The Hermeneutic Circle

 I have been getting into philosophy lately. This entry a continuation of the line of thought I have been trying to develop over the last few entries and before. 

     The hermeneutic circle is active in any act of understanding for the simple reason that it is always you, the person you are with the level of intellectual gifts, experience, virtue, knowledge/education, and wisdom that you possess who must understand. As a growing boy in small town Kentucky growing up during the Vietnam War, I had little experience of the world, of politics, of war. I could only understand the war in the simple categories I understood – good guy vs. bad guy. I knew the war wasn’t a movie or a game, the it did not, could not have, been real to me, any more at that age that my own mortality. I suppose a boy of ancient Sparta was in a better position to understand war though his culture’s cultivation of war and the warrior ethic would have blinded him to other aspects, aspect, for example, that Shakespeare’s Falstaff or a reflective veteran of the recent Afghan War could understand. But in confronting the war in various ways over the years, from interviews with the decision-makers, to the stories of veterans from both side, through histories and documentaries, through conversations, I have, of course, found my earlier categories of good guy verses bad guy too simplistic to understand the reality of the war.

      Or a Shakespeare play. We had to read Romeo and Juliet in high school. I couldn’t get through it. I had heard that it was a “love story,” which I was not interested in at that age. Then the language barrier. Judgment: Shakespeare boring. Then as a university student I took a Shakespeare class with Joseph Bryant at the University of Kentucky, and he opened my eyes to layers of complexity I could not imagine and to the beauty and complexity of Shakespeare’s poetry. I watched a BBC performance of the play and saw a live production at a “Shakespeare in the Park” festival. I read and reflected on the readings by Shakespeare authorities (Johnson, Goddard, Van Doren, other). I wrote a paper on the play. Later I even had to deal with the deconstructivist critique of Shakespeare as part of white male patriarchy, which I could only understand as wrong-headed but which I might have embraced as a high school student. All of this continued to deepen my understanding of the play. Again, my earlier prejudices, natural for my age, were a barrier to understanding and I was able to overcome them with the help of a wonderful teacher and further experience.

 

. . .

 

   The hermeneutic circle, as Gadamer understands it, is at work in every act of understanding because understanding never begins from nowhere. It is always a particular person who understands, and that person brings to the act of understanding a certain level of intelligence, experience, education, moral formation, knowledge, and wisdom. We do not first stand outside our assumptions and then begin to understand. We begin with them. We approach things with prior judgments, expectations, categories, and habits of thought. Gadamer calls these Vor-urteile, prejudices or pre-judgments. These are not simply irrational biases. They are the starting points of understanding. Without them, we would not know how to begin.

    My example of growing up in small-town Kentucky during the Vietnam War shows this clearly. As a boy, I had little direct experience of politics, war, or the wider world. So I could only understand the war through the simple moral categories available to me, such as good guy versus bad guy. That was not a foolish beginning. It was the only beginning available to me at that stage of life. Still, those categories were too narrow for the reality. In Gadamerian terms, my understanding began within a limited horizon. The important point is that this horizon was not final. It was tested by reality and by better understandings of that reality.

      That testing against reality and other understandings is essential to the hermeneutic circle. One does not simply project one’s prejudices onto reality and remain enclosed within them. Genuine understanding requires that one’s initial assumptions be brought into contact with the thing itself. In my case, this happened gradually through watching interviews with decision-makers, stories from veterans on both sides, histories, documentaries, and conversations. These were encounters with the reality of the war as mediated through different forms of witness and reflection. In that process, my earlier categories were not merely supplemented. They were challenged and shown to be inadequate – taken up into a high synthesis, a Hegelian would say (aufgehoben, preserved somehow in a higher quality of understanding; it is not like good and evil became irrelevant in my more mature understanding). The simple opposition of good guy and bad guy could not bear the weight of the reality. Thus my prior understanding was revised. That is the circle: one begins with a preliminary whole, approaches the matter through it, finds it tested by the matter itself, and then returns to the whole with a deeper and more adequate understanding.

     The same structure appears in my Shakespeare example. In high school, I approached Romeo and Juliet with a set of assumptions already in place. You had heard that it was a love story, and at that age I was not interested in that subject. The language also seemed like a barrier. From within that horizon, your judgment followed naturally: Shakespeare is boring. Again, this was a real act of understanding, but it was shallow because the prior assumptions governing it were too narrow. Later, at university, under the guidance of my teacher, my assumptions were tested against the text itself in a more serious way. What had seemed flat and uninteresting now disclosed layers of beauty, complexity, and poetic power that I had not been able to see before. The text had not changed. What changed was my horizon of understanding. My earlier prejudice had functioned as a barrier, but through the discipline of reading and the help of a good teacher, that prejudice was corrected. I came to see the same work differently because I myself had changed in relation to it.

    This is why the hermeneutic circle should not be understood as a closed circle in which we are trapped inside our own assumptions. It is rather a movement in which our pre-judgments are constantly being exposed to reality and tested by it. Some prejudices prove fruitful because they open the thing up to view. Others prove false or too limited because the thing resists them. Understanding advances when we allow that resistance to correct us. In this sense, the circle is not vicious but fruitful. We begin with anticipations of meaning, but these anticipations must prove themselves in contact with what is to be understood.

 

. . .

 

     This has important consequences for conceptual understanding as well. If we want to understand the essence of something such as war, love, justice, education, or courage, we do not begin with a pure definition grasped outside history and experience. We begin with rough notions formed by upbringing, language, culture, and limited experience. These rough notions are then tested against reality through encounters with concrete cases, counterexamples, stories, arguments, and deeper reflection. If the concept is inadequate, it must be refined. Then we return to the cases with a better concept, and the cases themselves become more intelligible. In this way, conceptual understanding also moves in a circle. We approach the parts in light of an assumed whole, but the parts force us to revise the whole. Thus our grasp of essence deepens. The essence is not invented by us, true, but it is not exhausted by our first attempt to name it.

 

. . .

 

    The same structure can be applied to the question of truth and justification. At any given moment, a person’s belief may be justified within the limits of his present horizon. A child may be justified in thinking of war in simple moral terms, because that is all he can yet grasp. But justification at a given stage is not the same thing as truth in the full sense. The later revision of understanding shows this. My earlier judgments about war and Shakespeare were not simply replaced because one social practice gave way to another. They were revised because reality, encountered more fully, exposed their inadequacy. The thing itself pushed back against my earlier way of understanding.

   Thus the hermeneutic circle helps explain why justification is always historically situated while truth is not reducible to justification. We always begin from where we are, and therefore our judgments are conditioned by our horizon. But because those judgments are answerable to reality, they can be corrected. The distinction between truth and justification depends on this point. Justification names our present best account from within a given horizon. Truth names the adequation of understanding to reality. For finite knowers, that adequation is always partial and revisable, but it is not merely a change in what our community happens to justify. It is a movement toward the thing itself through the testing and correction of our prejudices.

    Hence, the hermeneutic circle, rightly understood, means that all understanding begins in prejudice (i.e., pre-judgments), proceeds through encounter, undergoes testing, and advances through correction. It applies not only to the interpretation of texts but to moral, historical, and conceptual understanding as such. And it provides a way of saying both that all human understanding is historically situated and that reality is not reducible to our historically situated interpretations. Indeed, the very possibility of correcting our prejudices presupposes that reality exceeds them. It is like different translations of the same poem that transcends all its translations, good and bad.

 

. . .

 

    Go back to the apple. Think of a child encountering an apple for the first time. At this stage, the child’s understanding is minimal. The apple is grasped through a few basic features: it is round, red (perhaps), edible, and sweet. The implicit concept might be stated very simply: an apple is something you eat that tastes good. This is not false. It is a real understanding. But it is thin and governed by immediate experience.

   This is the first moment of the hermeneutic circle: an initial pre-understanding. The child does not approach the apple without assumptions. Rather, the child brings simple categories such as food, sweetness, and perhaps pleasure. These categories allow the apple to be understood at all. Without them, the apple would not yet appear as anything meaningful.

     Now the process of testing/possible deepening begins. The child encounters more apples. Some are not red but green or yellow. Some are sour rather than sweet. Some are hard, others soft, some even rotten. The initial concept begins to strain under these encounters. If an apple is defined as something sweet and pleasant, what is one to say about a sour apple? Or a spoiled one?

     At this point, the earlier understanding is not simply discarded but corrected. The child revises the concept. An apple is no longer simply something sweet. It is now understood as a kind of fruit that can vary in taste, color, and quality. The concept becomes more flexible and more adequate to the range of experience. This is the second moment of the circle: the testing of the initial prejudice against the diversity of the object.

