Dasein - Monoskop

234 PART III
ment of a "prejudice against prejudice itself" 10 . Gadamer also rejects
the attack of enlightenment on authority and draws on the "romantic
criticism of the enlightenment", suggesting that "that which has
been sanctified by tradition and custom has an authority that is
nameless . .." n However, authority, for Gadamer, is not inevitably
linked to supression. The authority that he seeks to vindicate is foremost
an authority of knowledge. It is authority in this sense that
Gadamer regards as central in the Geisteswissenschaften:
To be obedient to authority means to realize that the other is
able to see better than oneself—and this holds also of that voice
that can be heard from tradition and the past ... To belong
to tradition and to live within tradition obviously is the way of
truth that has to be found in the Geisteswissenschaften, 12
Since earlier knowledge thus seems to be placed automatically
beyond later knowledge, it is understandable why Gadamer can regard
judicial and theological interpretation of texts as paradigmatic
for hermeneutics as a whole, for what seems to be the heart of interpretation
is that the authoritative text, i.e., the "classic", is applied
to the present, not that its truth is systematically questioned. Application
is thus what interpretation is all about. The "classic" texts
of Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel 13 are to be listened
to—almost as if they were major dispatches from Being.
Little surprise then that Gadamer also ends up with some kind
of opposition between "truth" and "method". Indeed some interpreters
have wondered why he did not prefer to entitle his book
"Truth or Method". 14 Highly reminiscent of Heidegger's opposition
between thought/poetry and scientific method, Gadamer seems to
draw a sharp line between methodically obtained knowledge on the
one hand, and hermeneutical experience on the other hand. He seems
to reject the need for rules of understanding, i.e., he appears to renounce
the need for a distinction between "context of discovery"
and "context of justification". He even seems to suggest that the
context of justification is of no interest in the case of the Geisteswissenschaften
at all. For Gadamer, it seems to be sufficient that "all
understanding means understanding differently". 15 Gadamer writes
that "the hermeneutic phenomenon is basically not a problem o f