Notes from
Hermeneutics:
Interpretation Theory in
Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer
PART
I: ON THE DEFINITION, SCOPE, AND SIGNIFICANCE OF HERMENEUTICS
1. INTRODUCTION
3- The 'New Hermeneutic' is the dominant movement in Protestant
theology in Europe (with Gerhard Ebeling). For Heidegger, philosophy
should be 'hermeneutical'.
4- Hirsch proposes hermeneutics as a foundation for all literary interpretation. Palmer
will provide here a general introduction to hermeneutics with a view to
contribute to literary interpretation. Webster's definition:
hermeneutics is "the study of the methodological principles of
interpretation and exploration; specif.: the study of the general principles of biblical interpretation").
5- Palmer favours a phenomenological approach to interpretation.
Some Consequences of Common-Sense Objectivity in American Literary Criticism.
Suffering from naive realism, it thinks of the work as separate from
one's perception or from the author's intention ,as a 'being' in
itself. "The preliminary separation of subject and object, so axiomatic
in realism, becomes the philosophical foundation and framework for
literary interpretation."
6- This may be fruitful but is questionable under phenomenological
assumptions. Modern literary criticism imitates the scientist's
approach; analysis and interpretation become synonymous [for the New Criticism - JAGL]. They denounce the affective fallacy and promote a technological approach to interpretation
7- —but these promote the indifference to literature bewailed by the
same critics. Cf. Merleau-Ponty's observation: "Science manipulates
things and gives up living in them." Palmer: "Dialogue, not dissection,
opens up the world of a literary work. Disinterested objectivity is not
appropriate to the understanding of a literary work." We should see
works as "humanly created texts which speak"; Palmer opposes Frye's
'anatomies' and advocates "a humanistic understanding of what
interpretation of a work involves."
Literary Interpretation, Hermeneutics, and the Interpretation of Works
The work is not simply an "object". It is the work of a man or of God,
and as such it needs to be seen as meaningful. "This 'deciphering'
process, this 'understanding' the meaning of a work,
8- is the focus of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the study of
understanding, especially the task of understanding texts." It is a
humanistic and historical mode of understanding, beyond the (necessary)
treatment of the work as object. Hermeneutics is not a set of devices,
but an attention to (1) understanding a text, (2) the nature of
understanding and interpretation. These are interacting foci in
hermeneutics.
9- Existing is a constant process of interpretation. Interpretation
exceeds linguistic interpretation; it is the basis of human
interaction, more basic than language (although language is an
essential element in human communication). Palmer favours a complex
concept of interpretation in criticism. The work should be seen as a
voice, not as an object—hearing it.
10- "understanding is both an epistemological and an ontological
phenomenon"; understanding a work of literature is "an historical
encounter which calls forth personal experience of being here in the
world." "As a German current of thought, hermeneutics came to be
profoundly influenced by German phenomenology and existential
philosophy." Hermeneutics transcends disciplines: it is fundamental,
more than interdisciplinary. And it clarifies the nature and the
task of the humanities.
2. HERMENEUEIN AND HERMENEIA: THE MODERN SIGNIFICANCE OF THEIR ANCIENT USAGE
12- Meaning "to interpret", "interpretation." Cf. Aristotle's Peri hermeneias; a frequent word in Greek.
The Origins and Three Directions of the Meaning of Hermeneuein-Hermeneia
13- The "Hermios" was the priest at the Delphic oracle. Cf. Hermes, the messenger-god (derived from hermeneuein
or vice-versa?). "Hermes is associated with the function of transmuting
what is beyond human understanding into a form that human intelligence
can grasp." Hermes discovered language and writing, tools to grasp and
transmit meaning. Cf. in Plato's Ion, the poets "hermenes eisin ton theon", are the messengers of the gods. Hermeneuein means 'coming to understand' in all three basic directions: (1) to express aloud in words, that is, 'to say'; (2) to explain, as in explaining a situation; and (3) to translate, as in the translation of a foreign tongue."
14- Critics are ignorant of theological hermeneutics.
Hermeneuein as 'to say' - 'express', 'assert'; it is the first basic meaning. Cf. the 'announcing' function of Hermes, cf. Lat. sermo and verbum?
15- Saying is 'proclaiming'; "Even simply saying, asserting or
proclaiming is an important act of interpretation." Interpretation also
understood as style, e.g. interpreting music. Hermeneia as oral recitation (of Homer, etc., e.g. in Ion).
The 'interpreter' conveys more than he realizes, he is a vehicle for
Homer's message. Homer too interprets. Even today, written language
must be transformed into spoken, "it calls for its lost power."
16- Writing as an alienation of speech from itself, a "Selbstentfremdung der Sprache" (Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode
370-71); "language in its original form is heard rather than seen, and
. . . there are good reasons why oral language is understood more
easily than written language." Oral language is creative. Reading is a
dialectical grasping of meaning, supplying attitude and emphasis to the
text. A circle: Understanding guides the supplementation of
meaning.
17- Implications for teaching; oral genres vs. written genres.
But even in writing the 'inner ear' ears dialogues. "Every silent
reading of a literary text is a disguised form of oral interrpetation."
18- According to the New Criticism, the text speaks by itself. But the
critic actually supplies the loss implicit in written words: "the New
Critic would undoubtedly agree that a truly 'enabling' criticism is one
that is aimed at a more adequate oral reading of the text itself, so
that the text an exist as meaningful oral happening in time, a being
whose true nature and integrity can shine forth." Criticism must
restore the temporal, dynamic being of the work, not an atemporal essence or thing. "An adequate literary criticism moves toward the oral interpretation of the work on which it is focused." Christianity emphasizes the power of the oral word.
19- Against 'speed-reading'. The Bible is a message,
not 'information'. The scientific approach is different from literary,
religious or historical interpretation. Not signs but sound; Palmer
advocates transforming writing into speech, emphasizing the expressive
dimension.
20- Hermeneuein as 'to Explain' - Explaining, accounting, as the second moment after 'saying'. It is also the second direction in Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias:
21- "Aristotle defines hermeneia
as referring to the operation of the mind in making statements which
have to do with the truth or falsity of a thing. 'Interpretation' in
this sense is the primary operation of the intellect in formulating a
true judgment about a thing." Meaning understood as statement, for Aristotle: other [speech acts] are derived from this. Interpretations
as statements of truth or falsity—not instrumental 'statements'. But it
does not equal logic: "Enunciation is the formulation of the statements
themselves, not the process of reasoning from known to unknown things."
It is more fundamental than logic, rhetoric, or poetics: it has to do
with the construction of statements.
22- There is a shading of statement into explanation, of principles
into happenings. "Yet Aristotle was right to situate the moment of
interpretation earlier than the processes of logical analysis"; this is
correct, against the modern tendency which forgets that 'saying' is
already interpreting; "the literary critic calls his analysis of a work
interpretation; it would be correct also to call his way of seeing the
work itself interpretation"; "the 'understanding' that serves as the
foundation for interpretation is itself already shaping and
conditioning interpretation—it is a preliminary interpretation, but one
that can make all the difference because it sets the stage for
subsequent interpretation." —Even the interpretation of a poem as a
poem.
23- "Indeed, method and object cannot be separated: method has already delimited what
we shall see." The selection of tools for explanation is already
interpretation: "analysis is not the primary interpretation but a
derivative form; it has preliminary set the stage with an essential and
primary interpretation before it ever begins to work with the data" —in
all areas.
24- Jesus as hermeneut in the New Testament: he explains passages of
the Old Testament relating to himself, thus providing the right context
both for the text and for himself: "meaning is a matter of context . .
. Only within a given context is an event meaningful." — "Significance
is a relationship to the listener's own projects and intentions" . . .
"an object does not have significance outside of a relationship to
someone, and . . . the relationship determines the significance"; "all
explanatory interpretation assumes intention in those to whom the
explanation is directed." "Explanatory interpretation . . . must be
made within a horizon of already granted meanings and intentions"
called preunderstanding.
25- "It might be asked what horizon of interpretation a great literary
text inhabits, and then how the horizon of an individual's own world of
intentions, hopes, and preinterpretation is related to it. This merging
of two horizons must be considered a basic element in all explanatory
interpretation." "For the interpreter to 'perform' the text [orally],
he must 'understand' it: he must preunderstand the subject and the
situation before he can enter the horizon of its meaning. Only when he
can step into the magic circle of its horizon can the interpreter
understand its meaning. This is that mysterious 'hermeneutical circle'
without which the meaning of the text cannot emerge."; "a partial
understanding is used to understand still further", dialectically. "The
function of explanatory interpretation in literary interpretation may
be seen, in this context, as an effort to lay the foundation in
'pre-understanding' for an understanding of the text."
26- This is not 'psychologism', but rather the ground for both a
psychologism and anti-psychologism. For Gurwitch, "object and method
can never be separated. Of course, this is a truth foreign to the
realistic way of seeing" (Palmer).
27- Hermeneuein as 'to translate'.
"Translation is a special form of the basic interpretive process of
'bringing to understanding'"—it makes us aware of how much language
shapes our world-view.
28- The problem of translating cultural equivalents. The problem of
Bultmann's project of demythologizing the New Testament: the same in
literature, when we claim its universal significance.
29- "An approach to literature which sees the work as an object apart
from perceiving subjects easily and automatically avoids the question
of what really constitutes the human significance of a work." Palmer
opposes formal analyses—a pastime for English professors—and advocates
keeping literature humanly significant and alive. "Teachers of
literature need to become experts in 'translation' more than
'analysis'"—"recognizing the problem of a conflict of horizons and
taking steps to deal with it, rather than sweeping it under the rug and
concentrateing on analytical games."
30- The world-view of a work is integral to its understanding, not some
sort of historical fallacy. Palmer approves of Auerbach's view: "the underlying sense of reality is a key to understanding."
31- Early hermeneutics always involved translation among its problems
(biblical, etc.).—Translation is the "very heart of hermeneutics."
"There are always two worlds, the world of the text and that of the
reader, and consequently there is the need for Hermes to 'translate'
from one to the other."
3. SIX MODERN DEFINITIONS OF HERMENEUTICS
33- "the field of hermeneutics has been interpreted (in roughly
chronological order) as (1) the theory of biblical exegesis; (2)
general philological methodology; (3) the science of all linguistic
understanding; (4) the methodological foundation of Geisteswissenschaften
[i.e. the humanities]; (5) phenomenology of existence and of
existential understanding; and (6) the systems of interpretation, both
recollective and iconoclastic, used by man to reach the meaning behind
myths and symbols."
34- Each of these, as a 'moment' and point of view, brings to light specific sides of interpretation.
Hermeneutics as a Theory of Biblical Exegesis. This is the earliest moment, and hermeneutics developed here.
The first occurrence as a book was in J. C. Dannhauer's (1654); Hermeneutica sacra sive methodis exponendarum sacrarum litterarum —not a work of exegesis, but of methodology,
of the theory of exegesis. There were many protestant manuals between
1720 and 1820 as an aid to ministers without resource to authority in
their interpretations.
