Guerilla Metaphysics… Criticism of Hermeneutics

HARMAN, G. (2007) Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court Publishing Company.

“hermeneutics still ascribes to humans (and perhaps even to animals) an apparently miraculous power: the ability to convert the sheer impact of the world into pictures of simulacra of such impact. Humans still transcend the world and contemplate it, even if only partially, and this makes humans different in kind from mere paper, sand, or gold. It is still humans alone can perceive the world, and the philosophical gap between sentient and inanimate or object and appearance is still taken as a given.” (p#)

Annotation:
The criticism of hermeneutics here is that as it reveals the structure and personal interpretation of a human’s experience, it is only revealing a state of being that has always existed in humans. This is a pointless criticism as hermeneutic phenomenology seeks to reveal the meaning behind that said experience, and until the phenomenologists began this inquiry that state had never been addressed. Despite this Harman does ascribe to hermeneutics that its power is “the ability to convert the sheer impact of the world into pictures of simulacra” (p#) of the studied experience. This demonstrates the contribution that this methodology makes to understanding human experience within the world – to reveal the unrevealed.