Gadamer and the limits of hermeneutics

Abstract

The study is devoted to the third part of the book Truth and Method, by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, with the aim of outlining, from his observations, the limits of philosophical hermeneutics. It starts from the relation between thinking and speaking and from the example of conversation, in which the interlocutors are led by the dialogue itself, and extends the analogy to the reading of the text, taken as a companion in hermeneutic conversation that gains a voice only through the reader's intellective movements. It covers the notion of tradition, oral and written, writing as self-alienation whose overcoming is reading, the speculative character of language and its dialectical overcoming of one-sidedness, as well as the questioning of the idea of an original interpretation, which would not be found even at the moment the work is conceived by its author. It discusses the premise that the understanding of the world is linguistic and the concluding step of the universality of hermeneutics. It holds that, once made the absolute medium of the interpretation of reality, hermeneutics finds its limit in itself, in the universalisation the text ascribes to it.