The Review of Metaphysics

I

Philosophical Hermeneutics "takes as its task the opening up of the hermeneutical dimension in its full scope, showing its fundamental significance for our entire understanding of the world in all its forms."¹ By this Hans-Georg Gadamer means that his philosophical hermeneutics is a theory not just of textual interpretation, but of how we understand and find meaningful the world in all its richness. This is an ambitious project, and it has rightfully attracted attention from both adherents and detractors since its initial articulation in Truth and Method (1960). Chief among the criticisms raised against philosophical hermeneutics is the "specter" of relativism.² Indeed, philosophical [End Page 751] hermeneutics seems to entail relativism in just about every sphere of human experience that it propounds to explain. In the eyes of many it reduces to subjective caprice our understanding of laws, artworks, texts, history, and even language itself.

This article will not weigh in on these debates assessing the extent and tenability of relativism in Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Instead, I take as my starting point a claim to which nearly all in the debate should agree, namely, that Gadamer is committed to "relativism" insofar as he holds that our grasp of the truth necessarily depends on, and so is in some sense relative to, our particular historical situation. As Gadamer himself puts it: "[I]t is not only the case that when we recognize truth we always simultaneously cover and forget truth, rather it is the case that we are of necessity caught within the limits of our hermeneutical situation when we inquire into truth."³ Whatever else Gadamer might mean here, at the very least he is claiming that our understanding something to be true depends on our hermeneutical situation, and that situation for him is inescapably historical. This historicity thesis is central to his philosophical hermeneutics, and on account of that thesis alone the theory can be considered relativist.⁴ [End Page 752] Like other relativist claims, Gadamer's historicity thesis is subject to self-refutation arguments. Self-refutation arguments aim to show that a claim or argument somehow contradicts itself and is therefore self-refuting. Gadamer's thesis appears to contradict itself insofar as its assertion that every knowledge claim is historically conditioned seems to assert an absolute, unconditionally true knowledge claim. Whether or not the thesis is, indeed, self-refuting is a question that does not seem to have exercised many—perhaps because readers have been more troubled by other specters of relativism in Gadamer's thought. The question is still worth asking, though, since the historicity thesis is fundamental to philosophical hermeneutics.

Gadamer himself was well aware that his historicity thesis might be regarded as self-refuting, and in several passages he responds to this charge. Unfortunately, as we will see, his responses are rather brief and difficult to understand, and as a result they have been either neglected or inadequately understood.⁵ But given the fundamentality of his historicity thesis, we should nevertheless attempt to get clearer on how Gadamer addresses this charge of self-refutation. Only then can we justifiably decide whether philosophical hermeneutics deserves outright acceptance or rejection. [End Page 753]

II

The difficulties in understanding Gadamer's response to the charge of self-refutation become apparent in the following passage from Truth and Method :

Even if, as people who know about history, we are fundamentally aware that all human thought about the world is historically conditioned, and thus are aware that our own thought is conditioned too, we still have not assumed an unconditional standpoint. In particular it is no objection to affirming that we are thus fundamentally conditioned to say that this affirmation is intended to be absolutely and unconditionally true, and therefore cannot be applied to itself without contradiction. The consciousness of being conditioned does not supersede our conditionedness. It is one of the prejudices of reflective philosophy that it understands as a relation of propositions [Sätzen] that which is not at all on the same logical level. Thus, the reflective argument is out of place here. For we are not dealing with relationships between judgments to...