Until Heidegger and Gadamer, hermeneutics focused on the practical, philological challenges we encounter in engaging with the texts of the past. Gadamer, however, has surprisingly little to say about this issue. As far as he is concerned, what matters is the way in which we relate (or fail to relate) authentically to tradition and keep alive the world-disclosing and existentially challenging truths of the great historical works. For Gadamer, hermeneutics is at the same time a theory of Dasein's historical being in the world and a theory of its experiencing and understanding itself in light of the truth of the texts and artworks of the past.

In this chapter, I turn to the problem of the practical interpretation of texts that are temporally or culturally distant from the interpreter. No part of Gadamer's work could prove a better touchstone for an assessment of his interpretatory program than his reading of the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher and his critical theory of interpretation. This, it seems, would be the place where Gadamer could test and discuss the boundaries of his own philosophical hermeneutics. Yet such an encounter never takes place. In Truth and Method, Gadamer dismisses Schleiermacher as the philosopher who seals the fate of modern hermeneutics by ushering it into a problematic, romantic dead-end, heavily infested with the problems adhering to the aesthetics of genius and methodological ideals of a Cartesian stamp.