2.2 HISTORY OF HERMENEUTIC DEVELOPMENT
:
Here I discuss some of the theories proposed by
various important scholars in hermeneutics. The hermeneutics eventually is the
core concept in my entire work. My book is a hermeneutics of sivasiddhantham.
Therefore the prominent concepts must be made explicit
At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning
of the nineteenth, hermeneutics was theorized as method of interpreting all the
texts, specially the humanities texts. Instead of the particular rules of
interpretation which are applied only to certain texts (the Bible, in special),
the main concern now is finding the rules of understanding in general.
Hermeneutics as a science is increasingly becoming
influential in western philosophy circles. The
universality of hermeneutics can
be explained in two ways which correspond to the two big directions in the
development of this discipline.
In the first sense, the aim of the hermeneutics is to establish a
universal method for text interpretation. In the first point, we talk about a
normative or a methodic hermeneutics (from antiquity to the nineteenth century)in
interpreting the deeper meanings or hidden meanings in the classical texts.
The second,
meaning of universality of hermeneutics, the “understanding” is a phenomenon
constituent to all human beings. In this conception interpretation is not
limited only to the text, it becomes a way in which we relate to the world.
In the second
case, we have a phenomenological or philosophical hermeneutics in the twentieth
century.
Let us look at some of the important theories of
hermeneutics which deals with text
interpretation, language, historicism,..etc. since its beginning.
FREIDREICH.D.
SCHLEIRMACHER(1768-1834):
Friedrich D.
Schleiermacher attempted to theorize two
types of understanding in the reading of texts :
1.Grammatical interpretation , concerns the
understanding of an expression in relationship with the language as part of it.
2.Psychological
interpretation is aimed at understanding
utterances, as a part of a speaker’s
life process. The main task of psychological interpretation is to understand
how the author thinks the meaning of the
texts.
But understanding cannot be fully achieved. The understanding is primordial and it can never
be clear away definitive. But we do not understand the text in the proper way
because it contains many parts in it from various time. In this way
Schleiermacher found the universality of the hermeneutics on the universality
of misunderstanding[i].
Hermeneutics is a continuous process and misunderstandings may be eliminated by
deeper reading of the texts.
WILHELM DILTHEY(1833-1911):HISTORICAL
EXISTENCE:
The epistemological[ii]
foundation( fundamental knowledge) of hermeneutics was continued by Wilhelm
Dilthey. He says, the understanding becomes a “category of life” in the attempt
to provide a philosophical foundation for the human science.
Dilthey says
that the task of this science is to understand the manifestation of lived
experience. The lived
experience mean the “inner experience”.
The experience is conditioned by inner factors.
In this way lived experience must be seen as a web of relationship between
a practical agent and his historical context. This relationship becomes
explicit in expressions. This expression
can be understood only if we re-experience
them. Re-experiencing is a historic process. He says only if we clarify the historical
context, which are embodied in them, we can understand them.
In this way, the term of understanding has assumed the
meaning of existential principle. Experiencing it in the real sense. The
hermeneutics became not just a way of knowledge for the human sciences, but a
characteristic of historical human existence[iii].
MARTIN HEIDEGGER(1889-1976)DASEIN;UNDERSTANDING AND INTERPRETATIONS:
Martin Heidegger defines the terms such as understanding, interpretation, and assertions in hermeneutics. He used the word” dasein” to define the fundamental ontology of the experience.
DASEIN:
The fundamental ontology of life is called “dasein “. His major book Being and Time stressed the ontological difference between entities and the being of entities. He says “Being is always the Being of an entity”. Establishing this difference is the general motif running through his book Being and Time.
The fundamental ontology of life is called “dasein “. Dasein for Heidegger was
1.A way of being involved with and caring for the immediate world in which one lived.
2. While always remaining aware of the contingent element of that involvement.
3.Giving the priority of the world to the self,
4. And of the evolving nature of the self itself.
Heidegger considered that language, everyday curiosity, logical systems, and common beliefs obscure Dasein's nature from itself.
Authentic choice means
-turning away from the collective world of them,
-to face Dasein, one's individuality,
-one's own limited life-span
-and one's own being.
Heidegger thus intended the concept of Dasein to provide a stepping stone in the questioning of what it means to be
– to have one's own being,
-one's own death,
- one's own truth.
He said “Scientific research is not the only manner of Being which this entity can have. Scientific research is not in it- the one which lies closest. Moreover, Dasein itself has a special distinctiveness as compared with other entities. It is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it”.
Heidegger also saw the question of Dasein as extending beyond the realms disclosed by logic, science or in the history of metaphysics.
UNDERSTANDING:
For Heidegger understanding is an existential[iv].
What we, as human beings, already are simple because we do exist. This means
that is an “a priori “structure which reveals the manner in which the Dasein[v]
( fundamental ontology)exists. As existential understanding operates by
projecting before the Dasein and its
possibilities. These projections are worked out by interpretation which have the role to make hidden meanings explicit
.
Understanding, is
neither a method of reading nor the outcome of a willed and carefully conducted
procedure of critical reflection( thinking). It is not something we consciously
do or fail to do, but something we are. Understanding is a mode of being, and
as such it is characteristic of human being, of Dasein. The pre-reflective way in which Dasein
inhabits the world is itself of a hermeneutic nature.
Our understanding of the
world presupposes a kind of pragmatic question of “know-how” . This “know –how”,
is revealed through the way in which we
orient ourselves in the world. The world is familiar to us in a basic,
intuitive way.
Most originally, we do not understand the world by gathering a
collection of neutral facts. It is not by the conscious facts we may reach a set of
universal propositions, laws, or judgments that corresponds to the world as it
is.
The world is tacitly intelligible
to us. At stake is the explicit fore-grounding( basic knowledge) of a given
object. The fundamental familiarity with the world is brought to reflective
consciousness through the work of interpretation.
INTERPRETING:
Interpretation makes
things, objects, the fabric of the world, appear as something. This is
only possible on the background of the world as a totality of practices and
inter subjective encounters, of the world. This is
opened up by Dasein's being understandingly there. Interpretation,
however, does not have to be of a propositional nature.
Behind every interpretation is the fore-structure of
understanding. Every interpretation is grounded in something we have in advance
( fore-having). Every interpretation in something we have see in advance(fore-sight) and in something we grasp in advance (fore-conception
).
