The natural sciences gave modernity its model of knowledge: systematic method, controlled experiment, reproducible results, the elimination of subjective interference. The Enlightenment ideal was to extend this model to human knowledge, to history, culture, law, and art, by developing interpretive methods rigorous enough to guarantee objective understanding. If you want to know what a text means, strip away your preconceptions, apply the correct philological and historical methods, and the meaning will emerge independent of who you are and when you are reading.
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), student of Heidegger, author of Truth and Method (1960), among the most important works of twentieth-century philosophy, argued that this ideal is not merely unachieved but incoherent. Understanding is not a method applied to an object. It is an event, something that happens between a reader and a text, between a listener and a speaker, between a tradition and a person who belongs to it, and it cannot be reduced to a technique without destroying what is most essential about it.
Truth and Method is, as Gadamer himself said, a deliberately paradoxical title. Truth and Method are not a pair to be reconciled; they are in tension. The domain of genuine humanistic truth, the understanding of a poem, a legal precedent, a historical event, a person's meaning, is precisely the domain where method cannot guarantee access. You can be technically impeccable and still fail to understand. You can discard all method and still achieve a genuine understanding. The title is a provocation: the real question is whether truth can be reached by method at all. and Gadamer's answer is that the most important truths are reached by something other than method
Gadamer develops his account of understanding in opposition to the Enlightenment's "prejudice against prejudice." The Enlightenment ideal of pure method assumes that prior beliefs, culturally instilled assumptions, and historical situatedness are obstacles to understanding, noise that must be filtered out to reach the signal. Gadamer inverts this completely:
The overcoming of all prejudices, this global demand of the Enlightenment, will itself prove to be a prejudice, and removing it opens the way to an appropriate understanding of the finitude which dominates not only our humanity but also our historical consciousness.
— Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960), Part II, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall
Prejudice (Vorurteil, literally "fore-judgment") is, for Gadamer, not a failing but a condition of possibility. Every act of understanding is structured by prior assumptions, about what a text is likely to mean, what counts as a good argument, which questions are worth asking. These assumptions are not distortions to be eliminated; they are the very medium through which understanding occurs. You cannot understand anything from a standpoint of pure presuppositionlessness, because there is no such standpoint. To have no prior understanding is to have no foothold from which to begin interpreting at all.
This is not relativism. Gadamer is not saying that all interpretations are equally valid or that prior beliefs can never be revised. His point is that understanding is always historically situated: you understand from within a tradition, and the tradition is not a cage but a resource, it gives you the concepts, the questions, and the horizon within which meaning can appear.
Quick reflection
Gadamer says prejudice-free understanding is not merely difficult but incoherent. Does this feel liberating — it acknowledges you can never be fully neutral — or troubling — it means you can never fully escape your own perspective?