We have shown in the final chapter that in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, both language and history perform significant roles. The question guiding our inquiry has been whether Gadamer’s attempt to deal with the historical and linguistic nature of human experience is intended to develop a philosophical theory without any appeal to a supra-temporal, absolute, a priori foundation or whether he is committed to a certain metaphysical, ontological point of view. In this study, we have argued that history cannot be posited as a formal temporal category of knowledge, but rather must be conceived in terms of its contents mediated in language. Language is intimately related to the reality presenting itself through language.

Gadamer does not present the transcendental and ontological aspects of his theory in order to establish a foundation of knowledge. He does not offer us a system based on a priori, absolute foundations. He wants to keep the immanent and external analysis separate, and he wants to distinguish the effort of describing the conditions of understanding from the method of the application of these conditions to particular cases of understanding in human sciences.

This inquiry started with an examination of the problems that arise precisely from the description of understanding as conditioned not only by the pre-given cultural and historical conditions (e.g., tradition, prejudices), but also by language. In the first chapter of this dissertation, we have presented the question of relativism imputed to philosophical hermeneutics because of questions raised by the hermeneutic principle of historicity. However, our analysis also has taken into account Gadamer’s claim that his theory offers a solution to the problem of historicism and relativism in the theories concerning the method of historical knowledge.

Philosophical hermeneutics transcends the set of problems involved in understanding the subjective intentions of historical agents or of the author of a text. It transcends these problems by explicating meaning in terms of the text’s presentation of its subject matter through language as an autonomous medium of meaning.

The other problem philosophical hermeneutics avoids is the concern with the question of how the text was understood by its author and its original audience. Philosophical hermeneutics’ concern, instead, is the question how the meaning of a text can be continually reappropriated and understood by later generations in their own historical conditions by using the standard of the text itself.

Following this, we have demonstrated that Gadamer’s arguments against the ideal of method and objectivity are directed against their implications for understanding history. Hermeneutic philosophy raises two objections concerning the relevance of the natural scientific ideal of objectivity and the methodological criteria for knowledge in the human sciences. Understanding in the human sciences is accomplished not from a free and distanced position but arises from immediate life concerns, prejudices and traditions that shape both the interpreting subject and the object of the research. Moreover, not only is the interpretation guided by fore-understanding, but also the objectivity of the result cannot be measured by the yardstick of method according the model of the natural sciences.

Since Gadamer accepts Heidegger’s insight that interpretation and understanding are not two distinct activities but rather are separate dimensions of the same activity, Gadamer identifies the common sphere of understanding as the linguistic givenness of the human world. Philosophical hermeneutics is a theory about the condition of interpretation of this world, and not about the applications of these described conditions to specific, regional studies. The notion that understanding is not only a problem of method and that philosophical hermeneutics concerns the ontological structure of the experience of understanding was the subject of the third chapter.

We examined the claim that philosophical hermeneutics raises the pre-scientific conditions of understanding to reflection, because the natural sciences do not concern themselves with the ultimate ends for which their results are served, nor with the fundamental mode of human relatedness to world. We argued that formulating this universal aspect of hermeneutics does not mean that philosophical hermeneutics should be applicable to all areas of knowledge. We drew attention to the fact that philosophical hermeneutics’ concern with the conditions of understanding is not limited to knowledge in the humanities or natural sciences alone but to the experience of understanding in general.

We have analyzed the debates between Gadamer and his critics and have found that the methodological debate centers on the issue of the objective reproduction of the meaning intended by the author. We concluded that even in a theory according to which interpretation is a process of reconstructing the original meaning of a text or an historical event, the issue of the possibility of the objectivity of textual interpretations cannot be easily decided.

Hermeneutics, in the sense of understanding in the human sciences, is itself determined not only by the temporal historical distance of the objects of study, but also by the historical situation of interpretation. There is general agreement on the issue that no single interpretation can be exhaustive and determinative to the extent that it might completely forestall all subsequent interpretations. No matter how approximate an interpretation is to the original, there is always an excess of meaning contained in the text. The incompleteness of interpretation is the result of the possibility that the text may always address different persons at different times. The methodological concern should be the validity of interpretations, not a self-identical meaning to be established once and for all.

