Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait

2 THE EVENT OF TRUTH

36 The event of truth What the tool of method does not achieve must—and really can—be achieved by a discipline of questioning and inquiring, a discipline that guarantees truth. (TM 491/GW1 494) 1. Against Method? What does Truth and Method mean? The significance of the conjunction “and” has almost turned this title into an enigma. if “method” has a negative value in the title, then the “and” does not connect, but rather represents an alternative. The title could be revised accordingly as Truth or Method.1 in an even more radical version, one could think of the formulation: Truth against Method.2 if “method” is taken as a model and metaphor for the natural sciences, then truth occurs outside method. Thus it is possible to speak of “extramethodical” experiences of truth. Yet it is necessary to address a misinterpretation. Certainly Gadamer no longer understands hermeneutics in a traditional sense as a doctrine of interpretation, and thus he aims to free it from the burden of methodology. But he does not want to put method as such into question altogether. The title implicitly contains a tension between “method” and “truth.” When he considers this tension later in greater detail, Gadamer admits that he had sharpened it in a polemical sense (RHT 317/GW2 238). This was indispensable to show the limits of science to an age in which the faith in science borders on superstition. in the “afterword to the Third edition” of Truth and Method, Gadamer writes: “ultimately, as descartes himself realized, it belongs to the special structure of straightening something crooked that it needs to be bent in the opposite direction. But what was crooked in this case was not so much the methodology of the sciences as their reflexive self-consciousness” (TM 555/GW2 453). if philosophical hermeneutics highlights the tension between truth and method, its aim is not to enter into conflict with science and its method, but to offer an occasion for critical reflection on the truth implied by science. The “and” in the title points to this critical reflection. hence the epistemological relevance of hermeneutics, according to Gadamer, should be seen as an attempt “to mediate between philosophy and the sciences” (TM 552/GW2 450).3 The polemical tension in the title should be read neither as an antithesis nor as a hiatus: “it was, of course, a flat misunderstanding when people accused the expression ‘truth and method’ of failing to recognize the methodical rigor of modern science” 2 The Event of Truth | 37 (TM 551/GW2 449). it is not that hermeneutics disallows or dismisses method. it would be absurd not to recognize the need for a method when, for example, a mathematical problem is being solved, a skyscraper is being built or a vaccination against a disease must be found. Yet hermeneutics does not allow the imposition of a method—because of its fascinating and enormous results—in a mechanical way everywhere. a method presupposes that the object can be definable and the subject can define it objectively with a scientific demonstration; it proceeds from an instrumental conception of knowledge in which the subject is confident that it can dispose of the object. But if the method is adequate for scientific projects it cannot be for all others; on the contrary, it may bring a reduction or even a distortion of the experience of truth. husserl had already opposed the tendency to reduce our experiential world—the world that precedes all scientific research, our everyday “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt)—to mathematics. Gadamer follows in husserl’s wake, but takes the truth claim of the lifeworld more strongly into account. For Gadamer, a method can be a valid and legitimate procedure for gaining knowledge.4 it remains, nevertheless, secondary and derivative when compared to all those experiences of truth that do not fall under its logic, for example those that remain outside of methodical logic and in some cases precede it. here, “outside of” means “before.” The extramethodical experiences of truth that hermeneutics aims to bring to light have a priority that signifies autonomy as well. to put it differently: the truth that precedes method is autonomous, because it does not need a method to be verified, validated, or founded. on the contrary, in any method there is always already a hermeneutic pre-understanding at play. its application begins with our linguistic orientation, which “is and remains the vehicle of all understanding ,” just as every specialized language stems from a common language, from...