With Heidegger the hermeneutics is no longer a reflection
about the human science but a explication of the ontological ground on which
this science can be build. The hermeneutics is not understood now as a
method, but as the fundamental way in
which the human being is related to the” Being and to the world”[vi].
Jurgen Habermas(1929-)LANGUGE AND HERMENEUTICS:
Habermas
studied the differences between the field of linguistics and hermeneutics.
1)Hermeneutics means to Habermas is to investigate the structures of natural language, and engage in a ‘reflective use of communicative competence.’
-Linguistics is limited to ‘linguistic competence’, as distinct from communicative competence. This linguistic competence refers to the ability of an ideal speaker who has full command of the abstract rule system of a natural language.
2)Linguistics is concerned purely with the deep structure that produces our ideas,
-whereas hermeneutics takes into account the dimension in which language is transformed into a specific instance of speech or writing.
3)“Further, the goal of linguistics is a reconstruction of the rule system which underlies the production of all the various grammatically correct and semantically meaningful elements of a natural language,
-whereas hermeneutics reflects on the principle experiences of a communicatively competent speaker (whose linguistic competence is tacitly presupposed).”
4)Hermeneutics brings to light for the knowledge seeker his inherent freedoms and dependencies with regards to language.
- However, philosophical hermeneutics cannot define communicative competence. This is the task of linguistics. This means, according to Habermas, that the subjectivity of the speaker remains fundamentally untouched in the field of hermeneutics.
The ways in which hermeneutics is significant according to Habermas are:
1)“Hermeneutical consciousness demolishes the objectivistic self-conception of the traditional human sciences.
2)There is a bond between the interpreting scholar and the hermeneutical situation from which he starts.
3)An
impartiality of understanding can be secured by
abstraction, without preconceived
ideas.
4)Knowing through reflection on the effective historical relationship -in which the knowing subject stands- to its object alone helps .
5) “Hermeneutical consciousness calls to the attention of the social sciences problems. The social science problems arise from the symbolic ‘fore-structuring’ of their investigation field.”
6)Essentially- with regard to the scientific method- all observation is theory laden and must be treated as such.
7) “.. natural language always plays the role of an ‘ultimate’ meta-language for all theories expressed in formal language.. ”This explains the epistemological rank of colloquial language( natural language) in the research process.
8) “ hermeneutics necessitates the translation of momentous scientific information into the language of the social world at large.”
9)This is a new territory for hermeneutics argues Habermas:“Hermeneutical consciousness originates in reflection on our activity within natural language”.
10)However the interpretation of the sciences for the world at large must mediate between natural language and mono-logical language systems.
11)Hermeneutical understanding must always proceed ad hoc and cannot be developed into a scientific method.
12) Hermeneutical understanding can at most reach the level of an art through discipline and training.
This question is equivalent to asking whether there can be a theory appropriate to the structure of natural languages which provides the basis for a methodologically ensured understanding of meaning.
Habermas suggests two avenues of inquiry to find an answer to this problem:
a) the application
of hermeneutical understanding is limited by undertakings of explanation by
psychoanalysis.
1)The
primary suggestion is that the subject who expresses himself is unaware of his
own intentions:“A theory of colloquial communication, consequently, must first
open the way to pathologically buried meaning.
2)If the claim to produce such a theory were
to prove valid, an explanatory understanding -were then possible- which would
be able to pass beyond the limits of hermeneutical understanding of meaning” he
says.
b) the search for a universal theory of
linguistics, which amounts to the reconstruction of a rule system which would
adequately define universal linguistic competence.
The goal is to
assign a “structural description” from the theoretical language without doubt (unequivocally)
to every element of natural language. This ( structural descriptions expressed
in the theoretical language) would be able to take the place of hermeneutical
understanding of meaning. Habermas seeks
to replace the problem of subjectivity and structure of language, with a system
of analysis as a dominant force.
HANS GEORG GADAMER:(1900-2002):HISTORICISM IN
HERMENEUTICS:
Hans Gadamer says that an understanding is a
process of history(effect of history). Hermeneutics he says is a historically
effected unconscious.
The hermeneutical situation is a
phenomenological exercise and he calls this as “horizon”. Understanding and
interpretation thus always occurs from within a particular ‘horizon’ that is
determined by our” historically-determined situatedness”. The horizon of
understanding keeps changing as per our knowledge of history.
The “understanding” is
not, however, imprisoned within the horizon of its situation.Indeed, the
horizon of understanding is neither static nor unchanging. It is always subject
to the effects of history. Just as our prejudices are themselves brought into
question in the process of understanding.
In the encounter with another, the horizon of our own understanding
susceptible to change. It is a matter of negotiation between oneself and one's
partner in the hermeneutical dialogue such that the process of understanding
can be seen as a matter of coming to an ‘agreement’ about the matter at issue.
All understanding
involves a process of mediation and dialogue between what is familiar and what
is alien. In this process both knowledges get affected. This process of
horizontal engagement is an ongoing one. The process never achieves any final
completion or complete elucidation.
Our own history and tradition is itself
constitutive of our own hermeneutic situation as well as being itself
constantly taken up in the process of understanding. The process of unconscious engagement is
continuous. Our historical and
hermeneutic situation can never be made completely transparent to us. Gadamer says
the understanding is not confined to a method or technique. He insists that “understanding” is an ongoing
process and has no final completion[vii].
PAUL RICOEUR(1913-2005):
Paul Ricoeur is a French hermeneutic philosopher. His
project was to make psychoanalysis philosophically respectable by showing how
it is dealing with problems of interpreting our responses to the world and
ourselves.
Psychoanalysis is a science producing generalizations
based upon observations of the individual meanings generated in specific
instances of discourse and the meanings for the same. He views the
psychoanalysis as a method primarily concerned with uncovering hidden meanings
behind the explicit memories.
The universal hermeneutics of Gadamer and the depth
hermeneutics of Habermas were reunited
in the philosophical conception of Paul Ricoeur.
The conclusion of Ricoeur about this debate is that we
need a critical stance toward
civilization in which interests are
reduced almost to mere
Instrumentality and where we witness daily the industrialization and
manipulation of all dimensions in our cultural life.
This critical stance would enable us to preserve the
difference, between the idea of good life introduced and discussed by
philosophers and the growth of material goods that is the principle aim in
industrial and post-modern system of the world[viii].