In addition, we have examined the arguments made by the critical theorists against the universality of hermeneutics. In their arguments the intersubjective world of communication and social practice is elevated to a contingently absolute position meant to function as the foundation of knowledge and the criterion of truth claims. Habermas and Apel both raise free communication to the status of an ideal for hermeneutic practice itself.

The result of these debates, we have shown, ends in a stalemate because of the competing conceptions held by all sides. When Gadamer speaks of the historicity of understanding and tradition, he does not appeal to the truism that every human being belongs to a tradition. Rather, he means that the contents of tradition are not something objectified within a single consciousness, but are constantly expanding through language and, therefore, involve a community. Historical continuity and the meaning that encompasses this continuity are not experienced by a single individual consciousness, but have a social significance. Philosophical hermeneutics seeks to discover how the meaning intended by an individual author or the meaning understood by an interpreter acquire historical significance.

Hermeneutics deals with the interpretations of texts, as well as the inquiry into the interpretive nature of human self-understanding as a mode of being. The practice of textual interpretation furnishes an exemplary case for revealing the ontological structure of understanding. In this sense, inquiry into the historicity of understanding is distinguished from historical study which attempts to understand the empirical course of history.

From this conflict in the interpretation of philosophical hermeneutics, we drew the conclusion that the best option seems to be recognizing language as the ontological ground of Gadamer’s theory. Accepting the dependence of human knowledge on language is not a new feature of Gadamer’s philosophy. Probably our views on how language and reality are related is always the underlying matter. The obvious fact that language is the condition for understanding and communication is affirmed by the additional claim that thinking itself is largely a linguistic process.

The concept of historicity has served as the basis of the distinction between what is permanent and what is transitory in historical life. For Gadamer, historicity signifies the relation between understanding and its object. This relation is neither a subjective nor an objective relation, but precedes the subject-object distinction. The historicity of understanding does not require for itself a reality of history conceived by means of the facts discovered by the positive sciences, as well as by means of the a priori constructions of philosophy. The consciousness of historical effects is not a principle to regulate the efforts to comprehend the totality of the historical world, which is only a regulative idea in historical research.

Finally, we have argued that consciousness of historical transitoriness is not shaken by the threats of relativism, because historical life also has its own stability and continuity. The charges of relativism against hermeneutic theory, based on its assertion of the historicity of understanding, can only be anchored in the consciousness of the absolute. This also characterizes one of Gadamer’s arguments against relativism.

Without simply repeating or falling into the inertia of permanence, philosophy must do justice to transitoriness by preserving the productivity of life through recognizing the past in its effect on the present. Mediating the past towards the future, philosophy can do more justice to the human search for truth than seeking to be scientific without raising fundamental questions. It is no accident that Gadamer chooses the experience of as the first instance of hermeneutic understanding, as an example of the integration of the meaning or truth of artworks from the past and the present. With this summary, we come to the central conclusion. Despite the fact that Gadamer claims that he describes only the ontological significance of the experience of understanding and takes the practice of textual interpretation as the content of this description, he seems to exaggerate the function of method in interpretation. On this particular issue critics have a valid point, although their own suggestions might be untenable.

The other point we have raised in this study is the following. Gadamer takes the critique of subjectivity to be ultimate and irreversible. This criticism may be valid, as far as the continuity of the products of life is concerned. That is to say, the continuity of historical life and its mediation cannot be attributed to the subjective intentions and reconstruction of historical conditions of meanings intended by individuals. In order to avoid subjectivity, Gadamer tends to de-subjectivize all the objects of knowledge. It is as if everything expressed in language acquires its own independent existence. There is a tendency in Gadamer towards linguistic idealism. His only defense against this accusation is negative, that there is no transcendental subjectivity in which the infinite possibility of language may become completed.

However, Gadamer emphasizes the relevance of the knowledge of the human sciences for human self-understanding that can be spoken of only in terms of an individual subject’s self-understanding. Again, it is the subject who is required to engage in self-critique and to test his own prejudices in encountering the truth claims of the contents of tradition. The emphasis on the transcendental conditions of knowledge in language or history cannot de-emphasize the individuality and particularity of subjects. This becomes more clear when Gadamer avoids the attribution of any role to the author for specifying the meaning of a text. It seems that Gadamer is thinking more in terms of the meaning of historical events than the meaning of historical texts. Historical events may acquire meaning that cannot be restricted to the historical agents’ plans and intentions due to limitations of their own self-understanding and the fact that circumstances cannot be under their control. But the same cannot be said with equal certainty about the text as the product of an author.

