14 Cultural Hermeneutics: Interpretation of the Other Yong Huang Two Types of Hermeneutics Hermeneutics has obtained such a prominence in contemporary philos- ophy that it is not an exaggeration to say that one cannot understand con- temporary philosophy without an appropriate understanding of hermeneutics. However, using Richard Rorty’s distinction between self- fulfillment and human solidarity (see Rorty 1989), contemporary hermeneutics is primarily a hermeneutics for self-creation. When inter- preting a text, a tradition, a culture–in short, an “other”–the interpreter’s main concern is what we can learn from the “other.” In other words, the primary or ultimate purpose of our interpretation of the “other” is not to understand the “other,” but to understand ourselves through our under- standing of the “other.” For example, in his hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasizes the idea of Bildung, which normally means “the properly human way of developing one’s natural talents and capacities” (Gadamer: 10). However, Gadamer adopts the Hegelian interpretation of Bildung, according to which it means “to recognize one’s own in the alien, to become at home in it” and to return “to itself from what is other” (Gadamer: 14). Since the primary purpose of hermeneutics is not to understand the other but to understand oneself through an understanding of the other, Gadamer points out, “the real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history” (Gadamer: 294). Richard Rorty makes this point more clearly. According to him, the main feature of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is that it is “interested not so much in what is out there in the world, or in what happened in history, as