Die Macht der herrschenden Verstehbarkeit über Bedingungen eines nicht-trivialen Zusammenhangs von Anthropologie und Hermeneutik (The power of the dominating understanding. On the conditions of a non-trivial connection between anthropology and hermeneutics)

This essay attempts to take up the challenge of the human subject’s understanding in light of contemporary systemic superstructures and above all the achievements of Artificial Intelligence. For the construction of a respective theory of human understanding, a number of significant impetuses arise as soon as the argument regarding the conditio humana – in contrast to the one-sided conception of man as an actively interpreting subject – takes into account the fundamental passivity of its condition, as well as its need for comprehensibility. The theory has to consider how the understanding of being a subject develops in acts of comprehension, i.e. the self as a secondary formation. (The essay outlines parts of such a theory referencing H. Plessner.)The fruitful consequences of such an undertaking are situated in three areas: (1) The complex processes of construction in all modes of understanding. (2) The imposition or demand to understand (versus a complete moralization, i.e. understanding as a bestowed kindness or as pertaining to the extend of one’s character). (3) The primordial situation for human beings is that there are already interpretations and ascriptions; from that results the structural susceptibility to ideology within the hermeneutical process (the homo interpretativus is at once the homo ideologicus). To this ideology which masks the real interrelations belongs essentially the ideology of hermeneutical concepts and metaphors themselves which circulatein our times in everyday speech. Considering these three areas, also helps to escape a new fundamentalism which certain hermeneutical modes of thinking harbour within themselves ( anthropologoumena in place of a necessary social theory).