Is Gadamer a Realist?

Abstract

Although Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has been accused of relativism, there have been several attempts to interpret his position as realism. Among them, the theory ofWachterhauser’s “perspectival realism” offers a convincing reading. In this paper, however, it is demonstrated that Gadamer is not a realist in the normal sense by comparing Wachterhauser’s theory and Gadamer’s original text of Truth and Method. Although Wachterhauser captures the bipolar structure of Gadamer’s argument regarding one reality and plural perspectives, he fails to grasp Gadamer’s emphasis by overstressing the accessibility of reality, whereas Gadamer limits himself to perspectives which maintain that reality is nothing other than a continuity of these perspectives. The concept of reality, or in Gadamer’s own term, the “world–in–itself,” should not be used “constitutively” but “regulatively” in the Kantian sense: An objective statement about it should be avoided; rather, it works as the focus imaginarius of the linguistic perspectives. Gadamer’s attitude towards Kant is also discussed in this context: AlthoughWachterhauser claims that Gadamer is anti–Kantian in his orientation, it is shown that Gadamer shares the principal spirit of critical philosophy with Kant, namely not taking phenomena as thing–in–itself. The reason that Gadamer did not take the last step to realism is, in the end, interpreted as his radical attitude of docta ignorantia, which warns against dogmatism and maintains a hermeneutic openness to the other possibility