Productive Prejudice

The Enlightenment bequeathed the conviction that prejudice is the enemy of understanding. To see clearly, one must strip away bias, tradition, inheritance — until one arrives at the bare rational subject capable of confronting reality without distortion. Gadamer argued this conviction was itself a prejudice, and a dangerous one, because it concealed the very presuppositions that made observation possible. The German Vorurteil means, more precisely, pre-judgment — a judgment made before the encounter with the subject matter. Such pre-judgments are not necessarily distortions. In many cases, they are the conditions without which the encounter cannot occur. One cannot ask a question without already understanding something about the domain. One cannot interpret without bringing expectations about what kind of meaning might be found. The critical question is not whether one has prejudices — everyone does, always — but whether one's prejudices are productive or obstructive, and whether one submits them to the discipline of being tested by what the subject matter reveals.