What is the "meaning" of being? This is not a question of what we know and how we may guarantee interpretive accuracy. Rather, it is a question about our mode of knowing, a question about our living as knowers, not about the status or content of our knowledge per se.

most hermeneuts no longer try to answer what a particular passage "really means" in a complete and total way or what an author "really intended."

Saussure

In sum, hermeneutics - once something characterized by specific tools of thought within a handful of disciplines - has become a general theory of understanding for all spheres of human awareness.

distinguishes between the signifie (thing signified) and the significant (signifier),

For our purposes there are six distinct hermeneutical trends that, while overlapping in many areas, are worth examining in detail: romantic, phenomenological and existential, philosophical, critical, structural, and poststructural (deconstruction).

Hermeneutics attempts to answer the question by examining closely the hidden realm of activity behind the scenes of our own lives.

One of the ongoing debates in hermeneutics has been over which elements to emphasize in the tripartite relationship of author, text, and reader, for the purpose of bridging gaps in understanding -

radical deconstructionists, have simply given up, or at the very least have become radically skeptical about ever having a comprehensive theory of interpretation or a hermeneutic.