--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
>
> ^^^
> CB: How are these meanings made ? What is "history"
> ?
>
I am going to reread that section of BT. (If you want to see a really fleshed-out version of all this, see Gadamer's Truth and Method. I think he was by far the best of the Heideggerians.)
> ^^^^^^
> CB: What about the passive absorbtion of these
> meanings ? Doesn't the
> passive absorbtion impact how an individual
> understands the present and
> future ?
>
> ^^^^^
Yeah. Heidegger talks about the past, the present and the future as being Gleichursprunglich, which is usually translated as "equiprimordial." The recovery of the past and the projection into the future mutually determine the meaning of the present.
> ^^^^
> CB: People aren't born liberal, radical or
> neo-Nazis, are they ?
>
It's a hermeneutic approach. A person approaches a subject, say, history, with a certain worldview (though H wouldn't use that word). The subject is experienced from within the context of that worldview, and meaning is unlocked from it in the process. Simultaneously, the meaning pulled from the subject matter changes the worldview in terms of which it is being examined. Think of it as a feedback system, maybe.
E.g. say let's say I'm a middle-class American examining Roman history with an interest because I buy into the whole "clash of civilizations" thing and want to find a Roman parallel. While studying the subject, I come across the history of Roman slavery and start thinking, "hey, all these ancient texts were written by rich people." That may then have an influence on my original approach, and so I begin to operate with a modified approach different from that with which I started.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com