Hans-Georg Gadamer: Truth and Method 1

Abstract

Here, Gadamer argues that his teacher Heidegger only “entered into the problems of historical hermeneutics” (265) in Being and Time in order to “explicate the fore-structure of understanding for the purposes of ontology” (265). Gadamer is interested, by contrast, in the question of “how hermeneutics, once freed from the ontological obstructions of the scientific concept of objectivity, can do justice to the historicity of understanding” (265). Hermeneutics was conceptualised “as an art or technique” (265) by theorists like Friedrich Schleiermacher (the Protestant founder of modern hermeneutics in the early nineteenth century who sought to find a way to ensure the correct interpretation of the Bible above all) and Wilhelm Dilthey (who sought to expand hermeneutics into an “organon of the human sciences” [265-266], that is, a method for establishing the truth in fields like psychology or sociology). The “consequences for the hermeneutics of the human sciences of the fact that Heidegger derives the circular structure of understanding from the temporality of Dasein” (266) include not only the reform of practice by theory but also “correcting (and refining) the way in which constantly exercised understanding understands itself” (266).