Understanding the words is, everyone will agree, itself a toil. One not only has to learn the grammar of the language, but also the meaning, use and construction of words. The latter leads one to the psychology of the person, whose context is wider than the individual and extends to a whole society, even an entire epoch. No wonder, in the end Schleiermacher concludes that "the totality of understanding is always a collective work." In my own discipline, for example, it is not possible to understand Martin Heidegger if one fails to reckon with the two-thousand-year history of the West. And, indeed, one has to listen to what countless writers on Heidegger are saying if one is adequately to understand what he means.

¶ 9:20 AM