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What is hermeneutics?

There is clear precedent for using "hermeneutics" to refer both to a certain praxis or art and to a certain theory of this praxis or art. The praxis or art in question is critical interpretation, more exactly, critical interpretation of historical phenomena insofar as they are expressions of unique human existence.

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Presupposed by this definition is the Heideggerian-Bultmannian insight that understanding, including understanding of all the forms of life-praxis, is an "existential" human existence, i.e., one of the structures constitutive of the "existentiality" of human existence as such; and that interpretation in the strict and proper sense . of critical interpretation is the development, on the secondary level of critical reflection, of the understanding which, on the primary level, is an "existential," and, therefore, is constitutive of human existence as such. Life-praxis comprehends all that human beings think, say, and do, whether secular or religious. Culture, on the other hand, designates the semiotic structures or "systems" (Geertz), i.e., systems of concepts and symbols, that mediate life-praxis in all of its forms, secular as well as religious. Hermeneutics, then, as the art or the theory of critically interpreting life-praxis can also be understood as -- or as necessarily including -- the art or the theory of critically interpreting culture in all of its forms, including religion.

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"... Underlying any interpretation there is a life-relation to the subject matter with which the text is concerned, or about which it is questioned..." (74).

"... interpretation always presupposes a life-relation to the different subject matters that -- directly or indirectly -- come comes to expression in texts"(75).

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