35- Although the most common meaning in English is still the one referring to biblical interpretation,
when the use of the word broadens, it refers to obscure texts requiring
a special method to extract hidden meaning. E.g. in Edward Burnett
Tylor's Primitive Culture
(1871), I, 319: "No legend, no allegory, no nursery rhyme, is safe from
the hermeneutics of of a thorough-going mythologic theorist."
Hermeneutics is 'retroactively' extended to exegesis in "Old Testament
times, when there were canons for properly interpreting the Torah." In
the New Testament, Jesus relates to the Old Testament; also John's
Gospel, and the Pauline letters: it is already a system:
36- "in a certain sense, theology itself as the historical interpreter
of the biblical message is hermeneutics." Summary history:
"The history of biblical hermeneutics could be traced through the
primitive Church; the patriarchs; medieval fourfold interpretation of
the Bible; Luther's struggle against mystical, dogmatics, humanistic,
and the other systems of interpretation; the rise of the
critical-historical method in the eighteenth century and the complex
forces at work in this period to reshape the interpretation of
Scripture; Schleiermacher's contribution; the history-of-religions
school in relation to interpretation; the rise of dialectical
theology in the 1920's, and the New Hermeneutic of contemporary
theology."
There is a tendency to rely on a "system", a search for a
"hermeneutical principle" as a referential guide. "The text is not
interpreted in terms of itself; indeed, this may be an impossible
ideal." "In this sense hermeneutics is the interpreter's system for
finding the 'hidden' meaning of a text."
Problem of the scope of hermeneutics. Does it include unstated, implicit principles in exegesis?
37- As such, it becomes a history of theology. A wholesale history of
hermeneutics becomes unmanageable in this approach. Betti provides the
greatest contribution (Teoria generale della interpretazione, 1955).
38- Besides, history by itself does not provide new principles.
Hermeneutics as Philological methodology
In the 18th century, both the 'grammatical' and the 'historical'
schools of biblical interpretation affirmed that the interpretive
methods applying to the Bible were precisely those for other books.
Johann August Ernesti, Institutio Interpretis Novi Testamenti (1761) argues that "the verbal sense of Scripture must be determined in the same way in which we ascertain that of other books" (Ernesti). Spinoza, in Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670): "the norm of biblical exegesis can only be the light of reason common to all" (Spinoza).
39- The Bible was thus kept above history, was intellectualized. "The
task of exegesis, then, was to go deeply into the text, using the tools
of natural reason, and to find those great moral truths intended by the
New Testament writers but hidden within different historical terms." —A
kind of demythologization. Grammatical and historical techniques
developed in the 18th c.
40- Similarly in classical philology. Hermeneutics became identified with philologial methodology.
Hermeneutics as the Science of Linguistic Understanding
Schleiermacher's contribution. A radical critique of philology
leads to a general hermeneutics applicable to all kinds of text
interpretation. This is the beginning of a nondisciplinary hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics as the Methodological Foundation for the Geisteswissenschaften.
41- With Dilthey, Schleiermacher's biographer, hermeneutics becomes the methodological foundation of [the humanities] the Geisteswissenschaften,
those "disciplines focused on understanding man's art, actions, and
writings", which require an act of historical understanding (unlike the
quantifying scientific grasp of the natural world). Dilthey advocates a
"critique of historical reason"—but the basis for this on psychology
fails; hermeneutics is required.
Hermeneutics as the Phenomenology of Dasein and of Existential Understanding
42- Heidegger. Being and Time
(1927) as a "hermeneutic of Dasein," a phenomenological explication of
human existence itself. "Understanding" and "interpretation" are seen
as foundational modes of man's being. Hermeneutics is connected with
ontology and phenomenology. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics in Wahrheit und Methode
(1960) provides a history of hermeneutics, and "an effort to relate
hermeneutics to aesthetics and to the philosophy of historical
understanding." In Gadamer, Hegel, and Heidegger we find the "concept
of 'historically operative consciousness', dialectically interacting
with tradition as transmitted through the text." "Hermeneutics is an
encounter with Being through language"—due to the linguistic character
of human nature.
43- Hermeneutics as a System of Interpretation: Recovery of Meaning versus Iconoclasm
Paul Ricœur, De l'interprétation
(1965). Back to textual exegesis (in a wide sense) and insights from
psychonalysis. "Hermeneutics is the process of deciphering which goes
from manifest content and meaning to latent or hidden meaning."
Univocal vs. equivocal symbols—e.g. mathematical symbols vs. objects of
hermeneutics; "hermeneutics has to do with symbolic texts which have
multiple meanings."
44- A distrust of surface meaning in Freud, and iconoclasm.
Ricœur opposes a loving interpretation to the destruction of the symbol
as the representation of a false reality (2). Two
opposing attitudes, the second is prominent in Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud; for them thinking is an exercise in suspicion. "Because of the
two antithetical approaches to the interpretation of symbols today,
Ricœur asserts, there can be no universal canons for exegesis but only
separate and opposing theories concerning the rules of interpretation."
45- Ricœur advocates the former approach to interpretation. The challenge is to make philosophy creatively hermeneutical.
4. THE CONTEMPORARY BATTLE OVER HERMENEUTICS: BETTI VERSUS GADAMER
46- Two main traditions today: Schleiermacher &
Dilthey's tradition vs. Heidegger's, i.e. hermeneutics as "a general
body of methodological principles which underlie interpretation" vs.
"hermeneutics as a philosophical exploration of the character and
requisite conditions for all understanding"—now they are represented in
the opposition between Betti and Gadamer.
46-47- "The demythologizing theologian Rudolf Bultmann and the two
leaders of the New Hermeneuitcs, Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fusch—can be
grouped together as allies of Gadamer's basically Heideggerian and
phenomenological approach." E. D. Hirsch sides with Betti and pleads
for a return to objectivity, "a reaffirmation that the study of history
involves leaving behind the historian's own present standpoint."
Gadamer claims that he describes what is—ontology, not methodology.
48- For Betti, there is a morass of relativity, a standardlessness, in Gadamer and Heidegger.
Hermeneutics in Bultmann, Ebeling, and Fuchs
Rudolf Bultmann is the major Protestant theologian of the 20th century, sets forth a demythologizing project in Jesus (1926) and Jesus Christ and Mythology
(1941): "demythologization does not presume to delete or bypass the
mythical elements in the New Testament but to emphasize in them the
original and saving meaning"
49 —against the shallow literalism in the modern way of seeing; against
language understood as mere information: it is a way to confront God
and self-understanding. The mythical symbol is a window to the sacred.
"To interpret the symbol is to recollect its original, authentic, but
now hidden, meaning." Bultmann is nfluenced by Heidegger, whose
ontology is unconsciously religious: in both man appears as a
future-oriented, historically existing being. Language is full with
personal import and a power to command; cf. Heidegger on the derivative
character of logical assertions and of objectivity.
50- God or Being confronts man as Word, and Bultmann calls for an
existential self-understanding. But "He still sees hermeneutics as the
philosophy that should guide exegesis rather than as understanding
theory per se". In "The Problem of Hermeneutics" (1950) he emphasizes
freedom of inquiry; the Bible is equivalent to other books as respects
interpretation:
51- the problem is "what is the character of historical knowledge?" The
interpreter's preunderstanding guides interpretation (as in Heidegger).
The historian sees from a viewpoint; "he is open principally to the
side of the historical process disclosed to questions arising out of
that viewpoint. However objectively he may pursue his subject, the
historian cannot escape his own understanding." The objective is known
through becoming subjective—a purely objective, standpointless meaning,
does not exist. Meaning arises out of the interpreter's relation to the
future.
52- Cf. Heisenberg's principle of intederminacy: the historian is part
of the field he observes. "Historical knowledge is in itself an
historical event" (a notion already found in R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History, 1946); for Bultman, it is only eschatologically, after history, that objectivity is possible.
53- Gerhard Ebeling (Word and Faith)
and Ernst Fuchs follow Bultmann with greater emphasis on language:
"word-event theology." According to Ebeling, "Hermeneutics as the
theory of understanding must therefore be the theory of words" (Word and Faith);
the goal of hermeneutics is the removal of hindrances to understanding.
History is understood as a living reality coming to expression in
words: one should focus on its meaning, instead of its factuality.
54- Ebeling departs from the realistic objectivity of historical facts:
in theology this position is attacked by Wolfhart Pannenberg, and
outside theology by Betti.
Betti's Hermeneutics. Emilio Betti is a historian of law. In Die Hermeneutik als allgemeine Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften
(1962) he opposes the hermeneutics of Gadamer, Bultmann and Ebeling
arguing that "it does not serve as a methodology or aid to methodology
for the humane studies and . . . it jeopardizes the legitimacy of
referring to the objective status of objects of interrpetation and thus
renders questionable the objectivity of interpretation itself."
55- His Teoria generale della interpretazione (1955) presents itself as a renewal of the old German tradition. Its aim is
56- "to differentiate among the various modes of interpretation in the
humane disciplines and to formulate a foundational body of principles
with which to interpret human actions and objects. If a distinction is
to be made between the moment of understanding an object in terms of
itself and the moment of seeing the existential meaning of the object
for one's own life and future, then it may be said that this latter is
clearly the concern of Gadamer, Bultmann and Ebeling, while the nature
of 'objective' interpretation has been Betti's concern." He
differentiates the two aims: "If the object is not other than its
observer, and if it does not, of itself, speak, why listen?" Sinngebung [understanding, ascribing a sense, application] is not interpretation or Auslegung.
57- — The object of interpretation appears as the "objectification of
man's spirit . . . expressed in sensible form. Interpretation, then, is
necessarily a recognition and reconstruction of the meaning that its
author, using a special kind of unity of materials, was able to
embody." This involves the translation of the interpreter to a foreign
subjectivity. His own subjectivity is involved but it must penetrate
the otherness of the object, which is essentially autonomous.
— Meaning arises from the overall unity of parts.
58- —Understanding is seen as an active reconstructive process which
involves the interpreter's experience in the world and is based on it
(a kind of preunderstanding). Explication (Auslegung) and understanding (Sinngebung)
must be differentiated; our preunderstanding may be changed by the
object. Gadamer lumps together many different modes of interpretation
(legal interpretation is not the same as historical interpretation; the
second does not involve an application to the present). Gadamer argues
back that he tries to go beyond the concept of method to describe "what
is" [what actually happens when we interpret].
59- In the preface to the 1965 edition of Wahrheit und Methode, Gadamer says that he seeks what all
interpreters have in common, not focusing on special disciplines. He
stresses objectivity in the sense that interpretation belongs to the
being of what is understood. Two different directions: "Betti, following Dilthey in quest of a foundational discipline for the Geisteswissenschaften,
looks for what is practical and useful to the interpreter. He wants
norms to distinguish right from wrong interrpetation, one type of
interpretation from another. Gadamer, following Heidegger, asks such
questions as: What is the ontological character of understanding? What
kind of encounter with Being is involved in the hermeneutical process?
How does tradition, the transmitted past, enter into and shape the act
of understanding an historical text?"
60- Their positions are not totally antithetical—although ultimately we
must choose between a realistic and a phenomenological perspective.
