Truth and Change - A defense of Gadamer’s hermeneutics

In explaining our consciousness as “historically affected,” Hans-Georg Gadamer employed a positive concept of authority that he thought was necessary to describing methods of understanding. This was a revolutionary thesis that strayed away from the two historically dominant ways of understanding interpretation. Although he employed the concept of authority, which seems unchanging, he used it to explain the explicitly changing nature of truth. Building on the model of “play,” Gadamer showed how historical rules are used and remoulded through interpretation. In art, literature, and law, concepts are re-articulated constantly, all the while embedded in the notion of historical authority. This account was philosophically groundbreaking because it addressed a question that other phenomenological accounts never managed to ask. Whereas past accounts explained the nature of interpretation or made normative claims about interpretation, Gadamer made a claim about truth, as formed through interpretation. Unfortunately, critics of Gadamer have concluded that this revolutionary thesis brings us to a dilemma: we can either forfeit truth to tradition and authority, or reject any criterion of understanding, and thus most phenomenological accounts. This line of thought can be drawn from some feminist critiques, which argue that Gadamer’s approach is either hostile to feminist theory, or simply useless. Unfortunately, these critics have oversimplified Gadamer’s account. They have placed it in a list of accounts of interpretation, alongside views that Gadamer vehemently rejects, such as those of Dilthey and Schleiermacher. The argument advanced in Truth and Method is much more than another phenomenological account. It is more accurately an account of the concept of truth, rather than just interpretation. Oversimplifying Gadamer’s project leads these critics to ignore the fact that the theory fuses both tradition and the development of the present. Thus, it situates itself above and beyond the horns of the dilemma that these critics force us to choose between. It is neither authoritarian nor vacuous. Rather, it accepts past authority and necessitates a new criterion. I give that criterion the name of “change” and explain that it is fundamentally malleable, though still constant. This perplexing nature is exactly what Gadamer hoped to illustrate with the concept of conversation. Though both entities within a conversation hold stagnant authority and tradition, they re-articulate these notions through the interaction. Obviously, we are not accounting for either of their interpretations, as other phenomenological accounts do. We are instead accounting for the conversation as a whole, which exists on a different level than the criticisms assign to Gadamer’s theory. They exist on the level of truth. Critics who abhor Gadamer’s thesis as a forfeit to authority misunderstand the author, and themselves fall prey to the mistakes laden in any attempt of trying to grasp an author’s perspective objectively – while merging the author’s prompts with their own histories of anti-authority intuition. Their accounts are informative, but are themselves embedded in a tradition. In this essay, I re-emphasize Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” as a theory of truth held far apart from the criticisms of conservatism and apathy which critics have laid against him