SEBASTIAN GARDNER:SYMBOLICISM AND HERMENEUTICS:
Sebastian Gardner- a contemporary philosopher-
analyses the central theme in symbolizing capacity of mind. Unconscious does
not intentionally communicate with the external world. He says the unconscious
is structured, it recovers memories systematically.
The operation of censorship is important in the
unconscious. The true meanings appear in disguised forms due to the censorship.
This results in syntactically characterized operations. They are the
intrapsychic symbolic relations (between different mental contents) and extra
psychic symbolic relations (between mental contents and external objects).
Gardner offers to resurrect symbolism. He says, symbolic
mechanisms exploits the presupposition( assumption) and propositional(
planning) borders. Desires involves the exercise (of certain dispositions) that
are object hungry. Hence symbolic mechanisms( methodologies) provide a path to
the phenomenology[ix] of
the objects.
There
are apparent relationship of meanings between symbols and objects in memory. There
is a constant conjunction( concurrence) of symbols with the object. Symbols
and their role is satisfaction of a
desire. This is a sufficient
justification for creating rules of meanings. Symbols can be explored to understand the
semantics of desire. A symbolic qualification may be sufficient when the symbol is adequate for
a study.
However Gardner says there are no innate symbolizing
function for the unconscious. He feels it comes from the interaction with the
environment over the ages. This interaction leads to the symbolizing function[x].
In short he says, there exists a
symbolic relationship between the systems of symbolic meanings and the meanings
found in art, religion, language and human culture.
Thus we saw the various important approaches over
time in the reason and importance of the
benefits we have in interpreting the texts and
religious texts in particular. The religious texts are closer to the
particular humanity and has involved in them over millennia. From the early nomadic
hunter gatherer time to modernity, these texts are treasure troves for exploring the inner
conscious of the people themselves.
Saiva hermeneutics:
Saiva siddhantha studies are hermeneutics in many sense. Hidden meanings
were explored from the agams and their psycho-analytic connotations were
investigated . The later works of saiva
siddhantham involves themselves to exclusive psycho-analytic themes. Hence studying the text gives us the knowledge of
the mind of the people and the
psycho-analysis itself.
Tholkapiam also mentions about hermeneutic concept as
“nool neri”(நூல்நெறி). Saiva siddhantham studies offer a
solution in a hermeneutic -psychoanalytic direction.
That is the ancient agamas were
studied by later siddhanthists and the hidden meanings were explored. These
hidden meanings were refined into sadasiva agamam( thirumanthiram) and still
later into sivagnanabodham and the fourteen sastra texts. These were furthered
by the pandara sastras and the padiyam( bashyam)texts. So the process of
exploring hidden meanings are already had taken place and we are studying that
here.
Modern hermeneutics in saiva texts are also
actively done in Malaysia and tamil diaspora. Alexis Anderson in the united kingdom
is doing important contribution in delineating the core differences among the
various saiva sects in india based on the ontological grounds.This aspect of saivism
is a new trend and authors like
PROF.K.LOGANATHAN OF PENANG has done a great work on these areas[xi].
Such an interpretation is yet to gain momentum in india and tamil nadu.
In the following section we shall
go to the aspects of unconscious in the
western philosophy development before going to the hermeneutic understanding of
siddhantha texts and their interpretations in those unconscious lines.
[i]
Hermeneutics (i.e. Theory of Interpretation)
Schleiermacher's theories of interpretation and translation rest squarely on
three of the Herder-inspired doctrines in the philosophy of language which were
described earlier: (4) thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by, or
even identical with, language; (5) meaning is word usage; and (7) there are
deep linguistic and conceptual-intellectual differences between people.
Doctrine (7) poses a severe challenge to both interpretation and translation,
and it is the main task of Schleiermacher's theories to cope with this
challenge. Schleiermacher's most original doctrine in the philosophy of
language, (8) (semantic holism), is also highly relevant in this connection,
for, as Schleiermacher perceives, semantic holism greatly exacerbates the
challenge to interpretation and translation posed by (7).Schleiermacher lectured on hermeneutics frequently between 1805 and 1833. The following are his main principles:
(a) Hermeneutics is strictly the art of understanding verbal communication -- as contrasted, not equated, with explicating, applying, or translating it.
(b) Hermeneutics should be a universal discipline -- i.e. one which applies equally to all subjects-areas (e.g. the bible, law, and literature), to oral as well as to written language, to modern texts as well as to ancient, to works in one's own language as well as to works in foreign languages, and so forth.
(c) In particular, the interpretation of sacred texts such as the bible is included within it -- this may not rely on special principles, such as divine inspiration (of either the author or the interpreter).
(d) Interpretation is a much more difficult task than is generally realized: contrary to a common misconception that “understanding occurs as a matter of course,” “misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point.” (This position derives from Schleiermacher's version of principle (7): deep linguistic and conceptual-intellectual diversity.) How, then, is interpretation to be accomplished?
(e) Before the interpretation proper of a text can even begin, the interpreter must acquire a good knowledge of the text's historical context. (The suggestion found in some of the secondary literature that Schleiermacher thinks historical context irrelevant to interpretation is absurd.)
(f) Interpretation proper always has two sides: one linguistic, the other psychological. Linguistic interpretation's task (which rests on principle (5)) consists in inferring from the evidence consisting in particular actual uses of words to the rules that are governing them, i.e. to their usages and thus to their meanings; psychological interpretation instead focuses on an author's psychology. Linguistic interpretation is mainly concerned with what is common or shared in a language; psychological interpretation mainly with what is distinctive to a particular author.
(g) Schleiermacher implies several reasons why an interpreter needs to complement linguistic interpretation with psychological in this way. First, he sees this need as arising from the deep linguistic and conceptual-intellectual distinctiveness of individuals. Such distinctiveness at the individual level leads to the problem for linguistic interpretation that the actual uses of words which are available to serve as evidence from which to infer an author's exact usage or meaning will usually be relatively few in number and poor in contextual variety -- a problem which an appeal to authorial psychology is supposed to help solve by providing additional clues. Second, an appeal to authorial psychology is also required in order to resolve ambiguities at the level of linguistic meaning which occur in particular contexts (i.e. even after the range of meanings available to the author for the word(s) in question is known). Third, in order fully to understand a linguistic act one needs to know not only its linguistic meaning but also what some more recent philosophers have called its “illocutionary” force or intention. For example, if I encounter a stranger by a frozen lake who says to me, “The ice is thin over there,” in order fully to understand this utterance I need to know not only its linguistic meaning (which in this case is clear) but also whether it is being made merely as a factual statement, as a threat, as a joke … (Schleiermacher emphasizes the first of these three considerations most. However, if, as he does, one wants to argue that interpretation needs to invoke psychology generally, and if, as I hinted earlier, linguistic and conceptual-intellectual distinctiveness is not the pervasive phenomenon that he normally takes it to be, then it is arguably the latter two considerations that one should consider the more fundamental ones.)
