Hermeneutics

Hermes, messenger of the gods, the inspiration of the hermeneutical name.

The hermeneutics (from the Greek ἑρμηνευτικὴ τέχνη [hermeneutiké tekhne], 'art of interpreting and, likewise, explaining or translating') is the art of interpretation, explanation and translation of written communication, verbal communication and, secondarily, non-verbal communication. Its central concept of modern constitution is that of understanding (Verstehen) of important written texts.

The need for a hermeneutical discipline is determined by the complexities of language, which frequently lead to different and even conflicting conclusions regarding the meaning of texts. Hermeneutics, eminently since Schleiermacher, its modern founder, responds to the famous maxim of being able to understand the author better than he himself was able to understand himself. Hermeneutics tries to decipher the complex, hidden or non-evident meaning that underlies the discourse and, to this end, attempts the exegesis of reason itself on the meaning.

Sometimes "exegesis" and "hermeneutics" are used as synonymous terms, but hermeneutics is a broader methodological discipline in that it is difficult to set its boundaries and can encompass not only written, verbal, but also non-verbal communication. 'Hermeneutics', as a singular noun, refers to a particular method of interpretation (as opposed to a 'double hermeneutics' approach). Exegesis focuses especially on sacred scriptures and philosophical and artistic texts.

“Hermeneutical consistency” concerns the examination of texts to reach a coherent explanation of them. Hermeneutics, in philosophy, refers mainly, after Schleiermacher, to the theory of knowledge initiated by Martin Heidegger, developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his thesis Truth and Method, and other thinkers and schools of the < span style="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">XX, such as Bultmann, Luigi Pareyson or Paul Ricoeur. Some scholars outside the humanistic tradition, such as Murray Rothbard, consider hermeneutics "mystifying nonsense" and "incomprehensible".

Hermeneutics was initially applied to the interpretation, or exegesis, of sacred scriptures. The hermeneutic method, after the ancient schools, from Alexandria to Antioch or Pergamon, obtained a technical focus with Flacius and later with Meier, to obtain in the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher its peak as a total method aimed at "understanding", it is to say relative as much to logic and grammar as to rhetoric and dialectic and history, as explained by Dilthey.

It is true that the vigor of hermeneutics during the 20th century can be gauged simply from the influence, otherwise highly problematic, of Martin Heidegger and his disciple Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method), but both are as important as they are debatable. Hermeneutics emerged as a theory of human understanding in the late 18th century and early 19th century primarily through the work by the theologian and translation specialist Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Modern hermeneutics is constituted, following the philological and philosophical tradition, as an interpretation of the great texts, particularly the Bible (biblical hermeneutics) and Plato, but in general it has referred to particularly difficult and important texts and, naturally, it has functioned as a support for philology, literary criticism and philosophy. Likewise, it has been extended to any type of humanistic object.

After Dilthey, in the field of philology it has been inherited by the idealist school, in particular Leo Spitzer and the Stylistic school, although this forked, adopting in part a neopositivist or formalist vision refractory to hermeneutic knowledge. In the field of philosophy, it has had a German axis defined by the aforementioned Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (1927), recontinued particularly by his disciple Hans-Georg Gadamer in his highly influential, and today discussed by invasive (Truth and method), where hermeneutics represents a theory of truth and method that expresses the universalization of the interpretative phenomenon from concrete and personal historicity. Be that as it may, Hermeneutics went on to play in the last quarter of the XX century a general philosophical position that has often been designated as koine, especially associated with the Vattimo school and other European and American sectors, where the derivations are multiple.

Origin and evolution of hermeneutics

The term hermeneutics comes from the Greek verb ἑρμηνεύειν (hermenéuein) which means interpret, declare, announce, clarify and, finally, translate. It means that something becomes comprehensible or brought to understanding. The term is considered to derive from the name of the Greek god Hermes, the messenger, to whom the Greeks attributed the origin of language and writing and to whom they considered the patron of communication and human understanding. The term originally expressed the understanding and explanation of an obscure and enigmatic sentence of the gods or oracle, which required a correct interpretation....

