In hermeneutics interpretive experience is typically clarified in reference to understanding In this context when we say that we understand what we mean is that we have really gotten at something through an attempt at interpretation and when we say we do not understand we mean that we have not really gotten anywhere at all with our interpretation For this reason understanding can be described as a ‘success’ of interpretation even if since Heidegger understanding is more commonly described as a fulfillment realization or enactment In hermeneutics such success of understanding is not measured by norms and methods typical of the modern natural sciences and quantitative social sciences such as whether our understanding derives from a repeatable experiment nor by norms typical of much of modern philosophy such as whether our understanding has indubitable epistemic foundations Now philosophers associated with hermeneutics describe the success of understanding in a number of manners However else the success of understanding is described though it is typically also described as edifying or educative Indeed HansGeorg Gadamer the philosopher perhaps most closely associated with hermeneutics in our times closely connects interpretive experience with education By education he has in mind the concept of formation Bildung that had been developed in Weimar classicism and that continued to influence nineteenthcentury romanticism and historicism in Germany Truth and Method Part I11 Education as formation involves more than the acquisition of expertise knowledge or information it concerns the enlargement of our person though formal instruction especially in the arts and humanities as well as through extensive and variegated experience Accordingly the success of understanding is educative in that we learn from our interpretive experience perhaps not only about a matter but thereby also about ourselves the world and others That the success of understanding is educative in this manner can be clarified by an example say in reading a text such as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War When we say that we understand this text we mean that our attempts to interpret it whether rigorously as in scholarship or more casually as in evening reading have gotten at something perhaps that in politics prudent reasoning is not always persuasive enough to stem the tide of war Certainly we have not arrived at this understanding in result of repeatable scientific experiment or based on an indubitable epistemic foundation But it is not for this reason any less educative In this understanding we have come to something that we can agree or disagree with something that in any case expands or changes our views about the role of reason in politics and no doubt then also of public discourse and the causes of war and finally something that can also teach us something about ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves