Between the Black Forest and Latin America: from hermeneutics to decoloniality

Abstract

In this work, Heidegger's critique of modernity and Descartes' method will be pointed out, since when he inaugurated Modern Philosophy, Descartes did not bring light to the meaning of 'being', which remained hidden as tradition had already done: the ' entification' of being, the ontic to the detriment of the ontological. In this course, we will investigate the fact that Descartes not only omits the question of being, but also dismisses the question about the meaning of being from the cogito, because if the “cogito, ergo sum”, that is, the “I think, therefore I exist”, points out that the “being” of the thinking cogito does not need the world, the question arises: how can it, then, exist? Descartes thinks of the human being and his existence without historical roots, relying on his 'indubitable certainty,' which finds its own foundation in the subject. The repercussion of Heidegger's critique of modernity and Descartes opens up assumptions for Gadamer to think about his philosophical hermeneutic project and the conception that hermeneutics is not just the result of a technical or methodological procedure, but becomes the guiding thread in the treatment of the ontological/understanding issue, opening up to the perspectives of decolonial approaches, more precisely, of thinking modernity beyond a Eurocentric project.