Hermeneutic Consciousness Research Articles

A Gadamerian-Hermeneutic Reflection on T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats’s Poetics

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the hermeneutical dimension of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats’s poetics vis-à-vis H.-G. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. The study stems from a remarkable observation that Eliot and Yeats not only anticipate what Gadamer has systematically explained in his philosophical project, but they also present a new kind of poetry that can easily yield itself to a Gadamerian reading—one that is primarily based on the principle of hermeneutical situation and dialogue. The article strives for a critical study that focuses on the relevance of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reading and interpreting the poetry of Eliot and Yeats, as well as uncovering the underlying kinship between their hermeneutic reflection on the nature of poetry, truth, history, and understanding. The analysis undertaken has yielded interesting results, bestowing Eliot and Yeats as poets-philosophers who are genuinely aware of what Gadamer has advanced in his philosophy. This hermeneutic consciousness ingrained in Eliot and Yeats’s thoughts is the main motive that drives them to experiment with tradition, myth, symbolism, and musicality, in order to provide the reader with dialogic poetry, which Gadamer himself highly admires for its ability to facilitate the disclosure of truth.

Interrupting Christian Identity Construction: Catholic Dialogue Schools and Negative Theology

In a recent article, Didier Pollefeyt reflected on the worrisome observation that young children seemingly successfully raised in the Christian faith in Catholic schools lose this faith by the end of secondary education. According to him, the combination of an all-too-positive theology and positive psychology in primary schools (turning these into safe havens) should be complemented by theologies of vulnerability and responsibility in order to present a Christian faith that is able to assist youngsters in situations of conflict, suffering, etc. In this contribution, however, I argue that a more fundamental analysis is to be made to solve this problem, not only for pedagogical but especially for theological reasons. A theological recontextualisation in dialogue with the current context will show us that the interruption of (all too) positive theologies urges these theologies themselves to change from within, into theologies of interruption. After summarising Pollefeyt’s argument, I will analyse the current context of detraditionalisation and pluralisation, pointing to the challenges it poses to all identity construction (including Christian identity construction) that are to be interrupted by difference and otherness. Afterwards, I will shed light on the precise way in which the dynamics of negative theology foster a radical critical hermeneutical consciousness at the heart of the Christian faith, challenging any attempt at solidifying it within closed, self-securing narratives, and thus opening up these narratives to be interrupted. I will illustrate my point with a short reflection on the Gospel of Mark as a Gospel for our times. In the conclusion, I will apply the insights gained to the project of the Catholic dialogue school in order to prevent the counterproductive outcome of self-securing identities.

Analisis Syar’iyyah Ijtihad Umar Bin Khattab terhadap Hadd Sariqah

Umar bin Khattab acknowledged as a reformer in Islamic Criminal Law. He considered as a source of authority for liberal Muslim thinkers over his thoughts. His ideal of ijtihad differ from what being understood in the Qur'an and Sunnah which raises the pros and cons among the companions. Even liberal thinkers consider Caliph Umar bin Khattab has a hermeneutic consciousness and an actual rationalist figure. One example of his ijtihad is declining the implementation of hadd punishment of cutting off hands for thieves under certain circumstances. The research aims to re-examine of Umar bin Khattab ijtihad, especially on hadd of sariqah. This research is a qualitative literature review, where data come from the Quran, Hadith, and references which further analyzes by descriptive-analytical methods. The result of the study showed that inapplicability of sariqah punishment due to the emergencies, namely famine. Also, there was doubt in the crime that caused Umar to abhor the punishment. Based on these reasons, then Umar's ijtihad is allowed according to the Shari'ah and not a form of Shari'ah deconstruction.

KESADARAN HERMENEUTIK DALAM MEMBACA TEKS: MODEL IJTIHAD UMAR IBN AL-KHATTAB

Umar ibn al-Khattab was one of the most controversial caliphs. He was a caliph that was courageous or "disobedient" to the text of Alquran and Sunnah literally. This disobedientside of Umar ibn al-Khattab brought up a serious reaction from the other companions. Toward this context, Umar ibn al-Khattab could be said as the liberal companion, because of his courage to re-interpret the sacred text. From the J.E. Gracias perspective, the way of Umar ibn al-Khattab interpreting the sacred text is a sophisticated reading, considering that at the time he had already been aware of the hermeneutic difference from other companions. This hermeneutic consciousness was able to make Umar bin al-Khattab placing the sacred text as a text that can be reinterpreted in accordance with the certain conditions and its maqasid can be taken. Thus, the sacred text revealed historically, is always sahih li kulli zaman wa makan.

