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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
- Sprache: Englisch
Hans-Georg Gadamer is one of the leading philosophers in the world today. His philosophical hermeneutics has had a major impact in a wide range of disciplines, including the social sciences, literary criticism, theology and jurisprudence. Truth and Method, his major work, is widely recognised to be one of the great classics of twentieth-century thought.
In this book Georgia Warnke provides a clear and systematic exposition of Gadamer's work, as well as a balanced and thoughtful assessment of his views. Warnke gives particular attention to the ways in which Gadamer's work has been taken up and criticised by literary critics, social theorists and philosophers, such as Hirsch, Habermas and Rorty. She thus provides an introduction to Gadamer which demonstrates the relevance of his work to current debates in a variety of disciplines.
This book will be invaluable to students and specialists throughout the humanities and social sciences, as well as to anyone who is interested in the most important developments in contemporary thought.
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Seitenzahl: 436
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Copyright © Georgia Warnke 1987
First published 1987 by Polity Pressin association with Basil Blackwell.
Transferred to Digital print 2003
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Except in the United States of America this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Warnke, Georgia Gadamer : hermeneutics, tradition and reason. — (Key contemporary thinkers). 1. Gadamer, Hans-Georg I. Title II. Series 193 B3248.G34
ISBN: 978-0-7456-6900-7 (Multi-user ebook)
Typeset in Garamond by Columns of Reading
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Lindsay Ross International Ltd, Oxfordshire
For My Parents
Key Contemporary Thinkers
PublishedChristopher Hookway, Quine
Forthcoming Peter Burke, The Annales School Jocelyn Dunphy, Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics, Philosophy and Social Theory David Frisby, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Social Theory John Hall, Raymond Aron: A Study in French Intellectual Culture Philip Hansen, Hannah Arendt: History, Politics and Citizenship Adrian Hayes, Talcott Parsons and the Theory of Action Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Post-modernism and Beyond Eileen Manion, Mary Daly: Philosophy, Theology and Radical Feminism Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes William Outhwaite, Habermas Philip Pettit, Rawls Simon Schaffer, Kuhn Geoff Stokes, Popper
The ground on which the ball bounces Is another bouncing ball.
The wheeling, whirling world Makes no will glad.
Spinning in its spotlight darkness It is too big for their hands.
A pitiless, purposeless Thing, Arbitrary and unspent,
Made for no play, for no children, But chasing only itself.
The innocent are overtaken, They are not innocent.
They are their fathers’ fathers The past is inevitable.
Delmore Schwartz
Preface and acknowledgements
Introduction
1 HERMENEUTICS AND HISTORY
Critique of romantic hermeneutics
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics
The hermeneutic account of history
Hermeneutics and the Geisteswissenschaften
The phenomenological turn
2 HERMENEUTICS AND AUTHORIAL INTENTION
Hirsch’s intentionalism
The structure of game-playing
Mimesis
Understanding as participation
3 HERMENEUTICS AND THE PROBLEM OF SUBJECTIVISM
The rehabilitation of prejudice and tradition
The anticipation of completeness
Understanding and application
The dialogic structure of understanding
4 HERMENEUTICS AND THE CRITIQUE OF IDEOLOGY
Habermas’s review of Truth and Method
Apel’s critique of hermeneutics
Habermas’s second response to Gadamer
Unconstrained communication
Gadamer’s conservatism
5 HERMENEUTICS AND THE “NEW PRAGMATISM”
Rorty’s new unity of science
Rorty’s critique of epistemology
Rorty’s irrationalism
Bildung and practical reason
6 CONCLUSION
The dialogic character of understanding
Hermeneutic experience
Bildung
Notes
Index
Since the publication in 1960 of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, his hermeneutics has been the focus of a great deal of philosophical attention. His ideas on understanding and interpretation have been applied to a wide-ranging series of discussions: to questions of interpretation in the study of art and literature,1 to issues of knowledge and objectivity in the social sciences;2 to related debates in such disciplines as theology and jurisprudence;3 and even to re-evaluations of the project of philosophy itself.4 None the less, Gadamer’s work has less often been itself the subject of systematic interpretation or assessment and it is this omission that the present book tries to redress.5 My concern is first to reconstruct the thread of argument that ties together Gadamer’s disparate discussions of art, history and philosophy, and second to identify both its virtues and its difficulties. By doing so I hope to provide a reliable guide for the continued appropriation and discussion of his work.
