Part III of the present enquiry addresses the contours of the responsibility to understand in the dimension of our lives that we live in common. This Part is therefore concerned with what is usually designated by terms such as ‘the political sphere’, ‘political life’ or perhaps even ‘the public square’ or ‘the polis’. For several decades now, much of the discussion of the stakes of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics for political life has been reduced to questions about the politics of Gadamer's thought. The frame of this discussion, in the first instance, turns on whether or not his philosophical hermeneutics is a form of ‘conservatism’, and whether other more recent figures associated with hermeneutics, such as Gianni Vattimo, Richard Rorty, John Caputo, Dennis Schmidt or James Risser are subject to the same critique. In more recent years, this frame of discussion has been supplemented by, as it were, a ‘frame within the frame’ focused on the relation between the politics of Gadamer's thought and Gadamer's own politics. The raison d’être for this frame within the frame appears to be at least in part some sort of iniquitatem patris, centred on whether Gadamer’s thought indicates Gadamer's complicity in National Socialism.

In this chapter I wish to argue that these frames of debate, whatever they may have to teach, nevertheless miss some of the most important stakes of Gadamer's thought for the dimension of our lives lived in common. These stakes cannot be boiled down to questions about the politics of Gadamer's thought. Rather, Gadamer's thought aims at an elucidation of hermeneutical experience that, among other things, helps to clarify the character, and, with this, the limits and possibilities, of the political sphere as such. As we shall see, Gadamer recognises that his philosophical hermeneutics can contribute to the formation of political judgements and engagement in political agency. Yet, as I wish to show, Gadamer also brings into focus another, perhaps even more critical stake of his philosophical hermeneutics for political life. For Gadamer, philosophical hermeneutics is not only important for politics, but, more originally, for our efforts to make the political contexts of our lives and our place within them visible in the first place.