The hermeneutic ethics
17
Mar
If romantic ethics deviated little from the modern model that is fixed in the interpretation
within the context and cultural appropriation, we have already said that alterity and more than this the understanding of the Other (we have already explained the capital), is something that promises to put incessantly Dialogue, relativizing methods that imply putting the correct one-sided.
The word we use without explaining Verstehen (“to understand”) in German already expresses this: being in someone’s place (für jemanden stehen), addressing others and speaking for others, it would be said using.
We hope that it has become clear that neither will consciousness be possible in the sense of a full identification with itself, and also in the historical sense, nor the reach of an absolute truth, without a concrete opening to the Other, from this comes an “ethics”.
These limits are also in the idea of fineness defended by hermeneutics: no one can fully know himself, let alone the other, but open to the infinite.
The “hermeneutic ethics of dialogue” comes from a development of the idea of practical wisdom present in the three Aristotelian ethics, in the form of practical rationality (phronesis), which in reality is a Platonic concept, and we know that Aristotle was one of his disciples .
The theses that Plato developed revolved around the idea of ”good” (ἀγαθόν), but not as the basis of an ontological perspective, but as a question for the ethical in the proper sense, while Aristotle had the greater intention of criticizing the theory of ideas , In addition to providing a basis for his theory of phronesis, that is, to concretize this ethics in human status. Its ethics Nicomaqua is already ontological, where it put the modes of behavior (ἦθος), with rules depended on the mutability and limitation of the human being and the way of being human behaves, so it must be established in its variable mode of listening to another attack , So language and dialogue need to be appropriate and respected.
In Gadamer, theory is not in opposition to practical activity, for both are put in a presentification of praxis, the highest mode of being of the human being, gives as proof that we are absorbed (aufgehen) by something, as we linger (verweilen) Observing it and feel certain “pride”, but this is emptied soon if there is not the reflective act of life.
He will state this very clearly: “hermeneutical knowledge must refuse an objectivist style of knowledge … But ethical knowledge, as Aristotle describes us, is not an” objective “knowledge either. Here again, knowledge, not simply in front of something, must be verified; Knowledge is in advance involved and invested by its “object”, that is, by what it has to do. “(Page 49)
But it makes a profound difference with technical knowledge, when he states: “No one can ignore that there are radical differences between ethical knowledge and technical knowledge. It is evident that man does not dispose of himself as the artisan disposes of his material “(page 51)
What Gadamer will call ethical knowledge, and makes it supported in is far from that Hegelian “know-for-itself”, because “precisely in that” perfect application “that unfolds as” knowing “within a given situation” (pag. 55), just as “the just signifies the opposite not of error or delusion, but of blindness” (idem), and it is precisely this blindness that “loses control of itself and, dominated by the dialectic of passions, More oriented towards the good. “(Idem).
Thus, it will almost define ethics, hermeneutics is a dynamic process unrelated to definitions, will say that ethical knowledge: “opposes precisely to a purely technical knowledge. Thus, there is no longer any sense in distinguishing between knowledge and experience … an absolutely primordial form of experience, in relation to which all other experiences may be secondary, not original. “(P.55)
GADAMER, H.G. The issue of historical consciousness, 3rd. Editing by FGV SP, 2006 (pages is brazilian edition).
