Philosophical Hermeneutics and Hermeneutic Philosophy

Abstract

Philosophical hermeneutics pursues two broad questions that are fundamental to any efforts to transform a society. The first focuses on the culture of individuals within a society i.e., how does a person interpret the world around them and how this, in turn, affects the manner in which they come to think and act?—Dilthey had sought to resolve this question by putting forward a philosophy of ‘worldviews’, but it was radicalized by Martin Heidegger into the question about the roles understanding and interpretation play in our everyday lives: they are in fact constitutive of our very being as part of an existential structure known since Antiquity and called the ‘hermeneutic circle’, whereby we experience, i.e. understand and interpret, anything new on the basis of what we know or believe already. This circle need not be taken as a ‘vicious’ one, so long as we are aware of it. The second question emerges from the first, in that it asks how two individuals from dissimilar cultures, thinking and acting as differently as they do, can reach common understanding through communication. An awareness of this difference is one of the conditions for successful cross-cultural communication; another is simple ‘good will’, which implies ‘openness’ to being affected by the other’s discourse. This second question, which the philosophy of Gadamer focuses on, may be that which concerns the enterprise of the Western coalition in Afghanistan the most. Yet this cannot be understood without a satisfactory answer to the radicalized reformulation of the first question, which is what the philosophy of Heidegger has sought to address.