(h) Interpretation also requires two different methods: a “comparative” method (i.e. roughly, a method of plain induction), which Schleiermacher sees as predominating on the linguistic side of interpretation (where it takes the interpreter from the particular uses of a word to the rule for use governing them all), and a “divinatory” method (i.e. roughly, a method of tentative and fallible hypothesis based on but also going well beyond available empirical evidence -- the etymology to keep in mind here is not Latin divinus but French deviner, to guess or conjecture), which he sees as predominating on the psychological side of interpretation. (The widespread idea in the secondary literature that “divination” is for Schleiermacher a process of psychological self-projection into texts contains a small grain of truth -- in that it is his view that interpretation requires some measure of psychological commonality between interpreter and interpreted -- but is basically mistaken.)
(i) Ideal interpretation is of its nature a holistic activity. (This principle in part rests on but also goes well beyond Schleiermacher's semantic holism.) In particular, any given piece of text needs to be interpreted in light of the whole text to which it belongs, and both need to be interpreted in light of the broader language in which they are written, their larger historical context, a broader preexisting genre, the author's whole corpus, and the author's overall psychology. Such holism introduces a pervasive circularity into interpretation, for, ultimately, interpreting these broader items in its turn depends on interpreting such pieces of text.
Schleiermacher, especially in his later work, more closely specifies psychological interpretation as a process of identifying, and tracing the necessary development of, a single authorial “seminal decision [Keimentschluß]” that lies behind a work and unfolds itself as the work in a necessary fashion -- which seems a very unhelpful move to make, for how many works are composed, and hence properly interpretable, in such a way? Again, whereas Herder includes not only an author's linguistic behavior but also his non-linguistic behavior among the evidence relevant to psychological interpretation, Schleiermacher normally insists on a restriction to the former -- which seems misguided (e.g. the Marquis de Sade's recorded acts of cruelty seem no less potentially relevant to establishing the sadistic side of his psychological make-up, and hence to interpreting his texts in light of this, than his cruel statements). Again, unlike Herder, Schleiermacher regards the central role of “divination,” or hypothesis, in interpretation as a ground for sharply distinguishing interpretation from natural science, and hence for classifying interpretation as an art rather than a science -- whereas he should arguably instead have seen it as a ground for thinking interpretation and natural science similar.
Forster, Michael, "Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/schleiermacher/>.
[ii]
Defined narrowly, epistemology is the
study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge,
epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary
and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its
structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief,
epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the
concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is
justification internal or external to one's own mind? Understood more broadly,
epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination
of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism
Whereas up to then lived experience had been assumed to provide us an understanding of ourselves, now Dilthey asserts that we understand ourselves only by means of our objectifications. The understanding of self requires me to approach myself as others do, that is, from the outside to the inside. “The process of understanding, insofar as it is determined by common conditions and epistemological means, must everywhere have the same characteristics” (Dilthey 1996, 237). To the extent that rules can guide the understanding of the objectifications of life it constitutes interpretation. Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation that relates to all human objectifications—that is, not only speech and writing, but also visual artistic expressions, more casual physical gestures as well as observable actions or deeds.
This new perspective that approaches the inside from the outside also alters Dilthey's conception of psychic structure. In a 1904 study entitled “The Psychic Structural Nexus,” Dilthey considers what linguistic expressions can teach us about the intentionality of consciousness. No longer merely explicating the breadth of psychic life through the inter-weavings of acts of cognition, feeling and willing, Dilthey uses an expression such as “I am worried about something” to disclose the referential structure of a lived experience. Psychic acts have contents that are related to the objects of the world by means of what Dilthey calls attitudinal stances. Our attitudes toward the world are “indefinite in number. Asking, believing, presuming, claiming, taking pleasure in, approving, liking and its opposite, wishing, desiring, and willing are such modifications of the psychic attitude” (Dilthey 2002, 43). These attitudinal stances are not just cognitive, but predelineate something more encompassing, which Dilthey calls “knowledge.” Knowledge (Wissen) adds to the conceptual cognition (Erkenntnis) of reality, “the positing of values” and “the determination of purposes and the establishment of rules” (Dilthey 2002, 25).
While the kind of epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) established by Kant and others suffices for the natural sciences, the human sciences require a more full-blooded theory of knowledge (Theorie des Wissens). Knowledge is to be “distinguished from a mere representation, presumption, question, or assumption by the fact that a content appears here with a sense of objective necessity” (Dilthey 2002, 27–28). This objective necessity is to be located in the evidentness that accompanies thinking that is properly executed and reaches its goal whether through the self-given reality of lived experience or the “givenness that binds us to an outer perception” (Dilthey 2002, 28).
Every attempt to characterize a lived experience leads beyond it to other structurally related experiences that ground it. This involves not just an observational process of willful attention, but also an involuntary “being-pulled-along by the state of affairs itself” to ever more constituent parts of the nexus of human knowledge.
In using words we do not represent them as words but fulfill their meaning by representing their objects. There is a triadic structural relation between the intuitive content of a linguistic expression, an act that gives it meaning and the object that embodies that meaning as what is expressed. But whereas Husserl's phenomenology focused in the conceptual structures of objective apprehension, Dilthey gives equal attention to the structures of what he calls “objective having” (Dilthey 2002, 66). In objective apprehension we progress from attitude to objects, in objective having we regress from objects to attitude. This regressive structure is characteristic of our lived experiences of feeling and tends to “lose itself in the depth of the subject” (Dilthey 2002, 69). At root feelings can be said to explicate the self-givenness of the reflexive awareness that Dilthey attributes to consciousness in general. But feelings also assess what is given in consciousness as either furthering or diminishing one's state. That is why we often distinguish them as pleasurable or painful.
