Hermeneutics is a term used to describe the views of a variety of authors who have been concerned with problems of understanding and interpretation. Some of the themes of hermeneutics were introduced to English-speaking social scientists by the writings of Max Weber. As a participant in the methodological debates which occurred in Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Weber was familiar with the views of philosophers and historians such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windleband, who all argued that the study of the social and historical world requires the use of methods which are different from those employed in the investigation of natural phenomena. These arguments were reflected in Weber’s own emphasis on the concept of understanding (verstehen).
While Weber played an important role in introducing many social scientists to the ideas of hermeneutics, the latter tradition stretches back to a period well before Weber’s time. Hermeneutics derives from the Greek verb hermeneuein, which means to make something clear, to announce or to unveil a message. The discipline of hermeneutics first arose, one could say, with the interpretation of Homer and other poets during the age of the Greek Enlightenment. From then on, hermeneutics was closely linked to philology and textual criticism. It became a very important discipline during the Reformation, when Protestants challenged the right of tradition to determine the interpretation of the holy scriptures. Both classical scholars and theologians attempted to elaborate the rules and conditions which governed the valid interpretation of texts.
The scope of hermeneutics was greatly extended by Wilhelm Dilthey (in the nineteenth century). An historian as well as a philosopher, Dilthey was aware that texts were merely one form of what he called ‘objectifications of life’. So the problem of interpretation had to be related to the more general question of how knowledge of the social-historical world is possible. Such knowledge is based, in Dilthey’s view, on the interrelation of experience, expression and understanding. Cultural phenomena, such as texts, works of art, actions and gestures, are purposive expressions of human life. They are objectified in a sphere of conventions and values which are collectively shared, in the way that a person’s attitude may be objectified in the medium of language. To understand cultural phenomena is to grasp them as objectified expressions of life; ultimately it is to re-experience the creative act, to relive the experience of another. While reorienting hermeneutics towards a reflection on the foundations of the Geisteswissenschaften or ‘human sciences’, Dilthey’s writings preserved a tension between the quest for objectivity and the legacy of Romanticism.
The key figure in twentieth-century hermeneutics is Martin Heidegger. Whereas in Dilthey’s work the hermeneutical problem is linked to the question of knowledge, in Heidegger’s it is tied to the question of being, problems of understanding and interpretation are encountered while unfolding the fundamental features of our ‘being-in-the-world’. For Heidegger, ‘understanding’ is first and foremost a matter of projecting what we are capable of. This anticipatory character of understanding is a reformulation, in ontological terms, of what is commonly called the ‘hermeneutical circle’. Just as we understand part of a text by anticipating the structure of the whole, so too all understanding involves a ‘pre-understanding’ which attests to the primordial unity of subject and object. We are beings-in-the-world, familiar with and caring for what is ready-to-hand, before we are subjects claiming to have knowledge about objects in the world.
Heidegger’s work has implications for the way that the human sciences are conceived, as Hans-Georg Gadamer has attempted to show. In Truth and Method, Gadamer (1975 [1960]) establishes a connection between the anticipatory character of understanding and the interrelated notions of prejudice, authority and tradition. The assumption that prejudices are necessarily negative is itself an unjustified prejudice stemming, in Gadamer’s view, from the Enlightenment. It is an assumption which has prevented us from seeing that understanding always requires pre-judgement or ‘prejudice’, that there are ‘legitimate prejudices’ based on the recognition of authority, and that one form of authority which has a particular value is tradition. We are always immersed in traditions which provide us with the prejudices that make understanding possible. Hence there can be no standpoint outside of history from which the totality of historical effects could be grasped; instead, understanding must be seen as an open and continuously renewed ‘fusion’ of historical ‘horizons’.
Gadamer’s provocative thesis was challenged in the mid-1960s by Jürgen Habermas and other representatives of ‘critical theory’. While acknowledging the importance of Gadamer’s hermeneutics for the philosophy of the human sciences, Habermas attacked the link between understanding and tradition. For such a link underplays the extent to which tradition may also be a source of power which distorts the process of communication and which calls for critical reflection. Appealing to the model of psychoanalysis, Habermas sketched the framework for a ‘depth-hermeneutical’ discipline which would be oriented to the idea of emancipation.
The debate between hermeneutics and critical theory has been reappraised by Paul Ricoeur (1981). As a hermeneutic philosopher concerned with critique, Ricoeur has tried to mediate between the positions of Gadamer and Habermas by re-emphasizing the concept of the text. In contrast to the experience of belonging to a tradition, the text presupposes a distance or ‘distanciation’ from the social, historical and psychological conditions of its production. The interpretation of a text, involving both the structural explanation of its ‘sense’ and the creative projection of its ‘reference’, thus allows for the possibility of establishing a critical relation vis-à-vis ‘the world’ as well as the self. Ricoeur shows how the model of the text and the method of text interpretation can be fruitfully extended to the study of such varied phenomena as metaphor, action and the unconscious.
As debates have indicated, the issues which for centuries have been discussed under the rubric of hermeneutics are still very much alive. The appreciation of texts and works of art, the study of action and institutions, the philosophy of science and social science: in all of these spheres, problems of understanding and interpretation are recognized as central. While few contemporary hermeneutic philosophers would wish to draw the distinction between the natural sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften in the way that their nineteenth-century predecessors did, many would nevertheless want to defend the peculiar character of social and historical enquiry. For the objects of such enquiry are the product of subjects capable of action and understanding, so that our knowledge of the social and historical world cannot be sharply separated from the subjects who make up that world.
John B.Thompson
University of Cambridge
References
Gadamer, H.-G. (1975 [1960]) Truth and Method, London. (Original edn, Wahrheit und Methode, Tübingen.)
Ricoeur, P. (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. J.B. Thompson, Cambridge, UK.
Further reading
Palmer, R.E. (1969) Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, Evanston, IL.
