Hermeneutics and Politics

Abstract

Interpretation and politics merge in one the famous story of Joseph's power of dream interpretation in the Hebrew Bible. Rome's College of Augurs reinforces the entwinement of interpretation, power, religion, and folklore that one can also find in the earlier context of the Delphic Oracle. Augury reminds us that understanding happens in the context of an event, a context that presupposes one is missing something, lacking the necessary vision or foresight, and help is called for. Most of the contemporary scholars who write about philosophical hermeneutics, the tradition which includes Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, are allergic to politics in the proletarian sense of that word. Party politics and parliamentarian procedures receive almost no attention in the secondary literature on contemporary hermeneutics. Assertion about the political incompetence of philosophy opens the door to an esoteric tradition in philosophy that includes Plato's “secret doctrine”, and stretches back to Pythagoras and Heraclitus.

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