The term hermeneutics derives directly from the Greek adjective ἑρμηνευτικἡ, which means explanatory or interpretive knowledge, especially of the Holy Scriptures, and of the meaning of the words of the texts, as well as the analysis of the theory or science itself focused on exegesis of signs and their symbolic value.

The technical term ἑρμηνεία (hermeneia, 'interpretation, explanation') was introduced into philosophy mainly through the title of Aristotle's work Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας (Peri Hermeneias), commonly known by its Latin title De Interpretatione and translated into Spanish as On Interpretation. It is one of the oldest (c. 360 BC) philosophical works extant in the Western tradition that treats the relationship between language and logic in a comprehensive, explicit, and formal way:

The primitive use of 'hermeneutics' places it within the limits of the sacred. A divine message must be received with an implied uncertainty as to its truth. This ambiguity is an irrationality; it is a kind of madness that is inflicted on the receiver of the message. Only those who possess a rational method of interpretation (i.e., a hermeneutics) could determine the truth or falseness of the message.

Background

Euhemerus of Mesene (IV century BC) made the first attempt to rationally interpret Greek legends and myths reducing its content to historical and social elements (euhemerism). In the VI century B.C. C. Theágenes de Regio tried a similar enterprise to interpret them allegorically and extract their deep meaning.

In the first rhetors there are already mature interpretations of the speech.

The allegorical interpretation is at the base of the hermeneutic discipline.

Hermeneutics, philology and theology

But the origin of hermeneutical studies is found fundamentally in Scripture and Christian theology, where the purpose of hermeneutics is to establish the principles and norms that must be applied in the interpretation of the sacred books of the Bible. Philo of Alexandria is the first great master of allegorical interpretation. Philology and the science of literature, in particular Literary Criticism and Literary Theory as well as the auxiliary discipline ecdotic or textual criticism define disciplinary fields both parallel to and subsumed in Hermeneutics.

The biblical books, which, as revealed by God but composed by men, had two different meanings: the literal and the spiritual, the latter divided into three: the anagogical, the allegorical and the moral:

• The Verbatim sense is the meaning by the words of Scripture and discovered by the philological exegesis that follows the rules of just interpretation. According to Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 10, ad 1:

Et ita etiam nulla confusio sequitur in sacra Scriptura, cum omnes sensus fundentur super unum, scilicet litteralem.

And thus there is no confusion in the Scriptures, since all the senses are based on one, the literal one.

• The Spiritual sense, infused by God in man according to Christian belief, gives a supplementary religious sense to the signs, divided into three different types:
  • The Allegorical senseby which it is possible for Christians to acquire a deeper understanding of events recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the passage of the Red Sea symbolizes the victory of Christ and baptism. (see 1 Co 10:2).
  • The moral senseby which the events narrated in Scripture can lead to a righteous work; its end is instruction (1 Co 10, 11; see Epistle to the Hebrews 3-4,11).
  • The Anagogic sense (or mystical sense) by which the saints can see realities and events of an eternal significance, leading (in Greek) anagogue...to the Christians to the heavenly homeland. Thus, the Church on earth is a sign of heavenly Jerusalem. (see Revelation 21,1-22,5).

Romanticism and Friedrich Schleiermacher

After remaining secluded for several centuries in the field of theology, hermeneutics opened up in the era of romanticism to all kinds of written texts. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) stands in this context, who sees in the hermeneutic task a process of reconstruction of the spirit of our ancestors. Thus, Schleiermacher proposes a hermeneutic circle to be able to interpret the texts, he postulates that the correct interpretation must have an objective dimension, related to the construction of the author's context, and another subjective and divinatory one, which consists of moving to the author's place. For Schleiermacher, hermeneutics is not a theoretical knowledge but a practical one, that is, the praxis or the technique of the correct interpretation of a spoken or written text. This is about understanding, which has long since become a fundamental concept and purpose of all hermeneutical issues. Schleiermacher defines hermeneutics as «historical and divinatory, objective and subjective reconstruction of a given discourse».

