Hermeneutics Quotes

“For Heidegger, language is really the means by which we have a world in the first place—it is the most important medium for relating to the world. Particularly for the later Heidegger, language is what makes the world a home to us, providing the symbolic web of meaning relations that make up the conceptual map by which we interpret the world. His claims that ‘Language is the house of being’, or that ‘Language speaks us’ are provocative phrases meant to indicate that language is not a tool to name objects in the world but the very lens through which we understand the world and ourselves.”
― Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction

“Natural science, economics, and politics depend on literature, philosophy, and religion for educating the imagination... we cannot oppose facts to values, but... all facts are integrated into meaningful wholes through a personal commitment to some kind of vision of how things ought to be. If this universal hermeneutic claim is true, then the shaping of our imagination through historical, philosophical, and literary texts in the humanities is indeed paramount.”
― Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction

“His claims that ‘Language is the house of being’, or that ‘Language speaks us’ are provocative phrases meant to indicate that language is not a tool to name objects in the world but the very lens through which we understand the world and ourselves.”
― Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction

“Imagine for a moment that you want to attend a concert or play. After parking the car and walking six city blocks on a cold, rainy evening, and while lining up at the entrance for another half hour, you glimpse an inviting auditorium seat. The seat appears to you not as a meaningless object of neutral observation but as a place of comfort where you can rest and warm your weary bones while enjoying the anticipated performance. You do not first perceive this seat from a purely objective stance in terms of its compositional material or its measurements. Such a theoretical stance is not our primary mode of perception, but a secondary, unnatural way of looking at things we adopt when we abstract something from the context of our experience to study it separately. Should, for example, the seat collapse under us as we sat down, only then would we adopt a scientific attitude and examine the seat to determine its structure and the reasons for its malfunction.”
― Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction

“Philosophical hermeneutics, as Gadamer himself put it, is concerned with ‘understanding understanding’. As a philosophical discipline, hermeneutics examines and describes what happens when understanding of any kind takes place.”
― Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction

“In contrast to our modern inclination to discount philosophy, religion, and poetry as sources of real knowledge, the ancient world considered them to be important carriers of moral ideals.”
― Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction

“It is the task of the humanities to act as cultural memory by keeping the history of concepts alive and by guarding important insights for future generations.”
― Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction

“The notion of god-consciousness was Schleiermacher’s answer to the modern fragmentation of knowledge. He argued that even those who do not actually believe in gods nonetheless assume that what they know reflects part of a greater meaningful whole. He believed that by completing our understanding of the universe, every science deals with a particular facet of the Spirit’s unified artwork, and thus contributes to our knowledge of God. Ultimately, not only science and art, but also science and religion, are grounded in the same unifying whole and therefore not inherently at loggerheads.”
― Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction

“Schleiermacher realized that this conflict stemmed from a deficient view of human knowledge. With uncanny prescience, he warned that failing to address this modern obsession with certainty would create a society dominated by culture wars between secular and religious fundamentalists, each believing itself to have the monopoly on truth. A prophetic warning indeed!”
― Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction