TAIKYMO FUNKCIJA H. G. GADAMERIO FILOSOFINĖJE HERMENEUTIKOJE: PRAKTIKOS KOGNITYVUMAS
FUNCTION OF APPLICATION IN H. G. GADAMER’S PHILOSOPHICAL HERMENEUTICS: COGNITIVITY OF PRACTICE

Summary/Abstract: The article continues the analysis of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and its fundamental concept – hermeneutical understanding – that pursues in this specific method of humanitarian sciences much more universal and significant structure of any human cognition in general. The main problem of investigation remains the same: adequacy of evaluation of the role that aspect of normativity plays in Gadamer’s hermeneutical understanding and also in the conception of all human thinking in general both with its consequences to any epistemological theory. In the second part of the article the main object of the investigation – the fundamental components of any human cognition – normativity and cognitivity together with so multiple and important their mutual relationship – is viewed from the perspective of moral theory and practice. The first part of the article discerns the main elements of hermeneutical understanding and emphasizes normativity of cognition as especially important notion that determines and transforms the whole epistemological structure. The second part of the article proceeds to the consideration of the peculiarity of cognitivity of hermeneutical understanding. This way the main objective of the article is pursued: to reveal the influence of normativity to hermeneutical understanding and describe the most important aspects of the transformation that traditional conception of human cognition in general undergoes. We see the same relationship between particularity and universality in Gadamer’s hermeneutics as the one that is found in the field of moral practice and that is opposite to the relationship in modern natural sciences: priority is given to the particularity that also deserves the epistemological status. In this reversal of the relationship between particularity and universality we recognize ontological orientation to the factual Gewordene Sein that determines all Gadamer’s hermeneutics and its epistemological characteristics. In hermeneutical understanding normativity appears to be the true source of cognitivity and condition of its possibility: application that in its essence has the character of morality not only is identified with cognitive act of cognition but is the very act itself. Gadamer rehabilitates hermeneutical understanding not only as the more significant kind of human cognition but also as the more correct, truer and even more cognitive cognition that perhaps is the only kind of cognition altogether that truly cognizes the true reality. Hermeneutical understanding starts with the primordial unity of “subject” and “object”. Instead of trying to break the real, true-life relationship that binds them both and eliminate them from the process of cognition, as the modern natural science would require, hermeneutical understanding chooses these relationship to be the field of its pursuit for the “higher” cognitive synthesis. “Subject” of hermeneutical understanding appears to be practical, moral in its nature. Its

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