On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act

Gadamer, the father of the philosophical hermeneutics, sought tointegrate the progress of science and thought by means of language

What we ultimately should care about is being able to use our knowledge to produce something new, whatever that may be. To not merely reproduce you must understand the material. And understanding requires application, a hermeneutic principle that particularly Gadamer worked out extensively. If you really want to measure your level of understanding, you should try to apply or explain something to yourself or someone else.

Every intellectual endeavour starts from an already existingpreconception, which then can be transformed during further inquiresand can serve as a starting point for following endeavours. Basically,that is what Hans-Georg Gadamer called the hermeneutic circle

The hermeneutic circle (German: hermeneutischer Zirkel) describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.

el concepto de formaciónplanteado por Hegel y Gadamer6. En Hegel apunta a la esen-cia humana: la persona en su devenir es una tarea intermina-ble para convertirse en ser espiritual general. En Gadamer, la formación debe ser entendida como un proceso constante de desarrollo y progresión, que va más allá del cultivo de las capacidades previas y de la habilidad y la destreza, para hacer énfasis en el desarrollo de las capacidades y del talen-to.

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