Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics (Gk., hermeneutikos, ‘interpretation’, from Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods). The discipline arising from reflection on the problems involved in the transmission of meaning from text or symbol to reader or hearer. Since there is no privileged or ‘correct’ meaning of an utterance, hermeneutics has sometimes been summarized in the question, ‘whose meaning is the meaning of the meaning?’ —i.e., there are many possible and legitimate meanings to be found in any text.

The modern discussion of hermeneutics derives from the early Romantic movement. Kant's emphasis on understanding was essential: Verstand (understanding) is the underlying human capacity for thought and experience, and Verstehen (acts of understanding), which are present in all thought and experience, are the expression of the distinctively human rationality. For Schleiermacher (the key figure in the development of hermeneutics), hermeneutics could no longer be a matter of uncovering a single given meaning in a text by chipping away at the obstacles which at present obscure it. Rather, hermeneutics ‘is an unending task of understanding’. Every utterance, verbal or nonverbal, belongs to a linguistic system (Sprache), but it belongs also to the lived experience (Erlebnis) of the one who utters. There is thus a hermeneutical circle which it is the task of hermeneutics, conceived of as the art of understanding, to close.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) took what he understood of Schleiermacher much further. His On the Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (1910) abandoned the view that understanding rests in human language-competence, and claimed instead that it rests in the whole life-process: it is a Lebenskategorie (a category of life). By this he meant that the process of life is a constant ‘scan’ of circumstances so that they can be understood and so that appropriate reactions can be initiated. What has to be ‘understood’, therefore, by the scientist of human behaviour is always a life-expression (Lebensausserung), which points back to a lived experience (Erlebnis) as its source. The expressed meaning (Ausdruck) can be apprehended only by relating the two, but that in itself is a ‘lived experience’ on the part of the one who apprehends, part indeed of a continuing ‘lived experience’ which constitutes a ‘pre-understanding’. The closing of the hermeneutical circle now becomes the connecting of two culturally and historically embedded lives, not to achieve ‘the meaning’, but to create a new horizon of meaning from the connection, the fusion of horizons. For Emilio Betti (1890–1968), this offered the best hope for a tolerant society, since there is no one meaning, closed to all revision, ever to be attained.

Against what may seem to be a steady drift toward subjectivism (‘meaning is for me’), ontological hermeneutics (associated especially with the later Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode …, 1972, ‘Truth and Method’, 1975) has sought to integrate the truth which lies behind language and which alone makes intelligible utterance possible. While it seems obvious to say that ‘what are true are sentences’, Gadamer insists (as do critical realists in the natural sciences) that there is what there is ‘over and above our wanting and doing’. Gadamer argues that ‘the truth finds us’. Language is the surface where truth becomes visible.

While hermeneutics is thus an issue in many disciplines, it is central to the interpretation of religious utterance, and of religious and sacred texts. In the Christian tradition, there have in fact been many different styles of exegesis of the Bible. In the medieval period, scripture was expected to yield a fourfold meaning: the literal (letter) sense; the allegorical or typological sense (the meaning in the context of the drama of salvation); the moral sense (the practical meaning in terms of conduct); the anagogical sense (the meaning in relation to the purposes of God in eternity). For the Reformers, much of this had produced eisegesis (reading meaning into the text) rather than exegesis. The fusion of horizons between text and reader reconciles these extremes by allowing the continuing creativity of the Holy Spirit to bring God's truth and the truth of God to the surface of a particular moment.