Mutual Understanding

Abstract

To understand something, argues Gadamer, is to understand it on its own historical terms and from one’s own historically defined perspective. Hermeneutics—focusing, as it always has, on linguistic expression—provided Gadamer with a tradition within which to explore this insight. He sought to show how our understanding is bounded by our temporal horizons and that to deepen and extend our understanding we need to fuse those horizons: hence his emphasis on ‘the fusion of horizons ’. By insisting on the dialogical nature of human understanding, he redirected the hermeneutic tradition towards a greater emphasis on the process of question-and-answer as the enactment of understanding in specific situations and under particular circumstances. Being attentive to what is unfamiliar and strange is a necessary condition of participating in that process of question-and-answer. In becoming educated we become, therefore, more attentive to that what is not immediately intelligible. We become attentive to the other. Education is centrally concerned with the development of human understanding through mutual recognition.