Document

Transcript Document

Hermeneutics

Bertram C. Bruce U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

History of hermeneutics

• Dilthey, 1914 (in Howard, pp. 15-17) • Habermas: interests • Husserl • Heidegger • Hirsch: meaning (one) v significances (vary) • experience => breaking down of old ways of seeing –John Berger • participating in language, history, world –Palmer

Explanation v Understanding No Yes radical skepticism romanticism (Nietzche, Foucault) (Shelly, Kierkegaard)

No Yes

logical positivism (Neurath, Carnap) Hermeneutics (Howard)

Dilthey, 1914

Nature we explain, the life of the soul we understand.

Erlebnis–a lived experience fits into patterns of significance we already entertain about our own lives; connectedness that life reveals quite different sides to us according to the point of view from which we consider its course in time is due to the nature of both understanding and life. –1961 part-whole-part –in Howard, pp. 15-17

Husserl

• things-in-themselves v things intended • eidetic abstraction

Heidegger

• Dasein (irreducible givenness of human existence) • anti-dualism of subject/object • Dreyfus: Nazism • broken hammer is more a hammer • our situation (horizon) has its own past & future

Gadamer

• Fusing of horizons (Tillich: love as overcoming of separation) • All understanding is hermeneutic • Dialogue between past & present • Historical conditionedness

Meaning through Production

Not occasionally only, but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive, but always a productive attitude as well.

–H. Gadamer,

Truth & Method

Communication is Educative

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communication (and hence all genuine social life) is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has thought and felt and in so far, meagerly or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who communicates left unaffected. –J. Dewey,

Democracy & Education

, pp 5-6

Wirkungsgeschichte-liches Bewußtsein (effective-historical consciousness) => fusing of horizons Even when we ourselves, as historically enlightened thinkers, are fundamentally clear about the historical conditionedness of all human thinking and hence about our own conditionedness, we have not ourselves taken an unconditioned stand... The consciousness of the conditionedness does not in any way negate this conditionedness.

–