1

Hermeneutical Naïveté:
Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Historiography of Science

Charles J. Sentell
University of Cambridge
Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine
21 March 2005

From the beginning of the hermeneutic tradition, one of the primary aims of its practitioners
has been the articulation of a method that would render true interpretations of past texts and
events. Many such attempts have focused on diminishing or eliminating the various ways in
which present concepts and understandings obfuscate interpretations of the past. One of the
most recent and significant contributions to this tradition comes with the work of Hans-Georg
Gadamer, who challenges this traditional focus by radically expanding the scope and function
of hermeneutical inquiry. In this essay, I explore the implications of Gadamer’s
hermeneutics for the historiography of science in particular, and historical studies more
generally. In order to accomplish this, I examine a recent debate within the historiography of
science over a set of issues known as the problems of anachronism and presentism. My
thesis is that, by over emphasizing actor intentionality as the key to establishing a general
historiographical method, many recent discussions of these problems within the literature
exhibit a remarkable degree of hermeneutical naïveté. My aim in this essay, therefore, is to
show just how these debates over anachronism and presentism exhibit such naïveté, and how
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics works to dissolve such issues. Through my analysis,
I also hope to show how Gadamer’s hermeneutics reformulates the conception of the
historian’s task in general.
I.
Most generally, the problem of anachronism involves determining the extent to which it is
acceptable to employ categories – cognitive, social, theoretical, and otherwise – that were not
available to, or used by, agents in the past. The problem of presentism is related, but more
precisely involves using present knowledge or theories to guide our investigations or frame
our explanations of past actors and their actions. Both are interpretive or hermeneutic
problems, and, at least within the history of science, are often traced back to the
historiographical work of Herbert Butterfield. In his 1931 The Whig Interpretation of
History, Butterfield labelled “Whiggish” the then prevalent practice of interpreting the
history of English constitutionalism as the unfettered march of progress from the Magna
 2

Carta to modern parliamentary democracy. And while Butterfield’s own use of the term was
somewhat inconsistent, the thrust of his argument was directed against present-centered
history, which he contrasted with more “historical” modes of inquiry that sought to
understand past actors on their own terms and with their own categories, rather than with
current conceptions and the retrospective vantage point occupied by historians.1 Butterfield
said, “The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all
sins and sophistries in history, starting with the simplest of them, the anachronism.”2 So
Butterfield laid the groundwork for identifying as spurious those historiographies that failed
to account for the contingency and alterity of the historical past: history does not consist of
the inevitable march of events leading to the present, nor do past concepts or beliefs
seamlessly map onto current ones, even if they do retain the same name.
Following this line, Quentin Skinner in 1969 picked up on some of these themes and
reinvigorated the debate within intellectual history. Skinner argued that there were entire sets
of “mythologies” about the causal efficacy and systematic intensions of thinkers and their
thoughts that taint the historian’s perspective and result in attributing to past actors
impossible positions and beliefs. The “mythology of parochialism,” for example, involves a
“historical foreshortening” whereby the “observer may ‘see’ something apparently (rather
than really) familiar in the course of studying an alien argument, and may in consequence
provide a misleadingly familiar-looking description.”3 For Skinner, describing past agents’
actions in terms they would not recognize themselves is to commit the methodological sin of
historical anachronism. All of Skinner’s “mythologies” concerned such sins, and the crux of
his thesis was that “no agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which
he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done.”4
Skinner aims to establish a methodology that would render the true meaning of past texts and
actions based on the social context in which they were made. The central goal in route to this
method is “recovering the intentions” of past authors, which are situated within a socio-
linguistic framework that makes possible the meaning of any given utterance. For Skinner,
interpretation and understanding, insofar as they aim to be correct, are properly concerned