Reading Engineer's Concept of Justice: The Real Power Hermeneutical Consciousness (A Gadamers Philosophical Hermeneutics)

This paper aims to describe the concept of justice in Islam interpreted by Ali Asghar Engineer by using Gadamers philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamers philosophical hermeneutics is ontological rather than methodological and it has been very influential in interpretation world. Engineers work in interpreting the concept of justice in Islam, in the notion of Gadamers philosophical hermeneutics, is affected by his horizon and fusion of horizons. His prejudices into the world lead him to bring about the idea of liberation by doing liberative interpretation. It is hoped that his liberative interpretation will influence Muslims way of thinking and gradually can challenge the structures of modern oppressions so that people will live in justice and peace. Since all Engineers efforts to interpret Quran and hadiths in liberative spirit are initiated by his question into the world, it means that he shows his ability to see what is questionable which is the real power of hermeneutical consciousness. This paper attempts to present the basic concepts of Gadamers philosophical hermeneutics then use them to analyze the interpretation on justice made by Engineer based on his liberative idea.

How did Neotestamentica Serve the Needs of Its Public(s)?: A Brief Survey

The first fifty years of Neotestamentica reflect the changes in the way the text of the New Testament was interpreted as well as changes in the social context in which this interpretation took place. The article provides a brief survey of the contributions to the journal under three rubrics: studies with their main focus on the world “behind the text” (historical aspects), “in the text” (textual and exegetical aspects) and “in front of the text” (reader, contextual and contemporary aspects). For several reasons, the historical aspects were not the main focus during the first fifty years and when they did receive more attention, it was from a post “linguistic turn” perspective. The bulk of the articles concentrated on the text, its structure and text-immanent meaning, reflecting a preoccupation with method, leading to the criticism of “methodolomania.” A subsequent shift in focus on the reader and reception paved the way to concentrate on issues “in front of the text.” A high level of hermeneutical consciousness resulted in a considerable widening of the scope of the journal and an increase in interdisciplinarity. The question remains whether the journal in future will be able to make a meaningful contribution from its own discipline and enrich on-going conversations within theology, the humanities and society.

While milk remains in the memories of my heart

The main purpose of this article is to show the importance of the affective memory rebuilt in the fictional narrative of Chico Buarque de Hollanda. Through the protagonist-narrator – Eulálio d’Assumpção –, from ‘Spilt Milk’, considerations are made about the speculate structure, a so present element in Buarque’s narrative style. By rescuing a double biography – Eulálio and Matilde – we show that the narrator expresses symptoms of resentment on his text pattern, and the traces left by the image of pain: a symbolic image. We emphasize that this literature piece implicitly designs on its plot a fundamental ontology of being: the wandering. That is why the scope of hermeneutic consciousness is used to receptively show the alterity of the text.

Phenomenological Considerations of Habit: Reason, Knowing and Self-Presence in Habitual Action

Paul Ricoeur claims in Freedom and Nature that delimiting the domain of habit is deeply challenging, owing to the fact that we tend not to know exactly what it is that we are asking about. Habit, he says, is not like acting, sensing or perceiving but is more akin to a way of sensing, perceiving and so on. It has to do with settled or dispositional ways of engaging the world that provides a form to our world relations. But what is the status of these ways of acting etc.? In ordinary discourse, habits are often thought of as good or bad and even as important to shaping our personal and social identities. But they tend also to be thought of as actions in which the free exercise of reason is deeply attenuated, as automatic responses conditioned over time which are triggered by the environment such that we act ‘before we know what we are doing’. In what follows, I want to offer some reflections about the nature of the relationship between habitual action, reason and knowledge. I will draw mostly on the phenomenological tradition in asking the question whether habits denote performances in which thinking is absent or whether they involve a spontaneity in which the embodied and embedded subject comes to expression as subject. In doing so, I will (1) sketch an outline of the largely negative view of habit that tends to dominate specialized and ordinary understandings of the matter before, (2) looking to phenomenological insights that offer a more positive view by integrating the notion of habit with discussions of embodiment and hermeneutic consciousness. Here, I will refer to the work of Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, for whom habit is an irreplaceable way of knowing the world. My claim is that these phenomenological resources are not only important in establishing the centrality of habit for identity formation, as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty do, but that they entail a unique form of knowing or exercise of reason which is dynamic, attentive and imaginative.

