Lancaster University Education Research Department Seminar Wednesday 10 May 2017 12.30 – 2.00
Gadamer: ‘the problem of method’1 Jon Nixon Applying the method is what the person does who never finds out anything new, who never brings to light an interpretation that has revelatory power. (Gadamer, 2001, 42) I Introductory remarks: understanding and application Gadamer resolutely refuses to provide us with a rule book or anything approaching a method. There can, he insists, be no step-by-step procedures leading from understanding to application, since application and understanding comprise a single unified process. To understand is to apply whatever it is that I am seeking to understand to my own unique circumstances. This is a dizzying – and potentially anxiety-inducing – prospect. An initial response might well be: How, without the aid of any procedural rules, can I begin to set about this task of understanding? This is the kind of response we experience when, for example, we are confronted with a work of art or piece of music that defies our expectations – or a text such as Gadamer’s Truth and Method that challenges our received notions and presuppositions. The overriding feeling is one of bewilderment combined possibly with a touch of resentment or irritation. Without a step-by-step rule book, how do we know where to begin? If Gadamer deprives us of a rule-book, he provides us with some starting points and a beginning. The starting points are our origins: our culturally and historically formed consciousness which is unique to each of us. That is what we carry with us into the great adventure of understanding the world we inhabit. Our beginnings, on the other hand, are what we make of our origins in engaging with that world: our origins are given to us; our beginnings are an expression of our unique agency. Those beginnings – and this is the crux of Gadamerian hermeneutics – take the form of a question: the specific question that unites what it is we seek to understand to the particular circumstances within which we seek to understand it. Given the specificity of those circumstances, understanding is always a unique event. We begin and end with the ‘hermeneutic priority of the question’ (Gadamer, 2004, 356-371). But ‘the question’ is not any old question. It is the question that is formed in the unique encounter between the interpreter and the interpreted and that is informed by the 1
This paper draws on ideas and arguments from Chapter 3: The Interpretive Tradition of my Interpretive Pedagogies of Higher Education and Chapter 4: Beyond Method of my Hans-Georg Gadamer: The Hermeneutical Imagination. (See, Nixon, 2012; 2017)
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