governing the unity of the process of experience is specified, there is no concrete rule for the application of the principle.

The principle for the unity of experience can explain only the results of experience, but not the process of experience. According to Gadamer, "This process is essentially negative."232 Negativity is intrinsic to the process of experience as the generation of a determinate knowledge of the subject matter is determined by virtue of the cancellation of the previous experience of the thing, as well as by what we thought we previously knew about the object. Gadamer writes: "We cannot, therefore, have new experience of any object at random, but it must be of such nature that we gain better knowledge through it, not only of itself, but of what we thought we knew before"—i.e., of a universal. The negation by means of which it achieves this is a determinate negation. We call this kind of experience dialectical.233 

The fact that experience has the characteristic of negativity does not contradict the achievements of scientific or any other kind of experience. On the contrary, "experience is valid so long as it is not contradicted by new experience . . . [this] is clearly characteristic of the general nature of experience."234 The hermeneutic problem is related to the question why the same text or an historical event is in need of continuous interpretation, why its meaning is not determined once and for all. For this question to be settled, it must be established that the new experience of something is possible on the basis of previous experience, as well as its negation in the process.

However, Gadamer does not follow all the implications of Hegel’s idea of the negativity of experience. That negativity belongs to experience means for Gadamer that experience never involves a complete and pure grasp of the object in its totality. The object can always be experienced as something new, which means that it is also experienced as something that it was not previously supposed to be. In view of this new aspect of the object, "both things change, our knowledge and its object."235 The dialectics of experience allow the reversal of previous knowledge, but not the transformation of the previous experience of the object into absolute knowledge. Gadamer argues that experience is always open for its object. This aspect of experience as self-critique, self-reflection and alteration of previous knowledge in the face of the renewed self-presentation of the object, never allows for the "complete identity of consciousness and its object."236 

This proximity to Hegel, with whom "the element of historicity comes into its own,"237 has its limits in Gadamer’s concept of experience as an open process. However, Gadamer agrees with Heidegger that Hegel’s description of "what is dialectical in terms of the nature of experience"238 is important, but "applying Hegel’s dialectic to history . . . does not do justice to hermeneutic consciousness."239

Gadamer combines the openness and negativity of experience in order to prove that the truth of experience is other than scientific certainty, because the openness of experience calls for an always "radically undogmatic" attitude from us.240 

Hermeneutic experience is often contrasted with the kind of experience which prevails in the natural sciences. This has to do with the "objectives of knowledge." Knowledge in the natural sciences is oriented to the results that are imposed on the research itself; in the human sciences, knowledge is existential, that is to say, it cannot be pre-determined. For this reason, hermeneutic discussion concerning the method of the sciences does not indicate a purely apologetic engagement with the sciences, but rather involves questions concerning what "precedes and makes" science possible in the first place.241 Interpretation as the method of the human sciences’ research procedure thus becomes the central problem of philosophy.242 

The concept of the openness of experience as revealing the finitude of human nature is central to the hermeneutic understanding as recognition of the reality and the otherness of its subject matter. However, the attempt to recognize the otherness of the objects of the humanities can be conceived from an opposite perspective, i.e., the perspective of a meaning’s difference from the past. According to Gadamer, "modern consciousness--precisely as historical consciousness--takes a reflexive position concerning all that is handed down by tradition." The contents of tradition, recognized as something distant and alien, require a reflective transformation into an historical context in order to find the significance and relative value of its object. "This reflexive posture toward tradition is called interpretation."243 

The experience of historical distance is transformed into a radicalization of interpretation in the sense that interpretation is the imposing of meaning upon the contents of tradition. It is this concept of interpretation that brings us to the hermeneutic experience as a corrective to hermeneutic nihilism. Interpretation is the understanding of meaning.

The concept of interpretation, after Nietzsche, signifies not the "discovery of pre-existing meaning, but the positing of meaning."244 The modern concept of interpretation, since Nietzsche, has a claim to universality quite different from what Gadamer means by the universality of understanding. Nietzsche has radicalized the critique of the certainty of self-consciousness to the extent that not only facts and phenomena, but all theoretical assumptions of objectivity become suspect. Interpretation, if it is considered to be reading our own meaning into a text, "is no longer the manifest meaning of a statement or a text, but the text’s and its interpreter’s function in the preservation of life."245

For Gadamer, as for Heidegger, "interpretation is not an isolated activity of human beings but a basic structure of our experience of life. We are always taking something as something. That is the primordial givenness of our world orientation, and we cannot reduce it to anything simpler or more immediate."246 However, interpretation cannot be understood from the point of view of the immanence of self-consciousness that can return to the givenness of the object as an element of experience.247 Rather, Gadamer approaches understanding as the experience of the world as given interpretively, i.e., through its constitution in language.248 If the primacy of self-consciousness is denied, there is no longer a problem of grounding experience in a higher principle, but understanding is itself a participation in the sense of taking the whole on oneself, not taking a part.249

It is possible to understand the meaning of something unfamiliar only in the context of the familiar. The most general context of understanding is the world. Our experience of the world is given not as an aggregate of objects, but as already linguistically organized. The structure of experience, primarily the experience of something as something, refers to this fact. What is confronted as unfamiliar is always also brought into a world, into a familiar context. Gadamer speaks of works of art brought into a structure. When, for instance, a drama is staged, the work undergoes a "transformation into structure." In this transformation the work realizes itself.

