Understanding and Interpretation: Defending Gadamer in Light of Shusterman's "Beneath Interpretation"

Abstract

Hans-Georg Gadamer's important work, Truth and Method, ushered in a new trend in hermeneutic thought that combined understanding, interpretation, and application into a dynamic process that individuals experience in actions producing meaning. The individual was portrayed as situated in a specific tradition that influences the cognitions and meanings that texts and language use in general can contain. The central point of Gadamer's hermeneutic thought is that the human being is historically situated, and that is consequently historically conditioned. It was this intrinsic situatedness of humans and their prejudices that led him to conclude, all is Richard Shusterman, in his work Beneath Interpretation, has recently taken issue with this stance that equates interpretation with understanding, arguing for a conception of understanding that resides beneath interpretation. Gadamer and others are said to collapse interpretation into understanding, thus depriving unders tood bodily exper iences of their p lace in the conceptualization of According to Shusterman, does not involve interpretation. This essay will argue that this position advanced by Shusterman rests ultimately on a misconception of Gadamer's notion of interpretation, and as such, is not a strong challenge to Gadamer's insights concerning the process of human understanding. Shusterman's emphasis on being pre-reflective and interpretation being conscious disavows Gadamer's analysis that they are identical in so far as they both refer to an individual's situatedness in tradition and its concurrent impacts on the production of meaning. In order to demonstrate how this is so, this essay will first examine some of