HERMENEUTICS

HERMENEUTICS . The term hermeneutics is derived from the Greek verb hermēneuein ("to interpret") and refers to the intellectual discipline concerned with the nature and presuppositions of the interpretation of human expressions.

Introduction

The Greek term has etymological associations with the name of the Greek god Hermes, the messenger of the gods and the deity of boundaries. Some have seen this association as reflecting the inherently triadic structure of the act of interpretation: (1) a sign, message, or text from some source requires (2) a mediator or interpreter (Hermes) to (3) convey it to some audience. So considered, this deceptively simple triadic structure implicitly contains the major conceptual issues with which hermeneutics deals: (1) the nature of a text; (2) what it means to understand a text; and (3) how understanding and interpretation are determined by the presuppositions and beliefs (the horizon) of the audience to which the text is being interpreted. Serious reflection on any of these three issues reveals why interpretation is itself a philosophical issue and a subject of interpretation.

Since interpretation is fundamental to all the intellectual disciplines—to the natural sciences as well as the humanities—one might have expected hermeneutics to have arisen earlier in Western culture than it did. Although there were many controversies within Judaism and Christianity concerning the interpretation of the Bible—just as pre-Reformation humanists were concerned with the exegesis of the texts of antiquity—it was not until the middle of the last century that modern hermeneutics was born. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is generally acknowledged to be the founder of modern hermeneutics, but it was Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) who first dreamed of developing a foundational discipline for the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften ) that would render their conclusions as objective and as valid as those of the natural sciences.

Dilthey's dream was overtaken by the rapid emergence and proliferation of the many specialized disciplines that are now recognized and preserved by the organizational structure of the modern university—art history, anthropology, economics, history, the various literatures, political science, psychology, philosophy, and so on. Each of these disciplines rapidly developed its own intellectual interests and normative procedures for the presentation and adjudication of arguments within them. Methodologies rather than hermeneutics dominated intellectual life.

In recent years, however, powerful intellectual currents have brought hermeneutics once again to the fore, so that interest in it has burgeoned among literary critics, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, theologians, philosophers, and students of religion. These currents include (1) new theories of human behavior in the psychological and social sciences in which human cultural expressions are regarded as manifestations of unconscious and instinctual drives or as reflections of class interests; (2) developments in epistemology and the philosophy of language that have led to claims that what counts as reality for a given culture is a function of the linguistic structures superimposed on experience; and (3) the arguments advanced by philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger that all human experience is basically interpretative, and that all judgments take place within a context of interpretation mediated by culture and language behind which it is impossible to go. Underlying all these currents is the assumption that human consciousness is situated in history and cannot transcend it—an assumption that raises important questions concerning the role of cultural conditioning in any understanding.

It would be an error, however, to conclude from this new interest in hermeneutics that Dilthey's dream of a universal foundational discipline for the cultural sciences is about to be realized. Even a superficial glance at the contemporary intellectual scene reveals little agreement concerning how hermeneutics is conceived or how the discipline should proceed. The intellectual disciplines constituting the modern university have themselves been fractured into parties, each of which has its own method and mode of interpretation. In psychology, for example, there are behaviorists, cognitive psychologists, Freudians, Jungians, and Gestaltists, just as in the social sciences there are functionalists, structuralists, ethnomethodologists, and Marxists.

Paradoxically, it is just this proliferation of parties that partially accounts for the resurgence of interest in hermeneutics in the early twenty-first century. Diversity and conflict of interpretations historically have provided the stimulus and the urgency for acquiring understanding and agreement. Dilthey pointed out, for example, how the rise of modern hermeneutics was itself closely connected with the post-Reformation debates among Protestants and Catholics over the interpretation of Scripture, just as Schleiermacher's own attempt to establish a universal hermeneutics was admittedly prompted by the attempt to overcome misunderstanding. The incommensurate perspectives that disciplines may adopt concerning the same object (such as a text, language, or human nature) raise profound questions about the nature of human conceptualization, objectivity, understanding, explanation, and translation. Hence it is not surprising that, for many intellectuals, hermeneutics is increasingly coming to occupy the role that epistemology did a few decades ago.