Historicism and Dilthey

Following the perspective of Friedrich Schleiermacher arises the proposal of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911). Dilthey, from his reading of Immanuel Kant awakens his attraction to philosophy, in addition to his exact interest in historical texts and philology, since 1861 his plans arise to develop a specific theory of the Sciences of the Spirit expressed in his book < i>Introduction to the Sciences of the Spirit, taking these from their difference with the Natural Sciences. The difference between the two sciences consists in the conditions under which their processes arise; we have the Sciences of the Spirit as something that we understand and that is presented from within as reality and as a connection, dealing with linguistic objectifications of the spirit; while the Natural Sciences are merely based on their explanation originating from outside and as a phenomenon. This contrast between explaining and understanding is molded as a historical-social reality preserved in memory and later expressed in the form of news or theorems. The Sciences of Spirit arise when man becomes aware of his activity as endower of meanings deposited in texts and documents, special attention is paid to understanding and not to explaining because this, unlike the second, does not claim limitations, that is, it opens up to possibilities. within which man can appropriate what he considers. For Dilthey, understanding the historical world is not knowing the world scientifically or the interiority of the individual, but delving into the meanings produced by the individual in his relationship with others through the channels mentioned above, then the interpreter of those texts and documents deals with reproducing the texts to recognize them as their own through their understanding.

By virtue of Schleiermacher's contribution regarding hermeneutics that seeks to extend understanding to the relationship of men among themselves and their relationship with the world, Dilthey warns that what becomes the object of understanding are merely "manifestations of life" Permanently fixed in writing, these manifestations can be read and understood within a historical context. He transfers the acquisition of experience to a field of history, establishing hermeneutics as the basis of the Sciences of the Spirit, since the individual is constituted as a historical being that is filled with human memory and lives on it. The act of comprehension is then constituted as a reconstructor that is repeated, this is given thanks to the recovery of messages from another era that are intended to be understood, but to understand them it is necessary to build a bridge, this bridge is conceived as a text or document which in turn gives rise to something eternal that is reproduced through time.

Through the application of hermeneutics we discover meanings from the interpretation of words and texts, it is a theory that recovers the meaning and elements of a whole, understanding then is the means by which we know in full interiority of what is being interpreted at the moment.

In addition, Wlihelm Dilthey's approach is considered a pioneer in Humanist Pedagogy.

Martin Heidegger

Already in the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, in his analysis of understanding, affirms that, whatever, presents a "circular structure":

Every interpretation, to produce understanding, must already understand what it will interpret.

This reciprocity between text and context is part of what Heidegger calls the hermeneutic circle. Another central thinker in the development of this concept is the sociologist Max Weber.

Heidegger introduces new paths in hermeneutics by ceasing to consider it solely as a way of understanding the spirit of other times and thinking of it as the fundamental way of placing the human being in the world: to exist is to understand. In this way, the focus of hermeneutics shifts from interpretation to existential understanding, which is treated as a more direct, non-mediated way of being in the world—hence more authentic—than simply as a "way of know". For example, he argued the need for a "special hermeneutics of empathy" to dissolve the classic philosophical problem of "other minds", putting the problem in the context of being-with the way of relating to humans. (Although Heidegger himself did not complete this project.)

Since then, his hermeneutics of factuality has become a philosophy that identifies truth with a historically situated interpretation, which would be raised as a model by his disciple Hans-Georg Gadamer, the most influential of the hermeneutics of the second half of the 20th century.. Gadamer's hermeneutics under supposed comprehensive extension supplants the contiguous disciplinary fields.

Followers of this approach maintain that some texts and the people who produce them cannot be studied by using the same scientific methods that are used by the natural sciences, reaching positions similar to those of antipositivism. They even maintain that these texts are conventionalized expressions of the author's experience. Therefore, the interpretation of those texts will reveal something about the social context in which they were formed, and, more significantly, it will provide the reader with a means to share the author's experiences. For these reasons, hermeneutics is considered the opposite school of thought to positivism.