Thus, understanding is not the process of imposing our own meaning onto the work, such that the artwork loses its own world; rather the reverse is the case, that is, "what no longer exists is the world in which we live as our own. Transformation into structure is not simply transposition into another world."250

In fact our own world is transformed into one which was only a potentiality in "undecided possibilities." A work of art, in being transformed into structure, comes into speech; the unfamiliar is integrated into the familiar and the world of meaning of the work of art opens up for us a "wholly transformed world".251

Because self-understanding is not an immediacy of self-consciousness but is achieved through the understanding of the other, when we interpret the works of art we also interpret ourselves. Because self-understanding requires the alterity of the other in its self-identity, the experience of art as the experience of the exceptional and distinctive provides the otherness necessary for self-understanding. However, the artwork cannot remain as something alien and strange, for the continuity of the work as artwork belongs already to our world. Concerning the work of art, Gadamer writes: "We learn to understand ourselves in and through it, and this means we sublate (aufheben) the discontinuity and atomism of isolated experiences in the continuity of our own existence. "252

The principle of self-consciousness lies at the basis of philosophical idealism and influenced the theory of knowledge and concepts of psychology. After the criticisms by Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, the "social role of the individual rather than his self-understanding moves into the foreground."253 What are the answers to these questions: how does the ego maintain its self-identity? how is the continuity of its selfness constituted? does such an ego that vouches itself in self-consciousness exist? Both in Hegel’s concept of the dialectical struggle for recognition and in Kierkegaard’s concept of religious inwardness, in the sense of choice lay the basis for an "ethical concept of continuity" of consciousness.254

Interpretation has therefore acquired a universal dimension in the modern human sciences. One’s relationship to the past as well to one’s contemporaries requires interpretation, because the meaning of what a text or person says is not understood at first sight. The turn toward interpretation is not only the result of a "reflexive posture," but also is the result of the awareness of alienation from the past. "An explicit reflection is required on the conditions which enable the text to have one or another meaning." Therefore, the necessity of interpretation implies the "‘foreign’ character of what is yet to be understood."255 Whatever is immediately evident and persuasive would not require interpretation.

Interpretation in this wider sense "has become a universal concept determined to encompass tradition as a whole."256 This general sense of interpretation goes back to Nietzsche. For him, all statements dependent upon human reason are "open to interpre-tation, since their true or real meaning only reaches us as masked and deformed by ideologies."257 In Gadamer’s view historical criticism is an extension of this assumption. All the material of historical studies requires critical interpretation because of their foreign and fundamentally different situation from our own.258 The historicity of understanding is asserted against the attempts to derive a nihilistic conclusion from the historical life.

Gadamer does not draw a nihilistic conclusion from the finite nature of human understanding; instead he recognizes historicity as the foundation of man’s orientation towards the world. There are several ways in which the concept of historicity can be understood in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. First, Gadamer speaks of historicity in the sense of the finitude of human existence and knowledge. This principle will serve a herme-neutical theory in the following way. While hermeneutics previously engaged itself with the problems of interpretation of texts and the problem of method in the historical studies, the task of philosophical hermeneutics is to extend this to a reflection on the nature of "all that can be understood."259 Everything is included in the experience of understanding. In this sense, the historicity of understanding primarily corresponds to the Dilthey’s concept of "ordinary understanding" (Menscherkenntnis).260 The historicity of understanding signifies the pre-reflective experience of the world. As Gadamer writes: "What I am describing is the mode of the whole experience of the world. I call this experience hermeneutic, for the process we are describing is repeated continually throughout our familiar experience."261 This basic orientation toward the world is through its interpreted existence in language.

Secondly, historicity not only signifies comportment toward a linguistically "organized"262 natural world, but also "the unity of the world we live in as men," that is the world as constituted by "historical tradition and the natural order of life."263 And finally, the mediative nature of understanding is also implied by the historicity of understanding. The finitude of human understanding and the openness of experience to the world find their limitation in dependence on, and mediation by, language which also asserts its own otherness against the individual consciousness in the orientation of language towards totality, towards a universality.

Understanding, as always limited and finite, is mediated through language. "For men’s relation to the world is absolutely and fundamentally verbal in nature."264 For this reason Gadamer tells us that "language is the record of finitude."265 In experiencing the world in language, especially in the language of art, we discover our own limitations. Thus, the experience of art is one of the forms of experience in which the transcendence of reality and the finitude of human experience is disclosed.

We choose Gadamer’s analysis of the experience of art and the concept of practical judgment in order to present models of understanding other than historical understanding. In these models, too, Gadamer’s insight into the structure of understanding is demonstrated. The scientific concept of experience emphasizes repeating the process of experiment and leaves out the continuity of experience. Since the objectivity of method guarantees the possibility of repeating the process of experience that leads to the results, the process must be "capable of being checked in the human sciences also."266

The specific nature of the experience of art reveals certain aspects of understanding that make the investigation into aesthetics an integral part of the overall purpose of Truth and Method. Gadamer characterizes this distinct feature of the experience of the human sciences as "extrascientific."267 The experience of art illustrates a mode of experience that surpasses the methodological limitations of science. Knowledge in the human sciences always remains close to the experience of art.268

Gadamer analyzes the approaches to aesthetics, history and language from the point of view that accords a primacy to the mutual belonging of subject and object. To proceed with the assumption that alienation and distantiation is a necessary condition of knowledge in the humanities cuts the ground from under the possibility of knowledge in the first place. Gadamer argues that the fact that the experience of art preserves its continuous relevance in life and the fact that the works of art remain contemporaneous with every age provide us with a counter-example to respond to the assumption of historical alienation.

The experience of art achieves this timeless contemporaneity in the linguisticality of all experiences of the world. These forms of experience point to a truth that precedes and surpasses any knowledge.269 Gadamer also declares that unless it is taken in the wider sense of a liber naturae, textual understanding does not exhaust the scope of hermeneutics.270 Textual understanding concerns only one of the experiences of meaning in which the limits of understanding are revealed.

We will analyze the forms of experience in which the understanding subject transcends its own limits. Examples of the experience of art and moral deliberation show that understanding process as appropriation is a transformative and productive.