The problems of hermeneutics are more unavoidable in the scholarly study of religion than in many other academic disciplines, for reasons both conceptual and historical. Conceptually, religions themselves may be regarded as communities of interpretation, so that the scholarly study of them takes the form of an interpretation of an interpretation. Since the scholarly interpretation of religion most often rests on different assumptions than the religious interpretation itself, the religious participant frequently regards the scholar's interpretation as reductionistic and alien. Hence there is a perennial debate among scholars of religion regarding the degree to which the scholarly interpretation of religion must do justice to the believer's own point of view.

Historically, the scholarly study of religion—as well as the rise of modern hermeneutics—is closely associated with the religious tradition of liberal Protestantism. Indeed, liberal Protestantism might be said to have emerged through a series of bitter hermeneutical debates concerning the application of historical-critical methods to the Christian Bible. These debates illustrate the phenomena discussed at the beginning of this paragraph, since orthodox Christians regarded the application of these methods to the Bible as an alien mode of interpretation. Liberal Protestantism resolved the issue by defining the essence of religious faith as experience rather than doctrine or historical belief.

Schleiermacher, the founder of hermeneutics as well as of liberal Protestantism, was particularly influential in articulating the outlines of this compromise. He regarded the various religions as culturally conditioned forms of an underlying and universal religious sensibility. Thus he not only moved the locus of faith from belief to experience, but also laid the foundations for a descriptive science of religion to which Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), Joachim Wach (1898–1955), and others were to contribute. This close connection between liberal Protestantism and the scholarly study of religion partially accounts for the fact that liberal theologians have been particularly sensitive to theories of interpretation.

Many scholars would insist that, to answer the many questions arising from the activity of interpretation, it is important to have a hermeneutical theory. Others, however, would insist that the great mistake distorting all modern hemeneutics is precisely the lust for some such theory. Rather than prejudice the issue from the outside by describing alternative hermeneutical theories, this article shall roughly delineate four ways in which modern hermeneutics may be conceived, each of which is dominated by a distinctive question:

1. What is it to understand a text and what are the conditions of its possibility?
2. How are the cultural sciences distinct in method and form from the natural sciences?
3. What are the conditions that make any sort of human understanding possible?
4. How can one resolve certain conceptual puzzles associated with concepts like understanding and meaning, and how might such a resolution help one to understand the task of interpretation?

Each of these questions, and the conception of hermeneutics it yields, often overlaps with the others, and a theorist of one type may also deal with issues characteristic of another. Nevertheless, these four ways are sufficiently distinctive to be a useful heuristic device for organizing what follows.

Hermeneutics as Inquiry into the Interpretation of Texts

Modern hermeneutics had its origins in attempts to solve problems and conflicts concerning the interpretation of texts; Schleiermacher is usually regarded as the originating figure. Although there were debates before his time concerning the difference between sacred and profane interpretation, it was Schleiermacher whom Dilthey properly called the "Kant of hermeneutics," because Schleiermacher argued that Scripture required no special type of interpretative procedure, and grasped that the fundamental issue was to develop the basic grammatical and psychological conditions necessary for the understanding of any text whatsoever. It was Schleiermacher again who saw that the nature of language was the crucial theoretical issue confronting hermeneutical theory, because one could gain access to another person's meaning only through the medium of language.

Authorial Intention

Schleiermacher's hermeneutical theory is organized around two foci: (1) the grammatical understanding of any characteristic modes of expression and the linguistic forms of the culture in which a given author lived and which conditioned that author's thinking and (2) the technical or psychological understanding of the unique subjectivity or creative genius of that author. Both these foci reflect Schleiermacher's own indebtedness to Romantic thinkers who had argued that any individual's mode of expression, however unique, necessarily reflects a wider cultural sensibility or spirit (Geist ). A correct interpretation requires not only an understanding of the cultural and historical context of an author, but a grasp of the latter's unique subjectivity. This can be accomplished only by an "act of divination"—an intuitive leap by which the interpreter "relives" the consciousness of the author. By seeing this consciousness in the larger cultural context, the interpreter comes to understand the author better than the author understands himself or herself.

