The Condition of Hermeneutics: the Implicative Structure of Understanding

In this paper the conditional – i.e. the implicative – form is shown as the very structure of understanding. The predominance of this structure, as structure of understanding, is intended as the mark which signals the passage from phenomenology to hermeneutics, that is, from the predominance of intuitive representation (it is day, there is light) to the predominance of the transitive representation (if it is day, there is light), or more concisely, from representationalism to inferentialism. Hermeneutics is the thinking of a transitivity: to interpret is to explicate an understanding, moving from the effects back to the causes, from the consequent to the antecedent, from the signs to the signifieds and from these to sense; or, vice versa, to translate or express an understanding in signs and behaviour by descending from the causes to the effects, from the antecedent to the consequent. On the basis of these considerations (which imply a reference to Stoic logic and its theory of sign), a “hermeneutic conditionalism” is sketched out in the last part of the paper. It means that: 1) understanding has an implicative, that is a conditional, structure; 2) the conditional character of understanding is the condition of possibility of every cognitive act; 3) understanding itself is conditioned, i.e. historical determined. The conditionality of understanding defines in conclusion the hermeneutic conception of reality, its “realism”, as Wirklichkeit and not as Realität. The conditional structure of understanding corresponds namely to the structure of historical reality: far from separating the natural sciences from the human sciences, it instead fastens a clear point of contact between them.