The Historicity of Understanding

Hans-Georg Gadamer

HANS-GEORG GADAMER (b. 1900) was born in Marburg, where he also studied philosophy and classics. He received his doctorate in 1922 and began teaching at Marburg as an instructor (Privatdozent) in 1929, where he became a professor extraordinary in 1937. From 1938 to 1947 he taught at Leipzig, and from 1947 to 1949 at Frankfurt. In 1949 he moved to the University of Heidelberg where he taught until his retirement in 1968. Gadamer, a personal student of Heidegger's, combines in his work a vital interest in Greek thought and culture with a strong inclination toward the German idealist tradition in its different facets. His work in hermeneutics grew out of his historical and philosophical studies and his abiding interest in literature and poetry, both ancient and modern. In Truth and Method Gadamer developed an extensive and profound analysis and critique of classical hermeneutic thought in its various manifestations. The concept of the historicity of understanding—which he derived from Heidegger's Being and Time—is at the center of his argument. But he is also indebted to Dilthey's methodological studies and interests in the nature and history of the humanities and human sciences. In contrast to Dilthey, however, Gadamer does not wish to secure a methodology for these sciences. Instead, he chose to concentrate his efforts on exposing and criticizing the hermeneutic principles which underlie the humanistic disciplines in their actual history and present-day manifestations. Our first two selections present sections from Truth and Method. The first one deals with the important notion of prejudice (Vorurteil) without which understanding is not possible, according to Gadamer. Because of the attitude of Enlightenment philosophers against prejudice and bias, he believes that we have until now overlooked the positive, or, better, the constitutive character of prejudice in our culture. The concept of effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) is one of equal importance for Gadamer. What he means, in a nutshell, is that no understanding would be possible if the interpreter were not also part of the historical continuum which he and the phenomenon he studies must share.

One of the criticisms leveled against Truth and Method by Habermas and the followers of the Frankfurt School concentrated on Gadamer's alleged narrow transcendental interest in hermeneutics and the human sciences. Habermas expressed this criticism in his study On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967). Gadamer replied almost immediately and at length in an essay which constitutes our third selection, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Critique of Ideology (1967). Points of affinity, as well as differences, between the positions of Gadamer and Habermas are brought out in this essay, and the indebtedness of both thinkers to the hermeneutic tradition becomes quite apparent. Habermas's reply to this essay is reprinted below in chapter 10.

THE DISCREDITING OF PREJUDICE BY THE ENLIGHTENMENT

If we pursue the view that the enlightenment developed in regard to prejudices we find it makes the following fundamental division: a distinction must be made between the prejudice due to human authority and that due to over-hastiness. $^{1}$ The basis of this distinction is the origin of prejudices in regard to the persons who have them. It is either the respect in which we hold others and their authority, that leads us into error, or else it is an over-hastiness in ourselves. That authority is a source of prejudices accords with the well-known principle of the enlightenment that Kant formulated: have the courage to make use of your own understanding? $^{2}$ Although this distinction is certainly not limited to the role that prejudices play in the understanding of texts, its chief application is still in the sphere of hermeneutics. For the critique of the enlightenment is directed primarily against the religious tradition of christianity, i.e. the bible. By treating the latter as an historical document, biblical criticism endangers its own dogmatic claims. This is the real radicality of the modern enlightenment as against all other movements of enlightenment: it must assert itself against the bible and its dogmatic interpretation. $^{3}$ It is, therefore, particularly concerned with the hermeneutical problem. It desires to understand tradition correctly, i.e. reasonably and without prejudice. But there is a special difficulty about this, in that the sheer fact of something being written down confers on it an authority of particular weight. It is not altogether easy to realise that what is written down can be untrue. The written word has the tangible quality of something that can be demonstrated and is like a proof. It needs a special critical effort to free oneself from the prejudice in favour of what is written down and to distinguish here also, as with all oral assertions, between opinion and truth. $^{4}$

It is the general tendency of the enlightenment not to accept any authority and to decide everything before the judgment seat of reason. Thus the written tradition of scripture, like any other historical document, cannot claim any absolute validity, but the possible truth of the tradition depends on the credibility that is assigned to it by reason. It is not tradition, but reason that constitutes the ultimate source of all authority. What is written down is not necessarily true. We may have superior knowledge: this is the maxim with which the modern enlightenment approaches tradition and which ultimately leads it to undertake historical research. $^{5}$ It makes the tradition as much an object of criticism as do the natural sciences the evidence of the senses. This does not necessarily mean that the “prejudice against prejudices” was everywhere taken to the extreme consequences of free thinking and atheism, as in England and France. On the contrary, the German enlightenment recognised the “true prejudices” of the christian religion. Since the human intellect is too weak to manage without prejudices it is at least fortunate to have been educated with true prejudices.

It would be of value to investigate to what extent this kind of modification and moderation of the enlightenment $^{6}$ prepared the way for the rise of the romantic movement in Germany, as undoubtedly did the critique of the enlightenment and the revolution by Edmund Burke. But none of this alters the fundamental facts. True prejudices must still finally be justified by rational knowledge, even though the task may never be able to be fully completed.

Thus the criteria of the modern enlightenment still determine the self-understanding of historicism. This does not happen directly, but in a curious refraction caused by romanticism. This can be seen with particular clarity in the fundamental schema of the philosophy of history that romanticism shares with the enlightenment and that precisely the romantic reaction to the enlightenment made into an unshakeable premise: the schema of the conquest of mythos by logos. It is the presupposition of the progressive retreat of magic in the world that gives this schema its validity. It is supposed to represent the progressive law of the history of the mind, and precisely because romanticism has a negative attitude to this development, it takes over the schema itself as an obvious truth. It shares the presupposition of the enlightenment and only reverses the evaluation of it, seeking to establish the validity of what is old, simply because it is old: the “gothic” middle ages, the christian European community of states, the feudal structure of society, but also the simplicity of peasant life and closeness to nature.

In contrast to the enlightenment's belief in perfection, which thinks in terms of the freedom from “superstition” and the prejudices of the past, we now find that olden times, the world of myth, unreflective life, not yet analysed away by consciousness, in a “society close to nature,” the world of christian chivalry, all these acquire a romantic magic, even a priority of truth.⁷ The reversal of the enlightenment’s presupposition results in the paradoxical tendency to restoration, i.e. the tendency to reconstruct the old because it is old, the conscious return to the unconscious, culminating in the recognition of the superior wisdom of the primaeval age of myth. But the romantic reversal of this criterion of the enlightenment actually perpetuates the abstract contrast between myth and reason. All criticism of the enlightenment now proceeds via this romantic mirror image of the enlightenment. Belief in the perfectibility of reason suddenly changes into the perfection of the “mythical” consciousness and finds itself reflected in a paradisic primal state before the "fall" of thought.

In fact the presupposition of a mysterious darkness in which there was a mythical collective consciousness that preceded all thought is just as dogmatic and abstract as that of a state of perfection achieved by a total enlightenment or that of absolute knowledge. Primaeval wisdom is only the counter-image of “primaeval stupidity.” All mythical consciousness is still knowledge, and if it knows about divine powers, then it has progressed beyond mere trembling before power (if this is to be regarded as the primaeval state), but also beyond a collective life contained in magic rituals (as we find in the early Orient). It knows about itself, and in this knowledge it is no longer simply “outside itself.” $^{8}$

There is the related point that even the contrast between genuine mythical thinking and pseudo-mythical poetic thinking is a romantic illusion which is based on a prejudice of the enlightenment: namely, that the poetic act, because it is a creation of the free imagination, is no longer in any way bound within the religious quality of the myth. It is the old quarrel between the poets and the philosophers in the modern garb appropriate to the age of belief in science. It is now said, not that poets tell lies, but that they are incapable of saying anything true, since they have an aesthetic effect only and merely seek to rouse through their imaginative creations the imagination and the emotions of their hearers or readers.

The concept of the “society close to nature” is probably another case of a romantic mirror-image, whose origin ought to be investigated. In Karl Marx it appears as a kind of relic of natural law that limits the validity of his socio-economic theory of the class struggle. $^{9}$ Does the idea go back to Rousseau’s description of society before the division of labour and the introduction of property? $^{10}$ At any rate, Plato has already demonstrated the illusory nature of this political theory in the ironical account he gives of a “state of nature” in the third book of the Republic. $^{11}$

These romantic revaluations give rise to the attitude of the historical science of the nineteenth century. It no longer measures the past by the yardsticks of the present, as if they represented an absolute, but it ascribes their own value to past ages and can even acknowledge their superiority in one or the other respect. The great achievements of romanticism—the revival of the past, the discovery of the voices of the peoples in their songs, the collecting of fairy-tales and legends, the cultivation of ancient customs, the discovery of the world views implicit in languages, the study of the “religion and wisdom of India”—have all motivated the historical research that has slowly, step by step, transformed the intuitive revival into historical knowledge proper. The fact that it was romanticism that gave birth to the historical school confirms that the romantic retrieval of origins is itself based on the enlightenment. The historical science of the nineteenth century is its proudest fruit and sees itself precisely as the fulfilment of the enlightenment, as the last step in the liberation of the mind from the trammels of dogma, the step to the objective knowledge of the historical world, which stands as an equal besides the knowledge of nature achieved by modern science.

The fact that the restorative tendency of romanticism was able to combine with the fundamental concern of the enlightenment to constitute the unity of the historical sciences simply indicates that it is the same break with the continuity of meaning in tradition that lies behind both. If it is an established fact for the enlightenment that all tradition that reason shows to be impossible, i.e. nonsense, can only be understood historically, i.e. by going back to the past's way of looking at things, then the historical consciousness that emerges in romanticism involves a radicalisation of the enlightenment. For the exceptional case of nonsensical tradition has become the general rule for historical consciousness. Meaning that is generally accessible through reason is so little believed that the whole of the past, even, ultimately, all the thinking of one's contemporaries, is seen only "historically." Thus the romantic critique of the enlightenment ends itself in enlightenment, in that it evolves as historical science and draws everything into the orbit of historicism. The basic discrediting of all prejudices, which unites the experiential emphasis of the new natural sciences with the enlightenment, becomes, in the historical enlightenment, universal and radical.

This is the point at which the attempt to arrive at an historical hermeneutics has to start its critique. The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the enlightenment, will prove to be itself a prejudice, the removal of which opens the way to an appropriate understanding of our finitude, which dominates not only our humanity, but also our historical consciousness.

