Understanding Differently

Gadamer from Truth and Method : “Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way . . . The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter . . . . Not just occasionally but always, the texts goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well . . . . It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all .”

Another: “It is part of the historical finitude of our being that we are aware that others after us will understand in a different way. And yet it is equally indubitable that it remains the same work whose fullness of meaning is realized in the changing process of understanding, just as it is the same history whose meaning is constantly in the process of being defined. The hermeneutical reduction to the author’s meaning is just as inappropriate as the reduction of historical events to the intentions of their protagonists.”