As we have seen, the general task of Truth and Method has always been considered from the point of view of its negative task, i.e., anti-objectivism and anti-methodologism. Hence, its positive task has been preempted by these debates. This ignoring of Truth and Method’s positive task is shown by the general neglect given to the critique of aesthetics that occupies Part I of Truth and Method.

The positive task Gadamer sets for himself concerns an understanding of the experience of the interpretation of tradition. Artistic tradition in particular presents a case of transcending the context of the problems of understanding in the human sciences dominated by idealism and positivistic historicism. We must refer to the significance of this task as the expressed purpose of the text. The investigation of Truth and Method "starts with a critique of aesthetic consciousness in order to defend the experience of truth that comes to us through the work of art against the aesthetic theory that lets itself be restricted to a scientific conception of truth."271 Concerning the experience of art, for instance, Gadamer writes that his work is "concerned with truths that go essentially beyond the range of methodological knowledge."272

In the first part of Truth and Method, the positive task Gadamer sets for himself is to clear away the obstacles preventing an understanding of the truth of art and tradition in general. Among the philosophical disciplines, aesthetics has acquired a relative autonomy even at the expense of losing its cognitive value and hence its truth claim. In its struggle for autonomy, aesthetic experience is freed from its claim to be knowledge, because it is not conceptual; and from its claim to truth because it is based on feeling.273 Hence, it is not thought to be science, because it is not universal. The first part of Truth and Method is devoted to "freeing up the question of truth in the experience of art."274 

Gadamer intends to give a justification of the truth of the experience of art on the basis of the cognitive value of judgment. He argues that the experience of art and moral judgment involve modes of knowledge that are immediate in the sense that the experience of their object is contemporaneous and the historical distance is overcome without recourse to reconstruction of the conditions of their object by submitting them to a logical criterion, or demonstration. The universality of practical and aesthetic experience cannot be grasped as an empirical or abstract universality, nonetheless, it is a concrete universality.

The experience of truth in the moral and aesthetic realms cannot be verified by empirical certainty, yet the certainty of these experiences is binding for every individual, even though the whole, the totality of life, or the totality of mankind is never empirically given.

It is not only the objectivization of history, but also the subjectivization of aesthetics and practice that overlooks the historicity of human understanding. Gadamer argues against the hermeneutic nihilism that results from the notion that the meaning of the work of art is indeterminate. It is the effect of subjectivism in aesthetic theories that gave rise to what Gadamer calls "aesthetic differentiation."275 The art work is abstracted from its living world, and the artist is abstracted from his historical world, and art itself is purified out of its existence. Aesthetic perception is not pure seeing and hearing. These are "dogmatic abstractions. . . . Perception always includes meaning."276 Even understanding abstract art, something like an "absolute music" involves getting into a "relation with what is meaningful."277 Perception is already understanding, in that perception interprets something as something. The work of art perceived as an artistic product itself is more than art, it is its meaning. Interpretation is not something imposed on the work, rather interpretation belongs to the being of the work itself.278 

Gadamer intends to transcend the "purity of aesthetic"279 to get beyond the entanglement of the subjectivity of the experience of art and turn to the ontological structure of the work of art in order to determine its meaning. Gadamer develops a critique of subjectivist theories of art. He analyzes the concept of aesthetic genius in the Romantics’ aesthetic theory. In certain aesthetic theories the concept of genius serves for explaining the inexhaustibility of the interpretation of the artwork. After Kant, the concept of genius is employed to explain the completeness of the work of art as the distinctive character of the artist, while it belongs to the interpreter to conceive this completeness without reference to a purpose, which is what distinguishes the art from a craft. The indefiniteness of the work of art in reference to a purpose and its completeness in reference to the genius, is taken into a conception of the indefiniteness of the work of art.

Take for instance, Valery’s notion that all works of art are open and indeterminable, because the purpose of the work cannot be decided and, thus, the work is essentially incomplete. "From this it follows it must be left to the recipient to make something of the work. One way of understanding a work, then, is no less legitimate than another."280 The concept of genius conceived from the side of the recipient leaves no criteria for appropriateness of interpretation. Gadamer concludes that it leads to an "untenable hermeneutic nihilism."281

The objectivity of understanding in the human sciences is dependent upon the characteristics of the subject matter. The appropriateness of the interpretation is bound to the work of art itself, because, if the interpretation is possible, it must be appropriate to the work of art; it is the interpretation of the work, and it must have its own identity and coherence.282 

The aporia of the indeterminateness of meaning has found its expression in the arguments that claim that the unity of the work of art is constituted in its form. This implies that the art work is only an empty form which can be filled by the multiplicity of possible experiences in which an aesthetic object exists. The self-identity of the work of art is disintegrated into the formal unity of aesthetic experiences which annihilates the unity and continuity of the work of art.283 The emphasis on the exceptional temporal quality of the experience of art leads to notions of the incompleteness of the work of art or the incompleteness of the experience of art.

Gadamer recognizes that the discontinuity of aesthetic experience points beyond itself and is grounded on the experience of the continuity of human life.284 Kierkegaard’s critique of aesthetic existence as momentary existence points to the need to transcend the transitoriness of the aesthetic existence, while at the same time preserving it. The aesthetic object is not immediately intelligible and not timelessly present to itself, nor is the experience of it. This is the conclusion of aesthetic subjectivism. It is necessary to integrate aesthetic experience into the continuity of the experience of self-understanding, because self-understanding is not a pure givenness of the consciousness to itself either. "Self-understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self, and includes the unity and integrity of the other."285

The way to transcend aesthetic consciousness is to trace the history of its conceptual background. This is intended to show that, first, the experience of art contains more than aesthetic consciousness admits, and second, this remainder is related to the object of art, and to the being of the work of art.

