HERMENEUTICS

While there is already a general sense of the word "hermeneutics" in ancient Greek thought, where it refers to the problems of interpretation and understanding, the first real consolidation of its meaning comes in the medieval world when the peculiar task of interpreting the Bible is theorized. The first systematic form of hermeneutic theory emerged out of the effort to supply methods and rules for biblical commentary. Hermeneutics as a theory of biblical exegesis was subsequently widened to include the concerns of interpreting juridical texts, where the jurist faces the problem of applying a universal rule to particular cases. Over time, the domain of hermeneutic methodology was broadened to include any text the meaning of which could be disputed. Although a wide range of texts became the objects of hermeneutics, theological and legal texts long remained its preeminent concerns. In its primary concern for textual exegesis, hermeneutics tended to develop methods for interpretation and understanding based upon the rhetorical principles, and thus helped to define the difference between the humanities and modern natural science with its own emphasis on a method linked with mathematics.

The hermeneutic tradition underwent significant expansion and modification in the nineteenth century when first Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich von Schlegel, and then Wilhelm Dilthey, expanded the scope of hermeneutical concerns while probing the character of the foundations of hermeneutic practices. Following in the wake of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy, wherein both the conditions that render experience possible and the ineradicable limits of knowledge are exposed, the Romantics argued that all understanding—not simply the understanding of texts—is always already interpretive. In Romanticism, hermeneutics thus begins to take on the contours of the new meaning that it acquired in the twentieth century: it is no longer simply a matter of a strategy directed to the interpretation of a special domain of texts, rather it is now understood to be concerned with the character of any form of understanding that may emerge from human experience. In addition to this is the claim that all understanding takes place within language, making language thus one of the chief concerns of any hermeneutic theory. The plurality of languages, their history, and the problem of translation replace a concern with the word of God and the word of law dominating earlier conceptions of hermeneutics. Dilthey, for his part, elevated hermeneutics into a methodology for the entirety of the human sciences by insisting that the understanding of the historical life expressions, which encompass human experiencing, requires a methodology distinct from that of natural science. Dilthey maintained that whereas the natural sciences explain nature, the task of the human sciences is to understand historical life.

By the end of the nineteenth century, "hermeneutics" had ceased to designate simply a methodology or doctrine concerned with decoding the meaning and truth claims of texts. Instead, it had become the name for a broader methodology and a philosophical approach to experience that was sensitive to the limits of language and history. Hermeneutics at this stage of its development came to be especially attentive to those experiences directly challenging the possibility of understanding; for example, the translation of foreign languages, the comprehension of foreign cultures, and, in particular, the interpretation of other historical periods.

Martin Heidegger took the decisive steps in formulating the contemporary shape of philosophical hermeneutics as it is understood today, achieving this by gathering together and radicalizing the concerns dominating its prehistory while adding a new dimension whereby hermeneutics became the name for a full-fledged ontology. Heidegger does this under the rubric of a "hermeneutics of facticity." That notion, which Heidegger worked out in his lecture courses during the 1920s (above all in his courses dealing with Aristotle), is consolidated in his 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time. There Heidegger argues that understanding is not simply a cognitive task, but that it names one of the basic ways (existentialia) of being-in-the world. In short, understanding is now taken to be concerned with an experiencing that subtends methodological procedure. The form of such lived experience proper to human beings, for whom being is always a question and always defined by death and the ineluctability of nonbeing, is what Heidegger refers to as "factical life."

When Heidegger speaks of the hermeneutics of factical life it is a way of acknowledging both that the concerns of hermeneutics—language, history, and finitude—and the manner in which it takes truth to be a matter of interpretation rather than objectivity are especially well suited for the attempt to theorize factical life. The phenomenology of lived experience is now said to have the character of a hermeneutics. This means that lived experience is taken to be the working out of the factical conditions upon which any understanding whatsoever can be founded. The analysis of existence thus takes the form of a hermeneutics that traces the action of these conditions of understanding. The most important aspect of this new development is that now even self-understanding comes to be presented as a hermeneutic task. Hermeneutics is thus the manner in which existence discloses the truth of a world that is lived and it is the form by which self-understanding is achieved.