“Either a Hermeneutical Consciousness or a Critical Consciousness”: Renegotiating Theories of the Germany-India Encounter

In his 1973 essay Hermeneutics and Critique of Ideology, Paul Ricoeur articulates demands of human sciences by recalling what he referred to as the fundamental gesture of philosophy: this gesture an of historical conditions to which all human understanding is subsumed under of finitude? Or rather is it, in last analysis, an act of defiance, a gesture, relentlessly and indefinitely turned against false consciousness, against distortions of human communication which conceal permanent exercise of domination and violence? ... What is at stake can be expressed in terms of an alternative: either a or a consciousness. (63) Ricoeur identifies first attitude, hermeneutical consciousness, with Gadamer, who conceived tradition, context, and prejudices (qua pre-judgments, or Vorurteilen) as basic coordinates of human understanding. Instead of trying to escape these conditions, theory offers an avowal of the of finitude. Understanding Other (a text, a culture, past, etc.) only occurs because we interpret from within a historical moment, from standpoint of a particular with its own construction of authority and meaning, and practice of interpretation unfolds in dialogical fashion, allowing a gradual accumulation of ever-adjustable truths. Misapprehensions, it should be said, are affirmed as part of this dialogical process as interpreter reintegrate^] misunderstanding into understanding by very movement of question and answer (83). In his essay Ricoeur associates opposing view, approach of critical consciousness, with Habermas, though it surely evokes past modern masters of suspicions (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) and, by extension, more recent theorists such as Gramsci, Benj amin, and Foucault. According to Ricoeur, critical consciousness lodges a protest against reign of finitude, often in cause of lifting veil on the permanent exercise of domination and violence. (1) The tradition that dictates expanse of our circle is in fact product of underlying forces, like economic interest, sexual drive, or will to power; criticism has power to unmask these ideologically frozen dependencies (82), which is a crucial step in freeing ourselves from repression, injustice, and exploitation that they often enforce. As a consequence, critical consciousness insists--in contrast with model--that distortions in communication and understanding are always related to repressive action of an authority and therefore to violence (83). Ricoeur's scheme illuminates dynamics that have been at work within humanities and social sciences for several decades. His formulations are particularly helpful, however, when we consider recent work on encounter between European intellectuals and cultural artifacts (texts and data) of non-Western, largely colonized lands. Within this broader frame, post-Enlightenment reception of South Asian culture, texts, and thought in German-speaking lands has emerged as a challenging area of investigation. And here too Ricoeur's observations identify a significant theoretical rift in scholarship, one that I plan to trace in this article. But I also aim to chart out some new territory. Indeed, by drawing bright lines between hermeneutical consciousness and critical consciousness, I wish neither to over-simplify nor to call for an either/or decision in our historical investigation of India's place in German imagination. In fact, Ricoeur himself questioned his categories almost as soon as he offered them: Is it not alternative itself which must be challenged? it possible to formulate a hermeneutics which would render justice to critique of ideology, which would show necessity of latter at very heart of its own concerns? …

