The Responsibility to Understand

What is it about?

The concern of the present inquiry is whether, and, if so, how, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of hermeneutical understanding can help us grasp the character of our ethical responsibility, and, indeed, a sense of responsibility that remains answerable to the plurality of our always singular and contingent ethical experiences.

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Why is it important?

The focus of this essay, however, is to shed novel light on the responsibility at stake in understanding—or, as this may be referred to more simply, the responsibility to understand—on the motif of Gadamer’s call for us to “elevate” ourselves “to humanity” through “the aptitude [Fähigkeit] for conversation.” This identification of the responsibility to understand with our elevation of ourselves to our humanity appears, initially at least, to stand in opposition to Heidegger’s celebrated (some would say notorious) criticism of humanism in his “Letter on Humanism” and elsewhere. Yet, as we shall see, Gadamer’s call for us to elevate ourselves to our humanity in fact may be grasped as an ‘extreme’ form of humanism that answers to criticisms of the humanist tradition prevalent since they were first raised by Heidegger in his “Letter.”

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