(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Gadamer was a German philosopher with a focus on hermeneutics.
To learn from books they must challenge us. We’re biased to seek information that coheres with what we already know, and it’s reassuring to be reminded that we’re right, but learning is the opposite process.
Books challenge us when they provoke our prejudices by triggering bodily affect: we feel surprise, disgust, discomfort, intrigue. We may be unable to make the prejudice itself conscious, but the experience of reading can make it felt and thus a subject of reflection—“prejudice as a condition of truth” (Weinsheimer 1985, 164–184). This is how learning begins.
A prejudice for Gadamer is a “judgement that is rendered before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally examined” (2013, 316). Our prejudices are clearly shaped by tradition and history (Weinsheimer 1985, 169–170). Many of the principles we believe are based on what our ancestors believed—rightly or wrongly—with morality being an obvious example. We ground most beliefs in the authority of others rather than reasoning them out for ourselves because that’s the only practical way to live (Simms 2015, 72–74, 134–135). Legitimate prejudices save us from infinite regress by ceding authority to legitimate others; illegitimate prejudices distort our understanding and divide us against our fellows (Gadamer 2013, 323). We seek to discriminate between our prejudices by continually testing them against our tradition and interlocutors, then overcoming those on which we’re “pulled up short” (pp. 280, 316). We don’t seek to eliminate them because there is no judgement without prejudice. However much we learn, we will always have prejudices; our aim is to adopt better ones and overcome the negative.
We judge books by their covers, first chapter, and our general impressions, because we project our prejudices to predict the whole from the part—“Understanding is projection” (Weinsheimer 1985, 166). If our initial predictions are borne out by the remainder of the book, then we have understood yet learned little. Being right reminds us that we wasted our time. If a text does not challenge us, or we aren’t receptive to learning, it can only confirm what we already believed. A text from which we learn is a crucible in which some of our prejudices are disconfirmed.
To affect us a text must be both challenging and interesting. A textbook for a subject you’re compelled to study may contain challenging material, but because it doesn’t engage you, you aim to simply mirror it in your memory; encode to retrieve. Lacking emotional investment in the author’s claims, you read more as a disinterested, objective observer. Passive reception of an author’s opinion isn’t learning. It’s at best memorisation, although ironically your lack of interest impairs your recollection, too.
There’s a need, then, to adopt a certain attitude toward a book from which you wish to learn. Passive reading is uninteresting because it doesn’t involve who the reader is. This is why attempts at mere perspective taking fail: to take the perspective of another is to abandon one’s own, and without your own perspective, you can’t learn your own lessons. Gadamer’s alternative to perspective taking is that the reader should aspire to fuse their horizon with that of the text (Gadamer 2013, 305). A horizon is “the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point”—a world view (p. 345). We must “transpose” ourselves into “the historical horizon from which the traditionary text speaks” (p. 398). This fusion is never to be achieved in practice because our horizon is in constant motion as a result of our experiences—“understanding is primarily the attempt to reach an understanding” (Weinsheimer 1985, 177).
Reading needs to involve a dialogue with the text. This is the spirit behind the popular suggestion that reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author, but that isn’t quite Gadamer’s position. Our interlocutor is actually the text, because the text is autonomous and its author unknowable (at least psychologically) (Simms 2015, 18–19, 93). It is the text that speaks to posterity, and is inherited by future generations as a historical artefact (p. 95). In a conversation between contemporaries one speaks to specific individuals, but the text has no addressee. Or, rather, even if it did, this no longer defines its audience (ibid.). Its audience is universalised—essentially anybody who can read—such that the text gains a life of its own, independent of the author, situated in tradition.
The contrasting view is that to read is to recreate the text by following the author’s process—discovering why they wrote, what they were thinking, and whether they were writing for some specific reader (Gadamer 2013, 186). This is to commit the intentional fallacy. We shouldn’t seek to reproduce the opinion of the author but to understand the truth. The meaning of a specific text for a specific reader is constructed by the two in dialogue; it’s not recovered from the past. The understanding reader is the arbiter of the text’s claim to truth (p. 433).
This conversation between us and a text must be conducted with an openness to learning, but openness isn’t deference. We are neither a blank slate for the text’s imprinting, nor the tide which brings in its bounty and washes away what was already there. Instead, we are curious and vulnerable. We make our prejudices questionable in order to give the text a chance to affect us, but also pose questions for the text. Posing questions is necessary for reading to be a conversation. When a text makes a claim it is a response to a question, and when disconfirming of our prejudices, prompts us to question the claim. The meaning of a claim is given by the question to which it is an answer (p. 367).
The question to which the text responds is not to be found in the intentions of the author, or any original audience for whom they wrote; it’s found in us. This doesn’t mean it’s arbitrary, though; rather, it’s sensible given the situation in which the text was written (p. 301). By situation, Gadamer means the circumstances which limit our understanding, such as historical, social, cultural, and linguistic factors. This is why even if we could know what question the author had in mind when making a claim, it wouldn’t necessarily be relevant in our situation. We can’t assume the question of the author to be the one actually answered by the text: “its meaning necessarily exceeds what is said in it” (p. 363). Successful answers in one situation may not even count as useful in another, so when a question arises, it must be asked anew. This is why “the meaning of the text is constantly changing: interpretation and re-interpretation are ceaseless tasks” (Lawn 2006, 74).
A question must engage us by involving our concerns; addressing a finite range of live possibilities for us (Gadamer 2013, 357). It can’t be rhetorical, because that wouldn’t address any possibilities, and it can’t be generic or boundless, because then it wouldn’t admit an answer. It should make possible the item under question being other than what we thought. We bring a set of prejudices to a text from which we have an interest in learning, allow the text to prompt questions which interest us, and are encouraged to formulate questions which the text could sensibly answer. A “logic of question and answer” occurs (p. 411).
A theme is developing of the text being distant from the reader by virtue of it being a text. There’s the historical and sociological dimension, potentially a translation involved, and the unavailability of the author’s intention to us. There’s a tension between understanding as projecting from what we already know, and avoiding silencing an ancient text by imposing upon it “exclusively contemporary categories” (Lawn 2006, 74). This can be felt as alienating, but can also be liberating when conscious because of how it brings our beliefs into sharp relief. Writing distances, reading appropriates. The interplay between questions that engage us and distance that challenges us is how reading rewards and teaches.
This helps explain why Gadamer suggested that we eschew scientific, rationalistic methods of interpretation which try to remove both our subjectivity and traditions from the process (p. 41). He demonstrated that this was infeasible because all knowledge is human knowledge, and that of a particular human and of a particular object. Reader and text have a historicity that it is vital to remain conscious of—“we are always part of what it is we seek to understand” (p. 39). In understanding a book, we should seek to fuse horizons without pretending that they don’t exist or attempting to universalise the Other.