E. D. Hirsch: Hermeneutics as the Logic of Validation
E. D. Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation is
the first full treatise of hermeneutics in English. Hirsch challenges
current interpertive assumptions: in favour of intention, and of the
separation of 'meaning' and 'significance' (equivalent to Betti's Bedeutung vs. Bedeutsamkeit).
61- The objective of hermeneutics is for him to determine verbal
meaning, not significance. Verbal meaning cannot change—otherwise there
is no norm of judgment. There is an Aristotelian flavour in Hirsch's
position.
62- Validity as the problem of choosing one meaning over another: an
issue sidestepped by Heideggerians. Significance is the province of
criticism, etc. Hermeneutics is a modest philological task: knowing
what the author meant. Interpretation is conceived by Hirsch as a
foundation for criticism. He leaves out the subjective process of
understanding, crucial in Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and also the
relation to the present. Here he is concerned only "with the problem of
umpiring between already understood meanings so as to judge among
conflicting possible interpretations."
63- It is not a problem of 'translation' but of determination of
meaning. This approach rests on his conception of objective and
changeless verbal meaning (based on Husserl). Palmer opposes Hirsch's
conception: "in fact the hermeneutical problem is not simply a
philological problem, and it is not possible to relegate to limbo
with
64- Aristotelian definitions the bulk of understanding theory in
Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, not to mention the
contributions both inside and outside theology, toward defining
historical understanding." "The fact that a mental object can be viewed
from several perspectives does not make it historically changeless and
eternal; and to argue that objectivity would otherwise be impossible is
circular, since the possibility of objective and ahistorical knowledge
is itself the question." Palmer rejects the mechanical separation
between meaning and significance: the separation is constructed after the act of understanding. Hirsch presupposes a theory of understanding as a "guess", and restricts hermeneutics to validation.
65- Hirsch rests on a basically Aristotelian epistemology and a
questionable theory of language; his approach is an inadvisable
oversimplification of the problem. Norms cannot be found in the
original intent of the author: "even the standards for, and of,
objectivity are manufactured out of today's historical fabric"
(Palmer). The notion of an objectivity of validation is opposed to the
phenomenology of the historical event of understanding.
5. THE MEANING AND SCOPE OF HERMENEUTICS
66- There is room for
all: "The diverse directions in hermeneutical theory illustrate in
themselves a hermeneutical principle: interpretation is shaped by the
question with which the interpreter approaches his subject." The
question for validity is not the same as the question about the nature
of understanding,
67- but both are valid. No school is absolutely valid; "the demand by
Betti and Hirsch that Gadamer's hermeneutics should furnish an
objective norm for distinguishing valid from invalid interpretations
fails to take account of the basic intention of Gadamer's thinking: to
examine the dynamics of understanding itself"; "essentially indirect
debates on the nature and scope of hermeutics itself."
The Double Focus of Hermeneutics: Event of Understanding and the Hermeneutical Problem
Two foci in the development of hermeneutics:
68- 1) linked to linguistic understanding and general phenomenology, philosophy of sybols, ontology...
2) the hermeneutic problem: a specific instance of (1). It is
linguistic, and historical. There are two phases: understanding itself,
and its relationship to us. Hirsch only takes into account the first
part. "The view of the hermeneutical problem presented by Hirsch would
leave aside the moment of understanding itself and focus on the need to
judge among several understandings; hermeneutics then becomes not the
phenomenology of understanding but the logic of validation."
69- The hermeneutical problem "is not simply that of arbitrating among competing interpretations."
The Potential Contribution of Other Fields to Hermeneutics
There is no clear place for
hermeneutics up to now. "The stepchild of theology, the ungainly
offspring of philology, nontheological hermeneutics is only now coming
of age as a field." Contributions from psychoanalysis (Ricœur),
philosophy (Gadamer), translation theory, information theory, and the
theory of oral interpretation." Literary criticism may contribute as
well (and not only Ingarden and the phenomenologists). (3)
70- E.g. the New Criticism, and myth criticism. The phenomenology of
language is indispensable. Also the philosophy of mind: Cassirer; and
of other disciplines: legal, historical and theological
interpretation... etc.
71- Palmer rejects Hirsch's limitations, and believes in the possibilities of a phenomenological hermeneutics. Witness the four major theorists studied here.
PART II: FOUR MAJOR THEORISTS
6. TWO FORERUNNERS OF SCHLEIERMACHER
75- Friedrich Ast and Friedrich August Wolf. Schleiermacher reacts to them: lectures in 1819, Akademiereden in 1829, "Ueber den Begriff der Hermeneutik, mit Bezug auf F. A. Wolfs Andeutungen und Asts Lehrbuch" (in Hermeneutik, ed. Heinz Kimmerle). Still valuable. (4)
76- Friedrich Ast (1778-1841)
Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik (1808) (the focus here)
Grundriss der Philologie (1808)
The aim of philological study for Ast is to grasp the 'spirit' of Antiquity, especially in its literary heritage. He sees Geist as an inner unity of work and age, derived from Herder's Volkgeist.
The aim is to become more like the Greeks; Antiquity is seen as the
paradigm of life in general. From the need to understand them arise
grammar and hermeneutics; hermeneutics is here "the theory of
extracting the geistige (spiritual) meaning of the text" (Palmer); understanding is possible because we all participate in Geist
77 —a spiritual unity of the humanities. This is the basis of the hermeneutic circle (Palmer): "because Geist is the source of all development and all becoming, the imprint of the spirit of the whole (Geist des Ganzen)
is found in the individual part; the part is understood from the whole
and the whole from the inner harmony of the parts." Thus, "one can only
rightly grasp the combined unity of the spirit of antiquity if one
grasps the individual revelations of it in individual ancient works,
and on the other hand, the Geist
of an individual author cannot be grasped apart from placing in its
higher relationship [to the whole]" (Ast). The task of hermeneutics is
for Ast "the clarification of the work through the development of its
meaning internally and the relationshipi of its inner parts to each
other and to the larger spirit of the age" (Palmer).
Parts of understanding:
1) historical (in relation to the content of the work)
2) grammatical, in relation to language
3) Geistige, understanding the work in relation to the total view (Geist) of the author and the Geist of the age [the spirit of the age].
78- (1) & (2) are
developed by Semler and Ernesti, respectively; (3) by Ast,
Schleiermacher and Böck. They are roughly the matter, the form, and the
spirit of the work, which reveals both the general spirit of the age
and the individual genius of the author. These aspects of understanding
interact and illuminate each other.
Levels of explanation:
1) hermeneutics of the letter
2) hermeneutics of the sense
3) hermeneutics of the spirit
(1) includes linguistic and historical understanding; (2) the
exploration of the genius of the age and of the author (contextual
meaning);
79- (3) seeks the Grundidee, Anschauung (i.e. 'view of life') in historical authors, Begriff,
basic conception, in philosophical authors. Only the greatest writers
achieve a harmonious synthesis, "in which conceptual content and view
of life stand in balanced complement within the controlling idea". The geistige
[spiritual] explanation leads to a transcencence of the temporal (vs.
Heidegger). History, Palmer argues, is not really historical in either
the Enlightenment or the Romantics, "it is only the new material for
deducing an atemporal truth or an atemporal Geist."
80- Understanding as reproduction or repetition of the creative process
(similarly in Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Simmel).
"Previously interpretation had not been seen in connection with any
theory of artistic creation." This notion is not literally true, Palmer
argues, although "it may be asserted that the experience communicated
in the work must somehow rise again as event for the reader." The
classics coincide here with the New Critics (against the hermeneutics
of Ast and the Romantics), considering that the creative process is
irrelevant. Palmer emphasizes the importance of our theory of knowledge
and of the ontological status of the work,
81- "for they determine in advance the shape of our theory and practice in literary interpretation."
Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1825)
Vorlesung über die Enzyklopädie der Altertumwissenschaft (1831)
Wolf sees hermeneutics as "the science of the rules by whih the meaning
of signs is recognizd" (Wolf). The rules vary with the object: there
are different hermeneutics for each discipline. Rules are reached
through practice—a practical, nontheoretical collection of rules. The
aim of hermeneutics for Wolf is "to grasp the written or even spoken
thoughts of an author as he would have them to be grasped" (Wolf; "Die
Wissenschaft fon den Regeln, aus denen die Bedeutung der Zeichen
erkannt wird"; "[Die] geschriebene oder auch bloss mündlich
vorgetragene Gedanken einer ander ebenso zu fassen; wie er sie gefasst
haben will." The interpreter must have an aptitude for dialogue and
empathy. Understanding is not the same as explanation:
82- "We understand for ourselves but we explain to others" —explanation depends on the audience, but "Niemand kann interpretari, nisi subtiliter intellexerit." Wolf lacks a metaphysics of Geist: his three levels are 1) interpretatio grammatica, 2) historica, and 3) philosophica.
The first refers to linguistic issues, the second to events and what
the author knew, the third is conceived as a check on the other two, a
control. Not a real system.
The trend to philosophy is carried over in Schleiermacher; a move to psychology and
83- "a systematic conception of the operation of human understanding in dialogue".
7. SCHLEIERMACHER'S PROJECT OF A GENERAL HERMENEUTICS
84- Hermeneutik, ed. Heinz Kimmerle (1954); Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Friedrich Lücke (1838, student notes).
"Hermeneutics as the art of understanding does not exist as a general
field, only a plurality of specialized hermeneutics" (Schleiermacher).
Schleiermacher's aim, Palmer says, is "to frame a general hermeneutics
as the art of understading," the same for all disciplines, with the
general hermeneutics of language as a basis for more specific
hermeneutics.
85- The basis is "the act of understanding, the act of a living,
feeling, intuiting human being"; Schleiermacher opposes mere
encylopedism and idealism. Religion is not based on some rational
ideal, but on dependence on God: hermeneutics similarly is based on the
concrete human being understanding dialogue. Schleiermacher advocates a
focus on the actual situation of understanding. The act of explanation
falls outside hermeneutics: "Eigentlich gehört nur das zur Hermeneutik
was Ernesti Prol. 4 [Institutio Interpretis Novi Testamenti] subtilitas
intelligendi nennt. Denn die [subtilitas] explicandi sobald sie mehr
ist als die äussere Seite des Verstehens ist wiederum ein Object der
Hermeneutik und gehört zur Kunst des Darstellens."
86- "The understanding situation is one of dialogical relationship"
(Palmer); hermeneutics as an art of hearing for Schleiermacher.
Understanding as a Reconstructive Process
Understanding is seen by Schleiermacher as "the
experience of the mental processes of the text's author" (Palmer), the
reverse of composition. Grammatical and psychological moments interact
in the hermeneutical circle.
87- The Hermeneutical Circle
In understanding, as seen by
Schleiermacher, parts define unities and unities define parts,
reciprocally, etc. Palmer explains: "an individual concept derives its
meaning from a context or horizon within which it stands; yet the
horizon is made up of the very elements to which it gives meaning. By
dialectical interaction between the whole and the part, each gives the
other meaning; understanding is circular, then. Because within this
'circle' the meaning comes to stand, we call this the 'hermeneutical
circle'." A logical contradiction? —"we must say that logic cannot
fully account for the workings of understanding. Somehow a kind of
'leap' into the hermeneutical circle occurs and we understand the whole
and the parts together." According to Schleiermacher, understanding is
partly comparative, partly intuitive and divinatory. There is an
initial community of meaning—"what is to be understood must already be
known" in some measure.
