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Strength and weakness of hermeneutics
The author discusses advantages and disadvantages of hermeneutics as seen from the perspective of interpretation. He aims at showing that Gadamer’s hermeneutics, even though it formulates quite a few accurate intuitions as to successful process of interpretation, it is, however, unable to deal with at least one essential problem, i.e. with mapping the boundaries between that which comes from an interpreted text and that which is contributed to it by an interpreter. According to the author the reason for that could be found in the fact that such a boundary cannot at all be introduced. Having said so, he suggests to reject Gadamer’s dualist attitude according to which the reality of interpretation is being divided into text and interpretation, and assume that in the process of interpretation, the latter simply overlaps with the text, thus the text itself loses any autonomy in the face of interpretation. The author
claims one should leave behind the problem of an accurate interpretation, i.e. faithful to the text, and concentrate instead on cultural study of ethical and political reasons for the emergence of different interpretations. Additionally, he argues it is not true that such an
interpretative freedom is opposed by the text itself. According to him the resistance is introduced by the people and their interpretations which have in the process of their conventionalisation begun to play the role of the text itself. Such a resistance can at most be associated with a set of interpretative communities existing in a society and the ideas shared by them. In that sense, he repeats an argument mentioned some years ago that the boundaries of interpretative anarchism do not belong to the text, rather to the cultural context of an interpretation. |
