George Bondor, “History as Macro-phenomenon: Heidegger and Gadamer”, in: Carlos Belvedere, Alexis Gros (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Macrophenomenology and Social Theory, Springer, 2023.

History’s admission to phenomenology fuels at least two overthrows. Firstly, it changes the prejudice that phenomenology is an ahistorical approach. Secondly, it modifies the impression that this philosophical method is possible only as a micro-phenomenology. In young Heidegger’s courses and in Being and Time, historicity is not regarded as an ordinary phenomenon, but the very existential background of the Dasein, delivering a whole range of inherited possibilities for projection. Along the same train of thought, one can find the seeds of the hermeneutic turn in phenomenology. The current interpretation is that early phenomenological projects describe historicity within the framework of a micro-phenomenology, which defines the phenomenality from the perspective of individual subjectivity. The main purpose of the present chapter is that of exploring some manners in which the problematics of history/historicity becomes relevant for a macro-phenomenological perspective and for the interconnectedness between phenomenology and social theory (offering a basis for the critique of inauthenticity and alienation). I will argue that the discovery of the limits of the subject within Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s hermeneutic phenomenology restores the scenario of hermeneutic circularity between part and whole but taking into account the existential difference between an authentic and an inauthentic way of being.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34712-2_13