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Gadamer starts within Heidegger’s hermeneutical circle, a circle of interpretation where “fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception” are integral to our meaning. Meanings are not simply to be found in the artifacts of speech, text, art. We bring our prior experiences of meaning to bear as we make sense of the meanings we encounter. “What Heidegger is working out here is not primarily a prescription for the practice of understanding, but a description of the way interpretive understanding is achieved.”¹⁰⁸

Gadamer develops his own terms to describe what an interpreter brings to meaning: horizon, tradition, and prejudice.

Horizon: “We define the concept of ‘situation’ by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of ‘horizon.’ The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.”¹⁰⁹

Tradition: “The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition.”¹¹⁰

Prejudice: “The prejudices of the individual … constitute the historical reality of his being.” Our prejudices are the starting point for interpretation. We make meaning from within the horizons of our life experience, on the basis of tradition, in ways that are peculiar to ourselves and our histories. “Thus the meaning of ‘belonging’ – i.e., the element of tradition in our historical-hermeneutical activity – is fulfilled in the commonality of fundamental, enabling prejudices.” Then, in defense of this seemingly heretical idea: “The fundamental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power.”¹¹¹

Gadamer’s system nevertheless leaves scope for openness and change, albeit limited. It allows that the meaning-maker’s horizons can expand, that traditions can evolve in history, and that prejudices can be incrementally revised. This is because the meanings one encounters are never from the same time and place. They must always be to some degree strange to us. So, we find ourselves in a conversational relationship with them. However, the effect is always within horizon, and tradition. Our prejudices can be deepened, but we can’t escape them.

“It is in the play between the traditionary text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanced object and belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between.” A strange meaning encountered gives us reason to be aware of our prejudices, perhaps to revise them. “Thus it is quite right for the interpreter not to approach the text directly, relying solely on the fore-meaning already available to him, but rather explicitly to examine the legitimacy – i.e., the origin and validity – of the fore-meanings dwelling within him.” So: “The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings.”¹¹² However, to the extent that revision is always within horizon and tradition, to revise means to refine.

“Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘language games’ seemed quite natural to me when I came across it,” Gadamer remarks casually in a footnote.¹¹³ Like the late Wittgenstein,^§MS2.3.2a Gadamer locates language in the context of forms of life. And like Wittgenstein, language remains the center of human meaning.

“All understanding is interpretation, and all interpretation takes place in the medium of a language that allows the object to come into words and yet is at the same time the interpreter’s own language … [L]anguage is the universal medium in which understanding occurs.” It is “this universal mystery of language that is prior to everything else.”¹¹⁴

Gadamer uses enough metaphor and so many examples that go beyond language (vision in image, horizons in space, the architecture of object-in-space), to suggest there is more to meaning than language alone. But he does not distinguish, as we would want, between the characteristic forms of speech which are indeed dialogical in form, and writing, which is not. Or at least writing is dialogical in a very different way from speech. Instead of reducing participation in meaning to language, the concept of interpretation will work equally well for all forms of meaning. The broader canvas of life and historical experience influences new meaning. Interpretation is a play between prior and newly encountered meanings.

And what of Heidegger’s historical situation, then Gadamer’s? If context is so important to both of their philosophies, what was their context?

Heidegger, Gadamer’s teacher, joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and remained a member until the party was dissolved in 1945. When he died in 1976, he asked his son to be sure that thirty-four “Black Notebooks” remain sealed for one hundred years. However, when publication began in 2014, further evidence was revealed to show that his Nazi affiliation was complemented by explicit anti-Semitism and racism.¹¹⁵

Gadamer did not become a member of the Nazi Party, however he did voluntarily attend a political camp run by the National Socialist University Lecturers Association, during which he glimpsed the figure of the visiting Führer. He did also benefit in 1934 from the dismissal for his race of his Jewish friend and philosopher, Richard Kroner – Gadamer willingly took his position as professor. When Gadamer visited Paris in 1941, the year after the Nazi invasion, he lectured French prisoners of war, explaining that Germany’s battlefield successes were an expression of superior culture, the “genetic spirit and character of a Volk,” distinguished by the “depth and breadth of historical self-consciousness.” This was for that time his “horizon,” his “tradition,” his “prejudice.” The text of this lecture has been omitted from Gadamer’s collected works.¹¹⁶

But, by and large, his defenders say, Gadamer remained neutral, quietly doing his arcane philosophical work while the world around him convulsed.¹¹⁷ “To be sure, the secret police also came to my courses … but the only result was that they didn’t understand a word.”¹¹⁸

What of the situation? Should not the pre-eminent philosopher of interpretation have scanned horizons, interrogated tradition, and questioned its prejudices? Even if there was avoidance of context on Gadamer’s part, what does that context tell of its avoidance?

In modernity, we have lived for the past centuries in a succession of cycles of catastrophe. We have also nurtured in this context imaginations of dreamworld,¹¹⁹ a persistence of hope that things might be made different.

In the case of Gadamer, the catastrophe of context itself becomes the meaning of a philosophy that silently stays within the horizons of tradition, whose only mark of progress is incremental evolution or deeper personal immersion in that tradition, catastrophic though it has been.

The situation is the meaning, the context wider than any interpretations. But the situation does not necessarily have to be. This is why in this book we have gone out of our way, not just to interpret meanings but, as part of our interpretation, to set them in the context of their making. Then, to our situation: as we pass by thinkers and actors in this book, we do this to acknowledge the way they have touched our thinking and acting. They are our context.

To return to the pejorative meaning of “prejudice,” interpretation can indeed be this, but of a kind that is self-confirming. In the midst of catastrophe, prejudice produces not transformative dialogue, but unhearing, unseeing, unfeeling. Not just refinement of more-of-the same, interpretation must have the capacity for disruption. Interpretation is not only to internalize the world, but to change the world.

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¹⁰⁷ Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1960 [2004], Truth and Method, translated by J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall, London: Continuum, p. 254.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., p. 269.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., p. 301.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., p. 293.

¹¹¹ Ibid., pp. 278, 295, 273.

¹¹² Ibid., pp. 295, 270, 271–72.

¹¹³ Ibid., p. xxxvi.

¹¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 390, 370.

¹¹⁵ Jesús Adrián Escuder, 2015, “Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ and the Question of Anti-Semitism,” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 5:21–49.

¹¹⁶ Richard Wolin, 2000, “Untruth and Method: Nazism and the Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer,” New Republic (May 15):36–45, pp. 38, 43.

¹¹⁷ Richard E. Palmer, 2002, “A Response to Richard Wolin on Gadamer and the Nazis,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10(4):467–82.

¹¹⁸ Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacque-Labarthe, 1988 [2016], Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics: The Heidelberg Conference, translated by J. Fort, New York: Fordham University Press, p. 71; Jean Grondin, 2003, Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography, translated by J. Weinsheimer, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

¹¹⁹ Susan Buck-Morss, 2000, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 60–63. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “Truth and Method” §AS1.2.3b