A SPECULATIVE MEDIUM: THE MATERIAL DIMENSION OF THE INTERPRETIVE EXPERIENCE IN GADAMER’S HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY

Abstract

Key innovation of phenomenological, or philosophical hermeneutics is the treatment of ‘understanding’ not as an operation with symbols and meanings but as an activation of the specific experiential forms, including correlative affective and bodily potentials as well as respective ‘aggregate states’ of the material-perceptual environment. In this regard, understanding is a kind of transposition from one material and bodily configuration into another. In each case, configuration is comprised of ‘subjective’ (experience) and ‘objective’ (milieu) components. But while ‘subjective’ side of ‘hermeneutic phenomenon (‘hermeneutic event’) is elaborated by Gadamer relatively detailed (for example, “theory of hermeneutic experience” makes up the central—systemic—part of Truth and Method), dynamics of the ‘objective’ side (and first of all, of its material dimension) is just indicated by the use of the vivid metaphors (for example, “fusion of horizons” or “increase in being”) or by description of everyday material practices in which ‘microphysics’ of transformative dynamics of ambient environments is implicated but not discussed overtly, as, for example, in case of Gadamer’s references to architecture, décor, and gestures. The problem here is that the ‘strong’ treatment of the transformative potential of hermeneutic experience presupposes the strong transformation affecting not only interpreter’s consciousness but also materiality of his body and ambient environments. The elements of such a ‘strong’ treatment of transformative potential of understanding, we find in Gadamer’s conception of the speculative schematically presented in the two concluding sections of his Truth and Method.