Abstract

Most generally, this dissertation argues that the hermeneutical theories of Heidegger and Gadamer, while universal in scope, are nevertheless entrapped in a mentalistic prejudice. In addition to pointing up and describing this prejudice, our project undertakes to supplement existential-hermeneutical theory with a bodily inclusive hermeneutics . ;Essentially, a bodily hermeneutics in an existential-phenomenological theory of interpretation with the lived body at its foundations. In the process of outlining the fundamental role of the body in hermeneutical experience, we shall seek out and revise the notion of intentionality as it has been employed in phenomenology from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty. As we develop a primordial intentionality of our own, we will be concerned ultimately with the ways in which our lived body gives to our experience a certain unified 'style' of Being-in-the-world. Putting this another way, we endeavor to show how the body plays a decisive "interpretive" role in the event of meaning as a kind of fore-structure and principle of effective-historicality itself. Of course, essential to this whole discussion--indeed, underlying it all the while--is the central existential notion of the temporality of human Being that was thematized in Heidegger's Being and Time and subsequently developed by Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. This crucial theme of existential thought provides a fertile soil for cultivating the possibility of unifying Heidegger, Gadamer and Merleau-Ponty in a bodily hermeneutics. ;Thus, our comprehensive project in this dissertation consists in exhibiting and conquering a hermeneutical mentalism by employing the important gains--not to mention the basic method--of phenomenological research in the areas of intentionality and the body. By seeking the birth and the origination of meaning in lived bodily experience, we have extended the project of Merleau-Ponty to include the hermeneutical experience and interpretation theory. The lived body is integral to meaning, understanding and interpretation. Our task here lies in showing precisely how this is so