Understanding and learning: a hermeneutic approach

Abstract

This essay aims to reflect upon the relationship and the difference between understanding and learning. Thus, it focuses on two fundamental purposes. First, how understanding precedes and prepares for learning; and second, how learning differs from understanding. Specifically, learning requires a practical ability to carry out an activity related to what has been understood. Methodologically, this essay follows the fundamental principles of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology. In the first section, the essay begins from a broader concept, a common point between understanding and learning: the experience. Then it demonstrates how the experience of understanding and learning is essentially application in the sense presented in Gadamer’s Truth and method. Finally, it concludes with the proposition that both experiences – understanding and learning – are based on a broader phenomenon: the play. This leads to an important conclusion: understanding and, above all, learning are not naive experiences, without practical consequences; rather, they concern the way in which each human being behaves in the world. Therefore, the rules of the play according to which understanding and learning must be experienced end up taking over the very being who understands and learns.