THE PROBLEM OF EXISTENCE IN GADAMER’S DOCTRINE – 2014-1

Summary

Marieta K. Nikoghosyan

20th century philosophers (following Kant) rightly emphasized the danger of identification of human understandings with the real-world existence, in other words, the danger of the “ontologization” of human existence and knowledge. Especially important was the struggle of phenomenologists and existentialists against the “naturalization” and biologization of human being, when human’s research was represented by natural Sciences as the “last word” of the human essence. People usually learn to combine themselves with the world, learn to see their existence as a part and continuation of the world’s existence. They make judgments about the world not only in terms of their existence, consciousness and kind, but also proceeding from the world’s things. The human’s individual existence is controversial: people actually can look at the world only through the lens of their own existence, consciousness and system of values and at the same time human being is capable, in which Heidegger was right: “Inquire about the existence as such”. Individuals, generations of people and all of humanity proceed from their “residence” and “time”, when they “fit” in the world. But they wouldn’t be able to make any vitally important and effective step, if every day and every hour they wouldn’t disclose how “existential” the objective qualities of things and processes of the world are by themselves. People learn to synthesize themselves with the world, regarding their existence as a part and continuation of the world existence. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to live in this world, and moreover, they wouldn’t be able to inquire about the existence as such. And it is not accidental, that Heidegger in his later works seeking to overcome the subjectivism and the psychologism of his earliest position moves to the foreground of the existence as such. And developing the ideas of Dilthey, Husserl and Heidegger, Gadamer brings the hermeneutics, as a philosophical doctrine, to the bases of human life, directly to human’s nature. He is seeking a way of philosophy in “the very existence”, for which he thoroughly explores existential grounds and objective socio-historical preconditions.

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