88- The hermeneutic circle is active at the linguistic level and also
at the level of the subject; meaning must be shared, a preknowledge is
necessary in every act of understanding.
Grammatical Interpretation and Psychological Interpretation
In the late Schleiermacher, there
is a tendency to separate language and thought: "grammatical" vs.
"technical" or "psychological" interpretation. The first follows
general hermeneutics; the second focuses on what is subjective and
individual. "Just as every speech has a twofold relationship, both to
the whole of language and to the collected thinking of the speaker, so
also there exists in all understanding of the speech two moments:
understanding it as something drawn out of language and as a 'fact' in
the thinking of the speaker" (Schleiermacher). The first moment is
negative, general, boundary-setting;
89- the second focuses on individual genius; this is a positive phase,
in which congeniality is needed. Both phases interact, the specific and
the general are involved in the whole act of interpretation. It
involves seeing the part (of the author's thought) in a larger whole
(e.g. his life, other lives...). The goal of Schleiermacher's
hermeneutics is, Palmer says, "the reconstruction of the mental
experience of the text's author"—not a psychonalysis of the author,
there is no analysis of the causes of thought, only reconstruction:
90- "a basically intuitive approach is required" (Palmer). "The
divinatory [method] is that in which one transforms oneself into the
other person in order to grasp his individuality directly"
(Schleiermacher)—but the end is to understand the text, not the author.
Hermeneutical Understanding as Understanding of Style
A talent of linguistic
understanding is necessary (not just empathy). We know the whole
individuality through style: "The fulfilled understanding of style is
the whole goal of hermeneutics" (Schleiermacher).
91- Hermeneutics as a Systematic Science (An ideal sought by Schleiermacher [with a hope of finding laws.]). From a Language-centered to a Subjectivity-centered hermeneutics
92- After 1819, "The decisive element in the move away from a
language-centered hermeneutics to a psychologically oriented
hermeneutics, according to Kimmerle, was the gradual relinquishment of
the conception of the identity of thought and language."
93- "Thus the text could not be seen as the direct manifestation of
inner mental process but something given up to the empirical exigencies
of language" —which must be transcended, although it is a necessary
step. Early (in 1813): "Essentially and inwardly, thought and its
expression are completely the same." According to Kimmerle and Gadamer,
Schleiermacher goes astray abandoning a language-centered hermeneutics
and fall into bad metaphysics.
The aim is to reconstruct an author's meaning: "But this assumption"
(Palmer writes) "is questionable, for a text is understood not by
reference to some vague inner mental process but by reference to the
subject, the matter, to which the text is referring." The earlier
Schleiermacher is closer to present conceptions. He surrenders his
fruitful standing point:
94- later he focuses on nonlinguistic individuality of which style is
now but an empirical manifestation, a psychologizing approach [Psychologizing is a bad word in Palmer, as in the phenomenological tradition generally.]
The Significance of Schleiermacher's Project of a General hermeneutics.
"Regardless of the psychologizing element
in the later Schleiermacher, his contribution to hermeneutics marks a
turning point in its history." It is a general, foundational
discipline, dialogical in nature (though blinded by its desire for
coherence). But Schleiermacher pushes hermeneutics to a new direction,
as science. Dilthey goes on with this project, with a "quest for
'objectively valid' knowledge and . . . his assumption that the
task of hermeneutics is discovereing the laws and principles of
understanding." We may see here perhaps a mistaken assumption "that it
is possible to occupy a point above or outside history from which
atemporal 'laws' can be devised."
95- But they place a fruitful focus on understanding. Later Dilthey will speak of a historical, not scientific basis
for hermeneutics. "Thus Schleirmacher moved decisively beyond
seeing hermeneutics as methods accumulated by trial and error and
asserted the legitimacy of a general art of understanding prior to any
special art of interpretation." Palmer advocates sound principles,
"beyond the pyrotechnies of the new Criticism or the contradictions of
present 'myth criticism'"; "present-day literary interpretation
certainly should consider more carefully its relation to the general
nature of all linguistic understanding" and avoid psychologizing:
"Psychologizing, properly defined, refers to the effort to go behind
the utterance to its author's intention and mental processes."
96- This is illegitimate for Palmer, but he is in favour of "seeing the
interpretive problem as inseparable from the art of understanding in
the hearer. Just this assertion helps to go beyond the illusion that
the text possesses an independent, real meaning separable from every
event of understanding it." He advocates a historic view.
Schleiermacher's emphasis on the life experience of understanding is
also important; it is related to previous experience. According to
Gadamer, the problem for Schleiermacher was not the obscurity of
history, but of the thou. This leads to a shift from history to
psychology; a late misconception in Schleiermacher [cf. the intentional
fallacy]. His work was influential on many, e.g. on Dilthey.
8. DILTHEY: HERMENEUTICS AS A FOUNDATION FOR THE GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN
98- Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) goes back to the idea of a general
hermeneutics—not developed after Schleiermacher—as a foundation for all
the humanities and social sciences. The aim is to develop methods of
gaining "objectively valid" interpretation of "expressions of inner
life." He opposes the scientistic analogy and idealism, and was
influenced by Comte.
99- "Concrete, historical, lived experience must be the starting and ending point for the Geisteswissenschaften"—"life
itself." A conflict: a Romantic desire for immediacy and totality, even
while seeking objectively valid data. In part he goes beyond
historicism and psychologism. Positivism, empiricism on the one hand,
and idealism & life philosophy on the other mix in Dilthey.
100- The Problem of Finding a Methodological Basis for the Geisteswissenschaften
The humanities need to get away from the reductionist
perspective of the natural sciences. The problem of understanding is
focused by Dilthey in epistemological, not metaphysical terms. He
continues Kant's work with a "critique of historical reason". The
Kantian categories not are significant for the inner life of man.
101- "This is a matter of [further] developing the whole Kantian-critical attitude; but in the category of self-interpretation [Selbstbesinnung]
instead of theory of knowledge, a critiique of historical instead of
pure reason" (Dilthey); "Not through introspection but only through
history do we come to know ourselves" (Dilthey). Life is grasped as
concrete meaning in particular situations—Dilthey emphasizes the
historicality of existence. For Dilthey, "These units of meaning
require the context of the past and the horizon of future expectations;
they are intrinsically temporal and finite, and they are to be
understood in terms of these dimensions—that is, historically"
(Palmer). Life philosophers (Nietzsche, Dilthey, Bergson), anticipated
by some romantics, opposed the formalism, rationalism, and convention;
against mere reason they set up the collected inner powers.
102- Later followed by James, Nietzsche, Simmel, Klages, Ortega y
Gasset. Palmer: "There is a distinct tendency in Locke, Hume, and Kant
to restrict 'Knowing' to the cognitive faculty in separation from
feeling and will."
103- Dilthey sees life as "human experience known from within"
(Dilthey). It is relative, not absolute (as against Hegel). Works: Der Erlebnis und die Dichtung, Gesammelete Schriften...
The 'Human Sciences' versus the 'Natural Sciences'
"Meaning", not "power"; "history", not "mathematics" (in the humanities).
104- The human sciences deal with phenomena "which are meaningful only
as they shed light in man's inner processes, his 'inner experience'"
(Dilthey). In the human sciences there is the "possibility of
understanding the inner experience of another person through a
mysterious process of mental transfer." This possibility is not
available to the natural sciences. It is based on the likeness between
mental experiences of persons, the "possibility of finding in another
person the profoundest depths of our experience." "Dilthey, following
Schleiermacher, sees this transposition as a reconstruction and
reexperiencing of another person's inner world of experience"; but the
end is the world, not the person—the socio-historical world of moral
imperatives, feelings, the experience of beauty, penetrated through
interpretation, not through introspection.
105- In the natural sciences there is an absence of reference to human
experience, which is inevitable in human studies; they refer to another
context of relationships. There are no mental facts in the natural
sciences. In the human sciences, the external world is treated only in
relation to feeling and willing men. Facts are significant only in
relation to human purposes. In the humanities, the key word is
'understanding', not 'explaining'; the aim is to grasp individuality,
versus the generalities of science.
106- But Palmer and others oppose the rigid separation between the
human and the natural sciences: "both work together in varying degrees
in every act of knowledge." Scientism creeps into Dilthey's thought,
though, in his aim of 'objectivity'. But Heidegger goes back to Dilthey
in his reflections, opposing Husserl's scientific tendencies.
Dilthey's Hermeneutical Formula: Experience, Expression, Understanding
106-7- Dilthey: "A science belongs
to the human studies only if its object becomes accessible to us
through a procedure based on the systematic relation between life,
expression and understanding."
107- 1) Experience, Erfahrung (in general) or Erlebnis (especially in individual instances [Spanish vivencia]), or Leben. Experience is a unified set of parts of life bound together by a common meaning [e.g. a love, a picture...].
108- It is not the 'content' of a reflexive act of consciousness, but
the act itself, experiencing as such; not an object for consciousness
but the act of consciousness. Experience does not perceive itself—it is
previous to the subect/object separation of reflexive thought.
Prereflexive consciousness was staked out by Husserl and Heidegger
after Dilthey.
109- It is not a merely subjective reality; it is previous to the
difference between subjectivity and objectivity, "a realm in which the
world and our experience of it are given together" (Palmer); Dilthey
wants to express "the freedom of life and of history" (Dilthey),
against a shallow separation of feelings and objects, sensation and
understanding. He places an emphasis on the temporality of experience:
its meaning encompasses the recollection of the past and the
anticipation of the future.
110- (Palmer): "The past and the future, then, form a structural unity
with the presentness of all experience, and this temporal context is
the inescapable horizon within which any perception in the present is
interpreted." Against Kant, Dilthey holds taht temporality is not
imposed by consciousness; it is already implicit in experience as a
given (we can speak of his realism in this sense). Temporality is not
added to the experience. Consciousness merely brings to light the
structural relationships implicit in experience, the meaning of an
experience.
111- "Experience is intrinsically
temporal . . . and therefore understanding of experience must
also be in commensurately temporal (historical) categories of thought"
(Palmer). A focus on historicality does not mean a focus on the past;
"It means we understand the present really only in the horizon of past
and future; this is not a matter of conscious effort but is built into
the structure of the experience itself" (Palmer).
112- 2) Expression (Ausdruck). In
Dilthey this is not linked to a subject/object "expressionism" or to
feelings. Expression is anything that reflects the imprint of the inner
life of man (a work, a law...), an 'objectification' of the mind.
Against introspection, which produces ineffable intuitions or yet more
objectifications in the form of concepts; Dilthey advocates the
hermeneutical study of objectifications in all Geisteswissenschaften.
3) The Art Work as Objectification of Lived Experience
Kinds of inner experience:
(1) Ideas. They are conceptual, easily communicated and accurate.
113- (2) Actions. Their goal is clear, but their reasons are not so clear. Both ideas and actions are "manifestations of life."
