Description

WHAT IS HERMENEUTICS? The term "Hermeneutics" is in great demand in our times. Presently, it is one of the most attractive catchwords. Almost countless hermeneutical approaches are vying for attention in the academic and cultural centers across the globe. In view of its use in different contexts with so many different meanings, the word no longer enjoys a univocal meaning. Hermeneutics has a long-drawn-out history and it has been universally applied as an approach to an understanding of Art, Religion, Literature, Philosophy, History and even Science. It has negotiated countless vertical and horizontal vicissitudes throughout its long historical evolution. There are numerous debates within the tradition of hermeneutics. The practitioners of hermeneutics share certain critical concerns and perspectives that constitute a strongly unified philosophical programme. To begin with, it is one of the abiding assumptions of hermeneutics that human intellect per se or pure consciousness can never serve as a wordless and timeless source of insights. Man is incapable of appropriating of reality in itself. He just cannot have wordless intuition of reality. According to hermeneuticists, no human understanding can ever operate wordlessly or timelessly. Human understanding always operates within some evolving linguistic framework that has been worked out our time against the backdrop of some historical condition, concerns, and practices. Hermeneuticists are firmly convinced that language and history always condition human understanding. They also constitute the limits of human understanding. Hermeneutics as a discipline or science deals with problems pertaining to understanding and interpretation of signs, some message, and collection of propositions or a text. Etymologically speaking, hermeneutics is associated with the name of the Greek god Hermes who was the messenger of gods. Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation and any act of interpretation is inherently triadic in structure: Firstly, there has got to be a text, Secondly, a.