Schleiermacher's hermeneutics have not had a great influence on secular literary criticism in either England or the United States, although most literary criticism until the 1920s generally assumed that the aim of interpretation was to discover the intention of the author. In the last several decades, however, most literary criticism has been built on the assumption—classically enunciated by T. S. Eliot in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) but argued on other grounds by Freudians, Marxists, New Critics, structuralists, and deconstructionists—that a literary text has its own afterlife independent of the author, and that to understand it has little or no relationship to understanding the author's intentions when writing it. In recent years, however, some critics have rediscovered Schleiermacher and reaffirmed his view that some form of authorial intent must be the foundation of a theory of objective meaning. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for example, has argued in Validity in Interpretation (1967) that, if interpretation is to avoid pure subjectivity and arbitrariness, there must be some criteria for determining the correct meaning of a text. This in turn, says Hirsch, requires some theory of determinate meaning. Anyone concerned with objectivity will be driven logically to some discriminating norm, and "the only compelling normative principle that has ever been brought forward is the old-fashioned ideal of rightly understanding what the author meant" (p. 26). This has led Hirsch and others to deal with the many problems this position raises. However, while this view represents the common sense of most laypersons, it is not now widely shared by most literary critics, who have developed hermeneutical theories rejecting authorial intent as the norm of meaning.

Schleiermacher and the Interpretation of Religion

So far as the interpretation of religion is concerned, Schleiermacher's influence is to be found less in his hermeneutical theory, which is dominated by the problem of recovering the author's meaning, than in his views that (1) religiosity is an essential and a priori aspect of human nature and (2) language is the medium of all understanding. The first assumption has elicited many attempts to develop what Paul Ricoeur has called a "regional hermeneutics": rules governing the interpretation of religious expressions as a unique and autonomous type. One of the earliest and most influential of these attempts was Rudolf Otto's analysis of the "numinous" in his famous book Das Heilige (1917; Eng. trans., The Idea of the Holy ).

Less explicitly indebted to Schleiermacher, but based on the same assumption of the universality of human religiosity, was the very influential work of Mircea Eliade. He argued that the basic structure of religiosity can be seen most clearly in archaic religions in which human life is regarded as part of a living cosmos. Profound connections are said to exist between the rhythms of human and cosmic life. Myths and religious symbols are systems of micro-macrocosmic correspondences and analogies. Human fecundity, for example, is seen as recapitulating the pattern of divine fecundity. All human activities are thus sanctified and made meaningful. This assumption led Eliade to explore the many variants of certain recurring symbols in the world's religions, as for instance the sacred tree, stones, snakes, fish, and water.

Hermeneutics as Foundation for the Cultural Sciences

A second way of thinking about hermeneutics is to regard it as providing a foundational discipline for the cultural in contrast to the natural sciences. This discipline would presumably establish the boundary lines separating the various generic types of interpretation—literary, artistic, philosophical, legal, religious, and so forth—and would establish the methods and normative canons of objectivity and validity for each type. It would, in short, be a universal hermeneutics. Wilhelm Dilthey is generally regarded as the most important exponent of this view of hermeneutics, and the Italian historian of law Emilio Betti is perhaps its best-known contemporary advocate. Although profoundly influenced by Schleiermacher—at an early age he wrote a prize essay on Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, and later a monumental biography of him—Dilthey rejected Schleiermacher's assumption that every work of an author is an outgrowth of an implicit principle contained in the author's mind. Dilthey considered this assumption to be profoundly antihistorical, because it does not sufficiently take account of the external influences at work or the author's development. Moreover, Dilthey thought that a universal hermeneutics required the elaboration of epistemological principles that would serve the cultural sciences in the way that Kant's principles accounted for Newtonian physics. If Kant developed a "critique of pure reason," then Dilthey devoted his life to a "critique of historical reason."

Cultural versus Natural Sciences

Dilthey's hermeneutics quite obviously rests on a sharp distinction between the methods of the cultural and those of the natural sciences. The distinctive method of the cultural sciences is understanding (Verstehen ), whereas that of the natural sciences is explanation (Erklärung ). The natural scientist explains events by employing universal laws, whereas the historian neither discovers nor employs such laws but, rather, seeks to understand the actions of agents by discovering their intentions, purposes, wishes, and character traits. Such action is intelligible because human actions, in contrast to natural events, have an "inside" that others can understand because they too are persons. Understanding, then, is the discovery of the "I" in the "Thou," and it is possible because of a shared universal human nature.

