The magnum opus of the twentieth century’s most consequential thinker on hermeneutics, Wahrheit und Methode is an investigation into the structure and nature of the operation of human understanding, using the existential method of Being and Time as its methodological model. Heidegger was a friend and fellow student of Gadamer, and his influence upon this text, which takes his concept of philosophical hermeneutics as its starting point, cannot be overstated. Picking up on Heidegger’s temporal analysis of ontology as well as the priority he accorded to language, Gadamer establishes an inviolable distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘method’. In so doing, he advocates against ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ approaches to the human sciences as well as hermeneutic methods that claim to access an author’s inner creativity, both of which fail to account for meaning’s inexorable entanglement in which interpreter and text both find themselves caught. Understanding, then, becomes understood as a dynamic, dialogic process between text and reader, one with no scope outside its ‘belongingness’ to language.
