THE MIDDLE ELEMENTS (4, 5, 6 AND 7) OF THE HERMENEUTIC SITUATION IN HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY

Social Sciences and Education Research Review, Volume 12, Issue 2 – 2025 451 2025, vol. 12, issue 2, 451-455 RESEARCH ARTICLE https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17870767 THE MIDDLE ELEMENTS (4, 5, 6 AND 7) OF THE HERMENEUTIC SITUATION IN HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY Ștefan VLĂDUȚESCU1 Victor Justice PITSOE2 1 University of Craiova, Romania, ORCID: 0000-0002-6929-1614 2 Department of Leadership and Management College of Education, University of South Africa, South Africa ORCID: 0000-0003-3127-8198 Abstract The hermeneutic situation in Martin Heidegger has 9 elements: the preliminaries (1), the partners (2), the hermeneutic relationship (3), the thing (4), the language (5), the discourse as address (6), the listening (7), the understanding and its derivatives (8) and the hermeneutic circle (9). The preliminaries (1), the partners (2) and the hermeneutic relationship (3) are primary elements. The thing (4), the language (5), the discourse as address (6) and the listening (7) are middle elements. Man is a hermeneutic being; as a conscious being, man evokes a hermeneutic situation through this very fact. The middle elements of the hermeneutic situation are the subject of the present study. The thing is whatever exists in one way or another. The thing (4) is what is in relation to being. Language (5) is the house of being. So the thing reaches Dasein through language. Discourse (6) is the addressed speech. Speech derives from the listening (7) that precedes it. Keywords: Heidegger, hermeneutic situation, thing, language, discourse, listening a. The thing (4) In order for Heidegger to become Heidegger, he sets out on the path opened by Husserl, from whom he takes over the method in general terms and to whom he dedicates not only the most important of his works. From this perspective, the thing is the principle concept on which the hermeneutic situation is based, and not the object or the something that are used, indisputably, synonymously. Specific to the Heideggerian approach is “starting from the things themselves”. At the beginning is the thing. The thing is primordial. In contrast to Husserl, understanding must be achieved, “starting from the things themselves” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 210). In the primordiality of the beginning supreme The thing has precedence. After it comes the primordial comprehension. Before understanding is only the thing. Elementary being, the simply-present being, comes after. Understanding begins with the thing. The simply-present being has its beginning in understanding. In other words, understanding stands between the thing and the simply-present being. On the path of understanding, the thing acquires the status of simply-present being. The simply-present being is “the thing understood” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 207). The thing is “anything that is in one way or another. (…) Only the word gives existence to the thing” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 144). It is a thing that language has reached, because within it, it pre-exists those who understand themselves through language in relation to it. Nothing is where the word, that is, the name, is missing. “What is named is understood as something” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 204). Every naming is an understanding. Naming brings with it comprehension. Everything that appears as language becomes understood. The word gives existence and significance to the thing. The thing understood, which is maintained in the prior-possession and which we aim at through the prior-gaze, becomes conceptualizable with the explication. Even when it comes to a specific and concrete explication, for example the exact interpretation of a text, and we like to invoke “what we have before our eyes”, even then what we “have before our eyes” in the first instance is nothing other than the presumed, self-evident and unquestioned opinion of the one who explicates; this opinion is necessarily present in any explicative approach and it is “postulated” from the outset with the explication, that is, with what was given from the very beginning through the prior-possession, the prior-gaze and the prior-conception. (Heidegger, 2003, p. 207). It should be emphasized that opinion is postulated. Social Sciences and Education Research Review, Volume 12, Issue 2 – 2025 452 The situation from which signification starts is the factual. The thing is factual, its perception is hermeneutic. “Factually,” Heidegger shows, “I always live in the need for signification, and every signification has its own sphere of significance (Husserl, 1997, p. 181). The need for signification constitutes the basis of anticipation. The need for signification generates anticipation which in turn, through projection, determines significations. The need is prior, anticipation is mandatory. b. Language (5) The first Heideggerian thesis regarding language is that “Language speaks. Language is speaking” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 16). There are three presuppositions that create the pedestal on which language is put under examination: “to speak is to express”, speech is “a human activity”, the human agent “represents and exposes the real and the unreal”. Accepting their correct functioning means that we could no longer say that language speaks or that speech makes man and makes him man. The second thesis is that “we speak and we speak speech” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 163). From this it follows that we speak a language that precedes us. Analyzing the thesis in the field of presuppositions, H.