Hermeneutics as the art of interpretation plays a prominent role in the humanities. Gadamer has raised this role into a philosophical problem by taking up the question whether hermeneutic disciplines, such as art, history, jurisprudence and literary criticism, in their research practices differ from the natural sciences. Autonomy and independence of the humanities as sciences have long been considered to be based on understanding as their specific method. In Truth and Method, Gadamer has revived the question of the autonomy of hermeneutic sciences in terms of the sort of knowledge attainable in the human sciences. The specific nature of the experience of truth and understanding is not a problem of method, but concerns the historical and linguistic character of the distinctive objects of the human sciences.

The experience of the human sciences involves the understanding of meaning, not empirically given objects. The ideal of objectivity is based on the concept of the validity of scientific method, independent of the content of knowledge. Natural sciences inquire into their objects on the basis of mathematical, hypothetical construction and its verification by means of experiment and measurements. The scientific method provides the rule for the certainty of their results. As long as the content-independent methods are employed, the validity and the certainty of its results can be proven. According to Gadamer, philosophical efforts to justify the natural sciences’ mode of knowledge as a general epistemology is responsible for the conception of the universal validity of scientific method. Modern science did not start out as search for a comprehensive knowledge, but on the contrary proceeded by abandoning comprehensive knowledge in favor of the certitude and controllability of its knowledge.79

Philosophical hermeneutics deals with understanding as the basic experience of the world in which knowledge is not limited to criteria of control and certitude but oriented to the whole of human life. The interpretive understanding in the human sciences, whose subject matter is human life in general, is much closer to basic human experience. The object of understanding cannot be isolated from the totality of its relation; the knowledge of its object always involves an orientation towards the whole. For this reason, understanding in the human sciences is not primarily a question of methodological control and certitude, but is conditioned by the certitude of the experience of life. As Gadamer states: "The certainty of science is very different from the certainty acquired in life."80 

For Gadamer, it is a philosophical task to describe the conditions of knowledge in the human sciences, which he understands as the heir to the tradition of metaphysics, concerned with "man’s knowledge about himself and the world of his creations in which he has deposited this knowledge." From the methodological point of view, this kind of knowledge is only a mixture of feelings and imagination, failing to display the requisite scientific vigor.81

Gadamer’s Truth and Method is not an apologetic work for the defense of the human sciences against the ideal of objectivity of the scientific method. Rather it is an attempt to show the limits of knowledge in the sciences and, hence, the modes of experience of knowledge that cannot be explained within those confines. The experience of knowledge and truth that lies beyond the conceptual and methodological limits of the natural sciences is described in the domain of the historical sciences such as art, history, and legal and moral sciences. Although the limitations of his inquiry are set by the fields Gadamer chooses to discuss, its outcome is expressed in the claim that hermeneutic understanding is universal.

The claim to universality by philosophical hermeneutics has been challenged from the point of view of the method of textual interpretation and from the point of view of the critical function of the social sciences. Gadamer argues that the ideal of the objectivity of method cannot be univocally applied to the research practices of the human sciences. The specific character of the object of the human sciences must be taken into consideration. Since Gadamer denies the possibility of an absolute and "objective" knowledge in the human sciences, philosophical hermeneutics becomes susceptible to the criticism that it is an historicistic-relativistic theory.

Even in the traditional sense, hermeneutics as the theory of textual interpretation involves the problems of historical understanding. Gadamer employs the concept of the historicity of understanding to describe the incompleteness of the interpretation and understanding in the humanities. The methods of interpretation that are supposed to aid understanding historical texts, works of art, events and so forth cannot provide criteria for determining the decidability of interpretation in other and notably, in future instances and, therefore, all interpretation inevitably involves the problem of historical understanding. In the face of this problem of historicism, Gadamer develops two strategies to defend hermeneutic understanding from the objectivism of the sciences and the relativism of historical positivism.

In this chapter our inquiry has the following objectives: First, we construe Gadamer’s own thesis that philosophical hermeneutics is developed against the ontological prejudices of methodological hermeneutics that led to the doctrine of historicism—this is Gadamer’s own claim. Second, we examine Gadamer’s theory concerning the relation of history and hermeneutics and his application of the principle of historicity to textual interpretation. Gadamer’s critique of Romantic hermeneutics and the objective method of historical studies has its implications for his arguments against relativism and historicism in humanities.

The relation between hermeneutics and history is very complicated and always threatened by the challenge of relativism. Hermeneutics as a theory of understanding and method in the humanities has dealt with this challenge in the form of historicism. In the first section of Part II of Truth and Method, Gadamer develops a critique of historicism and relativism as part of an analysis of Romantic hermeneutics and its application to historical studies. In the second section of Part II, Gadamer expounds the historicity thesis in conjunction with a critical outline of the history of hermeneutics from Schleiermacher through Dilthey to Heidegger. Since Gadamer deals with the relation between history and hermeneutics at length, we introduce it in preparation for the development of his thesis concerning the rehabilitation of tradition, authority and prejudices, the "historicity of understanding," and "consciousness of the history of effects"—all of which are central to debates on Gadamer’s hermeneutics.82

Traditional hermeneutics dealt with the rules to be followed in the interpretation of texts. Philosophical hermeneutics refers to a wider scope as an inquiry into the conditions of understanding in history, art, texts, moral practice and philosophy. Therefore, hermeneutics embraces both the method to be applied in textual interpretation, as well as the epistemological presuppositions of understanding in the human sciences. In the second sense, Dilthey has called it a "critique of historical reason."83 The expansion of hermeneutics from an art of the analysis of texts to an art of understanding all meaning expressed in language was initiated by Schleiermacher.