    The process continues as the person grows. One learns that apples come from trees – I still recall something magical about the apple trees of my grandparents’ (German) neighbors, the elderly woman’s gift of one to me, teaching me the German word Apfel – that they have seeds, that they belong to a broader category called fruit, and that fruits are part of plant life. The apple is now no longer understood merely in terms of immediate consumption but in terms of its place within a natural order. One might learn about seasons, cultivation, and varieties. The apple is now understood as something that grows, that has a life cycle, that can be cultivated or neglected. The concept deepens because reality continues to press upon it from new angles.

    At a further stage, the apple may enter into cultural, symbolic, and historical understanding. One encounters the apple in stories: the apple in the Garden of Eden, the golden apples in Greek myth, the apple as a symbol of temptation, knowledge, or discord. One may encounter it in literature, in painting, or in everyday expressions. The apple is no longer merely a biological object but also a bearer of meaning within a human world. The earlier understanding of the apple as food is not rejected, but it is now only one aspect of a richer whole. Or it is both preserved and transcended in a higher (or deeper) understanding.

   At each stage, the same structure is at work. One begins with a preliminary whole, an implicit understanding of what an apple is. One then encounters the apple in ways that do not fully fit that initial understanding. The object resists the limits of the concept. This resistance forces a revision. The revised concept is then brought back to the object, allowing one to see more in it than before. The circle then continues, because no stage exhausts the reality of the apple.

    What is important here is that the concept is neither simply imposed by the subject onto the object (apple) nor simply given in a finished form by the object, mirroring it. It develops through the interaction between the two. The apple itself guides the process by resisting inadequate understandings. At the same time, the person must bring concepts to understand it at all. The circle is the movement between these two poles.

     This example also shows how prejudices are tested rather than simply removed. The child’s initial prejudice that apples are sweet is not irrational. It is grounded in experience. But it is too narrow. When the child encounters sour apples, the prejudice is corrected, not by abandoning the idea of taste, but by expanding it. In this way, prejudices are refined through contact with reality.

    Finally, this shows why understanding is never complete. Even in adulthood, one’s understanding of something as simple as an apple can deepen further, whether through scientific knowledge, cultural reflection, the encounter with very different cultures, or new experiences. The concept approaches adequation with the thing, but for a finite knower it never exhausts it.

    So the hermeneutic circle, even in this simple case, consists in this: an initial understanding, the encounter with the object, the testing of that understanding against the object, the revision of the concept, and the return to the object with a deeper grasp. The process is guided throughout by the resistance and richness of reality itself.

 

. . .

 

    I can apply it to metaphysics as well. For me, as a young student, the traditional (religious) stories had lost their hold over me and I took over a certain metaphysical posture from the surrounding culture or from admired voices: in my case, a kind of ironic or comedic nihilism, such as one finds in figures like Woody Allen or George Carlin. The world is treated as ultimately meaningless, human life as accidental, moral seriousness as somewhat naïve, and depth itself as something to be punctured by humor. This is not simply a set of propositions one explicitly argues for. It is an Einstellung, a way of seeing and responding. It shapes what appears intelligible and what does not.

    At this stage, the hermeneutic circle is already in motion, though in a relatively closed form. Experiences are interpreted within this framework. Suffering may be acknowledged but often at a distance. Love may be experienced but not yet seen as disclosing anything fundamental about reality. The framework has a certain plausibility because it can account for many surface features of life, especially when reinforced by cultural forms that reward detachment and irony.

 

Then comes the testing. In my case, my experience at my beloved grandmother’s funeral. Here the prior framework encounters something it cannot easily absorb. To have remained within the nihilistic posture in that moment, treating death as ultimately insignificant, to responded to with ironic detachment, struck me as selfish, cold, and unloving. I experienced my metaphysical posture as a kind of failure to be adequate to the reality of the situation. The prior attitude was exposed as insufficient. This is a crucial moment in the hermeneutic circle. The prejudice is not abandoned because of an argument alone, but because it fails in the face of reality. The reality of death, and of the love that makes death matter, presses against the framework and reveals its limits. The circle is forced open.

    A further stage of testing came with becoming a father. Here again, the prior metaphysical posture was brought into contact with a form of life that resists it. The experience of responsibility, of care for another person whose existence matters in an unconditional way, is not easily accommodated within a nihilistic framework. One can attempt to redescribe it in those terms, but the description begins to feel strained, reductive, or false to the experience itself. The reality of the relationship calls for a different kind of understanding.