(3) Expressions of lived experience—ranging
from exclamations to art works. They are the fullest expression of
lived experience. They contain "more of the content of inner life [seelischen zusammenhang]
than any introspection can perceive, for it rises up out of the depths
which consciousness never lights up" (Dilthey); "In the great works of
art a vision [ein Geistiges] is set free [sich loslöst]
from its creator, the poet, the artist, or the writer, and we step into
a realm where deception by the expressor ends. No truly great work of
art can try to mirror a reality foreign to the inner content [geistigen Gehalt]
of its author. Indeed, it does not wish to say anything at all about
its author. True in itself, it stands there fixed, visible,
enduring..." (Dilthey)—it points to life, not to its author.
114- "Of all art works, those in language have perhaps the greatest
power to disclose the inner life of man" (Palmer); "for Dilthey,
hermeneutics takes a new and larger significance: it becomes the theory
not merely of text interpretation but of how life discloses and
expresses itself in works." It posits "generally held structures in and
thorugh which objective understanding takes place"—a matter of social,
historical expression, not merely individual.
(4) Understanding (Verstehen)—it is not only rational, but an operation in which a mind grasps another mind.
115- (Dilthey): "We explain by means of purely intellectual processes,
but we understand by means of the combined activity of all the mental
powers in apprehending." (Dilthey): "We explain nature; man we must
understand." Understanding is a pre-reflexive transposition of thought
into the other person, and it is valuable in itself, not just as a
means. Dilthey: "The secret of the 'person' attracts [us] for its own
sake to ever newer and deeper efforts to understand." He places an
emphasis on the particular, on the individuality of the work, etc.
116- The Meaning of 'Historicality' in Dilthey's Hermeneutics
Man as "ein geschichtiliches Wesen." History is not "the past," it is not an object:
(1) Man's self-understanding is indirect, by means of objectifications; a hermeneutical detour, dependent on history.
(2) Man's nature is not a fixed essence (cf. Nietzsche).
117- Man takes possession of framed
expressions of heritage to become creatively historical. Historical
relativism in Dilthey. History is a series of world-views, there are no
ultimate standards of judgment. Palmer: Meaning always stands in a
horizontal context that stretches into the past and into the future.
118- We depend on history for our self-interpretation, which involves a
constant interpretation of the past; man as a hermeneutical animal
(Palmer).
The Hermeneutical Circle and Understanding
According to Palmer, "Meaning is what understanding grasps in the
essentially reciprocal interaction of the whole and the parts" —a
sentence as an example. "And meaning is something historical; it is a
relationship of whole to parts, seen by us from a given standpoint, at
a given time, for a given combination of parts. It is not something
above or outside history but a part of a hermeneutical circle always
historically defined" (Palmer). Meaning is contextual.
119- This applies from particular statements to works: e.g. King Lear
seen from a post-deistic universe; "there is a seventeenth-, an
eighteenth-, a nineteenth- and a twentieth-century Shakespeare."
"Interpretation always stands in the situation in which the interpreter
himself stands". But for Dilthey meaning is not free-floating, though:
120- "Meaningfulness fundamentally grows out of the relation of part to
whole that is grounded in the nature of living experience" (Dilthey);
Palmer: "Meaning is not subjective; it is not the projection of thought
or thinking onto the object; it is a perception of a ral relationship,
within a nexus prior to the subject-object separation." There is an
interaction of the individual with objective Geist in the hermeneutic circle. Without a starting point:
121- (Palmer): "There can be no 'presuppositionless understanding'; we
always understand within our own horizon, by reference to our
experience. The interpreter's task is not a complete immersion in the
object, "but rather that of finding viable modes of interaction of his
own horizon with that of the text" (Palmer).
The Significance of Dilthey for Hermeneutics: Conclusion
Dilthey broadens the horizon of hermeneutics: from psychology he
moves to lived experience. He emphasizes the objective status of the
interpreted object—which provides an objectively valid knowledge
[¿¿??]. And its historicality:
122- "Great literature is rooted in the lived experience of the riddles
of life." The work of art is good in itself because it speaks about
life—it is not an aimless play with forms. Art is conceived by Dilthey
as truth, an expression of lived experience. The work has a problematic
status, as it opens up a reality that is neither subjective nor truly
objective.
123- Dilthey is still scientistic in his aim; Palmer does not approve
of his quest for "objectively valid knowledge", which is for Palmer "a
reflection of scientific ideals wholly contrary to the historicality of
our self-understanding". He also opposes the notion of understanding as
reeexperiencing the author's experience (in Dilthey and in
Schleiermacher); the processes of creating the work involve knowledge
we need not have in order to 'understand' what is 'said' in the work.
9. HEIDEGGER'S CONTRIBUTION TO HERMENEUTICS IN BEING AND TIME
124- Husserl and Heidegger: Two Types of Phenomenology
Heidegger uses hermeneutics in the context of his
quest for a more 'fundamental' ontology. He is similar to Dilthey in
his aim of disclosing life on its own terms. Husserl provides a method
"which might lay open the process of being in human existence in such a
way that being, and not simply one's own ideology, might come into
view"; he opens "the realm of the preconceptual apprehending of
phenomena."
125- But "Whereas Husserl had approached it with an idea of bringing
into view the functioning of consciousness as transcendental
subjectivity, Heidegger saw in it the vital medium of man's historical
being-in-the-world." Being as lived escapes conceptual categories—not a
matter of spatializing concepts, but of time. Heidegger is uneasy about
Husserl's concerns for consciousness. Husserl "tended to regard even
the facticity of being as a datum of consciousness." Heidegger's Sein und Zeit as a "hermeneutic phenomenology," a rethinking of phenomenology.
126- Husserl never uses the term "hermeneutic"; for Heidegger, "the
authentic dimensions of a phenomenological method make it
hermeneutical." Heidegger is antiscientific (like Gadamer) [in his
understanding of human experience]; Husserl conceives the aim of
philosophy as a rigorous science, a quest for apodictic knowledge.
Heidegger does not care for this, and becomes more hermeneutical,
interpreting the early philosophers. An opposition between scientific
and historical philosophy, thus.
127- Husserl denies the temporality of being: the realm of ideas is
above the flux (idealism). Heidegger is a historicist. As Palmer puts
it, "Phenomenology need not be construed as necessarily a laying-open
of consciousness; it can also be a means of disclosing being, in all
its facticity and historicality."
Phenomenology as Hermeneutical (in Sein und Zeit).
Phainomenon + logos. Phainomenon as "that which shows itslef, the manifested, revealed" (Heidegger); cf. phos, light: 'becoming visible'. It is not a symptom of something more primary, but a disclosure of being as it is.
128- Logos as speaking; its function is letting something be seen as
something, pointing to phenomena. Palmer: "The mind does not project a
meaning onto the phenomenon; rather, what appears is an ontological
manifestation of the thing itself." "[T]o let a thing appear as what it
is becomes a matter of learning to allow it to do so, for it gives
itself to be seen" [!!! — See my comments on the hermeneutics of suspicion as opposed to this hermeneutics of trust (Note 2)- JAGL].
Heidegger rejects our forcing our categories on things: things reveal
themselves to us. Phenomenology is a way of being led by the
phenomenon:
128-29- "Such a method would be of highest significance to
hermeneutical theory, since it implies that interpretation is not
grounded in human consciousness and human categories but in the
manifestness of the thing encountered, the reality that comes to meet
us."
129- Is Being interpretable thus? But Being is not a phenomenon, not an
object; it is more encompassing and elusive. It is interrogated through
appearing. Ontology becomes phenomenology. "Ontology must turn to the
processes of understanding and interpretation through which things
appear"—a 'hermeneutic' of existence. It is not an interpretation of an
interpretation (i.e. of a text) but the primary act of
interpretation which first brings a thing from concealment."
The methodological naming of phenomenological description is interpretation [Auslegung, laying open]. The logos of a phenomenology of Dasein has the character of hermeneuein [to interpret], through which are made known to Dasein
the structures of his own being and the authentic meaning of being
given in his [preconscious] understanding of being. Phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics in the original sense of the word, which designated the business of interpretation. (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit 37)
130- Palmer: "Hermeneutics as methodology of interpretation for the
humanities is a derivative from resting as and growing out of the
primary ontological function of interpreting". There is a historical
tendency to expand the meaning of hermeneutics; now it is the ground of
Dasein's being, not only of understanding in the humanities.
The Nature of Understanding: How Heidegger Moves Beyond Dilthey
'Understanding' suggests sympathy in English; it does not refer
only to knowledge, and it is not the same in Heidegger as in Dilthey
and Schleiermacher.
131- Here it is the basis for all interpretation, prior
to understanding, it is the power to grasp one's own possibilities for
being: it is a mode of being in the world. It is projective,
understanding relates to the future on the basis of one's situation (Befindlichkeit).
The essence of understanding is "the disclosure of concrete
potentialities for being within the horizon of one's placement in the
world": "Existentiality" (Existenzialität). "It always operates within a set of already interpreted relationships, a relational whole."
132- Heidegger "explores the implications of the hermeneutical circle
for the ontological structure of all human existential understanding
and interpretation." Understanding hs become ontological.
World and Our Relationship to Objects in the World
World is not separate from self. Not the scientific world or the
whole world, but the world in which we are immersed. It is prior to all
objectivity and conceptualizing—prior, then, to subjectivity too.
133- World is fundamental to understanding, but yet we see thorugh it,
it is difficult to grasp (cf. those unobtrusive tools which are noticed
only when a breakdown occurs).
Prepredicative Meaningfulness, Understanding, and Interpretation
134- "World" is more than
preconsciousness: "it is the realm in which the actual resistances and
possibilities in the structure of being shape understanding." It is the
realm of the hermeneutical process, "the process by which being becomes
thematized as language"; "Meaningfulness, then, is not something man
gives to an object; it is what an object gives to man though supplying
the ontological possibility of words and language." "Understanding must
be seen as embedded in this context, and interpretation is simply the
rendering explicit of understanding" (Palmer). For Heidegger, the
foundation of understanding is prior to any statement. Later he
stresses even more the connection between language and being: "It is in
words and language that things first come into being and are"
(Heidegger). "Language is the house of Being" (Heidegger). Palmer:
"understanding haas a certain 'prestructure' which comes into play in
all interpretation."
The Impossibility of Presuppositionless Interpretation
The structure of presupposition puts into question the subject/object model of interpretation.
136- "Likewise it raises questions as to what can be meant by so-called
objective interpretation or interpretation 'without presuppositions'."
Heidegger: "Interpretation is never a presuppositionless grasping of
something given in advance" (Sein und Zeit
150). "Self-evidence" rests on presuppositions, uncovered by Heidegger.
E.g. the encounter of the critic with the work "is not in some context
outside time and space, outside his own horizon of experiences and
interests, but rather in a particular time and place. There is, for
instance, a reason he is turning to this text and not some other, and
thus he approaches the text questioningly, not with a blank openness"
(Palmer). The prestructure rests not on consciousness, but on the world
which already contains the subject and the object. Heidegger discusses
things themselves, the ontological structure of understanding.