Beginning with Schleiermacher, hermeneutics becomes a theory of interpretation dealing with the conditions that make the understanding of texts and speech possible.84 Gadamer sets the development of Schleiermacher’s theory of understanding against the background of the older theory of interpretation as an art, occasionally applied when the immediacy of understanding the subject matter of text is breached due to historical and linguistic differences.85

Schleiermacher distances himself from the early Romantics’ distinction between understanding as immediate grasp of the subject matter and interpretation as an art to supplement understanding, that is required for external purposes. The early Romantics followed the Enlightenment concept of interpretation, according to which understanding is concerned with rational discourse. Differences in understanding are due not to the rationality of speech but to differences in "point of view."86 Something is seen in one way and not in another because of the differences of the point of views.87 Gadamer notes that two rules require specific attention: the first rule has to do with the familiarity with the subject matter of the text, and the second rule has to do with adopting the right ideas concerning the subject matter in order to remove the obstacles for understanding the text.88 

Prior to the Romantics, hermeneutics was based on the familiarity or the immediacy of the relation between the meaning of the text and the interpreter. The Enlightenment’s idea of a universal reason which could understand truth and values in a timeless way had reduced the immediacy of meaning to the immediacy of rational ideas. Whatever could not be understood by reason must be understood historically, in terms of the historical genesis of texts. For instance, according to Spinoza, when a text seems unintelligible, understanding it "motivates the detour via the historical" and according to Chladenius, understanding "involves the art of interpretation."89 Historical method, as a supplement to hermeneutic understanding formulated here, prepares the ground for a later theory of interpretation as a reconstruction of the historical conditions of a text’s composition. The concept of hermeneutic understanding as the art of interpretation has a different meaning for Schleiermacher; he defines its as "the art of avoiding misunderstanding."90

Gadamer argues that, prior to the rise of historical consciousness, understanding was always considered as natural and immediate, and interpretation as explication of this understanding was directed to the subject matter. The unity of the hermeneutic process, consisting of "understanding," "explication" and "application", is based on their reference to the subject matter.91 Relying on Chladenius, Gadamer describes the basic principles of pre-Romantic hermeneutics as follows: 1) the author’s meaning is not the norm for understanding a text,92 2) the object of hermeneutics is to "understand the true meaning" of the texts, i.e., their "content," and 3) not everything that can be thought of a text or not "every ‘application’" but only what corresponds to the "subject matter" can be considered as part of the meaning of a text.93

These principles of hermeneutics as a discipline of art guide Gadamer’s analysis of the history of hermeneutics. Gadamer intends to show that linguistic and historical alienation had become the starting point of Romantic hermeneutics. Also history and language are not even regarded as the source of the continuity and familiarity of objects of hermeneutics, as the foundations of understanding. In order to prove this, Gadamer tries to show that the Romantic notion of the method of interpretation as psychological re-construction of the meaning of the text as intended by the author and the historical method as the reconstruction of empirical contents of history by means of texts and remnants from the past are similar attempts to overcome the historical and linguistic distance. For Gadamer, the idealist concept of the individual subject and scientific epistemology are responsible for the theories of interpretation as a "restoration" process.

Under the influence of the Enlightenment, Romantic hermeneutics makes an attempt to radicalize the historical method as an aid to interpretation and turn it into a universal aspect of hermeneutic problems. The early Romantic concept of the point of view as an explanation of the subjective aspect of rational discourse is the precursor to Schleiermacher’s concept of meaning as the intention of the author.94 Romantic hermeneutics has made misunderstanding or unintelligibilty the rule; understanding the exception. The hermeneutic task was conceived as restoring understanding by means of psychological and historical methods. The historical detour which was only a limiting case of intelligibility became for Schleiermacher the "norm and presupposition from which he develops his theory of understanding." Schleiermacher isolates the procedure of understanding from its content and makes hermeneutics into an independent method.95

However, the universal rules of interpretation based on the shared procedures of understanding, rather than on the content, allow Schleiermacher to see the historical distance as an instance of a more general form of alienation between the I and the Thou.96 The distance and alienation from the past that prevent the understanding of the text are also actual for understanding speech as well.97

The solution for overcoming the gap between the text and interpreter is to supplement the grammatical and historical analysis with a psychological re-creation of the author’s creative act. In this view, the object of interpretation shifts from the content of the text to the creative process of another mind.98 Hermeneutics ceases to serve interpretation and becomes a general method guiding all understanding.

However, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics concerns the interpretation of particular texts and appeals to the larger historical context for the purpose of determining the peculiarities of the author’s use of language and his life context. As Schleiermacher stated, historical interpretation cannot be limited to the collection of data, it concerns "re-creating the relation between the speaker and the original audience," without which interpretation cannot even begin. Understanding historical facts requires a minimal psychological interpretation, but the "overall viewpoint" requires it because of the subjectivity of the author.99 Still, appeal to history is for him only a philological requirement to determine the author’s relation to language by establishing the "objective-historical" conditions, and to determine the effects of thoughts and use of language on the author by establishing the "subjective-historical" conditions for the purpose of re-constructing the meaning.100

These rules of interpretation apply regardless of the truth value of the content. For Schleiermacher, understanding the content is the subject of dialectics.101 Gadamer admits that the subject matter, as the object of understanding, could be regarded as a self-evident principle for Schleiermacher. However, hermeneutics does not concern the meaning of content, but only of expression, which is an artistic expression.102 The hermeneutic task is the "re-construction of construction"103 and the aim of interpretation is always understanding an author better than he understood himself.104 Expressions are the products of an artistic genius and, hence, they are unconscious products; a re-production is always a better understanding, because it is conscious.105 Gadamer derives from this only a positive conclusion that the author has no privilege over his text as an interpreter.106 The interpreter’s understanding is not superior with regard to the content, but it could be so only in terms of what the author was not able to see in what the text says. For instance, the existence of classical texts proves that their enduring presence is related to the truth of their content.107 

The problem of relativism becomes a challenge for Schleiermacher as a result of his concept of individuality. He sees the task of understanding a text not in terms of its subject matter, but as an aesthetic construct.108 The text as a work of art is a "free construct and the free expression of an individual being."109 Hence, the hermeneutic circle, as it applied to psychological understanding, implies "understanding every structure of thought as an element in the total context of a man’s life."110 The circle constantly expands and, because this understanding always remains relative, a larger context is constituted by integration of the parts. Although the unity of the author’s life context through individual thoughts is completed only as a divinatory act, it cannot be decided whether it is ever completed. It may describe only a "relative completeness of understanding."111

In order to resolve the hermeneutic tension between the relative difference of all individuality and the universality of method, Schleiermacher appeals to artistic feeling, to "con-genial understanding. Hermeneutics is an art and not a mechanical process. Thus, it brings its work, understanding, to completion, like a work of art."112 Thus, the incompleteness of understanding is always a problem of the artistic re-creativity of the interpreter; it is never a problem of "historical obscurity, but the obscurity of the Thou."113

Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics concerns particular texts with an undisputed authorship and appeals to history only to determine subjective and objective conditions of its composition.114 For instance, myths do not enter into the hermeneutic study.115 Hermeneutics, on the other hand, as a universal method in the service of the historical study, has as its subject not "the individual text but universal history."116 Hermeneutics is also applied to the study of history.

Application of Romantic hermeneutics to the study of history has led the Geisteswissenschaften to become entangled in the problems of historicism. Understanding a text in terms of the dogmatic unity of its content as a condition of interpretation is denied. Since the unity of a text cannot be established in terms of its content as a self-contained whole, every text must be read within the larger context of its composition. The historical method reverses the situation. The historian needs to understand a particular text as a means to understanding history as a whole. The historical school has based its understanding of universal history on the "Romantic theory of individuality."117 Not only texts but every particular event is to be understood in the "universality of the historical context."118 The particular text can be used to construct the whole of history.

Dilthey recognized that the application of hermeneutics to the study of history could make it possible to comprehend the idea of a universal history. This is because, according to Dilthey, not just "sources are texts, but historical reality itself is a text that has to be understood."119 By textualizing history, the historical school was resisting Hegel’s concept of history as a teleological process. Contrary to an a priori construction of history, it can only be understood empirically. There is no standpoint outside history from which to understand history.120 The continuity of history can only be understood from the historical tradition. Hence, hermeneutics now has become the foundation for the study of history.

In its opposition to an a priori construction of history, the historical school was also resisting Hegel’s notion of a world history. In order to develop a critique of the concept of history based on an a priori construction of the unity of history according a teleological, rational or eschatological end state, the historical school was drawn to methods of the natural sciences. History must be based on research and progressive experience. In this effort, Schleiermacher was a better guide than Hegel, who recognized the "importance of history for the being of spirit and the knowledge of truth" more than did the great historians.121 

The historical school’s method requires an empirical construction of world historical phenomena. Particular events cannot be understood except in the larger context of a universal history. However, universal history cannot be construed a priori, but only through historical research. There are other ways of conceiving history in terms of a criterion that lies beyond it. History can also be understood as the cyclical rise and decline of a golden period, as the movement towards a future perfection, or as a reestablishment of a lost perfection of some primal time, or, as Hegel saw it, the perfection of history lies in its fulfillment in the "universal self-consciousness of freedom."122 

Against Hegel’s philosophy of history that there is a "reason in history,"123 the historical school accepted the notion that ideas, essence or freedom did not find "sufficient expression in historical reality."124 Instead, historical research discovers the empirical variety and multiplicity of the manifestations of historical life. Therefore, the unity of the historical process is constituted by the variety of historical phenomena. However, if this unity is attained by empirical research, historical research might be considered to replace philosophy to "inform man about himself and his place in this world."125 

Gadamer finds both choices unacceptable. History is neither the pre-determined self-unfolding of reason nor the natural process in rigid, necessary law-like regularity that emerges into the world. Both of these conceptions of history cannot do "justice to the metaphysical value of history and the status of the historical science as knowledge. The unfolding of human life in time has its own productivity."126

The historical school attributed a formal unity to the variety of historical life, a formal principle not derived from the empirical content. Between the variety of historical phenomena and the value of these in human life there is no necessary relation. This belongs to the contingency of the historical world. The formal ideal of variety is empty, "for it cannot be shaken by any historical experience, any disturbing evidence of the transience of human things. History has meaning in itself."127

The formal unity of historical process requires that every period with a distinct value be included in the universal history, while the variety of historical phenomena renders the unity of history problematic.128 History must be empirically studied in order to establish the unique value of particular historical phenomena. Yet the very phenomenon is historically meaningful only as part of the unity of the historical process. Constructing the unity of a historical process at the same time divests the particular phenomenon of its unique value. Therefore, the idea of an empirical construction of universal history is as problematic as its opposite, idealist construction.

The change and the impermanence in historical life seem to speak against the universal value of historical phenomena; transitoriness is also the basis of history. "In the impermanence itself lies the mystery of an inexhaustible productivity of historical life."129 Therefore, the unity of history is not so much a formal concept, independent from the "understanding of the contents of history."130 However, such a unity cannot be conceived of as a matter of knowledge or experience, but rather as an a priori of historical research. As Droysen recognized it, the idea of the unity of history is a "regulative idea."131 It is the a priori principle of the empirical orientation of the historical sciences. This unity cannot be regarded as an object of knowledge because the essence of history is its continuity. Unlike nature, history includes the element of time, and unlike the repetitiveness of nature, history expands. The increase of history always includes the element of self-knowledge which not only involves the act of preservation, but also surpasses "what is preserved."132 History belongs to the consciousness of this continuity.

The unity and continuity of an historical process cannot be regarded as only an "idealist prejudice." Rather, for Gadamer, "This a priori of historical thought itself is a historical reality."133 Since Gadamer follows Hegel’s answer for historical understanding as "integration" rather than Schleiermacher’s description of historical understanding as "reconstruction," it follows that hermeneutics for Gadamer cannot avoid the question of a universal history.134

According to Gadamer, Dilthey is the first one who applied the hermeneutic principle of the circularity of understanding to history: "To understand parts in terms of the whole, and the whole in terms of the parts. Conceived in terms of hermeneutic understanding, historical reality is conceived as a text."135 But because the universal history lacks the self-containedness of a text, the historical school has raised the particular events in the past, historical periods and even the history of peoples no longer on the stage of world history into a "complete unit of meaning."136 For Dilthey, the problem of the constitution of the unity of the meaning of history appears to involve either an empirical construction of historical processes or an aesthetic construction of the unity of history.

Dilthey has recognized this tension between aesthetic reconstruction and the philosophy of history. It appears to him as a tension between empirical knowledge of history and a priori construction of history. His critique of historical reason is directed against Hegel’s notion that there is a reason in history. Dilthey intends to show the limits of a rational a priori construction of history and to legitimate the claim of the historical sciences to be rightfully called science. Against the purely rational construction of history, Dilthey asserts the relevance of historical experience to render history intelligible. He takes up the question of how the experience of history is legitimized as a science.

Dilthey approaches the problem of the unity of the historical process from the issue of the coherence between the subject and the object of history. The structure of the continuity of history has its coherence in the unity of the categories of life. Historical experience has its own unity and intrinsic continuity within the unity of experience. Dilthey takes the life experience of the individual as the basic object of historical understanding. By showing that life experience has its own immanent coherence and structural unity, he tries to lay the foundations of historical understanding. It can be proven that historical experience is not constituted by atomic elements in the experience of facts, but rather is already an understanding of meaning and connections immanent in life.