   Thus revision becomes necessary. The earlier metaphysical Vor-urteile (pre-judgments) do not simply fade away. They are actively replaced because they no longer do justice to what one has encountered. A new framework begins to emerge, one that can account for the seriousness of death, the reality of love, the weight of responsibility, and the sense that these are not merely subjective projections but disclosures of something real. This often takes the form of a new “story” because narrative is one of the principle ways in which a life as a whole is made intelligible.

     The circle then continues. The new framework was brought back to the same realities – death, love, responsibility – and now I saw them differently, more adequately. At the same time, the new framework itself remains open to further testing and deepening. It is not final, but it is more adequate than what came before because it has survived a more serious encounter with reality.

    What this parallel to the account of the apple makes clear is that the hermeneutic circle is not confined to the interpretation of texts or the refinement of isolated concepts. It extends to our most basic metaphysical orientations. In such cases, the “object” that tests our understanding is not a discrete thing but the structure of lived experience itself, i.e., events that carry a kind of existential weight.

     It also shows again the role of Einstellungen (attitudes) and moral attunement. The recognition that a detached response at a funeral is cold and unloving already presupposes a certain sensitivity to the significance of love and loss. Without that sensitivity, the prior framework might remain intact, insulated from correction. In this sense, the capacity to be corrected is itself part of what is at stake.

      This example also strengthens the distinction between truth and mere justification. At one time, the nihilistic posture seemed justified within my horizon. It even appeared intellectually sophisticated. But its breakdown under the pressure of lived experience suggests that justification at a given stage is not the final measure. The movement of the circle is not simply from one socially supported framework to another. It is a movement in which reality (here, the reality of death and love) exerts a claim on us and calls forth a more adequate understanding. So just as with the apple, but at a deeper level, we see the same structure: an initial understanding, an encounter that tests it, a breakdown, a revision, and a return to reality with a deeper grasp. Only here, what is being transformed is not just a concept but the very way in which a life is understood. Which in turn allows us (me in this case) to understand apples more deeply, as part of a larger metaphysical-religious story (i.e. as “created through love”). That is neither a scientific nor a historical statement. It is a metaphysical-ontological statement.

 

. . .

 

    And now a contrast to the kind of propositional understanding positivists and analytic philosophers in general want to make the paradigm, where truth or falsity is 'objective' in the sense it seems to escape the hermeneutic circle i.e. analytic and synthetic propositions, the verification or falsification criteria of meaning, and so on. In these cases, there is a sense in which we can bracket ourselves and our inner lives out (though another sense in which we cannot). Questions of fact in a certain restricted sense verses questions of meaning. The temptation to restrict reality to the former and make the latter subjective.

    I will set the two approaches side by side without caricature. On the one hand, there is the hermeneutic account I have been describing. On the other, there is the kind of propositional model of understanding associated with much of analytic philosophy and with positivism. The contrast does not lie simply in subjectivity versus objectivity, but in what counts as the paradigm of understanding. In the propositional model, understanding is centered on statements that can be clearly formulated, whose meaning is fixed by rules of use, and whose truth or falsity can in principle be empirically or logically determined.

      Two distinctions. First, between analytic and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are true by virtue of meaning alone. “All bachelors are unmarried” does not require experience of the world to be known as true. Synthetic propositions, by contrast, depend on how the world is. “This apple is red” or “water boils at 100°C under standard conditions” are true or false depending on empirical verification.

    Second, the idea that meaningful statements must in some way be tied to empirical or logical conditions of verification or falsification. A statement is meaningful insofar as we can say empirically or logically what would count for or against it. This gives rise to a picture of knowledge in which we can, at least in principle, step back from ourselves and test propositions against publicly accessible criteria.

     In this restricted domain, there is indeed a sense in which we can bracket much of ourselves out. My personal history, my moral formation, my particular experiences do not seem to matter when I determine whether 2 + 2 = 4 or whether a given liquid is boiling at a certain temperature. The procedures are, in principle, the same for anyone. This gives rise to a strong sense of objectivity: truth appears independent of the particular knower. This model is powerful and legitimate within its proper sphere. It gives us clarity, precision, and agreement. It allows for the accumulation of knowledge in the natural sciences and for exact reasoning in logic and mathematics. It rightly insists that not everything is a matter of perspective or interpretation in the loose sense.

