By: M. Azzam Rakan Noor

In approaching a particular event or term, it is said that historians have to be accurate and non-influential–nonpartisan. However, it is still debatable how historians should be purely objective or should involve various essences of subjectivity, i.e prejudice, in order to analyse thoroughly. One example is how Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Koselleck’s conceptual history show contrast approaches to divulge historical meaning. 

Hans-Georg Gadamer, in ‘Truth and Method’, argues that historical understanding is shaped by the interpreter’s own prejudices and historical context, emphasizing the productive role of “temporal distance” where it enables us to see the past differently than those who lived through it, which helps us to become aware of the prejudices that shape our interpretation. Conversely, Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte aims to trace the evolution of historical concepts independently of contemporary bias, seeking a more objective insight into the shifting meanings of terms and breaking free of the circular movement from word to thing and back. For him, concepts are irredeemable because their meanings are always in flux, shaped by the historical condition in which they are used.

Gadamer does believe in a retrospective element in understanding, but he sees it as a necessary part of our historical awareness rather than a way to “reconstruct” the past objectively. He argues that our understanding is always shaped by our current context, which allows us to look back and reinterpret historical meanings with new insights. As for Koselleck, concepts embody historical shifts and carry meanings shaped by political and social forces, suggesting a structural evolution of language and meaning over time that is less about subjective understanding and more about tracking objective shifts within historical terms. To give an example, Koselleck examines how the concept of “democracy” has evolved in different historical contexts, aiming to understand each shift in meaning as influenced by the socio-political climate rather than personal interpretation. Unlike Gadamer, who would likely engage in how our own understanding of “democracy” is influenced by our current context and historical assumptions.

However, when it comes to perspective, the approach of Gadamer is more reasonable to be implemented for broad application. If a concept must remain ambiguous in order to be a concept, then it indirectly has to be looked back and forth, which contradicts Begriffsgeschichte about irredeemable movement of words. It can be argued that one has to acquire a sense of retrospect in order to fully comprehend and analyse the interconnection or in language, etymology. Gadamer believes that understanding happens in the “fusion of horizons”, where different historical and cultural perspectives meet and interact.  He argues that we are always influenced by our historical background (what he calls prejudices, or pre-judgments) and they are productive and necessary conditions for understanding. 

Regardless of that, both approaches underscore the universality of language as the medium of understanding, though their approaches depend on the type of analysis. Each of them establish their own particular horizon for potential experience and conceivable theory: Begriffsgeschichte has their semantic function and performance that its understanding mainly focused with the objective historical development of terms (political and social capacities), whereas Gadamer’s understanding is more focused on analysing language from the art and history side/perspective and to understand how a certain thing is shaped by our situated, dialogical relationship with history.

References

KOSELLECK, REINHART, and Keith Tribe. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time.

Columbia University Press, 2004. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/kose12770.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2013. Truth and Method. 1st ed. New York, USA: Bloomsbury Publishing..

Abadía, Oscar M. 2011. “Hermeneutical contributions to the history of science: Gadamer on‘presentism.’” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42, no. 2 (June): 372-380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2010.12.003.