Abstract

Recognition is central in both heremeneutics and critical theory. For Gadamer the “highest” form of hermeneutic experience involves understanding a text not by reducing its meaning to its audior's intentions or its historical situation, but rather by recognizing it as a claim to truth. Genuine understanding is impeded both by approaching the text as a mere object and by failing to comprehend that the interpreter is ordinarily embedded in the very tradition as the text. It is only through a relation of mutuality with the text, through an openess to its truth claims, through what Gadamer calls a “fusion of horizons,” that hermeneutic understanding can be achieved. And for Gadamer this openness to experience and to others' claims to truth is not only the essence of formal interpretation, but of all intersubjective understanding