A Hermeneutic of Everyday Life

Reviews the book, Radical Reflection and the Origin of the Human Sciences by C. O. Schrag (1980). Schrag's contention the human sciences have produced such a proliferation of portraits and models of human existence that the place from which they all begin has been forgotten, if not lost. This crisis can not be overcome by another attempt at establishing philosophical/theoretical foundations, nor can it be done by an effort to unify the special human sciences by conceptually integrating their findings. Rather, we are urged to abandon the metaphor of "foundations" and instead aim toward a recovery of the originally matrix from which all foundations spring. This is to be done by a radical reflection upon and a deconstruction of the inquiry standpoints of philosophical anthropology and the human sciences. To penetrate the pre philosophical and pre scientific origins of self-understanding and world-comprehension is a precondition for a hermeneutic of everyday life that recognizes the meaning-formation already reflexively at work in the ongoing stream of precategorial world experience. Schrag is clear about the sources of the crises of the human sciences. As candidates explaining the problem, he disqualifies specialization in the intellectual division of labor, quantification and formalization, technology, and the proliferation of philosophies. The predicament instead resides in a loss of a primordial motivation for an originative questioning of our self-understanding. This understanding can be recovered only through a proto philosophical and proto scientific reflection that blossoms into a hermeneutic of everyday life and of lived-through history and praxis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)