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1 - Heidegger's hermeneutics: towards a new practice of understanding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2011

By
Holger Zaborowski
Edited by
Daniel O. Dahlstrom
Holger Zaborowski
Affiliation:
The Catholic University of America
Daniel O. Dahlstrom
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Summary

J (Japanese man): … Kuki merely stressed constantly that the term “hermeneutic phenomenology” was to indicate a new direction of phenomenology.

I (Inquirer/Heidegger): It may indeed have looked that way. In fact, however, I was concerned neither with a direction in phenomenology nor, indeed, with anything new. Quite the reverse, I was trying to think the nature of phenomenology in a more originary manner, so as to fit it in this way back into the place that is properly its own within Western philosophy

Martin Heidegger (GA 12: 90 f./OWL 9; tm).

This essay examines Heidegger's hermeneutics. At first sight, an examination of this sort could appear to be a rather limited task. If we consider all of his writings, we have to acknowledge that Heidegger has in fact relatively little to say about hermeneutics. There is, to be sure, his early “hermeneutics of facticity,” outlined in rather broad strokes (and by no means fully thought through) in his early Freiburg lecture courses. But already a few years later, in Being and Time (1926), the concept of hermeneutics no longer seems to play a prominent role. Heidegger continues to lose interest in hermeneutics, one could further argue, in the years and decades after the publication of Being and Time. Given the significant shift during that time in his understanding of philosophy and the task of thinking, this development is hardly surprising.

Keywords

DaseinHeideggerhermeneuticsWorld War IILetter on Humanismphilosophy
Type
Chapter
Information
Interpreting Heidegger
Critical Essays
 , pp. 15 - 41
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

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