Joseph Partain

I begin with Heidegger's admission to hermeneutical violence in the context of teaching Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Heidegger says that he used his own horizon for teaching Kant's work, and in another place says, that his own interpretation is what Kant really meant to say. ;In order to assess what happens in such hermeneutical violence, I suggest that there is an ambiguity to our word, "interpretation." We use this word to speak of a shared meaning and also to speak of a creative meaning . The first kind of interpretation or reading I call "protohermeneutics"; the second, "deuterohermeneutics." First reading is about "the said" of a text; second reading is about "wresting" "the unsaid" from "the said" of a text. ;With these distinctions about interpretation made, I argue that Heidegger is generally not hermeneutically violent at the protohermeneutical level. His violence is of the deuterohermeneutical sort, a violence integral to that kind of hermeneutics and therefore not objectionable on that account. Turning to Gadamer and his characterization of the three levels of hermeneutical experience , I show that what Gadamer implicitly finds ethically objectionable about Heidegger's hermeneutics is that he usurps authorial intention by claiming that the philosophers he interprets meant to say what he is saying. According to Gadamer, this usurpation violates the Kantian categorical imperative. By such a violation, Heidegger robs these philosophers of the merits of their own horizonal saying. In Gadamer's terms, the Thou as the one interpreted suffers under the claims of domination made by the I as the interpreter. I suggest that Gadamer's "fusion of horizons" provides a way towards a non-violence with respect to the horizons of others