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Essay on Gadamer's-Truth and Method
Section 2
No one would disagree that the consideration of language stands at the center of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. Truth and Method makes this obvious. Whoever follows the discussions and descriptions in the first two parts of the book can only affirm the logical development that leads to the consideration of language. As the work develops, we find again and again the principal theme to be the understanding: “the phenomena of understanding and of the correct interpretation of what has been understood”. The historically effective consciousness, for which the “historicity of the understanding” is to be shown as a hermeneutical principle, is above all the history of transmitted texts. The relationship of the text and the interpreter is always a “conversation”; the logic of which is the “logic of question and answer.” All these concepts, central to Gadamer's hermeneutics, point to forms of language, which can only be satisfactorily clarified in a treatment of its linguisticality.
But just there, where this clarification of language is undertaken, comes something additional that does not follow from the prior discussions. At the point at which language becomes the theme, the work takes “an ontological turn”. This turn, considered from the analyses that Gadamer provides in the first two parts of the book, is amazing enough. In the introduction, Gadamer expresses the aim of his philosophical project much more carefully and reservedly. The “conscientiousness” of thought requires that we become aware of its “anterior influences” (Voreingenommenheiten) and, correspondingly, “it is a new critical consciousness, that now has to accompany all responsible philosophizing”. Philosophical thinking itself belongs to the very tradition whose structure it attempts to clarify hermeneutically. It should make transparent the accomplishment of tradition, of historical life, but neither of these claims independent insight. Thus, Gadamer could conceive of practical philosophy in the sense of Aristotle as a model for philosophical hermeneutics..................
