Virtue of necessity

One might characterize Gadamer’s project as one of recognizing the virtue of necessity. We cannot understand the past, he points out, without involving ourselves in it; even if we could slice ourselves from our understanding of the past then it would no longer be we who understand it. No matter how much we try to put ourselves into the shoes of an author or imagine a historical time period, it is we who are wearing the shoes and doing the imagining.

That is obvious enough, though Gadamer is more forthright in acknowledging the obvious than many. What he rejects, though, is regret at the undeniable fact that we are we. Instead of wishing he could transcend himself in knowing, instead of worrying that our inescapable we-ness leads to relativism and skepticism, he points out that our we-ness is the condition of possibility for knowing anything at all. And this is obvious enough too, though much of the history of philosophy has been designed to avoid it: It’s obvious because if we transcend ourselves in the act of knowing, then it is no longer we who are knowing it.

Gadamer doesn’t regret finitude. His is a philosophy at home in human skin. Which means it’s a healthy philosophy, since human skin is the home we’ve got.