FROM METHODOLOGICAL TO ONTOLOGICAL HERMENEUTICS: HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract

This text examines the consolidation of historical hermeneutics in the twentieth century, highlighting its shift from a methodological approach to an ontological understanding of historical experience. Departing from the critique of the historian’s neutrality, hermeneutics conceives historical knowledge as the result of a situated dialogue between the interpreter and the past, structured by the hermeneutic circle. In Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, hermeneutics still appears primarily as a method aimed at reconstructing meaning and distinguishing between explanation and understanding. The decisive turn occurs with Martin Heidegger, for whom understanding is not a methodological operation but a mode of being of Dasein, historically situated, making the hermeneutic circle an expression of the finitude of understanding. Hans-Georg Gadamer deepens this perspective by formulating philosophical hermeneutics, emphasizing tradition, the history of effects, and the fusion of horizons as conditions of historical understanding. Subsequent developments in authors such as Paul Ricoeur, Jörn Rüsen, and Reinhart Koselleck expand the debate by articulating narrative, historical consciousness, temporality, and the critique of language, thereby revealing the limits of a self-sufficient hermeneutics. Thus, twentieth-century historical hermeneutics redefines objectivity as situated, dialogical, and critically regulated.