137- Hermeneutics is in Heidegger a theory of ontological disclosure,
as present in human existence. "His analysis weds hermeneutics to
existential ontology and to phenomenology, and it points to a ground
for hermeneutics not in subjectivity but in the facticity of world and
in the historicality of understanding".
The Derivative Character of Assertions
Assertions
are grounded on preunderstanding. Without this, they have no meaning.
The fundamental process of interpreting the world is not linguistic (a
practical 'contact' with objects). Then they are posited as beings
without properties, and they are concealed. (Palmer): "The hammer
disappearing into its function as tool represents the 'existential hermeneutical' as."
138- The apophantic 'as' cuts the hammer from the
world, it posits it as an object to be looked at. (Heidegger is against
presenting things as objects to be looked at). Against a theory of
judgements "which sees assertions as the mere binding and representing
of ideas and concepts, one which always remains on the shallow level of
the objective, on-hand realities" (he favours the first 'as').
139- Heidgger opposes the moern view of language in linguistics. He
advocates a foundation of language on speaking, on the living context.
A stress on the hermeneutical function of language; language is found
on something ready-to-hand, transparent, contextual. The best language
as speaking, or poetry, is not an expression of an inner reality; it is
not a speaker that is disclosed, but the world which encompasses all.
10. HEIDEGGER'S LATER CONTRIBUTION TO HERMENEUTICAL THEORY
140- "A theme in later Heidegger will be the effort to go back behind
the reality-founding event on the basis of which being itself is today
thematized." E.g. in Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959). These works are footnotes to Sein und Zeit, deepening and radicalizing Heidegger's views.
141- He becomes more obscure and poetical, but the basic quest is still
the same. Thinking as responsiveness, not as manipulation of ideas, a
hermeneutic process by which Being can be brought to light, now through
"an exploration of nonbeing, of the word 'being' itself, of Greek and
modern conceptions of being and truth, of thinking, and of language"
(Palmer). He turns increasingly to text interpretation.
The Critique of Foundational Thinking, Subjectism, and Technology
142- "In
later writings Heidegger attempts to review how Western thinking came
to define thinking, being, and thruth in essentially presentational
terms"—truth becomes unconcealment, correct seeing, and thinking
becomes the proper manipulation of ideas. He opposes the "ideological"
(i.e. theoretical) approach to metaphysics, and the abstracting of
essence from existence.
143- (Palmer): "Western man no longer senses being as constantly
emerging and receding from his grasp but as the form of a static
presence of an idea." "[B]eing is conceived not in terms of living
experience but in terms of idea—statistically, as a constant, atemporal
presentness." Heidegger opposes the Platonic and neo-Platonic influence
on Christianity (God as standing outside history, etc.).
144- He opposes the influence of Descartes: "Truth, for Descartes, is
more than merely the conformity between the knower and the known, it is
the subject's rational certainty of this conformity"—all is reduced to a subject/object polarity, the human subject appears as a reference point for everything. It is the syndrome of Subjektität,
subjectism"—pervading any philosophy that takes the human phenomenon as
the ultimate reference point. It is latent in Plato, explicit in
Descartes. Man is locked in the circle of his own projected world.
145- The world is de-divinized; nothing comes from God (or Being). Or
religion is turned into a human feeling of dependence. The 'value' of
objects is reduced to their usfulness. Values
themselves soon become objects. Truth is conceived as
correctness, a correspondence between the statement and the way the
object is presented to us. "This presentation cannot really be a
self-disclosure of something, since it is caught up un the overpowering
act of objectification by the subject." Subjectism as an
ever-increasing will to power, a frenzy for technological mastery.
Thinking itself, Heidgger complains, is conceived in terms of mastery,
it is technological,
146- thinking no longer conserves the world, "ut exhausts the world in
trying to restructure it to man's purposes." Interpretation is now a
means for conceptual mastery; only an objectification is interpreted.
Interpretation is no longer concerned with bringing things to light;
"Then its task is not the primary 'showing' of the thing but that of
achieving correctness among several possible interpretations" [Cf. Hirsch's approach above].
Language is conceived as a system of signs applied to an already known
set of objects. The whole Western thought appears as a thematization of
Plato's concept of truth.
147- "In Kant, in Hegel, in Nietzsche, Heidegger finds hints of the
older, Greek approach to truth as unconcealmente briefly asserting its
claim, only to be overshadowed and lost." A concern for hermeneutics,
in Heidegger, but going beyond mere 'correctness': an attempt to bring
out a hidden meaning. The mere interpetation of the author's intention
"would be to stop short at the very point where true interpretation
must begin"; Heidegger wants to go behind the text, to see what the
author could not say; he
looks for evidence of struggle in the text (versions, etc.).
"Interpretation must be creatively open to the as yet unsaid."
Interpretation he conceives not as grasping, but as receiving a gift
from the sacred.
148- Interpreting is resurrecting a text in a new
light. "Thus every interpretation must do violence to the explicit
formulation in the text"; "one does not understand an author better
[than himself], but differently."
On the Way to Thinking
The problem for Heidegger is how to think Being.
149- Man as an enunciator of being. "Man is the being who bridges the
gap between concealment and disclosure of being, between nonbeing (in
other words) and being. Man, in speaking, interprets being." But much
remains unspoken in a text; hermeneutics brings further disclosure.
"Yet this secondary act of interpretation must continually go back to a
loving repetition of the original disclosure, must keep itself as the
border between what is concealed and revealed." With "almost a
devotional passivity which will be completely open to the voice of
being."
150- In Introduction to Metaphysics,
questioning is addressed. Being in history as questioning; in the later
writings, Heidegger emphasized a wakeful openness to being. Being
occurs historically as a gift,
151- not as the result of man's grasping. An emphasis on a
nonsubject-centered stance. Later in Heidegger, "Not questioning but
response is the key word." He opposes interpretation conceived as an
objective analysis.
152- Language and Speaking
Language is a part of man's being; objective, logical thinking is a derivation.
153- (Palmer): "there can be no being without language and no language
without being"; language is essential for disclosure, "For to be a man
is to speak" (Heidegger). Questioning remains fundamental. Man did not invent language;
154- rather, language speaks; in itself it is not an expression or activity of man.
155- The essence of language is speaking; being (not man) is thereby disclosed; to say is to show. The Sprachlichkeit (linguisticality) of man's way of being. The
essence of language is hermeneutical—bringing a thing to show itself.
Interrpetation as a thinking dialogue with the text; helping the
language event to happen, with attention and care. Great poetry is
hermeneutical; Heidegger conceives of the poet as a messenger.
156- "The subject/object schema, objectivity, norms of validation, the
text as an expression of life—all are foreign to Heidegger's approach."
He proposes an ontological hermeneutics, giving hermeneutics too broad
a scope for Ricœur.
Explication and the Topology of Being
Three phases in interpreting a poetical work by Sophocles:
1) Attending to the intrinsic meaning.
157- 2) The delimitation of an area that is opened up by the poem.
3) Judging who man is according to the poem.
(Palmer:) "the explication seeks to locate the 'place' (topos)
out of which the poem speaks, the location of the clearing within being
that is lighted up by the passage." First phase: "What is said stands
within a meaning that is not totally explicit, the maeaning that is
below and above the text". The third attends to the border between
concealment and disclosure: "going beyond the poem to what was not
said."
If we content
ourselves with what the poem directly says, the interrpetation is at an
end [with the second phase]. Actually it has just begun. The actual
interpretation must show what does not stand in the words and is
nevertheless said. To accomplish this the exegete must use violence.
He must seek the essential where nothing more is to be found by the
scientific interpretation that brands as unscientific everything that
transcends its limits. (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics 148)
158- In Unterwegs zur Sprache,
Heidegger looks for the 'place' from which Trakl is poetizing. Each
poet speaks out of a single overarching poem that is never spoken, and
"Only out of the place of the [unspoken] poem does the individual poem
shine and sound" (Heidegger). Above all, we should hear the poem. Explanation can only make a hearing questionable or more meaningful. (So, violence is moderate). Palmer: "The function of explication is to let the line speak, not to try to say better what it says."
159- For the New Criticism, the poem is supreme; the background is not
the author but the subject matter; they promote the notions of the
ontological autonomy of the poem, of the heresy of paraphrase, the
intentional fallacy, etc. But the New Criticism objectifies the text,
and provides an explication within the restrictions of scientific
objectivity. Heidegger wants to go beyond what is indisputably given.
But "Heidegger's hermeenutics might provide the basis for a revitalized
form of New Criticism."
A Hermeneutical Conception of the Work of Art
The lecture "On the Origin of the Work of Art," published in Holzwege
(1950). These works transpose Heidegger's previous conception of
language and hermeneutics to the realm of art. There is a simultaneous
revelation and concealment of truth through the work's speaking. All
art is intrinsically poetical; it makes truth into a concrete
historical happening. This is explained as a tension between 'earth'
and 'world'. The work captures this tension in a form.
160- The work carves for itself a world precisely by showing the
materiality of the materials: the work "lets earth be earth"; (Palmer:)
"The essence of art, then, lies not in mere craftmanship but in
disclosure. To be a work of art means to open up a world. To interpret
a work of art means to move into the open space which the work has
brought to stand."
161- Art as revelation, not imitation. (Palmer): "The greatness of art,
in other words, must be defined in terms of its hermeneutical
function"—a hermeneutic theory of art. "Hermeneutics in Heidegger
points to the event of understanding as such, not to historical methods
of interpretation as over and against scientific methods."
162- Against Dilthey, for Heidegger all understanding
is rooted in the historical character of existential understanding.
Heidegger opens the way for Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics.
11. GADAMER'S CRITIQUE OF MODERN AESTHETIC AND HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
163- Wach and Betti. Betti provides an organon, classifying kinds of
interpretation, in the idealistic German tradition. His axioms had
already been questioned by Heidegger. For Gadamer, hermeneutics no
longer has a methodical basis: he questions the status of method;
ironically (if we think of his title), "method is not the way to
truth." "Understanding is not conceived as a subjective process of man
over and against an object but the way of being of man himself."
Gadamer does not deny the importance of formulating interpretive
principles, but he studies understanding in itself, how is it possible.
(5)
164- A consequence, however: if understanding pervades all, it cannot
be limited. "Gadamer asserts that the experience of a work of art
transcends every subjective horizon of interpretation, both that of the
artist and that of the perceiver." The work does not exist in itself
apart from its historical encounter. Like Heidegger, Gadamer opposes
modern technological thinking. Knowledge is conceived as participation,
as letting being speak,
165- —against the subject/object opposition, and against subjective
certainty. In Gadamer, "the dialectical approach to truth is seen as
the antithesis of method, indeed as a means of overcoming the tendency
of method to prestructure the individual's way of seeing. Strictly
speaking, method is incapable of revealing new truth; it only renders
explicit the kind of truth already implicit in the method." It is
not a matter of grasping the object through method, but of finding
oneself interrogated by the object. Gadamer does not follow Hegel to
ground dialectics on subjectivity, on self-consciousness—it is grounded
for Gadamer
166- "in the linguisticality of human being in the world." Not a
dialectic of refining opposed theses, but a dialectic of horizons, our
own and the tradition. A Heideggerian approach: "The objective of the
dialectic is eminently phenomenological: to have the being or thing
encountered reveal itself."