Throughout the book my strategy has been to elucidate Gadamer’s position by reconstructing a set of debates in which his work has participated – either actually or virtually. In the first chapter I consider his critique of the romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, the Historical School and Dilthey. He argues that this tradition erred in restricting the problem of understanding to methods for ascertaining an agent’s or author’s intentions; rather, understanding remains primarily a historically situated understanding of the possible validity of texts or such “text-analogues” as actions, practices and social norms. In this critique of the hermeneutic tradition, Gadamer already introduces two of the important tenets of his own “philosophical hermeneutics”: the possible “truth” of texts or text-analogues and the historically conditioned or prejudiced character of understanding. In chapter 2, I expand on Gadamer’s position by setting it against the intentionalist view Hirsch takes from Schleiermacher. Hirsch argues that in emphasizing the variability of textual understanding according to historical circumstances, Gadamer’s position reduces to a subjectivistic glorification of an interpretive community’s or tradition’s prejudices. The notion of a tradition of interpretation is as central to Gadamer’s view as are the ideas of truth and prejudice. The question is whether these need to be given the subjectivistic twist that Hirsch gives to them.
I take up this question in chapter 3, contrasting Gadamer’s position here to a series of actual and possible criticisms. I argue that there are in fact two general objections with which Gadamer’s hermeneutics must contend: not only that it is subjectivistic but that, in its attempt to avoid subjectivism, it becomes conservative. In order to provide a basis for deciding between different plausible interpretations, it takes as its standard the tradition to which it belongs and favors that interpretation which can illuminate its truth. This latter objection is similar to that which Habermas and Apel have raised and chapter 4 therefore examines their debate with Gadamer. As we shall see, Habermas and Apel stress the significance of his analysis as a critique of objectivistic positions such as Hirsch’s; none the less they argue that in taking the tradition as the standard of correct interpretation, Gadamer destroys any basis upon which to assess its own rationality and that he therefore ignores the fact that traditional interpretations can be ideologically distorted. In chapter 5 I consider Richard Rorty’s very different appropriation of Gadamer’s work. Here the value of Gadamer’s work is seen to lie in the scepticism it directs at the possibility of providing a proof for the rationality of our tradition and Rorty thus applauds Gadamer for precisely his disregard for Habermas’s and Apel’s “foundationalist” concerns.
In these final chapters of the book I evaluate both assessments of Gadamer’s work. In my view the contrast between the two accounts suggests that Gadamer’s hermeneutics might best be understood as a middle path. We are situated in history and historically conditioned. This means that our conception of rationality is subject to the limitations of the historical experiences we have inherited. At the same time, the rationality of our response to these experiences remains a constant question for us. No scepticism towards the idea of reason will permit us to avoid it; indeed, it may be that our hermeneutic understanding of others and our past can help us to a provisional answer.
I undertook the preliminary study to which this book is a distant relative while on a fellowship in Germany granted by the Deutscher Akademische Austauschdienst. The book itself was written under the auspices of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. I would like to thank all three institutions for their support. I would also like to thank Thomas McCarthy and my editor, John Thompson, for their intelligent and valuable suggestions, Paul Stern for his criticism and encouragement and Anne Janowitz for both theoretical and practical assistance. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Dalia Fiore who took care of my son with a competence and love that made concentration on this book possible and who is therefore largely responsible for whatever merit it may have.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
In recent years there has been a spate of philosophical books on the limits of various philosophical approaches. In this regard, Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice1 and Bernard Williams’s Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy2 are only two of the more explicit examples. But from deconstructionist studies of the self-deception involved in claims to textual understanding to historicist accounts of scientific research, the emphasis has been on the limits of our knowledge of texts, nature, ourselves and our world. The claim is that we are always involved in interpretations and that we can have no access to anything like “the truth” about justice, the self, reality or the “moral law.” Our notions of these “truths” are rather conditioned by the cultures to which we belong and the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves. Hence, we must face the fact of our finitude and the utterly contingent character of our efforts to understand.
