Thursday, 2 August 2012

The Aims of Interpretation… Kant & Lebenswelt

HIRSCH, E.D. (1976) The Aims of Interpretation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.


“Kant’s procedure shows very clearly that it was he and not the twentieth-century phenomenologists who first conceived the value-laden objects of cultural experience as epistemological ultimates. It was he, not ourselves, who first discovered the irreducible connection of ‘fact’ and ‘value’ in the Lebenswelt [world of lived experience]. For Kant argues that the objects of cultural experience, no less than those of primary sensation, are constituted by the mental organization of the perceiver.” (p101)
 

Annotation:
It is not important here to enter an argument of who came up with what, but Kant’s argument that the objects of our socio-cultural experience, on which our interpretations are based, are attributed meaning by the perceiver. The objects in themselves do not hold meaning until they are perceived. 

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