Insofar as Dilthey's hermeneutics rests on understanding as a distinctive act that requires an imaginative identification with past persons, one can discern the influence of Schleiermacher. But Dilthey developed an elaborate and complex theory of experience (Erlebnis ) and its relationship to various forms of expression that constitutes nothing less than the philosophical anthropology and epistemology he thought necessary to establish hermeneutics as a foundational discipline of the cultural sciences. Dilthey was never able to complete this enterprise in a way satisfactory to himself or others, and its complexities defy any brief exposition here. Suffice it to say that it contained a sophisticated analysis of the temporality of experience and the way in which human experience is bound together by units of meaning that are subconscious and prereflective. These meanings become objectified in human expressions. He held that one's knowledge of one's own experience as well as of the experience of others is available only through these objectified expressions. Consequently, one comes to know human nature through historical knowledge, that is, through understanding the varieties of objectified forms in which humanity has expressed its own experience of life. Ultimately, history is the variety of ways in which human life has expressed itself over time. Indeed, one can grasp one's own possibilities only through historical reconstruction and understanding. Through understanding (Verstehen ) of the life-expressions (Lebensäusserungen and Erlebnisausdrücke ) of past persons, one comes to understand the humanity of which one is a part.

Weber and Wach

Like Dilthey, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) was preoccupied with establishing the objectivity of the results of the cultural sciences, but he was even more interested in the status of generalizations in political economy and sociology. His work therefore stands at the juncture between the humanities and the social sciences. He was interested in the logical relationships between understanding and explanation. Though sympathetic to Dilthey's attempts to establish the autonomy of understanding, he was also interested in generalizations about human collective actions—generalizations he hoped could be made as objective and scientific as those in the natural sciences. His analysis and classification of types of social actions, and his delineation of ideal types, are attempts to solve these conceptual problems. Unlike Dilthey, he was especially interested in the interpretation of religion. His Sociology of Religion (1904–1905) is one of the great works in the comparative study of religion, and his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1922), although now dated in important respects, is one of the influential books in modern sociology.

The significance of Dilthey and Weber for hermeneutics lies primarily in (1) their minimalization of the concern for recovering the author of the text, and their extension of hermeneutics to cover all forms of cultural expression and actions; (2) their efforts to work out the logic of understanding as an activity unique to the cultural sciences; and (3) their attempts to ground the possibility of understanding in some theory of the structure of human nature and its expressions (Dilthey) or of types of social action (Weber).

The hermeneutical theories of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Weber deeply influenced the work of Joachim Wach, a German sociologist of religion who immigrated to the United States in 1935. Wach wanted to establish the interpretation of religion as an objective descriptive discipline free of the normative claims of Christian theology. For him as for Dilthey, the proper starting point for such a discipline was the establishment of the necessary conditions for understanding (Verstehen ). Wach, like Schleiermacher, believed that Verstehen generally requires a type of empathy, but that in religion it specifically presupposes a basic "sense for religion" that Wach then explicated in terms of Schleiermacher's notion of an inherent religious propensity in human nature. Wach argued that religions are the expressions of this sense for religion. The challenge of religious studies, then, is to develop a logic of the forms of religious expression, a theory of religious symbolism and language. Wach himself concentrated on arranging and classifying the forms of religious expressions—for example, the theoretical, practical, and sociological, which he then further subdivided and explored.

The attempt to construct a universal hermeneutics for the cultural sciences inevitably leads the theorist to propound some theory of human nature and its expressions. Having uncovered the radically different forms of consciousness and belief exemplified in history, for example, Dilthey then thought it important to develop a psychology that would account for this diversity of worldviews while affirming the "unity of human nature" that made it possible for an interpreter in one culture to understand a person in a strange and different culture. But, it may be asked, how can the appeal to some abstract principle such as the "unity of human nature" aid an interpreter who is actually confronted with cultural expressions so different and strange that a sympathetic act of understanding seems impossible? Dilthey never solved this problem.

Psychological Theories

The degree to which one's hermeneutics is a function of one's view of human nature is most dramatically illustrated by modern psychological theories such as those of Freud and Jung. Here human expression and behavior are explained and understood in terms of unconscious psychical forces. As Paul Ricoeur has shown, Freud's theory of the unconscious led him not only to broaden the theory of human expressions so as to include dreams and slips of the tongue as "texts" but also to propose a hermeneutics in which art and religion were also seen as containing unconscious meaning. According to Freud, for example, religion is best understood as the expression of unconscious wishes rooted in infantile helplessness and molded by the "family romance" in which Oedipal sexual wishes play an important role. Consequently, religion is regarded as a collective neurosis and evaluated negatively. Thus not only does Freud's hermeneutics reject "authorial intent" as a superficial category, but it proposes a different meaning for the classical hermeneutical dictum that the interpreter can better understand an author than the author understands himself. For Schleiermacher and Dilthey, this dictum meant that the interpreter better understands the cultural and linguistic context that conditions the author, and of which the author is unaware. For Freud, this dictum means that the interpreter has the theoretical key to unlock the unconscious meanings of which no past author could possibly be aware. The interpreter understands more scientifically the unconscious drives, instincts, and mechanisms of repression that determine a given form of expression. Texts are semiotic codes for which the scientific interpreter alone holds the key.