Gadamer does not intend to prove that the work of art demonstrates its own truth but rather to show how to make sense of the experience of art. This already requires the admission of the truth value of works of art because, despite the efforts to "rationalize it away," in the works of art a "truth is experienced" in a way that cannot be constituted any other way.286 Methodological hermeneutics ignores the fact that interpretive methods do not demonstrate the truth of art, but rather the truth of art is prior to this demonstration. In the second section, Gadamer shows the same to hold true with regard to historical consciousness.

Common to both aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness is the narrowing of the cognitive value of the experience of the human sciences by focusing on the "problems of method."287 Gadamer does not deal with the general problem of methodologism, but with the logical difficulty of its application to the Geisteswissenschaften. Under the influence of John Stuart Mill’s Logic, in which the inductive method is construed as the basic method for all sciences, a distinction was made between the logical and the "artistic-instinctive induction" that is specific to the human sciences.288 The implication of this distinction is that the method of the Geisteswissenschaften is tied to particular psychological capacities, and understanding in the humanities requires "tact." Also implied in this distinction is the idea of a limitation to the universal validity of scientific method as its binding norm.289

The question Gadamer raises is how artistic-intuitive tact is acquired. He seeks the answer to this question by analyzing the concept of Bildung. It is one of the concepts that was central to the Geisteswissenschaften even though the idea remained without "epistemological justification."290 Gadamer contends that Bildung provides the ground of legitimation for the human sciences and remained as their "special source for truth."291 

What is specific about this concept is that it implies a specific form of universality. Bildung as "cultivating the human" reveals the real significance of the concept. Herder’s definition of Bildung as "rising up to the humanity through culture"292 confirms that the universality of human scientific knowledge is concrete, i.e., its universality and specific form of objectivity are content-dependent. It means that understanding in the humanities is also a form of human self-understanding, as self-formation.

The nature of such an understanding is a process, it is a becoming and nature, physis.293 Bildung, as becoming, describes more the result than the process itself, but the result here is not something external to the process, but rather a continuous internal process without an end.294 Gadamer applies Hegel’s concept of sublation (Aufhebung) to Bildung. "Bildung is a genuine historical idea, and because of this historical character of ‘preservation’ it is important for understanding in the human sciences." This brings Gadamer close to Hegel who introduced historical ideas "into the realm of ‘first philosophy.’"295

Following Hegel in this initial step opens up a hermeneutic dimension in that we recognize the universality characteristic of the historical understanding. Rising to universality is not a specific capacity of theoretical reason "but covers the essential character of human rationality as a whole."296 Thus, Bildung, defined as "rising to universality", requires the individual to leave his particularity behind for the sake of universality. It refers to the human ability to restrain one’s desires and "hence freedom from the object of desire and freedom for its objectivity."297

Gadamer develops a critique of the experience of art that points to inadequate consequences of the subjectivist theories of aesthetics. This theory of aesthetics has found its consummation in the concept of aesthetic understanding as the re-experiencing (Erlebnis) of the artist’s original creative experience. If the notion of the experience of art as Erlebnis is examined closely, it becomes clear that aesthetics here surrenders to the scientific ideal of objectivity in the sense that the aesthetic experience is divorced from the truth of the work of art.

Gadamer suggests that the experience of art is analogous to the experience of play. The work of art, like play, represents itself only in being played. All playing is a being played, a "self-presentation."298 "Play is really limited to presenting itself. Thus its mode of being is self- presentation. But self-presentation is a universal ontological characteristic of nature."299 Gadamer finds the work of art as both energia and telos.300 Representation is a temporal category. Play realizes itself in the temporal happening of its various representations. The mode of being of the work of art is a "coming-to-presentation of being."301 For this reason, the ontological structure of the being of the work of art has the character of a temporal event, as Heidegger called it (Ereignis).302 

The process or event character of the work of art is not limited to the plastic arts but is valid for the literary arts as well as all literary works in general.303 The truth content of a text always emerges in the "event" of reading.304 However, the possibility of reading and being read is the ontological character of texts as literary art. "Literary art can be understood only from the ontology of the work of art, and not from the aesthetic experience that occurs in the course of the reading."305 Because, both in the case of understanding texts and of understanding works of art, the fundamental structure of understanding is, in each case, the same, "aesthetics has to be absorbed by hermeneutics."306

Through these excursions, Gadamer prepares the ground for showing the radical antithesis between aesthetic consciousness and the experience of art. The notion of aesthetic consciousness is of relatively modern origin. As Palmer puts it, "It is a consequence of the general subjectivizing of thought since Descartes, a tendency to ground all knowledge in subjective self-certainty."307 Gadamer’s critique of what is characterized as the aesthetic consciousness concerns the fact that —in Dahlstrom’s description of the aesthetic project of German Idealism— "its appeal to consciousness or subjectivity [is] perhaps even wrong-headed."308 Gadamer tries to demonstrate that the experience of art is not simply a matter of subjective consciousness, but a matter of the ontological disclosure of the object itself. The uniqueness of the experience of art is thus summed up in the words of Georg Simmel: "The objective not only becomes an image and idea, as in knowing, but an element in the life process itself."309 

In the experience of art, the aesthetic object addresses perception. However, perception is not a pure grasp of the thing, but already includes an interpretation. The experience of art works discloses the interpretive nature of all our experience of the world.

Gadamer’s analysis of aesthetic experience shows that perception, even if it is psychologically conceived as a response to a stimulus, is never a mere representation of what is there. For perception always retains an understanding of something as something. All ‘understanding as’ is an articulation of what is there, in that it "looks-away-from, looks-at, sees-together-as."310

The aesthetic object as a phenomenon in the world is already constituted in its different self-presentations and different aspects of its being. It cannot be exhausted by our cognition of it. The historicity of understanding essentially refers to this aspect of experience. Gadamer expresses this feature of experience when he asserts that "understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood."311 The role attributed to historicity as the condition of experience must not be confused with the historicist concept of the historical conditions of understanding. The idea expressed by the concept of historicity is that experience is not an immediate cognitive relation to the object.

