The event of understanding and the hermeneutic task according to Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method

Abstract

Hans-Georg Gadamer's project, with Truth and Method (1960), is to claim for the spiritual sciences (Geisteswi-ssenschaften) an experience of truth which is not dependent on the concept of objectivity of the method, as the various attempts to remedy the status considered "precarious" of the sciences of the mind, either by adopting the methods of the exact sciences (Auguste Comte and positivism in general, J. S. Mill, the Vienna Circle, K. Popper ...), or by defining a methodology specific to the sciences of the mind (thesis of specific methodology: Droysen, Dilthey, Weber, etc.); We will therefore see as a correlative objective of the author that of contesting the monopoly that the so-called “exact” sciences exercise on the truth. In this context, Gadamer's question which will occupy us in these pages consists of examining "how, once freed from the ontological constraints of the concept of objectivity specific to science, hermeneutics could do justice to the historicity of understanding1" . This question imposes a double task: 1) the overcoming of the concept of objectivity in the sciences of the mind and 2) the emergence of an experience of truth which rigorously integrates the very historicity of understanding