Paul Ricoeur

Paul Ricoeur (Essais d'herméneutique, Paris: Seuil, 1969) exceeds the two previous currents in his contribution, and proposes a «hermeneutics of distance», which gives rise to a interpretation is the fact that there is a distance between the sender and the receiver. From this hermeneutics a theory emerges whose paradigm is the text, that is, all discourse fixed by writing. At the same time this discourse suffers, once emitted, an uprooting of the author's intention and gains independence from him. The text is now detached from the issuer, and it is a metamorphosed reality into which the reader, upon taking the work, is introduced. But this same metamorphosed reality proposes an "I", a "Dasein", which must be extracted by the reader in the hermeneutic task. For Ricoeur to interpret is to extract the being-in-the-world that is found in the text. In this way he proposes to study the problem of the "appropriation of the text", that is, of the application of the meaning of the text to the life of the reader. The reworking of the text by the reader is one of the axes of Paul Ricoeur's theory.

Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade, like a hermeneutic, understands religion as an «experience of the sacred», and interprets the sacred in relation to the profane. The Romanian philosopher emphasizes that the relationship between the sacred and the profane is not one of opposition, but of complementarity, after having interpreted the profane as hierophany. The hermeneutics of myth is a part of the hermeneutics of religion. People should not interpret myth as an illusion or as a lie, because there is truth to be rediscovered in myth. Myth is interpreted by Mircea Eliade as "sacred history". Eliade introduces the concept of "total hermeneutics".

Basic structures of understanding and diatopical hermeneutics

• Horizon structure: the singular content and learned in the entire context of meaning, which is pre-appeared and co-learned.
• Circular structure: comprehension moves into a dialectic between pre-comprehension and understanding of the thing, it is an event that progresses in the form of a spiral, as one element presupposes another and at the same time it does as it goes on.
• Structure of dialogue: in dialogue we keep our understanding open, to enrich and correct it.
• Mediation structureMediation is presented and manifested in all the contents, but it is interpreted as understanding in our world and in our history.

On the other hand, diatopic hermeneutics is a concept used in sociology and anthropology that describes the spaces for intercultural argumentation necessary to promote a dialogue away from ethnocentric positions. This procedure is based on the fact that all cultures are incomplete, and that in order to reach the maximum degree of completeness, this exchange of arguments is necessary.

Applications in education and complementary media

Hermeneutics is a kind of master key with which historical development has managed to load itself with valuable senses and meanings. Its use in almost all disciplines due to the sense of the term that deals with the art of explaining texts or writings, artistic works, making descriptions and interpretations among other characteristics that surround the concept. This has managed to build itself socioculturally due to its various functions and applications.

Likewise, the concept is transhistorical, since it has made it possible to expose, publish, resignify and analyze what it deals with. The word is an adjective because its accompaniment allows material or immaterial things (abstract or imaginary) to be modified when this science intervenes, since through this tool qualities or circumstances are expressed or the meaning is specified through relationships of place, time, position, quantity and other elements that can be considered according to what is being studied.

The importance of recovering the process of investigation, application and reflection using the tools of hermeneutics has recently been worked on as described by this researcher^[who?]: his «article suggests the importance of the knowledge and / or commitment of the researcher for the development of the understanding of the experience. One way of theoretical understanding derived by ground researchers is to carry out a pilot study. The hermeneutic circle, as described by Heidegger, provides a framework for understanding the importance of pilot studies; suggests that a person must have a practical sense of the domain in which a phenomenon is found in order to develop understanding. In this article, 1 I present the numerous significant revisions to the theoretical framework and a methodology that a pilot study has allowed me to do within the research project. Two important implications that contribute to higher education research and practice are offered: (1) it illustrates the importance of grounding the research process in practice, and (2) it highlights how reflection can help improve our research practice.”

