For Heidegger, despite Husserl’s methodological breakthrough, Husserl’s fundamental (i.e., ‘prefigured’) connection to both ‘Cartesian psychology’ and ‘Kantian epistemology’ gives to transcendental phenomenology a ‘fatal determination.’ Whatever (presumptively) one takes religious experience to be, Heidegger does not accept a call ‘to the things themselves’ if den Sachen here means entities ‘encountered as characteristic of a possible region for science’, which, of course, presupposes a theoretical approach to the phenomena under examination, theoretical ‘knowing.’ If Heidegger is correct, this approach to the phenomena of religious life leads to distortion [Verdrehen]. Heidegger claims: ‘Knowing’s manner of being as care about certainty resides in a particular remoteness from being, that is to say, in a position that does not let this knowing, so characterized, come near its own being, but instead interrogates every entity with respect to its character of possibly being certain.’ Hence, within the onto‐theo‐logical tradition of Western metaphysics, theology—as the science of God in quest of the certainty that belongs to knowing—already has its remoteness from the being taken to be the supreme being among beings.
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The philosophy of religion articulated as Christian theology, whether Roman Catholic patristic tradition or later Protestant theology, of course, has a long history of rationalist efforts to arrive at ‘deductive certitude’ and empiricist attempts to garner ‘inductive adequacy’ concerning the existence of God, thereby to secure a proper relation of faith and understanding. These endeavors have relied upon the presumed, manifest, or demonstrated capacity of the faculty of reason, the faculty of sensibility, or the two in combination, all engaged in a theoretical comportment of ‘knowing.’
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http://mason.gmu.edu/~rnanian/Keats-NegativeCapability.htmlI had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. — Keats
‘Knowing’s manner of being as care about certainty resides in a particular remoteness from being, that is to say, in a position that does not let this knowing, so characterized, come near its own being, but instead interrogates every entity with respect to its character of possibly being certain. — link
In Heidegger’s early thinking, particularly the lectures from the early 1920s (‘The Hermeneutics of Facticity’), hermeneutics is presented as that by means of which the investigation of the basic structures of factical existence is to be pursued—not as that which constitutes a ‘theory’ of textual interpretation nor a method of ‘scientific’ understanding, but rather as that which allows the self-disclosure of the structure of understanding as such. The ‘hermeneutic circle’ that had been a central idea in previous hermeneutic thinking, and that had been viewed in terms of the interpretative interdependence, within any meaningful structure, between the parts of that structure and the whole, was transformed by Heidegger, so that it was now seen as expressing the way in which all understanding was ‘always already’ given over to that which is to be understood (to ‘the things themselves’—‘die Sachen selbst’). Thus, to take a simple example, if we wish to understand some particular artwork, we already need to have some prior understanding of that work (even if only as a set of paint marks on canvas), otherwise it cannot even be seen as something to be understood. To put the point more generally, and in more basic ontological terms, if we are to understand anything at all, we must already find ourselves ‘in’ the world ‘along with’ that which is to be understood. All understanding that is directed at the grasp of some particular subject matter is thus based in a prior ‘ontological’ understanding—a prior hermeneutical situatedness. On this basis, hermeneutics can be understood as the attempt to ‘make explicit’ the structure of such situatedness. Yet since that situatedness is indeed prior to any specific event of understanding, so it must always be presupposed even in the attempt at its own explication. Consequently, the explication of this situatedness—of this basic ontological mode of understanding—is essentially a matter of exhibiting or ‘laying-bare’ a structure with which we are already familiar (the structure that is present in every event of understanding), and, in this respect, hermeneutics becomes one with phenomenology, itself understood, in Heidegger’s thinking, as just such a ‘laying bare’. — link
One might respond to Gadamer’s emphasis on our prior hermeneutic involvement, whether in the experience of art or elsewhere, that such involvement cannot but remain subjective simply on the grounds that it is always determined by our particular dispositions to experience things in certain ways rather than others—our involvement, one might say, is thus always based on subjective prejudice. Such an objection can be seen as a simple reiteration of the basic tendency towards subjectivism that Gadamer rejects, but Gadamer also takes issue directly with this view of prejudice and the negative connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather than closing us off, our prejudices are themselves what open us up to what is to be understood. In this way Gadamer can be seen as attempting to retrieve a positive conception of prejudice (German Vorurteil) that goes back to the meaning of the term as literally a pre-judgment (from the Latin prae-judicium) that was lost during the Renaissance. In Truth and Method, Gadamer redeploys the notion of our prior hermeneutical situatedness as it is worked out in more particular fashion in Heidegger’s Being and Time (first published in 1927) in terms of the ‘fore-structures’ of understanding, that is, in terms of the anticipatory structures that allow what is to be interpreted or understood to be grasped in a preliminary fashion. The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.
Gadamer’s positive conception of prejudice as pre-judgment is connected with several ideas in his approach to hermeneutics. The way in which our prejudgments open us up to the matter at issue in such a way that those prejudgments are themselves capable of being revised exhibits the character of the Gadamerian conception of prejudgment, and its role in understanding, as itself constituting a version of the hermeneutic circle. — link
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