After Being and Time, Heidegger uses the word "hermeneutics" less frequently. It will be left to one of Heidegger's students from those lecture courses of the 1920s, Hans-Georg Gadamer, to systematically develop the notion of hermeneutics as a philosophical standpoint. Gadamer, whose name is most closely associated with the idea of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics, does this most extensively in his magnum opus, Truth and Method (1982).

The title Truth and Method alludes to the early sense of hermeneutics, where it was understood as a method for getting at the truth of texts. But the argument of that book entails both a fundamental rethinking of the notion of truth and a powerful critique of the idea that a method can ever yield it. In Truth and Method, Gadamer identifies hermeneutics with the insight that the concept of method is inappropriate for the task of understanding in the domain of the human sciences. Other guideposts take the place of method in the effort to unfold a truth that is understood as belonging to the realm of a historical event rather than objective fact: Language, tradition, questioning, and conversation become the leading concerns of Gadamer's hermeneutics.

Gadamer creatively draws upon several sources for his formulation of a systematic philosophical hermeneutics. In addition to those figures already mentioned, Aristotle's notion of phronesis (prudence or practical wisdom) in his Ethics, the logic of question and answer as it is found in the Platonic dialogues, Kant's understanding of judgment as well as the relation of art and truth in his Third Critique, and G. W. F. Hegel's notion of the formation of traditions all play pivotal roles in Gadamer's hermeneutics. Without any significant departure from Heidegger's way of opening up the notion of philosophical hermeneutics, Gadamer places a greater emphasis on the relevance of three themes for hermeneutics: the role of art in the disclosure of truth, the force of the prejudices of tradition in any understanding, and the importance of the question in the opening of the restrictions of such prejudices and in the liberation of understanding to the new and the foreign.

Gadamer understands hermeneutics not as a method, but more as a sort of dialogue or conversation in which understanding increases insofar as one becomes aware of the formative roles of history and language in one's self-understanding. In such a genuine dialogue with others, one's self-understanding is challenged to reflect upon and reach beyond the limits that are inscribed in its own roots in tradition and language. With Gadamer, hermeneutics comes to refer to a philosophical sensibility that has a deep commitment to exposing the ways in which all forms of understanding, rooted in self-understanding, is finite and so remains always at best a task and an ideal.

One other key figure in the field of contemporary hermeneutics is Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur's work has been marked both by its extension of hermeneutic concerns to include psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and linguistic analysis, as well as by the details of his treatment of issues such as problems in semantics, metaphor, narrative, and temporal structures. In his earlier work Ricoeur attempted to reintegrate the role of explanation into hermeneutics theory by relying on the insights from linguistic structuralism, while in his later writings Ricoeur was less prone to pursue methodological questions. The originality of Ricoeur's hermeneutics has taken shape primarily as a matter of practices and studies of special themes, rather than as a theory of hermeneutics proper. What one sees most in those studies is how the workings of language and time have come to dominate his sense of the task of hermeneutic reflection.

See also Dilthey, Wilhelm; Gadamer, Hans-Georg; Heidegger, Martin; Phenomenology; Ricoeur, Paul; Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst.

Bibliography

Bruns, Gerald. Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Heidegger's Ways. Translated by John Stanley. New York: SUNY Press, 1994.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by David Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1982.

Grondin, Jean. The Sources of Hermeneutics. New York: SUNY Press, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: SUNY Press, 1996.

Heidegger, Martin. Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Translated by John van Buren. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Makkreel, Rudolf. Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Sciences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Ricoeur, Paul. From Text to Action: Essays on Hermeneutics. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991.

Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences edited by John Thompson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Risser, James. Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other. New York: SUNY Press, 1997.

Smith, Christopher. Hermeneutics and Human Finitude. New York: Fordham University Press, 1991.

Dennis, J. Schmidt (2005)