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Understanding, Frameworks, and Interpretation

Seyla Benhabib:

Understanding always means understanding within a framework that makes sense for us, from where we stand today. In this sense, learning the questions of the past involves posing questions to the past in the light of our present preoccupations. The reconstruction and interpretation of another’s thought is a dialogue in which one asks a question, seeks to comprehend whether this question is meaningful for the other, listens and reformulates the answer of the other, and, in light of this answer, rearticulates one’s original position. Every interpretation is a conversation, with all the joys and dangers that conversations usually involve: misunderstandings as well as ellipses, innuendos as well as surfeits of meaning.

The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, p. xlviii

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