This book review Of Don Idhe's Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science maps my starting point in hermeneutics. Don Ihde says that:
"....the dominant interpretation of hermeneutics, which is informed by the 'hermeneutics-positivism binary'. From this binary point of view, the natural sciences have a positivist (empirical-analytical) way of understanding and the humanities a hermeneutic (interpretative) one. The former is supposed to be dominated by realism, the latter by relativism: the sciences reveal reality 'as it really is', the humanities develop interpretations."
That is how I understand it. Hermeneutics is interpreting people's relationships with the world. Our world is 'interpreted reality' and our existence is 'situated subjectivity'. What the world 'is' and what subjects 'are', arises from the interplay between humans and reality.
An example. Link courtesy Bonyton
What sits in the background to this phenomenological description is a technology that constituted a new type of cultural system that restructured the entire social world as an object of control. Technology here is an environment and a way of life. As individuals the individual we adapt to life in a technological environment----"It took two elevators and an escalator just to grab coffee"---- and our subjectivity is shaped and formed by the technological mode of life.
Most of the people in the modernist World Trade Centre Towers were knowkedge workers. There's was a world in which information had gained the upper hand over raw materials, where software is more valuable than hardware, and where data bits are as important as atoms. Their information existed in a digital form of acquisition, processing, and distribution and they they merged into the computer world.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 16, 2003 08:36 PM | TrackBackwe are all knowledge workers, working with, working on, working through bodies of knowledge and all sorts of puns that hurt our ears...
the politics of admitting this are impossible amidst the rise of the aspirational, while my tears drip into my cafe latte
the impoverished brain has no time for looking at looking at things as they meet to construct of even just to constitute themselves as they walk to work...
i mean drive
Posted by: meika on September 18, 2003 10:44 AM