Gadamer’s work might be said to serve as the basis for this current focus on limits. For the whole of his philosophical career and culminating in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, his concern has been to overcome the positivistic hubris of assuming that we can develop an “objective” knowledge of the phenomena with which we are concerned. As a distinct discipline hermeneutics has its origins in nineteenth-century attempts to formulate a theory of interpretation. Questions of interpretation had been raised earlier, in particular in the Reformation’s challenge to the Catholic reading of the Bible. Did an understanding of Scripture require a prior acceptance of the precepts of the Catholic faith or could it be understood on its own? If it could, was it to be read as a unified text or as a series of disparate narratives written at different times with different purposes? At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the philologist and theologian F. D. E. Schleiermacher significantly expanded the scope of hermeneutic questions. The problem, as he saw it, was not just how the Bible or even classical texts were to be understood, but how meaning could be comprehended, what the methods were that would permit an objective understanding of texts and utterances of any kind. Following Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey asked even broader questions: what were the methods that would permit an objective reading of symbolic structures of any kind, including actions, social practices, norms and values? How could the understanding of meaning be raised to the same level of methodological clarity that characterized the natural sciences? How could it find as solid a basis for methodical progress?
By 1960, when Gadamer published Truth and Method, the consequences of this kind of question had become apparent. Dilthey had tried to establish the autonomy of the logic of the Geisteswissenschaften or of such studies as history, textual interpretation and the investigation of social norms, practices and institutions. That is, his desire had been to illuminate the difference between the structure of these sciences of meaning and the natural scientific explanation of events based on the formulation of theoretical frameworks and discovery of causal laws. Nevertheless he conceived of both kinds of study as objective sciences; the point of both was to develop a neutral understanding of social or human phenomena, an understanding that would be accessible to all interpreters or observers from whatever historical or cultural vantage point they might inhabit. The positivism of the mid-twentieth century differed only in denying any distinction in the logics of the natural sciences and Geisteswissenschaften. If both were to be objective sciences, this meant that the latter had to emulate the practices and standards of the former; what was required was an ability to explain and predict the occurrence of events by formulating and verifying causal hypotheses. Social scientific findings were to be repeatable in the same way as natural scientific experiments and in both cases objectivity was to mean an elimination of subjective intrusions: explanations were to be based on adherence to rigorous scientific methods so that the effects of differences in imagination, interpretive talent or individual perspective could be minimized. Disciplines in which the influence of talent, imagination and perspective could not be minimized, such as literary studies and art appreciation, were no longer to be viewed as cognitive disciplines at all.3
From Gadamer’s point of view, this constellation of norms and premises is a disaster since it overlooks important differences between understanding meaning and explaining the occurrences of events, differences that Dilthey was right to emphasize. Gadamer thus reverses the positivist response to Dilthey, criticizing him not for maintaining a distinction between natural and social science but for not realizing that this distinction runs right through to the standards’ of objectivity appropriate to each. In so far as positivism assumes that the natural sciences provide the model of an objective inquiry impervious to changes in historical vantage point and scientific perspective, it does not describe even them correctly. Gadamer maintains that the natural sciences are the product of a tradition of interpretation and that their norms and standards are simply the “prejudices” of this tradition. To hold them up as the muster of knowledge in general is thus to overlook the extent to which they are historically conditioned and, moreover, to refuse to recognize the existence of other historically constituted norms and standards. We shall examine the details of this argument in the substance of the book itself. The point here is that, for Gadamer, the question that Schleiermacher and Dilthey ask and positivism takes up is the wrong question. We cannot ask how the sciences of meaning are to attain the objectivity characteristic of the natural sciences because this standard of objectivity is one constituted within a certain tradition, appropriate, perhaps, for certain purposes, but not at all one that can be absolutized as a general demand.
Hermeneutics, as Gadamer conceives of it, then, is no longer to be seen as a discourse on methods of “objective” understanding as it was for the hermeneutic tradition of Schleiermacher and Dilthey. It no longer seeks to formulate a set of interpretive rules; rather, in referring to his analysis as “philosophical hermeneutics,” Gadamer turns to an account of the conditions of the possiblity of understanding in general, conditions that in his view undermine faith in the ideas of both method and objectivity. Methodological approaches to both natural and human phenomena are rooted in history; they accept certain historical assumptions as to both what is to be studied and how it is to be approached. Understanding is therefore rooted in prejudice and the way in which we understand is thoroughly conditioned by the past or by what Gadamer calls “effective history.” This influence of the past obtains in our aesthetic understanding, in our social and psychological self-understanding and in all forms of scientific understanding. The objectivity of our knowledge is therefore significantly curtailed by its dependence on tradition and this dependence is not one that method can in any way transcend. Anticipating the trend I noted earlier Gadamer might therefore have titled his book Objectivity and the Limits of Method.
