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logical milieu in which, as understanding, socially constituted beings, we “live, move, andhave our being.”Gadamer’s hermeneutics is grounded in Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit),104 and thus, as Ricoeur also makes clear, the notion of effective-history means thatwe can never achieve a bird’s-eye overview of our historical situatedness in such a wayas to realize the metaphysical ideal of an all-encompassing science -- “To exist historicallymeans that knowledge of oneself can never be complete.” (TM, 269) “Between finitudeand absolute knowledge,” Ricoeur observes, “it is necessary to choose; the concept ofeffective history belongs to an ontology of finitude.” (HHS, 74) Gadamer’s ontology offinitude is not, however, a version of relativism, as I mentioned above. To say thatunderstanding is finite or situated, is to say that it is always bounded by horizons(“essential to the concept of situation is the concept of horizon.” [TM, 304]), but a horizonis not a wall or a barrier (an absolute limit) that closes us off from what is “other.” Onthe contrary, horizons, being mobile, invite exploration and allow us to move about in theworld and make contact with what is distant and alien (the world itself being, as Husserlsaid, the “horizon of all horizons”). What lies beyond one’s horizon at any given time is,by definition, unknown, but it is not in principle unknowable; a horizon always pointsbeyond itself to, as Husserl would say, a vast realm of “determinable indeterminacy.”Indeed, from a phenomenological point of view the very notion of a “closed horizon” (andthus also the notion that different cultural lifeworlds are “incommensurable”) is, asGadamer says, “artificial” (see TM, 304), a metaphysical construction without any basis inlived experience. Thus, as Gadamer accordingly insisted, “Precisely through our finitude,the particularity of our being, which is evident even in the variety of languages, the infinitedialogue is opened in the direction of the truth that we are.” (PH, 16)Just as Merleau-Ponty maintained that truth is nothing other than the experience of a“concordance” between ourselves and others, so likewise for Gadamer, truth is not amatter of “adequation” between an isolated, cognizing subject and an objective, in-itselfworld (adaequatio intellectus et res), but is a matter of mutual agreement between actualhuman subjects freely engaged in dialogue, and seeking -- oftentimes painfully -- a commonunderstanding of things. We are “in the truth” when, through a “merging of horizons(Horizontverschmelzung),” the “hermeneutic experience” par excellence, we are able toencounter other people and other ways of life and to arrive in this way at mutual understandingsand common agreements as to what is or ought to be the case. 105Gadamer’s crucial insight, one which dominates all of his work, is that there is, or needbe, no contradiction between “openness” and “belongingness” (between tradition andemancipation) -- which is what allowed him to assert that there is “no higher principle ofreason” with which to think our effective-history than that of freedom. 106In maintaining that the locus of truth -- of reason (the logos) -- is not the isolated,monological subject of modern philosophy but the dialogical encounter between situatedhuman beings, Gadamer’s hermeneutics effected a decisive break not only with modernepistemologism but also with the quasi-solipsism of Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness.Merleau-Ponty had said that the “germ of universality” lies not in a transcendental104See Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy, 130.105For a discussion of this matter, as well as of other basic themes in philosophical hermeneutics,see my “Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur,” in Kearney, ed., Continental Philosophy in the 20thCentury; for a more succinct overview of philosophical hermeneutics, see my “Hermeneutics: Gadamerand Ricoeur,” in Richard H. Popkin, ed., The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (New York:Columbia University Press, 1999).106See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 9, hereafter RAS.31