Understanding and Hermeneutics
09
Nov
Certainly wisdom is the opposite of ignorance, but wisdom is possible that
springs from tradition and wise living, but even these should have present interlocutors who have plunged into the thoughts and reflections of others, and who have read the tradition and the problems somewhere of humanity.
The idea that only a book exists in all wisdom is even refuted by the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas with his famous maxim; “Distrust the man of a single book,” Marx also read the “capitalist” economy of Adam Smith and Richard to write his famous “Capital,” but it must be said that few read the Bible, Capital, or any other book of basic reference to the thought of “tradition” that they claim to have.
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Geog Gadamer, Emmanuel Lévinas, Paul Ricoeur, Edgar Morin and many others attest that there is a crisis in thought, at least in Western thought, as there is little reading and deepening in the thinking of the Arab and Eastern world , the African is almost incognito.
Another idea is to reduce culture to ideologies, and their exercise is in most cases to subject cultures to their scheme of thought, Paul Ricoeur wrote “ideology is this contempt that makes us take the image for the real, the reflex by the original “(Ricoeur, 2013, page 84) and this is perhaps the greatest Confucianism of our time.
Wisdom involves understanding, and hermeneutics is the science of understanding because it involves interpretation, overcoming preconceptions, understanding and dialogue, and revising concepts, the so-called hermeneutic circle, whose elucidation is made by Gadamer.
Although Gadamer sees him as stuck in romantic historicism, Dilthey has identified three classes of understanding: the first that he calls “larger judgments and formations of thought,” related to science that includes both natural and human sciences, are examples a textbook of biology or mathematics, but can also include concepts such as gravity and others present in common sense; the second is the lived experience and these are the ones who take the actions but should pass through the former, calls this a vital nexus.
It expresses the second as “elucidating how a situation, a purpose, a milieu and a vital nexus intersect in an action, it allows no inclusive determination of the external life from which it arose.”
The third and most essential are the expressions of lived experience, as Dilthey puts it: “An expression of lived experience may contain more nexus of psychic life than any introspection can perceive,” thus partly because of the aspect of understanding that has not yet if it is perceived, to penetrate it leads to a hermeneutic circle returning to greater judgments and formations, although Dilthey did not formulate thus, would be the hermeneutic circle.
DILTHEY, W. Obras escolhidas – vol. 3 A fundação do mundo histórico nas ciências humanas, 2002.
RICOEUR, P. Hermenêutica and Ideologias, 3ª. Edition, São Paulo: Vozes, 2013.
