THE HISTORICITY OF UNDERSTANDING : A CRITICAL STUDY OF HANS-GEORG GADAMER'S PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS

Abstract

Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics marks an important tum in the history of hermeneutics. Steering away from the common preoccupation with methods to understanding, it sought instead an understanding of understanding itself and thus initiated a radical re-definition of the hermeneutical task. Gadamer's hermeneutics is focused upon the unravelling of the nature of understanding and the conditions for it, which project led him to maintain the historicity of understanding. This thesis is precisely concerned with Gadamer's assertion of the historicity of understanding. It attempts to address the questions of how this view was derived, what it involves and implies. Basically, there are two parts to this dissertation. Part I is devoted to an exploration of Gadamer's account of the historicity of understanding: its origins and its specific claims, while Part II serves to draw out its implications. As Gadamer himself admits, his understanding of understanding was adapted from Heidegger's phenomenological insights on being and understanding. The latter's views on being as situated and temporal form the basis for both his own and Gadamer's convictions of understanding as situationally relative and historically effected. Understanding as such, Gadamer notes, requires our openness to what the interpretive situation discloses and allows. In addition to that, he also sees understanding as the work of history which transcends all our self-imposed methodological efforts. The kind of openness towards a text as recommended by Gadamer seems to me to pose the problem of whether his philosophical hermeneutics is not yet another hermeneutical theory, rather than just a pure description of the process of understanding. Besides this, I am also interested in the question of what the historicity of understanding implies in regard to the issue of truth- particularly, if Gadamer's conclusions pertaining to truth and understanding are really the best we can settle for.