167- The Critique of Aesthetic Consciousness
Gadamer opposes the "aesthetic consciousness" which rests on a
subject/object scheme. Art is not to be considered an object to be
enjoyed; pro art as knowledge. Addressing art as subject/object ends in
empty formalism and provides no grounds for the value of art. Whereas
through the work of art we see a world, not a play of forms.
168- Art widens our horizon and makes us see objects (even common ones)
in a new light. We understand art as a part of our own
self-understanding, not as a foreign universe. Gadamer rejects the
notion of stepping outside of time and history in enjoying art. In
entering a great work we enter a whole but discover reality inside. For
him, "The legitimation of art is not that it gives aesthetic pleasure
but that it reveals being" (Palmer). We must hear the question put to
us by the work of art; Gadamer advocates openness to the work.
169- "The artist has the power to transform into an image or a form his
experience of being." A fusion of the represented thing and the form in
the work, so that something new comes into being. In this sense we can
speak of the 'autonomy of the work', not "the aimless and isolated
autonomy of 'aesthetic consciousness', but the mediation of knowledge
in the deeper sense of the term"; "total mediating", with no
possibility of separating aesthetic elements from other elements in
play.
170- Gadamer speaks of an "aesthetic indifferentiation," both between
materials and form and between the work and its performance. [Some of these notions might seem to be pre-Brechtian, though - JAGL]
Game and the Way of Being of a Work of Art
171- Gadamer opposes subjective theories of play as the enjoyment of an aesthetic moment outside the world;
172- —it is not a matter of freedom but of engagement in play; the
game's rules go beyond the consciouness of the player, they become the
true subject and they take place through us.
173- But art is, moreover, presentation—not just self-contained play.
174- The work of art as "a presentation, transformed into an image, of
a truth of being as event"—etc. Do Gadamer's positions approach those
of the New Criticism? There are similarities.
175- Stronger position in Gadamer because of his stronger concept of
autonomy: "Hitherto the New Critics' defense of the auton0my of the
literary work only served to undermine its relevance." The New Critical
notion of "surrendering to the work", etc.— "Yet the New Criticism
remained entangled in the illusions of subjectivized aesthetics without
knowing it." Gadamer is stronger on the historicality of literature,
and on the critique of isolated form.
176- The New Criticism is muddled when it discusses 'form' leafing
present-day relevance out: there is no tension present/past there.
Palmer agrees with Gadamer on the temporal character of the work.
The Critique of the Ordinary Understanding of History
Gadamer starts from Heidegger's intrinsic historicality of human
existence. Notion of preconceptions: "There is no pure seeing and
understanding of history without reference to the present." The present
is only seen through tradition.
177- (In Heidegger, 'being' —but this is linguistic, as tradition, in
Gadamer). Being, history and tradition, and language, are interfused. A
critique of Droysen's and Ranke's historicism which strove after
objectivity. "The task of the historian was not to inject his personal
feelings into history but to enter completely the historical world of
which he wished to give an account." Dilthey opposed complete scientism
and promoted hermeneutics;
178- for Dilthey, understanding history is reflexive; it includes
understanding our place in it. But for Gadamer, Dilthey still believes
in objective knowledge, in the 'objectivation' of minds. Dilthey is
still method-oriented, and this prevents his finding real
historicality.
179- Husserl already oppposes the 'objectively valid' world to the
intentional horizon in which we live. Heidegger moves further: "away
from transcendental subjectivity, to an objectivity which stands
outside the subject-object distinction, an objectivity which takes the
'facticity' of human existence as its ultimate point of reference."
(...) "It is the objectivity of allowing the thing that appears to be
as it really is for us."
180- "One's lifeworld recedes from efforts to grasp it though any
'method', and one generally stumbles on its nature by accident,
principally through some kind of negativity or breakdown." Heidegger's
approach is to see not the way the world belongs to the subject, but
the way the subject belongs to the world. Gadamer emphasizes this
historicality of understanding—now, with relation to the past and
projections to the future.
181- Some Hermeneutical Consequences of the Historicality of Understanding
1) The Issue of Prejudgment
Palmer rejects the 'open-mindedness' of not taking into account the
ideas of the past in judging art. "Regrettably, literature professors
generally may be classified as either formalit-aesthetes or
antiquarians."
182- "Actually the present cannot be left in order to go into the past;
the 'meaning' of a past work cannot be seen solely in terms of itself.
On the contrary, the 'meaning' of the past work is defined in terms of
the question put to it from the present. If we consider the structure
of understanding carefully, we see that the questions we ask are
ordered by the way we project ourselves into the future."
Preconceptions (coming from tradition) are necessary.
183- "what we call 'reason' is a philosophical construction and not a
final court of appeal." Authority and tradition regain their
enlightenment, and there is no interpretation which is 'right' in
itself. (But this does not equal a thoughtless application of
present-day standards!).
184- 2) The Concept of Temporal Distance
Temporal distance to the work as important aesthetic element to be
taken into account. "What is mediated by the text is not important to
its interpretation primarily as the feeling or opinion of the author
but rather in its own right as something intended." Time eliminates the
inessential,
185- "allowing the true meaning [—?¿ JAGL] that lies hidden in a thing to become clear." Cf. the notion of "aesthetic distance." [E.g. in Edward Bullough et al.—JAGL]
3) On Understanding the Author of a Text
"The task of hermeneutics is essentially to understand the text, not
the author." "The text is understood not because of a relation between
persons is involved but because of the participation in the subject
matter that the text communicates." One lets the text address us in our world. "Understanding is a participation in the stream of tradition, in a moment which mixes past and present" [Again we find here the same disregard of otherness or distance with respect to other contemporary, present, cultures- JAGL].
186- 4) On Reconstruction of the Past
Gadamer opposes this notion, vs. Schleiermacher: "Integration, not restoration, is the true task of hermeneutics."
5) The Significance of Application
187- J. J. Rambach distinguished 3 phases of interpretation.
Schleiermacher suppresses application. But for Gadamer it always takes
place in all kinds of hermeneutics.
188- Juridical and theological hermeneutics appear now as models for
literary hermeneutics (with their conscious effort to span distance).
189- "The interpreter must be governed by the claim of the text, yet
translate the meaning of the claim into the present." Bultmann, etc.
The Bible is read as kerygma, message.
190- Reading is therefore an event, not merely a matter of entering
another world, but of integrating our present horizon with that of the
work. Staging a play is interpretation, a fusion of horizons which is
linked to the very idea of dramatic illusion.
191- Consciousness which is Authentically Historical
"Authentically historical consciousness" is a translation of the term "wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein" ["consciencia histórica efectual," JAGL.]
Not in the Hegelian sense; it is not based on self-mediation as a root
for dialectic; it is rather the structure of experience itself.
192- There are three kinds of 'I-thou' relationships; only
'thou-as-tradition-speaking' is authentic historical awareness. The
others are not ('thou-as-object' and
'thou-as-reflection-of-I')—corresponding to 'method' and 'historical
consciousness' respectively, for Gadamer.
193- In the third kind, we are open, we allow something to be said to
us. The text cannot be fully an 'other'. Gadamer opposes the notion of
the present considered as the apex of the truth.
12. GADAMER'S DIALECTICAL HERMENEUTICS
The Structure of Experience and of Hermeneutical Experience
194- Gadamer vs. the idea of knowing as a perceptual act and of
knowledge as a body of conceptual data. Against the ideal of data
gathering and verification in philology; in favour of a historical and
dialectical conception of experience.
195- Knowledge he understands as a happening and an encounter. Cf.
Hegel: experience as a dialectical restructuring of awareness; the role
of negativity (against our expectations) at origin. But for Gadamer
fulfillment is not found in knowing but in openness for experience. A
wider view of experience as necessarily including negativity and
disillusionment. The experience of finitude, against our illusions,
renders us open, not rigid and dogmatic.
197- Experience as coming to understand our heritage and ourselves as
immersed in it. All dialogue has a question-answer structure,
198- (but not a matter of person to person: we must see this in terms of subject matter).
The Structure of Questioning in Hermeneutics
There is an encounter with negativity in all true questioning (dialectical). Cf. the Socratic docta ignorantia.
"Method" presupposes that we only would need to understand more
thoroughly in the way we already understand.—method is opposed to
openness.
199- "The openness of questioning, however, is not absolute, because a
question always has a certain direction." There is the problem, then,
of the right question. Cf. Plato: to test is the assertions of the
other person by tring to strengthen (not refute) them.
200- The problem is to restore the fixed text to conversation—a task
for hermeneutics. Understanding the text means to understand the
questions it poses to the interpreter. It is not merely a matter of
rendering the text more explicit: we must reconstruct the question for
which the text was one answer (and there always other possible answers).
201- It is not a matter of "intentions": "The heritage itself speaks in the text" through language.
The Nature of Language
202- The Noninstrumental Character of Language
Against the 'sign' theory of language—against the
idea of unambiguous concepts. Palmer stresses participation in living
language. Cf. 'logos'. Signs are not seen as revealing being but as
designating a preknown reality. Palmer rejects the approach to language
as a symbolic form.
203- Language is linked to and arising from experience.
204- "To take form as the starting point in language is to make
essentially the same error as to take form as the starting point in
aesthetics. Language cannot be divorced from thought and from the
tradition it transmits.
205- Language and the Disclosure of the World
Of the lifeworld. World and language are both transpersonal (against subjectivist theories);
206- —an objectivity is thereby disclosed that is not the objectivity
of science. The world is the communal ground recognized by everybody;
"language and world transcend all possibility of being fully made into
an object."
207- A text of the past can open a world different from our own and yet one we can understand.
Linguisticality and the Hermeneutical Experience
Linguisticality is for Gadamer the ground for the hermeneutical encounter.
208- We belong to language and to history and
that opens the possibility of the emergence of a common horizon (fusion
of horizons). Against the notion of mastery on the text; rather one
should serve it, hearing it.
209- The interpreter is not so much a knower as an experiencer. Something new emerges from the encounter.
The Speculative Structure of Language and of the Nature of Poetry
210- Language is always moving, shifting. The said and the unsaid form
a unity in true saying, where people understand each other. A backdrop
of ungraspableness is present in all language, especially in the poetic
statement. Moreover, the poetic word brings
211- something new to the realm of the said, because "the poet is the
speculative experiencer par excellence, he opens up, through his own
openness to being, new possibilities in being." The interpreter is like
the poet; he must be open if he is to understand, and must interact
dialectically with the text.
212- All this is grounded on the negativity of being and of experience.
The Universality of Hermeneutics
Gadamer advocates a new philosophical inquiry, a new objectivity.
213- "Hermeneutics is ... a universal way of being of philosophy
and not just the methodological basis for the humane disciplines"
(Gadamer). Against Hegel's conception, language is not the instrument
of subjectivity, but "a repository and carries the experience of being"
of the past. Gadamer's hermeneutics is speculative rather than
dialectical.
