ABSTRACT
The prejudices of individuals, far more than their judgments, according to Gadamer, constitute the historical reality of their being. In Chapter 1, I brought out some of the difficulties in Gadamer’s peculiar use of ‘prejudice’ while pointing to the sort of philosophical confusions that he wanted to avoid. Philosophical hermeneutics rightly opposes the idea of a superhuman view of reality, but practical difficulties arise with Gadamer’s reformation of ‘prejudice’. There is confusion between his more positive conception of ‘prejudice’ and the ordinary, negative use of ‘prejudice’. He tries to correlate his reformed use to a pre-Enlightenment legal term. We saw that this effort fails because his use of the word is a technical one in which all our views are said to be prejudiced. The pre-Enlightenment concept applied only to a particular legal judgment and did not imply, in any way, that all our views are prejudiced. In fact, we were able to trace Gadamer’s reformed use to Heidegger’s technical term ‘foreconception’. Finally, in Chapter 1, we saw that Gadamer’s peculiar use of ‘prejudice’ leads to the use of other words that lack a context. These include a notion of a ‘worldin-itself’. Despite his attempt to emphasize that our views of the world are constitutive of what the world is to us, he is unable to dispense with an intentional ‘world’ that is common to everyone, the ultimate source of which is (metaphysical) being. Thus the account of the preconditions of understanding that we find in philosophical hermeneutics has recourse to an underlying metaphysical notion of being that is prior to language.
