Putting Our Prejudices at Risk

Gadamer and the Humility of All Understanding

We rarely enter an encounter without already having begun to understand.

Before the other person has told their story, we have noticed the clothes, the face, the age, the body, and the way they move. We have heard the voice, registered the choice of words, and observed whether the person meets our gaze or looks away.

We may also have read a medical record, a report of concern, or an earlier assessment. We know the diagnosis, the problem, the background, or the event that brought the person to us.

Understanding is already under way.

It cannot be avoided.

We do not encounter the world with an empty mind. We bring experience, language, professional knowledge, norms, and memories with us. All of this enables us to orient ourselves. Without previous experience, we would not know what mattered, what to ask, or what a situation might mean.

But what makes understanding possible can also make it too quick.

We may become so certain of what we already believe that the other person is given only the opportunity to confirm it.

Hans-Georg Gadamer reminds us that understanding always begins in pre-understanding. We never see without a perspective, and we never interpret without prejudices. Yet this does not mean that we are condemned to remain within them.

We can put them at risk.

This may be the most demanding movement in all genuine understanding.

To put a prejudice at risk, we must be willing to accept that it may not hold. We must dare to encounter something that may alter our view. We must be able to say:

This is how I understand it at present.

But I may be wrong.

Prejudice as a Beginning

The word prejudice today carries an almost entirely negative meaning.

We associate it with racism, discrimination, stereotypes, and unreasonable judgements. Prejudices can reduce people to gender, skin colour, religion, social background, or diagnosis. They can close doors and justify injustice.

For Gadamer, however, the concept also has a broader meaning.

A prejudice is a provisional judgement. It is an understanding formed before the matter has been fully examined.

In this sense, we cannot live without prejudices.

When we see dark clouds, we expect rain. When a person speaks with a trembling voice, we assume that something important is at stake. When a social worker meets a family with a known history of violence, she becomes especially attentive to signs of fear and control.

Without such provisional expectations, the world would appear chaotic.

Prejudice is therefore not only an error. It is also a point of departure.

The problem arises when the starting point becomes the endpoint.

A provisional understanding may become a fixed judgement. What we first assumed begins to appear as what we know. Gradually, we notice only what fits.

The person already understood as difficult appears difficult even when protesting against being misunderstood.

The person understood as manipulative has every explanation interpreted as a further attempt at manipulation.

The person understood as weak has independent choices explained as the result of outside influence.

At that point, prejudice has ceased to be an entry into understanding.

It has become a closed door.

We Notice What We Expect

Experience teaches us how to see.

An experienced teacher may recognise that a pupil has given up even when the pupil says nothing. A physician may discern a pattern of illness in symptoms that appear unrelated. A social worker may register fear or powerlessness in small movements.

This is professional knowledge in practice.

But experience can also make the gaze selective.

When we expect to find a particular problem, signs of that problem become easier to see. Other aspects of the person may disappear.

A parent assessed as lacking care may show tenderness without this altering the overall picture. The moment is treated as incidental. A client described as lacking motivation may express a hope that does not fit the assessment. The hope is overlooked because it appears in the wrong form.

We do not see only with our eyes.

We also see through our concepts.

Professional language brings some things forward and pushes others into the background. Diagnoses, risk assessments, and categories can make important conditions visible. But they can also organise the gaze in such a way that the person becomes visible only through the problem.

The question is therefore not whether we should use professional concepts.

The question is whether the concepts can still be corrected by the person to whom they are applied.

When Prejudice Becomes Invisible

The most powerful prejudices are often those we do not experience as prejudices.

They appear as common sense.

We may believe that a responsible person arrives on time, expresses themselves clearly, keeps appointments, and accepts good advice. We may assume that a good parent displays love in recognisable ways. We may think that someone who truly wants help cooperates with the helper.

Such assumptions may seem reasonable.

But they, too, have a history.

They are shaped by culture, class, education, profession, and personal experience. People from other lifeworlds may express responsibility, love, and trust in ways different from those we expect.

A person may arrive late because life is chaotic, not because the appointment is unimportant.

A parent may struggle to express warmth while still being deeply concerned with the child’s safety.

A client may reject an intervention because previous help has been humiliating, not because the person lacks a desire for change.

When our own normality becomes invisible to us, it can easily become the standard by which everyone else is measured.

We no longer see our expectations as interpretations.

We see them as reality itself.

Openness Is Not the Absence of Judgement

Gadamer is sometimes interpreted as though openness required us to abandon judgement.

It does not.

Putting our prejudices at risk does not mean believing everything the other person says. It does not mean pretending that all perspectives are equally valid. Nor does it mean ignoring violence, power, deception, or injustice.

Openness is not naivety.

