Gadamer Hans Georg: Početak filozofije

Hans-Georg Gadamer: The Beginning of Philosophy

Hermeneutics is the art of reading, which developed from the interpretation of scriptures, legal texts and classical works. In law, for example, the problem of interpreting legal norms is the largest part of legal training, while court cases are not only the interpretation of what happened (establishing the truth is, for example, a struggle for the supremacy of various interpretations, an effort to make one interpretation, drawn through a truthful procedure, prevail over other interpretations), but also the interpretation of legal norms (if the truth is established, then it is necessary to see whether it is in accordance with the law or not). For centuries, the sacred writings have been the subject of enormous, exhausting efforts of interpretation (it is always necessary to interpret again and again what the biographer said, that is, what God wanted to say through the evangelistic record). Classical Greek and Roman texts resist unequivocal interpretation - which, unequivocally, would kill them - re-finding personal youth in contemporary interpretations (one should not forget that translations are also a kind of interpretation). The great master who tried his hand at each of these three types of interpretation, Nietzsche, a philologist by primary education, noted that facts, in fact, do not exist, only interpretations exist, while his sharp-tongued interpreter Peter Sloterdijk asserted that classic works can be called those that have survived their interpreters. However, the German philologist Schleiermacher, who is reputed to be the founder of philosophical hermeneutics, established that we must understand the author better than he understood himself, and the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Heidegger's contemporary, a man who, at the age of 102, asserted that dying is a difficult job (and then lived two more), the author of the capital work "Truth and Method", a little hazy when Nazism was discussed in his presence, one of those thinkers who marked the philosophy of the twentieth century, he elevated hermeneutics to a philosophical discipline that is included in the program of regular philosophical training. In the small book The Beginning of Philosophy, in which he collected the lectures he gave in Italian in Naples in 1988 (when he was only 88 years old), Gadamer demonstrates exactly what it means to interpret classical philosophical texts in an unpretentious, fun, seemingly easy way, in the search for the motive for the beginning of philosophy. Namely, the beginning was still a wonderful concept for the ancient Greeks, which is why they paid due attention to it: is the beginning, simply, what comes at the beginning of time, or is the beginning, understood as arche, as the first in value, in order of seniority (archon), actually the beginning on the scale of values? In his Neapolitan lectures, Gadamer starts from the interpretation of Plato's dialogue Phaedo (or about the soul), and, through the dialogue Theaetetus and the Sophist, he reaches Aristotle, making quick excursions into pre-Socratic thought. The main part of the book is devoted to the reading of Plato and precisely the wonderful material that Gadamer extracts from that great work. Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation that keeps the text firmly in front of it all the time. The text is relevant for interpretations, the type of text, its supposed or questionable reliability, the way of writing and the time when it was created, the sources that were used for its creation, the interpretations that already exist and the traditions that merge again, everything is at stake, and especially the language is at stake as, perhaps, the most closed, but also the most reliable guide through the gorges of the text. The rise of Gadamerian hermeneutics - to a large extent, admittedly, based on Heidegger's work and the path paved by that work - coincides with the rise of the linguistic turn in philosophy, when the philosophy of consciousness as the metaphysics of subjectivity is abandoned and language as a non-metaphysical category now takes its place, in the place of that elusive consciousness. That is why we will also find great etymologies in Gadamer, precise considerations about the contexts in which certain words were used, their weight and the misinterpretations with which these words were burdened. Finally, Gadamer will not hesitate to interpret the works of classical philosophers that he does not understand her, an oversight, or an insufficiently penetrating interpretation. Where, however, is the beginning of philosophy in all this? Well, at Plato's. Unless it's with Aristotle. Although Aristotle, it must be said, interpreted Plato incorrectly. At least to some extent. He was his best student for a long time. And he was the first to understand the importance of thinking opinions, unless, before him, Anaxagoras had already done so. Or maybe Socrates who gave Anaxagoras a whirl. Provided that the "illiterate" Socrates is not, in fact, Plato himself, which means that... Philosophy, therefore, certainly begins with the Greeks, that is its beginning in time, but what is particularly interesting is that, according to Gadamer, it begins at the moment when the mind chooses itself as the object of reflection, and then hermeneutics also begins to unfold.