Since the experience of art illustrates the interpretative and temporal nature of experience, Gadamer argues that despite the temporality of the mode of being of the aesthetic objects, it is possible to understand how works of art present themselves in a timeless way. Gadamer has chosen the example of the classical for explicating the historicity of the objects of the human sciences in Truth and Method, and extends this notion to all works of art, especially linguistic art.312

Certain texts that have acquired the status of the classical represent the whole historical tradition in its authority through the claim to truth that is embodied in them. The classical "signifies a period of time, a phase of historical development but not a supra-historical value."313 The contemporaneity of classical works of art is brought about "on account of their effective history."314 

Thus, the concept of the classical represents something being in history, while at the same time not being limited by history. In this sense, it is a "mode of being historical" which preserves truth in a process of constantly proving itself as valid.315 The self-legitimation of the classical is due to the fact that the classical preserves its truth claim in history within a tradition, and as such requires our recognition.316 

The discussion concerning the classical has no independent value in itself unless it is considered as an illustration of the historical mediation between past and present. Gadamer carries out the analysis of understanding in the light of the historical mediation which appears as the "effective substratum" of all historical activity. The defining characteristic of an historical activity cannot be conceived other than as a process.317 

What is considered to be classical exemplifies the self-presentation of the object in its identity through change. Indeed, just as the analogy of play exemplifies how the self-presentation of the work of art can be beyond objective and subjective determination, the case of the classical illustrates the dialectical movement of finitude and the possibility of transcendence without undermining the historical character both of understanding and of the text in the continuity of an historical tradition.

The classical does not represent a dogmatic or supra-historical quality of the historical object, but rather is precisely an historical category itself. To call something "classical" by no means implies that a certain quality is attributed to a particular historical phenomenon; the classical refers to a "notable mode of being historical."318 Furthermore, the classical denotes a mode of being historical, a mode of historical preservation, that continually proves something true about the historical writing.319 

The mode of being of historicity that is characteristic of the objects of historical studies and of the interpreting subject is the common ground of their being in continual movement. Temporality is the common element of the mode of the being of the subject and the object of this study. On the side of the interpreter, the category of the classical refers to the historical reality as something to which historical consciousness belongs. The classical signifies the capacity of works of art or texts to present themselves in a "timeless present that is contemporaneous with every other present."320 

In the interpretation of the works of art a clearance is opened by the temporal distance. The fixity of written expression provides this clearance for understanding linguistic works. The principle of distantiation accounts for the possibility of confronting something as other, and its integration into the familiar. Only something unfamiliar or alien calls for interpretation. Equally, it must bring its own familiarity with it. The principle of distantiation is dialectically opposite to the consciousness of the history of effects. As Ricoeur suggests, interpretation must be taken as a distantiation of re-appropriation.321 The intermediary position of hermeneutic understanding brings the "text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanced object and belonging to a tradition."322 

Similar to the temporal distance and the clearance opened by the written expression, moral experience reveals another form of distance between the subject and object. Practical experiences of moral decisions, applying a moral rule in a particular situation, involve a distantiation that cannot be explained through the modern distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge.

Under the influence of the modern concept of method, the traditional meaning of the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge is altered. In modern epistemology, practical and theoretical knowledge are defined according to the method of the sciences. The distinction between theoretical and practical is reflected in the methodological division of the sciences as the natural sciences and the human sciences with regard to production. Gadamer’s account, on the other hand, is based on a revaluation of the concept of production in terms of moral practice, represented in Aristotle’s concept of phronesis as a moral "production" distinct from natural scientific production, techne.

Phronesis is to be distinguished, on the one hand, from theoretical knowledge, episteme, and from technical reasoning, practical skill, techne, on the other. Moral practical reasoning involves a special kind of mediation between the universal and the particular in which both the universal and the concrete case are co-determined.323 It is not a subsumption of the particular under the universal rule or a derivation of the particular from a universal; rather it is distinctive of phronesis that it involves an "interlacing of being and knowledge."324

It is important to note that Gadamer’s return to Aristotle and moral reasoning has a critical significance. Two points require special attention. First, Gadamer recognizes that the modern division of sciences is based on the division of theoretical and practical knowledge, and upon the idea that the theoretical apparatus of natural sciences are superior because they find more practical applications. Here, practice is reduced to technical production, and the superiority of scientific method is proven by the results. The theoretical aspects of the human sciences, on the other hand, produce no similar results. The upshot of this argument is that the human sciences are not even practical, but only speculative or theoretical in the pejorative sense of the term.

The second point Gadamer makes is that philosophy can make a difference not by making rules concerning what specific methods must be used in the sciences, but by pointing out the preceding conditions of these reflections on the methodological peculiarities of the sciences. Philosophical hermeneutics is the heir to the older tradition of practical science.325 

In the light of the above distinction, the ideal of the objectivity and certainty of scientific knowledge appears to be a specific form of certainty relative to the specific goal or the subject matter of an investigation. The claim that scientific method is itself independent from every content and, as such, is applicable to every content is misleading with respect to the goal of the sciences to utilize their results for human needs.

Gadamer accepts Kant’s notion that the moral world of human life is a realm governed by freedom. The historical life-world in general is not subject to regularities and laws similar to those of nature. Only in imitation of the scientific method of the natural sciences can the human sciences be said to be "concerned with establishing similarities, regularities, and conformities to law which would make it possible to predict individual phenomena and process."326 But they could not obtain these regularities because of insufficient data available in these domains. Thus, beside methodological accuracy, the second measure of the sciences is the success and the increase of knowledge.

