In the modern age, hermeneutics is characterized by a progressive transformation, using the new concept of language by philosophers such as Herder, Hamann, Humboldt, concepts that will prepare the ground for the establishment of an autonomous formulation of philosophical hermeneutics by the German philosopher and theologian Schleiermacher.
In the transition between the modern and contemporary times hermeneutics sees the assertion of its philosophical autonomy, distinguishing both from the exegetical, philological and legal one, and from a "universal hermeneutics" tied to a conception still "technical". It is on this strategy that still moves the work of Friedrich Meier, philosopher and esthete who defines hermeneutics a "science of the rules by which the meanings may be known by their marks," or "the science of the rules that must be followed in the interpretation of all or at least most kinds of signs. "
With Meier there are still trying to process an universal hermeneutics based on the technical rules of interpretation, position that will be overcome when hermeneutics will assume a role decidedly philosophical. This will be done in two significant milestones: the first due to Schleiermacher and his conception of hermeneutics as "the art of linguistic understanding"; the second due to the influence of Heidegger and his conception of hermeneutics as "phenomenology of existential understanding". In turn, the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher could form on its own, observing only two philosophical premises, which arose earlier and outside of hermeneutical philosophy: the new concept of "history" and the new concept of "language".
It was Schleiermacher to realize the limits of an hermeneutics understood only as " philological methodology " against the universal problem of interpretation, taking care to elaborate a general hermeneutics based on a foundation not only philological or technical but above all linguistic and philosophical.
To Schleiermacher some basic central hermeneutics must be recognized, first of all that of the "hermeneutical circle." The hermeneutical circle indicates the circular motion that in the interpretation of any text, literary, philosophical, religious, links the understanding of the totality of the text to the understanding of its parts, and in turn influences the understanding of the individual parts to that of the whole text. Schleiermacher established also a second hermeneutical norm: the principle of intuition, with which indicates that beyond external rules and methodological canons, hermeneutics is characterized as a process of identification with the inner life of the author.
The philosophical problems that have characterized the post-Kantian thought, and in particular the conflicts between scientific explanation and hermeneutic understanding (Dilthey), and then between logic and history, nature and spirit, were the basis of the great philosophical debates of the second half of the twentieth century, which saw opposing respectively structuralism and existentialism, positivism and dialectic, Marxism and phenomenology, and then they made the background of the debate between epistemology and hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics Greek word is the prime transliteration of the Greek "Ερμηνευτικη" "erminevtiki" hermeneutics means interpretation ;. as words have the power to reveal or conceal and can deliver messages in an ambiguous way. we could add semiosis to the list. A dot in the upcoming exegesis but a good starter in the menu that is to be served.Just to know what are we talking about.
To cut the long story short, no there is no difference between General Hermeneutics and Philosophical Hermeneutics. General Hermeneutics, meaning analysis/study of the "seme", relates to the method of arriving at the meaning of the referents (denotation) with respect to the context (historical, textual). In Philosophy, Hermeneutics is a "subjective way of looking" at an object (external reality) and giving meaning to it based on one's individual experience using language. Theoretically speaking, in both cases, it is a subjective "conscious" experience. In practice, however, ethical, aesthetic perspectives, among others, are not factored in in the case of General Hermeneutics.
My written English is not very good ... I hope you understand ... Ricoeur distinguishes between general or universal hermeneutics (Schleiermacher and Dilthey) and an ontological hermeneutics (Heidegger and Gadamer) . Ricoeur 's purpose is precisely to try to unite these two aspects or moments of hermeneutics. That is, in the ontological hermeneutics insert an epistemological stretch in order to philosophical hermeneutics can serve as an epistemology of the human sciences subordinating, however, the epistemological to the ontological problem. I hope I have made some contribution to the title and to the development of their exposure. Greetings.
Prerequisites of hermeneutics.
What is significant about Gadamer’s hermeneutics is his ontological focus (Being) and capacity to not only interpret human understanding but misunderstanding as a mechanism for effective communication.
The key to investigating Gadamer’s concept of understanding (the outcome of hermeneutics) is through logos . Logos is the vehicle for communicating with others, and when we think and speak we ‘‘…make what is not present manifest through …speaking…communicating everything that he means…”
This means that the word triggers a denoted name given to an object and a resulting mental image When thinking of any object we unconsciously join up our internalized thoughts within the shared, externalized medium of communicating with other people.
