Hermeneutics

Understanding, Interpretation and Language: A Reading into Heidegger’s Hermeneutics

—M.Parameshwaran[1]

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), beyond any doubt was the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. During his theological studies at the University of Freiburg (1909-1911) he was introduced to the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey. Important, but not-so-popular influence on Heidegger is one of his theology lecturers, Carl Braig (1853-1923), who deepened Heidegger’s understanding of the problem of Being. As a matter of fact, Braig’s book, On Being (1896) contained many etymological explanations of Greek metaphysical terms as well as lengthy extracts from Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and Suarez. It even carried the phrase ‘the Being of beings’ which is central to Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology.1 Having been introduced to Brentano’s work on Aristotle—Manifold meaning of Being—while still at Constance, during his first semester at Freiburg, Heidegger encountered Husserl’s Logical Investigations, a work that challenged him deeply. In 1923 he began writing Being and Time [hereafter BT], which was published in 1927. Following the path of Husserl, he rejects the traditional language of philosophy and draws on the resources of his native German to coin his own philosophical vocabulary.

Heidegger saw his account of understanding as a revolutionary break from the traditional philosophical emphasis on problems about knowledge and on the dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity. To understand this break it is essential to place his account of understanding and interpretation in BT, in the backdrop of traditional hermeneutics. From ancient period onwards, hermeneutics has been epistemological in character. It was a method to understand difficult texts. Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Hirsch and Betti of the modern period too hold that the text has a static objective meaning, which is...