The Idea of Dialogue in Gadamer ’ s Hermeneutics (original) (raw)
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The idea of dialogue occupies arguably the most central position in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer 1960/1989). Dialogue is here not understood merely as the conversation between two subjects about something of common interest in a shared medium of understanding, but rather as the foundational phenomenon within which objects and themes, subjects and perspectives, and common interest and shared understanding are grounded. The foundational character of dialogue derives from the fact that all experience is understood to be linguistically mediated, while language as a medium exists in its true and essential form as dialogue. The strongest support for this approach comes from a phenomenological perspective on understanding, i.e. on what really happens when we understand something, when we make sense of something by interpreting it. Bringing together the encompassing and foundational role of dialogue with its concrete origin in the act of interpretation will yield, as I will show, a postmetaphysical concept of understanding as dialogue. Gadamer’s own philosophical-hermeneutic conception of dialogue both suggests and yet misses its full articulation, as our analysis of the idea of dialogue in philosophical hermeneutics, the question of the metaphysical grounds of understanding in language, and the issue of the epistemological significance of dialogue will show.
This paper’s aim is to explore Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in order to draw out implications for the ethics of dialogue. Through examining key interconnected components in Gadamer’s theory, I highlight the openness to the other and otherness as a key normative ideal for dialogic understanding and their influence on the core practical ethos that underpins dialogue encounter, including the ethics of alterity, self-cultivation, equality, reciprocity, and solidarity. We further consider hermeneutical application or praxis by way of a guide insofar as to how one might act in the world through dialogue construed through these ethical dimensions.
PhaenEx, 2006
S. Geniusas: Although Gadamer’s hermeneutics has suffered attacks from a number of philosophical perspectives, the profusion of criticisms seldom constitutes new challenges and for the most part is a reiteration of two seemingly opposite claims. On the one hand, we often hear that Gadamer’s hermeneutics is merely a disguised brand of the “philosophy of the subject” which under the pretext of openness reduces the Other to the self. On the other hand, it is just as often claimed that Gadamer’s writings fall into the category of the “hermeneutics of the fundamental questions” and therefore they cannot account for the selfhood of the self. Taking as its focus the theme of the oneness of the hermeneutical horizon(s), this paper argues that this theme carries no hegemonic or essentialist connotations. Rather, a careful analysis, which accentuates the negative and the dialectical elements of the oneness of horizons and the fact that this theme is for Gadamer both a presupposition and an ac...
Journal of Dialogue Studies Volume 2 Number 1 Paper 3: ‘Just Send Me Word’: the Promise of Dialogue
This paper specifically concerns an aspect of the central place given to dialogue in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Though understanding is presented as the unquestioned achievement of dialogue, there is scant attention to a prior question: ‘What draws us into dialogue in the first place?’ Gadamer’s treatment of dialogical understanding as an event tends to obscure the necessary pre-conditions of its emergence. He correctly assumes that texts, artworks, literature speaks directly to us, even disarm us by their address. Yet, what disposes us to listen? Even if we hear nothing in a dialogical claim, what impels us to listen again or more closely to what might be being said? The paper attempts to answer this question and throw light on this, an obscurer aspect of Gadamer’s thinking. We will argue in the vein of philosophical hermeneutics and seek an answer to the question its approach to dialogical understanding supposes but seems neither to ask nor answer. Our central argument is that within the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics, the importance of dialogical exchange lies not in what is transmitted between interlocutors but in the respective hermeneutic effects of that exchange. In dialogue there is no literal ex-change of ‘hermeneutic content’ between one speaker and another. We shall argue that it is not what is literally exchanged that matters but, rather, what participation in that exchange can unexpectedly bring about within the understanding of each speaker and often contrary to their willing and doing.
Listening to Language in Gadamer\u27s Hermeneutics
2012
Subscribing to Hans-Georg Gadamer\u27s belief that human beings are called to be insightful and discerning, this dissertation explores Gadamer\u27s idea and practice of listening to language in order to understand the relationship between a constitutive theory of language and a life of wisdom. As Gadamer\u27s texts reveal, the hermeneutic practice of listening to language is a reflective engagement of language that is theoretically grounded in a constitutive view of language. First, we need to listen to language because language, not consciousness, is the critical element in understanding. Second, the ontological priority of language over subjectivity comes with the nature of our primary relationship to language--we belong to it. Language is the medium in which we think and live, which makes us human. This means that our primary and most consequential relationship to language is as hearers, not users, of language. Third, the nature of language is both binding and expansive; hence th...
Are we a conversation? Hermeneutics, exteriority, transmittability
Research in Phenomenology, 2017
Hermeneutics is widely celebrated as a call for “conversation”—that is, a manner of inquiry characterized by humility and openness to the other that eschews the pretenses of calculative rationality and resists all finality of conclusions. In this, conversation takes shape in efforts to understand and interpret that always unfold in the transmission of meaning historically in language. Yet, the celebration of hermeneutics for humility and openness appears, at least, to risk embarrassment in light of claims found in Heidegger and Gadamer that conversation is always contingent on “prior accord.” Critics of hermeneutics have, for some decades, interpreted this claim of prior accord to refer to a common tradition, so that the understanding achieved in conversation is restricted to those who belong to the same heritage. In this essay, the author argues that although Heidegger and Gadamer often suggest this prior accord is a matter of common tradition, crucial threads of Gadamer’s thought, in particular, recommend a different view. Gadamer, in these threads, offers that “prior accord” concerns not a common tradition, but, on the contrary, the call to participate in hermeneutic transmission as such, even—and no doubt especially—when those in conversation are not familiar with the tradition or language of the other. With this, we are called to converse not first by what the other says, but by the fact that we do not yet understand, that we have already misunderstood, and that we perhaps cannot understand.