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Gadamer (1900-2002) considers truth in the Heideggerian terms of unconcealedness against the backdrop of concealment. Truth for Heidegger is aletheia, or unconcealedness. It is not a set of fixed ideas, but a dynamic process of emergence, a conflict between concealment and unconcealedness. “A primary mystery which shrouded all things belongs to the background which all ‘uncovering' …of ‘truth' has taken and is taking place” (Heidegger, “Essence of Truth” 313; “Origin” 15-88). For Gadamer as well as Heidegger, the lifeworld is forever receding from the grasp of methodical man. Truth is not to be possessed once and for all but always to be reached dialectically.

Experience, hermeneutical experience in particular, is always a dialectical event. Gadamer's dialectical movement of experience is different from Hegel's in two ways. First, experience for the former is “non-objectified, non-objectifiable accumulation of ‘understanding'” while the latter defines it as “the self-objectification of consciousness” (Palmer 194). Secondly, for Gadamer, experience has its fulfillment not in the knowing (of the Absolute) but in an openness for experience. “True experience is the experience of negation…[It] has the structure of a reversal of consciousness and hence it is a dialectical moment” (Gadamer, Truth and Method 318). As historical beings, we can never attain a transcendent or purely objective stance outside of history. Our understanding is at the same time conditioned by history and negated by present encounters. Therefore, we are involved in ceaseless dialectic relations with both past and present surroundings. In other words, the hermeneutical circle[1] in which we find ourselves is not only between ourselves and the things encountered, but also in our understanding itself: just as our understanding of the whole of a text and that of its parts determine each other, so do our understanding and our prejudice.

The basic reason for this hermeneutic circle, then, is our limited range of vision—in Gadamer's terms, our horizon. We each have different horizons and view things differently. Our horizons, theoretically, are always in motion. But some people's horizons may be narrow and self-enclosed, refusing to open themselves or allowing the penetration of other horizons as negating forces. Some have relatively broader horizons, open to negation and being broadened by it.

What is always at risk in experience is our prejudices. “To exist historically,” says Gadamer, “means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete. All self-knowledge proceeds from what is historically pre-given” (Truth and Method 269). The “pre-given,” namely, our prejudices, are formed based on our previous experiences, understanding as well as the tradition we belong to. According to Gadamer, “prejudice (Vorurteil) is not completely a pejorative term as we normally understand it. Vorurteil can also be translated as “prejudgment.” As Richard Berstein points out, however, this translation, though more neutral than “prejudice,” would weaken the strong claim that Gadamer wants to make in analyzing the predetermined structure of one's understanding (127). There are prejudices that imprison us and hinder us from true understanding, but there are also positive or constructive ones that enhance our understanding. The negative as well as the positive prejudices together prescribe our understanding as such. They are “biases of our openness to the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something—whereby what we encounter says something to us” (Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics 8).

Understanding is thus “the dialectical process of interaction of the self-understanding of the person (his ‘horizon' and his ‘world') with what is encountered”(Palmer 183). This hermeneutical circle between one's prejudices and the thing encountered is by no means a vicious one. In the process of understanding, we may not have the same prejudices always at work. Instead, we can constantly give up our false ones and form new ones. In other words, a fusion of horizons takes place through our dialectical understanding, which “transforms an implicit ‘mine' into an authentic ‘mine,' makes an inadmissible ‘other' into a genuine ‘other' and thus assimilable in its otherness” (“Problem” 158). We can thus acquire a broadened horizon, which means that we “[learn] 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” (Truth and Method 272).

“In the last analysis, all understanding is self-understanding, but not in the sense of a preliminary self-possession or of one finally definitely achieved” (Philosophical Hermeneutics 55). This self-understanding will not fall into subjectivism, because it is through ‘the other' that we come to understand ourselves. Nor will the understanding be final, since, with it, we are/should be open for more experiences and thus will continue to know more about ourselves. In other words, through the dialectic process of understanding, we gradually increase our “maturity in experience which places [us] in proper openness to the future and to the past” (Palmer 197). This maturity is the essence of the “historically operative consciousness,” or effective historical consciousness, which “takes account of its own historicity” and is marked for its “openness to other” (Gadamer, Truth and Method 324).

Comparing the hermeneutical act to a dialogue, Gadamer points out that “dialectic is the art of questioning” (Truth and Method 330) The text questions us with its foreignness to our horizon. “In order to answer this question,” Gadamer maintains, “we must attempt to reconstruct the question to which the transmitted text is the answer” (Truth and Method 337).

Berstein, Richard. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.

Heidegger, Martin. “On the Essence of Truth.” Existence and Being. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949.

---. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language and Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

---. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976.

---. “The Problem of Historical Consciousness.” Interpretive Social Science: A Reader. Ed. P. Rabinow and W. M. Sullivan. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979.

[1] The hermeneutical circle is, in short, the circle between our understanding of a part (i.e. a text detail or an author's work), and that of its wholeness (i.e. the text or the author), and between our pre-understanding and understanding. The concept can be traced back to Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834), and Friedrich Ast (1778-1841), who influenced Schleiermacher. For Ast, there are three levels of understanding a work: the historic, the grammatical and the geistige—the spirit of a work as is related to the general spirit of the age. The hermeneutical circle is formed on each level, as well as in between (Palmer 76-78). With Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was brought from that of specific disciplines such as theology, law and literature, to a general hermeneutics which both emphasizes the dialogic nature of understanding and discovering systems and laws of interpretation (Palmer 94). Schleiermacher emphasizes grammatical and psychological interpretation. The whole on the grammatical level can be a sentence, whose meaning depends on the meaning of each individual word in it. On the psychological level, interpretation aims at constructing the whole of the author's “individuality” or “genius” through the part--his individual works (Palmer 88-90). Schleiermacher's work on general hermeneutics is then followed up by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), who placed hermeneutics in “the horizon of historicality” and “laid the foundations for Heidegger's thinking on the temporality of self-understanding” (Palmer 123). For Dilthey, the hermeneutical circle is always historically defined, and the object of understanding is “meaning,” but not the author's mind or God's messages. Meaning is historical and contextual(it changes with time and in different contexts); thus the whole which determines the part can be the text's various kinds of historical contexts. For Dilthey, however, meaning is not provisional or free-floating as it is for some postructuralists, since the ultimate “whole” is life, or “lived experience.” Dilthey believes that meaning is “imminent in the texture of life,” and “to understand meaning involves entering into a real, not imaginary, relationship with the forms of objectified ‘spirit' [Geist] found everywhere about us” (Palmer 118-20). Hermeneutics is brought to ontology by Heidegger (understanding being part of the temporal process of being), and further elaborated by Gadamer with his concepts of dialectical hermeneutics, the subject of this article (or give the article title if this entry appears separately). The hermeneutical circle happens because there is no presuppositionless (or prejudice-less) understanding, and it happens in the form of dialogue or fusion of horizons.