Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is the art of understanding, but also a wide range of different approaches in the context of scholars such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey and Martin Heidegger (Maclean 1986; see also Johnsen and Olsen, 1992: 420-423, 429f.). In this work, the important is the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his magnum opus Truth and Method (1975).
Understanding interpretation as a time lag

Most importantly, Gadamer has made it clear that he, hermeneutics is not a method for understanding, but an attempt "to clarify the conditions in which understanding takes place" (Gadamer 1975: 263). Under such conditions are crucial, prejudices and fore-meanings in the minds of the interpreters. Understanding is always interpretation, and it means confronting his own ideas, so that the meaning of the object can be really, talk to us (Gadamer 1975: 358). Understanding is not only a reproductive, but a very productive process, and interpretation is always changing during the reception of the story of what is understood.

One of the biggest problems is with Gadamer is how to distinguish 'true prejudices "with which we understand from the" wrong "to which we misunderstand. He proposes as a solution to the development of a" historical "self-awareness to raise awareness of their own prejudices and allows one to isolate and evaluate an object on itself: but I am unsure how this can work and, more importantly, how to always be sure that Gadamer's position as a whole (see below ), the view of an object "on its own" (Gadamer 1975: 266f., see also 269f.; CF. Maclean 1986: 133f.).

Another important prerequisite to the understanding of the place, time interval. For Gadamer, past and present are firmly connected and the past is not something that is too painful back into the individual steps:

"Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates, but it is actually the reason, the process in which the present is rooted. Therefore, temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was much more the naive assumption of historicism, ie we need to deal with the spirit of the time, and think with their ideas and thoughts, not with our own, and therefore the historical objectivity. In fact, important to recognize the gap in time as a positive and productive possibility of understanding. It is not a yawning abyss, but with the continuity of custom and tradition, against the background of all that is is for us. "(Gadamer 1975: 264f. )