‘Historically effected consciousness’ (also referred to as ‘effective historical consciousness’)
Gadamer refers to ‘effective history’ meaning the history of effects: ‘understanding is, essentially, a historically effected event’ (TM, p. 300). This is a difficult thought to grasp. What Gadamer has in mind is that the position of the interpreter, or the one who seeks to understand, is not fixed (as science conceives its detached observer to be); on the contrary, the interpreter is always, as part of tradition, the effect of prior interpretation. There can be no neutral position from which interrogation or understanding takes place as the site of interpretation is itself the effect of the past upon the present. The sovereignty of the subject is once again taken to be fictional since the interpreter is little more than the effect of tradition rather than its controlling subject. What then is one conscious of in ‘effective historical consciousness’? We are conscious of the tradition and the way it has its effect. The prejudices of the individual can never be raised to the level of consciousness. Because the prejudices are themselves the condition of consciousness, they can never be raised to the level of reflective judgement. But the effect of the disruption of the prejudices can be experienced, i.e. felt as an effect. Once again, the model of textual interpretation will provide the clue to unravelling the identity between understanding and interpretation. When reading a text it is understood not simply by making sense of the words on the page but by permitting the horizon of the text to fuse with the horizon of the reader in such a way that the reader is affected by the encounter with the text. It is a common enough experience to be disrupted by the effect a text can have on the reader; often what we take for granted can be redefined, changed and realigned by the act of reading. Gadamer speaks here of consciousness. A consciousness in the act of reading is never fully present to itself but it can be made aware of changes taking place (in that consciousness) as the text has an effect. In its capacity to surprise, delight, intrigue, confuse and so on, we can speak of the effect the text has upon consciousness. Gadamer seeks to dispel the orthodox idea that consciousness is reflection fully in control of itself: he conceives of consciousness as both active and re-active.
The idea of an effect is important in another way. Not only is the reader an effect of the text, as the horizons of reader and text fuse; the reader is also revealed to be part of an historical effect: ‘Every encounter with tradition that takes place within historical consciousness involves the experience of a tension between the text and the present’ (TM, p. 306).
There is a constant dialogue at work in interpretation, a dialogue between the past and the present. The past does not have to be the distant past of antiquity – it can be the recent past of a moment just gone; the point is that in both cases the same hermeneutical problem arises: how can the interpreter in the present accommodate or negotiate meanings external to current consciousness? Gadamer’s whole point is that there are no meanings external to current consciousness, since meaning itself is always produced by the coming together of the immediate and the point of tradition one seeks to understand.
The Gadamer Dictionary, by Chris Lawn, Niall Keane, Continnum, 2011, pp. 79-80
