Hermeneutics

Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 

The term hermeneutics covers both the first order art and the second order theory of understanding and interpretation of linguistic and non-linguistic expressions. As a theory of interpretation, the hermeneutic tradition stretches all the way back to ancient Greek philosophy. In the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, hermeneutics emerges as a crucial branch of Biblical studies. Later on, it comes to include the study of ancient and classic cultures.

With the emergence of German romanticism and idealism the status of hermeneutics changes. Hermeneutics turns philosophical. It is no longer conceived as a methodological or didactic aid for other disciplines, but turns to the conditions of possibility for symbolic communication as such. The question “How to read?” is replaced by the question, “How do we communicate at all?” Without such a shift, initiated by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, and others, it is impossible to envisage the ontological turn in hermeneutics that, in the mid-1920s, was triggered by Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and carried on by his student Hans-Georg Gadamer. Now hermeneutics is not only about symbolic communication. Its area is even more fundamental: that of human life and existence as such. It is in this form, as an interrogation into the deepest conditions for symbolic interaction and culture in general, that hermeneutics has provided the critical horizon for many of the most intriguing discussions of contemporary philosophy, both within an Anglo-American context (Rorty, McDowell, Davidson) and within a more Continental discourse (Habermas, Apel, Ricoeur, and Derrida).

1. The Beginnings of Hermeneutics

The term hermeneutics, a Latinized version of the Greek hermeneutice, has been part of common language from the beginning of the 17^th century. Nevertheless, its history stretches back to ancient philosophy. Addressing the understanding of religious intuitions, Plato used this term in a number of dialogues, contrasting hermeneutic knowledge to that of sophia. Religious knowledge is a knowledge of what has been revealed or said and does not, like sophia, involve knowledge of the truth-value of the utterance. Aristotle carried this use of the term a step further, naming his work on logic and semantics Peri hermeneias, which was later rendered as De interpretatione. Only with the Stoics, and their reflections on the interpretation of myth, do we encounter something like a methodological awareness of the problems of textual understanding.

The Stoics, however, never developed a systematic theory of interpretation. Such a theory is only to be found in Philo of Alexandria, whose reflections on the allegorical meaning of the Old Testament anticipate the idea that the literal meaning of a text may conceal a deeper non-literal meaning that may only be uncovered through systematic interpretatory work. About 150 years later, Origenes expounds on this view by claiming that the Scripture has three levels of meaning, corresponding to the triangle of body, soul, and spirit, each of which reflects a progressively more advanced stage of religious understanding.

With Augustine we encounter a thinker whose influence on modern hermeneutics has been profoundly acknowledged by Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. According to Gadamer, it is Augustine who first introduces the universality-claim of hermeneutics. This claim arises from the connection Augustine establishes between language and interpretation, but also from his claim that interpretation of Scripture involves a deeper, existential level of self-understanding. The work of Thomas Aquinas, to which the young Heidegger paid a great deal of attention, has also had an impact on the development of modern hermeneutics. Heidegger, however, was mainly interested in Aquinas's notion of Being, and not in his engagement with specifically hermeneutic issues such as the proper authorship of certain pseudo-Aristotelian texts. Presupposing the relative unity of an author's work, Aquinas questions the authenticity of these texts by comparing them to the existing Aristotelian corpus, thus anticipating a critical-philological procedure that would later emerge as a crucial aspect of Friedrich Schleiermacher's notion of grammatical interpretation. This, however, is not the only point of contact between medieval philosophy and modern hermeneutics. Another such junction is the way in which medieval interpretations of Sacred texts, emphasizing their allegorical nature rather than their historical roots, are mirrored in Gadamer's attempt to rehabilitate the hermeneutic relevance of the allegory.

In spite of these and similar points of dialogue, it is in the wake of Martin Luther's sola scriptura that we see the dawn of a genuinely modern hermeneutics. Following Luther's emphasis on faith and inwardness, it was possible to question the authority of traditional interpretations of the Bible in order to emphasize the way in which each and every reader faces the challenge of making the truths of the text her own. Our understanding of a text does not consist in a faithful adoption of the predominant or authorized readings of the time. It is up to the individual reader to stake out her own path to the potential meaning and truth of the text. Reading now becomes a problem in a new way.

Coming from a very different tradition, Giambattisto Vico, the author of the Scienza nuova (1725), is another central figure in the development of early modern hermeneutics. Speaking out against the Cartesianism of his time, Vico argues that thinking is always rooted in a given cultural context. This context is historically developed, and, moreover, intrinsically related to ordinary language, evolving from the stage of myth and poetry to the later phases of theoretical abstraction and technical vocabularies. To understand oneself is thus to understand the genealogy of one's own intellectual horizon. This grants a new urgency to the historical sciences. Moreover, it offers a model of truth and objectivity that differs from those entertained by the natural sciences. The historian does not encounter a field of idealized and putatively subject-independent objects, but investigates a world that is, fundamentally, her own. There is no clear distinction between the scientist and the object of her studies. Understanding and self-understanding cannot be kept apart. Self-understanding does not culminate in law-like propositions. Appealing to tact and common sense, it is oriented towards who we are, living, as we do, within a given historical context of practice and understanding.