      However, what my earlier reflections bring out is that this model achieves its clarity by working within a restricted domain. It isolates cases in which meaning is tightly controlled and criteria of truth can be explicitly formulated. In doing so, it tends to conceal the broader conditions under which understanding itself is possible.

   Returning to the apple example, we can see both sides. At a certain level, we can make propositional statements: “This apple weighs 150 grams,” “This apple contains a certain amount of sugar,” “This apple reflects light at certain wavelengths.” These are statements whose truth can be tested in ways that do not depend on the particular life history of the observer. In this sense, we bracket much of ourselves out. But this bracketing presupposes a prior understanding of what counts as an apple, what counts as measuring, what counts as evidence, what counts as relevant properties. These are not given in the form of isolated propositions. They belong to a broader horizon of understanding that has been formed historically, linguistically, and practically. Even the decision that weight or chemical composition are the relevant features is not forced by the object alone but arises within a certain way of approaching it.

    The same is even clearer in my earlier examples. Whether the Vietnam War can be understood as a conflict between good and bad, or what kind of thing Shakespeare’s plays are, are not questions that can be settled by simple verification conditions. They require interpretation, judgment, and the testing of one’s prior assumptions against a complex reality. Here the hermeneutic circle is not something we can escape.

 

      The temptation to make the realm of meaning, defined sharply against the realms of empirical fact and logic, arises when the clarity of the propositional model is taken (imperialistically) as the standard for all understanding. Because in some cases we can achieve a form of objectivity by bracketing out the knower, it is then suggested that only those cases count as genuinely objective. Questions that do not fit this model – questions of meaning, morals, purpose, or essence – are then relegated to the subjective. They are treated as expressions of preference, attitude, or cultural conditioning rather than as attempts to understand reality.     At this point, a shift occurs. What began as a methodological restriction becomes an ontological claim. Reality is implicitly identified with what can be captured in propositional form under verification or falsification conditions. What cannot be so captured is no longer treated as a different kind of understanding but as something less than knowledge.

     Gadamer’s account of the hermeneutic circle resists this move. It does not deny that there are domains in which propositional clarity and testability are appropriate and even necessary. But it insists that these domains do not exhaust our relation to reality. In many of the most important cases – e.g.,understanding a historical event, a work of literature, a moral concept, or even something as simple as an apple in its full significance – we do not stand outside the process as neutral observers applying fixed criteria. We are participants whose understanding develops through the testing and correction of our own prejudices within a shared form of life.

    There remains, however, a point of contact between the two. Even in the most controlled propositional contexts, we cannot fully eliminate the hermeneutic dimension. The meanings of our terms, the relevance of our criteria, and the interpretation of our results all presuppose a background that is not itself given in the form of explicit propositions. Conversely, even in hermeneutic understanding, there is a kind of objectivity, because our interpretations are constrained and corrected by the reality we are trying to understand.

     The contrast, then, is not between objectivity and subjectivity, but between two models of objectivity. One seeks objectivity by abstraction and bracketing, aiming at clear, testable propositions. The other seeks objectivity through the disciplined testing of our historically formed understanding against the thing itself. The danger lies in taking the first as exhaustive and thereby reducing the second to mere subjectivity. My examples show that, in fact, much of what we most need to understand belongs to the second domain, even though it does not fit easily into the first.

 

. . .

 

    A short return to Einstellungen (attitudes), hinge beliefs, the importance of moral character for understanding a certain range of phenomena, and how that informs the hermeneutic circle. Perhaps as an example the understanding of the Vietnam War and a different Shakespeare play, Lear, where pity and compassion are keys to understanding.

    In every act of understanding, we do not only bring concepts and prior judgments. We also bring a more fundamental orientation toward the world and toward others. These are not propositions we explicitly affirm or deny. They are ways of seeing, dispositions, habits of response. One might call them an “attunement” to reality. They include such things as a readiness to trust testimony, a sense that suffering matters, an openness to being corrected, or, by contrast, a tendency to suspicion, reduction, or indifference. These attitudes function as the background of the hermeneutic circle. They shape what we are able to see as significant in the first place. In that sense, they are deeper than explicit prejudices (pre-judgments). They do not merely guide our initial interpretations; they condition the very field within which something can appear as meaningful.

