Dean Komel

Taken philosophically, Europeanness is the origin of intercultural encountering and understanding rather than some sort of substantial basis of common cultures. This of course doesn’t imply the negation of historical foundations of common European existence, which were the key determinations -- be they good or bad -- of its geography. However, these determinations remain obscure unless the horizon and the ground are constituted from the midst as the intercultural midst of the world. Intercultural evidence of culture reveals itself from within the midst of the world as the ground and horizon of mutual encountering

The question of the contemporaneity of Europe appears in the context of dialogue on the common European future, which, on the one hand is an achievement of the encounter of diverse cultural languages and, on the other, dictated through reflection on what is reestablishing the Europe of today as a world’s. Views on “opening the future” and “enabling development” cannot be mutually harmonized, since there is a lack of experience of contemporaneity in the jointing of horizons. From this experience also comes the common interest in European dialogue. The diversity of European languages does not prove to be an obstacle to reestablishing this dialogue, but its vital condition. It is, namely, the historically mediated possibility that brings the essential difference into the uniform process of the expansion of power without difference

Eden od osnovnih vzgibov razvitja filozofije v 20.stoletju je bil nedvomno poskus hermenevtične utemeljitve Geisteswissenschaften pri Wilhelmu Diltheyu, ki se je pri Heideggru zaokrenil v smer hermenevtičnega zasnovanja filozofije same in naposled doprinesel k uvidu, da znotraj filozofije ni več kaj začenjati, ter da je pristni kraj mišljenja treba določiti onkraj filozofije. Vendar pa se mišljenje, ki stopa čez filozofijjo v hkratnem sestopanju pod njo, nahaja na poti vmes, v neki vmesnosti, ki zase terja svoje razumevanje. Tako razumevanje predvsem zaznamuje »ukvarjanje s hermenevtiko«, ki se je v prejšnjem stoletju vsekakor pomenljivo preobrazila v filozofsko hermenevtiko. Kaj zaobsega ta oznaka izvemo šele, ko sežemo do tistega, kar naj bi bilo v njemu dosegu: sodobnost kot godišče filozofske hermenevtike.One of the basic incentives of the development of philosophy in the 20th century was undoubtedly the attempt at hermeneutic grounding of Geisteswissenschaften in Wilhelm Dilthey, which, in Heidegger, took the course of hermeneutic formation of philosophy itself and eventually led to the insight that there is nothing to begin with within philosophy and that the genuine place of thinking should be determined from without philosophy. However, thinking which transcends philosophy and descends under it at the same time finds itself on the way in between, in a certain midst, which calls for an understanding proper only to itself. Such understanding primarily determines “dealing with hermeneutics”, which in the previous century tellingly transformed into philosophical hermeneutics. What this designation actually embraces can only be realized after we have reached that which was in its grasp: contemporaneity as the going-on of philosophical hermeneutics.

To speak about works of art or the essential relevance of art for philosophy today is far from being an easy task, if at all possible. What needs to be called into question is this very possibility in its possibility – in both art and philosophy. The pretentiousness of the question is not related only to the fact that contemporary aesthetics and theory of art are fundamentally involved in distancing themselves from the inherited philosophical notions on art. Sooner or later, the appropriateness and scope of such restrictions turn out disputable. The weight of the question lies in the very manner of the process of artistic creation and the presence of artworks

The underlying premise of this essay is that the essential contribution of the hermeneutic turn in contemporary philosophy is the acknowledgment of a historical criterion of thinking, whereby the philosophical tradition is claimed by the question of its own truth. Philosophy, historically established by founding experience in truth, thus finds itself facing the open experience of truth, i.e. the truth as the coming about of the openness. Philosophical hermeneutics, as differing from hermeneutic philosophy, cannot limit itself solely to interpretative criticism. Rather, it must follow the opening of truth primarily happening in transit from thinking to language. And the moment of this transit is the question of ourselves.