Hans-Georg Gadamer

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“In language there is, first of all, both langue and parole, to use Saussure’s distinction. The spoken word (parole) is something other than the system of symbols (langue) that constitute language. . . . Speech exists in texts. Yes, certainly, but the texts are alien or brutal. How is this speech, the speaking word, really preserved in the written text? Is it completely the utterance of my mind? Are we not all acquainted with the alienation between what we said and what we had in mind? . . . We must always look for the real meaning of an utterance.” (“The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, eds. G. Shapiro and A. Sica [Amhurst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984] 63).

“Understanding is not to be thought of as an action of one’s subjectivity [cf. Romanticists], but as the placing of myself within a process of tradition in which the past and the present are constantly fused. This is what must be expressed in hermeneutic theory which is far too dominated by the idea of a process, a method” (TM 258, emphasis mine).

Understanding is “not a mysterious communing of souls, but a sharing of common meaning” (TM 260).

“It is only when the attempt to accept what he [an historical author] has said as true fails that we try to ‘understand’ the text, psychologically or historically as another’s meaning” (TM 262).

“We see here again that understanding means primarily, to understand the context of what is said [or written], and only secondarily, to isolate and understand another’s meaning as such. Hence the first of all hermeneutic requirements remains one’s own fore-understanding, which proceeds from being concerned with the same subject. It is this that determines what meaning can be realized and hence the application of the anticipation of completion” (TM 262).

“Hermeneutics must start from the position that a person seeking to understand something has a relation to the object that comes into language in the transmitted text and has or acquires, a connection with the tradition out of which the text speaks” (TM 262).

“Understanding begins . . . when something addresses us. This is the primary hermeneutic condition” (TM 266).

“The place of strangeness [individuality] and familiarity that a text has for us is that intermediate place between being an historically intended separate object and being part of the tradition. The true home of hermeneutics is this intermediate area” (TM 263).

The purpose of hermeneutics is not to develop a procedure of understanding [= method], but to clarify the conditions in which understanding takes place: “These conditions are not of the nature of a procedure or a method, which the interpreter must himself bring to bear on the text, but rather they must be given. The prejudices and fore-meanings in the mind of the interpreter are not at his [/her] disposal. He [/She] is not able to separate in advance the productive prejudices that make understanding possible from the prejudices that hinder understanding and lead to misunderstandings” (TM 263).

“The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and whom he originally wrote for. It is certainly not identical with them, for it is always partly determined by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history” (TM 263).

“In fact our own prejudice is properly brought into play through its being at risk. Only through its being given full play is it able to experience the other’s claim to truth and make it possible for s/he himself [/herself] to have full play” (TM 266). (alterity of the text; cf. Levinas).

“The naiveté of so-called historicism consists in the fact that it does not undertake this reflection, and in trusting its own methodological approach forgets its own historicality” (TM 266-7).

“True historical thinking must take account of its own historicality. Only then will it not chase the phantom of an historical object which is the object of progressive research, but learn to see in the object the counterpart of itself and hence understand both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship in which exist both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding” (TM 267).

“Effective history” determines in advance both what seems to us worth inquiring about, and what will appear as an object of investigation: “Historical objectivism, in appealing to its critical method, conceals the involvement of the historical consciousness itself in effective-history” (TM 268).

“In this historical objectivism resembles statistics, which are such an excellent means of propaganda because they let the facts speak and hence simulate an objectivity that in reality depends on the legitimacy of the questions asked” (TM 268).

“We think we understand when we see the past from a historical standpoint, i.e., place ourselves in the historical situation and seek to reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact however, we have given up the claim to find, in the fast, any truth valid and intelligible for ourselves” (TM 270).

“A horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point” (TM 269).

“A hermeneutical situation is determined by the prejudices that we bring with us. They constitute then the horizon of a particular present, for they represent that beyond which it is impossible to see” (TM 272).