Hermeneutics: An Introduction to Interpretive Theory by Stanley E. Porter & Jason C. Robinson

Author:Stanley E. Porter & Jason C. Robinson [Porter, Stanley E. & Robinson, Jason C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Books & Bibles, Bible Study & Reference, Criticism & Interpretation, Exegesis & Hermeneutics, Politics & Social Sciences, Philosophy, Epistemology, Reference, Religion & Spirituality
Amazon: B006MEA1QG
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Published: 2011-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Throughout his career, Habermas has repeatedly returned to three key concepts, the public sphere, discourse, and reason. Around these, he develops a comprehensive social theory meant to free us from oppressive ideologies, prejudices, and biases. Habermas's critical hermeneutics is meant, among other things, to displace distortions within communication and understanding, and to open the way to the rationality inherent in interpersonal linguistic communication. Again, this is important for Habermas because through it we may come closer to freeing our societies from domination, violence, coercion, and ignorance. His focus on distorted communication and interaction, evident both by his theorizing about the conditions of legitimacy crises, e.g., colonization, and also by his theorizing about the conditions necessary for restoring legitimacy, e.g., the ideal speech situation, reflects his persistent emancipatory interest.

Habermas rekindles the Enlightenment project of rationality and, as a consequence, opens the door to what he sees as the way toward achieving public spaces for discourse, laws, and even democracy. Indeed, Habermas has spent considerable effort in trying to overcome what he sees as onedimensional forms of rationality. Through his elaboration of an intersubjective theory of communication, critical hermeneutics promises us ways of be ing objective while we work toward achieving the public good, made possible through our rationality that exists beyond the reign of regional biases and prejudices. For Habermas, universal pragmatics may be performed generally, consistently, and without contradiction, even though we may accept that the hermeneutical circle is the starting-point for all understanding.

Like Gadamer, Habermas avoids prescribing specific ways of acting, interpreting, thinking, etc., as if these could guarantee specific outcomes. Unlike Gadamer, Habermas prescribes procedural norms and practices for arriving at genuine and rational consensus. In this sense, Habermas's transcendental pragmatics, ideal speech situation, etc., represent, for many, the same misguided foundationalism found in Husserl's phenomenological reduction and the historical foundationalism of Dilthey. By attempting to reflect objectively on our pre-understandings, one might argue that Habermas has merely reinstated a form of objectivity and universalism that led Heidegger and Gadamer to emphasize facticity in the first place. It is not surprising that many find his regulative principles to be far too idealistic, ahistorical, and unrelated to experience, especially given that many of his distinctions seem arbitrary and rigid, e.g., between system and life-world.

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