The commonality of language ensures a shared acceptance of meaning and ability to vocalize thoughts when alone or when with other people. That relates to the problem of language; we learn to think and use language from the first steps of cognition, a familiarizing engagement experimentally with the world and it with us. In the hermeneutic sense this allows the interpreter to develop ways of knowing and predicting the world through the use of their senses of conformity, cohesion and survival within the world Such predictive abilities mean we are always biased in our understanding of the spoken and written language as we become consciously aware of language only in unusual circumstances.
The role of the interpreter within Gadamerian hermeneutics has a specific characteristic in understanding human potential, through the ontic-ontology of Heidegger’s notion of Being (Heidegger 2003; Gadamer 2004). The word ontology comes from the Greek language meaning the study of Being, reviewed
by Heidegger for contemporary philosophy by situating Being into the average everydayness of life. To Heidegger and Gadamer, understanding the concept of Being and ‘what it is to be’ human meant that by analysing this most fundamental of concepts we can then and only then begin to understand how we live and engage in the world through the medium of language .
Language delivers pointers to the truth concealed within word meaning and reveals that something exists in a (hermeneutic) circle of ontological possibilities .
Fundamental to Heidegger’s hermeneutic is the notion of the human as an existential (worldly) ‘Being,’ referred to as ‘Dasein,’ always spelt with a capital D, ‘da’ meaning ‘there’ and ‘sein’ meaning ‘to be,’ or ‘there-being’ (Heidegger 2003). The concept of Dasein lies therefore in the face of something that is.
Something inevitably has to "exist" first before it can be "investigated" and Heidegger’s analysis enabled the first step towards human understanding of Dasein . This complex but also intuitively familiar concept relates to when a human being becomes aware of themselves as an existent located temporally in time ‘‘...Dasein (therefore) always understands….its existence in terms of the possibility of … being itself or not itself...” . Hence, we are aware and yet unaware of ourselves, ‘forgetting’ as we go about our daily lives, a pre-ontological awareness of existing through the experiences of everyday life .
In so far as hermeneutics from its latin root is related to interpretation, whose anciliary is understanding, philosophical hermeneutics share something in common with areas such as exegetical hermeneutics or textual hermeneutics, especially when language assumes a significant position.
However, interpretation and understanding makes sense only within the mode of being, the hermeneutic being, the being that interpretes and understands. Gadamer, rightly observed the human embeddedness of hermeneutic experience. It would be within the significant role which a person such as Gadamer assigns to the human bieng in the hermeneutical process that philosophical hermeneutics could differ from textual or exclusive linguistic hermeneutics.
I think that Christiana should know better that Hermeutrics does not have a Latin root but a Greek one the word is the prime transliteration of the Greek "Ερμηνευτικη" "erminevtiki" hermeneutics means interpretation. Too bad. the basic problem of hermeneutics was methodological: how to found the human sciences, and so how to found the science of interpretation, in a way that would make them properly ‘scientific’.
"hermeneutics" means the theory of interpretation, i.e. the theory of achieving an understanding of texts, utterances, and so on (it does not mean a certain twentieth-century philosophical movement). Hermeneutics in this sense has a long history, reaching back at least as far as ancient Greece. However, new focus was brought to bear on it in the modern period, in the wake of the Reformation with its displacement of responsibility for interpreting the Bible from the Church to individual Christians generally. This new focus on hermeneutics occurred especially in Germany where in began in Germany are that it began with a fumbling germination in the eighteenth century and then flowered in the systematic hermeneutics of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century, or that it began with a fumbling germination in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then eventually flowered in the philosophical hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Three principles follow
Principles (1) and (2) essentially established modern philosophy of language in one swoop, and would and is widely accepted by philosophers of language today. Principle (3) would meet with much more skepticism among contemporary philosophers of language, but may nonetheless very well be correct too (contrary to first appearances, it need not conflict with principle (1); and the widespread anti-psychologism concerning meaning due to Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein that is likely to make it seem dubious to philosophers of language today is arguably itself mistaken).
Principle (1) grounds at a deeper level Ernesti's thesis that it is an essential task of interpretation to determine linguistic usage and hence meaning. Principle (2) implies not only that in order to access an author's thoughts an interpreter must explore the author's language, but also that there is no danger that an author's thoughts will transcend his capacity for linguistic expression. Principle (3)is quasi empiricist thus implies that interpretation requires the interpreter to perform some sort of imaginative reproduction of an author's meaning-internal sensations.
