Hermeneutics and How They Work In Our Everyday Lives

What is hermeneutics?  How does it play in our lives?  Both questions are excellent questions that many may face, especially in the communications world.  Hermeneutics is essentially a way of thinking, interpretation.  It originated as the Greek word, hermeneutice.  It is how the individual person interprets what is going on around them.  There are five hermeneutics that help identify the specific hermeneutic they are experiencing. 

Self-Explaining

One is the natural hermeneutics.  This specific theory is our everyday, unreflective interpreting that we do as human beings.  We perform this hermeneutics on a daily basis, even we when we do not realize it.  The second hermeneutics is normative.  Normative is how we interpret text as a deliberate discipline by a specialist caste.  This specific hermeneutics relates to natural hermeneutics, in the sense that we interpret text just like we interpret human beings actions subconsciously.  We do not realize we are doing these actions, it just comes naturally.  As these two hermeneutics go together, so do the third and fourth hermeneutics.

The third hermeneutics is scientific.  Scientific is the foundational discipline of the human or historical sciences, or in simpler terms, human and natural sciences.  When one thinks of science their minds often go to experimental science or science that we learn in school.  However, scientific hermeneutics relates more to the biblical reference, which is where hermeneutics originally came about in studies.  Scientific hermeneutics can help explain how humans came about and why we act the way we do.  The fourth hermeneutics is philosophical.  This hermeneutics interprets less of what we as humans do, and more of what we are as humans.  According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, they mention that philosophical hermeneutics came around in the German romanticism and idealism period.  Philosophical hermeneutics is what we use in classes as well.  Something else we use in class is the fifth hermeneutics, which is depth.  Depth is often known the “suspicion” hermeneutics.  Depth goes below the surface.  From ideology and Marx with values, to the unconscious with Freud.  Also, language and discourse are involved with depth.  Discourse is when we study the speech pattern people use when they talk and use language.  Depth helps tie the five hermeneutics together.   

Reason & Logic

All five hermeneutics work together  They all have different explanations on how they work, but all are present in our lives and are relevant in our everyday lives.  Which then leads to the hermeneutic cycle.  There is the thesis, which is us as human beings; the antithesis, which is the text; the final unit of the cycle is synthesis, which is human beings and the text.  The hermeneutics cycle helps make the five hermeneutic theories unify and become evident in our everyday lives.

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