2.71
Interpretation isn’t a subjective understanding on top of a real material basis. Rather, the so-called ‘real material basis’ is itself intimately and inextricably bound up with a particular kind of interpretation. We tend to interpret ‘interpretation’ as something that originates with the subject and is subsequently used to understand facets of the objective, passive world.
Instead, following Heidegger, interpretation is a way of making explicit our understanding of things,[1] which is itself bound up with our understanding of Being:[2] interpretation teases out how beings appear for us. It makes our experience of beings explicit by refocusing how beings are disclosed for us. Interpretation, then, further discloses what’s been disclosed.
Conflicting interpretations play out within (temporal, historical) horizons of meaning. How beings are unconcealed leaves open possibilities for interpretation.
Of course, it’s possible for beings to appear in an interplay of subject/object and interpretation/real material basis; but this is one possibility amongst many — one way beings may appear for us. The phenomena can dictate new interpretive understandings. For example, metaphoric ontology (§2.51) throws open interpretive horizons without a reconciliatory real basis.
But none of this means that we’re unilaterally assigning meanings to beings, or that there is no reality. We respond to beings that exist independently of us — they have their own worlds, ‘live’ their own ‘lives.’ Metaphoric ontology—which is a relational ontology—has to do with responding, in our world, to beings in their world.
With that said, interpreting isn’t something we could hold back from because it’s how we respond to our situation: we’re interpretive beings. The interpretive structure of being is how we’re thrown or struck and must take up beings in particular interpretive ways, even with and within a freeing range of possibilities for disagreement and further interpretation.
[1] Heidegger, B&T, 148/188–9.
[2] ibid, 5/25.