The professional must be able to assess risk. She must be able to recognise manipulation, protect children, and establish boundaries. Some actions are unacceptable even when we understand their background.

Yet even a necessary judgement should remain open to correction.

We may say:

“This is my assessment on the basis of what I know at present.”

We do not need to say:

“This is the whole truth about you.”

Humility does not mean refraining from action.

It means not making our own understanding absolute.

The One Who Knows and the One Who Is Understood

In professional encounters, knowledge is unequally distributed.

The helper knows theory, legislation, diagnoses, and services. The other person knows their own life.

Both forms of knowledge are necessary.

But professional knowledge usually has higher status. It is written into records, presented in meetings, and used as the basis for decisions. The client’s knowledge may be regarded as subjective, limited, or shaped by a lack of insight.

Sometimes this is relevant. Human beings do not always fully understand their own actions. We may conceal truth even from ourselves.

But the professional does not stand outside the same human limitation.

The helper may also be wrong.

Theory may also conceal something.

The language of the system may also be inadequate.

The person who puts their prejudices at risk therefore gives the other a genuine opportunity to correct the understanding.

Not merely formally.

Not merely by allowing the other to speak.

But by permitting the words to matter.

If everything the other says that fits the assessment is accepted as true, while everything that contradicts it is explained as resistance or lack of insight, there is no genuine dialogue.

The other person is allowed to speak, but cannot alter the understanding.

Listening for What Does Not Fit

It is easy to hear what we already expect.

The demanding form of listening begins when something does not fit.

A client described as aggressive shows care.

A parent regarded as indifferent expresses grief.

A young person described as unmotivated works hard at something the system does not value.

What do we do with such moments?

We may treat them as exceptions.

Or we may allow them to question the whole.

Putting our prejudices at risk means searching for what disturbs our own narrative.

What might show that my assessment is too simple?

What am I failing to see?

Which information receives little attention because it does not fit?

An understanding does not become weaker through encountering resistance.

It may become more truthful.

When Experience Becomes Certainty

Experienced professionals have often seen a great deal.

They recognise patterns. They know how problems can develop. They have learned to respond early.

Such knowledge can save lives.

But experience can also create a kind of certainty that makes curiosity more difficult.

“I have seen this before.”

The sentence may express recognition.

But no human being is merely a repetition of a previous human being.

No family is entirely like another. No grief, addiction, or mental illness is lived in precisely the same way in two lives.

The challenge for the experienced helper is therefore not to forget what she has learned.

It is to use experience without allowing it to determine everything in advance.

Genuine experience does not merely make us more certain.

It may also make us more cautious.

The person who has worked with human beings for many years knows how often first impressions must be corrected. She knows that what looked like resistance may be fear. That what appeared to be indifference may be shame. That a person may carry a history that changes the meaning of what is visible.

Perhaps the highest form of experience is not certainty.

It is humility.

Saying “I May Have Been Wrong”

It can be difficult for professionals to acknowledge mistakes.

We fear losing authority. We worry that the other person may lose trust. In some systems, mistakes may also have legal or organisational consequences.

We may therefore be tempted to defend the original assessment.

New information is adapted to the old picture. Responsibility is displaced. Uncertainty is concealed behind confident language.

But trust is not built only when the helper is right.

It may also be built when the helper can correct themselves.

“I think I understood you too quickly.”

“I now see that my assessment was too simple.”

“What you are saying means that I need to think again.”

Such statements do not necessarily weaken the professional.

They may demonstrate that the relationship has room for reality.

The other person discovers that their words matter. That the encounter is not merely a formal confirmation of something already decided.

Professional humility is not self-erasure.

It is the willingness to let truth matter more than personal prestige.

Prejudices in Encounters Between Cultures

Prejudices become particularly visible in encounters between people of different cultural, religious, or social backgrounds.

We may be deeply concerned to avoid stereotypical judgement. Yet we still carry assumptions about what is normal, liberating, oppressive, modern, or good.

At times, these assumptions protect important values. Children’s rights, gender equality, and protection from violence cannot simply be relativised away.

But even good values can be communicated with cultural superiority.

A professional may quickly interpret family cohesion as control, religious practice as oppression, or reserve as a lack of openness.

The family may, in turn, interpret the professional’s questions as disrespectful, intrusive, or threatening.

Putting our prejudices at risk does not mean avoiding difficult assessments.

It means examining whether we understand what we are assessing.

What does this action mean to those who perform it?

What power relations are present?

Who is affected?

How does the child or vulnerable person experience the situation?

What in my own culture appears natural to me but is actually tradition?

Such questions do not weaken ethics.

They make it more precise.

Prejudices About Normality

Normality is one of the strongest prejudices in modern societies.

We compare people with assumptions about how a life ought to develop. Children should follow certain stages. Adults should work, live independently, maintain relationships, and regulate emotions in recognisable ways.

