For Gadamer, the "knowledge" available through the Geisteswissenschaften ultimately derives from what he calls "tradition." The world of meanings found in art, philosophy, and history is far wider and deeper than anything the contemporary interpreter is able to imagine. We are, in effect, a product of that tradition. Even when arguing with it, we use concepts and language inherited from tradition. The most radical-sounding denunciations of Western thought may well be, upon inspection, echoes of Nietzsche -- whose work, in turn, involves an unrelenting argument with Plato.

For Gadamer's critics, the notion of a powerful and inescapable tradition sounds suspiciously authoritarian. So does his complaint that modern thought (which begins, for Gadamer, with Descartes) made a fatal mistake in trying to abolish "prejudice." Gadamer argues that we never approach the world with a blank slate. The process of understanding always begins with some established understanding already in place. Mr. Wolin points to this "rehabilitation of prejudice" as a particularly troubling element in the thought of a German philosopher of Gadamer's generation.

His defenders point out that Gadamer is not so much advocating prejudice as recognizing a fact of hermeneutic life. Prejudice must be accepted before it can be challenged through a "fusion of horizons" between the contemporary interpreter and the cultural tradition.

one name for the burden of history