Conclusion
215- "Hermeneutics is the ontology and phenomenology of
understanding." From late Heidegger, Gadamer has developed
something closer to Hegel. A liability?
216- No, since Heidegger's thought is also dialectical. Gadamer
provides an extension, "probably an improvement over Heidegger's
conception." Late Heidegger describes understanding in too passive a
way—only as an event, not an act. Gadamer moves farther from the
structuralists, which is OK for Palmer.
217- Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode
"could provide the foundation for a radical critique of the conception
of interpretation prevailing in literary criticism today."
PART III: A HERMENEUTICAL MANIFESTO TO AMERICAN LITERARY INTERPRETATION
Preamble
221-22- There is confusion now about what literary
interpretation does, in spite of so many methods. There is a way ahead
in hermeneutics.
223- 13- TOWARD REOPENING THE QUESTION: WHAT IS INTERPRETATION?
What does Understanding a Text Mean?
"American literary interpreters and theorists have fallen into a
crassly naturalistic and technological way of seeing their task."
Understanding is dismissed as dealing "not with the object of analysis
but with the subjective experience of it" [in the New Criticism].
But the work does not exist apart from the experience of it. "The
abstract analysis of form and of logical contradictions comes to be the
hallmark of subtle interpretation, and ultimately the dynamics of
experiencing the work are unconsciously bypassed, or dropped as leading
to 'fallacy'." Interpretation is decontextualized, dehistoricized. "The
subject-object model of interpretation is a realist fiction."
224- Understanding and subject are always positional; a privileged
access to works cannot be assumed. Literature and understanding are
historical; formalisms ignore this deep historicality, the creative
tension of horizons.
The Consequences of the Subject-Object Schema
Data, numbers, and schemas are privileged from the moment we see a work as an object.
225- Whatever is repeatable or measurable gets privileged. There is
subjectivism beneath this shallow objectivism: since Descartes, an
erroneous approach: "when human subjectivity is the final court of
appeal, there is nothing left forman but to control the 'objects' in
his world ever more completely." Now criticism is conceived as mastery
(with the New Criticism as a partial exception). Palmer opposes dry
historicism and philology—but the New Criticism rests on a shaky
philosophy, it vacillates between realism and idealism (in Murray Krieger).
226- Too often the work is presented by the New Critics apart from its
perception: a formalistic Aristotelianism. Critics should remove
hindrances to understanding, rather than trying to master the work. The
reader is placed at a distance from the text—while the interpreter
should be seized and transformed by the work, and listen to the work as
a thou, not as an it.
227- Dangers of too much method. Palmer says we should know methods and
their limitations, and advocates an experiential understanding.
Toward a More Comprehensive Conception of Understanding
228- Heidegger sees understanding as the medium by which the world
comes to stand before us. Understanding is not a tool for
consciousness, but the medium in which we exist. The temporal world "is historically formed, and . . . every act of understanding contains the acting of history in and through understanding"; "understanding is linguistic, historical, and ontological."
229- "what discloses itself is the being of the object as it is disclosed to understanding." A shared understanding, historicality, and language, as ground. They are not 'subjective' since they precede the subject.
230- Palmer rejects the conception of language as instrument; against
the notion of thought separate from language. "We do not originate
meanings"; languageis not coined, it appears.
231- [One might see a partial
contradiction in Palmer, when he denounces so many scientific
"errors"—since these theories are also the product of a situated
understanding and an act of interpretation. —JAGL]
Defining understanding in terms of experience
Understanding is not conceptual knowing. In literature
this confusion leads to "extensive analyses which contribute little to
enabling one to experience in a compelling way the saying power of the
work." Palmer rejects the kind of analysis which leads to the wrong
questions and to shallow understanding. "To understand a work is to
experience it"
232- —above all when it shatters our expectations, it teaches "the
poverty of knowledge in comparison with experience." He advocates
openness to the text.
The Dialectic of Question and Answer in the Hermeneutical Experience
233- "to experience is to understand not better but differently";
experience negates expectations. Analysis is testing—the answer is
already implicit in the system. But great works transform our
understanding, and their freshness of seeing escapes analytical
blindness. "The truly creative moment lay in the creation of the method
itself."
234- Palmer favours a "creative fusion of horizons", "a partial
negation of one's own horizon, and through this a more encompassing
understanding emerges."
On Being Able to Hear What the Text Did Not Say
"It is necessary to go behind the text and to find what the text did
not, and perhaps could not, say." "Just as every question contains a
preliminary assertion so every assertion may be seen as the answer to a
question."
235- "Thus to interpret the work means to step into the question
horizon within which the text moves. But this means also that the
interpreter moves into a horizon within which other answers are
possible." Palmer pro understanding the text in terms of those answers,
thus going beyond the author's intention, "although this may be
relevant." He rejects the fear to do violence to the text, and favors
going beyond explicitness.
On the Significance of Application to the Present
Palmer rejects theories which (following Ranke) aim at the mere reconstruction of meaning—the objectivist ideal of history.
236- Historical research has a purpose from the start: from the start,
application is implicit. Historical interpretation involves an
encounter, as happens in judicial and in theological hermeneutics. Etc.
On the category of the Aesthetic, and Attendant Misconceptions
237- "The idea, which has come down to us from the Enlightenment, of
'the aesthetic' or of a purely 'aesthetic' element in a work of art is
a reflexive fiction." The aesthetic dimension is not separable from
meaning, it is not 'form' or 'craftsmanship'. Aristotle rightly sees
pleasure in art as a by-product.
238- "In literature, the pleasure of reading is the pleasure of
understanding in and through form; it is not a response to the form as
such." "To differentiate between the material of the work and the
performance of it represents a falling away from the aesthetic
experience"; "aesthetic pleasure is a by-product of one's encounter
with the fresh truth of being set forth in the world of a work of art."
239- Heidegger's theory: the work opens up a space of being of being
thorugh form—both go together. The world of the work is continuous with
our own and we modify our understanding when we understand it.
240- "The universality of art, then, is an ontological universality:
all great art reveals being." It is not a mattter of feeling projected
into form (vs. subjectivism), but of truth projected into the work.
Palmer rejects the isolation of the aesthetic phenomenon, and the
alienation of art and the artist from society. "Beauty is truth, the truth of being which discloses itself to us in art." [But not the truth of verificability].
242- 14. THIRTY THESES ON INTERPRETATION
On the hermeneutical experience
1) "The hermeneutical experience . . . is intrinsically historical."
2) "The hermeneutical experience is intrinsically linguistic."
3) "The hermeneutical experience is dialectical."
4) "The hermeneutical experience is ontological" —our own being is disclosed.
243- 5) "The hermeneutical experience is an event"—a 'language event'.
6) "The hermeneutical experience is 'objective'"—(but
not scientifically!). Against the Enlightenment and its subjective
objectivity—data, reason, reflexive, etc. Pro 'participating', not using.
The situation itself (and not our reflexivity) comes to expression in
language. The ground of objectivity is linguistic reality.
244- 7) The hermeneutic experience should be led by the text.
It is not an analysis or a rape of the text, but a loving union of
partners. Some aspects of the text recede and others come forward, etc.
8) "The hermeneutic experience understands what is said
245) in the light of the present."
9) "The hermeneutic experience is a disclosure of truth." (Of truth as "the dynamic emergence of being into the light of manifestness"). It 'happens'.
10) "Aesthetics must be swallowed up in hermeneutics."
246- "The aesthetic moment cannot be understood apart from the total interpretive encounter."
On Transcending the Subject/Object Schema
11) The subject/object schema must be transcended through
phenomenology; cf. phenomenological literary criticism (Sartre,
Bachelard, Richard, Blanchot) and French phenomenological philosophy
(Ricœur, Dufrenne, Gusdorf, Merleau-Ponty).
On the Autonomy and Objective Status of the Work of Art
12) The New Criticism is OK on this point; Palmer too is against the
intentional fallacy, etc. The critic's interest falls on the thing
itself, not on intentions or beliefs.
247- On Method and Methods
13) Method as an attempt to control the phenomenon—whereas in openness
it is the phenomenon which leads. "Method is in reality a form of
dogmatism."
14) Palmer rejects the rape theories of interpretation, and the "cold
analysis of structure and pattern" which does not increase the pleasure
of literature.
15) "Form should never be the starting point of a literary interpretation."
248- Against the isolation of form; the unity and fullness of the aesthetic moment should be preserved.
16) The beginning point must be the language event of experiencing what the work says.
17) The true love of literature is not the same as this beginning point.
18) "It is not the interpreter who grasps the meaning of the text; the meaning of the text seize him."
249- 19) The craftsmanship of the work is not a criterion—only the experience provided.
20) Reading a work is not gaining conceptual knowledge but experience.
21) Against the conceptual methods of understanding; against Aristotelian formal analysis. Palmer advocates socratic dialogue.
250- 22) "A method receives its validation only if it works" —and they don't in literature.
23) One should hear the text, listen to it. Literary interpretation "needs to develop an openness for creative negativity."
The Need for Historical Consciousness in Literary Interpretation
24) Theres is now in America an inability to see the essential
historicality of literature. There are only formalists and antiquarians.
251- 25) "Literature is intrinsically historical."
26) "The task of interpretation, then, is that of bridging historical distance" —or "demythologizing."
[Again, Palmer underestimates or downplays here the task of
interpretation and of criticism, which should also include a critical,
sometimes oppositional, response and evaluation of the work - JAGL]
252- 27) Palmer advocates phenomenology as a critique of scientific seeing.
28) The understanding of the work is an event, and cannot be conceptualized as knowledge.
29) Literary interpretation is a historical, not a scientific
(conceptual) activity; it is experiential; it is not a matter of
rejecting conceptual knowing but of transcending and encompassing it.
30) Palmer calls for a recovery of a sense of the historicality of
existing, and questions the idea of 'the right interpretation'.
[Although he believes in "the verdict of history" which sounds hardly unanimous to me].
Our judgments of contemporaries are provisional. We should recognize
the world of conflict in our daily lives, and conceive of
interpretations as historical, like ourselves.
—oOo—
NOTES by JAGL
(1) These notes were taken c. 1990.
Numbers on the left refer to the pagination of the 1969 edition
(Northwestern UP). Line-breaks in this electronic file are thus somewhat atypical, but clear enough I trust.
(2) See on this issue my paper on the hermeneutics of trust vs. hermeneutics of suspicion: "Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism: Reframing, Topsight,
and Critical Dialectics." Online PDF at Social Science Research Network
28 August 2008; http://ssrn.com/abstract=1259696
(3) On Ingarden's phenomenology of literature, see my notes on The Literary Work of Art in Vanity Fea: http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2012/08/the-literary-work-of-art-roman-ingarden.html
(4) My summary and notes on Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics (ed. Kimmerle) are available here: "Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. (Notes on Schleiermacher)" Vanity Fea 13 May 2013.
http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2013/05/hermeneutics-handwritten-manuscripts.html
(5) I provide a detailed summary and notes on Gadamer's Truth and Method in "Notas sobre Verdad y método de Hans-Georg Gadamer",
http://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/verdaymetodo.html
—oOo—