Understanding Gadamer and “The Hermeneutic Circle”

Lecture notes prepared by: Duane Allyson G. Pancho

I. INTRODUCTION
Imagine reading a book for the very first time. You pick it up, and you begin to leaf
through it. Before you dive into the main contents of the book, you first go through the
blurb, or the summary at the back. You say to yourself, “Ah, so this is a mystery novel.”
What ideas come to your mind as you think of a mystery novel? You probably think to
yourself: did someone die? Are they investigating a crime? Will they solve this mystery?
How will they do it? And then you begin to read the main contents of the book.
You realize, along the way, that you have to adjust your expectations. The mystery
does not involve someone’s death; the mystery revolves around a missing-persons case.
But you are right: in the book, they are, in fact, investigating a crime. And from one page to
the next, your idea of the book gets confirmed, changed, modified, confirmed again, denied,
but ultimately, changed, modified, again and again. At the same time, your reading of the
book invites you, in a way, to change the text, too---as you use the text’s insights and lessons
to reflect on your own life. You think to yourself: “I realized that it’s important to value
every moment; after all, I never know what’s going to happen next to me, or to the ones I
love.” In very broad strokes one might say that such an insight has already ‘added’ to the
text. Through the acts of reading, interpreting, re-interpreting the text (all of which happen
simultaneously), both you and the text have been changed. Neither you nor the text will
ever be the same again.

II. THE HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE AND THE PROBLEM OF PREJUDICES

Given the above example, we can then work our way backwards and raise the
necessary question: how is it possible for us to understand anything at all? Still going by the
earlier example, we can take a hint and see how understanding is not a one-time thing. It
involves a process, or, more precisely, a set of processes, that is in itself never-ending.
Heidegger also encountered the same problem: how indeed does understanding
take place? However, where Heidegger aims to understand ‘understanding’ in order to
understand the Being of beings, Gadamer, on the other hand, looks to the hermeneutical
process (or the process of interpretation) in order to shed light on the historicity of the
understanding.
With this, we see how the two philosophers both treat of the faculty of
understanding, but in different directions. Heidegger pursues an understanding of
understanding in order to shed light on (human) Being, while Gadamer begins with
interpretation in order to show that understanding is always within a historical context,
and thus the one who understands always comes from a particular standpoint or position
in time and space.
a) Heidegger’s disclosure of the fore-structure of understanding

Heidegger grounds the faculty of understanding in the temporality of Dasein. 1 First,

let us take a look at the ‘temporality of Dasein.’ This temporality means that the human
being is always within a particular context, always within a particular position within space
and time. You can think of yourself as an example: when you came to exist, you did not
come to exist in a vacuum. You always already existed as a specific person, from a specific
cultural, familial, periodical background and orientation. You are born into a world, with its
own sets of practices, tools, and meanings. This world, into which you are born, then forms
and gives flesh to the ‘person’ that you are, as well as to how you ‘understand’ things.
However, this fore-structure of understanding does not immediately equate to
infallibility. In short, just because you were raised to think in a particular way does not
mean you are right. In order to be sure, one must take the effort to constantly ‘verify’ one’s
beliefs and claims. Heidegger proposes that one must return to the things themselves. 2
With this, one can imagine a back and forth process that takes place – from one’s
prejudgments to the things themselves, and back again.
This back and forth process is precisely the hermeneutic circle, wherein the
involvement is between one’s prejudices and the object or the text itself. As the process
continues, you then see how the circle gets bigger in circumference, accommodating more
ideas or truths, while at the same time excluding those that do not belong to what is being
understood.
The process that Heidegger describes is that every revision of the fore-projection is
capable of projecting before itself a new projection of meaning; rival projects can
emerge side by side until it becomes clearer what the unity of meaning is;
interpretation begins with fore-conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones.
This constant process of new projection constitutes the movement of understanding
and interpretation…3
You can see, through the above quote from Gadamer, that the hermeneutic circle,
very briefly, is the movement between our fore-conceptions and our interpretation. The
fore-conceptions are formed through our temporality and context, while the more suitable
interpretations are formed as we engage more and more with the things themselves. This
can be related to your experience of the seminary. You probably entered the seminary with
pre-conceptions and prejudgments of what it is like – music, basketball, bonding, food, etc.
But of course, years into your formation, experiencing the seminary life itself, you probably

1
Gadamer, “The Hermeneutic Circle,” in Epistemology: The Big Questions. p. 232A.
2
Ibid., p.233A.
3
Ibid., p.233B.
felt that you were ‘pulled up short by the text’ 4 – the meaning you receive does not coincide
with the meaning you were expecting. And then, you begin to realize that there’s more to
seminary life than what you used to think. There is prayer, community life, there is
ministry, service to other people, putting up with other people’s expectations, personalities,
temperaments, and many other factors which you did not necessarily take into account in
the beginning.
We must note, however, that our prejudgments, our prejudices, are not necessarily
wrong, which means we must not immediately reject them. Our prejudgments are products
of where we are in the world, meaning they are valid starting points in the process of
understanding. This is why interpretation then becomes the ‘first, last, and constant task,’ 5.
It is the first, because our prejudgments must always be confronted by the things
themselves, it is the last, because the end of interpretation is still interpretation, and it is
constant, because the hermeneutic circle will always only keep widening itself.
As Gadamer says, ‘all understanding inevitably involves some prejudice,’ 6 which
now points us to something we did not really expect. We were trained to look at prejudice
with suspicion, as though prejudice is something that mars or blocks our correct judgment
of a person or situation. Gadamer, on the other hand, leads us to the kind of thinking about
prejudice as ‘enabling’ – meaning our capacity to think and judge goes hand in hand, or is
formed by our prejudice.
So, why is there a negative attitude towards prejudice? For this, Gadamer pins the
blame on the Enlightenment.

