Hermeneutics

Definition

Hermeneutics, in Gadamer's philosophical sense, is the theory of understanding itself — not a method for recovering the author's original intention but a description of how understanding actually happens as a dialogical event. Understanding proceeds through the "hermeneutic circle," which Gadamer shows is "cumulatively productive, not vicious": one revises one's sense of the whole as one grasps the parts, and revises one's sense of the parts as the meaning of the whole emerges. For architecture, hermeneutics opens a way to understand how building today can be rich with human meaning, relating to the history of architecture "without merely repeating or repudiating it" (Kidder). It resists the reduction of architecture's significance to practical functioning and seeks to recover ideals of rationality broader than empirical and technical reason.

Key Thinkers

• Hans-Georg Gadamer — philosophical hermeneutics; the hermeneutic circle; the fusion of horizons.
• Paul Kidder — Gadamer's relevance for architecture: understanding history without repeating or repudiating it.
• Martin Heidegger — hermeneutics as the "phenomenology of Dasein," the existential ground of Gadamer's account.

Related Concepts

• Interpretation — the activity hermeneutics describes and theorizes.
• Tradition — the effective-historical context that both enables and limits understanding.
• Truth and Method — Gadamer's thesis that truth is in tension with the idea of method.
• Play — Gadamer's model for the event-character of understanding and artistic creation.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Gadamer for Architects — philosophical hermeneutics and architecture's cultural meaning.
• Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — the everyday as the test case for negotiating semiotic tools and hermeneutics; reports Freud's analytics of dreams and everyday parapraxes as expanding hermeneutics "beyond the walls [of the] abnormal into the realm of ordinariness," relocating common behavioral phenomena from superstition and mythology to psychical dynamics; judges Husserl to have "stopped short" of validating the everyday against common sense.