ABSTRACT
Though Gadamer rightly opposes a metaphysical claim to a superhuman view of the world, he combats this absurd claim as if it were sensible and thus contributes his own absurdities. His attempt to describe our conditions of understanding raises important questions about the unity of language, the relation of language to reality, and what it means to understand something that is said. Before delving into those questions, I will discuss, in this chapter, Gadamer’s attraction to the philosophical illusion that ‘all understanding is interpretation’. Why does he speak of the superhuman view as something that humans are unable to achieve? Why does he sometimes speak as if there is an extra-linguistic view, while simultaneously holding that humans cannot get access to it? And why does he sometimes treat human fallibility as a fact that calls into question each particular claim to knowledge? (‘Your understanding is only one of many interpretations.’) Answering these questions will involve us in the difficult task of trying to determine whether Gadamer is offering an epistemological justification of knowledge, or whether he is simply making observations about the nature of understanding. His discussion of history affords the best opportunity to determine whether his account of the unity of language is a conceptual limit of human understanding, that is, an account of what it means to say something, or a limitation on what humans can understand.
