CONCILIATORY THINKING
What is striking in the present reception of Gadamer's work is the concentration on what Henning Ritter has described as “conciliatory thinking which knows how to conceal his hardness.”[2] The notion of conciliation is generally explicated through reference to the third section of Truth and Method. In what he terms the “on to logical turn of hermeneutics oriented by the guiding thread of language,” Gadamer develops a conception of language that comes close to the dictum of the later Heidegger: that, properly understood, it is not the individual subject but language itself that speaks[3]-with the difference, however, that Gadamer introduces the model of dialogue as a sort of counterbalance. In short, Gadamer's basic assumption is that truth is disclosed in dialogical speech. Decisive here is Gadamer's reinterpretation
In contrast, the conditions of hermeneutic understanding that first enable a successful accomplishment of understanding, as developed by Gada-mer in the second section of Truth and Method, have retreated into the background.[4] In this section Gadamer pursues a trenchant rehabilitation of a thinking that is grounded in prejudices [Vorurteilen]’, and affirms both the power of tradition (above all through the example of the classical) and the unlimited validity of authority and authorities. He defends this as a genuinely conservative undertaking that does not need to be argumentatively justified.[5] The subjective dispositions through which this project is to be sustained are “affirmation, appropriation and care” (WMs65 ff.). Because Gadamer regards “the self-reflection of the subject” as “only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life” (WMa65), “the prejudices of the individual, far more than his or her own judgments, constitute the historical reality of being” (WMsGi). Under these conditions, understanding “is less to be thought of as a subjective act” than, in a way that carries associations with military practices, “as conscription into an event of tradition” (WMa74 ff.; italics removed). In Gadamer's view, there is no “method” for acquiring this competence in understanding.
Finally, it is characteristic of the current reception of Gadamer's work that the emphasis has shifted away from a thinking grounded in prejudices toward a more comprehensive notion of pre-understanding that is prior to every act of understanding. Through selective and sometimes critical readings, Gadamer has been drawn into dialogue with the school of Anglo-American philosophy of language, theorists of intersubjectivity such as Hab-ermas and Karl-Otto Apel, Richard Rorty in the United States, and Jean Grondin in Canada, as well as left-oriented hermeneutic thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo in Italy and Emilio Lledo in Spain.