Hermeneutics in Montaigne and Gadamer: The Art of Conversation (III, 8) and the Language as a Medium of Experience

da arte da conversação (III, 8) e a linguagem como médium da experiência

Abstract

This work seeks to argue that hermeneutics can be understood as the search for the interpretation of meaning in Montaigne and Gadamer. For Montaigne the event makes the knowledge, and not the knowledge makes the event. In Gadamer we only have 'explanation' and 'description'. Both, however, find that other possibilities of inquisition are hidden by abstraction and logos. In this sense, hermeneutics excavates these layers forgotten, buried or despised. In short, we investigate how this search for meaning in these two authors is given either through conversation or through language. The central idea we develop is that the conversation has its own spirit, and the language we use 'unveils' and lets something arise that it is from then on. Montaigne even advocates the need for a new language for the Pyrrhonian philosophers who cannot express their general conception in any form of speech, since they would need a new language.