Dilthey wanted to make the transition from the structure of the coherence of an individual’s life experience to "historical coherence, which is not experienced by any individual at all."137 The question Gadamer constantly asks is: how do individual experiences acquire an historical significance? how do they become an historical experience? The continuity of historical life and the knowledge of it cannot be explained on the basis of the way an individual’s life acquires continuity.138 The reason for this claim is the fact that there is no universal subject, only historical individuals. The ideality of meaning in history emerges from the historical reality of life, not from a transcendental subject.139

Dilthey has further developed the psychological interpretation by suggesting the re-experiencing (Erleben) of the meaning as the expression of the author’s life.140 At the same time, he broadens the scope of hermeneutics to take into account meaning not as a product of individual consciousness, but as an expression of the larger category of life; historical phenomena came under a new light. Historical understanding is possible because the interpreter or historian also participates in historical life.

However, Dilthey understands the continuity and unity of history in terms of the unity of structures. The relationships between the historical events are different from the causal relationships of the natural world. The structural quality of the continuity of the life experience is different from "causal continuity."141 Dilthey, under the influence of Husserl, called this structural continuity "significance."142

Dilthey did not regard it as any fundamental problem for the possibility of knowledge in the human sciences that finite, historical man lives in a particular time and place. Historical consciousness can reflectively rise above its own relativity in a way that makes the objectivity of knowledge in the human sciences possible.

This objectivity can be justified without a concept of absolute, philosophical knowledge beyond all historical consciousness.143 Dilthey has identified the "striving towards stability" as a tendency to transcend the particularity with objectivity.144 The objectivity of historical knowledge would be established, based on life’s orientation towards stability, towards the whole.

Dilthey was thinking in terms of these relative wholes. The phenomenon of life would provide only ground for understanding "an alien individuality that must be judged according to its own concepts and criteria of value, but can nevertheless be understood because I and Thou are of the same life."145 Dilthey’s position has this advantage over "idealistic reflective philosophy" when he correctly observed that "life’s natural view of itself is developed prior to any scientific objectification."146

In Gadamer’s view, Dilthey did not realize the significance of his position and its capacity to refute the charges of relativism against his philosophy, charges that came from the idealist point of view of the relation of the finite to the absolute.147 Dilthey did not question these charges, because he knew that "in the evolution of historical self-reflection leading him from relativity to relativity, he was on the way toward the absolute." 148 

Dilthey, according to Gadamer, was always reflecting on these charges without following the consequences of the philosophy of life he had developed against the reflective philosophy of idealism. "Otherwise, he could not have avoided viewing the charge of relativism as an instance of the ‘intellectualism’ that he had sought to undermine by beginning from the immanence of knowledge in life."149 Dilthey had a good start, but his reflections on the epistemological problems are not compatible with his starting point.150 Reflection immanent in life cannot transcend life itself. He did not raise "the priority of history to life" to methodological reflection.151 

In defending Dilthey’s starting point from life against the charges of relativism, Gadamer also demonstrates that it is only from a reflective idealist position that the relativity of historical understanding can be raised. Against the subjective certainty of reflective consciousness, Dilthey appealed to the certainty attained by means of empirical verification. Thus, according to Gadamer, by appealing to the certainty of scientific method, Dilthey contradicts his own insight that historical understanding must be based on the "immediate living certainty."152 This does not mean there is no "uncertainty of life" but it must be "overcome by the stability that experience of life provides."153 Dilthey appealed, instead, to scientific certainty.154 Scientific certainty is always the result of a critical method. Certainty as a goal of knowledge always precedes doubt in order to guarantee the certainty of its result.155 But social life cannot be understood on this methodological basis.

In Gadamer’s view, Dilthey’s philosophy remains entangled in the aporias of historicism. It is an attempt to preserve the empirical course of history, while taking account of the ideality of meaning structures immanent in life. It does not question the empirical givenness of the historical objects. Speculative idealism offers at least a better solution concerning the historical knowledge, for it has subjected the positivity, pure givenness of the object to a fundamental critique.156 However, Heidegger’s critique of the notion of the pure givenness of the object and the subject provides a better foundation for historical understanding.

Heidegger’s critique of the concept of substance has also shown the inadequacy of subjective consciousness for historical being and knowledge.157 Earlier, Husserl’s research on intentionality had opened a radical critique of "objectivism." His understanding of transcendental subjectivity as the only absolute, i.e non-relative thing, is here distinguished from the relativity of everything that appears before it. Heidegger raised a critique of the pure givenness of subjectivity to consciousness. Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory is based on concepts that are found in Heidegger’s analysis. We present a brief description of important aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy for hermeneutic theory.

In Being and Time, Heidegger appropriates the concept of historicity from Dilthey and applies it to the ontological question of the human understanding of Being. Although Heidegger acknowledges the importance of Dilthey’s philosophy of life, he criticizes it, because the ontological structure of life was left unquestioned by Dilthey.158 It later becomes clear that the ontological issue concerns the unity of life experience. Heidegger relies on the hermeneutic circle to point out the circularity of Dasein’s understanding of Being and to illuminate his own ontological inquiry into the understanding of the meaning of Being itself.

In his project to develop a fundamental ontology, Heidegger unfolds the concept of time as the horizon of understanding. His investigation into the ontological question of Being turns first to the modes of the human understanding of Being. How is Being disclosed in human understanding? Heidegger states that "we always conduct our activities in an understanding of Being. Out of this understanding arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency that leads us towards its conception."159 Human practice and knowledge already move within a fore-understanding of Being. How is it possible for ontological investigation to take its starting point from the finite and temporal structure of human life and experience?

In order to address this question, Heidegger links the human understanding of Being with time.160 The correlation of the human understanding of Being and the meaning of Being takes the form of an "existential analytic" as the initial articulation of ontological inquiry. Understanding is one of the existential characteristics of Dasein’s "being-in-the-world."161 For Heidegger, understanding has the structure of a projection, a projection of Dasein’s own possibilities to be. Interpretation is the explication of this understanding, the articulation and working out of the possibilities projected in understanding.162 However, interpretation is not something that follows after understanding. Rather, understanding and interpretation are coexistent.

Understanding is the form of apprehending something "as something," prior to the predicative determination of things "as that which is." Heidegger calls this first "as" the "existential-hermeneutic ‘as.’"163 There are three structural forms of fore-understanding:164 fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception. These constitute the fore-structure of understanding corresponding to the as-structure of interpretation.165 

Fore-understanding governs all cases of the experience of objects. Fore-understanding itself refers to the ontological structure of human existence.166 The circle of understanding is ontological, because it originates from the ontological structure of understanding. The meaning of the hermeneutic circle takes a positive turn in Heidegger: This circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move; it is the expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself. It is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle, or even of a circle which is merely tolerated. In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.167 Thus, the object, just as much as the subject, constitutes an integral part of the process of understanding. The notion that the hermeneutic circle is completed not according to the position of the subject, but rather according to the object, forms, also, a crucial part of Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory of understanding.

In Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory, the participation of the Being of the object in the hermeneutic circle constitutes the ultimate resistance of the object against being reduced to a representation. The object of experience always asserts its otherness over against the experiencing consciousness, so the process of understanding and experience is a never-ending task.

This is even more so in the human sciences. Heidegger emphasizes that the historical sciences are based on the ontological structure of human understanding. Heidegger writes: Because understanding, in accordance with its existential meaning, is Dasein’s own potentiality-for-Being, the ontological presuppositions of historiological knowledge transcend in principle the idea of rigor held in the most exact sciences.168 The human sciences differ from the natural sciences precisely because they are related to man’s own self-understanding. But the question of how human self-understanding and understanding in history are actualized brings us to the problem of historicity.

Heidegger gives an interpretation of historicity in section 74 of Being and Time.169 In order to clarify the concept of historicity, Heidegger relates it to the continuity of life experience, or as he calls it, the "connectedness of life." The continuity or the "connectedness of life" consists in a "sequence of experiences" in time as Dasein’s happening (Geschehen).170 Heidegger suggests that through an exposition of the structure of life’s "happening," one will achieve "an ontological understanding of historicity."171 Gadamer pursues such an ontological analysis in Truth and Method .

The ontological significance of the historicity of human existence cannot be explicated in the context of the ordinary conception of history as the continuous movement of time in which man lives his life.

The continuity of history, as it is experienced, is not constituted in accordance with the experience of time as a one-dimensional movement of ‘nows.’ The continuity of history is experienced within the context of discrete moments of life experience that achieves their unity of experience of past, present and the projection into the future in the ecstatical unity of temporality.172 The original sense of temporality is historicity.173 The concept of historicity, then, does not primarily signify human existence in history.

Heidegger emphasizes that only in the secondary sense of "historical," can man be said to be in history or a "being in time." In this sense, history, as it is ordinarily understood, is the time of man’s "within-timeness." Heidegger adds that in the sense that both history and historicity are derived from temporality, "historicity and within-timeness [history] turn out to be equiprimordial."174

Heidegger believes that this has to do with the "hermeneutic situation." In this context, the hermeneutic situation means the openness of Dasein in the present, once it makes its resolution, to the repetitive disclosure of the past. The truth of historical understanding lies here: "The possibility and the structure of historiological truth are to be expounded in terms of the authentic disclosedness (‘truth’) of historical existence. But since the basic concepts of the historiological sciences . . . are concepts of existence, the theory of the humane science presupposes an existential Interpretation which has as its theme the historicity of Dasein."175

Heidegger raises the question of historicity and hermeneutics in the human sciences as the problem of the self-interpretation of life. Historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), in the sense of the experience of the continuity of life, is closely related to the notion of understanding as a process, or happening (Geschehen). For this reason historicity must be distinguished from history (Geschichte) and historiography (Historia). Such a distinction is necessary because historicity is for Heidegger and Gadamer an ontological category, whereas the term "history" has the usual sense of the past, and historiography as a science refers to the study of the past.

For Heidegger, historicity refers to the possibility of history. Therefore, history as a science depends upon the ontological constitution of man in his historical existence, and this constitution makes it possible for man to appropriate tradition.176 Gadamer applies the concepts derived from Heidegger’s Being and Time to the problems of the human sciences. Particularly important for Gadamer’s starting point in philosophical hermeneutics are the notions that: understanding belongs to the ontological structure of human existence, that interpretation is the linguistic articulation of human understanding, and that the disclosure of the experience of Being occurs within the horizon of the experience of time.

Against the background of Heidegger’s notion of fore-structures of understanding, Gadamer formulates his thesis that understanding is made possible by the fore-understanding constituted by the prejudices of the interpreter’s own historical tradition. He moves from the notion that all understanding originates from the prejudgments (prejudices) of the reader. Thus, he no longer considers the circle of understanding as a formal element of hermeneutic method, but rather as the ontological and fundamental aspect of human existence. The hermeneutic circle includes the human relation to the world and, thus, encompasses the fact that human beings belong to language and tradition.

Gadamer makes it a central thesis that the epistemological ideal of the givenness of an object to a subject whose own consciousness is reflexively given to itself as an object has been proved to be a misconception. Husserl’s research in phenomenology has shown that the idea of the pure givenness of an object is not a correct description of experience as the correlation between subject and object. It was Heidegger’s ontological research that has shown the errors of ‘objective subjectivism,’ that is, the givenness of the subject to itself in self-consciousness. Husserl’s concept of life-world and Heidegger’s concept of "being-in-the-world" as the ground of experience concern the priority of historical life over subjective consciousness.

By adopting Heidegger’s concept of understanding and historicity to his hermeneutic theory, Gadamer intends to overcome the problems of historicism and relativism. Gadamer tells us that he came to the hermeneutic situation from the standpoint of Romantic-idealism restoration research.177 In contrast to an a priori construction of the historical past in the Hegelian manner, or the relativistic neutrality of historicism,178 Gadamer explains that historical understanding is grounded in the historicity of human existence.

In Gadamer’s view, historicism seems to be associated with objectifying thought and its metaphysical assumptions. Historicism is an approach to history that is concerned with not measuring the "past by the standards of the present, as if they were an absolute, but ascribing to past ages their own values and even acknowledging their superiority in one respect or another."179 Therefore, historicism transforms the Romantics’ notion of the intuitive retrieval of the past into a detached historical knowledge. Reversing the Enlightenment tendency towards the development of the rational course of history, Romanticism has resorted to "restoration."180 The historical school has taken "objective knowledge of the historical world" to be parallel to the knowledge of nature "achieved by modern science."181 The break with the continuity of meaning in tradition underlies both the Enlightenment and Romantic approaches to history. Historicism radicalizes psychological method as historical method; even one’s contemporaries are "understood only ‘historically.’"182 

The question Gadamer asks is this: What is the substance of historical mediation between the past and the present? Is it some homogeneous human nature, natural laws of historical phenomena, or a teleological goal? Romantic hermeneutic theory depends on the concept of a homogeneous human nature as the "unhistorical substratum" of understanding. Its application to history has freed the empathetic interpreter from all effects of history. However, "the self-criticism of historical consciousness leads finally to recognizing historical movement not only in events but also in understanding itself."183

As we have seen, Gadamer carries out his critique of Romantic hermeneutics and historical methods and draws the following conclusion that scientific objectivism and its application in the human sciences resulted in historicism. Historical understanding was considered only in terms of alternatives of empirical and idealist constructions of the unity of historical process.

Gadamer characterizes the 19th century dispute on interpretation as revolving around the question of the criterion of meaning for texts, works of art and historical events. As an alternative solution to the impasse of Romantic and historical hermeneutics--i.e., the intention of the author or the historical conditions of a text as the criterion of objectivity of interpretation—Gadamer suggests that the meaning of a text lies in its continuing effect, and this is given in a tradition.

What constitutes the object of hermeneutics is no longer the meaning as determined by the subjective intentions of an author or an historical agent, but rather the meaning as determined by the relation of the text to its content, as this is preserved in the continuity of tradition. Gadamer offers his views about what is involved in textual interpretation, based upon the consequences he draws from the critique of Romanticism and historical method.

Based on his thesis concerning the historicity of understanding and upon the implications of this thesis for textual understanding, Gadamer offers a non-objectivistic view of interpretation. Gadamer’s version of hermeneutics represents a substantial departure from traditional, methodological hermeneutics. Gadamer acknowledges that he was driven to this version by Heidegger. We now turn to an analysis of how Gadamer describes the interpretation of texts, and the meaning of history.

Many disputes about the method of the correct interpretation of texts continue to play significant roles in philosophical hermeneutics. Contrary to the Romantics’ hermeneutics of the reconstruction of the past, Gadamer describes hermeneutic understanding as an integration and mediation of the distance between the interpreter and the objects from the past.184 Gadamer argues against the thesis that interpretation can be decided on the basis of the historical context of the text or on the basis of the intention of the author. The hermeneutic principle that the interpretation of a text cannot be complete and decided led to the development of hermeneutics as the universal method of objective, scientific research in the human sciences. The criterion of the correct understanding of a text is thought to be the original meaning-intention of the author. Gadamer proposes the thesis that the original meaning of a text is not something to be re-produced by reconstruing the psychological acts of its author in the past, but is already embodied in the content of the text. The object of understanding is the meaning contained in the text, not as psychologically intended by the author, but as the perspective from which the subject matter of the text is described. Gadamer states that we do not "transpose ourselves into the author’s mind, but if one wants to use this terminology, we try to transpose ourselves into the perspective within which he has formed his views."185

Thus, instead of considering an historical text as a self-contained, self-identical phenomenon, Gadamer regards the relation between a text and the interpreting subject as the focus of hermeneutics. There are two components of this relation between an individual subject and the tradition: every subject has an interest in the subject matter and the medium in which the subject matter is presented, that is language. For this reason, Gadamer describes the hermeneutic circle as consisting of the "interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of interpreter."186 

The philological concept of the hermeneutic circle, the idea that the understanding of any part of a text from the whole and the whole from the parts is transformed into a formal concept as an aid in the search for the meaning of a text as self-contained or as the author’s intention. Gadamer’s thesis is that the task of hermeneutics cannot be conceived as only "formally universal."187 As a result of efforts to harmonize hermeneutics with the scientific ideal of objectivity, the "concretion of historical consciousness in hermeneutic theory" has been overlooked.188 Gadamer’s notion of the openness of the meaning of a text, undecidability of interpretation, is based on the idea of the historicity of understanding.

Human understanding is finite and limited. In addition, Gadamer attributes a transcendence to the being of the object or objects of understanding. The being of the works of art (and every text is a work of art in one sense) is not experienced as Being present. A text cannot be experienced in its self-identity, but rather the unity of the being of the text is always experienced in terms the dialectics of the self-identity and self-differentiation of its Being.189 Therefore, Gadamer does not commit himself to the view that the meaning of texts is indeterminate. He seems to defend the view that understanding the textual meaning is indefinite.

However, Gadamer’s attitude towards interpretation and meaning is ambivalent. On the one hand, he considers the notion that every text has its own determinate meaning to be a misleading approach to hermeneutics; on the other hand, he claims that understanding belongs to the text itself, i.e., a real interpretation always becomes self-transparent in revealing the meaning of a text.190 This means that a text is understood only in its application to the situation of the reader. It means also that every understanding, as application, brings out of the text a new and valid meaning without invalidating a former interpretation. Gadamer summarizes his view of the openness of the meaning of the text and its interpretation in the following way: "It is enough to say that we understand in a different way if we understand at all."191 

Gadamer opposes the idea that the object of understanding is to ascertain meaning as the author’s intention. The concept of the self-sufficiency of a text, i.e., the idea that the meaning of the text lies in the structural unity of the text itself, available through use of interpretative methods, is not proper either. Gadamer shows that the interpretation of texts, specifically the eminent text, is a never ending task. Gadamer’s account of the indeterminacy of interpretation calls for a different concept of textual meaning.

Until Heidegger, in Gadamer’s view, the hermeneutic tradition’s ontological status was dominated by "objectivism" about textual meaning; texts and works of art have their unique and definite meaning, determinable in principle by the interpreter. Posing the hermeneutic question in terms of the objectivity of meaning—either as the intention of the author, or the text in its structural unity—supposedly restrains the interpreter from making judgments concerning the presentation of the subject matter of the text as valid or invalid. However, disagreement over the question of what the meaning consists of and how the interpreter would have access to it through time led to concepts of historical and psychological methods to supplement interpretation.

Philosophical hermeneutics follows the modern philosophical move away from the ideal of the pure givenness of the object and pure givenness of the subject. An epistemological scheme of subject-object can no longer be applied to the hermeneutic disciplines.

The ideal of a given object—text, work of art, historical event, etc.—is said to neglect the ontological feature of the human scientific knowledge. What constitutes the conditions of knowledge in the human sciences is discarded as prejudices and subjective hindrances to understanding. The epistemological ideal of a methodological control of prejudice as a hindrance to objective knowledge overlooks the enabling prejudices which make understanding possible in the humanities. It also overlooks the fact that these prejudices might have a basis in the object. The object of the human sciences is not a self-contained entity that is in nature, but is related to human beings as part of a concrete tradition, as memories, as works of art, institutions etc.. Knowledge in the humanities is always increasing and expansive and changing along with the change in these relations and change of generations. Where exactly are the determinate objects of the hermeneutic sciences located? In the self-contained structure of texts or works of art; in the original intention of author or artist, in the plans and purposes of historical agents? For Gadamer, the meanings of texts are preserved and expanded through the continuity of tradition and history which is mediated by the continuity of language.

