Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide

by Patricia Waugh

Hermeneutic philosophy, which developed out of German Romanticism, insists that there is a more fundamental state of affairs pertaining to beings-in-the-world in which something is understood as something or recognized before the kind of warranted assertability of scientific description becomes possible.

truth of being which is always rooted in history and never circumscribed by scientific definitions of what the world is.

central concern of both thinkers is to defend the validity of the kind of 'understanding' at issue in interpreting literary, historical, religious, and philosophical texts against the growing tendency in the West to rate scientific understanding as the only genuine or 'objective kind'.

Gadamer drew on Heidegger's arguments to endorse the authority of traditional intellectual skills, such as textual interpretation, rejecting demands that there is a need to underwrite them with some more fully transparent 'scientific' method

Gadamer stresses the way in which Heidegger's work reveals the essentially pre-reflective, non-theoretical nature of human understanding.

(Dasein-literally 'bei...

our basic forms of knowledge are no...

In other words, most understanding is not the self-conscious and logically consistent deployment of clear systematic concepts of things or actions. We literally do not 'know' what we are doing in that sense, but this is not to say that we are ignorant or have no u...