Nietzsche's Hermeneutic Significance

Abstract

In the past half-century, philosophers on the European continent have, with increasing frequency, characterized their investigations as hermeneutical. Both traditional metaphysics and traditional epistemology have appeared to be incapable of solving many of the problems with which they have struggled since the time of Plato. This incapacity is viewed today not as the result of faulty solutions; rather, it comes forth as a consequence of asking the wrong kinds of questions. Heidegger's hermeneutics arose out of his attempt to re-think metaphysics and we find contemporary hermeneutics speaking of the move beyond epistemology. What this hermeneutic challenge to traditional philosophy points to is an emphasis on interpretation rather than the traditional pursuit of metaphysical and epistemological foundations upon which to erect a philosophical system. Yet by emphasizing the interpretive nature of perception and knowledge, the proponents of this view face the following dilemma: how to avoid the dogmatic positing of a single correct interpretation without lapsing into an unmitigated relativism which, in rejecting correctness as the interpretive telos, is unable to adjudicate between competing interpretations. This dilemma of dogmatism and relativism, I would argue, is the central problem confronting hermeneutics and can be seen to animate the debates between Gadamer and Betti, Gadamer and Habermas, as well a& the current controversy between the Heideggerian and deconstructionist approaches to interpretation.