-G. Gadamer comes to the conclusion that “language possesses a certain, but limited, prior character” (Gadamer, 2001, p. 596). Should language be added to the three priors? Should it be, because even if it were not, we would hardly impose the premises for a reasoning that would lead us to something that Heidegger, because it is not of the nature of evidence, forces us to infer: the antecedence of language to the individual speaker. Then, he himself claims it: “This, of which we speak, language, is always already in advance of us. We never do anything but speak after it” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 163). Thus, left behind, we set out on a journey to catch up with it. Suddenly, looking more closely, we notice with amazement that we are not only following it, but actually following it. The journey to language unfolds in language itself. Every practice is a journey, and every journey is a path, a method. Under these conditions, language “becomes a guiding speech that likes to lead us on the road” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 160). Consequently, as beings on the road, we will learn the rules of language, more than anything else it will be necessary for us to acquire “the formula of the road: to bring language as language into language” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 250). Being is, therefore, on the road to language, it is, that is, in full, continuous and permanent movement, in an obligatory change: “metamorphosis reveals our relationship with language” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 256). Speaking and understanding, being comes towards language. It is ceaselessly on the road to it. In turn, through self-utterance, ec-sistent thinking passes into language this something that comes. Language makes man a hermeneutic being. Unlike the theses on the use of language, the third Heideggerian thesis refers to its nature: language is the house of being, “the shelter of being. In its shelter man dwells” (Heidegger, 1988, p. 297), “it is both the shelter of being and the abode of the essence of man” (Heidegger, 1988, p. 340). The fourth and last thesis on language: “the existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 220). Discourse is, existentially speaking, as original as affective situating, understanding and falling. There are four Heideggerian existentials: affective situating, understanding, discourse and falling. Intelligibility, even before an explicitation intervenes to appropriate it, is articulated from the outset. Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility. What is articulable through explication and thus, even more originally, through discourse is meaning. Meaning is that something in which the intelligible character of something is maintained, that thing from which starting something becomes intelligible as something. It is characterized by its value as an ultimate term. The foundation becomes accessible only to the extent that it has a meaning. Its meaning in relation to certain points of view articulates the comprehensive explication. What is articulated as such through the articulation that discourse brings with it we now call an ensemble of meanings. This can be decomposed into meanings. Meanings are always carriers of meaning. Intelligibility is expressed as discourse. The ensemble of meanings of intelligibility reaches the word. Words are added to meanings. Which does not mean, however, that we are dealing with word-things provided with meanings. The exteriorization through utterance of discourse is language. Discourse is, existentially speaking, language. Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility through meanings. It has as “constitutive moments: the what (the thing we talk about in discourse), what is said as such in discourse, communication and making manifest” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 222). c. Discourse as Addressing (6) Any speech is “addressed” by the setting out of the saying from the human being. “Speech unfolds as addressed speech” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 165). We always understand it but we do not think about it. If we did not “understand the address of speech everywhere” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 165), we would not be able to use a single word of speech. Speech unfolds as this address. The unfolding of speech declares itself as spoken, as the speech of its unfolding. d. Listening (7) Social Sciences and Education Research Review, Volume 12, Issue 2 – 2025 453 Another feature-element of the hermeneutic situation is listening: “every word of human speech speaks starting from a certain listening and speaks as a certain listening” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 15). People speak because they listen, and insofar as they respond to her speech, they do so in a double way: “they take from her what they give her” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 36). In other words, what one of the partners thinks the other has said to him, he actually says to himself. Man speaks because he responds to the word. To respond is to lie in wait. There is listening insofar as there is belonging to the injunction of silence. Man speaks only insofar as it corresponds to speech, for, according to the first thesis, language is speaking. Two things are proper to listening: that it receives and accepts its determined existence (determined existence in terms of tone) and its intelligibility, its understanding by the one to whom it is given to hear even through the entrusted speech (Heidegger, 1976, p. 164). e. Conclusion Preliminarily, a hermeneutic situation goes towards the “address” that the discourse imprints on it. The address is, however, on the path of language and even in language. 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