HERMENEUTICS - THE IDENTITY OF A CONTROVERSIAL CULTURAL CONCEPT
HERMENEUTICS - THE IDENTITY OF A CONTROVERSIAL CULTURAL CONCEPT

Summary/Abstract: In the last decades, the term hermeneutics has known, in the Romanian spiritual space, an increasing popularity, being frequently used in articles, studies and essays from the literary/cultural press, but also in numerous specialized works, printed in volume, from the field of humanistic disciplines. Being used by more and more authors, who use it in different contexts and with different meanings, it seems to have become a moving target – as somebody suggestively mentioned the term have tried in vain to catch its meaning. Thus, for example, there are more than a few people who – we do not need to take special courses as „how to interpret the newspaper”, and no course of hermeneutics of conversation is taught in any school! We will try, in the following, to answer such questions, offering some explanations to those haunted by such dilemmas, or still puzzled as to the meaning of hermeneutics. It should be noted, first of all, that hermeneutics conversation, although we sometimes hear such questions as: „What did he mean?” or „In fact, what did you mean by that?” etc., which lead us to the famous irony of Talleyrand, Napoleon's skilled diplomat: „the words were given to us to hide our thoughts” ... From those mentioned above, it can be deduced that hermeneutics must be more first learned and only then „criticized”, subject to confrontation. In other words, it is necessary to give priority to the teaching and, according to the understanding, one may leave room, in subsidiary, to reflection and, eventually, to doubts or disproof... That is why, we considered it necessary to devote here a first subchapter, with a prolegomenic character, to theoretical aspects such as the origins of hermeneutics, the etymology of the term, the definition of the concept, the specification of the study object, etc. Then, in another sequence, called The Paradigm of Typological Invariants, we tried to perform a periodization, but also a classification of the different types of hermeneutics, corresponding to each of the humanistic disciplines.

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