"An adequate educational proposal can contribute to the emergence of research groups that provide a unique way of practicing more humane and humanizing research, focused on the world of life and the meaning and meaning of experience." Thus, a route is required, a path that serves as a guide for its basic application: reading as a fundamental element of what is its focus of interest, knowledge of minimum rules on the aspect that applies it, its interpretation.

It is about understanding the complexity of the phenomenon both with the intuition that knowledge provides, and recovering the objective work of the author-text through reflection. Hermeneutics uses symbolism, which is a construction and structure in itself, taking advantage of culture as a nuance together with the context.

It is a reality that hermeneutics has expanded its field of action due to its function of translating, in addition to adding points in favor by resorting to its application in current problems with new technologies, at the same time that it is judged by its flexible methodology. «This contribution investigates the claim that the establishment of hermeneutic pedagogy as the dominant paradigm in educational sciences after 1918 is particularly detrimental to the spaces for reflection, which the main defenders of this paradigm offer for the treatment of central problems in educational systems. The work of Eduardo Spranger, Erich Weniger, and Herman NOHL will be discussed in relation to the three main problems of these functionally differentiated systems - selection, curriculum, and profession. It can be shown that one explanation for the "success" of these hermeneutical scientists lies in their acceptance of semantic traditions, but also that they modify these in the recognition of the real-historical problems of education".

A field of action in which the incorporation of hermeneutics is important is that of the image and the current media «The hermeneutic analysis suggests the understanding of texts through the media», «the comparison with tradition and historical and cultural reality; the penetration of its logic; by comparing media images in historical and cultural context by combining analysis of media, plot, ethical, ideological, structural/visual iconographic stereotypes and media analysis, text characters. An analysis of this type of audiovisual communication texts, in our opinion, is especially important for media education in the training of future historians, culture, art historians, sociologists, linguists, theologians, psychologists and educators."

Hermeneutics in Latin America

Mauritius Beuchot

The proposal of analogical hermeneutics made by Mauricio Beuchot arises from the National Congress of Philosophy, held in the city of Cuernavaca (state of Morelos, Mexico), in 1993, synthesized in his work Treatise on hermeneutics analog (1997). Influenced by the Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel and the so-called analectic method, to later take up ideas of analogy in Peirce, Mauricio Beuchot proposes a hermeneutical project called analogical hermeneutics or also analogical-iconic hermeneutics.

Analogue hermeneutics, based on the concept of analogy, is structured as intermediate between univocity and equivocality. The univocity tends to the identity between the meaning and its application, it is a strong and positivist idea that seeks objectivity. For example, the hermeneutics of Emilio Betti. While equivocality is the difference in meaning and application, it tends towards relativism and subjectivism. For example the philosophy of Richard Rorty. Analog hermeneutics tries to avoid extreme positions, opening the margin of interpretations, hierarchizing them in an orderly manner so that there is an interpretation that is the main analogue and other interpretations that are secondary analogues. Thus, it is proposed as a moderate position, which recovers the Aristotelian notion of phronesis, and can be considered as the interpretation of texts that allows a position that is neither equivocal (which it is not) nor univocist (which it is), but prudent on one point. half.

Jorge Enrique González Rojas

He has contributed to Cultural Analysis, Hermeneutics and Phenomenology from Sociology and Philosophy. The author who interdisciplinary relates Philosophy and Psychology, Philosophy of Language, Analytical Philosophy, Semiotics and, above all, Hermeneutics, Cultural Analysis and Sociology. He is one of the main Latin American sociologists in the field of the so-called Analog Hermeneutics, recognized as philosophical hermeneutics from which he has investigated along with the Mexican philosopher Mauricio Beuchot and others. His proposal advances in the construction of clear statements located historically and spatially.

Bunge's critique of hermeneutics

According to Mario Bunge, philosophical hermeneutics opposes the scientific study of society. In particular, he despises social statistics and mathematical models. Since it considers the social as if it were spiritual, hermeneutics despises environmental, biological, and economic factors, while refusing to address macro-social facts, such as poverty and war. In this way, hermeneutics constitutes an obstacle to the investigation of the truths about society and, therefore, of the foundations of social policies.