Hans-Georg Gadamer On Prejudice And The Transmodern Project

ABSTRACT

There is no doubt that there is an urgent need to imagine another world in the face of the fall

outs of the current world order. The urgency of this need for ‘another world’ or ‘a world in

which all worlds fit’ is the primary motivation for this research. In line with this motivation, this

work is aimed at examining the concept of prejudice within Gadamer’s philosophy as well as the

transmodern project with a view to constructing an understanding of cross-cultural contact that

can foreground the possibility of ‘another world’ or ‘a world in which all worlds fit’. The basis

for this is that Gadamer’s direct appropriation of prejudice and its impact on the transmodern

idea of the bio/geo/body-politics of knowledge challenges the idea of universality as it operates

in the current Euro-American cosmovision. This challenge is not in favour of subjectivism or

relativism, but in favour of ‘intersubjective dialogue’ and ‘pluriversality as a universal project’.

Adopting the philosophical tools of exposition, critique and textual analysis the work seeks to

demonstrate that a proper appropriation of Gadamer’s conceptualization of prejudice and of the

influence it has had on the transmodern project can serves as the basis for a new principle of

cross-cultural interaction/evaluation; the ethical-hermeneutic principle of intercultural

contact/evaluation which can guarantee ‘a world in which all worlds fit’. In the addition to this,

the work also establishes that: i) the transmodern anti-Cartesianism and resistance of provincial

universality are strong influences from Gadamer in their philosophy. Hence, their claim of

delinking is not totally true; ii) the transmodern project in taking on board the coloniality

question within the context of the bio/geo/body-politics of knowledge is a clear extension and

application of Gadamer’s prejudicial philosophy; iii) despite the strength of Gadamer and the

transmodern case, Gadamer’s postulation is haunted down by the hegemony of the verbal

understanding/factual modes of expression, while the transmodern project is wrong in blaming

coloniality solely on foreign agency.