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126 Beyond Objectivism and Relativism UNDERSTANDING AND PREJUDICE As the passage just cited suggests, the "radical subjectivisation" that Gadamer ascribes to Kant's aesthetics is not limited to aesthetic phenomena, or even to Kant, but pervades all of modern thought.16 It is itself a reflection of the modern obsession with objectivism. Gadamer has already indicated this when he claims that the unintended consequences of Kant's critical inquiry was to leave the human sciences in an unhappy disjunction. Either they must model themselves on the natural sciences, if they are to provide us with objective knowledge, or they must give up any claim to objective knowledge and be resigned to dealing with what is "left over"-with the "merely" subjective, with "private" feelings. One of Gadamer's most striking criticisms of nineteenth-century German hermeneutics is that although it intended to demonstrate the legitimacy of the human sciences as autonomous disciplines, it implicitly accepted the very dichotomy of the subjective and the objective that was employed to call into question the cognitive legitimacy of these disciplines. As a consequence, a new concept of inner experience (Erlebnis) was elaborated, and a concept of psychological empathy was developed , according to which the aim of "understanding" is to grasp the subjective intentions of the author of a work of art or a text, or (in the case of historical understanding) to grasp the subjective intentions of historical agentsY But Gadamer's statement that "understanding must be conceived as a part of the process of the coming into being of meaning" indicates that neither meaning nor understanding are to be identified with psychological states of mind. This, for Gadamer, is still a vestige of the Cartesian legacy that plagued nineteenth-century hermeneutics. The task of hermeneutical understanding is not to (deceptively) convince us that we can somehow abstract ourselves from our own historical context, or that it is even conceivable to think that by some pure act of empathy we can leap out of our situation and "into" the minds of the creators of works of art or historical subjects. Meaning and understanding are not psychological processes, discrete events, or states of mind; they are essentially and intrinsically linguistic. IS It is the work of art or text itself that possesses meaning. And furthermore, this meaning is not selfcontained -simply "there" to be discovered; meaning comes to realization only in and through the "happening" of understanding. Once again, despite Gadamer's warnings to the contrary, a skeptical critic might claim that we seem to be on the brink of a new, sophisticated version of relativism. For it would seem that if the 127 From Hermeneutics to Praxis meaning of a work of art or text is affected by or conditioned by the understanding of its meaning, then there does not seem to be any meaning that has "objective" integrity, that is "there" in the work of art or text to be understood. Such a relativism (which seems to make meaning dependent on our changing understanding of this meaning) is a misinterpretation of Gadamer. Indeed, it is just this type of relativism that he seeks to refute. But the possibility of misunderstanding his argument in this way points to a problem that needs to be confronted if we are to escape from such relativistic consequences-the question of the nature and role that prejudice plays in all understanding. One of the boldest and most controversial aspects of Gadamer's philosophic hermeneutics is his defense of prejudice and his argument with the Enlightenment's "prejudice against prejudice" (TM, p. 240; WM, p. 255). We might try to make Gadamer's position more intellectually palatable by substituting the more neutral term "prejudgment" for "prejudice," because the latter term suggests something that is negative , unfounded, and false.19 But such a substitution (while not entirely inaccurate) tends to weaken the strong claims that Gadamer wants to make. It is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudices that constitute our being. This is a provocative formulation, for I am using it to restore to its rightful place a positive concept of prejudice that was driven out of our linguistic usage by the French and the English Enlightenment. It can be shown that the concept of prejudice did not originally have the meaning we have attached to it. Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that they inevitably distort the truth. In fact, the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense...

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