World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 246

other physical things, or as fundamentally different from inanimate things); we'd reject an interpretation of "machine" if it led us to nonsensical conclusions about the body. For example, if we were to find a seventeenth century association between the word "machine" and the phrase "the use of iron in construction" we'd rightly conclude that is not the sense of "machine" in Descartes' claim that the body is a machine. The relevant interpretive contexts, the historical horizons, are those that produce possibly true sentences. Notice that in practice determining the meaning of a sentence and determining how a sentence might be true are not two separate operations. This insight is necessary for understanding how the fusion of horizons is properly called a fusion.
If we take Gadamer's understanding of horizons as the beliefs that make possible the understanding of a culture, then we can see what he means by the fusion of horizons. Horizons fuse when an individual realizes how the context of the subject matter can be weighted differently to lead to a different interpretation than the one initially arrived at. Either new information, or a new sense of the relative significance of available information leads, at the very least, to an understanding of the contingency of the initial interpretation, quite possibly to a new understanding of the subject matter, and ideally to a new agreement between the two parties about the subject matter. In any case, the original understanding is surpassed and integrated into a broader, more informed understanding. One's horizons are broadened; we have a new perspective on our old views, and maybe new views as well. This is the meaning of the "fusion of horizons."
Inasmuch as understanding always occurs against the background of our prior involvement, so it always occurs on the basis of our history. Understanding, for Gadamer, is thus always an 'effect' of history, while hermeneutical 'consciousness' is itself that mode of being that is conscious of its own historical 'being effected'-it is 'historically-effected consciousness' (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein). Awareness of the historically effected character of understanding is, according to Gadamer, identical with an awareness of the hermeneutical situation and he also refers to that situation by means of the phenomenological concept of 'horizon' (Horizont)-understanding and interpretation thus always occurs from within a particular 'horizon' that is determined by our historically-determined situatedness. Understanding is not, however, imprisoned within the horizon of its situationindeed, the horizon of understanding is neither static nor unchanging (it is, after all, always subject to the effects of history). Just as our prejudices are themselves brought into question in the process of understanding, so, in the encounter with another, is the horizon of our own understanding susceptible to change.
Gadamer views understanding as a matter of negotiation between
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