Round and Round

One of the best descriptions concerning the circularity of interpretation and the steps of the hermeneutical endeavour is to be found in the pages of a book by David Couzens Hoy (The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics)

Language [...] it brings certain features of each world or horizon to light, it conceals other features. Similarly, the text itself must have functioned in the same way, clarifying certain features of the actual situation that were perhaps only dim adumbrations before, at the same time concealing other features. Language is essentially entrenched in history, then, insofar as it is the same time limited to particulars and can never reveal the whole as such. At the same time language is the essence of history, for it is this process of revealing and concealing that demands further accounts and further actions. Accounts and actions are linked, for an action is taken according to the account that is believed, while accounts are themselves actions, since they structure the situation and sometimes alter it.

It is important to note that what is at play here is a gap between revealed and concealed and that ""Language" here means the way the situation is encountered, the way problems are phrased, and the way the future is anticipated." An encounter, a phrasing, an anticipation, it is not difficult to see (and hear) the moment where the gap gives rise to metadiscursivity, a reasoning about the reasons and the wherefore of action.

And so for day 682
25.10.2008