The main focus of this reading was exploring the ways we think about thinking and ultimately asked us to explore how we engage in knowledge and interpretation.
My main focus throughout this reading was on Hermeneutics, which is the theory and practice of interpretation. It developed primarily as a branch of philosophy and theology and was largely concerned with the interpretation of literary texts. Hermeneutic readers of the bible believed that all biblical stories were divinely inspired and therefore contained moral truths and lessons. Since then, Hermeneutics has been applied to all different kinds of written and spoken texts and cultural practices.
Martin Heideggar asked the question “What does it mean to be?” He argued that human beings don’t exist apart from the world. The world isn’t something separate that needs to be analyzed but rather we emerge from and exist in the world and we can only know it by being a part of it. Understanding isn’t an isolated act of cognition, but a part of human existence.
A work of art has a special character, “It is a being in the Open” where the Open is a proper noun. The Open is a cultural space created by an entire new level of understanding of what it means to be a being. Works of art express a shared understanding of the meaning of being. In this way, art can give understanding to any range of different things.
Art has a stubborn “irreducibility” which is why people argue over the meaning of art. When art no longer functions as a cultural paradigm it simply becomes an object of aesthetic contemplation. Art is about experience not about feeling. Heidegger also argues that art is not representational or symbolic, arguing that this approach can’t even being to capture the way that art functions to shape human experience.
On the topic of contemporary art,this chapter argues that the contemporary interpreter can never perfectly recreate the artist’s original intentions or the original conditions of reception. Both the artists and the hermeneutists are limited by their different social, cultural, and intellectual horizons. The idea of the Hermeneutic circle is that the meaning expressed by a cultural artifact or practice does not emerge only from the creators intentions, but also depends on the whole system of meaning of which it forms part. We can think of interpretation as a loop, or a circle if you will, where you are only ever able to enter into the middle, past experiences feed your interpretation which in change feeds the larger discourse.