Anti-Hermeneutics

This monograph develops the concept of anti-hermeneutics and diagnoses the age of COVID-19 as one marked by anti-hermeneutics. Crist describes and defines the concept of anti-hermeneutics as constituting an active resistance to many of the hermeneutic principles or virtues that Gadamer has affirmed throughout his life and works. This includes an emphasis on conversation or dialogue for genuine interpretation and understanding, the cultivation of practical and social reason, and the call for solidarity in the world with others. Furthermore, anti-hermeneutics promotes the outsourcing of individual decision and judgment, encourages conformism, and participates in the corruption of language as the medium of hermeneutic experience. Ultimately, anti-hermeneutics marks the condition for the impossibility of a community’s collective ability to interpret, understand, and come into agreement with one another. After developing this account of anti-hermeneutics, the author discusses in specific terms how the age of COVID-19 is profoundly anti-hermeneutical. The latter part of this book focuses on how anti-hermeneutics has played a significant role in how we have collectively approached, and continue to approach, pandemic lockdowns, masks, COVID-19 vaccines, and censorship. While these topics are still considered by many to be controversial, the claim is that avoiding these discussions is itself an anti-hermeneutical gesture, and in doing so, will only exacerbate the modern hermeneutical crisis. The concept of anti-hermeneutics will be of scholarly interest for those who are familiar with or actively research Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics. However, this book will be accessible and of interest to any generally educated person with an interest in philosophical approaches to COVID-19.