EN
In this paper, I present a view of the nature of concepts that I call transcendental hermeneutics. I argue that the proper domain of conceptual thinking is understanding, not knowing, or representing the world. Understanding is the ability to grasp a given content in a broad horizon related to that content and incorporating the understanding subject itself. I refer to Andrzej Półtawski's criticism of the analytical and constructivist tendency in 20th-century philosophy. This tendency consists in presenting meaningful experience resp. a state of mind as giving form to some fundamental but meaningless components of the experience. Półtawski argues that meaning can only originate from the meaningful. I attempt to express the primacy of sense in some detail by referring to Georg W. F. Hegel's Science of Logic. Hegel's theory is not logic but a transcendental view of understanding. It presents the dynamic structure of the understanding reflection, which projects a dialectic chain of successive horizons and their transgressions. In this process, it realizes an ideal of understanding, and by so doing makes consciousness a part of the world. The general form of this understanding consciousness is the Concept, which comes to partial realization in the historical development of conceptual systems. This process can be studied in the convergence between the a priori elements in knowledge (especially in science) and the transcendental forms of understanding.