Abstract

The article is concerned with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of understanding. It first presents arguments against Paweł Dybel’s objection that Gadamer eliminates the incommensurability of a thing and way of understanding it, conceptually mediating the unintelligibility of things.On the basis of Paweł Dybel’s work two functions of understanding are pointed out, the mediating and differentiating functions. Next the article shows that Gadamer’s conception is based on the claim that the differentiating function can be carried out only by means of mediating methods. This impossibility does not, however, imply forgetting the difference between the inexpressible thing and its way of being understood. The inexpressibility of a thing comes to the fore during the hermeneutic process, whose essence is dialectical the copresence of mutually exclusive functions. This copresence gives the hermeneutic process a critical and dynamic character.The article thus shows that in Gadamer’s hermeneutics the primacy of the mediating function is only apparent.