- Length
- 640 pagesWeinsheimer and Marshall, Truth and Method, Continuum, 2nd rev. ed. 2004
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Truth and Method
A defence of what happens when a person reads an old book, written against the assumption that the humanities become respectable by imitating the sciences. Gadamer argued that understanding is not a method one applies but something that happens to you, and that the prejudices you bring are what make it possible.
- Date
- 1960
- Author
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
- Region
- Heidelberg
- Language
- German
- 1975 English, Barden and Cumming The first English version; superseded Consensus
- 1989 English, Weinsheimer and Marshall The standard revision; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Phenomenological — Description of experience as it is given
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 21 years
The most influential work of philosophical hermeneutics, and the occasion of a public argument with Habermas that ran for a decade and defined a generation of German philosophy.
What the book says
A book arguing that the humanities took the wrong model when they tried to become sciences, and that what they actually do is closer to conversation than to measurement. Gadamer's title is a warning rather than a pairing: method, on the natural-science model, is a procedure for eliminating the observer, and applying it to a text or a work of art removes precisely what makes understanding possible. His first section works through art, arguing that a painting is not an object with properties but an event that happens to a viewer, and that the model for this is play - something one enters and is taken up by rather than controls. The second recovers the concept of prejudice, which the Enlightenment made a synonym for error: Gadamer argues that we always approach anything with expectations formed by the tradition we stand in, that these are the condition of understanding rather than obstacles to it, and that the question is which prejudices are productive rather than how to have none. Understanding is then a fusion of horizons - my situation and the text's meeting and both being altered - and it is never complete, because there is always more to be said.
What it argues
That understanding is historical all the way down and is none the worse for it. The Enlightenment treated inherited assumptions as distortions to be cleared away before enquiry could begin, and Gadamer calls this the prejudice against prejudice - itself an inherited assumption, and a self-refuting one, since a mind with no expectations could not recognise anything as an answer to anything. What happens instead is a movement: I approach a text with an anticipation of its sense, the text resists at points, I revise, and the process continues without terminating in a final reading. Because I stand somewhere and the text came from somewhere else, the distance between us is productive rather than an obstacle - it lets the text say something I did not already think. And because understanding is always application to my own situation, there is no reading of a work that is correct once and for all.
What answered it
Habermas, at length and publicly, on whether tradition can be criticised from inside. Derrida met Gadamer in Paris in 1981 in an encounter now discussed as much for its failure as its content - the two talked past each other so completely that the exchange became a standing example of the gulf between hermeneutics and deconstruction. E. D. Hirsch defended the older view that a text has a determinate meaning fixed by its author's intention, which Gadamer's account denies.
How it argues
By historical reconstruction, working through the fate of concepts - taste, judgement, experience, prejudice - from the eighteenth century onward, on the principle that a concept's history is part of what it now means. This makes the book long and indirect: the constructive argument about the fusion of horizons arrives after three hundred pages of showing how the alternatives were formed. The prose is patient and unaggressive, and Gadamer's manner throughout is that of someone in conversation rather than making a case, which is itself the position being argued for.
The moment
Heidelberg in 1960, in a German philosophy still reckoning with what had happened. Gadamer had studied under Heidegger, kept a low profile through the Nazi years in a way that has been examined and variously judged, and held chairs at Leipzig, Frankfurt and finally Heidelberg. The book appeared when he was sixty and made his reputation; he outlived almost every critic, dying in 2002 at a hundred and two.
How it travelled
Into every field that reads. Hermeneutics became a working method in theology, legal interpretation, literary study, historiography, medicine and qualitative social research, and the vocabulary of horizons and the hermeneutic circle is used far beyond philosophy. In America it arrived through Rorty and through the theological reception; the English translation of 1975 lagged fifteen years behind the German.
The strongest objection
Habermas', and it is the one Gadamer could never fully answer. If every act of understanding happens within an inherited horizon, and there is no standpoint outside, then a tradition that has systematically distorted what its members can think will look, from inside, exactly like a tradition that has not. Gadamer has no way to distinguish the authority of a genuine insight from the authority of a settled arrangement that serves someone, because the test he offers - whether the prejudice proves productive in the encounter - is applied by someone the tradition formed. His reply, that critique is itself always exercised from within a tradition and that Habermas' own standard is no exception, is true and does not remove the difficulty. It shows that the problem is general rather than that it has been solved.
Why read it
The second part, on prejudice, historical distance and the fusion of horizons, which is the philosophical core and can be read without the long historical preamble. The account of play in the first part is the best thing written on why a work of art is not an object. It is long, slow and worth it if the subject interests you at all.
- First printed
- 1960
- First in English
- 1975
- Digitised
- No
Gadamer added forewords and afterwords to successive German editions responding to critics, and the collected works run to ten volumes. The English translation of 1975 was heavily revised in 1989.
The Weinsheimer and Marshall revision is the standard English and is in copyright, as is the German.
Where it stands
Live. Philosophical hermeneutics is an established position, the Gadamer-Habermas dispute is still the reference point in arguments about tradition and critique, and the account of understanding as application is used constantly in law and in the interpretive social sciences.
On quoting this book
In copyright in German and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the position is conservative in effect, whatever Gadamer intended, is the standing political charge. Whether it can accommodate radical critique, or only reform from within, is the Habermas question and remains open. Gadamer's conduct during the Nazi period, and whether his emphasis on tradition and authority bears any relation to it, has been examined by several scholars with different conclusions. And whether the fusion of horizons describes a genuine achievement or renames the problem of how understanding across distance is possible is a fair question about the central concept.