   This can be connected with hinge beliefs. A hinge belief is not ordinarily something we justify by argument. It is something we stand fast on, and which makes argument possible at all. For example, that other people have minds, that their words can be meaningful, that suffering is real and not merely a behavioral pattern. These are not conclusions reached at the end of inquiry. They are conditions of inquiry. If they are absent or weakened, whole regions of reality become inaccessible.

   This has consequences for the hermeneutic circle. The testing of our prejudices against reality presupposes that reality can, in some way, address us and correct us. But whether we are receptive to that correction depends in part on our attitude. A person may encounter the same evidence, the same testimony, the same text, and yet not be moved to revise his understanding, not because of a failure of reasoning, but because of a failure of attunement.

      My example of the Vietnam War can be extended in this direction. It is not only that one moves from a simple good-versus-bad schema to a more complex understanding through exposure to more information. It is also that one learns to see the human reality of the war: the suffering of soldiers on both sides, the ambiguity of motives, the weight of decisions, the tragedy that cannot be captured in abstract categories. This requires more than new concepts. It requires a certain moral and emotional formation, a capacity for seriousness, for sympathy, for restraint in judgment. Without this, the circle may continue at a superficial level, but it will not deepen in the way required for genuine understanding.

    The same point can be seen even more clearly in a play such as King Lear. One can grasp the plot, identify the characters, and follow the sequence of events without much difficulty. In that sense, one can make true propositional statements about the play. But to understand the play in a fuller sense, one must be able to respond to it with pity and compassion. Lear’s descent into madness, the ingratitude of his daughters, the loyalty of Cordelia, the suffering that unfolds: these are not simply data points. They call for a certain response. If one approaches the play with a detached or cynical attitude, one may register what happens but fail to understand what is at stake.

     Here again, the hermeneutic circle is operative, but it is informed by moral character. An initial attitude – i.e., whether one is disposed to take suffering seriously, whether one is capable of pity – shapes what one sees in the play. The play, in turn, can deepen or correct that disposition. A reader who allows the play to address him may come to see more in human vulnerability, dependence, and love than he did before. His understanding of the play and his understanding of human life develop together. The circle thus includes not only conceptual revision but also a transformation of the person.

    This shows that the circle is not merely cognitive but also ethical. The adequation of the mind to reality, in certain domains, depends on the formation of the person who understands. Where this formation is lacking, reality may still be present, but it will not be fully disclosed. In this sense, hinge beliefs and attitudes are not obstacles to objectivity but conditions for a deeper kind of objectivity, one that cannot be reduced to the verification of propositions but is nonetheless answerable to what is.

 

. . .

 

Another example. Take the case of the coastal redwood forests of California, long inhabited by peoples such as the Yurok Tribe and the Karuk Tribe. While one must be cautious not to idealize or oversimplify, it is broadly true that these cultures approached the forest within a framework in which land, animals, and natural features were not merely objects but were embedded in a network of meaning, practice, and often sacred significance. The forest was not first encountered as “timber.” It appeared as a place to dwell, a source of life, a setting of ritual, a reality to which one stood in a relation of dependence and respect. Here the initial attitude – the basic attunement to the world – already opens up certain aspects of the forest. It allows the forest to appear as something with its own integrity, something not simply at one’s disposal. Practices such as careful harvesting, seasonal use, and ritual acknowledgment are not external additions. They are expressions of a way of understanding what the forest is.

    When European-American settlers and later capitalist enterprises entered the same forests, they did not encounter a neutral object either. They brought their own attitudes and Vor-urteile pre-judgments), shaped by a different history and set of practices. Within this horizon, the forest appears primarily as a resource. Trees are understood as timber, timber as commodity, and commodity as a means to wealth. This is not simply greed in an individual sense. It is a structured way of seeing, supported by economic systems, technologies, and legal frameworks. Under this second framework, certain features of the forest come sharply into view: the height of the trees, the quality of the wood, the efficiency of extraction, the potential profit. At the same time, other aspects recede or disappear: the forest as a place of dwelling, its role in sustaining a wider ecological and cultural order, its significance beyond use. The same reality is present, but it is disclosed differently, reductively.

    This shows how attitudes and prejudices operate in a double way, not merely as distortions but also as conditions of disclosure. The capitalist framework genuinely reveals something about the forest: its material properties, its usefulness for building, its economic potential. These are real aspects. But because the framework is oriented in a certain way, it also covers over other aspects. The forest is reduced to what can be extracted from it, and thus destroyed. (Or the strip mining and mountaintop removal in the Appalachians, another example.)

