Gadamer Truth and Method Review
Gadamer’s Truth and Method is not a methodology of the human sciences, but an attempt to understand what the human sciences truly are, beyond their methodological self-consciousness, and what connects them to the totality of the world and its experiences. He does not seek to produce a set of rules or a technique of understanding. His real concern was and is philosophic: not what one ought to do, but what happens to them over and above their wanting and doing (preface). He contends that historicism, being naive, has failed. Historicism asserts that interpretation of the meaning of events is possible through a method of discovering their effective history. Gadamer criticizes historicism as a methodological approach to understanding, and argues that historicism produces many misleading prejudgments about how discourse is to be interpreted. Gadamer also criticizes Dilthey’s approach to historicism as giving insufficient clarity to the problem of how our understanding of history is influenced by the changing nature of our own historical situation. Historicism abandons the distinction between facts and values, because every understanding, however theoretical, implies specific evaluations. Moreover, historicism leads to judgmental relativism and it thrives on the fact that it exempts itself from its own verdict about all human thought. The historicist thesis assumes, in other words, that all thought is historically limited, save the historicist thesis itself. One of the prejudices of historicism is to assume that the application of critical research methods would finally erase all normative considerations or exemplary qualities. This assumption, in Gadamer’s view, has proved to be thoroughly misguided.
Thus, a central feature of Gadamer’s theory of context-dependence is its critique of historicism (Historismus). Gadamer’s concept of historicism refers to the view that the present age is characterized by a high degree of historical consciousness (geschichtliches Bewusstsein), that is, a sense of the context-dependence of thought. On this view, whereas previous eras unreflectively conducted historical study and thereby neglected the problem of anachronism, the present age has freed itself from this attitude and has thereby become able to approach the past in a presuppositionless way. Gadamer holds that historicism overestimates the extent to which context-dependence may be overcome. Precursors of historicism rejected the Enlightenment view that previous eras failed to recognize the validity of contemporary beliefs or that contexts are similar as regards their fundamental presuppositions.
His book is phenomenological in method. He contends that the construction of meaning is a continual movement from the whole of a writing, to its parts, and from the parts back to whole (259). According to Gadamer, the ‘horizon’ is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point (269). Gadamer contends that we can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer (333), which I think is his MOST important contribution within this text, personally.