“Archeology of Knowledge” and Interpretation: a hermeneutical approach.

by | Jul 14, 2018 | Senza categoria | 0 comments

Meaning is not a consequence of a cause, but the working out of the knowing subject. While in the natural sciences the object of the research is a material element always equal to itself in space and time, having no awareness of the mechanisms where it belongs, in Human Sciences the subject (the researcher) and the object being studied (the historical man) share the same nature and work with the same mechanisms. The object cannot be reduced to a “thing” separated by the ways employed to know it and the knowing subject is not a neutral entity, as it knows beginning from his own historical being, which makes him belong to a horizon of conceptual bonds. Because of this, the subject is in cultural symbiosis with part of the knowledge he intends to track down in the object. In this context interpretation is the act by which, through the recovery of the lost code, the meaning is returned to a historical fact.

The understanding occurs in a hermeneutic process that starts from the inside as a form of knowledge in which the subject and the object come to coincide. According to Ricoeur every interpretation wants to overcome a remoteness, a distance between the past cultural time to which the text belongs and the interpreter himself.  Overcoming this distance, making himself contemporary to the text, the interpreter can take possession of the meaning. Every Hermeneutics thus comes to being understanding of itself through the way mediated by the understanding of the other. This approaching to the object however is not an empathetic process. In the historical object which we mean to know there is a core of knowledge which is still available, but only in a mediated form. This result is achieved through a process, the “hermeneutic circle”, which goes from the whole containing to the contained part and vice versa. I gave this hermeneutical procedure the name of  “Archeology of Knowledge” . A historical research usually has its starting point in the farthest event in the chain of understandings. One must start from the most ancient document, where our knowledge is more lacking, because of his distance from the sources from which its understanding is originated. On the contrary, a journey in the “Archaeology of Knowing” always starts in the present time. Since the conclusions we arrive at are originated from our pre-understanding and extend, in the ways we have described, as far as to their farthest layers, every research should start from the point in which the subject and the object of the research are nearly superimposable identities, that is the present time, today, to go back then in time along the path marked by the inevitable and progressive acquisition of the distance between subject and object, which the interpretation, working with the available data, reassembles.

The “Archeology of Knowledge” allows to elaborate a stratigraphy in which the light produced by the comprehension of the (contemporaneous) elements  identified on the country level, managed to illuminate the underlying levels, to glimpse the oldest level where the whole sequence had originated. 

La Danza delle Origini

Versione cartacea

di Gaudenzio Ragazzi

15.00

C’era una volta il Torchio

Versione digitale

di Gaudenzio Ragazzi

8.60

L’ Albero del Tempo

Versione digitale

di Gaudenzio Ragazzi

4.90

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