     From the standpoint of the hermeneutic circle, the crucial question is whether these frameworks are tested and corrected by the reality they encounter. A way of understanding that treats the forest purely as a resource may, for a time, function effectively within its own terms. It can generate wealth, build cities, and organize large-scale activity. But it may also encounter limits that it cannot easily account for: ecological degradation, loss of biodiversity, the destabilization of systems that sustain life, and even a sense of loss that is not captured in economic terms.

    At that point, the circle is opened. The prior understanding begins to show its inadequacy, not necessarily through abstract argument, but through the resistance of reality itself. The forest, so to speak, pushes back. It reveals that it is not simply what the framework took it to be. This can lead, at least in principle, to a revision of understanding, a recognition that the earlier framework, while not entirely false, was partial and reductive.

    The comparison also helps clarify that there is no “view from nowhere.” Both the indigenous inhabitant and the capitalist enter into a relation with the forest through a historically formed horizon. The difference lies in what their respective horizons allow them to see and what they obscure. One may be more adequate in certain respects, another in others. The task is not to escape all prejudices, which is impossible, but to allow them to be tested. In this sense, the example makes visible the ontological point I have been developing. Being is not simply given in a way that is immediately and fully transparent. It is disclosed through ways of understanding. But these ways of understanding are answerable to what is. They can fail, not just morally, but in their capacity to do justice to the reality they encounter.

 

    So the redwood forest becomes a case of the hermeneutic circle at a civilizational scale: different attitudes open up different worlds, and the ongoing question is whether those worlds remain closed within themselves or are willing to be corrected by the reality they only partially disclose.

 

. . .

 

I would stop for today by placing this account alongside the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

 

    Aquinas holds that truth consists in the adequation of the intellect to reality (adaequatio intellectus et rei). At first glance, this might seem closer to the propositional model, as if truth were simply a matter of forming correct judgments about objects. But when read more carefully, especially in light of these reflections, it becomes clear that Aquinas’s position can accommodate, and even illuminate, the hermeneutic circle.

     For Aquinas, the intellect does not begin with complete and explicit knowledge of essences. It begins in experience, with confused and partial apprehensions, and moves gradually toward clearer understanding. We come to know what a thing is not in a single act but through a process of abstraction, comparison, correction, and refinement. This already has the structure of a circle. We begin with a preliminary grasp of the whole, we test it against particular cases, we revise it, and we return again to the thing with a more adequate concept. The adequation of intellect and reality is therefore not an all-or-nothing state for finite knowers but something achieved imperfectly and progressively. 

     Aquinas also thinks that reality is prior to and independent of the intellect. It is the thing that measures the intellect, not the other way around. This corresponds to what I have described as the resistance of reality within the hermeneutic circle. Our concepts are not free constructions. They are corrected by what is. In this way, the circle does not collapse into relativism. Its movement is oriented toward the thing itself.

    Aquinas also gives an account of the role of disposition and moral character in knowledge that aligns with the notion of attitudes and hinge orientations. He holds that the will and the moral virtues affect our capacity to know, especially in matters that concern human action and the good. A person who is disordered in his desires may fail to grasp what is evident to one whose affections are rightly ordered. In such cases, ignorance is not merely a lack of information but a kind of blindness rooted in the person’s orientation. This is directly relevant to my examples. To understand the human reality of war, or the suffering and compassion at the heart of King Lear, one must possess, or at least be open to, the corresponding moral dispositions. Otherwise, the reality is present but not truly seen.

 

    Finally, Aquinas distinguishes between what is known per se and what is known per accidens, and between different degrees of certitude appropriate to different domains. This allows him to affirm the kind of objectivity found in clear propositional knowledge without reducing all knowledge to that form. Mathematical and logical truths may achieve a high degree of precision and universality, while moral, historical, and literary understanding proceed in a different way, requiring judgment, experience, and the formation of the person. Yet both are ordered toward truth as adequation.

    Thus the hermeneutic circle can be seen not as a departure from Aquinas but as an account of how finite knowers actually move toward the adequation he describes. We all begin within a horizon shaped by prior judgments and dispositions. These are tested against reality. Through correction and deepening, our understanding may become more adequate, though never complete. And in certain domains, this movement requires not only clearer concepts but a transformation of the knower. Thus the circle is not opposed to truth as Aquinas understands it; it is the concrete form that the pursuit of truth takes in a finite, historical, and moral being.