Indo-German Connections, Critical and Hermeneutical, in the First World War

The questions that Edward Said raised in Orientalism are still unresolved regarding the German interest in India. Said himself mostly excluded German Orientalism from his critique of the British and French intellectual project of domination over the Middle East. As the Indo-German connection was not burdened directly by German colonialism of India, one can argue that Said does not apply to Indo-German contacts, or at least, as Fred Dallmayr does, that Said's formulation itself an essentializing construct based on a selective examination of historical evidence. (1) Others such as Ronald Inden, Kamakshi Murti, and Kaushik Bagchi argue that Said applies very well to the German interest in India, and that Germans adapted themselves to European colonialism, which explains some of their attitudes toward India. (2) Susanne Zantop even theorizes that it was the lack of colonies during the eighteenth and early nineteenth Centuries that created a greater desire for them in Germany. (3) Wilhelm Halbfass, most known in his India and Europe for promoting the hermeneutical interpretation, actually eventually made arguments between these poles, pointing out that Germany is very much part of Europe, inseparable from its European context, including both its hermeneutical and colonial projects. (4) Bradley Herling in an article in this issue of The Comparatist discusses the two main approaches scholars have taken regarding cultural interaction: critical consciousness or hermeneutical consciousness, or in other words, a Saidian focus on power differentials and exploitation versus a Gadamerian emphasis on shared dialogue. (5) If these are the twin poles of colonial interaction, one can certainly see them within Indo-German connections during the First World War. Dialogue was very apparent in the active courting of Indian revolutionaries by Germans. As Modris Ecksteins argues, Germany was a revolutionary force in the world at the time, supporting revolutionaries in Ireland and Russia, and I would add India. (6) Yet the Germans were deeply conflicted, and their attitude toward revolutionaries also reflected a counter-current of domination, when Germans found themselves adhering to the colonial attitudes of their otherwise wartime enemies in Europe, the British. This alignment makes sense in terms of the patterns of belief in the superiority of European civilization, religion, and race, attitudes that stretched back well into at least the nineteenth Century. Following, Ricoeur scholars such as Herling are today seeking the fusion of these two points of view, the critical and the hermeneutical. An examination of Indo-German relations around the First World War provides a promising venue for such a dialectical synthesis of these viewpoints, a site of inquiry as Herling suggests, for an analysis that transcends the more materialist concerns of the Saidian critique of Orientalism and the intellectualist focus of Halbfass's hermeneutical approach. (7) It important that one examine the context around the formation of these views. As Herling points out, hermeneutics and 'critical consciousness' come together when we identify the genealogical critique of our categories, including the anti-Orientalist critique, with a foregrounding of the prejudices that have come down to us from within our tradition. (8) A step toward finding this synthesis the examination of the structures of knowledge about the other, just what the arguments and ideas Germans and Indians each held. Usually scholars look at one approach or the other, trying to dispel its opposite. Yet these views really are two sides of one coin of cultural interaction and (mis)perception. After all, at least a century before Germans decided to work with Indians to undermine the British during the First World War, Germans also made arguments for an especially close Indo-German connection, and pursued actions that helped to establish one. A small circle of cultivated Germans revered ancient Indian texts and the admiring influence was mutual. …

Gadamer and the Mechanics of Culture

The guest editors of this special issue, James A. Knapp and Jeffrey Pence,contend that the current preoccupation with the materiality of things has usually generated a polarization between “history” and“theory” in literary criticism, whereby the work of scholars who continue to align themselves with the critical motives and methods of theory is dismissed for being un- or trans-historical. The primary goal of this essay is to suggest a middle way between these polarities, especially concerning recent scholarly interest in the history of the book. Specifically, this essay argues that Hans-Georg Gadamer's important contribution to the field of hermeneutics not only anticipates recent developments in textual scholarship,but also has much to offer scholars who are attempting to write the history of the material book. In such light, the so-called “turn toward history” commented upon at length in this issue does not require a concomitant turning away from theory. The essay begins with an examination of some important links between Gadamer's most significant assertions about the hermeneutic consciousness and comparably significant assertions about the study of the material book. Subsequently, this comparative analysis is applied to the discussion of a specific material book, the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare. From both of these contexts (general and specific), we can begin to see the necessity of a mutual engagement between“history” and “theory.”

