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139 From Hermeneutics to Praxis from all prejudices and not "contaminated" by interpretation.) The continuity of understanding and interpretation is evident in the phenomenon of translation, Gadamer points out. For there is no translation without highlighting, and all highlighting involves interpretation .3s We can, of course, speak of and discriminate misinterpretations and misunderstandings, but this does not mean that we do this by reaching some level in which no interpretation is involved. We can see why for Gadamer the process of understanding can never (ontologically) achieve finality, why it is always open and anticipatory. We are always understanding and interpreting in light of our anticipatory prejudgments and prejudices, which are themselves changing in the course of history. This is why Gadamer tells us that to understand is always to understand differently. But this does not mean that our interpretations are arbitrary or distortive. We should always aim (if informed by an "authentic hermeneutical attitude ") at a correct understanding of what the "things themselves" say. But what the "things themselves" say will be different in light of our changing horizons and the different questions that we learn to ask. Such an analysis of the ongoing and open character of all understanding and interpretation can be construed as distortive only if we assume that a text possesses some meaning in itself that can be isolated from our prejudgments. But this is precisely what Gadamer is denying, and this play between the "things themselves" and our prejudgments helps us comprehend why "understanding must be conceived as part of the process of the coming into being of meaning ." Meaning is always coming into being through the "happening" of understanding. Gadamer's point is brought into sharp focus in his characterization of the "classicaL" He defines it as that which speaks in such a way that it is not a statement about what is past, a mere testimony to something that still needs to be interpreted, but says something to the present as if it were said specially to it. What we call "classical" does not first require the overcoming of historical distance, for in its own constant communication it does overcome it. The classical, then, is certainly "timeless," but this timelessness is a mode of historical being. (TM, p. 257; WM, p. 274, italics added) TEMPORAL DISTANCE, EFFECTIVE-HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS, AND THE FUSION OF HORIZONS Gadamer's claims that timelessness is a mode of historical being opens up a new dimension of philosophic hermeneutics. For Gada- 140 Beyond Objectivism and Relativism mer's reflections on philosophic hermeneutics can be approached (as is also true of Heidegger) as a meditation on temporality and historicity . I want to consider only those aspects of temporality that can help to forestall a common misinterpretation of Gadamer. To put it very simply, we might be inclined to say that because Gadamer's thinking is oriented toward tradition, he expresses a nostalgia for what has been destroyed by the onslaught of modernity. But it is vital to see that his thinking moves us in a very different direction. Gadamer has been sharply critical of the romantic infatuation with a past that is frequently an imaginative construction of our own present concerns. This is only another version of the false belief that we can escape or bracket all our prejudices and enter into a radically different world. Temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather the naive assumption of historicism, namely that we must set ourselves within the spirit of the age, and think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance towards historical objectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognise the distance in time as a positive and productive possibility of understanding. It is not a yawning abyss, but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which all that is handed down presents itself to us. [Temporal distance] lets the true meaning of the object emerge fully. But the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process. Not only are fresh sources of error constantly excluded, so that the true meaning has filtered out of it all kinds of things that obscure it, but there emerge continually new sources of understanding, which reveal unsuspected elements of meaning. (TM, pp. 264-66; WM, pp. 281-82) Another aspect of temporality needs to be emphasized: the temporality of those prejudgments...

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