Summary
Romik Kh. Kocharyan
Key words – hermeneutics, understanding, interpretation, openness, lived experience, re-lived experience
This article considers three meanings of the “open hermeneutics” and demonstrates that two aspects of the first meaning are present in Dilthey’s theory in such a way, that the second aspect is in the basis of the first, and, moreover, his conception appears to us as just the embrio of the second meaning, which later was completed by H.-G. Gadamer’s conception of philosophical hermeneutics. In Dilthey’s conception the possibility of being of human sciences is self-understood by epistemological inquiry, and his conception of hermeneutics is formulated as the universal methodology of human sciences. The goal of Diltey’s methodological reflection is to understand and interpretively explicate the calling and truth of human sciences. He defined the own subject, experience and method of these sciences, in contrast to natural sciences. In his viewpoint, the goal of human sciences is not the establishing of general laws and concepts, but the understanding and interpretively revealing of the uniqueness of the individual phenomena as such. The subject of understanding is composed of three classes of expressions of life: the first is presented by concepts, judgments, and more complex structures of thought, the second class consists of actions, the third – of expressions of lived experience, the latter is just the preferable subject of understanding, and according to these classes there are elementary and higher forms of understanding.