It seems that those cases concerning anonymous products, such as myths or texts whose authorship cannot be determined, have a strong influence on Gadamer’s view. But from this, we cannot infer that in all understandings of texts mens auctoris is of minor importance. Probably the intention of an author cannot be established as definite and cannot be taken as normative, but it cannot be left out completely from the procedures of interpretation. Gadamer is right to say that the text acquires it own autonomy and existence as an artwork in presenting a view of reality. This may be true of most of those texts with a poetic quality, texts which are linguistic art in the perfect sense. Language and the being of the text may be harmonized in a linguistic artwork. However, again, if the text is intended to convey something, it may point beyond itself, to its subject matter. It would also mean that we leave the text behind, if understanding concerns the subject matter. We cannot determine the meaning of the subject matter of the text simply through a survey of all possible relations obtaining between language and the presentation of the subject matter in it. In the effort to specify the text’s reference to a particular content, the author’s intention might be a necessary guide.

Nevertheless, it cannot be demanded from Gadamer’s theory that it be applicable to all cases of the interpretation of literary texts. Rather, some cases merely show the limitations of Gadamer’s critique of methodological hermeneutics. Gadamer’s critique of method is not unreserved. He simply assigns to method a secondary role. He could have been more precise concerning these distinctions, for example, by showing that methodological procedures are secondary, not in the sense of understanding a text, but in the sense of understanding its truth. Methods apply only to specifying external conditions of texts and historical events, while their meaning and truth are not limited to those features identified.

Gadamer is right to insist that claiming that a text has a certain form, for instance, that it is a philosophical text, or a poetic text, does not convey anything about the truth claim of its subject matter. Methodological interpretation has its limits. However, Gadamer does not elaborate these distinctions. He is not always consistent in his claim that philosophical hermeneutics is not intended to propose a new method of interpretation or to interfere with the internal criteria of what is considered knowledge. He has continued to engage in discussions concerning texts and interpretation, not only on the theoretical level, but also on the practical level. His critics have legitimate points on specific issues concerning the requirements of method in the actual practice of interpretation and understanding in the social sciences. However, in the overall structure of Gadamer’s theory, the objection of relativism cannot be sustained.

On the more positive side, philosophical hermeneutics opened up the ontological horizon of the problems of interpretation and understanding texts from the past. Historical distance is no longer seen as a gulf to be closed by a methodological abstraction from the value and the truth claims of texts from the past, because this distance is already filled with the continuity of tradition through language. Gadamer’s conception of the ontological relation of language, reason and reality provides a position for defending his thesis against the charges of relativism. The knowledge and the truth experience in hermeneutic understanding is the truth of Being through the medium of language.

In addition, the emphasis on the forms of knowledge in the Geisteswissenschaften, in terms of concrete results and the universal validity of these results, is an important element of Gadamer’s thesis. Furthermore, we can include in our analysis the experience of art which is applied to texts that take the form of literary art. This also provides evidence that language, rather than mere historical process, is thought to be constitutive of the integration of past meaning into the present. Another strategy in the battle against the problem of relativism consists in examining the concept of time, and proposing an alternative view of time that is more appropriate to historical experience and knowledge. Whether this attempt is successful cannot be decided on the basis of the fact that it occupies a relatively small space in the body of Gadamer’s writings. But this can definitely contribute to an attempt to avoid relativism.

Because of his Kantian inclination toward the notion of the limitation of any possible transition from finite understanding to the understanding of the infinite, Gadamer does not follow Hegel’s philosophy all the way. Instead, Gadamer appropriates Hegel’s philosophy in his analysis of the forms of knowledge in art, history and philosophy. These three forms of knowledge represent the mediation of understanding without presupposing a self-conscious subject, the positive givenness of the object, or historical relativism.

The universality of philosophical hermeneutics as a theory has the same structure as that of a practical theory. It cannot be expected, for instance, that Aristotle’s theory of moral practice specify a particular norm for action in a particular situation. Yet this in no way diminishes the value of Aristotle ‘s theory of moral practice. The same can be said of Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory. In this sense, the universality of hermeneutics has the same character of universality as that of practical philosophy. Like practical philosophy, philosophical hermeneutics stands beyond the alternatives of transcendental reflection and empirical pragmatic knowledge.