Because of the continuity of tradition, the circularity of understanding is no longer conceived as a formal principle of hermeneutics, but extends to the contents of tradition. Prejudices as fore-understandings belong to the ontological structure of understanding. Hermeneutic understanding must be thought as a movement from fore-understanding to understanding the subject matter in its self-presentation. Thus it becomes possible to explain the nature of knowledge in the humanities as a continuous movement of the confrontation and testing of prejudices against the otherness of text. In this process, not all prejudices are eliminated, some are confirmed, some are proved fruitless. However, even the fruitless prejudices remain dialectically effective as negative points of reference for determining the meaning of a text as "not that" and separating its truth claim from the false appearances. Therefore, as a whole, interpretation belongs to the history of the effects of the text. The correct interpretations emerge from the consciousness of this history of effects.192 Thus, it is not only the case that the interpreter has a horizon constituted by his prejudgments, but also the text has a horizon of its own.

Interpretation is a conscious confrontation with the horizon of a text, a horizon that is not limited to historical conditions in which it came into existence, but is constituted by the possibilities of its meaning. In confronting the horizon of the text, we put those prejudices to test where they thereby either prove to be hindrances for genuine understanding or prove to be productive with a basis in the text. The naiveté of objectivism and positivism lies in the attitude that considers all prejudices as false and ignores the fact that prejudices might have their foundations in the subject matter. How these prejudices are tested is a demanding question for philosophical hermeneutics.

The thesis concerning the prejudice-structure of understanding, articulated by Gadamer in the second section of Part II of Truth and Method, seems paradoxical. It appears that prejudices are both indispensable and also unproductive for revealing the meaning of the text, if we seek to discover the truth claim of the text. Gadamer suggests that prejudices must be tested against the subject matter of the text, the Sache. It is not at all clear whether by the subject matter, Sache, of the text Gadamer alludes to the theme that the text is about or the perspective in which the subject matter of the text is presented. Of course, not all texts may have a particular, tangible object of reference. Cases in point are literary texts which can hardly be judged by appealing to some "thing" or subject matter. Another difficulty is that Gadamer does not specify whether the hermeneutic task includes a critical examination of the way the text presents its subject matter or whether it always proceeds as a self-critique by testing an interpreter’s own prejudices concerning the subject matter in the light of a text’s presentation of it. Gadamer wants to keep this ambiguity and tension in play for the sake of elucidating a different notion of the textual meaning and a different truth criterion of interpretation.

This tension lies at the basis of historicism. The question that immediately arises is: whose perspective would play the prominent role in the critical task of interpretation? The maxim for hermeneutics rooted in historical consciousness is "we know better."193 From Gadamer’s point of view, the question one has to answer is this: what can one learn in the age of science from a text coming from the past? Should one dismiss it as no longer relevant or treat it only as a matter of historical interest for the present? Or should it be understood as part of a "meaningful relationship that exists between the statements of a text and our understanding of the reality under discussion"?194 Gadamer’s point is that even if such a text contains information that is scientifically irrelevant today, it is still meaningful as a point of reference concerning the ‘correctness’ of the current scientific view on the subject matter. Therefore, it is not only the case that the meaning of a text emerges in a reciprocal horizon fusion, but also correct and incorrect views about a subject matter come to light in this way. This is the way in which texts from the past address us and make a truth claim on us. This truth is not to be ascertained by subjecting its statements to a test of logical coherence or verifying its propositions through experiments, but it asserts itself as a matter of meaningfulness in the totality that encompasses the human world.

In other words, prejudices cannot be bracketed since the whole of an interpreter’s own opinions are involved.195 However, what Gadamer also fails to make clear is what the conditions are in which disabling or negative prejudices are separated out. He acknowledges that understanding cannot begin until the kind of text and its the subject matter are determined. These prejudices concerning the formal conditions of text, that is "the rules of grammar, the stylistic devices and the art of composition upon which the text is based,"196 enable us to understand. But to claim that prejudices about the subject matter bring into the text our own views, our conceptions, is to ignore the commonality that binds the subject and the object. Rather, to consider the subject matter of the text as something totally alien or simply familiar is itself a mistaken prejudice. The hermeneutic task is to work out this tension without covering up the alienness—the otherness of the being of the text—and the familiarity—the common ground in which the interpreter and the text stand.

Gadamer describes the condition in which the productive prejudices are separated from the unproductive ones as a moment of the breakdown of the natural agreement between the text and the interpreter about the subject matter. Appropriateness of understanding to the subject matter of the text is one of the internal criteria for the correctness of interpretation.197 Temporal distance and the distance created by writing preform the functions as external criteria of a proper understanding.198 However, Gadamer deliberately chooses an extremely ambiguous formula to express the unity of these criteria of understanding: "Understanding primarily means to understand [oneself in] the subject matter (Verstehen heißt primär: sich in der Sache verstehen)."199

Hermeneutic understanding as an understanding of the subject matter and consequently as a self-understanding implies that the two basic hermeneutic requirements to be met are: first, the interpreter must know the subject matter, must be able to find his way around it; second, the interpreter must be open to or agree to that about which the text speaks as true. To remain open to the truth-claim of the text is also the condition for remaining open to question one’s own pre-conceptions concerning the subject matter. Only when the interpreter lets his prejudgments be challenged by the text’s views on the subject matter, can he thereby achieve a self-understanding.200 All these meanings are packed in his formula. Gadamer often uses the most familiar experience as an example representing hermeneutic understanding: reading a letter from a friend.201 The factual agreement with the other is a necessary condition of understanding.

