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84 GEIGER, MORITZ

especially from other historical periods, is the model for all understanding.

Central to this experience is the need to understand the parts of the textin order to understand the whole, and to understand the whole in order to

contextualize the parts. This is true not only at the level of an individual

text and its parts, but of the individual text considered as a part of the

culture from which it arose. Hence, understanding for Gadamer always

takes place within a hermeneutic circle and can never be presupposition-

lessan ideal toward which Husserl was oriented, although Husserl

might have meant only that all presuppositions must constantly be put to

a critical test.

Hermeneutical understanding, for Gadamer, arises in the fact that thehistorical text we encounter is both familiar and strange. It is strange

because it dates from another period with different views and mores. It is

familiar, however, because those views continue to operate, albeit perhaps

in a different way, in our own time and historical situation. Gadamer

capture s this idea in his notion of effective-historical consc iousness

(wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewutsein). Any historical consciousness is

subject to the effects of effective-history, which is at work in advance as

providing an initia l schematization for all our possibilities of understand-

ing and in determining both what seems worth investigating and what will

appear as an o bject of i nvestigation. The universe of understanding,

therefore, encompasses both the world from which the text springs and the

world in which the interpreter is situated; it is the single horizon that

embraces everything contained in historical consciousness. This horizon

is not acquired by placing ourselves in the past, but by reaching out from

the present to the past, to a historical situation, and understanding what it

has to say as a response to the questions of its own time and also as still

speaking to us, as still making truth-claims upon us. In this wa y, theinterpreter achieves what Gadamer calls a fusion of horizons, in which

a contempo rary understanding is brought into dialogue with a past

understanding. This employment of the not ion of horizon and i ts

rootedness in Husserls reflections on inner time-consciousness marks

the chief indebtedness of Gadamer to Husserl.

GEIGER, MORITZ (18801937). Moritz Geiger was a member of the

M unich Circle whose members were devoted to following the realistic

tendencies they saw in Husserls L ogical I nvestigationswhile rejectingthe idealistic tendencies in his transcendental phenomenology. Geigers

work covered a broad range of topics, from mathematics to psychology

to aesthetics. It was in the last area that Geiger did some of his most

important work. Geiger was an original co-editor of Husserls Yearbook

f or Phi losophy and Phenomenological Research(Jahrbuch fr Philoso-