We have outlined the purpose of the analysis of humanistic concepts of common sense and Bildung so as to illustrate the objective power of these concepts derived from the tradition of moral philosophy and their "critical significance."327 The critical function of moral reasoning consists in its political content.328 This has been changed when moral reasoning is included under the concept of judgment. Because judgment is considered as being among the lower powers of the mind, the sensus communis is deprived of its critical significance. The sensus communis, as judgment, concerns the individual, unique thing. As the sensible individual is agreeable to many, or if it has internal coherence, this is what Kant calls "reflective judgment." Reflective judgment is appropriate according to what is the formal and real element of the thing, and is hence not conceptual, but rather immanent knowledge.329 

Kant’s moral philosophy denies that morality can be grounded on "moral feeling." In this opposition, it not only excludes the sensus communis but also reduces it to aesthetic judgment as a faculty common to all individuals. Gadamer considers this a misconception concerning the common sense. Rather it is the real "sense of community, genuine moral and civic solidarity, but that means judgment of right and wrong, and a concern for the common good."330 "Moral feeling" is not an individual feeling but a common sensibility. Moral judgment might serve to restrict the judgment of others as detached from our own private, subjective conditions, but this limitation has nothing to do with avoiding appealing to the judgment of others.331 This is the sense in which the sensus communis is divested of its political content.

Gadamer states that the "sensus communis is the sense of the right and the general good that is to be found in all men, moreover a sense that is acquired through living in the community; it is determined by its structures and aims."332 It appears that practical knowledge is concerned more with human possibilities than with those available to rational proof. Gadamer further comments that "it has always been known that the possibilities of rational proof and instruction do not fully exhaust the sphere of knowledge."333 Gadamer aims to prove that the human sciences’ claim to knowledge and truth has been emptied of its content by measuring it in terms of extrinsic standards, "namely the methodological thinking of modern science."334 Contrary to the narrow concepts of practice and theory, the theoretical attitude "is in itself part of the practice of man." Objective behavior itself is based on man’s ability to distance and restrain himself from the immediate desires which are all made possible by the gift of the "theoretical."335 However, taking a theoretical attitude does not mean subjecting all our knowledge and experience to reflection.

Gadamer turns to the structure of experience and the reality of the object as limiting the power of reflection and to effective history as exceeding experience prior to reflection. The first point to be made is that historically effected consciousness "has the structure of experience (Erfahrung)."336 For this reason, the explication of the concept of experience must be understood in the context of the historicity of understanding. The contemporary conception of experience has become excessively influenced by the experimental sciences, and, therefore, "the inner historicity of experience" is now overlooked.337 

Gadamer states that the aim of his study is to investigate "all experience of understanding" and indicates that "the section on experience (Part Two, II.3.B) takes on a systematic and key position" in this investigation.338 His analysis of experience in that section is closely related to his analysis elsewhere of the experience of the otherness of the historical object.

The situation of consciousness as historical consciousness and also as the consciousness of being as such brings out the question of the possibility of rising reflectively out of the historical conditions of understanding. The historicity of understanding must be considered as a reflexive act, which is the implication of Gadamer’s concept of the "consciousness of the historical effects." We raise this issue in order to determine the ontological implications of the hermeneutic requirement of reflection. Hermeneutic reflection upon the status of consciousness that is effected by history brings us back to the pre-understanding or the pre-judgment that constitutes its initial directedness.

Gadamer connects the reflective activity of consciousness with the consciousness of Being. He writes: "Reflection on a given pre-understanding brings before me something that otherwise happens behind my back. Something — but not everything, for what I have called the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein is inescapably more being than consciousness, and being is never fully manifest."339 

This raises an important question concerning the nature of consciousness and the reflective capacity that belongs to it. Gadamer writes: "However much we emphasize that historically effected consciousness itself belongs to the effect, what is essential to it as consciousness is that it can rise above that of which it is conscious. The structure of reflectivity is fundamentally given with all consciousness. Thus, this must be the case for historically effected consciousness."340 If through reflection consciousness can rise ‘above’ what it is conscious of, then this would imply that by means of reflection consciousness could go beyond effective history.

The fact that this question arises belongs to the Hegelian elements of Gadamer’s thinking. But, unlike Hegel, Gadamer concludes that the ability of consciousness to rise above the conditions determining it does not mean consciousness can attain an absolute standpoint from which it can know both its own self and the object of its activities.

There are two issues involved here. The possibility of hermeneutic analysis shows that the historicity of understanding includes the ability to comprehend reflectively that of which it is conscious. But this does not mean that consciousness can grasp the totality of the being of the object, but rather only the aspect that is revealed. This much is clear from the remark mentioned earlier to the effect that being is never fully manifest.

The second issue involved is the concept of the subject of hermeneutic understanding. Gadamer emphasizes the historicity and finitude of understanding in the sense that the subject can never become a self-transparent object . This is the whole issue behind the critique of objective subjectivism.341 The subject can never become an object to itself.

This can be explained more clearly from the point of the phenomenological notion that consciousness is always a "consciousness of something." The reflectiveness of consciousness can mean awareness or being conscious of something. On a higher level, reflection would be an awareness of consciousness as being the consciousness of different things. The concept of self-consciousness applies to this second awareness. If it is asserted that consciousness can discover that certain structures pertain to its own activity at the first level, this would mean that the structures of consciousness are free from effective history.

Gadamer avoids accepting that self-reflection could reveal the structure of consciousness to itself, free from its contents. For, if such possibility of self-reflection exists for self-consciousness, then the laws or the structures discovered within consciousness would provide an absolute basis for our knowledge of objects, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics would be no different from Hegel’s idealism.342

The reflective nature of consciousness, together with its ability to escape the boundaries of the particular objects of its experience, are very crucial for proving the historicity of understanding. The task of hermeneutics is to establish the otherness of history in order to demonstrate that historical determination is an effect of the finite nature of human existence, not the result of the fact that human life is lived in the course and development of history.