1
Jardine (2003), p. 126
2
Butterfield (1931), p. 31-2
3
Skinner (1969), p. 24-5
4
Skinner (1969), p. 29
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with reconstructing these intentional contexts and making them the basis for the
interpretation of texts.
More recently, Andrew Cunningham has put forward a similar intentionality-based
thesis. The crux of Cunningham’s argument turns upon identifying science as a specific,
actor-defined, intentional activity, which he intends to use as a criterion for the material that
can be legitimately included within the history of science.5 According to Cunningham,
science, as an intentional activity, began somewhere between 1780 and 1850.6 Thus,
including material before that period within the history of science amounts to a present-
centered history that imposes present categories upon past activities that the agents
themselves would not have recognized. In the course of his argument, Cunningham rightly
eschews the idea that the history of science concerns tracing the development of “how ‘the
Truth’ became visible to men” and asserts, rather, that science is a “human activity, wholly a
human activity, and nothing but a human activity.”7 But Cunningham then turns to claim that
this human activity can only be understood, at least if we are to do “history historically”, by
adhering to past actor’s categories. To do otherwise would be “hijack their actions and
statements into our context…and give them a post factum identity.”8 Cunningham’s thesis is
striking, then, precisely because the actor’s intentions are not only supposed to set the
parameters of meaning that we can glean from their activity, but also because they set the
(disciplinary) parameters of our current investigations.9
As should be clear by now, this debate is not solely limited to the historiography of
science; rather, its consequences extend much further to all areas of historical investigation
and explanation. Moreover, these problems point to the general hermeneutic, or interpretive,
character of all historical understanding. But before moving on to discuss the hermeneutic
aspects of this debate, there are two important features to note, the first of which is the focus
on intentionality. Butterfield, Skinner, Cunningham, and others for whom these are major
historiographical problems, are all concerned to “get inside the heads” of past agents. By
making intentional states the key to historical understanding, these thinkers claim that
transposing oneself into past frameworks is the only way to achieve “authentic” historical
understanding. Crucially, intentional states are recovered by the historian through a process

5
Cunningham (1988), p. 373
6
Cunningham (1988), p. 385
7
Cunningham (1988), p. 373
8
Cunningham (1988), p. 380
9
For two recent, rather more nuanced contributions to this debate, see Jardine (2000a) and Tosh (2003).
 4

of reconstructing the particular belief-system through which the intention acquires its
meaning. This reconstruction involves a complex synthesis of textual, biographical, and
social-historical knowledge so as to reconstitute the background against which specific
actions and utterances gain meaning. The second feature to note is the underlying
presupposition of method, which is exposed by presenting anachronism and presentism as
problems in the first place. Implicit in the presentation of these problems is the idea that
“authentic” understanding is possible only when the historian sets aside all of her present
concepts and categories and takes up a distinctive historical method that allows them
unmediated access to the past. One of the primary presuppositions of Butterfield, Skinner,
Cunningham, and others is that it is possible to transcend the present and transpose oneself
into the minds or conceptual frameworks of past actors. Consider, for example,
Cunningham’s claim: “To ‘ask’ of people in the past…what their own description and
understanding of their own intentional activity was, and then to take seriously what we
learn…is our means of ‘getting out of the present’, of transcending our present-centeredness
as historians of science.”10
As we shall see, within the history of hermeneutics this attempt to transcend the
present and capture the past “as it really was” is inextricably linked to the search for a general
method that would put knowledge in the human sciences on as sure a path to objectivity as in
the natural sciences. Suspension of the present, so the line goes, is the key to an “authentic”
historical knowledge, untainted by contemporary concepts and understandings. When these
two features are combined, a general historiographical metaphor begins to emerge, namely,
that of the paradigm, the cognitive framework, or conceptual scheme. That it is possible to
reconstruct and “get inside” this closed, synchronic system of beliefs so as to recover the true
intentions of the author – solely on their own terms – is dependent upon taking the metaphor
of paradigm or conceptual scheme literally. As Nick Jardine has shown, no matter how
important Butterfield’s proclamation of the problems of anachronism and presentism may
seem to us today, the scholarly response at the time was less than overwhelming.11 In fact, I
suggest it is no coincidence that within the history of science these historiographical
problems re-emerge only in the late 1960s, after the intellectual upheaval brought about with
the publication of Kuhn’s Structure. Since then, the metaphor of paradigms or cognitive
frameworks has come to dominate much of the work done in the history and philosophy of
10
Cunningham (1988), p. 383
11
Jardine (2003), p. 126
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science. That the debates over anachronism and presentism are dependent upon the metaphor
of the paradigm is clearest when one considers the hermeneutic strategies devised by various
historians (such as the ones mentioned above) to understand past forms of life that seem alien
or entirely different from our own. These radically different conceptions of the world, they
claim, can be understood only when the entire system of thought, which makes specific
beliefs possible, coherent, and meaningful, is reconstructed. And while this metaphor is
notoriously difficult to articulate precisely, it also presents a unique set of methodological
problems that manifest themselves in attempts to recover the original meaning of a text, or to
base interpretations off of the inferred intentions of the original author.
II.
In this section, I examine the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer with the
intent to shed light on the historiographical problems of anachronism and presentism.
Moreover, I explore these issues through Gadamer’s analysis of the focus on actors’
intentional states, the search for a general historical method, and the broader metaphor of
paradigms and conceptual schemes.
Emphasizing the central importance of method to hermeneutics, Gadamer claims that
Schleiermacher, the first great modern hermeneuticist, sought a method of interpretation
through a “unity of procedure…not differentiated…by the way the ideas are transmitted –
whether in writing or orally, in a foreign language or in one’s own”.12 This search for an
adequate interpretive procedure continues throughout the Romantic hermeneutic tradition and
culminates with Dilthey, whose work embodies the last best attempt to put the
Geisteswissenschaften on the secure path of objective knowledge. For Gadamer, this entire
project is ill-founded precisely because it fails to account for the universal nature of the
hermeneutic experience. By attempting to establish a set of methodological rules that would
render knowledge in the human sciences as objective as that of the natural sciences, Dilthey,
according to Gadamer, dichotomized the hermeneutic situation and legitimated the dualism
of knowledge he was trying to undermine. Gadamer’s project aims to unify this divide by
showing that when the universality of the hermeneutic situation is properly understood, the
task of philosophical hermeneutics becomes not a project of working out appropriate methods
of interpretation, but “the opening up of the hermeneutical dimension in its full scope,
showing its fundamental significance for our entire understanding of the world and thus for