He calls the expectation that we share this common ground as a "fore-conception of completeness."202 Anticipation of what we read must have a unity, coherence and be true. The experience of understanding what a text speaks about, as long as it is comprehended, would elicit plausibility and familiarly in us and perforce invoke the feeling that it "belongs to us and we belong to it." 203 

When the fore-conception of completeness is disturbed, the interpreter becomes aware of prejudices that are unproductive. It becomes difficult to understand or agree with the text. Such an encounter puts the interpreter’s own opinions into question. Thus, hermeneutic understanding requires, too, the suspension of the prejudices that come to light through a text’s claim to truth. But this suspension does not imply that those prejudices are completely annulled and done with. They still continue to perform their effect in terms of a negative determination of the meaning of the text, as this, not that. Gadamer writes: "All suspension of judgments—consequently and above all the suspension of prejudices—has in logical terms the structure of a question. The essence of a question is to open up possibilities and keep them open."204 

The essence of prejudices then is that they might be based on the subject matter itself and the perspective of an historical past might still be effective as prejudices concerning them. Prejudices belong to the "essential reality of history in understanding itself."205 Hermeneutic consciousness of the situation emerges as the consciousness of our own historicity when we encounter a text from the past and thereby confront ourselves in understanding the meaning of it. Gadamer calls this awareness "consciousness of the history of effects." Historical objectivism is characterized by the lack of consciousness of the historicity of the interpreting subject. Historical objectivism considers the study of history as a search for "an historical object" or as a matter of the advancement of research.206 Historical objectivism ignores the fact that historical research originates from interests and the questions of the present. Gadamer argues that hermeneutic understanding not only involves a mediation of past and the present, but also the application of what is understood to a particular situation at hand, which is always an integral part of interpretation.

Gadamer contrasts the "consciousness of the historical effects" with the objectivism and positivism of historical method and introduces the concept of the horizon of understanding.207 Romantic hermeneutics defended the idea that the interpreter should not mingle his own horizon with that of the text. This idea has been drawn to its radical conclusion in the doctrine of historicism as a call for understanding historical objects, including one’s own contemporaries, in their own context, in the context of their own historical epoch.208 Historical and psychological method as an aid to hermeneutic understanding overlooks the reality of historical continuity. It brings the temptation to assume that there is no relation between the past and the horizon of the present. Gadamer argues against objectivist historicism’s assumption that the horizon of the past is self-enclosed, and the present horizon can be separated from it so that the past can be studied with methodological detachment. Ranke has formulated this idea as the "self-extinction" of the subject.209 But where can we draw the dividing line between the past and the present? There is no self-enclosed horizon of the past and the present.

The consciousness of the continuity of history raises the awareness that the interpretation of a text is conditioned by our own historicity. Therefore, hermeneutic "understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves."210 But if there are no allegedly independent horizons, why should hermeneutic understanding be considered as a fusion of horizons? It concerns the preservation of the otherness and the autonomy of the meaning of the text. Although we cannot speak of an independent horizon of past and present in view of the continuity of history, it is necessary to be conscious of the hermeneutic situation and our own historical situatedness in order to maintain the tension between the text and the present. "The hermeneutic task consists in not covering up this tension by attempting a naive assimilation of the two but in consciously bringing it out."211 

Gadamer wraps up his understanding of the nature and the conditions of the humanities in the hermeneutic concept of the consciousness of the historical effect. With this notion, he intends to point neither to the effects of history nor to the effectiveness of consciousness in history. Gadamer takes great pains to explain that this notion means at once the awareness of the reality of a text, i.e., the text’s own history of interpretation as it belongs to its meaning, and the awareness of the interpreter’s own prejudices. However, a text and its effects are not causally related according to the contingencies of history; the effects of a text refer to the fact that the reality of a text consists in its being understood and understandable. The hermeneutic consciousness of this consists in being aware that a text is understood and applied by variable subjects and generations. Gadamer conveys this idea when he states: "Understanding is never a subjective relation to a given ‘object’ but to the history of effect . . . to the being of what is understood."212

The naiveté of objectivism lies in that it assumes understanding as a theoretical attitude in which the subject matter of the text is examined as a passive object of investigation. This leaves unanswered the question as to why the subject matter became an object of scrutiny in the first place. Here Gadamer draws attention to the role of application213 and illustrates the hermeneutic value of the principle of application and its significance in interpretation by examples from the field of legal hermeneutics.214 What is involved in the experience of the past is represented paradigmatically by the case of understanding a law, which is not an exceptional case but rather constitutes the essence of hermeneutic experience as comprising understanding, explication and application.215 To understand the meaning of a law, whether one is a jurist or a legal historian one always is guided by the interest in its application to a present case. Although normative and historical approaches to the meaning of a law could have different interests in it, Gadamer argues that the principle of application is universally valid in both cases. He insists that the situation of a legal historian is no different from that of the jurist.216 For, understanding a law entails recognizing how it applies "at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way. Understanding here is always application."217

The object of the hermeneutic sciences is always understanding the meaning of texts and works of arts handed down from the past. The meaning of past events or texts is given neither immediately nor in a total alienation.218 Hermeneutic understanding always moves in this tension,219 where this tension does not exist, understanding is already immediate. But hermeneutic understanding as contemporaneous dialogue is not an experience of meaning in an intuitive immediacy, but rather meaning as mediated through language. Therefore, historical continuity is a linguistic phenomenon.

The understanding of written texts always takes place as a process of translating this language to the language of the interpreter. This is not only necessary for translations from one language into another. Rather, what Gadamer suggests is that the understanding of a speech or a written text is a dialectical process of removing the tension between individual linguistic perception and the common language use.

From all this, we can summarize Gadamer’s position on the relation between history and interpretation as follows: 1) the interpretation of a text is always mediated by the effective history of the meanings of the text understood; 2) an interpreter’s relation to objects of the human sciences is a condition for the possibility of understanding; 3) the historical distance between the object and the interpreter is mediated in language; 4) the historicity of understanding and the linguistic nature of understanding cannot be eliminated by scientific methods or interpretive rules.

In many respects, Gadamer’s theory is in conflict with the methodological concerns of traditional hermeneutics. This conflict has to do with different epistemological presuppositions. We examine Gadamer’s approach to experience and understanding in the next chapter. It must be noted here, however, that Gadamer’s critique of previous hermeneutics is an important part of his effort to deal with historicism and its relativistic conclusions. The consequences Gadamer draws from his critique and the implications of philosophical hermeneutics in terms of the textual interpretation must also be noted. We emphasize that Gadamer’s approach to interpretation raises certain questions concerning the determination of the textual meaning and the interpreter’s role in the process of understanding.

However, the interpretation of texts is merely one of the issues Gadamer describes as an example to prove the ontological structure of hermeneutic understanding. The other issues concern Gadamer’s arguments for the experience of hermeneutic understanding and its universality as belonging to the ontological structure of human existence. Gadamer describes the experience of art and the experience of practical life as other cases that reveal the ontological structure of understanding. In the following chapter we explore these forms of experience which will disclose the forms of the experience of truth and knowledge other than scientific experience and method.