Although Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theories of philosophical hermeneutics appear quite near the end of a long chronological history of western philosophy, springing mainly from the existential notions presented by his mentor, Martin Heidegger, his contributions to western thought tap their roots to a far more ancient stream. Historically, Gadamer’s understanding of how we know things, his epistemological ideas, revivify and reshape for a modern context the nineteenth-century practice of hermeneutics, designated at that time strictly to the interpretation of ancient texts in the pursuit of their supposed one true meaning. This tradition of hermeneutics, the art of understanding, having now passed through Gadamer’s radical hands, has been freed from the constraints of its elementary task and opened to the grasp of historians, artists, rhetoricians, psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers. However groundbreaking and new it seems, philosophical hermeneutics possesses a timeless and mythical parentage, reaching back to the originators of the western tradition, the ancient Greeks.

Both subject and object, necessarily delineated in their individuality, are situated in unique fixed positions from which they perceive and experience all that lies within the horizons surrounding those positions. Says Gadamer of these horizons, “Every finite presentation has its limitations.” These perspectives, though ridden with intrinsic presuppositions and alienations, allow an interpretation of their horizons with those of others, from other times, other languages, other cultures, or merely other individual beings. And it is in the overlaps, the places in which one horizon blends and even fuses with another, that meaning, that ever sought boon may be cultivated. Meaning, according to Gadamer, does not simply appear at the beckon of the isolated Cartesian mind peering down upon its object of study, but rather develops and grows in the fusion of horizons which occurs in the equalizing space between the two. And it is to the exploration of this synergistic space that Gadamer and other practitioners of philosophical hermeneutics devoted much of their work, taking detailed notice of its conditions, its characteristics, and its potentials for meaningful communication. In short, “hermeneutics is a kind of phenomenology of the between.”

The novelty and basis of Gadamer’s epistemological ideas and more specifically his approach to interpretation resides in its emphasis on meaning between language, including what is said, but also including that which is meant. Such an idea supports the distinction between scientific thinking, what is said explicitly, and hermeneutical, reflective thinking, that which is not said but meant. Rhetorical language seeks to communicate shared experience and meaning, that which exists in the fusion of horizons, rather than cling in isolation to empirical “truth.” Again, reality is not limited to that which scientific methodology apprehends but includes all that occurs in the realm of language. As Gadamer states, “Rhetoric from oldest tradition has been the only advocate of a claim to truth that defends the probable, the eikós (verisimile), and that which is convincing to the ordinary reason, against the claim of science to accept as true only what can be demonstrated and tested!”

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