关键词: 诠释学, 语言, 实践, 德行

Abstract: The task and object of hermeneutics are closely related. Hermeneutics, which attaches the importance to texts or the authors’ original meanings, is normally characterized by methodology. In contrast, the ontological hermeneutics rooted in German romanticism has initiated a new dimension that examines hermeneutic phenomena from the perspective of consciousness. Giving “understanding” an ontological status and regarding it as the foundation of Dasein, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is sublimated from a doctrine of interpreting techniques to a “practical philosophy”. Thus, hermeneutics directly turns to our life world and our own existence. It is this turning that has made philosophical hermeneutics gradually become apart from epistemology and unavoidable to result in a relativist concept of understanding. So, what is coming for hermeneutics? We can get a profound insight from Confucianism, especially from Confucian hermeneutic tradition of the Book of Changes (Yijing). In his interpreting Yijing to “observe its moral significance”, Confucius stresses the moral dimension of hermeneutics. If we define the task of hermeneutics as developing virtue and promoting the Dao and thus all hermeneutic activities are carried out surrounding “virtue”, hermeneutic methodology will not become a pure technical tool on the one hand and Gadamer’s hermeneutic ontology has a dimension of value so as to avoid the morass of relativism. This shall be the direction of contemporary hermeneutics.