Does the fact that one is set within various traditions mean really and primarily that one is subject to prejudices and limited in one's freedom? Is not, rather, all human existence, even the freest, limited and qualified in various ways? If this is true, then the idea of an absolute reason is impossible for historical humanity. Reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms, i.e. it is not its own master, but remains constantly dependent on the given circumstances in which it operates. This is true not only in the sense in which Kant limited the claims of rationalism, under the influence of the sceptical critique of Hume, to the a priori element in the knowledge of nature; it is still truer of historical consciousness and the possibility of historical knowledge. For that man is concerned here with himself and his own creations (Vico) is only an apparent solution of the problem set by historical knowledge. Man is alien to himself and his historical fate in a quite different way from that in which nature, that knows nothing of him, is alien to him.

The epistemological question must be asked here in a fundamentally different way. We have shown above that Dilthey probably saw this, but he was not able to overcome the influence over him of traditional epistemology. His starting-point, the awareness of “experience,” was not able to build the bridge to the historical realities, because the great historical realities of society and state always have a predetermined influence on any “experience.” Self-reflection and autobiography—Dilthey's starting-points—are not primary and are not an adequate basis for the hermeneutical problem, because through them history is made private once more. In fact history does not belong to us, but we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.

THE REHABILITATION OF AUTHORITY AND TRADITION

This is where the hermeneutical problem comes in. This is why we examined the discrediting of the concept of prejudice by the enlightenment. That which presents itself, under the aegis of an absolute self-construction by reason, as a limiting prejudice belongs, in fact, to historical reality itself. What is necessary is a fundamental rehabilitation of the concept of prejudice and a recognition of the fact that there are legitimate prejudices, if we want to do justice to man's finite, historical mode of being. Thus we are able to formulate the central question of a truly historical hermeneutics, epistemologically its fundamental question, namely: where is the ground of the legitimacy of prejudices? What distinguishes legitimate prejudices from all the countless ones which it is the undeniable task of the critical reason to overcome?

We can approach this question by taking the view of prejudices that the enlightenment developed with a critical intention, as set out above, and giving it a positive value. As for the division of prejudices into those of “authority” and those of “over-hastiness,” it is obviously based on the fundamental presupposition of the enlightenment, according to which a methodologically disciplined use of reason can safeguard us from all error. This was Descartes’ idea of method. Overhastiness is the actual source of error in the use of one’s own reason. Authority, however, is responsible for one’s not using one’s own reason at all. There lies, then, at the base of the division a mutually exclusive antithesis between authority and reason. The false prejudice for what is old, for authorities, is what has to be fought. Thus the enlightenment regards it as the reforming action of Luther that “the prejudice of human prestige, especially that of the philosophical (he means Aristotle) and the Roman pope was greatly weakened.” $^{12}$ The reformation, then, gives rise to a flourishing hermeneutics which is to teach the right use of reason in the understanding of transmitted texts. Neither the teaching authority of the pope nor the appeal to tradition can replace the work of hermeneutics, which can safeguard the reasonable meaning of a text against all unreasonable demands made on it.

The consequences of this kind of hermeneutics need not be those of the radical critique of religion that we found, for example, in Spinoza. Rather the possibility of supernatural truth can remain entirely open. Thus the enlightenment, especially in the field of popular philosophy, limited the claims of reason and acknowledged the authority of bible and church. We read in, say, Walch, that he distinguishes between the two classes of prejudice—authority and over-hastiness—but sees in them two extremes, between which it is necessary to find the right middle path, namely a reconciliation between reason and biblical authority. Accordingly, he sees the prejudice from over-hastiness as a prejudice in favour of the new, as a predisposition to the overhasty rejection of truths simply because they are old and attested by authorities. $^{13}$ Thus he discusses the British freethinkers (such as Collins and others) and defends the historical faith against the norm of reason. Here the meaning of the prejudice from over-hastiness is clearly reinterpreted in a conservative sense.

There can be no doubt, however, that the real consequence of the enlightenment is different: namely, the subjection of all authority to reason. Accordingly, prejudice from over-hastiness is to be understood as Descartes understood it, i.e. as the source of all error in the use of reason. This fits in with the fact that after the victory of the enlightenment, when hermeneutics was freed from all dogmatic ties, the old division returns in a changed sense. Thus we read in Schleiermacher that he distinguishes between narrowness of view and over-hastiness as the causes of misunderstanding. $^{14}$ He places the lasting prejudices due to narrowness of view beside the momentary ones due to overhastiness, but only the former are of interest to someone concerned with scientific method. It no longer even occurs to Schleiermacher that among the prejudices in the mind of one whose vision is narrowed by authorities there might be some that are true—yet this was included in the concept of authority in the first place. His alteration of the traditional division of prejudices is a sign of the fulfilment of the enlightenment. Narrowness now means only an individual limitation of understanding: “The one sided preference for what is close to one’s own sphere of ideas.”

In fact, however, the decisive question is concealed behind the concept of narrowness. That the prejudices that determine what I think are due to my own narrowness of vision is a judgment that is made from the standpoint of their dissolution and illumination and holds only of unjustified prejudices. If, contrari-wise, there are justified prejudices productive of knowledge, then we are back with the problem of authority. Hence the radical consequences of the enlightenment, which are still contained in Schleiermacher's faith in method, are not tenable.

The distinction the enlightenment draws between faith in authority and the use of one's own reason is, in itself, legitimate. If the prestige of authority takes the place of one's own judgment, then authority is in fact a source of prejudices. But this does not exclude the possibility that it can also be a source of truth, and this is what the enlightenment failed to see when it denigrated all authority. To be convinced of this, we only have to consider one of the great forerunners of the European enlightenment, namely Descartes. Despite the radicalness of his methodological thinking, we know that Descartes excluded morality from the total reconstruction of all truths by reason. This was what he meant by his provisional morality. It seems to me symptomatic that he did not in fact elaborate his definitive morality and that its principles, as far as we can judge from his letters to Elizabeth, contain hardly anything new. It is obviously unthinkable to prefer to wait until the progress of modern science provides us with the basis of a new morality. In fact the denigration of authority is not the only prejudice of the enlightenment. For, within the enlightenment, the very concept of authority becomes deformed. On the basis of its concept of reason and freedom, the concept of authority could be seen as diametrically opposed to reason and freedom: to be, in fact, blind obedience. This is the meaning that we know, from the usage of their critics, within modern dictatorships.

But this is not the essence of authority. It is true that it is primarily persons that have authority; but the authority of persons is based ultimately, not on the subjection and abdication of reason, but on recognition and knowledge—knowledge, namely, that the other is superior to oneself in judgment and insight and that for this reason his judgment takes precedence, i.e. it has priority over one's own. This is connected with the fact that authority cannot actually be bestowed, but is acquired and must be acquired, if someone is to lay claim to it. It rests on recognition and hence on an act of reason itself which, aware of its own limitations, accepts that others have better understanding. Authority in this sense, properly understood, has nothing to do with blind obedience to a command. Indeed, authority has nothing to do with obedience, but rather with knowledge. (It seems to me that the tendency towards the acknowledgement of authority, as it emerges in, for example, Karl Jaspers' Von der Wahrheit, pp. 766ff. and Gerhard Krüger, Freiheit und Weltverwaltung, pp. 231ff., is not convincing unless the truth of this statement is recognised.) It is true that authority is necessary in order to be able to command and find obedience. But this proceeds only from the authority that a person has. Even the anonymous and impersonal authority of a superior which derives from the command is not ultimately based on this order, but is what makes it possible. Here also its true basis is an act of freedom and reason, which fundamentally acknowledges the authority of a superior because he has a wider view of things or is better informed, i.e. once again, because he has superior knowledge. $^{15}$

Thus the recognition of authority is always connected with the idea that what authority states is not irrational and arbitrary, but can be seen, in principle, to be true. This is the essence of the authority claimed by the teacher, the superior, the expert. The prejudices that they implant are legitimised by the person himself. Their validity demands that one should be biased in favour of the person who presents them. But this makes them then, in a sense, objective prejudices, for they bring about the same bias in favour of something that can come about through other means, e.g. through solid grounds offered by reason. Thus the essence of authority belongs in the context of a theory of prejudices free from the extremism of the enlightenment.

Here we can find support in the romantic criticism of the enlightenment; for there is one form of authority particularly defended by romanticism, namely tradition. That which has been sanctioned by tradition and custom has an authority that is nameless, and our finite historical being is marked by the fact that always the authority of what has been transmitted—and not only what is clearly grounded—has power over our attitudes and behaviour. All education depends on this, and even though, in the case of education, the educator loses his function when his charge comes of age and sets his own insight and decisions in the place of the authority of the educator, this movement into maturity in his own life does not mean that a person becomes his own master in the sense that he becomes free of all tradition. The validity of morals, for example, is based on tradition. They are freely taken over, but by no means created by a free insight or justified by themselves. This is precisely what we call tradition: the ground of their validity. And in fact we owe to romanticism this correction of the enlightenment, that tradition has a justification that is outside the arguments of reason and in large measure determines our institutions and our attitudes. It is even a mark of the superiority of classical ethics over the moral philosophy of the modern period that it justifies the transition of ethics into “politics,” the art of right government, by the indispensability of tradition. $^{16}$ In comparison with it the modern enlightenment is abstract and revolutionary.

The concept of tradition, however, has become no less ambiguous than that of authority, and for the same reason, namely that it is the abstract counterpart to the principle of the enlightenment that determines the romantic understanding of tradition. Romanticism conceives tradition as the antithesis to the freedom of reason and regards it as something historically given, like nature. And whether the desire is to be revolutionary and oppose it or would like to preserve it, it is still seen as the abstract counterpart of free self-determination, since its validity does not require any reasons, but conditions us without our questioning it. Of course, the case of the romantic critique of the enlightenment is not an instance of the automatic dominance of tradition, in which what has been handed down is preserved unaffected by doubt and criticism. It is, rather, a particular critical attitude that again addresses itself to the truth of tradition and seeks to renew it, and which we may call “traditionalism.”

It seems to me, however, that there is no such unconditional antithesis between tradition and reason. However problematical the conscious restoration of traditions or the conscious creation of new traditions may be, the romantic faith in the "growth of tradition," before which all reason must remain silent, is just as prejudiced as and is fundamentally like the enlightenment. The fact is that tradition is constantly an element of freedom and of history itself. Even the most genuine and solid tradition does not persist by nature because of the inertia of what once existed. It needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated. It is, essentially, preservation, such as is active in all historical change. But preservation is an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one. For this reason, only what is new, or what is planned, appears as the result of reason. But this is an illusion. Even where life changes violently, as in ages of revolution, far more of the old is preserved in the supposed transformation of everything than anyone knows, and combines with the new to create a new value. At any rate, preservation is as much a freely-chosen action as revolution and renewal. That is why both the enlightenment's critique of tradition and its romantic rehabilitation are less than their true historical being.

