Circular Foundations 309Second, in fusing our horizons in genuine dialogue, we are prepared to listen to
another, to vacate, or to mutate our own assumptions, and thus to detach ourselves,
in play, from our own interests. In the third sense, Gadamer’s notion of conversation
as a buoyant play, which detaches the players from their selves, achieves something
very similar to Rawls’s procedural veil of ignorance, or Habermas’s ideal speech situ-
ation. However, Gadamer is closer to Habermas on this point, in suggesting that
the normative constraints on rationality are implicit in the process of genuine dia-
logue and conversation. Fourth, if all ethical and political experience, by definition,
is negative for Gadamer, then it preventsanymoral or political absolutes or dog-
mas being cultivated. Political and ethical dialogue becomes a creative, open-ended
series of challenges. Ethical and political norms—almost in a Popperian sense of
falsification—become permanently open to critical challenge and dialogue. Ethical
and political experience, then becomes something (by definition), which raises doubts
in us about the validity of existing norms. This sense of the rational open-ended fallib-
ility, built into the integuments of dialogue both about, and within ethics and politics,
is reinforced by Gadamer’s sense of the infinite possibilities of interpretation. This
opens up the whole sphere of practical judgement and reason (phronesis). Whereas in
postmodernism the spaces, which open up here, in the signifiers, remain unresolved,
in Gadamer differences can be dynamically and creatively fused. There is a dialectic
of growth, change, and psychological maturity in individuals.
In the above sense, ethical theory, and indeed political theory, can be viewed
as a form of pragmatics (see Warnke in Dostal (ed.) 2002: 82ff.). Gadamer is not
offering us a deductive, universalist, or objective perspective, conversely, it is one
based upon what is implicit in substantive actual human dialogue—oncewe grasp
that being in the world is within language and dialogue, and that no language actually
represents the world, but rather circles back continuously into its own fallible and
finite fore-understanding and traditions. As Warnke observes, ‘At work is a dialogue
of ethical cultures and understandings in which each addresses and is addressed
by the claims of the other and in which each provides for the other the check of
ethical knowledge...We possess this check not through recourse to thin moralities,
however, but through an openness to thick ethical cultures’ (Warnke in Dostal (ed.)
2002: 94).
Ethical and political theory, in the above sense, both observes and creates the
communicative disposition to act in certain ways which can be described,ex post
facto, as virtuous. Thus, the arguments and claims deployed by Gadamer do not
substantively describe an ethical or political disposition, but, they rather create the
pragmatic conditions for an ethical demeanour and for certain forms of politics to
be realized and practised. We reflect and conjecture how to act in a dialogic, finite,
and fallible setting.^22 It is clear that the arguments discussed about, for example, the
hermeneutic circle, the play of dialogue, and the intrinsic negativity of experience,
would not be conducive to many more rigid ideological perspectives on politics,
deployed during the twentieth century. It would, though, be conducive to a view
of politics which was, for example, non-absolutist, profoundly self-critical, open-
ended, open to alternative understandings, procedurally fair and egalitarian, and