…[Hans-Georg] Gadamer’s (1975, 1976) philosophical hermeneutics may offer some solutions to the problems with the social justice movement.

For Gadamer, how we come to understand the present necessarily includes an understanding of the past. And when we engage in a Gadamerian “genuine conversation” or dialogue in good faith, we create a hermeneutical situation that makes it possible to experience a moment of what Gadamer called the “fusion of horizons.”

The concept of “horizon” suggests itself because it expresses the superior breadth of vision that the person who is trying to understand must have. To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand — not in order to look away from it but to see it better, within a larger whole and in truer proportion.

Gadamer, 1975, p. 305

Here, Gadamer is not suggesting that “to see it better” means to discover a fixed or essential truth. But rather, seeing it better suggests an active process of understanding the context of “pre-judgments” or prejudice. For Gadamer, prejudice is inescapable. It is situated in the historical horizon, and it is only through dialogue, which reveals aspects of the historical horizon, that we can contextualize prejudice and thereby understand them — theirs and ours — more clearly.

So, in hermeneutical dialogue, the perspective of the other is not solely attributed to that individual as if they exist in a vacuum; instead, the other’s perspective becomes known upon understanding the broader context of that perspective. As the other’s context becomes more understandable, one can experience a truer understanding of the other, and crucially that process can then lead to a truer understanding of one’s own prejudices. This becomes a search for humble understanding, not a demand for purity. [emphasis mine —Matt Sholler]

Dialogue, then, enables a discovery of the good prejudices as well as the bad ones in both dialogical partners. Further, this back-and-forth exchange of horizons helps to create conditions for new understandings; and this enables new possibilities for establishing shared and shifted horizons that can lead to change and transformation.

— from Chung, M. (2021). Are We Woke Yet? Hermeneutics and the Politics of 21st-Century Social Justice. In P. Cushman (Ed.), Hermeneutic Approaches to Interpretive Research: Dissertations in a Different Key (pp. 191–213). Taylor & Francis Limited.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1975). Truth and method (J. Wiensheimer & D. Marshall, Trans.) New York: Seabury Press (Original work published 1960).

Gadamer, H.-G. (1976). Philosophical hermeneutics (D. E. Linge, Trans.) Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.