Feelings are further related to the way we evaluate the world. Our values express adjudicative attitudes based on feeling. Although the setting of purposes is grounded in the lived experience of values, the life of feelings has an immanent teleology that does not require it to go over into the desire to act. The structural nexus of willing is thus different from that of feeling. There are many feelings that evoke further feelings rather than the impulse to do something in response to them. A feeling of suffering can for instance elicit a kind of self-pity that, far from reproducing the suffering, elicits a “distinctively mellow” (Dilthey 2002, 76) mood that immobilizes.
The final general attitude relevant to the structural nexus of knowledge is that of willing. In the lived experiences of willing “we possess a reflexive awareness of an intention to realize a state of affairs” (Dilthey 2002, 82). If we call this state of affairs to be realized a “purpose” then what is expected from this purpose is a satisfaction of some kind.
Dilthey's most important work is The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences of 1910. Here Dilthey applies the same kind of structural analysis that we saw him develop for lived experience to the understanding of history. The human sciences give form to the historical world by analyzing the structural systems in terms of which human beings participate in history. In the Introduction to the Historical Sciences Dilthey had conceived the psychic nexus, cultural system and the external organization of society as purposive systems. Now a more neutral covering concept is used to capture all the ways the forces of life can converge. This is the concept of the “productive nexus or system” (Wirkungszusammenhang). The efficacy of life and of the historical world is to be understood in terms of productivity before any causal or teleological analysis is applied. The carriers of history, whether they be individuals, cultures, institutions, or communities, are productive systems capable of producing value, meaning, and, in some cases, realizing purposes. Each is to be considered structurally as centered in itself.
Each individual is a psychic productive system inherently related to other more inclusive productive systems that are also at work in history. These larger productive systems come about because of the need for communication, interaction, and cooperation among individuals. But they can also take on a life of their own and survive the individuals that formed them. Dilthey's category of Wirkung or productivity is at the root of Gadamer's theory of effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte). In the Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey had been unwilling to consider these larger groupings as subjects or carriers of history. In The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, he qualifies his opposition to transpersonal subjects by allowing them to be considered as logical rather than real subjects. It is possible to regard cooperative productive systems as logical subjects that transcend individuals without positing them as superempirical real subjects.
Even when individuals participate in more encompassing cultural systems and organizations of society, they are never completely submerged by them. This is because any such productive system only engages some aspects of an individual. Moreover, the individuals active in a cultural system often put their stamp on its mode of productivity so that not just the rationally agreed upon function of the system is achieved. Summing up these two points, Dilthey discerns a difficulty in conceptualizing the sciences of these cultural systems in terms of the idea of purposes alone:
Individuals give only part of themselves to these more inclusive systems, yet they can express their whole being through this part. No cultural system will embody merely the purposes it was meant to fulfill. That is why it is crucial to reconceive purposive systems as productive systems. A productive nexus or system may be purposive in a general sense without fulfilling a determinate purpose. It is to be understood more generally as producing objectifications that express human values as well as purposes—leaving open the extent to which specific goals are achieved. The important thing is how human values and purposes are expressed in productive systems and how their meaning is to be understood.
As in the essay “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” understanding is said to involve a process of referring back from outer sensory phenomena to a reality that is inner. But now in The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences Dilthey recognizes that this inner reality need not be psychological in nature. He uses the example of how the statutes of a state express the common will of a community. The inner content of the laws on the books is a legal meaning formation. The expressions we read in law books articulate an inner relation among legal imperatives. What is expressed in these laws is not the mental states of individual legislators, but a general way of regulating human relations. Dilthey makes the same claim for individual poetic creations. What is expressed in a drama is “not the inner processes in the poet; it is rather a nexus created in them but separable from them. The nexus of a drama consists in a distinctive relation of material, poetic mood, motif, plot, and means of presentation” (Dilthey 2002, 107).
The interpretation of history must deal with all manifestations of life, not merely expressions that are intended to communicate a state of mind. In the section entitled “The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life,” Dilthey distinguishes three classes of life-manifestations. The first class consists of concepts, judgments and larger thought-formations. They are intended to communicate states of affairs, not states of mind. Thus the proposition “two plus two equals four” means the same in all contexts and says nothing about the person uttering it. Actions form a second class of manifestations of life. Actions as such are not meant to communicate anything, but they often do reveal something about the intentions of the actor. Thus if someone picks up a hammer nearby some nails and wooden boards, it is legitimate to assume that he or she wants to assemble the boards into some artifact. If this occurs in a large workshop, it is also plausible to think the person is a carpenter. This might also tell us something about the person's livelihood, but not much more. There is a third class of life-manifestations that Dilthey calls “expressions of lived experience” and which disclose more about the individual uttering them. Expressions of lived experience can range from simple exclamations and gestures to personal self-descriptions and reflections to works of art. Often these expressions are more disclosive than was intended:
A work of art is often more disclosive of human life in general than of the specific life of the artist. It may disclose something about the state of mind or the attitude of the artist, but a work of art will only be great if its “spiritual content is liberated from its creator” (Dilthey 2002, 228).
After having analyzed these three kinds of manifestations of life, which can be called theoretical, practical and disclosive respectively, Dilthey proceeds to distinguish various modes of understanding them. Elementary understanding goes back to the associative relation that normally exists between an expression and what is expressed in it. It assimilates the meanings that are commonly attached to expressions in the community that we grow up in. Dilthey uses Hegel's concept of “objective spirit” to account for this commonality of meaning. Objective spirit embodies “the manifold forms in which a commonality existing among individuals has objectified itself in the world of the senses,” allowing the past to become “a continuously enduring present for us” (Dilthey 2002, 229). Whereas Hegel restricted objective spirit to the legal, economic and political aspects of historical life, Dilthey expands the concept to include the sciences, religion, art and philosophy that Hegel had assigned to absolute spirit. But most of all, objective spirit embodies the everyday, mundane aspects of life that we grow up with.