Hans-Georg Gadamer's Platonic Destruktion of the Later Heidegger

In a 1923 Freiburg lecture, Martin Heidegger stated emphatically: Hermeneutik ist Destruktion!1 While this striking assertion may need to be discounted as an example of what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls Heidegger's pedagogical overstatement,2 idea that one concept is equivalent to other suggests possibility that Gadamer's own appropriation and development of early-Heideggerian hermeneutics can be viewed in terms of an application of earlyHeideggerian Destruktion.3 In fact, Gadamer has mentioned that this particular course was first lecture course of Heidegger's he attended.4 In this essay my contention is that, with help of Plato, Gadamer tacitly but effectively applies early-Heideggerian project of Destruktion to later Heidegger himself. Thus he has described his project in Truth and Method as bringing later Heidegger to language again in terms of hermeneutical consciousness.5 By so doing, he does not so much urbanize Heideggerian landscape, in Habermas' famous phrase, as reinscribe it with his own life-long focus on question of human good-exactly where Heidegger so disastrously went astray. This Destruktion represents a stunning achievement, one ofthe most creative uses of Platonism in twentieth-century philosophy. In same way that Gadamer credits Holderlin with providing positive stimulus and voice for later Heidegger's thinking,6 Plato must be credited for providing positive stimulus and countervoice to later Heidegger for Gadamer's thinking. In end, much of difference between these two thinkers may be traced to contrasting inspirations of German poet and Greek philosopher. Destruktion Destruktion, name early Heidegger gave to his project of working through history of philosophy, may in retrospect have been a misleading choice of terms. As Gadamer has pointed out, German word does not have negative connotations of its English or French cognates.7 In Gadamer's reading, Heidegger uses term to refer above all to an activity that characterizes all authentic thinking: rejuvenation of conceptual language.8 By or destructuring reified, technical vocabulary of philosophy as it has become sedimented in tradition, it becomes possible for original insights of living language to reappear. This reflects hermeneutical turn in Heidegger's application of phenomenology to history of philosophy.9 Although this is by no means final word on Heidegger's purposes, even to Gadamer,10 it is consistent with early Heidegger's own remarks on subject.11 most famous statement of this is Section 6 of Being and Time, entitled The Task of Destroying History of Ontology, where he describes goal of Destruktion in terms of regaining access to (in part) genuinely primordial experiences transmitted through tradition.12 In 1922 Introduction, which Gadamer describes as having affected him like an electric shock,13 Heidegger characterizes Destruktion as a dismantling return towards primordial motive sources of explication, which is the authentic path upon which present must encounter itself in its own basic movements.14 Thus Heidegger's Destruktion of major figures in history of Western thought, from Aristotle to Kierkegaard, represent not so much critique as, in Gadamer's words, incomparable renewal of tradition.15 In his interpretations of theological and philosophical thinkers of West, Heidegger brought language of tradition back to life and repeated or reinscribed it with unmistakable stamp of his own original expres sion. 16 Gadamer says that it was for a time impossible to tell difference between old and new, so complete was Heidegger's apparent fusion of Aristotle in particular with his own way of thinking.17 Plato occupies a special, even anomalous position in this early-Heideggerian project of dismantling-cum-reinscription. …

The Crisis of Hermeneutical Consciousness in Modern China

The Crisis of Hermeneutical Consciousness in Modern China

The Conscience of Narrative: Toward a Hermeneutics of Transcendence

N THIS PAPER I wish to consider an aspect of literary narrative, specifically autobiographical narrative involving the subject as first-person narrator, which I take to be of central importance for hermeneutics. By hermeneutics I mean not only a general theory of interpretation but also those verbal procedures within the narrative itself whereby a reflective or cognitive awareness is conveyed to the reader of how such interpretation should proceed. Hermeneutical consciousness in narrative is essentially self-reflective. What interests me in this regard concerning first-person autobiographical narrative are strategies of discourse which establish a basis for understanding beyond the limits of subjective experience and which claim a general, universal, or even transcendent validity. The question to ask is how such narrative can convey to its reader a perspective or point of view which is not limited to the first-person narrator as subject or to the reader as the recipient of what is narrated, but which they come to share together in common. The basis of understanding conveyed by the text must be acknowledged by the reader as validfor him in a reciprocal relation to the subject whose life history is represented in the narrative. In the highest instances of such narrative (provided, for instance, by biblical texts such as the Books of Moses with their claim to theological truth or the Law and by Platonic dialogue, as in the Republic, which is narrated by Socrates, with a corresponding claim to

Conceptualizing human understanding: Gadamer's hermeneutics and American communication studies

American descriptions of the communicative process differ from hermeneutic descriptions in their assumed conception of human understanding. American studies have generally assumed a “reproductive” view of understanding — trying to discover means for avoiding intersubjective misunderstandings by eliminating prejudices. Gadamer presented a “productive” view — trying to increase understanding by developing a positive concept of prejudice and presenting the interaction structure as more fundamental than the interactants. Developing an American hermeneutic consciousness along the model characterized by Gadamer not only places in perspective the view of American scholars but reveals alternatives to current research inadequacies and, thus, has implications for future communication studies.