Another philosopher who came to influence the early stages of modern hermeneutics is Benedict de Spinoza. In the seventh chapter of the Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), Spinoza proposes that in order to understand the most dense and difficult sections of the Holy Scriptures, one must keep in mind the historical horizon in which these texts were written, as well as the mind by which they were produced. There is an analogy, Spinoza claims, between our understanding of nature and our understanding of the Scriptures. In both cases, our understanding of the parts hinges on our understanding of a larger whole, which, again, can only be understood on the basis of the parts. Seen in a larger perspective, this hermeneutic circle, the movement back and forth between the parts and the whole of the text, is an important hermeneutical theme. What does not lend itself to immediate understanding can be interpreted by means of philological work. The study of history becomes an indispensable tool in the process of unlocking hermetic meaning and language-use.

Preoccupied respectively with subjective piety, with the new science of man, and with the historical aspects of understanding, Luther, Vico, and Spinoza all shaped and gave direction to modern hermeneutics. Yet none of these thinkers developed anything like an explicit philosophical theory of understanding, let alone a method or a set of normatively binding rules by means of which the process of interpretation should proceed. Such a theory was first formulated by Johann Martin Chladenius.

In his Einleitung zur richtigen Auslegung vernünftiger Reden und Schriften (1742), Chladenius distinguishes hermeneutics from logic, but also elaborates a typology of points of view. Attesting to the legacy of Leibniz and Wolf, the so-called School Philosophy, the focus on the different points of view enables Chladenius to explain how variations in our perception of phenomena and problems may cause difficulties in our understanding of other people's texts and statements. At stake is not really a historical methodology in the modern meaning of the term, but a didactic and cognitively oriented procedure of interpretation. In order to understand what, at first, might look strange or obscure—and Chladenius outlines a whole catalogue of different obscurities—one ought to take into account the tacit and pre-reflective assumptions characterizing the point of view from which the problematic text or statement was brought forth. Only thus may we reach a true or objective understanding of the subject matter. Hermeneutics, at this point, goes hand in hand with epistemology. With his coupling of the search for truth and the search for understanding, Chladenius anticipates an important orientation in 20th century hermeneutics.

Georg Friedrich Meier is another hermeneutically minded philosopher within the Leibniz-Wolffian paradigm. Whereas Chladenius had been concerned with speech and writing, Meier's hermeneutics is geared towards signs as such—that is, every type of sign, including non-verbal or natural signs. In Versuch einer Allgemeinen Auslegungskunst (1757), Meier argues that signs do not stand for or refer to a specific non-semiotic meaning or intention, but gain their meaning through their location within a larger, linguistic whole. What determines the meaning of a sign is its relation to other signs. Meier's contribution to hermeneutics is to argue for the interdependence of hermeneutics and language, introducing a semantic holism in which linguistic obscurities are detangled by reference to language itself, not by reference to extra-linguistic elements such as the intention of the author.

Considering the early beginning of the modern hermeneutic tradition, two more names must be mentioned: Friedrich Ast and Friedrich August Wolf.

Ast published his Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik in 1808. An accomplished classicist and a student of Friedrich Schelling, his aim was to provide a methodology through which the whole of world-historical spirit could be retrieved. Individual utterances are neither to be understood with reference to their author, nor with reference to their place within the semiotic system, but according to their location within world-history. This, Ast thought, was possible through the combination of a synthetic and an analytic approach, the former focusing on the whole, the latter on the particular parts of which this whole consists. Ast thereby extends the scope of the hermeneutic circle. Originally conceived in terms of the relationship between the parts and the whole of the text, the hermeneutic circle now includes the text's relationship to historical tradition and culture at large.

Like Ast, Wolf was trained in Classical studies. Both his Museum der Altertumswissenschaft (1807) and his Vorlesungen über die Enzyklopädie der Altertumswissenschaft (1831) address the epistemic, that is, the philosophical, aspects of classical philology. Classical studies, Wolf claims, aims at a total knowledge of its object, but should also reflect on the relevance of such knowledge as well as the method through which it is reached. However, dealing with ancient texts, hermeneutic knowledge presupposes not only a general study of culture, but also a certain sensitivity to the individuality of its author. By establishing philology as a methodological discipline reflecting both the shared, cultural framework and the dimension of individuality, Wolf came to mark his place as one of the most important precursors of romantic hermeneutics.

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