Hermenêutica e compreensão: a tradição como médium para a verdade em Gadamer

Abstract

The present research takes as its central theme a classical philosophical question revisited within the scope of philosophical hermeneutics: the problem of understanding. Its purpose is to analyze the relationship between understanding (Verstehen) and tradition (Überlieferung/Tradition), since, in the hermeneutical philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, understanding is realized only through the mediation of tradition and the recognition of its authority. This theoretical and bibliographical study seeks to answer the following question: in what way does tradition constitute itself as a condition of possibility for hermeneutical understanding, in light of the ontological-existential foundations of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics? To this end, the research focused primarily on the classic work Truth and Method, in addition to other Gadamerian essays, as well as on dialogue with national and international commentators who address the hermeneutical phenomenon of understanding in its relation to the authority of tradition and the problem of truth. From this perspective, the study departs from the modern question of how understanding is possible, displacing it from a strictly epistemological framework toward an ontological horizon. In Gadamer’s conception, understanding cannot be grounded exclusively on gnosiological foundations, but rather requires a hermeneutic-phenomenological grounding. Thus understood, understanding is conceived as an originary phenomenon that is realized in hermeneutical experience and fulfilled in the realm of praxis. The study highlights the hermeneutical philosophical argument for the rehabilitation of tradition and the idea of effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) as a core foundation for discussing the experience of understanding. Tradition is not configured as an object available for methodological domination, but as a historical-ontological event that takes place in the very act of understanding, as belonging. Such belonging occurs through prejudices (Vorurteile), understood as productive anticipatory structures of understanding, and is articulated in the consciousness of effective history (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) and within the horizon of language (Sprache/Sprachlichkeit). Finally, the research emphasizes that both understanding and tradition can only be fully conceived on the basis of the notion of truth (Wahrheit/Aletheia). To think a philosophical hermeneutics of truth means to reflect upon it within the ontological dimension of understanding, but above all within the medium of tradition and as a dialogical experience of the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). This involves conceiving truth as a hermeneutical event (Ereignis) and as co-belonging, with tradition functioning as the mediating space in which truth manifests itself as the movement that reinterprets and actualizes tradition itself.