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Quote :Being and Time
If the basic conditions which make interpretation possible are to be fulfilled, this must rather be done by not failing to recognize beforehand the essential conditions under which it can be performed. What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it the right way. This circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move; it is the expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself. It is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle, or even a circle which is merely tolerated. In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.
Are you lost yet? Or maybe just fore-lost? If so, fret not. We can get around this description of understanding via the hermeneutic circle. And we can get around the hermeneutic circle via this description.
Being in the hermeneutic circle means that you don’t read or hear something from the position of nowhere. You read it or hear it from an endless spiral of your own life experiences, knowledge, and presuppositions—those things that make up the fore-structures Heidegger’s talking about.
So, as you encounter what folks around you are expressing from the standpoint of your own background, you do a better job taking the parts of a slice of knowledge and working toward a sense of the whole, which then gives you a better sense of each part. And that’s how your circle revolves, around and around and around.
Heidegger didn’t want you to try to get out of the hermeneutic circle, but he did want you to roll around it in the right way—i.e., not guided by far-flung fancies and popular conceptions. Sure, your background plays a role in how you interpret, but you nonetheless have a say about how your experiences and prejudices predispose you toward the world.
But to have this say, you have to know yourself, or more specifically, the ways in which you’re inclined to see and understand the world based on all that presupposition stuff. Once you have a good sense of your own worldview and how it angles the world for you to see, then you’re in a position to reengineer it. Who ever said you can’t reinvent the wheel? Or in Heidegger’s case, the plain old circle.
Let’s look at an example with some really serious classic literature. So let’s say that you’re passionate about vampire literature. You’ve read all the classics. Mary Shelley. Bram Stoker. Anne Rice. You name it, you’ve read it. Or, in the case of Buffy, watched it. Then Stephenie Meyer comes along with Twilight and the world is never again without steamy teenage vampires with funny-colored eyes.
And let’s say you’re not taken with these vampires. Not that you’re a vampire purist, but this isn’t a question of purity. It’s a matter of undead ontology, morbid metaphysics. Vampires aren’t teenagers. And they should not have eyes that color, not to mention Mormon undertones.
Hence, you’re not inclined to recognize Edward Cullen and the gang as authentic vampires. This is your fore-conception—the conception you had before you started reading Twilight. The Heideggerian hermeneutic question is whether this fore-conception is set in terms of the things themselves—in this case, vampires, in all their historical and mythological glory.
In other words, is your conception too limited? Or has Meyer taken vampires too far away from their proper mode of being-in-the-world—or un-being, as their almost-but-not-quite-dead status might be? (Being-in-the-world, by the way, is the multi-word for Dasein, in Heidi’s original German compound.)
The sad, sharp-fanged truth is that hermeneutics doesn’t actually answer this question for you, because Heidegger didn’t really have a thing for vampires. But it does give you the tools to observe and understand the relationship between vampire fiction and the way you’ve come to think and feel about vampires so that you can analyze the Twilight series from a more, um, intellectually profound position. Because that’s the only way to analyze vampire fiction.