As Gadamer notes, linguisticality is deeply embedded in the whole ‘sociality of human
existence’, Gadamer (1977: 20).
Learning to speak ‘means acquiring a familiarity and acquaintance with the world itself
and how it confronts us’, Gadamer (1977: 63).
‘If we seek to illuminate this history we may be able to make ourselves conscious of it
and overcome some of the prejudices which have determined us’, Gadamer in Hahn (ed.)
(1997: 95).
The basic idea ofBildungfor Gadamer is that ‘Every single individual that raises himself
out of his natural being to the spiritual finds in the language, customs and institutions of
his people a pre-given body of material which, as in learning to speak, he has made his
own’. Thus, every individual, wittingly or unwittingly, is engaged in aBildungprocess in
getting beyond naturalness, Gadamer (1979: 15).
Like Heidegger (and Habermas to a limited degree) he is critical of important
aspects of the occidental philosophical tradition as it developed from the seventeenth
century.
A similar theme was explored and used by Lyotard, see Part Four, Chapter Eight.
As mentioned earlier, Gadamer’s argument would be far less effective here against post-
positivist theories of science.
‘My only concern...was to secure a theoretical basis that would enable us to deal with
the basic factor of contemporary culture, namely, science and its industrial, technological
utilization’, Gadamer (1977: 11).
The manner that Gadamer speaks of this is almost equivalent to a continuous Popperian
falsification, each experience falsifies what we thought we knew.
He took the term ‘fusion of horizons’ from Edmund Husserl.
Gadamer admits that this idea of an horizon is, to a degree, illusory. In practice, there
are no hard and fast lines between horizons. Past horizons, prejudices, and traditions are
inevitably implicit within our present horizons, see Gadamer (1979: 271). However, the
notion of an horizon does nonetheless serve an heuristic function.
In dialogue we repeatedly move into the ‘thought worlds’ of others; the play of dialogue is
not a total loss of self, conversely, it is a dialectical ‘enrichment’, see Gadamer (1977: 56–7).
Gadamer refers to play, at one point, as ‘sacredly serious’, see Gadamer (1977: 92).
‘The real event of understanding goes beyond what we can bring to the understanding of
the other person’s words through methodical effort and critical self-control. Indeed, it goes
far beyond what we ourselves can become aware of. Through every dialogue something
different comes to be’, Gadamer (1977: 57–8).
Other than of course the usual human resort to violence.
We acknowledge our embeddedness in thick cultures ‘and if we want nonetheless to
monitor the ethical trajectory on which they seem to place us, then we must assume
that other thick cultures and other understandings of our own trajectory can speak to us
and teach us about ourselves. We assume that our ethical knowledge is prejudiced, his-
torically conditioned, and incomplete and that the ethical knowledge of others is at least
potentially capable of expanding our ethical understanding. We monitor and check on the
adequacy of our ethical knowledge and culture not by thinning either into a procedure for
validating norms that can hold for anyone but rather by comparing the norms and values
that hold for us against other thick possibilities of what we might believe and be’, Warnke
in Dostal (ed.) (2002: 95).
As Gadamer comments ‘I affirm the hermeneutical fact that the world is the medium of
human understanding, but it does not lead to the conclusion that cultural tradition should