But how can the otherness of history be established without denying the reflective nature of consciousness? This issue is related to the notion of reflection and its role in experience. Gadamer finds in Hegel’s speculative and dialectical thinking the true expression of the dynamic nature of experience. Speculation, as referred to here, is employed in the sense used by Hegel, that is, as a "mirror relation."343

Reflection, used in this sense, requires a counterpoint against which immediate experience can be compared. Without such a differentiation, the identity of the object cannot be established. Here, "speculative means the opposite of the dogmatism of everyday experience."344 

Speculative thought reduces the immediacy of the object to a moment within the process of a dynamic whole. In order to go beyond unreflective everyday experience to the totality of the process in which the immediate experience is a part, the initial objective presentation of the object comes to be seen as only a particular determination of the object within the context of apperception. The model of speculative thinking is not favorable to the appositive view that takes the object as given in the immediacy of experience. Speculative philosophy makes it possible to think that the object is potentially capable of being infinitely determinable according to the context of its perception.

Gadamer does not accept the claim that subjective consciousness can overcome its own historical conditionedness, or overcome its pre-judgments through self-reflective activity. This objection immediately forces him to deal with Hegel’s concept of absolute knowledge. Gadamer wants to adopt the speculative reflection described in Hegel’s dialectic, but to reject its claim to absolute science. Thus, the dialectic of absolute sciences can be refuted on the basis of the finitude of the understanding.

Prior to raising objections to Hegel, the strength of Hegel’s account of reflective experience must be appropriated in order to defend the historicity of experience. At the center of the problem of reflection is the experience of the other. The vigor of reflective philosophy comes into view in Hegel’s critique of Kant’s thing in itself. Hegel claims that insofar as reason sets the boundaries between that which is known (the phenomenal) and the unknowable (the thing in itself), consciousness becomes self-consciousness by recognizing that reason itself sets this limit and thus has already traversed the limit of the phenomenal in absolute consciousness.345 The other, in this understanding, becomes part of self-consciousness, because the other is recognized as the result of an act of consciousness itself. However, it is a failure not to see that the recognition of otherness is merely a stage of consciousness in the dialectical process.

The recognition of otherness has to do with attempts to criticize Hegel from the point of view of reflective philosophy. Gadamer tries to challenge Hegel’s arguments for the sublation of otherness on a new ground, on the basis of which the other would be recognized as being outside the reflectivity of consciousness. This can be shown by drawing the boundaries of reflection. For this reason, Gadamer introduces the historicity of experience into the discussion.

The concept of experience must be evaluated under the light of historically effected consciousness in such a way that "immediacy and superiority of work do not dissolve into a mere effective reality in the consciousness of effect—i.e., we are concerned to conceive a reality that limits and exceeds the omnipotence of reflection."346 

The experience of the Thou constitutes the original phenomenon of hermeneutics. The experience of the Thou represents a model of knowledge according to which reflection can go beyond the particular effects of the historical object, although it cannot sublate the being of the object into self-consciousness. Therefore, Gadamer asserts that: "[T]he experience of the Thou throws light on the concept of historically effected experience. The experience of the Thou also manifests the paradox that something that stands over against me asserts its own right and requires absolute recognition; and in the very process is ‘understood.’"347

Historical distance, as incorporated into the reflectivity of experience, involves a distanced objectivity. The object of understanding stands on its own in its otherness, because the tension created by reflection and temporal distance is effective in all understanding. Second, this involves a transcendence, both on the side of the meaning of the object, as well as providing a self-transformation, self-transcendence of the interpreter. Thirdly, it is productive as actualized in its application into the present situation. And finally, it makes it possible to make a projection of possibilities into the future.

In this analysis of experience, Gadamer achieves his purpose to demonstrate that fore-understanding and prejudgments do not exert inescapable domination over the process of understanding, but are constantly confirmed or negated.

If anything, the hermeneutic task described here involves an endless historical process not because of its lack of fulfillment in the timeless validity of an Hegelian absolute knowledge, but because of the temporality of the experience of Being. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is definitely in conflict with the concept of knowledge based on Cartesian self-certainty or on the reflective self-consciousness. The criterion of givenness of the self-identity of the subject to its own consciousness is abandoned in favor of the dialectical movement of self-understanding through the other. The other must be preserved as other in its discontinuous existence within the continuity of the hermeneutic experience as the understanding of the familiar, if it is to provide the alterity necessary for the subject’s self-understanding.

All further considerations aside, Gadamer’s notion that understanding is also a self-understanding in the humanities should not be taken in the sense of an "existential" self-understanding. Understanding as self-understanding is an heuristic concept, not an existential one. It is based on the observation that every knowledge presupposes or is oriented toward a whole, even if the whole is not given. The knowledge of the object given in the natural sciences is no different from that of the human sciences in this sense. The totality of nature is never given to scientific experience, but the unity and totality of nature is presupposed in every form of research on a particular object. The continuity and the unity of the scientific research is a presupposition based on the goal that it will be utilized for human purposes.

Similarly, for instance, historical study presupposes the unity of the history of the world historical phenomena, while the continuity and unity of historical understanding presuppose the continuity of human self-understanding. It will be admitted that these suggestions will bring Gadamer closer to Kant, as conceiving the totality and unity of nature and the historical world as regulative ideas. It may sound surprising, but Gadamer reads Kant through Hegel, and vice versa. In an effort to reinterpret Hegel’s objective spirit and the dialectic mediation of human consciousness through the objective forms of historical life, while preserving Kantian limits of knowledge, Gadamer tries to avoid the implications of Hegel’s dialectics of absolute knowledge.348

Most theories of understanding in art and history approach their subject matter from the perspective of historical alienation and the uniqueness of the individual who has created the artwork or participated in an historical event. From the critique of empirical and idealist conceptions of aesthetic and historical understanding, Gadamer draws the conclusion that language as the "universal medium of this mediation" should replace idealist and empirical approaches.349 Thus the historicity of understanding means not only that understanding comes out of the concrete situation which is both the condition of understanding as well as its limitation, but also orients us towards the universal self-presentation of the objects of our understanding, like art and history.

