Posts Tagged ‘dialog’
Being, interpretation and dialogue
05
May
The essential concept of philosophical hermeneutics
developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer criticizes the model of knowledge both of the romantic historical interpretation, which aims only to criticize or adhere to a reconstruction of the author’s intention (it is made mainly relative to the text) and has both a normative function when theological, when one looks at Being as language.
Thus, it corresponds to a requirement of meaning of the text, accepts the link with its content, does not aim to explain the theme or content of a text, accepts the binding character of the content, that is, it has an essential orientation to the human way of inhabiting the world , linked to culture.
To understand is, in this perspective, to apply, not in a mechanical or logical way (in the dual sense), but to translate the text into the very language of its concrete situation, in its entirety.
Understanding is like this, first of all, the act understood, applied to that situation or that something and thus has nothing to do with a doing and a technical knowledge, that is, the latter adds nothing to the way of being and the situation of the interpreter, which is mere automatic ability and cause-effect.
The rules of one’s own prejudices must then be put into play, opening the dialogue that they provide, thus a fusion of horizons occurs, then a new step of listening to the text, and only then is it possible to apply a meaning to the text and question up.
In this context, dialogue is possible, otherwise there is a dogmatic closure without the ability to listen to the Other beyond the preconceptions and intentions of readers and/or authors.
It is necessary to emphasize the need for mediation that is done through common ideas that are transmitted by the historical or literary tradition, for Gadamer, such mediation is what makes thinking and transmitting practices of relationship and communication, and without them there is difficulty in dialogue.
Phenomenology as a method for dialogue
04
May
Phenomenology is essential for a true dialogue because it
presupposes a “starting point” philosophically said, it presupposes an epoché (a suspension of judgment in the Greek sense) but the phenomenological epoché is a putting in parentheses, that is, it admits the dialogue with tradition or with the reader or interpreter of the text.
It emerged as a method in opposition to positivist thinking, through the studies of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and as a method of philosophical investigation it will capture the essence and meaning of a certain thing, said by Husserl: “there is no consciousness, only consciousness. of something”, and this comes from a subcategory that is intentionality, Franz Brentano and Tomás de Aquino had worked this but only with a psychological or mental sense.
Said by Husserl it is: “the description of what appears or science that has as objective or project this description”, thus part of the idea that we project our intentionality when describing.
Heidegger will place it, retaking ontology now on a different plane from the psychological and placing it as a method: “the expression ‘phenomenology’ means, above all, a concept of method”, in this sense it will also be a break with idealism and traditional rationalism.
“One of the contributions of phenomenology to philosophy is in the way it treats judgments and meanings. Martín Heidegger does not separate reason from emotion, nor the subject from the object”.
The question of the existence of Being turns to the concern with the way of human experience, or our preconceptions or even our rationalizations, it cannot be isolated from the relationship with the world and with the Others, all contemporary philosophy seeks a a way of being objectified, isolated, whether objective or subjective, because this deviation is also observed in the field of poetics, subjectivity and religion.
The Being must represent a presence, a manifesto, or a relationship with the Other, and a requirement is the symmetry of this relationship, where each one is able to make a “void” to contain the Other, an epoché of their preconceptions, without which there is no dialogue.
A first look at this dialogue is the hermeneutic circle proposed in the figure above.