Hermeneutics as Reflection on the Conditions of All Understanding

Given the way in which reflection on understanding necessarily drives one to consider basic epistemological and anthropological issues, it should not be surprising that the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) has been so influential at the turn of the twenty-first century. In Being and Time, Heidegger, although profoundly influenced by Dilthey, argues that Dilthey was finally unable to overcome the subjectivistic tendencies of Western thought since Descartes—tendencies that have led to a peculiar dilemma in epistemology, and to a seductive preoccupation with the cognitive ideals of the natural sciences and technology. Crucial to Heidegger's analysis is the argument that human beings already find themselves in a world made intelligible to them by virtue of what he called "the forestructure" of understanding, that is, the assumptions, expectations, and categories that one prereflectively projects on experience and that constitute the "horizon" of any particular act of understanding. An analysis of "everydayness" reveals that what is regarded as problematic as well as intelligible becomes so only against the backdrop of the tacit, prereflective understanding one already possesses. In all explanation one discovers, as it were, an understanding that one cannot understand; which is to say, every interpretation is already shaped by a set of assumptions and presuppositions about the whole of experience. Heidegger calls this the hermeneutical situation. He means that human existence itself has a hermeneutical structure that underlies all one's regional interpretations, even those in the natural sciences. One's prereflective understandings are modified and corrected as they become more self-conscious in the encounter with texts, objects, and other interpretations.

Heidegger's thought has been influential in several directions, two of which are important for religious studies: the interpretation of religion and the conception of hermeneutics generally. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), a German New Testament scholar and theologian, saw in Heidegger's analysis of human existence the conceptual basis for an exegesis of the New Testament whereby its basic religious insights could be extracted from the mythical thought-forms of the first century, in which it was originally expressed. To the complaint that this exegesis employed modern presuppositions, Bultmann replied that all exegesis is determined by certain philosophical presuppositions; the only question is whether these are correct. He believed Heidegger to be correct because Heidegger had discovered the inherent historicity of human existence; that is, how it is essentially constituted by acts of decision rooted in a self-understanding oriented toward the future. Moreover, Heidegger had shown that genuine historical understanding requires the encounter with past expressions of human self-understanding that can modify one's own. In this sense, the act of historical understanding has an element that resembles the act of appropriation of a religious message. Although Bultmann was primarily interested in the implication of Heidegger's work for the interpretation of the New Testament understanding of faith, the same hermeneutical procedure could be employed on other religious phenomena, as Hans Jonas has done in his well-known work The Gnostic Religion (1958).

It is Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), however, who in a major work, Truth and Method (1960), has done more than any other thinker to reconceive hermeneutics along Heideggerian lines. His theory also involves a criticism of previous conceptions of hermeneutics such as those of Schleiermacher and Dilthey. The difficulty with Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, apart from its limitation to the interpretation of texts, is that Schleiermacher (and Dilthey too) assumed that the historical and cultural distance of the interpreter from the phenomena being interpreted necessarily occasions misunderstanding. Gadamer argues, following Heidegger, that interpretation also assumes a context of intelligibility, and that the presuppositions and assumptions—one might say prejudices—of the interpreter are precisely what enable understanding as well as misunderstanding. Consequently, one's own assumptions and beliefs are not necessarily barriers to understanding but preconditions of it. The quest for a presuppositionless understanding is futile. Every text or object is interpreted from some standpoint in a tradition that constitutes the horizon within which anything becomes intelligible. This horizon is continually modified as it encounters objects, but there is no final and objective interpretation.

Gadamer has been criticized by Emilio Betti for destroying any possibility of distinguishing between a subjective and a universally valid interpretation. Betti argues that texts and cultural expressions have meanings independent of the interpreter's opinions, and that the interpreter can provide no canon for distinguishing right from wrong interpretations. Gadamer replies that the task is not to provide norms and rules for interpretation but to analyze the inherent structure of understanding itself—an analysis that reveals interpretation to be as Gadamer describes it.