12
Gadamer (1960), p. 179
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all the various forms in which this understanding manifests itself….”13 By universalizing the
hermeneutic experience, Gadamer claims that understanding and interpretation are always
already occurring. This transforms the hermeneutic experience into one that is operative in
all human activities, and not just textual or historical interpretation.
All understanding, then, is mediated by a set of hermeneutic structures. Within
Gadamer’s hermeneutic epistemology, the most important of such structures is that of
Vorurteile or “prejudices”. Gadamer attempts to “rehabilitate” the concept of prejudice,
which, since the Enlightenment, has been seen in an entirely negative way; prejudices were
those judgements that must be set aside so that reason can function without disturbance and a
true understanding can be reached. Against this conception of prejudice, Gadamer argues
that it is in fact impossible to set aside all of one’s pre-judgements, as they are the necessary
ground from which all understanding begins. There are, to be sure, legitimate and
illegitimate prejudices, and it is the ongoing task of hermeneutical consciousness to bring
these prejudices into play and evaluate their efficacy and legitimacy.14 But the possibility of
rejecting all of one’s prejudices wholesale is, Gadamer claims, an Enlightenment illusion; the
suspension of one’s vantage point in history does not result in objectivity, but in the
elimination of the very ground upon which all understanding is built. Thus prejudices are
necessary aspects, and indeed preconditions of, any understanding whatsoever.
Prejudices, as Gadamer conceives them, are not simply arbitrary preferences or
opinions. Rather, prejudices are inextricably linked to the tradition in which we all
necessarily participate. Gadamer claims that, “[i]n seeking to understand tradition historical
consciousness must not rely on the critical method with which it approaches its sources, as if
this preserved it from mixing in its own judgements and prejudices. It must, in fact, think
within its own historicity. To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of
knowledge but makes it possible.”15 Thus, prejudices are simply those pre-judgements
handed down to our understanding through the continuous development of tradition. All
knowledge and understanding is situated within a tradition, which constitutes both the
limiting and the transcendental conditions of meaning for any given text, utterance, or other
person. So knowledge and understanding, for Gadamer, are essentially and irreducibly
historical in character. He says,

13
Gadamer (1966), p. 18
14
For more on the epistemological significance of Vorurteile, see Schmidt (1987).
15
Gadamer (1960), p. 361
 7