These thoughts lead to the question of whether in the hermeneutic of the human sciences the element of tradition should not be given its full value. Research in the human sciences cannot regard itself as in an absolute antithesis to the attitude we take as historical beings to the past. In our continually manifested attitude to the past, the main feature is not, at any rate, a distancing and freeing of ourselves from what has been transmitted. Rather, we stand always within tradition, and this is no objectifying process, i.e. we do not conceive of what tradition says as something other, something alien. It is always part of us, a model or exemplar, a recognition of ourselves which our later historical judgment would hardly see as a kind of knowledge, but as the simplest preservation of tradition.

Hence in regard to the dominant epistemological methodologism we must ask if the rise of historical consciousness has really detached our scientific attitude entirely from this nature attitude to the past. Does understanding in the human sciences understand itself correctly when it relegates the whole of its own historicality to the position of prejudices from which we must free ourselves? Or does “unprejudiced science” have more in common than it realises with that naive openness and reflection in which traditions live and the past is present?

At any rate understanding in the human sciences shares one fundamental condition with the continuity of traditions, namely, that it lets itself be addressed by tradition. Is it not true of the objects of its investigation—just as of the contents of tradition—that only then can its meaning be experienced? However much this meaning may always be a mediated one and proceed from a historical interest, that does not seem to have any relation to the present; even in the extreme case of “objective” historical research, the proper realisation of the historical task is to determine anew the meaning of what is examined. But the meaning exists at the beginning of any such research as well as at the end: as the choice of the theme to be investigated, the awakening of the desire to investigate, as the gaining of the new problematic.

At the beginning of all historical hermeneutics, then, the abstract antithesis between tradition and historical research, between history and knowledge, must be discarded. The effect of a living tradition and the effect of historical study must constitute a unity, the analysis of which would reveal only a texture of reciprocal relationships. $^{17}$ Hence we would do well not to regard historical consciousness as something radically new—as it seems at first—but as a new element within that which has always made up the human relation to the past. In other words, we have to recognise the element of tradition in the historical relation and enquire into its hermeneutical productivity.

That there is an element of tradition active in the human sciences, despite the methodological nature of its procedures, an element that constitutes its real nature and is its distinguishing mark, is immediately clear if we examine the history of research and note the difference between the human and natural sciences with regard to their history. Of course no finite historical effort of man can completely erase the traces of this finiteness. The history of mathematics or of the natural sciences is also a part of the history of the human spirit and reflects its destinies. Nevertheless, it is not just historical naiveté when the natural scientist writes the history of his subject in terms of the present stage of knowledge. For him errors and wrong turnings are of historical interest only, because the progress of research is the self-evident criterion of his study. Thus it is of secondary interest only to see how advances in the natural sciences or in mathematics belong to the moment in history at which they took place. This interest does not affect the epistemic value of discoveries in the natural sciences or in mathematics.

There is, then, no need to deny that in the natural sciences elements of tradition can also be active, e.g. in that particular lines of research are preferred at particular places. But scientific research as such derives the law of its development not from these circumstances, but from the law of the object that it is investigating.

It is clear that the human sciences cannot be described adequately in terms of this idea of research and progress. Of course it is possible to write a history of the solution of a problem, e.g. the deciphering of barely legible inscriptions, in which the only interest was the ultimate reaching of the final result. Were this not so, it would not have been possible for the human sciences to have borrowed the methodology of the natural ones, as happened in the last century. But the analogy between research in the natural and in the human sciences is only a subordinate element of the work done in the human sciences.

This is seen in the fact that the great achievements in the human sciences hardly ever grow old. A modern reader can easily make allowances for the fact that, a hundred years ago, there was less knowledge available to a historian, who therefore made judgments that were incorrect in some details. On the whole, he would still rather read Droysen or Mommsen than the latest account of the particular subject from the pen of a historian living today. What is the criterion here? Obviously one cannot simply base the subject on a criterion by which we measure the value and importance of research. Rather, the object appears truly significant only in the light of him who is able to describe it to us properly. Thus it is certainly the subject that we are interested in, but the subject acquires its life only from the light in which it is presented to us. We accept the fact that the subject presents itself historically under different aspects at different times or from a different standpoint. We accept that these aspects do not simply cancel one another out as research proceeds, but are like mutually exclusive conditions that exist each by themselves and combine only in us. Our historical consciousness is always filled with a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard. It is present only in the multifariousness of such voices: this constitutes the nature of the tradition in which we want to share and have a part. Modern historical research itself is not only research, but the transmission of tradition. We do not see it only in terms of the law of progress and verified results; in it too we have, as it were, a new experience of history, whenever a new voice is heard in which the past echoes.

What is the basis of this? Obviously we cannot speak of an object of research in the human sciences in the sense appropriate to the natural sciences, where research penetrates more and more deeply into nature. Rather, in the human sciences the interest in tradition is motivated in a special way by the present and its interests. The theme and area of research are actually constituted by the motivation of the enquiry. Hence historical research is based on the historical movement in which life itself stands and cannot be understood teleologically in terms of the object into which it is enquiring. Such an object clearly does not exist at all in itself. Precisely this is what distinguishes the human sciences from the natural sciences. Whereas the object of the natural sciences can be described idealiter as what would be known in the perfect knowledge of nature, it is senseless to speak of a perfect knowledge of history, and for this reason it is not possible to speak of an object in itself towards which its research is directed.

THE PRINCIPLE OF EFFECTIVE-HISTORY

The fact that the interest of the historian is directed not only towards the historical phenomenon and the work that has been handed down but also, secondarily, towards their effect in history (which also includes the history of research) is regarded in general as a mere supplement to the historical problematic that, from Hermann Grimm's Raffael to Gundolf and beyond, has given rise to many valuable insights. To this extent, effective-history is not new. But that this kind of effective-historical approach be required every time that a work of art or an element of the tradition is led from the twilight region between tradition and history to be seen clearly and openly in terms of its own meaning—this is a new demand (addressed not to research, but to methodological consciousness itself) that proceeds inevitably from the analysis of historical consciousness.

It is not, of course, a hermeneutical requirement in the sense of the traditional concept of hermeneutics. I am not saying that historical enquiry should develop this effective-historical problematic that would be something separate from that which is concerned directly with the understanding of the work. The requirement is of a more theoretical kind. Historical consciousness must become aware that in the apparent immediacy with which it approaches a work of art or a tradition, there is also contained, albeit unrecognised and hence not allowed for, this other element. If we are trying to understand a historical phenomenon from the historical distance that is characteristic of our hermeneutical situation, we are always subject to the effects of effective-history. It determines in advance both what seems to us worth enquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation, and we more or less forget half of what is really there—in fact, we miss the whole truth of the phenomenon when we take its immediate appearance as the whole truth.

In our understanding, which we imagine is so straightforward, we find that, by following the criterion of intelligibility, the other presents himself so much in terms of our own selves that there is no longer a question of self and other. Historical objectivism, in appealing to its critical method, conceals the involvement of the historical consciousness itself in effective-history. By the method of its foundational criticism it does away with the arbitrariness of cosy re-creations of the past, but it preserves its good conscience by failing to recognise those presuppositions—certainly not arbitrary, but still fundamental—that govern its own approach to understanding, and hence falls short of reaching that truth which, despite the finite nature of our understanding, could be reached. In this historical objectivism resembles statistics, which are such an excellent means of propaganda because they let facts speak and hence simulate an objectivity that in reality depends on the legitimacy of the questions asked.

We are not saying, then, that effective-history must be developed as a new independent discipline ancillary to the human sciences, but that we should learn to understand ourselves better and recognise that in all understanding, whether we are expressly aware of it or not, the power of this effective-history is at work. When a naive faith in scientific method ignores its existence, there can be an actual deformation of knowledge. We know it from the history of science as the irrefutable proof of something that is obviously false. But looking at the whole situation, we see that the power of effective-history does not depend on its being recognised. This, precisely, is the power of history over finite human consciousness, namely that it prevails even where faith in method leads one to deny one's own historicality. The demand that we should become conscious of this effective-history is pressing because it is necessary for scientific consciousness. But this does not mean that it can be fulfilled in an absolute way. That we should become completely aware of effective-history is just as hybrid a statement as when Hegel speaks of absolute knowledge, in which history would become completely transparent to itself and hence be raised to the level of a concept. Rather, effective historical consciousness is an element in the act of understanding itself and, as we shall see, is already operative in the choice of the right question to ask.

Effective-historical consciousness is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation. To acquire an awareness of a situation, however, is always a task of particular difficulty. The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have any objective knowledge of it. $^{18}$ We are always within the situation, and to throw light on it is a task that is never entirely completed. This is true also of the hermeneutic situation, i.e. the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to the tradition that we are trying to understand. The illumination of this situation—effective-historical reflection—can never be completely achieved, but this is not due to a lack in the reflection, but lies in the essence of the historical being which is ours. To exist historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete. All self-knowledge proceeds from what is historically pre-given, what we call, with Hegel, “substance,” because it is the basis of all subjective meaning and attitude and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility of understanding any tradition whatsoever in terms of its unique historical quality. This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to move back along the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it.

Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of “situation” by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence an essential part of 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. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons etc. The word has been used in philosophy since Nietzsche and Husserl $^{19}$ to characterise the way in which thought is tied to its finite determination, and the nature of the law of the expansion of the range of vision. A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. Contrariwise, to have an horizon means not to be limited to what is nearest, but to be able to see beyond it. A person who has an horizon knows the relative significance of everything within this horizon, as near or far, great or small. Similarly, the working out of the hermeneutical situation means the achievement of the right horizon of enquiry for the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition.

In the sphere of historical understanding we also like to speak of horizons, especially when referring to the claim of historical consciousness to see the past in terms of its own being, not in terms of our contemporary criteria and prejudices, but within its own historical horizon. The task of historical understanding also involves acquiring the particular historical horizon, so that what we are seeking to understand can be seen in its true dimensions. If we fail to place ourselves in this way within the historical horizon out of which tradition speaks, we shall misunderstand the significance of what it has to say to us. To this extent it seems a legitimate hermeneutical requirement to place ourselves in the other situation in order to understand it. We may ask, however, whether this does not mean that we are failing in the understanding that is asked of us. The same is true of a conversation that we have with someone simply in order to get to know him, i.e. to discover his standpoint and his horizon. This is not a true conversation, in the sense that we are not seeking agreement concerning an object, but the specific contents of the conversation are only a means to get to know the horizon of the other person. Examples are oral examinations, or some kinds of conversation between doctor and patient. The historical consciousness is clearly doing something similar when it places itself within the situation of the past and hence is able to acquire the right historical horizon. Just as in a conversation, when we have discovered the standpoint and horizon of the other person, his ideas become intelligible, without our necessarily having to agree with him, the person who thinks historically comes to understand the meaning of what has been handed down, without necessarily agreeing with it, or seeing himself in it.

