Hermeneutic Experience (Erfahrung)

Gadamer argues that historically effected consciousness "has the structure of experience (Erfahrung)" — and that genuine experience is dialectical, negative, and finite. "Every experience worthy of the name thwarts an expectation"; experience is a determinate negation in which "both ... our knowledge and its object" change. Crucially, against Hegel, the dialectic of experience does not culminate in absolute knowledge: its truth is openness to further experience and the knowledge of human finitude. "Genuine experience is experience of one's own historicity." Hermeneutic experience is then experience of tradition, which "expresses itself like a Thou" that addresses us.

Key Points

Experience is negative and dialectical. The prevailing theory truncates experience by orienting it toward science (which strips its historicity by demanding repeatability — "experience abolishes its history and thus itself"). Genuine experience is the "reversal of consciousness" (Hegel): the in-itself is revealed as "for us."
But experience does not consummate in absolute knowledge. "The experienced person proves to be ... someone who is radically undogmatic" — open to new experience. Its fulfillment is "the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself," not definitive knowledge.
Experience = experience of finitude. Aeschylus's pathei mathos ("learning through suffering") yields "insight into the limitations of humanity"; "real experience is that whereby man becomes aware of his finiteness."
Tradition as Thou. Hermeneutic experience is concerned with tradition, which "is language — i.e., it expresses itself like a Thou. A Thou is not an object; it relates itself to us." There are three escalating forms of the I-Thou, with hermeneutic parallels (see Details).
The priority of the question. Understanding has the structure of question and answer; "to understand a question means to ask it. To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question." Dialectic is "the art of conducting a real dialogue" — strengthening the other's view, so the logos that emerges is "neither mine nor yours."

What the Concept Does

This concept is Gadamer's answer to Hegel — and the pivot on which his whole relation to German Idealism turns. He cannot refute Hegel's absolute reflection from outside ("polemics against an absolute thinker has itself no starting point"; every appeal to immediacy is itself reflective). So he instead preserves the truth of Hegel's dialectic of experience while conceiving "a reality that limits and exceeds the omnipotence of reflection" — namely finitude. Hermeneutic experience thereby gives historically effected consciousness its inner structure (it has "the structure of experience") and supplies the bridge to the logic of question and answer that culminates Part Two and opens onto language.

What It Rejects

The scientific (inductive) concept of experience — experience oriented teleologically toward repeatable, history-less results (Bacon, and even Husserl, who "noted more the negative than the positive side of language").
Erlebnis — the aesthetic "lived experience" as the punctual unit of the given; Gadamer's Erfahrung is its dialectical, historical counter-concept. (See aesthetic-consciousness for the critique of Erlebnis-aesthetics.)
Hegel's consummation of experience in absolute knowledge — "the nature of experience is conceived in terms of something that surpasses it; for experience itself can never be science."
The reflective I-Thou of mastery — claiming to "know the other better than he understands himself," which "robs his claims of their legitimacy."

Stakes

If hermeneutic experience is finite and open rather than consummated in knowledge, then understanding can never be completed — there is always "an orientation toward new experience" — and this is not a defect but the positive truth of our historicity. It is the precise point at which Gadamer's hermeneutics both depends on Hegel (the dialectic of experience, recognition) and breaks with him (finitude vs. absolute knowledge). For the wiki, this makes Gadamer a hinge between its Hegel corpus and its phenomenology/finitude corpus — a connection recorded as a claim candidate in the source's extraction note.

Details

The three forms of the I-Thou (and their hermeneutic parallels)

Knowledge of human nature — predicting the other's typical behavior, treating the Thou as a means ↔ naive faith in method/objectivity, making tradition an object.
Reflective acknowledgment that co-opts the other — granting the Thou is a person but "claiming to know him ... better than he understands himself" (the Hegelian master-slave dialectic of recognition) ↔ historical consciousness that "seeks to master the past." "A person who reflects himself out of a living relationship to tradition destroys the true meaning of this tradition."
Genuine openness — experiencing the Thou "truly as a Thou," letting him "really say something to us" ↔ the openness to tradition of historically effected consciousness: "I must allow tradition's claim to validity ... in such a way that it has something to say to me."

The priority of the question

All experience presupposes a question (the openness of "either this or that"); the radical form is the Socratic docta ignorantia ("knowledge of not knowing"). There is no method for asking the right question — questioning "is more a passion than an action," a question "presses itself on us." Dialectic, "the art of conducting a real dialogue," strengthens the other's view ("bringing out its real strength, not its weakness"); the meaning of a text "is relative to the question to which it is a reply" and so "necessarily exceeds what is said in it." This is why "the logic of the human sciences is a logic of the question."

Connections

gives the inner structure of historically effected consciousness — which "has the structure of experience."
critiques ... regarding the consummation in absolute knowledge Hegel — preserves the dialectic of experience, refuses its terminus.
shares mechanism with Hegelian recognition — the I-Thou as "a constant struggle for mutual recognition."
contrasts with Erlebnis — Erfahrung (dialectical, finite, historical) vs. Erlebnis (punctual aesthetic unit).
opens onto linguisticality — the question-and-answer structure leads to the thesis that "the fusion of horizons ... is the achievement of language."

Open Questions

Gadamer's claim that Erfahrung "can never be science" trades on a contrast with Hegel; does it adequately address experience's role in the natural sciences (which he largely brackets)?
The relation between Gadamer's finite Erfahrung and the Hegelian Bildung/Erfahrung the wiki already tracks (where their relation is an Open Question) is a candidate claim; see the extraction note Pass 3 Part D.

Sources

gadamer-1960-truth-and-method — Ch 4: "Analysis of historically effected consciousness / The limitations of reflective philosophy," "The concept of experience (Erfahrung) and the essence of the hermeneutic experience," "The hermeneutic priority of the question" (pp. 351–386).