Those who deviate are easily understood through what they lack.

The person becomes what does not function.

This may happen to people with disabilities, autism, mental illness, substance-related problems, or different forms of life. The professional may first see the symptoms, the limitations, and the need for accommodation.

But a human being is always more than a deviation from the norm.

Putting the prejudice of normality at risk means asking:

Is this truly a problem for the person?

Or is it primarily a problem for the surroundings?

Which aspects of life become invisible when we see only the lack?

Can what appears as weakness in one context be a strength in another?

This does not mean denying suffering or the need for help.

It means refusing to make difference the whole person.

Prejudices About the Good Helper

We also carry prejudices about ourselves.

The helper often wishes to see themselves as caring, fair, and open. This may make it difficult to recognise when help is experienced as control, pressure, or humiliation.

Good intentions do not automatically protect us from causing harm.

Sometimes it is precisely because we are certain that we want what is best for the other person that we find it difficult to listen to protest.

“I am only trying to help.”

The statement may be true.

But it does not answer the question of how the help is experienced.

The other person may understand the encounter differently.

Putting our prejudices at risk therefore also means risking our image of ourselves as good helpers.

We must be able to ask:

Could my way of helping have diminished the other person?

Have I listened, or have I waited for the other to understand what I already believed I knew?

Have I used care as a justification for taking control?

Such questions may be painful.

But without them, goodness can become blind.

Humility and Responsibility

Humility is sometimes confused with uncertainty.

The humble professional is not necessarily someone who doubts everything, avoids decisions, and withdraws from responsibility.

Humility may, on the contrary, be a form of strength.

It makes it possible to act decisively without imagining oneself omniscient. It makes it possible to protect a child while acknowledging that the whole story is not known. It makes it possible to establish boundaries while still listening to the person affected by them.

Humility says:

I must act.

But I do not see everything.

I possess knowledge.

But my knowledge is not the whole person.

I have responsibility.

But responsibility does not give me the right to make my interpretation absolute.

This is not weakness.

It is mature judgement.

Dialogue as Risk

For Gadamer, dialogue is essential to understanding.

But genuine dialogue is not merely a friendly conversation.

It involves risk.

If I enter the dialogue only to explain what I already believe, nothing is at stake. If I ask questions only to gather information for an assessment already formed, the other person has no genuine opportunity to change me.

Dialogue begins when I acknowledge that I may not possess the whole truth about the matter.

This does not mean that we are equal in power or responsibility. A professional may have authority to make decisions. Yet even within an asymmetrical encounter, she may allow the other person’s perspective to have an effect.

The question is not merely:

Was the other person allowed to speak?

But:

Could what the other person said actually change anything?

Where the answer is always no, there may be conversation.

But not dialogue.

When Prejudice Protects Us

Prejudices are not only about the other person.

They may also protect us.

If we understand someone as difficult, we may avoid confronting our own inadequacy. If we call a client unmotivated, we do not need to ask whether the help was relevant. If we describe a parent as cold, we may avoid encountering the pain behind the distance.

A fixed interpretation can provide the helper with security.

It makes the situation orderly. The problem receives a name. Responsibility can be assigned. An intervention can be selected.

What remains unresolved is more demanding.

Putting the prejudice at risk may therefore also mean losing a form of protection.

We must tolerate the situation becoming less clear.

We must tolerate not knowing.

This uncertainty may be uncomfortable, but it is sometimes more truthful than the rapid explanation.

What Cannot Be Fully Understood

Hermeneutics concerns understanding.

But it also reminds us of the limits of understanding.

Another human being can never become entirely transparent to us. There are experiences, memories, and meanings to which we will never gain full access. Even people who have lived together for many years may carry parts of their lives unknown to the other.

This is not merely a problem that greater knowledge will solve.

It is part of encountering another person.

The other person’s strangeness should not always be overcome.

Some things should be allowed to remain the other person’s own.

The humility of understanding therefore also consists in knowing when not to interpret further. When to allow a person to retain spaces that do not belong to us.

Understanding is not conquest.

It is closeness without ownership.

Seeing Again

Putting our prejudices at risk does not mean becoming free from prejudice.

It means becoming capable of seeing again.

We may encounter the same person, the same text, or the same situation and discover something we did not see before. Not necessarily because reality has changed, but because our horizon has.

What previously appeared as disobedience may now be seen as protection.

What seemed like weakness may reveal itself as endurance.

What was understood as resistance to help may be resistance to humiliation.

Seeing again does not always cancel the first understanding.

But it places it within a larger context.

This is the movement of hermeneutics.

Not from ignorance to complete certainty.

But from a provisional understanding to one that is more tested, more open, and more responsible.