In both cases, in our understanding we have as it were, withdrawn from the situation of trying to reach agreement. He himself cannot be reached. By including from the beginning the other person's standpoint in what he is saying to us, we are making our own standpoint safely unattainable. We have seen, in considering the origin of historical thinking, that in fact it makes this ambiguous transition from means to ends, i.e. it makes an end of what is only a means. The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim that it is uttering something true. 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 past, any truth valid and intelligible for ourselves. Thus this acknowledgement of the otherness of the other, which makes him the object of objective knowledge, involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth.

The question is, however, whether this description really corresponds to the hermeneutical phenomenon. Are there, then, two different horizons here, the horizon in which the person seeking to understand lives, and the particular horizon within which he places himself? Is it a correct description of the art of historical understanding to say that we are learning to place ourselves within alien horizons? Are there such things as closed horizons, in this sense? We recall Nietzsche's complaint against historicism that it destroyed the horizon bounded by myth in which alone a culture is able to live. $^{20}$ Is the horizon of one's own present time ever closed in this way, and can a historical situation be imagined that has this kind of closed horizon?

Or is this a romantic reflection, a kind of Robinson Crusoe dream of the historical enlightenment, the fiction of an unattainable island, as artificial as Crusoe himself for the alleged primary phenomenon of the solus ipse? Just as the individual is never simply an individual, because he is always involved with others, so too the closed horizon that is supposed to enclose a culture is an abstraction. The historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never utterly bound to any one standpoint, and hence can never have a truly closed horizon. The horizon is, rather, something into which we move and that moves with us. Horizons change for a person who is moving. Thus the horizon of the past, out of which all human life lives and which exists in the form of tradition, is always in motion. It is not historical consciousness that first sets the surrounding horizon in motion. But in it this motion becomes aware of itself.

When our historical consciousness places itself within historical horizons, this does not entail passing into alien worlds unconnected in any way with our own, but together they constitute the one great horizon that moves from within and, beyond the frontiers of the present, embraces the historical depths of our self-consciousness. It is, in fact, a single horizon that embraces everything contained in historical consciousness. Our own past, and that other past towards which our historical consciousness is directed, help to shape this moving horizon out of which human life always lives, and which determines it as tradition.

Understanding the past, then, undoubtedly requires an historical horizon. But it is not the case that we acquire this horizon by placing ourselves within a historical situation. Rather, we must always already have a horizon in order to be able to place ourselves within a situation. For what do we mean by “placing ourselves” in a situation? Certainly not just disregarding ourselves. This is necessary, of course, in that we must imagine the other situation. But into this other situation we must also bring ourselves. Only this fulfills the meaning of “placing ourselves.” If we place ourselves in the situation of someone else, for example, then we shall understand him, i.e. become aware of the otherness, the indissoluble individuality of the other person, by placing ourselves in his position.

This placing of ourselves is not the empathy of one individual for another, nor is it the application to another person of our own criteria, but it always involves the attainment of a higher universality that overcomes, not only our own particularity, but also that of the other. The concept of the “horizon” suggests itself because it expresses the wide, superior vision that the person who is seeking to understand must have. To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand—not in order to look away from it, but to see it better within a larger whole and in truer proportion. It is not a correct description of historical consciousness to speak, with Nietzsche, of the many changing horizons into which it teaches us to place ourselves. If we disregard ourselves in this way, we have no historical horizon. Nietzsche's view that historical study is deleterious to life is not directed, in fact, against historical consciousness as such, but against the self-alienation that it undergoes when it regards the method of modern historical science as its own true nature. We have already pointed out that a truly historical consciousness always sees its own present in such a way that it sees itself, as it sees the historically other, within the right circumstances. It requires a special effort to acquire an historical horizon. We are always affected, in hope and fear, by what is nearest to us, and hence approach, under its influence, the testimony of the past. Hence it is constantly necessary to inhibit the overhasty assimilation of the past to our own expectations of meaning. Only then will we be able to listen to the past in a way that enables it to make its own meaning heard.

We have shown above that this is a process of distinguishing. Let us consider what this idea of distinguishing involves. It is always reciprocal. Whatever is being distinguished must be distinguished from something which, in turn, must be distinguished from it. Thus all distinguishing also makes visible that from which something is distinguished. We have described this above as the operation of prejudices. We started by saying that 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. But now it is important to avoid the error of thinking that it is a fixed set of opinions and evaluations that determine and limit the horizon of the present, and that the otherness of the past can be distinguished from it as from a fixed ground.

In fact the horizon of the present is being continually formed, in that we have continually to test all our prejudices. An important part of this testing is the encounter with the past and the understanding of the tradition from which we come. Hence the horizon of the present cannot be formed without the past. There is no more an isolated horizon of the present than there are historical horizons. Understanding, rather, is always the fusion of these horizons which we imagine to exist by themselves. We know the power of this kind of fusion chiefly from earlier times and their naive attitude to themselves and their origin. In a tradition this process of fusion is continually going on, for there old and new continually grow together to make something of living value, without either being explicitly distinguished from the other.

If, however, there is no such thing as these horizons that are distinguished from one another, why do we speak of the fusion of horizons and not simply of the formation of the one horizon, whose bounds are set in the depths of tradition? To ask the question means that we are recognising the special nature of the situation in which understanding becomes a scientific task, and that it is necessary to work out this situation as a hermeneutical situation. Every encounter with tradition that takes place within historical consciousness involves the experience of the tension between the text and the present. The hermeneutic task consists in not covering up this tension by attempting a naive assimilation but consciously bringing it out. This is why it is part of the hermeneutic approach to project an historical horizon that is different from the horizon of the present. Historical consciousness is aware of its own otherness and hence distinguishes the horizon of tradition from its own. On the other hand, it is itself, as we are trying to show, only something laid over a continuing tradition, and hence it immediately recombines what it has distinguished in order, in the unity of the historical horizon that it thus acquires, to become again one with itself.

The projecting of the historical horizon, then, is only a phase in the process of understanding, and does not become solidified into the self-alienation of a past consciousness, but is overtaken by our own present horizon of understanding. In the process of understanding there takes place a real fusing of horizons, which means that as the historical horizon is projected, it is simultaneously removed. We described the conscious act of this fusion as the task of effective-historical consciousness. Although this task had been obscured by aesthetic historical positivism in the train of romantic hermeneutics, it is, in fact, the central problem of hermeneutics. It is the problem of application that exists in all understanding.

Notes

1. Praeiudicium auctoritatis et precipitantiae, which we find as early as Christian Thomasius's Lectiones de praeiudiciis (1689/90) and his Einleitung der Vernunftlehre, chap. 13, ## 39/40. Cf. the article in Walch's Philosophisches Lexikon (1726), p. 2794ff.

2. At the beginning of his essay, "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" (1784).

3. The enlightenment of the classical world, the fruit of which was Greek philosophy and its culmination in sophism, was quite different in nature and hence permitted a thinker like Plato to use philosophical myths to convey the religious tradition and the dialectical method of philosophising. Cf. Erich Frank, Philosophische Erkenntnis und religiöse Wahrheit, p. 31ff., and my review of it in the Theologische Rundschau 1950 (pp. 260-266). Cf. also Gerhard Krüger, Einsicht und Leidenschaft, 2nd ed. 1951.

4. A good example of this is the length of time it has taken for the authority of the historical writing of antiquity to be destroyed in historical studies and how slowly the study of archives and the research into sources have established themselves (cf. R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography [Oxford, 1939], chap. 11, where he more or less draws a parallel between the turning to the study of sources and the Baconian revolution in the study of nature).

5. Cf. what we said about Spinoza's theological-political treatise above.

6. As we find, for example, in C. F. Meier's Beiträge zu der Lehre von den Vorurteilen des menschlichen Geschlechts, 1766.

7. I have analysed an example of this process in a little study on Immermann's "Chiliastische Sonette" (Die Neue Rundschau, 1949).

8. Horkheimer and Adorno seem to me right in their analysis of the “dialectic of the enlightenment” (although I must regard the application of sociological concepts such as “bourgeois” to Odysseus as a failure of historical reflection, if not, indeed, a confusion of Homer with Johann Heinrich Voss [author of the standard German translation of Homer], who had already been criticised by Goethe).

9. Cf. the reflections on this important question by G. von Lukács in his History and Class Consciousness (London, 1969; orig. 1923).

10. Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes.

11. Cf. the present author's Plato und die Dichter, p. 12f.

12. Walch, Philosophisches Lexicon (1726), p. 1013.

13. Walch, op. cit., p. 1006ff. under the entry Freiheit zu gedenken. See p. 257 above.

14. Schleiermacher, Werke I, 7, p. 31.

15. The notorious statement, “The party (or the Leader) is always right” is not wrong because it claims that a certain leadership is superior, but because it serves to shield the leadership, by a dictatorial decree, from any criticism that might be true. True authority does not have to be authoritarian.

16. Cf. Aristotle's Eth. Nic., book 10, chap. 9.

17. I don't agree with Scheler that the pre-conscious pressure of tradition decreases as historical study proceeds (Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, p. 37). The independence of historical study implied in this view seems to me a liberal fiction of a sort that Scheler is generally able to see through. (Cf. similarly in his Nachlass I, p. 228ff., where he affirms his faith in the historical enlightenment, or that of the sociology of knowledge).

18. The structure of the concept of situation has been illuminated chiefly by K. Jaspers (Die geistige Situation der Zeit) and Erich Rothacker.

19. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen II, at the beginning.

