318 The Nature of Political Theory
be absolutized and fixed.... The principle of hermeneutics simply means that we should
try to understand everything that can be understood’, Gadamer (1977: 31).
- Wittgenstein ‘remained positivistic enough to think of this training process as the repro-
duction of fixed pattern, as though socialized individuals were wholly subsumed under
their language and activities. The language game congeals in his hands into an opaque
oneness’, Habermas (1996b: 148–9).
- ‘Hermeneutic self-reflection goes beyond the sociolinguistic level of linguistic analysis
marked out by the later Wittgenstein’, Habermas (1996b: 148).
- ‘Because hermeneutics understanding itself belongs to the objective context that is reflected
in it, its overcoming of temporal distance should not be thought of as a construction of the
knowing subject. The continuity of tradition has in fact already bridged the interpreter’s
distance from his object’, Habermas (1996b: 153).
- ‘Reflection does not wear itself out on the facticity of traditional norms without leaving a
trace’, Habermas (1996b: 170).
- In his later writings in the 1990s the psychoanalytic component quietly drops out. Ideology
stays, but is less emphasized.
- ‘I cannot accept the assertion that reason and authority are abstract antitheses, as the
emancipatory Enlightenment did. Rather, I assert that they stand in a basically ambivalent
relation which I think should be explored rather than casually accepting the antithesis’,
Gadamer (1977: 33).
- What is in dispute with Habermas is ‘whether reflection always dissolves substantial
relationships or is capable of taking them up into consciousness’, Gadamer (1977: 34).
