Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 to 2002) was a German philosopher whose book Truth and Method (1960) presents understanding not as the product of a method but as an event, more like a conversation than an experiment, in which what we bring and what we meet change each other. We never understand from nowhere; our prejudices, in the old sense of pre-judgements, are what open us to anything at all, and the task is to become aware of them. Therapeutic Shamanism makes the same point about journeying, that there is no such thing as a journey without preconceptions, so the discipline is to know what we bring.
Who was Hans-Georg Gadamer? #
He was born in Marburg, Germany, in 1900. In 1923 he met Martin Heidegger, and worked as his unpaid assistant during Heidegger’s years at Marburg; Heidegger’s influence on him was lasting. He taught at Marburg and Kiel, became director of the Philosophical Institute at Leipzig in 1939, moved to Frankfurt in 1947, and in 1949 succeeded Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, where he remained. Truth and Method, published when he was sixty, made his name. He died in Heidelberg in 2002, aged 102.1
What did he mean by “the limits of method”? #
That method, the careful step-by-step procedure that gives the natural sciences their power, does not exhaust truth. Some of the most important truths, the ones carried by art, history, poetry and conversation, are reached in a different way, and trying to force them through a method loses what they have to give. In understanding of this kind “the knower’s own being comes into play”, which shows “the limits of method, but not of science”. What method cannot achieve must be achieved instead “by a discipline of questioning and inquiring”.2
He did not mean that science is wrong or that evidence does not matter. He called it “a flat misunderstanding” when critics took his title as an attack on the rigour of modern science.3 His target was narrower, the belief that only what a method can establish counts as true.
What did he say about prejudice? #
That it has been misunderstood. Since the Enlightenment, ‘prejudice’ has meant a bias to be got rid of. Gadamer went back to the older sense, a pre-judgement, a meaning we bring before we start. He held that we cannot understand anything without such fore-meanings; our prejudices are what open us up to what is to be understood.4
So the aim is not to empty ourselves. Openness to a text, or to another person, involves “neither ‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self”. Instead, “The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias”, so that what we meet can show itself in its own otherness and correct us. He was realistic about how hard that is. We usually discover our assumptions only when we are “pulled up short by the text”, when it makes no sense, or not the sense we expected.5
What are the fusion of horizons and the play of understanding? #
His two pictures of what happens when understanding takes place. Each of us stands within a horizon, the range of what can be seen from where we are, shaped by our history, language and culture. Understanding something from another time or place is not leaving our horizon behind and stepping into theirs; it is the two horizons meeting and forming a wider one that neither had before, much as two people in a real conversation come to see something together that neither saw alone.6
He described this through play. In a game, the players do not control the game; the game takes hold of them and carries them. Play “absorbs the player into itself”, and so frees them from the strain of always having to take the initiative.7 Understanding is like that, something we are drawn into and not something we simply do.
How does Gadamer’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most closely on what we bring to a journey. There is absolutely no such thing as going into a journey without any preconceptions. A journeyer stripped of all imagery, culture and personality would be of no use at all, because if you bring nothing, then nothing will happen. The point is to be as aware as possible of what you bring, and not to bring things that distort the journey until it is no longer a true representation of spirit but a story full of your own stuff. This is why shamans talk about ‘stalking’ yourself, watching the thoughts, preconceptions and belief systems you bring to the process of co-creation.8 Gadamer’s “aware of one’s own bias”, set against the impossible ideal of neutrality, is close to this, though he was writing about reading texts, not about meeting the beings of the shamanic realms. See What are hollowing-out and stalking our stories? and Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
His limits of method meet the distinction between mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this and logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this. Logos is what is literally true; mythos is what is metaphorically true, the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys, which is just as real but of a different kind.9 Shamanic journeys are mythos, not logos. Like dreams, they are full of symbolic meanings, and they cannot be used to find out facts.10 Gadamer’s argument that art and history carry truth that method cannot reach is an argument from inside Western philosophy for taking that second kind of truth seriously.
And his refusal of a method of understanding is close to the way journeys are unpacked. The real and deepest meaning of a journey is what it means to the person whose journey it is, so the first step is to ask them, and research comes afterwards, for what still means nothing to them.11 Meaning, here too, is not extracted by a procedure but arrived at in something more like a conversation. See How do I unpack and interpret a shamanic journey?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On tradition. For Gadamer, the inherited tradition we stand in is the condition of understanding, something to be engaged in conversation, not escaped. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that nobody stands outside their culture, but it treats much of what modern people inherit as the conditioning of Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer, so pervasive since the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer that it has soaked into the language itself, and so as something to be recognised, questioned and often set down, stalked and not simply conversed with.12 See What are Leaver and Taker cultures, the Great Forgetting and the Great Remembering?
And on who the conversation is with. Gadamer’s partners in understanding are texts, artworks and other people. In shamanic practice, the other who can pull us up short may be a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer, a GuideGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this, a Plant or a Stone, beings with their own lives and agency, met in the shamanic realms. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Was Gadamer’s defence of tradition criticised? #
Yes, most famously by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who saw in Gadamer’s emphasis on tradition and authority a sign of ideological conservatism. Gadamer replied that he was offering a corrective to the Enlightenment’s over-reaction against tradition, not a defence of whatever happens to have been handed down.13