b) The discrediting of prejudice by the enlightenment

The Enlightenment period was a period that discredited prejudice. According to
Gadamer, if there is one prejudice that defines the Enlightenment period, it is its prejudice
against prejudice.7 Gadamer even traces the roots of the word that we assign to it:
‘prejudice’, and finds that both the Latin and the French words hold negative implications. 8
The Enlightenment period distinguishes between prejudice that is brought about by
our faith in the expertise of others and prejudice brought about by our overhastiness in
judgment.9 This means that we can be guilty of prejudice because we became too
dependent on the expertise of others, or because we were too quick to judge without really
looking at and into the situation. Either way, our prejudice has hindered us from making a
true and correct judgment.

4
Gadamer, p.233D.
5
Gadamer, p.233A.
6
Gadamer, p.235C.
7
Gadamer, p.235C.
8
Gadamer, p.235D.
9
Gadamer, p.236C.
 Think of the most dreaded disease today – contracting the Corona virus. On one end
of the spectrum, there are those who rely on doctors’ judgments about what to do: wash
your hands, avoid going out, drink a lot of water, make sure that you have sufficient intake
of vitamins and minerals. However, if you ask a person why he or she is doing it, the only
answer they can give is: because the doctor says so. On the other hand, there are also those
who choose to depend on the Facebook posts of other people, panic-buying tissue rolls and
alcohol because everyone else is doing it. And if you ask them why they do what they do,
they will say it’s because everyone else is doing it. Either way, one is not making a very
sound judgment at all.
Kant would then propose that we use our own reason. For Kant, and his brothers in
the Enlightenment period (think of Descartes, as well), to be swayed by the opinions of
experts or of the majority is to fail to use one’s capacity to reason. One must resist dogmatic
declarations, ultimately because one must think for oneself. Prejudice, according to the
Enlightenment, is a hindrance to correct judgment, because in being driven by prejudice,
one is not really doing the thinking, but one is allowing either expertise or the crowd to do
the thinking for her or him.
However, Gadamer sheds light on a necessary insight – the Enlightenment’s position
against prejudice is, in fact, a prejudice, too. 10 And if the goal is to get rid of prejudice, then
the Enlightenment will be caught up in a vicious and rather meaningless cycle.

III. PREJUDICES AS CONDITIONS OF UNDERSTANDING

What Gadamer proposes, then, is to view prejudice as a condition for understanding.
It is necessary to understand, at this point, that to Gadamer, following Heidegger, reason is
always in a historical position. The human faculty to think and judge, grounded in the
Dasein, is always grounded in a particular position in time. Kant, for example, was able to
think the way he thought primarily because of the conditions of his time, the issues that
were considered problematic in his time.11
Given this picture, we can then say that we can understand, interpret, and judge,
precisely because we come from somewhere; our judgments are all situated. Hence, we all
have our prejudices, and these prejudices make possible our capacity to make sense of a
text, a person, a life. Hence, says Gadamer: “That is why the prejudices of the individual, far
more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.” 12 It is not reasoned
judgment that is most basic or fundamental; instead, it is our prejudice that takes the more
fundamental level of our being.

a) The rehabilitation of authority and tradition

10
Gadamer, p.239B.
11
Gadamer, p.239C.
12
Gadamer, p.239D.
 We now come to understand how authority (or expertise) and tradition play
important roles in our understanding and interpretation. Our belief in expertise is
legitimate, because those who are experts have come a long way to get to where they are.
At the same time, tradition must not be rejected, because our relationship to the past is not
something that we can outright reject or deny. Because our existence is temporal, we
cannot deny that there are those who have come before us, have studied long before we did
(experts), and there are ways of life and doing things that have been established long
before we came to exist (tradition).
Once again, we can imagine the movement of the hermeneutic circle. Our prejudices,
whether formed with respect to authority or to tradition, or both, are always subject to the
‘things themselves,’ or the issue at hand, but at the same time the issue at hand will also
always be subject to prejudice. There is then no end to this hermeneutic circle of
understanding and interpretation, which then constitutes human knowing and, therefore,
human living.

Cristian: used his example

Patrick: not sabog

Go back to Heidegger’s original intention: to understand the being of the person

Differentiate problem of Gadamer and Heidegger

How can anything be wrong or right?

Context sa panahon
How can anything be moral?
Ongoing always ang process of knowing and interpretation.

Circular structure from the temporality of Dasein

Biases/prejudice, rooted in environment, but not just place, also time

Certainty: moral law: is there any certain authority

Knowing a thing: certainty may be possible
Tackle uses: we can have many possible interpretations
Expertise as authority
But no expert for determining use of things
We can know what things are, but I cannot know absolutely what it is for?

Go back to the thing itself: tama pod

‘necessity’ of the time

Things were made for a certain purpose, but we cannot limit

Dula?

How about people who underwent accidents and suffered amnesia?

Is it possible to have an original idea about myself?

Descartes
Does it mean that maybe Descartes’ driving force is his prejudice?
Yes definitely going by Gadamer

Agree with what was said

Online classes: rooted in context, too, social distancing, etc
But in other days: lain na paminawon