Hermeneutics as an Analytic and Mediating Practice

There is a fourth way of thinking about hermeneutics that is less easily characterized than the others, because it involves no theory of hermeneutics. Those who think in this fashion are not interested in establishing rules for the interpretation of texts nor in providing foundations for the cultural sciences. Their aims appear to be more piecemeal: to analyze, to clarify, and if possible to resolve conceptual issues surrounding explanation and interpretation in the various contexts in which they are employed; to establish the logical connections between meaning, truth, and validity; to discover the various normative uses of language; to ascertain what is meant by rationality and irrationality, especially as it bears on the possibility of translation and the problem of relativism. No one of the various thinkers who think and work in this way may necessarily discuss all these problems systematically, yet the various proposed solutions often bear directly on those problems normally associated with classical hermeneutical theory. For example, some thinkers concerned with the philosophy of science, such as Mary Hesse, have argued that no sharp distinction can legitimately be drawn between explanation and interpretation, since explanations in the natural sciences are as interpretative as those in the cultural sciences. Or again, some philosophers have argued that, since there is no realm of the given to which theories can correspond, the attempt by philosophers since Kant to formulate epistemological theories is a mistake. There is no one right or wrong way to interpret anything, including texts, hence the quest for agreement is not a desideratum.

Generally, this type of thinking about hermeneutics owes much to the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), whose later works deal extensively with issues such as "What does it mean to understand?" and "How does one know that another person is in pain?" It was characteristic of Wittgenstein's approach that no simple summary of his views can be given, since he argued that the function of a philosopher is to analyze carefully the concrete uses in specific contexts of words like understanding. He believed that it was a mistake to attempt to provide a general theory of understanding. The mind easily becomes bewitched by such general theories, and this bewitchment is itself the source of most philosophical difficulties and illusions. Instead, one should look at how such words are actually employed and embedded in concrete practices. A few students of religion have argued that this approach has important implications for the interpretation of religion. For example, it has been asserted that the hermeneutical theory of Joachim Wach has excessively constricted interpretation by superimposing a single model upon it.

Although Wittgenstein's philosophy is often said to be alien to Heidegger's, there are affinities at surprising points, not the least of which is the notion that explanation and interpretation make sense only within a horizon of presuppositions, practices, and assumptions that individuals' culture mediates to them—their tradition, so to speak. Wittgenstein, like Heidegger, also saw the human situation itself to be hermeneutical. But unlike Heidegger, he did not think this fact justified the construction of an ontology. Rather, he felt it should be the occasion for the painstaking exploration of the concrete forms of discourse—"language games"—in which human beings engage. There can be only regional explorations of the grammar governing specific forms of expression. Presumably, then, the interpretation of religion ought to devote itself to carefully mapping and exploring those characteristics of the distinctively human form of life one calls religious: its structure, presuppositions, and forms of expression.

See Also

Anthropology, Ethnology, and Religion; Biblical Exegesis; Buddhist Books and Texts, article on Exegesis and Hermeneutics; Literature, article on Literature and Religion; Phenomenology of Religion; Structuralism; Study of Religion; Tafsir; Women's Studies in Religion.

Bibliography

Bauman, Zygmunt. Hermeneutics and Social Science. New York, 1978. A discussion of the significance of hermeneutics when conceived as inquiry into the nature and objectives of historical knowledge and of the social sciences. There are chapters on Marx, Weber, Mannheim, Husserl, Schutz, and Heidegger.

Bernstein, Richard J. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia, 1983. A very useful critical discussion and overview of the debates concerning relativism in recent philosophy, with special attention to the philosophy of science and the hermeneutical tradition represented by Gadamer.

Betti, Emilio. Teoria generale della interpretazione. 2 vols. Milan, 1955. Translated into German by its author as Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (Tübingen, 1967). A criticism of the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the Heideggerian tradition, and a defense of the classical position on objectivity in interpretation. A shorter manifesto is to be found in his Zur Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Auslegungslehre (Tübingen, 1954).

