Tradition. For the most part, prejudices are borne by traditions.
Gadamer focuses on language-borne traditions, but there are also
traditional practices. We might think of the Muslim practice of prayer or
the playing of the national anthem before sporting events. In either case,
traditions are particular rather than universal, belonging to this society or
culture but not to that one; and the prejudices they transmit inherit this
particularity. Thus the practice in my junior high school of having bibli-
cally based devotions every morning over the loudspeaker system in each
classroom worked to transmit and reinforce the prejudice that we were a
Christian society in spite of the fact that the school in which this transpired
was legally segregated, separate, and unequal.
Method. Enlightenment rationalism, drawing on Descartes and the
emerging scientifi c revolutions, thought that method could neutralize
the effects of traditions and tradition-borne prejudices on our thinking,
making us the voice of universal reason enjoying the view from nowhere.
Gadamer doesn’t have to deny that there is some truth in this. As a Cubs
fan, I see the Mets in a rather Manichaean way. We’re the good guys and
they are the bad guys. But if we are doing chemistry, I expect the Cubs fan
and the Mets fan to get the same results in spite of their prejudices and the
same with Republican and Democratic biologists. What Gadamer notes is
that every method is itself a prejudice, something we bring with us to the
world or the text that, like any perspective, enables us to see some things
and keeps us from seeing others. Moreover, it is a prejudice in the pejo-
rative sense to presuppose that the only reality or the only truth is what
comes to light through the lens of my method. To say that “anything my
net doesn’t catch isn’t a fi sh” is to blind oneself to possible truth. Gadamer
argues that there is truth in the arts that is not discoverable by the meth-
ods of the natural or social sciences. He might have argued the same point
with reference to religious truth.
Conversation. Gadamer does not assume that we are trapped within
the tradition-borne prejudices by which we have been shaped (socialized,
catechized). While we are always somewhere and never nowhere, there
are other locations than our own and we can enter into conversation with
those who see things from where we are not. In this way, we can learn how
things look from other perspectives and, perhaps, enlarge and refi ne our
own horizons. There are, of course, no neutral rules, no simple method
for learning when to take the voice of another seriously, but without nam-
ing him, Gadamer suggests that Nietzsche was right when he said the
22 M. WESTPHAL