Both Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer are central figures in 20th-century hermeneutics. While they share many concerns—language, tradition, and interpretation—they each develop a distinctive understanding of the concept of horizon. For Gadamer, horizon reflects the fusion of historical perspectives in dialogue, while for Ricoeur it emphasizes distanciation, narrative, and the plurality of meaning. Comparing the two sheds light on how hermeneutics negotiates the tension between tradition and critique.
Gadamer: The Fusion of Horizons
In Truth and Method, Gadamer defines horizon as the range of vision available from a particular standpoint, shaped by history, culture, and language. Understanding is achieved not by escaping one’s horizon but by allowing it to fuse with that of the text or the other person.
This fusion of horizons is a dialogical process: both the interpreter and the text (or tradition) bring their historically situated horizons into conversation. Gadamer stresses openness and receptivity, suggesting that interpretation is not about mastering a text but allowing oneself to be addressed by it.
Ricoeur: Distanciation and the Horizon of the Text
Ricoeur accepts Gadamer’s emphasis on history and tradition but adds a critical dimension. For him, the text creates its own horizon, distinct from both its author’s intent and the reader’s context. Through distanciation, a text gains autonomy—it can outlive its original setting and project new worlds of meaning.
While Gadamer emphasizes dialogue with tradition, Ricoeur insists on the productive distance between text and reader. Horizons are not simply fused but mediated through interpretation, refiguration, and narrative Appropriation.
Horizon and Narrative
For Ricoeur, horizons unfold especially through narrative. Stories configure time, memory, and identity in ways that expand the horizon of understanding. A narrative projects a possible world into which readers can enter, reconfiguring their self-understanding. In this sense, Ricoeur’s horizon is less about historical continuity (as in Gadamer) and more about the opening of possibilities through imagination and storytelling.
Critique vs. Tradition
The difference between Gadamer and Ricoeur also lies in their stance toward critique. Gadamer privileges continuity with tradition and the authority of the past, while Ricoeur insists that interpretation must pass through a hermeneutics of suspicion—Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche—to expose hidden distortions. Ricoeur’s horizon is therefore not only a space of dialogue but also of critical distance, where meaning is re-appropriated after suspicion.
Convergence: Openness to the Other
Despite their differences, both thinkers agree that hermeneutics is an ethic of openness. Gadamer’s fusion of horizons requires humility before tradition, while Ricoeur’s horizon of the text demands receptivity to meanings beyond one’s immediate grasp. Both approaches resist reductionism and affirm interpretation as an unending process of dialogue and reconfiguration.
