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In line with Heidegger who in his ontological hermeneutics saw time as positive value, Gadamer opines that “time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged, because it separates, but it is actually the supportive ground process in which the present is rooted.”129 The efforts of the interpreter should not be to overcome temporal distance but rather see it as a positive and productive possibility of understanding. We must realize that the distance is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition. The temporal distance lets the true meaning of the object to emerge. It should be noted here that the meaning of a text or any work of art is never finished. He calls this an infinite process because through it errors are excluded continuously and it keeps emerging as a new source of understanding. Temporal distance filters and reveals elements of new meaning and in itself continuous to undergo constant movement and extension. In this movement and extension it filters all illegitimate prejudices and allows the legitimate prejudices that can lead to understanding to emerge.
Again for Gadamer it is only temporal distance that can help us distinguish between false and true prejudices. While the false prejudices lead us to misunderstanding, the true prejudices lead to understanding. The logical structure that could lead us to this all-important distinction is the questions raised. Questions, because they open up and keep open possibilities. Through questioning our prejudices are opened up, the false prejudices are suspended and as this happens, our true or legitimate prejudices enable us reach the understanding of the text or work of art.
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“in advance both what seems to us worth enquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation, and we more or less forget half of what is really there.130 Effective history is at work in all our understanding and when its existence is ignored, there is always an actual deformation of knowledge. He also notes that the power of effective history does not depend on its being recognised. Even though there is a pressing demand that we should become conscious of this effective-history, it does not however mean it can be fulfilled in absolute way. He rather writes that “effective-historical consciousness is an element in the act of understanding itself and, as we shall see, is already operative in the choice of the right question to ask.”131
Furthermore, effective-history is the consciousness of the hermeneutical situation. The hermeneutical situation means the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to the tradition that we are trying to understand. To effectively historically reflect on this situation is never completely achieved because of our essence as historical beings. In addition to this, he notes that “every finite present has its limitations and that an essential part of the concept of situation is horizon.”132 Horizon is defined as the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. It is on the account of horizon when it is applied to thinking mind that we can talk of narrowness of horizon, or the expansion of horizon. Thus he affirms that a person who has a horizon knows the relative significance of everything within the horizon, as near or far, great or small. Also to achieve the right horizon of enquiry for the questions raised by our encounter with tradition means that we have worked out the hermeneutic situation.
Understanding through interpretation only takes place when there is a coming together of the horizons of the interpreter and that of the object being interpreted. The hermeneut must leave his contemporary criteria and prejudices and place himself in the situation of the other, i.e. the historical situation. When this occurs understanding will no longer be a mere
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agreement but being in the situation of the past and acquiring the right historical horizon.
Here, the meaning of what has been handed down will be understood even without any form of agreement. Getting at the historical situation of the object of study, the job of the interpreter should not be to reconstruct the historical horizon because when this happens “we have given up the claim to find in the past, any truth valid and intelligible for ourselves.”133 At this point of fusion, the interpreter must not see himself as passing into an alien horizon unconnected to him. It is expected of him to fuse his horizon with the horizon of the particular history and
... together they constitute the one great horizon that moves from within and, beyond the one frontiers of the present, embraces the historical depths of our self-consciousness. It is in fact, a single horizon that embraces everything contained in historical consciousness. Our own past, and that other past towards which our historical consciousness is directed, help to shape this moving horizon out of which human life always lives, and which determines it as tradition.134
To understand the past therefore means placing oneself within a situation. This situation must be imagined and ourselves brought into it. Unless we are able to place ourselves in the position of others, we cannot understand them or become aware of their otherness and the indissoluble individuality of the other person.
It must be further noted that this is not the empathy an individual could have for another and it is not the application to another person of our own criteria. It involves “the attainment of a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity, but also that of the other.”135 This is what Gadamer calls the fusion of horizons. Understanding takes place here and that is why he posits that understanding “is always the fusion of these horizons which we imagine to exist by themselves.”136 This fusion is continuous and it is in it that the old and new ideas continue to grow together to make better ideas or meanings. The new horizon incorporates the past and the present but it is not static because prejudices are continually being adjusted based on past experiences, and are incorporated into the present
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horizon. The implication of this is that one’s own horizon is constantly in the process of formation. At the point of the fusion of horizon, “there is a birth and growth of something reducible to neither the interpreter, nor the text, nor their conjunction.”137 The product of the fusion of horizons is simply and completely something new, it is an independent horizon.