" as interpretive frameworks – lenses"

Here is the FRAMEWORKS, are certain lenses to look through to consider and think about various tendencies.

         rationalized society; it is rather a theory that tries to grasp the meaning of the transformation (of the idea) of Being that has been produced as a consequence of the techno-scientific rationalization of our world.10

         It should only be necessary here to say a few words about a “deconstructive” hermeneutics as a critical strategy of interpretation by way of conclusion. That the backward-looking emphasis in hermeneutics can conceivably be transformed within a more future-oriented practice is suggested by Derrida’s affirmative attitude towards the past and his desire to open up issues previously prepressed by the “dominant” histories. This dynamic approach to tradition also has a parallel with psychoanalysis, in the Freudian technique of working through the traumatic events of past experience. By taking up and restating the archetypal figures from the history of thought – at the same time as making explicit the basic ambiguities underlying their origin – the critical practice that Derrida advocates could also become a prelude to Heidegger’s “opening up”:

         This moment of doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading. To recognize and respect all its classical exigencies is not easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism. Without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading.11

         The taking up and challenging of traditions within architecture has been an important element in each of the themes in this book. It is hoped that as part of this ongoing process of critical assessment and reinterpretation – necessitated by the role of building as “cultural texts” – that enough will have been gained through the hermeneutic 

         The instability of meaning in Ricoeur’s notion of conflict was a theme in the more recent work of the Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo. Vattimo, who was also a student of Gadamer’s, developed his own version of the plurality that is characteristic of postmodernist thinking. Just as Heidegger and, later, Derrida had developed a critique of Western philosophy based on the misguided search for foundations as the ultimate ground for absolute knowledge, Vattimo likewise characterized the current state of postmodernism in philosophy as a period of “post-foundationalism” or, more memorably, “weak thought”. This situation lends significance to a range of previously marginalized discourses, such as Derrida makes clear in his discussion of fields not normally considered within philosophy. In the Truth in Painting Derrida focuses on the relationship between the work of art and the “frame”, which turns out to be constitutive for the definition of art itself. Vattimo likewise takes up this theme of the centrality of the apparently marginal, both in his discussion of architectural ornament and in developing the concept of nihilism. Vattimo borrows this term from Nietzsche, to denote the “de-centreing” of the experiencing subject which, as we have mentioned already, has been a defining characteristic of modern philosophy.

         For Vattimo, as for Ricoeur, this alienation of the individual subject from their position as “creator of meanings” has given new impetus to the idea that hermeneutic experience is actually a fundamental “mode of being”. In a sense, our very existence demands a constant project of interpretation, given that there is always some uncertainty in any act of communication – whether the “interference” that phenomenology describes between the body and the world; or the arbitrariness of the signifier/signified pair defined by structural linguistics; or the invisible filter of ideology between us and our social relations – each of the models we have discussed in this book sets out an approach to this situation. As Vattimo described the legacy that Heidegger has left for the role of philosophy within the contemporary “alienated” world:

         Hermeneutics is not a theory that opposes an authenticity of existence founded on the privilege of the human sciences, to the alienation of the 

renounce the link between the destiny of hermeneutics and the purely psychological notion of the transference into another mental life; the text must be unfolded, no longer towards the author, but towards its immanent sense and towards the world which it opens up and discloses.9

The “Conflict” of Interpretations 

The historical context of Ricoeur’s first encounter with the philosophical background of hermeneutics is important for an understanding of the whole direction of his later work. It was during his imprisonment by Nazis in the course of World War 2, that he discovered the writings of philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger and the tradition of German historical scholarship. In making sense of the fact that German politics was not the inevitable result of German tradition, he also concluded that history must be continually open to reinterpretation. From this fact he developed the general principle of the “multiple meanings” of language, which was a major contribution to the Conflict of Interpretations and a basic principle of hermeneutics. He was also critical of the idealist tendency in Husserl’s work in phenomenology, which attempted to interpret a “true” reality which is immediately apparent to the perceiving consciousness. Instead he insisted on the inescapable nature of the ongoing “task” of hermeneutics, which must be based on the suspicion of all immediately apparent meanings. He supported this endeavor in the work of various philosophers, who in their own different ways have developed a “hermeneutics of suspicion”. He included in this category some we have already mentioned: Nietzsche’s critique of the “genealogy” of rationality; Marx’s exposure of capitalist ideology; and Freud’s unmasking of the influence of unconscious as it interferes in the everyday life of the conscious mind.