"This, Here, Now"

When Samuel Johnson kicked a stone to refute subjective idealism (“I refute it thus!”) he was defending the empiricist view that the direct and immediate experience of the senses is reliable evidence of reality. Few common-sense assumptions have endured a more thorough-going philosophical assault, and Gadamer certainly used the empiricist faith in direct, unmediated perception as a foil for the hermeneutic view that world-understanding is linguistic all the way down. It is nevertheless hard to pigeonhole his overall take on the immediacy of perception because he still had much use for it in a variety of important ways. He respected Aristotle’s appeal to immediacy in rhetoric and ethics, Kant’s grant of authority in his theory of aesthetic judgment, Husserl’s disciplined attention to phenomena, and Heidegger’s Augenblick as an important temporal structure of understanding. Most complex of all was Gadamer’s relationship to Dilthey’s appeal to the immediacy of understanding in experience. This paper explores Gadamer’s discriminating reading of immediate perception in its serpentine journey through modern Western philosophy, especially as it passes through the idealist and romantic debate on sensible intuition, which sets the stage for Dilthey’s turn to Erlebnisse as the foundation of human understanding. I conclude that Gadamer’s affirmation of what he called mediated immediacy crowns his delicate negotiation of the meaning of immediate experience in life.