Murdoch Philosophy Research Seminars Semester 2, 2009

The Beginning of Understanding: Event, Place, Truth

Prof. Jeff Malpas (Philosophy, UTAS):

Abstract:

“Understanding begins … when something addresses us” – Gadamar, Truth and Method

Hermeneutics, especially as articulated by Gadamer in Truth and Method, begins nowhere if not with the concrete experience of understanding – an experience that arises in the encounter with a work of art, in the reading of a text, in the conversation with another person, in the simple appearing of things as thus and so. For this reason, hermeneutics begins with an event – the same event that Heidegger also called the event of truth (aletheia) – although it is an event that cannot be separated from our factical situatedness in the world. The event of understanding is thus no mere passive ‘happening’, but an active engagement, nor does it remain restricted to the subjective, but encompasses the world within which the subject, always standing in relation to others, is already embedded. Both Heidegger and Gadamer refer to this situatedness, which Heidegger thematizes early on in the idea of the ‘hermeneutical situation’, as the ‘Da’ of being, even though both also tended, at various times, to interpret this ‘Da’, this ‘here/there’, in terms that prioritise temporality.

While the focus on temporality is certainly important, and especially so given the way in which understanding has so often been separated from its essential historicality (a point that is particularly important in Gadamer), it should not be allowed to deflect attention from the spatialised and located character of hermeneutical situatedness. Understanding is always singular and concrete – it is always a ‘taking place’ in place – and this has important consequences not only for the character of understanding as such, but also for the character of hermeneutical and philosophical engagement. Indeed, if a large part of what is distinctive about the hermeneutical approach is its attentiveness to the original situatedness of understanding, then this must itself be understood as an attentiveness to the essential “topos” of the hermeneutical event as such. In fact, in the work of both Gadamer and Heidegger, such an attentivness to the “topographical” or “topological” (the latter term deriving from Heidegger himself) is clearly evident, even if it is not always made explicit nor directly taken up. In the pages that follow, I intend to explore the ‘place’ that is invoked here as a means, not only to understand the character of hermeneutic situatedness as it encompasses the temporal and the spatial, but also the way in which such situatedness underpins hermeneutical and philosophical engagement – an engagement without which philosophy cannot even begin – as well as implicating, in a crucial way, the concept of truth.

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