Reading the Gadamer essays, I found myself accepting that life is hermeneutics. We, as thinkers and human beings, are always interpreting, reinterpreting, and misinterpreting. We are affected individuals; affected by history, prejudices (even the way Gadamer defines them), society, everything. We do not live in a vacuum. “There is always a world already interpreted, already organized in its basic relations, into which experience steps as something new, unsetting what has led our expectations and undergoing reorganization itself in the upheaval” (15). We are always interpreting everything around us and what has already occurred. And language is the basis of this interpretation. What we experience and are exposed to is fundamentally based in language. The historical context which Gadamer refers to is based on the language and experiences of the victors. The past is related to us through a purely subjective view and thus is already interpreted.

I also enjoyed Gadamer’s take on statistical information. I have already heard and repeated that statistics can be made to say anything. I have seen this first hand when I was in charge of presenting data on 9th grade eligibility at the school I taught at. We had a number of different easy to present the same numbers, yet some seemed to be showing improvement while others showed no change or actually a drop. However, we interpreted the data was how the public would receive the information. “[E]ffective propaganda must always try to influence initially the judgment of the person addressed and to restrict his possibilities of judgment” (11 emphasis added).

Dave