With the apperance of Truth and Method hermeneutical theory enters an important new phase. The older conception of hermeneutics as the methodological basis specifically for the Geisteswissenschaften is left behind, and the status of method itself is called into question, for the title of Gadamer’s book contains an irony: method is not the way to truth.
Understanding is not conceived as a subjective process of man over and against an object but the way of being of man himself; hermeneutics is not defined as a general help discipline for the humanities but as a philosophical effort to account for understanding as an ontological process in man.
Gadamer is not directly concerned with the practical problems of formulating right principles for interpretation, he wishes rather to bring the phenomenon of understanding itself to light. Gadamer is working on a preliminary and more fundamental question: How is understanding possible, not only in the humanities but in the whole of man’s experience of the world? (Palmer 164)
The experience of a work of art transcends every subjective horizon of interpretation, both that of the artist and that of the perceiver. For this reason, “the mens auctoris is no possible measure of the meaning [bedeutung] of a work. Indeed, to speak about a work-in-itself, cut off from its ever renewed reality as it comes to stand in experience, is to take a very abstract view.” The decisive thing is neither the author’s intention, nor the work as a thing in itself outside history, but the ‘what’ that comes repeatedly to stand in historical encounters. (Palmer 164)
Like Heidegger, Gadamer is a critic of the modern surrender to technological thinking, which is rooted in subjectism (Subjektitat) – that is in taking the human subjective consciousness, and the certainties of reason based on it, as the ultimate point of reference for human knowledge.
The pre-Cartesian philosophers did not take subjectivity as their starting point and then ground the objectivity of their knowledge on it. Their was a more dialectical approach that tried to allow itself to be guide by the nature of what was being understood. Knowledge is not something that they acquired as a possession but something in which they participated, allowing themselves to be directed and even possessed by their knowledge. (Palmer 165)
For Gadamer, truth is not reached methodically but dialectically.
Strictly speaking, method is incapable of revealing new truth; it only renders explicit the kind of truth already implicit in the method. The discovery of the method itself was not arrived at through method but dialectically, that is, through a questioning responsiveness to the matter being encountered.
In method the inquiring subject leads and controls and manipulates; in dialectic the matter encountered poses the question to which he responds. One can only respond on the basis of his belonging to and in the matter. (Palmer 165)
The interpretative situation is no longer that of a questioner and an object, the the questioner having to construct methods to bring the object within his grasp, on the contrary the questioner suddenly finds himself the being who is interrogated by the subject matter. In such a situation, the subject-object schema is only misleading, for the subject has now become the object. (palmer 165)
The objective of the dialectic is eminently phenomenological: to have the being or thing encountered reveal itself. Method involves a specific kind of questioning which lays open one side of a thing; a dialectical hermeneutics opens itself to be questioned by the being of the thing, so that the thing encountered can disclose itself in its being.
Prejudgment:
The idea of freeing understanding and interpretation from the prejudices of the prevailing opinion of the time is common to us. It would be ridiculous, we commonly say, to judge the achievements of a past age by the standards of today. The objective of historical knowledge can only be fulfilled through freedom from personal ideas and values on a subjct and a perfectly “open mind” to the world of ideas and values of a past age.
Prejudgments are not something we must or can dispense with; they are the basis of our being able to understand history at all. “There can be no ‘presuppositionless’ interpretation.”
Understandng, since it is an historically accumulated and historically operative basic structure, underlies even scientific interpretation; the meaning of a described experience does not come from the interplay of the elements in the experiment but from the tradition of interpretation in which it stands and the future possibilities it opens up.
If there can be no presuppositionless understanding, then we must reexamine our relationship to our heritage. Traddition and authority need no longer be seen as the enemiues of reason and rational freedom. Tradition furnishes the stream of conceptions within which we stand, and we must be prepared to distinguish between fruitful presuppositions and those that imprison and prevent us from thinking and seeing.\There is no intrinsic opposition between the claims of reason and those of tradition; reason stands always within tradition. Tradition supplies reason with the aspect of reality and history with chich it will work.
There is no interpretation without relationship to the present, and this is never permanent and fixed. A transmitted tesxt has to be understood in the hermeneutical situation in which it finds itself in relation to the present.
Meaning is not like a changeless property of an object but is always “for us.”
It asserts that meaning is present related, arising in the hermeneutical situation.
