As part of his attempt to revitalize philosophical humanism – to move from an aesthetic to a political humanism – Gadamer advises that hermeneutics, if conceived in a philosophically adequate way, must move beyond a narrow, scientistic understanding of knowledge and truth. He wishes to rehabilitate, at the very core of his philosophy, the idea of truth as transformative world-disclosure, an existential appropriation of the interpreter's historicity and situatedness within tradition. Only thus, he argues, can hermeneutics overcome the idea of the past as dead and irrelevant to the interpreter's present self-understanding and future projections.

Gadamer's hermeneutics presupposes that a theory of interpretation either takes the form of naïve scientism or takes as its basis the self-transformative, ontological experience of Dasein's being-in-tradition. This sixth and final chapter argues that early nineteenth-century hermeneutics points a way beyond this tertium non datur, as it lies behind and motivates Gadamer's philosophical theory of interpretation. In Schleiermacher's work, the ideals of Bildung, understanding the other, and critical self-understanding are not contrary to but, rather, issue from a validity-oriented theory of interpretation. Gadamer's model, we have seen, leaves us with no standard in light of which the interpreter can critically assess his or her work and ask whether the voices of the past, in his or her interpretation, really do emerge as more than a mere echo of the interests of the present.