The Hermeneutics of Existence: Revisiting Heideggerian Ontological Hermeneutics
ARCHIE R. MAGARAO
Introduction
 |
| Martin Heidegger |
What the contemporary hermeneutics consider as the
“hermeneutic turn” is attributed to Martin Heidegger. He initiated a so-called hermeneutics of existence in his notion of the Dasein (there-being).
He also used the word “hermeneutics” in the context of his larger quest for a
more “fundamental” ontology.[1]
His conception of understanding is
something that is not static but dynamic,
having the power “to be”. Nevertheless, for Heidegger “understanding is the
power to grasp one’s own possibilities for being, within the context of the
lifeworld in which one exists.”[2]
Understanding and the “World”
What is the
world? One might be wrong in conceiving the “world” (Welt) as we understood it now when Heidegger coined it. The “world is not the whole of all beings but the whole in
which the human beings (Dasein) always finds himself already immersed, surrounded by its manifestness as
revealed through an always pregrasping, encompassing understanding.”[3]
Heidegger contends that the world is prior to any separation of the self and
the world and therefore prior to any objectivity and subjectivity.[4] For
him, the Dasein is only understood in reference to the world and the world in
reference to the Dasein. In the relational nature of the “world” and Dasein, we
infer that understanding is always an understanding-out-of-something in
contrary to understanding ex nihilo. Understanding
builds an understanding on something (being), which manifests itself in the world, not on nothing.
Meaningfulness and Understanding
In the philosophy
of Heidegger, by virtue of the concept of the Dasein, meaning and understanding
are always embedded in world. Hence, the world
serves as “the realm where the temporality and historicality of being are
radically present, and the place where being translates itself into meaningfulness, understanding, and interpretation.”[5] Understanding
orients itself towards what is meaningful. Moreover, meaningfulness resides in being. In other words, understanding
orients itself to being for being
contains meaning, which is the object
of understanding, while nothingness does not. “Understanding and
meaningfulness together are the basis for language and interpretation.”[6]
Nevertheless, both understanding and interpretation are on equal footing in
Heidegger’s term.
The Heideggerian Forestructures
For Heidegger,
interpretation or understanding has three forestructures: fore-having (Vor-habe),
fore-sight (Vor-sicht), and fore-conception (Vor-griff). The fore-having is an initial grasp of meaning or an initial possession
of an overview of the entity-that-is-understood. The Fore-sight is an initial seeing or a seeing in advance of an
overview of the entity-that-is-understood. The fore-conception is an initial idea or conception of an overview of
the entity-that-is-understood.
“Interpretation
is never a presuppositionless grasping of something previously given.”[7]
Meanwhile, Heidegger likens understanding and interpretation to fishing with a
net. In this analogy, the fisherman is
the interpreter, the net is the forestructures of the interpreter, the water is
the text, and the fish is the meaning
of the text. In other words, for Heidegger, to
understand is to project. This only means that in the process of
interpretation Heidegger believes that the interpreter approaches the text with
expectations allowing him to experience an initial
meaning in the text. Hence, this initial meaning serves as the ground of
convergence of the interpreter and the text and a compelling force in
discovering the meaning of the text. It, however, presupposes openness to the meaning that the text
asserts and the willingness to leave any prejudices
that do not meet the agreement
reached by the interpreter and the text. The text-interpreter rendezvous leaves
the interpreter a sense of newness of the text as the interpreter expects the
text to tell him something. It
necessitates though an openness when one views the meaning in relation to
oneself and when one views the meaning in relations to that of the text. Besides,
the act of understanding brings further the disclosure
of the meaning that the text possesses. Heidegger understood this “disclosure”
as truth’s ontology. Hence, for Heidegger as of the Greeks,
truth is unconcealment (Aletheia). Essentially,
interpretation aims for the truth, a
truth that discloses or unconceals itself in the meaning that the text and
interpreter discover in their convergence.
Conclusion
In general, Heidegger poses these notions with regard
to interpretation: (1) interpretation is the working out of the possibilities
of understanding by which we orient ourselves to the world projected by the
text, and (2) interpretation is always an open-ended affair.[8]
Finally, “Heidegger takes the final step and defines the essence of
hermeneutics as the ontological power of understanding and interpretation which
renders possible the disclosure of being of things and ultimately of the
potentialities of Dasein’s own being.”[9]
[1]Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. And ed. By David E. Linge
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 124.
[2]Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey,
Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969),
131.
[3]Ibid., 132.
[4]Ibid.
[5]Ibid.,
134.
[6]Ibid., 135.
[7]Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 151.
[8]David Klemm, Hermeneutical Inquiry Volume II: The Interpretation of Existence (Georgia:
Scholars Press, 1986), 91.
[9]Palmer, Hermeneutics:
Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, 130.
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