6533b82ffe1ef96bd12959c4

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Hermeneutics of Transcendence. Understanding and Communication at the Limits of Experience

subject

description

When access to shared realities is denied or blocked as in extreme situations that transcend everyday experience, a phenomenological-hermeneutic problem arises between the solitary Ego and its socially constituted meaning. With no action space to prove one’s own reality there lacks a counter-space to transcend the ambiguously irreal reality in order to perspectivize, to understand and reflect on it. Hermeneutics of transcendence analyse the experience of borders and limitations – not starting with an interrogation of constitutive grounds of shared social meaning but with structures to regain meaning in the socio-pathological structures of life excluding a Self from horizons of shared meaning. The article explores these constitutive structures by intertwining Schutz's analytical categories of modes a solitary ego transcends towards a social lifeworld with the narratological strategies of the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz. In his poetological claim for modes of expressing a life lived at the edge of the social sphere Kertesz both exemplifies Schutz's theory of solitary self and foreign understanding and yet also challenges Schutz's implicit ethical concept. In an attempt to understand the non-typified, this article develops a concept of an ‘epoche of the natural attitude’ in constructing narrative reality and meaning transcending exemplary experience and its expression towards intersubjective grounds.