From earliest childhood, the self is nurtured by this world
of objective spirit. It is also the medium in which the understanding of other
persons and their life-manifestations takes place. For everything in which
spirit has objectified itself contains something that is common to the I and
the Thou. Every square planted with trees, every room in which chairs are
arranged, is understandable to us from childhood because human tendencies to
set goals, produce order, and define values in common have assigned a place to
every square and every object in the room. (Dilthey 2002, 229)
This common background suffices for the elementary understanding of everyday
life. But whenever the common meaning of life-manifestations is called into
question for some reason, higher understanding becomes necessary. This can
occur because of an apparent inconsistency among judgments or expressions, or
because of an ambiguity that attaches to them or because of a complexity that
we have not come upon before. Higher understanding cannot continue to rely on
the common meanings of an expression that derive from a shared local background
between speaker and listener, writer and reader. Higher understanding must
replace the sphere of commonality, where inference by analogy suffices, with
that of universality, where inductive inference must take over. Here the human
sciences become relevant by offering the appropriate universal disciplinary
contexts that can help to deal with uncertainties of interpretation. These
universal systematic contexts can be social or political, economic or cultural,
secular or religious. When expressions can be determined to be functioning in a
specific disciplinary context then ambiguities tend to disappear. Literary
scholars may be able to clarify a puzzling poetic passage by showing it to
contain a literary allusion to a classical work with a foreign vocabulary. Or
they can perhaps clarify it by seeing it as a way of accommodating certain
technical demands of the genre as such. These cases of higher understanding
establish a larger context of reference.However, higher understanding can also focus on more specific contexts related to the work or its author. The consideration of such contexts should come only at the conclusion of the interpretive process and represents a shift from exploring the relation “of expression to what is expressed” toward the relation “of what has been produced to productivity” (Dilthey 2002, 233). Here we move from meaning relationships to something like a productive relationship to which knowledge about the authors becomes relevant. But the first recourse here is to consult more of the products of the author. How does a sentence fit into a paragraph, a chapter, a whole work, or a corpus as a whole? Only if these contexts fail to resolve the problem may we consider psychological claims about the author. The understanding of the individuality of an author should only bring in psychological factors as a last resort. Dilthey writes “we understand individuals by means of their affinities, their commonalities. This process presupposes the connection between the universally human and individuation. On the basis of what is universal, we can see individuation extended to the manifoldness of human existence” (Dilthey 2002, 233–34).
However, the highest form of understanding is not the reconstruction of the individuality of the author. It involves something that has been confused with reconstruction, but is distinct. What Dilthey points to is a process of re-creation or re-experiencing, which he contrasts with understanding as such: “Understanding as such is an operation running inverse to the course of production. But a fully sympathetic reliving requires that understanding go forward with the line of the events themselves” (Dilthey 2002, 235).
Re-experiencing develops understanding by completing the hermeneutical circle. If understanding goes “back” to the overall context, re-experiencing goes “forward” by following out the parts that give focus to the whole. A re-experiencing is not an actual re-construction but produces a better understanding that refines the original. This is made clear by the following example: “A lyrical poem makes possible, through the sequence of its verses, the re-experiencing of a nexus of lived experience—not the real one that stimulated the poet, but the one that, on its basis, the poet places in the mouth of an ideal person” (Dilthey 2002, 235).
Whereas the arts can expand the horizon of our lived experience by means of the ideal and imaginary means of fiction, history must do so by a process of structural articulation. The task of the human sciences is to analyze the productive nexus of history as it exhibits itself in stable formations or systematic structures. The productive nexus of history differs from the causal nexus of nature in producing values and arriving at purposes.
Each such system can be regarded as being centered within itself on the basis of some function, whether it be economic, political, cultural or religious. The structures to be analyzed here provide various cross-sections of what takes place in history. But there are also relatively enduring socio-historical contexts that we can delineate as nation-states and historical periods.
A nation organized as a state can be considered as a composite structural unity of productive systems. The individual members of a nation-state exhibit commonalities which produce a solidarity. And when cultural systems transcending the scope of this nation come into contact with other local productive systems, they begin to assume commonalities distinctive of that nation. Finally, integration of associations comes about through relations of “domination and obedience, as well as of community, that are combined in the sovereign will of a state” (Dilthey 2002, 196).
Nation-states are spatially defined historical wholes, but we can also delineate temporal composite wholes such as historical phases. What characterizes generations, ages and epochs according to Dilthey is that they are general, “permeating tendencies” (Dilthey 2002, 198). Each epoch defines a life-horizon by which people orient their life. “Such a horizon places life, life-concerns, life-experience, and thought-formation in a certain proportion” (Dilthey 2002, 198), which tends to restrain the way individuals can modify their outlooks. But an epoch is only a dominating tendency that will encompass opposing tendencies. In fact, a new epoch will come about when opposing tendencies take advantage of the inevitable tensions and dissatisfactions produced by any dominant tendency.
Whereas the structural analysis of history in terms of cultural systems and the external organization of society can be correlated with specific human sciences, the appeal by historians to the more composite structures of nation-states and epochs must be sanctioned by good judgment. History is an art as well as a science. Only historical reflection can create the right balance that will transform the conceptual cognition of the human sciences into adequate historical knowledge.
This shift to historical knowledge is the main theme of the notes for a second volume of The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences which were published posthumously as Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason. Here Dilthey analyzes the categories of life that are relevant to historical knowledge. He distinguishes between formal and real categories. Formal categories stem from elementary logical operations that are at work in all apprehension: they include the processes of comparing, noting sameness, differentiating and relating. Although such elementary operations are prediscursive, they provide the basis for discursive thought. The prediscursive noting of sameness prepares the way for the unifying concepts of discursive thought and the process of relating provides the basis for synthetic procedures. These prediscursive and discursive modes of thought account for the formal categories of unity, plurality, identity, difference, degree and relation that are shared by the natural and human sciences.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dilthey/ Makkreel, Rudolf, "Wilhelm Dilthey", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/dilthey/>.
[iv] On the existential view, to understand what a human
being is it is not enough to know all the truths that natural science—including
the science of psychology—could tell us. The dualist who holds that human
beings are composed of independent substances—“mind” and “body”—is no better
off in this regard than is the physicalist, who holds that human existence can
be adequately explained in terms of the fundamental physical constituents of
the universe. Existentialism does not deny the validity of the basic categories
of physics, biology, psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as
matter, causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so
on). It claims only that human beings cannot be fully understood in terms of
them. Nor can such an understanding be gained by supplementing our scientific
picture with a moral one. Categories of moral theory such as intention,
blame, responsibility, character, duty, virtue, and the like do capture
important aspects of the human condition, but neither moral thinking (governed
by the norms of the good and the right) nor scientific thinking (governed by
the norm of truth) suffices. “Existentialism”, therefore, may be defined as the
philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories, governed by
the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence. To
approach existentialism in this categorial way may seem to conceal what is
often taken to be its “heart” , namely, its character as a gesture of protest
against academic philosophy, its anti-system sensibility, its flight from the
“iron cage” of reason. But while it is true that the major existential
philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in our own time,
and while the idea that philosophy cannot be practiced in the disinterested
manner of an objective science is indeed central to existentialism, it is equally
true that all the themes popularly associated with existentialism—dread,
boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, nothingness, and so
on—find their philosophical significance in the context of the search for a new
categorial framework, together with its governing norm. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
[v]
consciousness can finally demarcate the
essential sense of a thing. Thus, Heidegger discarded the very concept of
consciousness and proposed a “fundamental ontology” of human being (Dasein).
