UNDERSTANDING AND FEELING. A HERMENEUTIC DISPUTE AROUND HEGEL
UNDERSTANDING AND FEELING. A HERMENEUTIC DISPUTE AROUND HEGEL

Summary/Abstract: Clarifying the relationship between the faculty of understanding and feeling constituted an imported concern of many German thinkers of the 19th century. If the French Enlightenment promoted the intellect and asserted that human reason is sufficient for understanding both the physical and the social world, and the Romanticism, reacting against it, grounded the art of comprehension on the feeling, great personality of sciences of the spirit as Hegel or Goethe claimed, rightly, that this separation is, in fact, only an apparent one. We propose, in this paper, to trace the way in which Hegel argues for a necessary synthesis between the two, as well as the debate around its theory with his colleague from the University of Berlin, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Finally, in the third part of our paper, we want to clarify the impact that this dispute had within the further development of the sciences of the spirit, in general and, in particular, on the theory of comprehending the texts. We will pursue, for this purpose, the hermeneutical theory of Wilhelm Dilthey.

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