In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. Long before we understand
ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-
evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity
is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the
closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more
than his judgements, constitute the historical reality of his being.16
Gadamer claims the emphasis on individual subjectivity, wherein prejudices are isolated and
set aside so that pure reason may function properly, is fundamentally misguided. He traces
this idea to Schleiermacher, who sought to overcome the hermeneutic obstacles of
misunderstanding and error through a method of recovering actors’ intentions. By
reconstructing the original meanings of the author, Schleiermacher claimed, the interpreter
can understand the writer better then they understood themselves, thus rendering an authentic
interpretation.
Gadamer says that the evolving interpretation of this claim is the lens through which
“the whole history of modern hermeneutics can be read.”17 So while Gadamer does see the
attempt to reconstruct the author’s original intention as central to the hermeneutical tradition,
it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the hermeneutical situation. Understanding
is always an understanding located in the present, and if the past is to have any significance at
all, it involves a necessary relation to the present. In this way, “understanding is to be
thought of less as a subjective act than a participating in an event of tradition, a process of
transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated.”18 This ongoing process of
historical mediation is captured by Gadamer’s concept of Wirkungsgeschichte, or “effective
history”. Gadamer claims that, “[c]onsciousness of being affected by history is primarily
consciousness of the hermeneutical situation…We always find ourselves within a situation,
and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished.”19 Becoming aware of the
effects of history on our understanding and, conversely, the effects of our understanding on
history, is the mark of a hermeneutically sensitive consciousness. This, again, points to the
universality – the always already character – of hermeneutical experience, and that our
understanding can never escape the historical situation into which it is thrown.
Understanding is affected by, and affects, history.

16
Gadamer (1960), p. 276
17
Gadamer (1960), p. 192
18
Gadamer (1960), p. 290
19
Gadamer (1960), p. 301
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Closely linked to his exegesis of Wirkungsgeschichte is Gadamer’s development of

the concept Horizontverschmelzung, or the “fusion of horizons”. Following Nietzsche and
Husserl, who both employed variations of the concept, Gadamer says, “[e]very finite present
has its limitations. We define the concept of ‘situation’ by saying that it represents a
standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is
the concept of ‘horizon.’ The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can
be seen from a particular vantage point.”20 Thus we are situated within a horizon of meaning
and culture, and this situatedness determines the limits of our understanding: “Understanding
tradition undoubtedly requires a historical horizon, then. But it is not the case that we acquire
this horizon by transposing ourselves into a historical situation. Rather we must always
already have a horizon in order to be able to transpose ourselves into a situation.”21 All
understanding is a projection from one’s current horizon into that of another horizon, and the
“fusion” that occurs is the event of understanding. Meaning, then, is not a passive entity to
be found objectively, or given, among the ruins of a text or utterance. Rather, understanding
is an active process whereby the text and interpreter participate in the event of meaning.
Gadamer’s appeal to horizons may, on first glimpse, suggest that he considers them
to be discrete, systematic entities that are closed off by social, historical, and cognitive limits.
This, however, is a misreading. That there are closed horizons – past, alien, or both – that are
inaccessible to our present understanding is, he says, “a romantic refraction, a kind of
Robinson Crusoe dream of historical enlightenment, the fiction of an unattainable island, as
artificial as Crusoe himself.” Against taking the concept of horizon as analogous to the
metaphor of paradigms or conceptual schemes mentioned above, Gadamer says,
Just as the individual is never simply an individual because he is always in understanding
with others, so too the closed horizon that is supposed to enclose a culture is an
abstraction. This historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never
absolutely bound to any one standpoint, and hence can never have a truly closed horizon.
This horizon is, rather, something in to which we move and that moves with us.
Horizons change for a person who is moving. Thus the horizon of the past, out of which
all human life lives and which exists in the form of tradition, is always in motion.”22

20
Gadamer (1960), p. 302
21
Gadamer (1960), p. 305
22
Gadamer (1960), p. 304
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So the universality of the hermeneutic experience – the fact that understanding and
interpretation are always already occurring – works to undermine the metaphor of paradigms,
or what Karl Popper termed the “myth of the framework”.23 For Gadamer, horizons are not
paradigms, nor are they conceptual frameworks. Rather, they are individual vantage points
that expand or contract to the extent that the individual understands more widely.
In the exchange of horizons, however, something fundamentally applicative happens.
Following Aristotle, Gadamer characterizes the hermeneutical situation as being a mode of
phronesis, or practical understanding. Importantly for Gadamer, and unlike much of the
previous hermeneutic tradition, interpretation, understanding, and application are not separate
moments of the hermeneutical experience, but are simultaneous elements of the same
activity. In every act of understanding, a type of application occurs. Gadamer says:
The interpreter dealing with a traditionary text tries to apply it to himself. But this does
not mean that the text is given for him as something universal, that he first understands it
per se, and then afterward uses it for particular applications. Rather, the interpreter seeks
no more than to understand this universal, the text – i.e., to understand what it says, what
constitutes the text’s meaning and significance. In order to understand that, he must not
try to disregard himself and his particular hermeneutical situation. He must relate the text
to this situation if he wants to understand at all.24
Gadamer’s appropriation of Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, then, serves both to unify the
concepts of prejudices, effective history, and horizon, but also stands as an example of how
past texts can speak to us in the present.25 By making phronesis central to the hermeneutic
situation, Gadamer makes every interpretation applicable to the situation of the interpreter.
Historical understanding, on Gadamer’s account, means relating the past text to the present
situation. Again, contrary to the idea that the past can speak to the present in an unmediated,
given way, Gadamer asserts that the relational aspect of understanding is central to the
hermeneutical process. Gadamer says: “Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a
text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but
always a productive activity as well.”26

