Beyond Objectivism and Relativism by Bernstein Richard J.;

Author:Bernstein, Richard J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 1983-03-30T05:00:00+00:00

True historical thinking must take account of its own historicality. Only then will it not chase the phantom of an historical object which is the object of progressive research, but learn to see in the object the counterpart of itself and hence understand both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship in which exist both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding. A proper hermeneutics would have to demonstrate the effectivity of history within understanding itself. (TM, p. 267; WM, p. 283)

Effective-historical consciousness influences what we consider worthy of investigation and how we go about investigating it. It is “already operative in the choice of the right question to ask” (TM, p. 268; WM, p. 285). Effective-historical consciousness does not indicate a final state of self-knowledge. Rather, we are always “on the way” to such self-knowledge, a self-knowledge achieved with the dialectical interplay with the “other.” But if the movement toward such consciousness of effective-history is the primary task of philosophic hermeneutics, how is this to be achieved? In asking and answering this question, Gadamer does not specify procedural rules, but instead clarifies what it means to achieve effective-historical consciousness. This is the context in which Gadamer introduces his notion of the “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung).

Drawing on Nietzsche and Husserl, Gadamer characterizes a horizon as follows:

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