Man as a subject in the world cannot be made the object of sophisticated
theoretical conceptions such as “substance” or “cause”; man, furthermore, finds
himself....questions are set aside in order to address a variety of
concerns pertaining to the “being for which its own being is an issue”—the
human subject, which Heidegger calls “Dasein” (literally, “being there”)
in order to stress subjectivity’s worldly and existential features.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/152062/Dasein
[vi]
Temporality and
Temporalizing
In a further hermeneutic spiral, Heidegger concludes that temporality is the
a priori transcendental condition for there to be care (sense-making,
intelligibility, taking-as, Dasein's own distinctive mode of Being). Moreover,
it is Dasein's openness to time that ultimately allows Dasein's potential
authenticity to be actualized: in authenticity, the constraints and
possibilities determined by Dasein's cultural-historical past are grasped by
Dasein in the present so that it may project itself into the future in a fully
authentic manner, i.e., in a manner which is truest to the mine-self.The ontological emphasis that Heidegger places on temporality might usefully be seen as an echo and development of Kant's claim that embeddedness in time is a precondition for things to appear to us the way they do. (According to Kant, embeddedness in time is co-determinative of our experience, along with embeddedness in space. See above for Heidegger's problematic analysis of the relationship between spatiality and temporality.) With the Kantian roots of Heidegger's treatment of time acknowledged, it must be registered immediately that, in Heidegger's hands, the notion of temporality receives a distinctive twist. Heidegger is concerned not with clock-time (an infinite series of self-contained nows laid out in an ordering of past, present and future) or with time as some sort of relativistic phenomenon that would satisfy the physicist. Time thought of in either of these ways is a present-at-hand phenomenon, and that means that it cannot characterize the temporality that is an internal feature of Dasein's existential constitution, the existential temporality that structures intelligibility (taking-as). As he puts it in his History of the Concept of Time (a 1925 lecture course): “Not ‘time is’, but ‘Dasein qua time temporalizes its Being’ ” (319). To make sense of this temporalizing, Heidegger introduces the technical term ecstases. Ecstases are phenomena that stand out from an underlying unity. (He later reinterprets ecstases as horizons, in the sense of what limits, surrounds or encloses, and in so doing discloses or makes available.) According to Heidegger, temporality is a unity against which past, present and future stand out as ecstases while remaining essentially interlocked. The importance of this idea is that it frees the phenomenologist from thinking of past, present and future as sequentially ordered groupings of distinct events. Thus:
Temporalizing does not signify that ecstases come in a ‘succession’. The future is not later than having been, and having-been is not earlier than the Present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in a process of having been. (Being and Time 68: 401)
What does this mean and why should we find it compelling? Perhaps the easiest way to grasp Heidegger's insight here is to follow him in explicitly reinterpreting the different elements of the structure of care in terms of the three phenomenologically intertwined dimensions of temporality.
Dasein's existence is characterized phenomenologically by thrown projection plus fallenness/discourse. Heidegger argues that for each of these phenomena, one particular dimension of temporality is primary. Thus projection is disclosed principally as the manner in which Dasein orients itself towards its future. Anticipation, as authentic projection, therefore becomes the predominantly futural aspect of (what we can now call) authentic temporalizing, whereas expectation, as inauthentic projection, occupies the same role for inauthentic temporalizing. However, since temporality is at root a unitary structure, thrownness, projection, falling and discourse must each have a multi-faceted temporality. Anticipation, for example, requires that Dasein acknowledge the unavoidable way in which its past is constitutive of who it is, precisely because anticipation demands of Dasein that it project itself resolutely onto (i.e., come to make its own) one of the various options established by its cultural-historical embeddedness. And anticipation has a present-related aspect too: in a process that Heidegger calls a moment of vision, Dasein, in anticipating its own death, pulls away from they-self-dominated distractions of the present.
Structurally similar analyses are given for the other elements of the care structure. Here is not the place to pursue the details but, at the most general level, thrownness is identified predominantly, although not exclusively, as the manner in which Dasein collects up its past (finding itself in relation to the pre-structured field of intelligibility into which it has been enculturated), while fallen-ness and discourse are identified predominantly, although not exclusively, as present-oriented (e.g., in the case of fallen-ness, through curiosity as a search for novelty in which Dasein is locked into the distractions of the present and devalues the past and the projective future). A final feature of Heidegger's intricate analysis concerns the way in which authentic and inauthentic temporalizing are understood as prioritizing different dimensions of temporality. Heidegger argues that because future-directed anticipation is intertwined with projection onto death as a possibility (thereby enabling the disclosure of Dasein's all-important finitude), the “primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future” (Being and Time 65: 378), whereas inauthentic temporalizing (through structures such as ‘they’-determined curiosity) prioritizes the present.
What the foregoing summary of Heidegger's account of temporality makes clear is that each event of intelligibility that makes up a ‘moment’ in Dasein's existence must be unpacked using all three temporal ecstases. Each such event is constituted by thrownness (past), projection (future) and falling/discourse (present). In a sense, then, each such event transcends (goes beyond) itself as a momentary episode of Being by, in the relevant sense, co-realizing a past and a future along with a present. This explains why “the future is not later than having been, and having-been is not earlier than the Present”. In the sense that matters, then, Dasein is always a combination of the futural, the historical and the present. And since futurality, historicality and presence, understood in terms of projection, thrownness and fallenness/discourse, form the structural dimensions of each event of intelligibility, it is Dasein's essential temporality (or temporalizing) that provides the a priori transcendental condition for there to be care (the sense-making that constitutes Dasein's own distinctive mode of Being).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/ Wheeler, Michael, "Martin Heidegger", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/heidegger/>.
