A ética como fundamento ontológico da compreensão em Gadamer

Abstract

This text has its main theme the philosophical hermenutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The main aim is to investigate the possibility of understanding ethics as the ontological foundation of comprehension, given that the Gadamer’s hermeneutics develops itself in the range of practical phylosophy. To make this more evident, we will begin our investigation by presenting some fundamental concepts of philosophical hermeneutics, as well as some of its historical roots. We will analyze the concept of comprehension which, for Gadamer, ceases to be an epistemological problem and becomes an ethical issue. Based on this work we will be able to see that Gadamer relates his hermeneutics to the Greek tradition of ontological thinking by understanding that since the beginning he has recognized that the whole search for knowledge being a natural disposition of man, was originally a moral phenomenon. Therefore, in order to reconquer the original meaning of the hermeneutic phenomenon, its ontological meaning, lost in the methodological deviations of the modern sciences, it retakes the concept of Aristotelian phronesis to serve as a model for the hermeneutic reflexive virtue. It also rescues the Socratic-Platonic dialectic to emphasize the primacy of the question and the importance of dialogue in the process of knowledge. Thus, for Gadamer, hermeneutics is the way of being of the human being who, in seeking to comprehend the world, finds himself faced with the opportunity to comprehend himself. To comprehend is to recognize; it is the attitude of those who know they do not know and want to know and who adopt the opening posture and dialogue with the other. The comprehension because it is originally dialogic, recognizes the other as an essential partner in the search for knowledge, thus revealing its true ontological foundation: ethics.