Journal of Continental Philosophy

Volume 1, Issue 1, 2020

Interpreting the World Is Transforming the World

Vattimo argues that the core of Gadamer’s hermeneutics resides in the identification of interpreting with changing the world, and analyzes the ontological turn in hermeneutics in light of such identification. Vattimo advocates for a radical reading of Gadamer’s claim “Being, which can be understood, is language” and maintains that hermeneutics requires a profound revolution in ontology, overcoming the idea of Being as a given object “out there”. In light of the dialogue that Gadamer’s Truth and Method establishes with Heidegger’s Being and Time, Vattimo concludes that hermeneutic ontology has its core in the identification of reality with the history of effects; not as a descriptive proposition, but as the meaning of Being in whose horizon hermeneutics interprets the experience of the world. A coherent philosophy of interpretation, conceived as a call to transform the objective reality of things “out there” into truth, namely into language and project, actually changes the world.