[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

alleged, in a kind of Seinsmystik -- and to focus directly on human understanding itself,explicating just exactly what it means to maintain, as Heidegger had in his existentialanalytic in Being and Time, that, as existing beings, an understanding of being is what wemost essentially are.With Gadamer, phenomenology fully accomplishes its interpretive turn and also withhim the long tradition of hermeneutic thought dating from the seventeenth century (and,in some ways, even before) becomes phenomenological. With regard to hermeneutics,Gadamer’s accomplishment was, indeed, to have brought a phenomenological turn to thisold discipline. He did, so, as Husserl had earlier on, by breaking with the preoccupationsof the modern “era of epistemology [l’ère de la théorie de la connaissance]),” ones whichhad set the parameters for earlier hermeneuticians like Schleiermacher and Dilthey. 87 AsGadamer stated in the Foreword to the second edition (1965) of Truth and Method, “I didnot intend to produce an art or technique of understanding, in the manner of the earlierhermeneutics…. My real concern was and is philosophic.” (TM, xxviii) Gadamer’shermeneutics is indeed “philosophic” in that he was concerned not with technical issueshaving to do with correctness (“objectivity”) in matters of text-interpretation, but withclarifying “the conditions in which understanding [itself] takes place.” (TM, 295) Hisintent, in Truth and Method, was not epistemological (prescriptive, in the manner oflogical positivism) but phenomenological (descriptive), 88 in that he was concerned withascertaining what, in actual fact, has occurred whenever we claim to have arrived at anunderstanding of things, other people, ourselves (“what always happens whenever an interpretationis convincing and successful.” [RAS, 111]).Truth and Method is in this sense a transcendental (reflective) inquiry, not into thelogical “conditions of possibility” of understanding, but into its actual, phenomenal make-up(its “conditions of actuality,” so to speak). Gadamer’s transcendentalism is not a speculativedeductivetranscendentalism à la Kant (transcendental-logical), but a reflective andinterpretive transcendentalism (transcendental-phenomenological). Because Gadamer’shermeneutics is a reflective inquiry concerned with “our entire understanding of the worldand thus all the various forms in which this understanding manifests itself” (PH, 18), itis not so much a theory of text-interpretation, as was the case with Romantic hermeneutics,as it is a general, all-inclusive philosophy or ontology of human existence. Sinceit is an attempt to elucidate the nature of that understanding which, at bottom, we are,Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics could appropriately be described as an exercise infundamental phenomenological ontology.Because Gadamer’s concern was with the human lifeworld, with “all human experienceof the world and human living,” and because he wanted “to discover what is common toall modes of understanding” (TM, xxx, xxxi), he could rightly claim that the scope ofhermeneutics so conceived is genuinely universal. 89 Faithful to his mentor Heidegger,Gadamer’s main thesis in this regard is that all human experience of the world isessentially lingual in nature; language “is the fundamental mode of operation of our beingin-the-worldand the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world.” (PH, 3) -- whence87See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Le défi herméneutique,” Revue internationale de philosophie 151(1984): 334.88See TM, 465: “Fundamentally I am not proposing a method, but I am describing what is thecase.”89See in this regard my “Hermeneutics' Claim to Universality,” in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy ofHans-Georg Gadamer; and PH, 25: “The phenomenon of understanding…shows the universality of humanlinguisticality as a limitless medium that carries everything within it—not only the 'culture' that has beenhanded down to us through language, but absolutely everything—because everything (in the world andout of it) is included in the realm of ‘understandings' and understandability in which we move.”27