...Gadamer argues (rightly, in our mind) that it is in fact our very personal relation with the object that actually provides our way to understand the object. For Gadamer, “Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that they inevitably distort the truth. In fact, the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something — whereby what we encounter says something to us.”¹ In fact, attempts to gain some personal remove from the subject at hand — what Gadamer calls “controlled alienation” — work against our ability to know as we ought. “What kind of understanding does one achieve through ‘controlled alienation’? Is it not likely to be an alienated understanding?”²