Application (Anwendung)

For Gadamer, application (Anwendung) is not a step that follows understanding but a moment intrinsic to it: "application does not mean first understanding a given universal in itself and then afterward applying it to a concrete case. It is the very understanding of the universal — the text — itself." Recovering the old pietist triad of subtilitas intelligendi (understanding), explicandi (interpretation), and applicandi (application), Gadamer argues that the third has been wrongly severed from hermeneutics — and that legal and theological hermeneutics are not special cases but the model, because in them "understanding is always application." Aristotle's phronesis (practical wisdom) supplies the philosophical paradigm.

Key Points

  • Application is constitutive, not subsequent. "Understanding always involves something like applying the text to be understood to the interpreter's present situation." A law or gospel "must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way."
  • Legal hermeneutics is exemplary, not a special case. The legal historian who reconstructs a law's original meaning must, exactly like the judge, mediate original and present meaning; Savigny's purely-historical task is "a legally untenable fiction." Legal hermeneutics is "capable of restoring the hermeneutical problem to its full breadth."
  • The historian, too, applies. "Historical understanding proves to be a kind of literary criticism writ large": all reading involves application, so that "a person reading a text is himself part of the meaning he apprehends."
  • Phronesis is the paradigm. Aristotle's moral knowledge is "knowledge for oneself" — distinct from episteme (theoretical, learnable by anyone, of the unchangeable) and from techne (craft, making according to a pre-held eidos). You cannot first know the good in general and then apply it; the knowing is in the concrete situation.
  • Understanding is service, not domination. Hermeneutics is not "knowledge as domination" but "subordinating ourselves to the text's claim to dominate our minds."

What the Concept Does

Application is the hinge that turns the fusion-of-horizons into a concrete account of how understanding works. By making application internal to understanding, Gadamer collapses the distinctions that fragment rival hermeneutic theories — the cognitive vs. the normative, understanding vs. interpretation vs. performance — into "one unitary process." It thereby unifies the originally-allied hermeneutic disciplines (philological, legal, theological) under a single structure, and it supplies the answer to the question opened by temporal distance: the productive difference between the interpreter and the text is realized precisely as the text is applied anew. The phronesis model also re-grounds the human sciences as "moral sciences" — knowledge oriented to action and the changeable, not to the eternal.

What It Rejects

  • The Romantic exclusion of application — the assumption that application is "an occasional, post facto supplement to understanding."
  • Betti's tripartite division of cognitive / normative / reproductive interpretation — Gadamer argues these "constitute one unitary phenomenon."
  • The techne model of self-knowledge — that one knows the good "for oneself" the way a craftsman knows how to make a thing; "man is not at his own disposal in the same way that the craftsman's material is."
  • Understanding as domination/appropriation — "knowledge as domination"; against this, interpretation "in the service of what is considered valid."

Stakes

If application is intrinsic to understanding, then the ideal of a value-free, application-free historical science is incoherent: every act of understanding already mediates past and present. This re-describes the human sciences as continuous with practical reason (the "moral sciences"), restores the unity of the hermeneutic disciplines, and gives the fusion-of-horizons its concrete mechanism. It also connects Gadamer's hermeneutics to the revival of Aristotelian phronesis in twentieth-century practical philosophy — and to his later defense (against Habermas) of rhetoric as a dunamis and of practical reason against its technological displacement.

Details

In legal interpretation, "discovering the meaning of a legal text and discovering how to apply it in a particular legal instance are not two separate actions, but one unitary process." The judge concretizes the law; but so must the legal historian, who cannot reconstruct a law's original sense "without being aware of the change in circumstances that separates his own present time from that past time." In theological hermeneutics, preaching concretizes the proclamation (parallel to the judge concretizing the law), and Bultmann's fore-understanding (Vorverständnis) shows that even scholarly interpretation presupposes "a living relationship between the interpreter and the text." A condition of legal hermeneutics is that the law bind all equally — "an absolute ruler" who can abrogate the rules of interpretation makes hermeneutics impossible.

Phronesis (the hermeneutic relevance of Aristotle)

The problem of application "concerns the relationship between the universal and the particular." Aristotle's analysis of phronesis in the Nicomachean Ethics is the model: moral knowledge is "not objective knowledge — i.e., the knower is not standing over against a situation that he merely observes; he is directly confronted with what he sees." Distinct from episteme and techne, it is a knowledge in which application is not a second step but the very form of the knowing. This is why "the human sciences stand closer to moral knowledge than to ... 'theoretical' knowledge."

Connections

  • is intrinsic to understanding — "understanding always involves application."
  • completes fusion-of-horizons — the fusion is realized as the text is applied to the interpreter's situation.
  • is the answer opened by temporal distance — the productive interpreter-text difference is realized in application.
  • applies ... to hermeneutics Aristotle's phronesis — the relation of universal to particular as the model of understanding.
  • is defended against Habermas via rhetoric-as-dunamis and practical reason (Afterword).

Open Questions

  • Does the phronesis model fit textual understanding as well as Gadamer claims, or does it import an ethical structure that not all interpretation shares?
  • The relation between Gadamer's Anwendung and the Hegelian judgment (Urteil) / Kantian determinative-vs-reflective judgment material (which Gadamer invokes in the Afterword) deserves dedicated treatment.

Sources

  • gadamer-1960-truth-and-method — Ch 4: "The recovery of the fundamental hermeneutic problem / The problem of application," "The hermeneutic relevance of Aristotle," "The exemplary significance of legal hermeneutics" (pp. 318–350); Afterword on phronesis and rhetoric.