The purpose of Chapter 5 is to examine the contours (or at least one of them) of the responsibility to understand at issue in our ‘I and thou’ relationships with other persons. It is a remarkable fact that one of the most significant formulations of this responsibility is found in an analogy Gadamer makes between our experience of tradition and that of another person. As he famously puts it, in our encounter with tradition as it is passed down in language, tradition ‘expresses itself like a Thou’. Gadamer introduces this analogy in order to clarify ‘the openness to tradition characteristic of historically effected consciousness’. But, by invoking our relationships with other persons as a normative ideal of our relation to tradition, he also reveals the embryo of his claims about our responsibility to other persons. He writes: ‘In human relations the important thing is … to experience the Thou truly as a Thou – i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us.’

Gadamer, as we shall see, finds an important antecedent for such responsibility in what Heidegger, in Being and Time, calls authentic solicitude. And, perhaps in consequence, Gadamer's view of our recognition of other persons has been criticised on the grounds that it fails to account for forms of recognition we owe to those with whom we have no personal ‘I and thou’ relations.

Yet, for Gadamer, our responsibility to other persons, while personal, is not heedless of what we can call ‘other others’, that is, those others with whom we are unfamiliar. Quite to the contrary, he maintains that our responsibility to the other person is itself our entreé to the larger world of others in which both we ourselves and the other person participate. In this, as I shall argue, Gadamer further clarifies the significance of our relations with other persons through motifs from Plato's and Aristotle's notions of friendship. Our mutual relations with the other, or friendship, will thus prove to be essential for our ‘self-love’, grasped not as self-absorption, but as an expression of life that helps us to recognise the limits of our self-knowledge – that is, to recognise our prejudices.