Donna Frost

Chapter 3 62 (Heidegger, 1953 / 1962 ). We are generally more involved with getting on with our lives, and in that process every act of recall, representation, judgment, presumption, hope, expectation, and so on, is directed at something. We navigate this world, then, according to what we understand of it at the time, whether these understandings are conscious or not. It is only under special circumstances that our understandings, or our search for understanding, become a scholarly task (Gadamer, 1975 / 1989 ). Our beliefs and understandings – even if unconscious – can however be divined from careful examination of the way in which we interact with the things which they pertain to (Heidegger, 1953 / 1962 ) and the viewpoints we encounter (Gadamer, 1975 / 1989 ), and in our recognition of and response to the humanity of the ‘other’ (Levinas, 1969 ). So examining the practical wisdom used in our everyday lives offers a way to uncover our understandings about our situation and the meanings we ascribe to our being-in-the-world. The role language plays in the creation and revelation of understanding is examined by all three of these philosophers (eg. Heidegger, 1959 / 1971 ; Gadamer, 1975 / 1989 , 1976 ; Levinas, 1978 / 1991 ; Heidegger, 2005 ). Although they differ in focus and sometimes in standpoint, there is a common recognition of the pervading influence of language in the ways in which we come to understand the world, and also in the ability of some kinds of language, expressive language such as poetry, for example, to reveal to us more than the surface meaning of thewords (Heidegger, 1959 / 1971 ) and to help us become conscious of the less tangible aspects of our being in the world (Levinas, 1935 / 2003 ). For Gadamer ( 1975 / 1989 ) the process of developing understanding is always dialogical and all understanding is linguistically mediated. Merleau-Ponty ( 1958 / 2006 ) explicitly rejects this view. He argues that our process of coming to understand is bodily and experiential and does not require that all meaning be understood linguistically (Wrathall, 2005 ). This point is returned to in the next section, ‘Embodied selves’. The epistemological consequence of our being enmeshed in the world is that our hermeneutic process, whether linguistic or not, is circular. It involves a recurring movement between the detail and thewhole, between particular featureswhich can only be understood with reference to the complete landscape and the landscape which has meaning only by virtue of its particular features. This circularity refers not only to the object of our understanding but also to the processes involved in coming to understanding: “ understanding develops through a circling back and forth between presumption and surprise ” (Moran, 2002 , p. 18 ), between the explicit and implicit. This process is elegantly illustrated by Gadamer ( 1975 / 1989 ) with reference to learning an ancient language: