Education and Culture

"Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged, because it separates, but it is actually the supportive ground of process in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naive assumption of historicism, namely that we must set ourselves within the spirit of the age, and think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance towards historical objectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognise the distance in time as a positive and productive possibility of understanding. It is not a yawning abyss, but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which all that is handed down presents itself to us." (Gadamer 1975: 264f.) "Understanding is not to be thought of so much as an action of one's subjectivity, but as the placing of oneself within a process of tradition, in which past and present are constantly fused." (Gadamer 1975: 258) "The ...

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...

French main representative of a philosophical, above all German - whose figures were in the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and the twentieth century, Heidegger and especially Gadamer - Paul Ricoeur has clearly given the task to the early 1960's legacy to fertilize hermeneutics in opening new horizons of thought: phenomenology, psychoanalysis, philosophy Anglo-Saxon language, in particular, such an opening it had to lead a thorough program herméneutique2. It is this spirit of openness and dialogue with other major currents of contemporary thought, a spirit might say ecumenical underlying the effort in "Hermeneutics and critique of ideology" to rethink the question basic hermeneutics in a way that "would do justice to the critique of ideology, [...] which shows the need for the substance of its own requirements" (333). Task that requires first the removal of the mortgage romantic, according to Ricoeur, continues to weigh on the issue or the proble...