Gadamer's positive conception of prejudice as pre-judgment is connected with several ideas in his approach to hermeneutics. The way in which our prejudgments open us up to the matter at issue in such a way that those prejudgments are themselves capable of being revised exhibits the character of the Gadamerian conception of prejudgment, and its role in understanding, as itself constituting a version of the hermeneutic circle
Constantine, you are right it is of Greek origin associated with Hermes, the messenger whose duty it is to bring the message of the gods to humans. See Palmer (1969) on Hermeneutics. However, I still argue that philosophical hermeneutics without going through the problematics in its historical development is connected to the mode of being. This is central to Gadamer's insistence on philosophical hermeneutics from the perspective of the humanities. It is within this frame could we understand his position on prejudice, historical consciousness and of course his explications on language. The notion of homo interrogens, evidently agrees with Gadamerian primacy of question such that the moment we view the reflective nature of the human person, one can not fail to find within the mode being search for meaning and understanding. We are always trying to make sense, whether of a text or reality. Hermeneutical experience make sense within the mode of being. The finitude of being underscores various questions around correct and true interpretation but from Gadamerian perspective we must acknowledge this limit rather than claim that an interpreter would interprete without prejudice. In that vein he prejudice and human histo-cultural situatedness are linked because we inherit our prejudice from tradition. The position held here is that history of hermeneutics has little consequence in deciding whether philosophical hermeneutics is different from textual or other sectoral hermeneutics. Rather, so long as some branch of study like biblical exegesis emphasises correct interpretation of text without reference to mode of being, philosophical hermeneutics would differ in that sense.
The role of the interpreter within Gadamerian hermeneutics has a specific characteristic in understanding human potential, through the ontic-ontology of Heidegger’s notion of Being. The word ontology comes from the Greek language meaning the study of Being, reviewed by Heidegger for contemporary philosophy by situating Being into the average everydayness of life . To Heidegger and Gadamer, understanding the concept of Being and ‘what it is to be’ human meant that by analysing this most fundamental of concepts we can then and only then begin to understand how we live and engage in the world through the medium of language . Language delivers pointers to the truth concealed within word meaning and reveals that something exists in a (hermeneutic) circle of ontological possibilities understands….its existence in terms of the possibility of … be(ing) itself or not itself...” . Hence, we are aware and yet unaware of ourselves, ‘forgetting’ as we go about our daily lives, a pre-ontological awareness of existing through the experiences of everyday life . Heidegger’s question enabled a single minded attempt to analyse the human life experience as ontologically explicit and objectifiable as possible.
Fusion of horizons Gadamer's approach to the "philosophy of language .
The key to investigating Gadamer’s concept of understanding is through logos .Logos is the vehicle for communicating with others, and when we think and speak we ‘‘…make what is not present manifest through …speaking…communicating everything that he means…” This means that the word triggers a denoted name given to an object and a resulting mental image . When thinking of any object we unconsciously join up our internalised thoughts within the shared, externalised medium of communicating with other people (Gadamer 2004). Therefore the commonality of language ensures a shared acceptance of meaning and ability to vocalise thoughts when alone or when with other people. That relates to the problem of language; we learn to think and use language from the first steps of cognisance, a familiarising engagement experientially with the world and it with us (Aristotle in Gadamer 2004). This allows the interpreter to develop ways of knowing and predicting the world through the use of their senses of conformity, cohesion and survival within the world . Such predictive abilities mean we are always biased in our understanding of the spoken and written language as we become consciously aware of language only in unusual circumstances Gadamer suggests three inter-relational points of relevance to language and understanding: Firstly, the universality of language; every dialogue has the potential for ‘inner infinity,’
an ability to reason, project understanding onto another and read between the lines. This dialogue may be in the form of a reflective journal entry, a research participants narrative or everyday dialogue in the health and social sciences. A
questioning mind ensures that language fills in any gaps toward a shared understanding opening up human potential for infinite dialogue with others in a fusion of horizons. Secondly, Gadamer refers to the essential forgetfulness of language; when losing the meaning of what is said there is potential for the ‘‘…real Being of language to unfold…” to be reduced . Gadamer develops the ontological (life experiences of the world)reflexivity of language as a means of communicating the meaning of what others say and write. As will be shown, this ontological freedom encompasses historicity, temporality and authenticity through hermeneutic analysis. Lastly, what Gadamer called I-lessness. When we speak we speak to someone and to our inner selves. When naming the word (in text or visually) we enable the unifying effect of language and communicating with others . Gadamer suggests there is a presence of spirit evident when using language, for example; projecting hesitancy, anxiety, intention and attitude. Gadamer refers to this as play in the hermeneutic game, a dynamic process of buoyancy, freedom potentiating reality and fulfilment of each players understanding. The play continues in the subjective inner world of thought and the motivation of the interpreter to play the game, to make sense of language as a key factor for understanding experience..
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Physical Sciences
- Waves