RHETORIC, HERMENEUTICS, AND THE CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY: METACRITICAL COMMENTS ON TRUTH AND METHOD

It is the task of a philosophical hermeneutics to reveal the full scope of the hermeneutical dimension of human experience and to bring to light its fundamental significance for the entirety of our understanding of the world, in all the forms which that understanding takes: from interpersonal communication to social manipulation, from the experience of the individual as a member of society to his experience of that society itself, from the tradition comprised of religion and law, art and philosophy, to the liberating, reflective energy of the revolutionary consciousness. Even so, the individual scholar necessarily begins from limited experiences and limited fields of experience. Insofar as it dealt with the theory of the human sciences, $^{1}$ for example, my own endeavor was closely linked to Dilthey's philosophical development of the heritage of German Romanticism; at the same time, however, it was based on a new, much broader foundation—namely, the experience of art, which replies to the historical alienation of the human sciences with its own persistent and triumphant claim to contemporaneity. In approaching the subject as I did, I had in view a kind of truth which goes questioningly behind and in anticipation before all knowledge—a kind of truth which I hoped to bring to light in terms of the essentially linguistic character of all human experience, the consummation and the burden of which is its constantly self-renewing contemporaneity. Still, it was inevitable that the phenomenon which had served as my point of departure should exert a special force even in my analysis of the universal linguistic character of man's relationship to the world, and that it should do so, moreover, in a way which reflected the intellectual and historical origin of the hermeneutical problem itself. The problem had been touched off by the written tradition, a tradition which had become foreign through fixity, longevity, and the distance of time. Thus, it was natural to take the many-layered problem of translation as a model of the linguisticality of man's relationship to the world and to develop the general problem of how that which is foreign becomes ours in terms of the structures of translation.

Nevertheless, what O. Marquard has called the Sein zum Texte $^{2}$ does not exhaust the hermeneutic dimension—unless the word “text” is taken to mean, above and beyond its narrower sense, the text which “God has written with His own hand,” the liber naturae, and thus to embrace all scientific knowledge as well, from physics to sociology and anthropology. And even then the model of translation is by no means broad enough to encompass the manifold significance of language in human affairs. To be sure, one can demonstrate in the reading of this greatest of all “books” the pattern of tension and resolution which structures understanding and understandability—perhaps even the understanding mind itself; and in this respect it is impossible to have any doubt about the universality of the hermeneutic problem. It is no secondary topic; hermeneutics is no mere handmaiden to the human sciences of the Romantic period. $^{3}$

At the same time, however, the universal phenomenon of human linguisticality unfolds itself in other dimensions as well. As a result, the concerns of hermeneutics make themselves felt in other fields which also have to do with the linguisticality of the human experience. Some of these were touched upon in Truth and Method itself. Thus, effective historical consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) $^{4}$ was presented there, in several phases of its history, as the conscious illumination of the human idea of language; it extends, however, as Johannes Lohmann has since shown in his book Philosophy and Linguistics $^{5}$ and in a discussion of my own work in Gnomon, $^{6}$ into still further and entirely different dimensions. Taking up the history of “the coinage of the concept ‘language’ in Occidental thought” which I had sketched, Lohmann extends it both forwards and backwards along the vast time-line of linguistic history: backwards, in that he examines the “emergence of the ‘concept’ as the intellectual medium by means of which the immediate ‘subsumption’ of given objects under thought forms becomes possible” (714), seeing in the “stem-inflected” character of Old Indo-European the grammatical form of the concept—a form which finds its most visible expression in the copula—and in this manner identifying the possibility of theory as the most distinctive invention of the Western world; forwards, in that he once again interprets the intellectual history of the Western world in terms of the development of linguistic form, in particular in terms of the transition from stem-inflected to word-inflected languages—a development which makes science possible in the modern sense, as a kind of knowledge which puts the world at our disposal.

Rhetoric further attests to truly universal linguisticality—and that of a kind which is by its very nature antecedent to hermeneutics in the limited sense and which represents something like the positive pole to the negative of textual explication. The connections between rhetoric and hermeneutics which I had noted in my book are susceptible to expansion in numerous ways, as can be seen from the wealth of additions and corrections which Klaus Dockhorn has offered in the Göttingischen Gelehrten-Anzeigen. $^{7}$ Linguisticality, however, is finally so deeply woven into the sociality of human existence that the validity and limits of the hermeneutical inquiry must also occupy the theoretician of the social sciences. Thus Jürgen Habermas $^{8}$ has recently brought philosophical hermeneutics to bear as well on the logic of the social sciences, evaluating it in terms of the epistemological interests of the social sciences.

It seems imperative, then, to take up the topic of the mutually pervasive and interdependent claims to universality embodied in rhetoric, hermeneutics, and sociology and to throw some light on the various kinds of legitimacy to which each can lay claim. It is all the more important to do so, since in all three—most visibly in the first two—the claim to scientific endeavor is itself attended by a certain equivocality, in which the reference to praxis plays a determining role.

For it is manifestly true that rhetoric is not simply a theory of forms of speech and means of persuasion, but can be developed to the level of practical mastery without any theoretical reflection on the means of which it avails itself. By the same token, the art of understanding [hermeneutics]—whatever its ways and means may be—obviously does not depend directly on the deliberateness with which it follows its rules. Here, too, a natural capability which everyone has transforms itself into an ability in the exercise of which one surpasses all others, and theory at best can only say why. In both cases, theory is an afterthought to that from which it is abstracted and which we call praxis. And yet for all that, the one art belongs to the period of the earliest Greek philosophy, while the other is a consequence of the modern breakdown of firm bonds with tradition and the effort to hold fast to that which was in the process of vanishing and deliberately to preserve it.

The first history of rhetoric was written by Aristotle. We have only fragments. It is clear, however, that Aristotle's theory of rhetoric was developed as the realization of a program originally drawn up by Plato. Behind all the specious claims put forward by contemporary teachers of oratory, Plato had discovered a genuine task which only the philosopher, the dialectician, was in a position to carry out: namely, to obtain mastery of truly illuminatory speech in such a manner that the appropriate arguments were brought forward in regard to the specific receptivity of the souls of those to whom they were directed. That is an enlightening theoretical statement of the task of rhetoric, which nevertheless involves two Platonic assumptions: (1) that only he who is at home with the truth (i.e., the Ideas) knows how to find unerringly the "plausible" pseudos represented by the rhetorical argument; and (2) that the rhetorician must be equally knowledgeable and at home with the souls on which he hopes to work. Aristotelian rhetoric is preeminently a working out of the latter concern. There, the theory of the correspondence between speech and soul which Plato had called for in the Phaedrus culminates in an anthropological approach to the art of speaking.

The theory of rhetoric was the long-term result of a controversy which had been touched off by the intoxicating and alarming invasion of a new art of speaking and a new concept of education which we now refer to as sophism. At that time, rhetoric, in the form of an uncanny new knowledge which showed the way to turn everything topsy-turvy, had streamed from Sicily into an Athens socially and politically stratified but animated by a younger generation easily led astray. Thus, it became imperative to teach this great dictator (as Georgias calls rhetoric) obedience to a new master. From Protagoras to Isocrates it was the claim of the masters of rhetoric not only to teach public speaking but to form as well the sound civic consciousness which promised political responsibility. However, it was Plato who first laid down the principles on the basis of which the new, universally disruptive art of speaking—Aristophanes has portrayed that for us vividly enough—found its limit and its legitimate place. To that the philosophical dialectic of the Platonic Academy attests with the same force as the Aristotelian foundation of logic and rhetoric.

The history of understanding is no less ancient and venerable. If one acknowledges hermeneutics to exist wherever a true art of understanding is in evidence, one would have to begin, if not with Nestor in the Iliad, then certainly with Odysseus. Then, too, one could usefully make reference to the new sophistic movement in education, which actually practiced the explication of famous passages of poetry and skillfully elaborated them as pedagogical examples; and one could distinguish between the practice of the Sophists and a Socratic hermeneutics, as Gundert has done. $^{9}$ Even so, that is far from being a theory of understanding; and indeed it seems to be generally characteristic for the emergence of the hermeneutical problem as such that a situation must exist where something remote has to be brought nearer, a strangeness overcome, a bridge built between “once” and “now.” Accordingly, the hour appointed to a theory of understanding arrived with the modern period, which had become conscious of its distance from antiquity. Something of that consciousness was already present in the theological claims brought forward by Protestant biblical exegesis and its principle of sola scriptura, but its true development took place as historical consciousness matured during the Enlightenment and the Romantic period and so established a broken relationship with all tradition. In keeping with the circumstances surrounding its historical development, hermeneutical theory quite naturally oriented itself to the task of explicating “expressions of life fixed in writing” [Dilthey], even though Schleiermacher’s theoretical formulation of hermeneutics included understanding as it occurs in the spoken dialogue of personal conversation. Just the opposite is true of rhetoric, which focused its attention on the immediate impact of the spoken word; and if it ventured into the paths of skillful written expression as well and so developed the doctrine of style and stylistics, the true vocation of rhetoric lay not in reading but in speaking. The equivocal position occupied by the prepared address, of course, already shows the tendency to ground the art of speaking in the permanency of written forms of expression and so to detach it from its original situation. At this point, then, rhetoric begins to merge with poetics, whose linguistic objects are so thoroughly art that they can be transferred without loss from spoken to written form and vice versa.

Rhetoric as such, however, is tied to the immediacy of its effect. In this connection, Klaus Dockhorn has shown with impressive and thoroughgoing scholarship the extent to which the excitation of the emotions has been seen as the most important tool of persuasion from Cicero and Quintilian to the English political rhetoricians of the eighteenth century. Now the excitation of the emotions, which is the essential task of the orator, has only the most shadowy kind of role to play in the written expressions which become the object of hermeneutical endeavor; and this is precisely the distinction upon which everything rests. The listener is carried away by the orator. The cogency of the speaker's arguments overwhelms him, critical reflection is and should be held in abeyance by the persuasive power of the speech. In the reading and explication of something written, however, the audience is so remote and so detached from the writer, from his mood, his immediate aims, and his unstated assumptions, that the act of grasping the sense of the text takes on the character of autonomous production, one which for its part is more like the art of the speaker than the attitude of his audience. With this in mind, it is not hard to see why the theoretical tools of the art of explication are extensively borrowed from rhetoric—a point which I made in several instances and which Dockhorn has explored on a broader basis.