23
Popper (1996), p. 35
24
Gadamer (1960), p. 324
25
For more on Gadamer’s appropriation of Aristotle, and the integral role of practical knowledge in
Gadamer’s hermeneutics, see Bernstein (1983) and Figal (1995).
26
Gadamer (1960), p. 296
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Gadamer frames this relational aspect of understanding in terms of the logic of

question and answer. 27 All assertions and texts, Gadamer claims, can be seen in dialogical
relation to a given question. Citing Collingwood with approval, Gadamer claims that to
understand historical texts we must grasp the range of questions to which a given text may be
an intended answer: “That a historical text is made the object of interpretation means that it
puts a question to the interpreter.”28 Recalling the position that closed horizons are an
abstraction, Gadamer claims “every historian…must reckon with the fundamental non-
definitiveness of the horizon in which his understanding moves. Historical tradition can be
understood only as something always in the process of being defined by the course of
events…By being re-actualized in understanding, texts are drawn into a genuine course of
events in exactly the same way as are events themselves.”29 Past actors and their written
works, in other words, affect history only through their interpretations, not in and of
themselves. Texts and their effects are not a “given” encountered in history, but are rather a
part of history in and through their interpretations.
III.
I would now like to draw out more explicitly the consequences of a Gadamerian analysis of
the problems of anachronism and presentism. Returning to the two features discussed in
Section I, the first point to notice is where these problems fit into Gadamer’s philosophical
hermeneutic. Differentiating between the legitimate and illegitimate uses of anachronistic
and presentisitic categories to account for the historical past is clearly part of the ongoing
examination of prejudices or pre-judgements in our understanding. Put another way, the
problems of anachronism and presentism are not really “problems” within the
historiographical literature, but are more aptly considered aspects of the general task of
examining the legitimacy, efficacy, and utility of our explanatory language. Contrary to the
idea that it is possible to suspend wholesale our current conceptual understandings and our
current vantage point in history so as to reach an objective historical method, the problems of
anachronism and presentism highlight the way in which our historical consciousness itself
undergoes a transformation through the uncovering and questioning of prejudices. This
corresponds to the point of method mentioned above: from a Gadamerian point of view, there

27
By using the concept of dialogue or conversation, Gadamer also links together his more traditional
hermeneutic ideas of Section II of Truth and Method with his discussion in Section III of language being
the medium and horizon of philosophical hermeneutics.
28
Gadamer (1960), p. 369
29
Gadamer (1960), p. 373
 11

is no special method by which historical understanding is rendered objective or authentic.

Rather, the point of historical consciousness is to continually expand both our understanding
of the past and our understanding of that understanding. Working out the ways in which
various explanations are acceptably or unacceptably anachronistic is just what historical
consciousness does. There are no hard and fast rules for the historian to adhere to so as to
write “good” history. History is “good” history when the historian is conscious of the way
history affects their understanding and the way they their understanding affects history.
By denying the possibility of methodologically suspending the present in one’s
historical understanding, Gadamer also denies that recovering actor intentionality is the key
to proper understanding, if only because intentions are not historically researchable. Again,
texts do not affect history, their interpretations do. In this way, historical understanding is
interpretive “all the way down,” so to speak. The problem, as we have seen, is that positions
holding actor intentionality to be the basis of all interpretation presuppose that intentions can
present themselves in an unmediated, “given” way. In his explication of what is always
already occurring when we understand – that we are applying, relating, and mediating the
past with the present – Gadamer shows that history is not a static form of understanding.
Histories are not written to end history writing. Rather, they are written for some particular
purpose, by some individual person, and from some specific point in history.30
I also suggested that two central features of the problems of anachronism and
presentism, namely the search for method and the focus on intentionality, are both part of the
more general historiographical metaphor of paradigms or conceptual schemes. Gadamer
works to undermine the literalness of this metaphor in terms of historical understanding.
Rather than transposing ourselves into past conceptual frameworks, Gadamer argues that the
“fusion of horizons” is always already underway if any understanding whatsoever is present.
His analysis of the dialogical form of understanding functions to show how this occurs on the
historical level as well: the historian’s researches gain impetus from a real or “live” question
being asked. It is here, however, that a significant tension arises within Gadamer’s thinking
as to how we are to understand those questions that are no longer real for us in the present.
Importantly, this category of understanding is absolutely central to the history of science, a

