Hermeneutics from plato.stanford.edu
Section 2
Notes
- Hermeneutics plays a role in a number of disciplines whose subject matter demands interpretative approaches, characteristically, because the disciplinary subject matter concerns the meaning of human intentions, beliefs, and actions, or the meaning of human experience as it is preserved in the arts and literature, historical testimony, and other artifacts.—Updated on 2024-10-09 08:17:12
- 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.—Updated on 2024-10-09 08:22:31
- understanding can be described as a ‘success’ of interpretation—Updated on 2024-10-09 08:23:29
- Hans-Georg 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 nineteenth-century romanticism and historicism in Germany—Updated on 2024-10-09 08:25:04
- 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.—Updated on 2024-10-09 08:25:35
- However else the success of understanding is described, though, it is typically also described as edifying or educative.—Updated on 2024-10-09 08:25:58
- our understanding is time and again bested by the things we wish to grasp, that what we understand remains ineluctably incomplete, even partial, and open to further consideration—Updated on 2024-10-09 08:52:38
- we must remain ever vigilant about how common wisdom and prejudices inform—and can distort—our perception and judgment, that even the most established knowledge may be in need of reconsideration, and that this finitude of understanding is not simply a regrettable fact of the human condition but, more importantly, that this finitude is itself an important opening for the pursuit of new and different meaning.—Updated on 2024-10-09 08:53:28
- Some beliefs are distinguished as foundations, ultimately, because they depend on no further beliefs for their justification; other beliefs are distinguished as founded, in that their justification depends on the foundational beliefs—Updated on 2024-10-09 08:58:26
- the concept of the hermeneutical circle signifies that, in interpretive experience, a new understanding is achieved not on the basis of already securely founded beliefs. Instead, a new understanding is achieved through renewed interpretive attention to further possible meanings of those presuppositions which, sometimes tacitly, inform the understanding that we already have.—Updated on 2024-10-09 09:06:39
- This contemporary significance of hermeneutically circular presuppositions has origins in an older (and perhaps more commonly known) formulation, namely, that interpretive experience—classically, that of text interpretation—involves us in a circular relation of whole and parts. This formulation derives from antiquity and has a place in the approaches of nineteenth-century figures such as Schleiermacher and Dilthey. On the one hand, it is necessary to understand a text as a whole in order properly to understand any of its parts. On the other hand, however, it is necessary to understand the text in each of its parts in order to understand it as a whole.—Updated on 2024-10-09 09:11:06
- through an interpretation of the whole of a text that proceeds from presuppositions about the parts—Updated on 2024-10-09 09:14:23
- through an interpretation of the parts that proceeds from presuppositions about the whole—Updated on 2024-10-09 09:14:31
- Understanding, then, is not pursued ‘vertically’ by layering beliefs on top of foundations, but rather ‘circularly,’ in an interpretive movement back and forth through possible meanings of our presuppositions that by turns allow a matter to come into view. In this, the pursuit of understanding does not build ‘higher and higher;’ it goes ‘deeper and deeper,’ gets ‘fuller and fuller,’ or, perhaps ‘richer and richer.’—Updated on 2024-10-09 09:14:44