Historicity thus implies the nature of understanding as a process, as well as its confrontation with the otherness of the object of understanding. "Every experience is a confrontation. Because every experience sets something new against something old."350 

As we can see, Gadamer looks for the mediative nature of understanding in the basic structure of experience itself. Gadamer gives as evidence for the openness of experience the fact that the nature of experience cannot be reduced to a theoretical fixation of consciousness upon its objects. This paves the way for his concept of determining meaning not through an approach from the perspective of propositional logic, but through the logic of question and answer. Thus, hermeneutic understanding is not be conceived as a matter of constructing a self-identical meaning of a text or work of art or a historical event, but rather as a continuous dialogue.

Dialogue, considered as the model for hermeneutic understanding, confirms the mediation of meaning by raising questions to which the text serves as an answer, hence, we also question ourselves in the face of the truth claim of the text. The testing of pre-understanding and the pre-judgment that condition understanding take place in this confrontation. Referring back to Truth and Method, Gadamer explains it in the following way: "I have tried to describe more accurately . . . how this process of challenge mediates the new by the old and thus constitutes a communicative process built on the model of dialogue. From this I derive hermeneutics’ claim to universality. It signifies nothing less than that language forms the base of everything."351 

In order to make good on the claim to universality and to the comprehensive unity of understanding meaning, philosophical hermeneutics directs its reflection on the limitations of objectifying thought represented by the scientific concept of method, as well as on the forms of experience that point beyond the sphere of methodological knowledge. The universality of hermeneutic experience is threatened by the distinction of fact and value and the objective and subjective conditions of knowledge, advanced in epistemological theories.

Hermeneutic reflections on understanding as an integration that becomes continually wider in extent and, thus, is universal reveals also the transcendental aim of philosophical hermeneutics that concerns the possibility of understanding in general. For this reason, hermeneutic philosophy adapts the strategy of a transcendental theory to describe the conditions of knowledge whose universal validity is confirmed by the fact that hermeneutic reflection is itself submitted to the same conditions. Hermeneutic philosophy circumvents this contradiction by returning its reflection back on the all-embracing character of these conditions.

Hermeneutics abstains from a claim to absolute knowledge by leaving aside any distinction between the empirical and ontological experience of meaning and subsuming them under the principle of the historicity of understanding. The dependence of understanding on prior conditions starts with the preconceptual structure of experience. The phenomenological description of experience exposes the fact that experience and its content are correlative, and these two should be included in the continuity of the universe of the meaning. Conceptual thinking and objectivity of method dismiss the original relation of experience to its content in a manner in which the autonomy and the self-identity of the historical object cannot be recognized as a concrete and unique phenomenon. Instead, objectivity is projected as a result of a reconstruction of the historical and subjective conditions underlying the creation of the object. Methodology concerns the abstract rules and principles of knowledge which have nothing to do with the specific contents of human knowledge or even the achievements of particular sciences. Philosophical hermeneutics takes as its subject matter the experiences which are bound to the already existing and yet changing, continuous complexes of meaning. Hence, the validity of the scientific method depends on its versatility and suitability for all purposes regardless of the content of the experience.

Thus, the universality of scientific method, as it concerns the formal relation between the subject and the object, covers over the difference and distance between knowledge and its object. The distance and the difference of the object of study and its experience become the central problems of the human sciences. Hermeneutics recognizes the independence and otherness of historical meaning towards which it stands in opposition by virtue of the historicity of understanding, but at the same time elevates this relation to the task of a mediation. The principle of understanding signifies the dependence of understanding on a given content and, thereby, historicity assumes the role of a continuous mediation content of a tradition. However, the mediation of content through the principle of historicity is not eo ipso a mediation of all the contents of history, because time, as the structure of the mode of being of objects and as the medium in which the temporality of life is structured, must be experienced and appropriated within the continuity of history. It is not just the mere passage of time as historical continuity that constitutes the unity and continuity of the object in history, so the experience of an isolated subject cannot overcome the temporal distance. For this reason, it is necessary to suppose either that the continuing unity of meaning can be reflectively construed, or that the unity of difference from, and dependence upon, its content is built into the activity of understanding.

It is not only the case that hermeneutic reflection goes beyond the immediacy of its own temporality in recognizing the identity of the object in its own temporal structure; it also rises above the difference of its object in relation to the understanding subject. However, the power of reflection cannot extend beyond the temporal horizon encompassing the whole. The reflectivity of hermeneutic experience contains its own critical element in that it submits understanding to the measure of its object’s own self-presentation, and also to the historicity as the temporal mode of the relationship between subject and the object. Language as a medium transcends the limits of hermeneutic reflection. The relation between language and reality and also that relation between historical continuity and the contents of tradition cannot be transcended by an emphasis upon the achievement of understanding unbroken by reflection. Hermeneutic understanding finds its universality always in concrete forms of the experience of life: a tradition mediated through language, such as art, history and moral practice.

However, despite Gadamer’s emphasis on the ontological structure of understanding and the historicity of understanding, this thesis cannot be maintained without difficulty if historicity is taken in the sense of the historical conditioning of human knowledge. The objections to Gadamer’s hermeneutics emerge from this point of view. We turn, in the next chapter, to the critical issues that Gadamer’s theory raises.