30
This type of claim – i.e. that one cannot escape to a vantage point outside of history – worries quite a few
thinkers, not the least of which is Habermas and his criticisms of Gadamer’s hermeneutics as lacking
features necessary for an adequate “ideology critique”. For more on this debate, see Habermas (1977),
Gadamer (1967), and Warnke (1987).
 12

discipline whose primary material consists of reconstructing the answers to questions that
oftentimes seem irrelevant (or simply wrong) to us today. Gadamer uses the example of
perpetual motion and says that for such questions “the horizon of meaning…is only
apparently still open. They are no longer understood as questions. For what we understand,
in such cases, is precisely that there is no question.”31 Gadamer surely intends for this to hold
true for scientists, but it is a much different claim – and a claim to which I would strongly
disagree – when it is applied to historians. For scientists, there is little doubt that questions
about perpetual motion are no longer held as real questions. But for historians, inquiries into
how and why such questions came to be “real” for a given set of past actors remains very
much a part of our historical interests today.32
At this point, I think it is useful to clarify two levels of questions that Gadamer does
not explicitly address himself. On the first level, there is the question as to how and why past
actors considered a particular question a real question to ask. Understanding on this level
entails examining various presuppositions involved with making that question real. On the
second level, however, there is the issue as to why this question is live for the historian. It is
this level of questioning that makes the history of “dead” questions meaningful; the historian
researches the history of perpetual motion precisely because that historical configuration
poses a question to us in the present. If it did not, there would be no reason to undertake the
research in the first place. Gadamer says: “Part of real understanding…is that we regain the
concepts of a historical past in such a way that they also include our own comprehension of
them [i.e. fusion of horizons]….[R]econstructing the question to which the meaning of a text
is understood as an answer merges with our own questions.”33 Thus, differentiating between
these two levels of questioning – between the why-them-then and the why-us-now – serves to
clarify the ways in which questions are considered real or “live” to different interpretive
communities across time. But no matter at what level these questions operate, the point
remains that understanding is always done from the present and as an answer to some present
question.
Finally, and perhaps most interestingly (though I do not have space to fully discuss it
here), Gadamer deals a significant blow to the viability of the metaphor of paradigms or

31
Gadamer (1960), p. 375
32
In fact, historical examination into the “life cycles” of questions is a relatively new and active field of
scholarship. See, for example, Jardine (2000b).
33
Gadamer (1960), p. 374
 13

conceptual schemes. Inextricably linked to this metaphor is the notion of

incommensurability, or the idea that there are frameworks so radically different from our own
that it is impossible to reconcile them so as to reach a mutual understanding. Both of these
ideas rest on the supposition that it is possible to “go native” and understand an alien culture
on its own terms and without the prejudicial influences of the interpreters perspective. In
short, the “myth of the given” is still operative in these accounts, and to counteract these
Gadamer reiterates the point that the hermeneutical situation is one wherein understanding
and interpretation are always already occurring. As soon as a seemingly incommensurable
paradigm is presented, the hermeneutical consciousness is at work. Understanding is always
on the march, and mediation, application, and interpretation are all part of its ongoing
processes.
Thus, the historical nature of historical understanding is the central lesson of
Gadamer’s hermeneutics. The type of historical understanding Gadamer rejects, then, is
precisely the type that is exemplified by the hypostatization of the problems of anachronism
and presentism. This type of historiography fails to account for the dynamic nature of
historical understanding itself and remains committed to the naïve position that a general
historical method can be uncovered so as to render historical knowledge objective. “Merely
historical understanding,” as Gadamer calls it, fails to account for the second, present-
centered level of questions that must be active within the historian’s own horizon so as to
motivate research into any given area. Without this level of questioning, the historian’s
research loses its relevancy. Gadamer says that “we think we understand when we see the
past from a historical standpoint – i.e., transpose ourselves into the historical situation and try
to reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find in
the past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves.”34 This relevancy to the present,
in the end, is what hermeneutically sophisticated history is all about.

34
Gadamer (1960), p. 303
 14

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