And where else, indeed, should theoretical reflection on the art of understanding turn than to rhetoric, which from the earliest days of the tradition has been the sole champion of a claim to truth which vindicates the plausible, the eikos (verisimilar), and that which is illuminating to common sense against science's claim to proof and certainty? To convince and to illuminate without being able to prove, that clearly is just as much the goal and measure of understanding and explication as it is of rhetoric and the art of persuasion—nor is this vast realm of illuminating convictions and prevailing opinions in the least diminished, gradually or otherwise, by the progress of science, however great that may be; on the contrary, it expands to take in every new advance in scientific knowledge, in order to claim it for itself and bring it into conformity with its own nature. The ubiquitousness of rhetoric is truly unlimited; for only through rhetoric does science become a social factor in our lives. What would we know of modern physics, which so visibly transforms our lives, from physics alone? All presentations of physics which are directed beyond professional circles (and perhaps one ought to say: which do not confine themselves to a very small circle of initiated specialists) owe their effect to the rhetorical element. As Henri Gouhier, especially, has shown, $^{10}$ even Descartes, that great and passionate advocate of method and certainty, is in all of his works a writer who handles the tools of rhetoric with consummate skill. There can be no doubt about the fundamental function of rhetoric within the social life. Every science which would be of practical significance is dependent on its resources. Nor is the function of hermeneutics less universal; for the incomprehensibility or susceptibility to misinterpretation of received texts which originally called it into existence is only a special case of that which is to be met with in every human orientation to the world as the atopon, the “strange,” as that which cannot be accommodated by the customary ordered expectations of experience. And just as, with the advance of knowledge, the mirabilia are no sooner understood than they lose their strangeness, so, too, every successful appropriation of tradition resolves itself into a new, distinct familiarity in which tradition belongs to us and we are a part of it. The two flow together into one world which unites in itself both history and the present, the particular experience and the shared, and which achieves its linguistic articulation in the discourse between one man and another. Not in rhetoric alone, then, but in the phenomenon of understanding as well, the universality of human linguisticality proves itself to be an intrinsically limitless element which carries everything within it—not merely the cultural heritage transmitted through language, but everything pure and simple; for nothing that is can remain outside the realm of interpretation and intelligibility in which we have our common being. Hence the validity of Plato’s fundamental assertion that he who beholds things in the mirror of speech becomes aware of them in their full and undiminished truth. And there is an equally profound and accurate insight to be had from Plato’s doctrine that all cognition is first what it is only as re-cognition; for a “first” cognition is as little possible as a first word. Even the freshest and most original perception, whose ramifications still seem entirely unforeseeable, is what it truly was only when its consequences have been worked out, its connections with existing knowledge established, and when it has been absorbed into the medium of intersubjective understanding.

Thus the rhetorical and the hermeneutical aspects of human linguisticality interpenetrate each other at every point. There would be no speaker and no such thing as rhetoric if understanding and agreement were not the lifeblood of human relationships. There would be no hermeneutical task if there were no loss of agreement between the parties to a “conversation” and no need to seek understanding. The connection between hermeneutics and rhetoric ought to serve, then, to dispel the notion that hermeneutics is somehow restricted to the aesthetic-humanistic tradition alone and that hermeneutical philosophy has to do with a “life of the mind” which is somehow opposed to the world of “real” life and propagates itself only in and through the “cultural tradition.”

It is in keeping with the universality of the hermeneutical approach that its implications must be considered for the logic of the social sciences as well. Accordingly, Habermas has taken up the analysis of “effective historical consciousness” and of the model of “translation” in Truth and Method and given them a positive role to play in overcoming the positivistic paralysis of social scientific logic and the historical naiveté of its fundamental assumptions about the nature of language. Such reference to hermeneutics, therefore, is made on the avowed premise that it should serve the methodology of the social sciences. That is a presupposition of the greatest moment, and one of course which severs Habermas’s approach from the traditional grounds of the hermeneutic problematic, in the aesthetically oriented human sciences of the Romantic period. To be sure, the methodical alienation which is of the essence in modern science is employed as well throughout the “humanities.” $^{11}$ The opposition which the title of Truth and Method implies was never meant to be absolute (see the Preface to the second edition, p. xv). Nevertheless, the human sciences were chosen as the starting point of the analysis because they have to do with experiences in which it is a matter not of method or science but, on the contrary, of experiences which lie outside of science—among them the experience of the culture which bears the imprint of science’s own historical tradition. The hermeneutical experience is fully operative only in such instances, nor can it be itself the object of methodical alienation; on the contrary, it necessarily precedes methodical alienation, in that it assigns to science the questions with which it occupies itself and thereby makes possible for the first time the application of its methods. The modern social sciences, on the other hand, to the extent that they recognize hermeneutical reflection as unavoidable, nevertheless claim to raise understanding, as Habermas puts it, “from a pre-scientific pursuit to the rank of a conscious procedure” through “controlled alienation”—as it were, through the “methodical cultivation of cleverness” (172/174).

Now it has long since been the way of science to accomplish through teachable and controllable modes of procedure what also accrues to individual cleverness on occasion, though in uncertain and uncontrollable ways. If awareness of the hermeneutical considerations involved in the interpretive human sciences leads to methodical contrivances which are beneficial to the work of the social sciences (which would not “understand” but would rather try to get hold of the real structure of society scientifically by drawing upon the truisms which have deposited themselves in linguisticality), then that would certainly be a scientific gain. At the same time, hermeneutical reflection will not allow the social sciences to limit it to this function within science, nor, especially, will it be restrained from applying hermeneutical reflection anew to the methodological alienation practiced by the social sciences—even if, in the process, it once again invites positivist devaluation of hermeneutics. Yet let us see first how the hermeneutical problematic makes its influence felt within the bounds of social scientific theory and how it looks in that role.

First, there is the “linguistic approach” (124ff.). If linguisticality is the distinctive province and embodiment of hermeneutical consciousness, then it is natural to see in linguisticality, as the basic constitutive element of human sociality, the reigning a priori of the social sciences—an a priori from which are derived ad absurdum the behaviorist and positivistic theories which view society as an observable and controllable functional whole. That seems clear enough inasmuch as human society lives in institutions which, understood as such, are traditionalized, reformed—in short, are determined by the self-conception of the individuals who comprise the society. Habermas thus sees the value of hermeneutics for social scientific statements in the fact that, unlike Wittgenstein’s theory of language games and Winch’s $^{12}$ interpretation of them as a linguistic a priori, the insights to be had from the concept of historical involvement enable one to establish a legitimate relationship between the communicative approach and the investigative field of the social sciences.

If, however, Habermas undertakes the analysis of the preconceptions and the inherent prejudice which accompany all human thought and action, the demand which he makes on hermeneutical reflection is fundamentally different. To be sure, he says, effective historical consciousness, which attempts to reflect upon its own prejudices and controls its own preconceptions, puts an end to the naive objectivism which falsifies both the positivistic theory of science and the phenomenological and language analytical approaches to the social sciences as well. But what, he asks, is such reflection able to accomplish in its own right? Among other things, he notes, there is the problem of universal history—that is, the conception of a goal in history which arises inevitably out of the conceptions of goal implicit in social action. If hermeneutical reflection rests content with the general observation that it is impossible to transcend the limitations of one's own point of view, then it is without consequence. To be sure, he says, such considerations call into question the validity of a full-blown philosophy of history, but historical consciousness will nevertheless constantly project a preconceived universal history out of its own orientation to the future. What good is it to know that such projections are provisional and repeatedly subject to revision?

In situations where hermeneutical reflection actually comes into play, however, what does it do? In what relationship does “effective historical consciousness” stand to the tradition of which it becomes conscious? Now my thesis is—and I believe—that the thing hermeneutics teaches us, as a necessary consequence of recognizing the contingency and finitude which are inseparable from historical involvement, is to see through the dogmatic antithesis between ongoing “autochthonous” tradition, on the one hand, and its reflective appropriation on the other. Behind such an antithesis lurks a dogmatic objectivism which deforms the very concept of reflection itself. Even in the interpretive sciences, the one who does the understanding can never reflect himself out of the historical involvement of his hermeneutical situation so that his own interpretation does not itself become a part of the subject at hand. The historian, even the historian of the so-called critical school, so little dissolves ongoing traditions—for example, nationalistic ones—that, on the contrary, he is really engaged, as a national historian, in their formation and development. And most important of all, the more consciously he reflects upon his hermeneutical conditionality, the more engaged he becomes. Droysen, who saw through the “eunuchlike objectivity” and the methodological naivete of the historians, was himself highly influential when it came to the nationalism of nineteenth-century middle-class culture—in any event, more influential than Ranke’s epical consciousness, which sought to inculcate instead the apoliticality appropriate to a state based on higher authority alone. The act of understanding is itself an event. Only a naive, unreflective historicism will see in the historical-hermeneutical sciences something absolutely new which puts an end to the power of tradition.

In Truth and Method I sought to furnish unequivocal proof for the constant process of mediation by means of which societal tradition perpetuates itself in terms of linguisticality, which is at once the medium and the register of all understanding. To this Habermas replies that the process of mediation profoundly alters the medium of knowledge through reflection—an insight, as Habermas would have it, which is itself the perpetual legacy bequeathed us by German idealism out of the spirit of the eighteenth century. Although Hegelian reflection, as it appears in my work, no longer culminates in an absolute consciousness, the “idealism of linguisticality,” which exhausts itself in mere “cultural tradition”—in its hermeneutical appropriation and continuation—nevertheless remains tragically impotent vis-à-vis the concrete whole of the living social network, which is woven not of language alone but of work and domination as well. Hermeneutical reflection, Habermas concludes, must pass over into a critique of ideologies.

With this, Habermas touches upon the main motive behind sociology's interest in epistemology. Rhetoric (as theory) took its stand against the enchantment of consciousness through the power of speech, in that it insisted on the distinction between the matter of fact, or the true, and the plausible or apparently true which its adherents are taught to produce; hermeneutics endeavors to reestablish a disrupted intersubjective agreement through the dialectical exchange of ideas and, in particular, to free an alienated epistemology from false objectivism and return it to its hermeneutical foundations. Similarly, there is an emancipatory interest at work in sociological reflection as well which undertakes to disperse external and internal social compulsions by bringing them to the level of consciousness. Insofar as these compulsions seek to legitimize themselves in and through language, the critique of ideologies (itself, of course, an act of reflection which makes use of the powers of language) becomes an exposure of “deception with language” (178).

In the realm of psychoanalytical therapy, Habermas argues, one finds further evidence of the emancipatory power of reflection for social life. When we see through repression, we rob false compulsions of their power; and just as in psychotherapy, as the end result of a reflective educational process, the meaning of all motives for action would coincide with that which they have for the patient himself—an end result which is, of course, limited in the psychoanalytical situation by the therapeutic task and therefore represents here only a theoretical concept—so, by analogy, social reality, too, would be hermeneutically comprehensible only in such a fictive final state. In reality, the life of society is a web of understandable motives and concrete compulsions. It is the task of social research to disentangle that web through a continuing educational process and set it free for action.

