Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.9, 2013

German Romanticism and Philosophical Hermeneutics

(Abstract)

Wu Jianguang

The philosophical hermeneutics represented by H.G. Gadamer attempts to carry on the historicity of German romanticism and to reflect on and criticize the scientific rationality advocated by Western Enlightenment, with a view to liberating philosophy from the Descartian scientific mythology of the subject and sublating the dichotomy between the subject and the object. Philosophical hermeneutics is a historical continuation of German romanticism. It is part and parcel of German romanticism, and is its new form under contemporary ideological circumstances. Philosophical hermeneutics inherits the claim of listening with the “Inner Ear” since Meister Eckhart, and weakens the religious element to highlight the significance of poetics. It stresses that both poetic composition and understanding are to listen to language, natural order and Mythos. This way of listening is to bring the self into the other side of a conversation to constitute a whole. Hence the discovery of truth in a holistic conversation.