[vii] The Linguisticality of Understanding
The basic model of understanding that Gadamer
finally arrives at in Truth and Method is that of
conversation. A conversation involves an exchange between conversational
partners that seeks agreement about some matter at issue; consequently, such an
exchange is never completely under the control of either conversational
partner, but is rather determined by the matter at issue. Conversation always
takes place in language and similarly Gadamer views understanding as always
linguistically mediated. Since both conversation and understanding involve
coming to an agreement, so Gadamer argues that all understanding involves
something like a common language, albeit a common language that is itself
formed in the process of understanding itself. In this sense, all understanding
is, according to Gadamer, interpretative, and, insofar as all interpretation
involves the exchange between the familiar and the alien, so all interpretation
is also translative. Gadamer's commitment to the linguisticality of
understanding also commits him to a view of understanding as essentially a
matter of conceptual articulation. This does not rule out the possibility of
other modes of understanding, but it does give primacy to language and
conceptuality in hermeneutic experience. Indeed, Gadamer takes language to be,
not merely some instrument by means of which we are able to engage with the
world, but as instead the very medium for such engagement. We are ‘in’ the
world through being ‘in’ language. This emphasis on the linguisticality of
understanding does not, however, lead Gadamer into any form of linguistic
relativism. Just as we are not held inescapably captive within the circle of
our prejudices, or within the effects of our history, neither are we held
captive within language. Language is that within which anything that is
intelligible can be comprehended, it is also that within which we encounter
ourselves and others. In this respect, language is itself understood as
essentially dialogue or conversation. Like Wittgenstein, as well as Davidson,
Gadamer thus rejects the idea of such a thing as a ‘private language’—language
always involves others, just as it always involves the world.Gadamer claims that language is the universal horizon of hermeneutic experience; he also claims that the hermeneutic experience is itself universal. This is not merely in the sense that the experience of understanding is familiar or ubiquitous. The universality of hermeneutics derives from the existential claim for hermeneutics that Heidegger advanced in the 1920s and that Gadamer made into a central idea in his own thinking. Hermeneutics concerns our fundamental mode of being in the world and understanding is thus the basic phenomenon in our existence. We cannot go back ‘behind’ understanding, since to do so would be to suppose that there was a mode of intelligibility that was prior to understanding. Hermeneutics thus turns out to be universal, not merely in regard to knowledge, whether in the ‘human sciences' or elsewhere, but to all understanding and, indeed, to philosophy itself. Philosophy is, in its essence, hermeneutics. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/
[viii] Hermeneutic Anthropology
In the aftermath of his “linguistic turn” Ricoeur did not abandon the basic
claims of his earlier anthropology. As he had in Freedom and Nature,
he continued to reject any form of substance dualism. And as he did in Fallible
Man, he continued to emphasize the fragility of the human
condition. But this turn led him to make major changes in his accounts of both
language and action. On the one hand, he found in his conception of discourse
as grounded upon the signs and symbols that make up human culture resources
both for framing working hypotheses to make sense of human existence and for
testing them. On the other hand, he came to conclude that his earlier work on
the will was insufficient to provide the basis for an adequate philosophical
anthropology. He had emphasized that the will involved an “internal” project or
aim that was basically self-contained. But he came to see that one can only
make sense of projects and intentions by understanding them as always connected
to events in the world.Properly conceived, action is that which brings projects and worldly events together, for action encompasses not only doing and making but also receiving and enduring. Action includes “saying inasmuch as it is a doing, ordinary action inasmuch as it is an intervention into the course of things, narration inasmuch as it is the narrative reassembling of a life stretched out in time, and finally, the capacity to impute to oneself or to others the responsibility for acting” (“De l'esprit,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 92 (1994): 248). Hence Ricoeur concludes that his conception of action is similar to Heidegger's conception of care as the fundamental way that persons exist and inhabit the world (Critique and Conviction, 74–75).
The implications of Ricoeur's investigations of different forms of discourse and action come together in a particularly striking way in his discussion of what he calls the narrative unity of a person's life. Whatever else a narrative recounts, he says, it also recounts care. Indeed, in a sense narrative “only recounts Care. This is why there is nothing absurd in speaking about the narrative unity of a life, under the sign of narratives that teach us how to articulate retrospection and prospection in a narrative way” (Oneself as Another, 163, translation modified).
Construing Heidegger's care in terms of action and thereby finding care-action to be at the heart of every narrative provided Ricoeur with the basic resources for articulating the main themes of his mature anthropology. Among these themes are: (a) discourse and action, (b) selves as agents, (c) the temporality of action, (d) narrativity, identity, and time, (e) memory and history, (f) ethics, and (g) politics. Each of these themes deals with a fundamental feature of the constitutive capabilities of the capable human being.
Dauenhauer, Bernard and Pellauer, David, "Paul Ricoeur", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/ricoeur/>.
[ix] Phenomenology is the study of structures of
consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central
structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward
something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is
directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents
the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.The discipline of
phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of
experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of
“phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience,
or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience.
Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective
or first person point of view. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/
[x]
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/philosophy/people/sebastian-gardner; University
College London, United Kingdom
Sebastian Gardner is Professor of
Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Humanities at
the University College London. His main research interests lie in Kant, German
Idealism, nineteenth-century German philosophy, and aesthetics. Currently he is
working on the legacy of Kant’s third Critique. His publications include Kant
and the Critique of Pure Reason (Routledge, 1999), Art and Morality
(Routledge, 2003) and Sartre’s “Being and nothingness“ (Continuum,
2009). He has published articles in Mind, British Journal of Aesthetics,
Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of the History of Philosophy or Deutsche
Zeitschrift für Philosophie.
[xi] Hermeneutic Science appears to be
the central methodology that has fashioned the significant achievements
in linguistics, philosophy, psychology and such other disciplines that
constitute the higher culture of the Dravidians, particularly the Tamils. An
attempt is made in this paper to study the literary hermenuetics as is
available in Marapiyal, an ancient text appended to Tolkappiyam, trace its
origins to the Sumerian times and discuss the important way in which it is
similar or dissimilar to the hermeneutic tradition in the West. This historical and comparative
study has furnished important new insights into the meaning of utti, a key
technical term in Dravidian Hermeneutics on the basis of which the
interpretations of the great commentators Illampuranar and Peraciriyar are
criticized. http://arutkural.tripod.com/tolcampus/utti-32.html retrieved
on 12.2.2013
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