Circular Foundations 305infinite and open-ended; yet, he also suggests that this endless ‘give and take’ is the
manner in which we grow and develop (Bildung) as human beings. One aspect of
this is his view of understanding as a ‘fusion of horizons’.^16 A horizon provides a
traditional vista, but it also denotes a restriction—an area within which we can see. A
horizon is thus a ‘standpoint that limits the possibility of vision’ (Gadamer 1979: 269).
To fuse a horizonistherefore, by definition, to expand one’s field of vision.^17 This is
the way in which we grow and deepen our selves. In effect, we critically appropriate
other prejudices, and traditions through dialogue. When I experience and under-
stand another person or text, I bring my horizon (my finite traditions, prejudices,
and interpretations), and I fuse them with another horizon (of finite traditions, pre-
judices and interpretations). The other point to bear in mind here is that no horizon
is fixed, all change and mutate. The outcome of any fusion is therefore unpredictable.
Interlocutors, of course, need, to some degree, to be aware of their historical situation
and must be willing to engage in dialogue. Gadamer links this with the idea of ‘effect-
ive historical consciousness’, for example, the awareness of the inevitability of some
fusion, of one’s own historical finiteness and of the inevitable dynamics of hermen-
eutical experience. Further, what one understands has an immediate effect on what
one does in the world. Understanding is thus linked immediately to practical action.
In accounting for conversation and dialogue, Gadamer uses the analogy of play
or games. If understanding, experience, and the fusion of horizons imply that our
present sense of our own self is unstable and mutable, then we appear to be in danger
of a loss of self, within the play of dialogue (see Gadamer 1977: 51). Changing our
understanding is altering our self, our actions, and our being in the world. In a
dialogue between human beings, this process affects all parties. Genuine dialogue,
understood as play, takes on its own subtle identity, an identity which transcends the
participants. In other words, there is a form of self-forgetfulness, or ‘I-lessness’, in
the play of dialogue. Thus ‘the more language is a living operation, the less we are
aware of it. Thus it follows from this self-forgetfulness of language that its real being
consists in what is said in it’ (Gadamer 1977: 65). The analogy he uses to explain
this forgetfulness isplay, thus ‘the back and forth movement that takes place within
a given field of play does not derive from...playing as a subjective attitude. Quite
the contrary, even for human subjectivity the real experience of the game consists
in the fact that something that obeys its own set of laws gains ascendancy in the
game...The back and forth movement of the game has a peculiar freedom and
buoyancy that determines the consciousness of the player. It goes on automatically—
a condition of weightless balance’. The play of dialogue is not an altercation between
two subjects. It is rather ‘the formation of the movement as such’. To be absorbed
in the play is for Gadamer ‘an ecstatic self-forgetting that is experienced not as aloss
of self-possession, but as the free buoyancy of an elevation above oneself’ (Gadamer
1977: 53–5, 92). Being, as linguistic understanding in dialogue, is therefore a kind
of playing. In a sense, to use, but extend, Wittgensteinian terminology, all human
understanding (and activity) takes place in language games. Being, in a sense, is
serious play, that is, the ‘life of language consists in the constant playing further of the
game that we began when we learned to speak’.^18