Bultmann, Rudolf. "Is Exegesis without Presuppositions Possible?" and "The Problem of Hermeneutics." In New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, selected, edited, and translated by Schubert M. Ogden. Philadelphia, 1984. Characteristically lucid attempts by a famous New Testament critic to deal with the problem of objectivity from an existentialist perspective influenced but not determined by Heidegger.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schriften. 18 vols. in 20. Stuttgart, 1957–1977. Volumes 5–7 are especially important for understanding Dilthey's view of historical understanding.

Eliade, Mircea. "Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism." In The History of Religions: Essays on Methodology, edited by Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa with a preface by Jerald C. Brauer, pp. 66–107. Chicago and London, 1959. A statement of the hermeneutical principles governing research on religious symbols by an influential historian of religion.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York, 1959. A more general work on the nature of religion.

Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. New York, 1950. This volume brings together a number of Eliot's influential writings, including the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), which debunks the "fallacy" of authorial intention.

Ermarth, Michael. Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason. Chicago, 1978. A fine scholarly discussion of Dilthey's attempt to provide theoretical foundations for the human sciences in the light of the exigencies of his own life and the intellectual crisis of the time.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York, 1975. Perhaps the most influential book in hermeneutical theory of the late twentieth century. Beginning with a critique of aesthetic theory, Gadamer engages in a far-reaching critique of Schleiermacher and Dilthey before exploring the implications of Heidegger's thought for hermeneutics.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York, 1962. Regarded by many as one of the most influential philosophical works of the last century, especially as regards hermeneutics.

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven, Conn., 1967. A modern statement of the classical view that the aim of literary interpretation is truth and agreement.

Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. New York, 1982. A useful introduction to the literary theories of deconstructionist critics, especially Jacques Derrida, that reject the assumptions of classical hermeneutical thought.

Palmer, Richard E. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston, Ill., 1969. After a useful classification of six modern definitions of hermeneutics and a discussion of the debate between Betti and Gadamer, the author discusses the four major theorists of the title. Contains a very helpful bibliography.

Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge, 1982. With roots in the French phenomenological tradition, Ricoeur has exerted a significant influence on Protestant theology and hermeneutical theory through his analysis of religious symbolism and his examination of the hermeneutical significance of Freud's view of human nature.

Robinson, James M., and John B. Cobb, Jr. The New Hermeneutic. New York, 1964. A collection of essays by German and American theologians dealing with the hermeneutical developments in the Bultmannian school as represented by Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Edited by Heinz Kimmerle, translated by James Duke and Jack Forstman. Missoula, Mont., 1977. An English translation of the various handwritten manuscripts found after Schleiermacher's death, including aphorisms dated as early as 1805 and formal addresses as late as 1829. There is an extremely helpful introduction by Heinz Kimmerle tracing the development of Schleiermacher's thought on interpretation.

Toulmin, Stephen. Human Understanding, vol. 1, The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts. Princeton, N.J., 1972. Intended to be the first of three volumes. The author interprets conceptual change in the sciences as rooted in "changing populations of concepts and procedures" that function within intellectual communities. Especially useful for its discussion of the way in which, since Kant, two paradigms of knowing have dominated the Western mind: relativism and formalism.

Wach, Joachim. Das Verstehen: Grundzüge einer Geschichte der hermeneutischen Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert. 3 vols. Tübingen, 1926–1933. A massive three-volume history of the problem of hermeneutics that, unfortunately, has yet to be translated. Primarily descriptive and historical, it nevertheless reflects the influence of Schleiermacher and Dilthey.

Weber, Max. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Glencoe, Ill., 1949. Contains some of Weber's methodological essays dealing with the problems of objectivity and value-freeness in the social sciences and the logic of the cultural sciences.

Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology. 2 vols. Berkeley, Calif., 1978. This unfinished masterwork of Weber contains his Katagorienlehre, his basic theory of types and categories of social and economic action, as well as his sociology of religion. There is an extremely useful introduction by Guenther Roth.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 2d ed. Oxford, 1958. Although not directly concerned with hermeneutics as traditionally understood, the revolutionary view of language proposed here has had a profound effect on modern philosophy generally. The analysis of meaning and understanding cannot be ignored by anyone dealing seriously with these issues.

Wood, Charles Monroe. Theory and Religious Understanding: A Critique of the Hermeneutics of Joachim Wach. Missoula, Mont., 1975. A published doctoral dissertation; an eminently readable critique of Wach and, by implication, of the classical hermeneutical tradition from a Wittgensteinian point of view.

Van A. Harvey (1987 and 2005)