Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Politics

It is a familiar thought about Gadamer's hermeneutics that its political and ethical implications lead in too conservative a direction. Gadamer locates the conditions of understanding meaning, whether textual, aesthetic, or historical, in the traditions to which interpreters belong and in the authority of those traditions (TM 277-85). That authority takes the form of expectations and assumptions that Gadamer calls prejudices, and he suggests that we can test these prejudices only in limited ways. Hence, some theorists have questioned whether his hermeneutics can be sufficiently critical of unwarranted prejudices and whether it can give sufficient recognition to the force of reason in undercutting them. In this essay, I want to cast doubt on this analysis of Gadamer's hermeneutics by suggesting that it leads in a more democratic and less authoritarian direction and that the form of criticism it allows is an interpretive form of democratic deliberation. I shall begin by exploring what Gadamer calls the hermeneutic situation in which ethical and political action takes place and then turn to the Aristotelian form of ethics and politics that he suggests follows from it.