Extract

chapter six

inoculating hermeneutics: Gadamer substrates.

The Western legacy from Descartes has taught us to objectify the world from the position of pure subjectivity, a move which renders human experience of the world to a game between subjects and objects, and ensures the breakdown of genuine communication between persons and of relations between human and natural worlds. Hermeneutically, one speaks of the intersubjectivity of everything.… To see this, however, requires a particular kind of imaginal discipline, especially an ability to see connections which may not be superficially apparent. That very ability itself requires an openness to experience which goes beyond dependence on conventional categories of explanation, or on tradition received as a final word. Putting it in the language of postmodernism, the hermeneutic imagination requires an openness to the Other of experience, an openness to that which knocks from beyond the boundaries of what is known. To open the door means to have one’s experience transformed into a new reality shared with new Others. (D. Smith, 1999, p. 46).

This chapter will consider a few of the key hermeneutic concepts of Hans-Georg Gadamer, student of Heidegger and perhaps the most renowned hermeneutic philosopher of the twentieth century. While Heidegger initiated the inquiry into being and interpretation, after the publication of Being and Time (1962), he ended his explicit engagement with hermeneutics and these aspects of his thinking were taken up by Gadamer, who spent thirty years composing his magnum opus Truth and Method (2013)...