One cannot deny that this socio-theoretical conception has its logic. It seems questionable, however, whether the role of hermeneutics is not unjustly restricted when its limits are defined in terms of a conjunction between all motives for action and their understood meaning. Indeed, the hermeneutical problem is so universal and so fundamental for all interpersonal experience, both of history and of the present, precisely because meaning can be experienced even where it was not the conscious intention of its author. It abridges the universality of the hermeneutical dimension when a realm of understandable meaning (“cultural tradition”) is set off against other determinants of social reality, identifiable solely as concrete factors. As if every ideology, as a false linguistic consciousness, presented itself only in the garb of understandable meaning and could not also be understood in its “true” sense—for example, as an expression of the interests of dominance. The same thing is true of the unconscious motives which the psychoanalyst brings to consciousness.

Here the choice of the experience of art and of the human sciences as the starting point for the development of the hermeneutical dimension in Truth and Method appears to have made an appreciation of its true compass more difficult. Certainly, even the so-called “universal” exposition in the third part of the book is too sketchy and one-sided. In light of the subject matter, however, and in particular of the way the hermeneutical problem was posited, it seems altogether absurd that the concrete factors of work and dominance should be seen as lying outside the scope of hermeneutics. What else are the prejudices with which hermeneutical reflection concerns itself? Where else shall they originate if not in work and dominance? In the cultural tradition? To be sure, there, too. But of what is that tradition compounded? The idealism of linguisticality were a grotesque absurdity indeed—if it would extend beyond its mere methodological function. Habermas says at one point: “Hermeneutics bangs from within, so to speak, against the walls of tradition” (177). There is some truth to that, if by “from within” he means to indicate the opposite of a position taken up “from without”—one which does not enter into our interpretational world, intelligible or unintelligible, but persists instead in the detached observation of external alterations (as opposed to individual actions). That my position amounts to the same thing as an absolutization of cultural tradition, however, seems to me an erroneous supposition. It means only: to want to understand everything which will allow itself to be understood. That is the proper meaning of the statement: “Being which can be understood is language.”

It does not mean nor does it entail confinement to a world of meaning which, as a “knowing of the known” (A. Boeckh), $^{13}$ were a kind of secondary object of knowledge, with the appropriation of that which is already known, the wealth of the “cultural tradition,” serving as a supplement to the economic and political realities which preeminently determine the life of society. On the contrary, everything that is reflects itself in the mirror of language. In language and only in language are we confronted by that which we encounter nowhere else, because it is we ourselves (not merely that which we believe to be true and which we know about ourselves). When all is said and done, language is no mirror at all, nor is that which we catch sight of in it a mere reflection of our own and of all existence. Rather, it is the continual definition and redefinition of our lives, in the concrete dependencies of work and dominance as well as in all the other dependencies which make up our world. Language is not the ultimate anonymous subject, discovered at last, in which all social-historical processes and actions are grounded, and which presents itself and the totality of its activities, its objectifications, to the gaze of the detached observer; rather, it is the game in which we are all participants. None less so than any other. Each of us is “it,” and it is always our turn. That is true whenever we understand something, and especially so when we see through prejudices or unmask pretenses which disguise the truth. Yes, there most of all we “understand.” When at last we have got to the bottom of something which seemed to us strange and unintelligible, when we have managed to accommodate it within our linguistically ordered world, then everything falls into place, just as it does with a difficult chess problem, where only the solution renders the necessity of the absurd setup intelligible, down to the very last piece on the board.

But does that mean that we understand only when we see through some subterfuge and expose false presumption? Habermas appears to assume so. At the very least, reflection seems to demonstrate its power for him only in such instances—and its powerlessness when we get stuck in the web of language and spin it out further. Indeed, he assumes that reflection, as practiced in the hermeneutical sciences, “upsets the dogmatics of the practical life.” Conversely, it seems to him insupportable and a betrayal of the heritage of the Enlightenment to say that elucidation of the biases inherent in understanding can lead to an acknowledgement of authority—of a dogmatic force! It may well be that conservatism (not the conservatism of Burke’s generation, but that of a generation which has seen three great upheavals in German history, not one of them involving a revolutionary upset of the established social order) lends itself to the recognition of a truth easily overlooked. In any case, it is a desire to throw some light on the problem at hand and not a mere “deep-seated conviction” (174) which leads me to sever authority and reason from the abstract antithetical relationship they have for the Enlightenment, with its emancipatory frame of mind, and to insist instead on their essentially ambivalent relationship.

The Enlightenment's abstract antithesis between authority and reason seems to me to mistake the truth, and to do so with fatal consequences—namely, because one thereupon ascribes a power to reflection which it does not have and so mistakes the true dependencies involved through false idealism. Granted, authority exercises dogmatic force in countless forms, from the system of education, through the chain of command in army and government, to the power structures of political and evangelistic movements. But this view of the obedience rendered to authority can never explain why it should express itself in power structures and not in the disorder which characterizes the exercise of force alone. As I see it, then, there are compelling reasons for viewing acknowledgment as the determining factor in true authority relationships. The question is simply: on what does this acknowledgement rest? In many cases, to be sure, such acknowledgement is really nothing much more than a yielding of the powerless to force, but that is not true obedience and does not rest on authority. One need only study representative instances of the loss or decline of authority to see what authority is and whence it derives its life. Not from dogmatic force, but from dogmatic acknowledgment. What, however, is dogmatic acknowledgment, if not this: that one concedes to authority a superiority in knowledge and judgment and on that ground believes that it is just. On that alone, authority “rests.” It prevails, therefore, not because it is blindly obeyed, but because it is “freely” acknowledged.

It is an undue imputation, though, to suppose that I thought there were no such thing as loss of authority and emancipatory critique. Whether one can really say that loss of authority comes about through emancipatory critique and reflection, or ought to say, instead, that loss of authority manifests itself in critique and emancipation is a question which may be let drop and which perhaps involves a distinction without a difference after all. The point at issue is simply whether reflection always dissolves substantial relationships or can equally well result in their conscious acceptance and adoption. In this regard, my treatment of the process of learning and education (in reference to Aristotelian ethics) is seen by Habermas in a remarkably one-sided way. The notion that, in the educational process, tradition as such should be and remain the sole ground for the assessment of prejudices—a view which Habermas attributes to me—flies directly in the face of my thesis that authority rests on knowledge and understanding. The individual who has come of age can—but need not!—adopt on the basis of insight that which he adhered to out of obedience alone. Tradition itself is no proof of validity, at any rate not in instances where reflection demands proof. But that is the point: where does reflection demand proof? Everywhere? The finiteness of human existence and the intrinsic particularity of reflection seem to me to make that impossible. Ultimately, it is a question of whether the function of reflection is defined in terms of a conscious awareness which confronts current practice and prevailing opinion with other possibilities—so that one can discard something established in favor of other possibilities but can also consciously adopt that which tradition presents him with de facto—or whether reflection and conscious awareness always dissolve the status quo. When Habermas says that “what was mere domination can be stripped from authority [by which I understand: what was not authority in the first place] and dissolved into powerless coercion by insight and rational decision” (176), then I no longer know what we are arguing about. At most, whether the “rational decision” involved can be made (on the strength of what progress!) with the help of one of the social sciences or not. Of that, however, I shall have more to say later on.

From the point of view of a hermeneutical reflection, Habermas's concept of reflection and bringing to consciousness seems heavily burdened by its own dog-matism, and here I could wish that the hermeneutical reflection I have argued for had come into play. From Husserl (in his doctrine of anonymous intentionalities) and from Heidegger (in his demonstration of the ontological abridgement inherent in the idealist concepts of subject and object) we have learned to see through the false objectification with which the concept of reflection is loaded. There is surely an inward reversion of intentionality which in no way raises that which is thus "reflected" upon to the level of a thematic object. Of that, Brentano (drawing on Aristotelian insights) was already aware. I fail to see how one were to grasp the enigmatic mode of existence of language at all, if not on the basis of that assumption. One must (to use J. Lohmann's terms) distinguish between "effective" reflection, which takes place in the unfolding of language itself, and the explicit and thematic reflection which has evolved within the linguistic history of the Western world and which, in that it makes everything into an object, has created, in modern science, the presuppositions of the planetary civilization of tomorrow.

With what extraordinary emotion Habermas defends the empirical sciences against the charge of being an arbitrary language game! Who has challenged their claim to necessity—seen from the point of view of the ability to exercise technical control over nature? At most, the researcher himself will disclaim the technical motivation of his work in the interest of his relationship to the science itself—and with full subjective right. But no one will deny that the practical application of modern science profoundly alters our world, and with it our language. Indeed, "also our language." That in no way means—Habermas's imputations notwithstanding—that the material existence of practical life is determined by the linguistic articulation of consciousness; it means simply that there is no social reality, with all its concrete compulsions, which does not also exhibit itself in a linguistically articulated consciousness. Reality does not happen "behind the back of language" (179); it happens behind the backs of those who live in the subjective opinion that they understand the world (or no longer understand it), and it happens in language as well.

Seen from this point of view, of course, the concept of an “autochthonous” or “natural” order of things—which Marx set in uncritical opposition to the working world of modern class society and which Habermas, too, is fond of using (“the autochthonous substance of tradition,” but also “the causality of autochthonous relationships” [173/4]—takes on a highly questionable aspect. Indeed, that is sheer romanticism—and such romanticism creates an artificial gulf between tradition and reflection grounded in historical consciousness. The “idealism of linguisticality” at least has the distinction of not lapsing into that kind of thinking.

Habermas's critique culminates in an attack on the immanentism of transcendental philosophy, calling it into question by reference to the same historical conditions on which its arguments are based. In fact, a central problem. Anyone who takes the finiteness of human existence seriously and who constructs neither a “consciousness in general” nor an intellectus archetypus or transcendental ego to serve as the repository and reference point for all authority will not be able to avoid the question of how his own thinking, as transcendental, is empirically possible. So far as the hermeneutical dimension I have developed is concerned, however, I see no real difficulty in that respect.

