Editing Hermeneutics (section)

===Modern Hermeneutics===
The 1950s and 1960s marked an increasing interest in hermeneutics with the turn of Western philosophy towards focus on language and its meanings.

Regarding hermeneutics, American theorist E. D. Hirsch put forth the theory that hermeneutics is the "philological effort to find out what the author meant", it is also the chief problem of hermeneutic i.e. determining the verbal meaning intended by the author. The author's intent is not merely the consciousness but the conventions, culture, norms of language, presuppositions and the literary conventions of the age in which the author was composing the work. The reader (at best) can achieve a probable meaning of the text which for Hirsch is adequate for the objective knowledge. Hirsch deliniates between "significance" and "verbal meaning"; "significance" is the meaningfulness for us or how the reader relates to a text, to its "verbal meaning" which is stable, discernible and the meaning intended by the author. The "significance" is indeterminate and ever-changing depending upon the reader and the time period when it is being read which entails differing personal, social and cultural scenarios and differing belief systems. 

For Hirsch, "significance" is not the chiefest end of hermeneutics, but a means by which to clarify the "verbal meaning".

Another line of development takes place from Dilthey's position that a reader's re-experience of the "inner life" represented by the text leads to proper understanding of that text. Edmund Husserl's phenomenology concerned itself with an analysis of human consciousness's ability to describe the "lived world" (Lebenswelt). However, his phenomenology has a temporality of consciousness which is static and in presentational terms of science. 

In Heidegger's phenomenology we find the 'historicality' (Geschichtlichkeit). His phenomenology concerns disclosing being, 'being' as such and not merely an opening up of consciousness. His 'phenomenology' is derived from Greek roots: ''phainomenon'' or ''phainesthai'', and [[Logos|''logos'']]. As Heidegger would describe Phainomenon, it is "that which shows itself, the manifested, revealed (das Offenbare)." For Heidegger hermeneutics is the fundamental announcing function through which Dasein makes itself known as the nature of being. Gadamer further extends the premise of temporality and historicality. For him, experience of one's own historicality is the "true experience" - the man who stands and acts in history and who gains insight and anticipation of the future, and who posseses a receptive openness of the past. The past or a heritage is "not simply an event which one recognizes through experience and comes to control; rather it is [[language]], that is, it of itself speaks, like a thou." The text must be allowed to speak, the reader being open to the ''text as a subject'' in its own right ''rather than as an object''. Gadamer emphasizes on 'understanding' which is not normative or manipulative but is dialectical. He is not concerned with an "objectively valid" understanding but to create 'understanding' which is as comprehensive as possible. It is for this reason that critics say that theory of Gadamer has a consequence; that the search for a determinate meaning becomes a "will-o'-the-wisp" - something impossible to achieve. There cannot be one right interpretation, as the meaning of the text is always codetermined by the particular temporal and personal horizons of a reader - ''understanding is no longer viewed as an act of man but as an event '''in''' man.''

It is also important to regard that Gadamer, like Heidegger, is a critic of modern technological thinking rooted in 'subjectism' (Subjektität) which is subjective consciousness which has certainties of reason behind it as the ultimate point of reference for human knowledge. The pre-Cartesian thinkers like the ancient Greeks saw their thinking as a part of [[Being ('Being' as such)|being]] itself. They did not have subjectivity as their starting point then grounding objectivity of their knowledge in it. They had a [[Dialectics|dialectical]] approach in which they participated, allowed themselves to be directed and guided by knowledge and even possessed by their knowledge. This way the Greeks achieved an approach to truth which went beyond the [[subject]]-[[object]] thinking which is rooted in the subjective certainty of knowledge.