Comprendere e essere: lo sviluppo della questione ermeneutica nel pensiero di Bernard Lonergan

The aim of this study is to convey the thrust of Bernard Lonergan’s method in terms of a hermeneutics of interiority as cognitive and as existential. But method has not conventionally been conceived of as hermeneutical. It might help to reduce the novelty of this idea if we recall that neither had philosophy commonly been thought to be hermeneutical; nor had hermeneutics been traditionally thought of as anything more than the art of interpretation. The genesis of philosophical hermeneutics is rather similar to the rise of method in Lonergan’s perhaps unusual sense. Besides the hermeneutical nature of basic method, Lonergan’s work has also been hermeneutical in the sense of his unique realization of the Leonine program of vetera novis augere et perficere. Finally, philosophy as hermeneutical is not simply the serious reading of classical texts of philosophy; but it is also and integrally the lifting up into fullest possible luminosity of just what is going on when one does this “reading” authentically: What I do as a matter of fact when I read, understand, interpret, translate is intimately bound up with what I am. Meeting this issue squarely means crossing over the threshold into the hermeneutics of interiority as cognitive and existential. And that is basic method in Lonergan’s sense.