Application As Practical Wisdom

Hermeneutics has an applied orientation at its etymology,and in the early classical hermeneutics,application has always occupied an important place.But the modern hermeneutics initiated by Schleiermacher,while trying to realize the universalization of hermeneutics by means of the scientific method,also obscures and forgets the application as the basic element of interpretation.Gadamer,based on phenomenal thinking and existentialism,returned to the ancient Greek tradition of theory as practice and practice as application,and"rediscovered" application as a mediator between the universal and the particular as a trinity with understanding and interpretation,an intrinsically unified element,and the problem of application between the sameness of a text and the concrete situation necessary for understanding that text.The question of the application of tension is a fundamental problem of hermeneutics.The task of application is actually present in both philosophical hermeneutics and universal hermeneutics,but their connotations are obviously quite different.The latter is a scientific-technical application,the use of technical knowledge to obliterate particularity and access to objectivity,practically obliterating the rationality of the application itself.The application of philosophical hermeneutics is not a methodological element that guides what understanding should do,but an action that brings the interpreted text into the field of view where its meaning can be revealed,an existential event that allows the meaning of the text to occur historically,or the practical wisdom of interpretation that reveals the truth.The application of practical wisdom as a kind of understanding reveals that the search for the universal is never neutral or objective,but is related to the particular concerns of the individual,and that the meaning of the text revealed in interpretation is actually the possibility of the interpreter’s own earthly existence,and that the existence of the interpreter with practical wisdom is generated in the practice of dialogical participation in interpretation.Practical wisdom is based on the fact of interpretation that there is a temporal spacing between the text and the interpreter,i.e.strangeness,and is concretely realized in the integration of the interpreter and the text’s field of vision and the emergence of the history of effects.In the process of interpretation,the application of practical wisdom is regulated and conditioned by the affiliation to tradition,but this historical finiteness is at the same time the root of the creativity of interpretation,and an openness without borders only slips into nothingness.The principle of the historicity of understanding emphasizes that there is no better understanding,but only different ways of understanding,that the field of view of each interpretation is different,and that different hermeneutical experiences are produced for the same text,so there is the question that the emphasis of philosophical hermeneutics on application has a relativistic tendency.But relativism essentially shares the same premise as objectivism,which presupposes that objects have prior objective meaning.Philosophical hermeneutics does not consider the existence of an objective reality of the text without history at all,but only recognizes the "thing in itself" of the text that emerges in the process of interpretation,which admittedly has a relativistic requirement,but is never relativistic.The application of philosophical hermeneutics to the problem of moral universal exceptions is an example of its ability to overcome the dilemma of ethical practice and dissolve the problem of relativism.