Pannenberg's highly useful discussion of my work $^{14}$ has led me to see what a fundamental difference there is between Hegel's claim to find reason in history and those constantly self-renewing, constantly antiquated conceptions of universal history, in the framing of which one always behaves as if he were "the last historian" (166). To be sure, the nature and validity of Hegel's claim to a philosophy of world history is open to debate. He, too, knew that "the footsteps of our pall-bearers can already be heard at the door," and one can find that, in spite of all one's reservations about world-historical speculation, there is a compelling kind of certainty about the root idea of universal human freedom itself which one can no more dismiss than he can dismiss consciousness itself. All the same, the claim which every historian must make by virtue of his need to tie the meaning of all events to a "today" of his own (and to the future of that "today") is a fundamentally different and much more modest one than Hegel's. No one can deny that history presupposes futurity, and to that extent a conception of universal history is unavoidably one of the dimensions of contemporary historical consciousness, "from a practical point of view." But does it do justice to Hegel to restrict the meaning of his work to an expression of this interpretational need which makes itself felt in every present? "From a practical point of view"—that no one today goes beyond such a claim is understandable in view of the ingrained consciousness of our own finitude and a mistrust of the dictatorship of the concept. But does one seriously want to reduce Hegel to practical terms?

So far as I can see, my discussion with Pannenberg comes to a dead end on this point; for Pannenberg has no desire to renew Hegel's claim either—only it does make a difference, of course, that for the Christian theologian the “practical point of view” involved in every conception of universal history has its fixed point of reference, its “today” so to speak, in the absolute historicity of the Incarnation.

Still the question remains. If the hermeneutical problematic expects to hold its own ground against the universality of rhetoric on the one hand, and the topicality of the critique of ideologies on the other, it must make a case for its own universality, and that precisely over against modern science's claim to absorb hermeneutical reflection into itself and make it subservient to science (through the "methodological cultivation of cleverness"). It will be able to do that only if, instead of taking refuge in the immanence of transcendental reflection, it is able to show in its own right what such reflection accomplishes over against—and not merely within the purview of—modern scientific knowledge.

Because the task of hermeneutical reflection is ultimately the same as that of all other efforts to provide self-conscious awareness of ourselves and our world, its worth will have to make itself felt first of all in terms of its contributions to scholarly and scientific knowledge themselves. Clearly, reflection on a prevailing preconception brings something before me which otherwise happens behind my back. Something—not everything. For effective historical consciousness is inescapably more existence than it is consciousness. That does not mean, however, that it can escape ideological ossification without constantly striving toward self-conscious awareness. Only by virtue of such reflection can I escape being a slave to myself, am I able to judge freely of the validity or invalidity of my preconceptions—even if “freely” means only that from my encounter with a prejudiced view of things I am able to come away with nothing more than yet another conception of them. This implies, however, that the prejudices which govern my preconception are always at stake along with it—to the extent, indeed, of their abandonment, which of course can always mean mere rehabilitation as well. For that is the inexhaustible power of experience, that in every process of learning we constantly form a new preconception.

In the fields which served as the starting point for my hermeneutical studies, the arts and the philological-historical sciences, it is easy to show the kind of effect hermeneutical reflection has. Consider, for example, the way the autonomy of style study in art history has been shaken by hermeneutical reflection on the concept of art—or on the concepts of individual periods and styles; how iconography pressed to the fore from its peripheral position; and the influence hermeneutical reflection on the concepts of experience (Erlebnis) and expression (Ausdruck) has had on literary criticism—if only in the form of a more conscious pursuit of scholarly trends long since emergent. (Interaction is also a form of influence.) It goes without saying that the shaking of fixed prejudices gives promise of an advancement in knowledge, for it makes new questions possible; indeed, we experience on an every day basis what historical scholarship is able to gain from an awareness of the history of ideas. In these fields I hope to have demonstrated how the alienation brought about by historicism is mediated through a “fusing of horizons.” Then, too, thanks to Habermas’s astute observations, the contribution of hermeneutics has made itself felt within the social sciences as well, in particular through a confrontation between the hermeneutical dimension and the preconceptions involved not only in the positivistic philosophy of science but in an aprioristic phenomenology and a universal linguistics as well.

But the function of hermeneutical reflection is not exhausted by the role it plays within the sciences themselves. Inherent in all modern sciences is a deep-rooted alienation, which they impose on natural consciousness and which, in the form of the concept of method, has been a part of reflective consciousness since the formative stage of modern science. Hermeneutical reflection cannot claim to do anything about that; it can, however, by elucidating for the sciences the ruling preconceptions of the moment, uncover new avenues of inquiry and thus indirectly be of service to the work of methodology. And, beyond that, it can bring to consciousness what the methodology of the sciences exacts in payment for the progress it makes possible: how much screening and abstraction it demands, and how, in the process, it leaves natural consciousness perplexed behind it—which nevertheless, in its role as consumer of the inventions and information acquired through science, perpetually follows in its wake. Or, to use Wittgenstein's terms: the “language games” of science remain related to the metalanguage represented by the mother tongue. The findings of science, travelling through modern channels of information and then, after due (many times after unduly great) delay, via the schools and education, become at last a part of the social consciousness. In this way, they give articulation to “socio-linguistic” realities.

For the natural sciences as such, of course, all that is largely irrelevant. The true natural scientist already knows full well how particular is the realm of knowledge encompassed by his field, compared with the whole of human reality. He does not take part in the deification of it which the public forces upon him. And yet that is all the more reasons why the public—and the scientist who goes before the public—stands in need of hermeneutical reflection on the presuppositions and the limits of science. The so-called Humaniora, by contrast, are still able to convey their knowledge to the general consciousness with ease—insofar as they still reach it at all—since the objects of that knowledge belong immediately to the cultural tradition and to the subject matter of conventional education. But the modern social sciences stand in an inherently and peculiarly strained relationship to the object of their knowledge, the social reality—a relationship which has a special need for hermeneutical reflection. For the methodical alienation to which the social sciences are indebted for their progress is brought to bear in their work on the whole of the human and social world, a world which thus finds itself exposed to scientific disposition in planning, management, organization, development—in short, in a multitude of offices which determine from the outside, so to speak, the life of every individual and every group within the society. The social engineer, who looks after the operation of the social machine, thus seems sundered from the society, of which he is nevertheless a member.

Clearly, that is a role which is unacceptable to a hermeneutically reflected sociology. In a lucid analysis of the logic of the social sciences, Habermas has resolutely worked out the distinctive epistemological interest which sets the sociologist apart from the social technician. It is, he says, an emancipatory interest, which aims only at reflection, and he makes reference in this connection to the example of psychoanalysis.

In fact, the role which hermeneutics has to play in the setting of a psychoanalysis is a fundamental one; and since, as I have already emphasized, unconscious motives lie well within the scope of hermeneutical theory—more, since psychotherapy can be described as the work of “unfolding interrupted processes of education into a complete history (which can be recounted)” (189)—hermeneutics and the circle of language, which is closed in conversation, have their place there, as I believe I have learned above all from the work of J. Lacan.

Nevertheless, it is clear that that is not the end of the matter. The categories of interpretation worked out by Freud make a distant but nevertheless real claim to the character of genuine natural-scientific hypotheses—that is, to constitute a knowledge of operative laws. One would expect that to be reflected in the role methodical alienation plays within psychoanalysis, and so it is. Although a successful analysis receives its own validation from the results it produces, the claim to knowledge of psychoanalysis as a discipline is by no means a matter that can be decided on pragmatic grounds alone. That means, however, that it is manifestly open to further hermeneutical reflection. What, it must be asked, is the relationship between the knowledge of the psychoanalyst and his professional position within the social reality, of which he is, after all, a member? That he inquires behind superficial explanations, breaks through obstacles to self-understanding, sees through the repressive effect of social taboos—all these things are part and parcel of the emancipatory reflection in which he engages with his patients. But if he exercises the same kind of reflection in situations and in fields where his role as doctor is not legitimately involved, where he is himself a participant in the social game, then he steps out of his social role. The person who “sees through” his playing partners to something beyond the understandings involved in their relationship—that is, does not take the game they are playing seriously—is a spoilsport whom one avoids. The emancipatory power of reflection to which the psychoanalyst lays claim thus has its limit—a limit which is defined by the larger social consciousness in terms of which analyst and patient alike understand themselves, along with everyone else. For hermeneutical reflection teaches us that social community, with all its tensions and disruptions, leads us back time and again to a social understanding, by virtue of which it continues to exist.

In light of such considerations, however, Habermas's analogy between psychoanalytical and sociological theory becomes problematic. For where is the latter to find its limit? Where in Habermas's scheme of things does the patient stop and the social partnership step in its unprofessional right? Behind and beyond which self-interpretation of the social consciousness—and every custom is such a self-interpretation—appropriate for one to inquire and go (perhaps out of desire for revolutionary change), and which not? Such questions are apparently unanswerable. The inevitable consequence seems to be that the emancipatory consciousness cannot stop short of the dissolution of every obligation to restraint—and thus that its guiding light must be the vision of an anarchistic utopia. This, of course, seems to me a hermeneutically false consciousness.

Notes

1. [Editor's note] Geisteswissenschaften. For a definition of the meaning of this term in the German hermeneutic tradition see "Introduction," pp. 23f.

2. Cf. O. Marquand at the Heidelberger Philosophiekongress 1966.

3. [Editor's note] That is of the human sciences as conceived by the historians of the Romantic era in Germany, for example, Savigny, Schleiermacher, Ranke.

4. [Editor's note] Literally, "consciousness of the history of effects"—consciousness not only of the effect a given work, event, or idea has on subsequent history and thus on the preconceptions of the interpreter, but consciousness as well of the effect produced by the confrontation between the point of view (or "horizon") of the interpreter and that of the material which he attempts to understand. For a more complete explanation of the concept, see the previous selection, pp. 267–73, and the "Introduction" to this volume, p. 38f.

5. [Editor's note] Philosophie und Sprachwissenschaft, Erfahrung und Denken: Schriften zur Förderung der Beziehung zwischen Philosophie und Einzelwissenschaften, 15 (Berlin, 1965).

6. Gnomon XXXVII (1965), pp. 709-18.

7. Göttingische Gelehrten-Anzeigen CCXVII, Heft 3/4 (1966), pp. 169-206.

8. Jürgen Habermas, "Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften," Philosophische Rundschau, Beiheft 5 (1967), pp. 149-80.

9. Hermann Gundert in Hermeneia, Festschrift für Otto Regenbogen—1952.

10. Henri Gouhier, "La résistance au vrai. . . ." in Retorica e Barocco, (ed. E. Castelli; Roma, 1955).

11. [Editor's note] Gadamer uses the English term "the humanities" here.

12. [Editor's note] Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (London, 1958).

13. [Editor's note] See "Introduction" to this volume, p. 21.

14. Wolfhart Pannenberg, "Hermeneutik und Universalgeschichte," in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 60 (1963), pp. 90-121. Eng. trans. in History and Hermeneutik, (ed.

Rob. W. Funk and G. Ebeling; New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 122-52.

15. Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966.

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