Dialectic Spirals and Hermeneutic Circles in Writing the Future

Notes (2003) from:

Schmidt, Dennis J. “Circles—Hermeneutic and Otherwise: On Various Senses of the Future as ‘Not Yet’.” In Writing the Future. Ed. David Wood. London: Routledge, 1990. 67-78.*

 

 

Dialectic growth requires hermeneutic understanding. Hermeneutic circle vs. dialectic spiral: —a synthesis in the hermeneutic spiral, since understanding is also a dialectic process of growth and action.

 

Circle: “When philosophers and critics invoke the circle as a description of the experience of thinking and interpreting it is because it seems to be the image that best captures the sense that experiences of reflection, learning, and understanding, are just as much recovery and recollection as discovery and creativity. Plato’s discussions of anamnesis already point in this direction. So do contemporary discussions of repetition and the hermenutic circle.” (Schmidt 68).

 

Philosophic circles and time: “since the contributions of Hegel and Heidegger, the essential trademark of philosophic circles is that they have some relation to time and history”

 

And to the self: narrative as a hermeneutic circle involving interaction, recollection and interpretation.

 

The present as a vantage point (hindsight bias)—but it is not a privileged vantage point “We need to remember that the present juncture in history, its language and tasks, is the locus of liabilities as well as vantage points” (Schmidt 73)

 

Circle as a way of showing the present entangled with something beyond it—recapturing the given (cf. revisiting our origins, after the fashion of T. S. Eliot or Elytis). The modern circle is open to the future as the time of hope (Schmidt 76)

 

 

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