By now, this analysis may seem old-hat. The positivism that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s no longer has the force it once had and few still deny the reliance of scientific approaches on a series of historically advanced assumptions or conventions. Such theorists as Richard Rorty, whose views I shall be discussing in chapter 5, go so far as first to reject the positivistic distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive disciplines, and second to argue that natural science is itself hermeneutic. The development of hermeneutics which began with Schleiermacher and Dilthey’s attempt to erect a science of meaning on a par with the natural sciences thus culminates in the claim that the natural sciences are themselves sciences of meaning; in other words, that they are themselves historically conditioned, fallible interpretations. But if Truth and Method thus sets itself against a positivism that is no longer generally accepted, the question arises as to whether it has anything left to say to us, post-positivists as many of us are.
In my view it has a great deal to say to us. For, if the attention Truth and Method pays to prejudice and the influence of the past is important, no less important is its attempt to resuscitate a dialogic conception of knowledge. Understanding (Verstehen) for Gadamer is primarily coming to an understanding (Verständigung) with others. In confronting texts, different views and perspectives, alternative life forms and world-views, we can put our own prejudices in play and learn to enrich our own point of view. Against positivism, then, Gadamer argues that an objectivity attained through scientific method is no more adequate than the prejudices it presupposes; but he also suggests that our prejudices are as much thresholds as limits, that they form perspectives from which a gradual development of our knowledge becomes possible. To this extent, Gadamer’s account of understanding retains a connection to the Enlightenment. To be sure, we can no longer hope to eradicate prejudice through method. Nor can we search for an objectivity that would lift us above historical variations and subjective interpretations. None the less, in coming to an understanding with others we can learn how to amend some of our assumptions and, indeed, how to move to a richer, more developed understanding of the issues in question.
It is significant, then, that Gadamer does not refer to limits in his title. In stressing the way in which our understanding is embedded in history, his point is not simply the degree to which our history limits our knowledge and not simply the extent to which notions of truth are historically various. His point is also that history can itself aid our development and help us to cultivate what we may still call “reason.”
In “Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik” the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey characterizes the development of modern hermeneutics as a “liberation of interpretation from dogma.”1 Textual interpretation has its origins in the Greek educational system but on Dilthey’s account advances in the formulation of methods of interpretation had to await the Reformation and the attack on the Church’s authority to interpret the Bible. At this time Matthias Flacius, a Lutheran, criticized the Catholic emphasis on tradition in the interpretation of supposedly obscure parts of the Bible and maintained that it could be understood on its own grounds as the word of God. This attack on the Tridentine Church already disclosed what Dilthey saw as the fundamental principle of modern hermeneutic theory: texts are to be understood in their own terms rather than those of doctrine so that understanding requires not dogma but the systematic application of interpretive rules. Dilthey further credited Flacius with the first formulation of the idea of a hermeneutic circle: since Catholic teaching was no longer to serve as a guide to the Bible’s meaning, the understanding of it was rather to be built up from an understanding of its individual parts. At the same time, however, it was clear that some guide was needed to the meaning of those individual parts, indeed, that they had themselves to be understood in light of the aims and composition of the Bible as a whole. Hence, it was claimed that Biblical interpretation necessarily moved in a circle, that its individual books and passages were to be understood in terms of the meaning of the whole, while the understanding of the whole was to be achieved in light of an understanding of these individual parts.
Despite the significance of Flacius’s break with the canons of Tridentine interpretation, Dilthey argued that his own procedure remained problematic in so far as he overlooked the different historical circumstances under which various parts of the Bible were written. In fact, since the Protestant reading of the Bible simply assumed that it constituted a unified, self-consistent whole, what Dilthey referred to as a second “theological-hermeneutic” step criticized this reading itself as dogmatic. The importance of this step was to articulate another hermeneutic principle: the individual books of the Bible were now to be understood in light of differences in context and linguistic usage. This principle allowed G. F. Meier to extend the tenets of religious hermeneutics to the philological study of classical texts and ultimately permitted Schleiermacher to formulate the principles of a general theory of interpretation, applicable to all discourse (Rede). Not only classical texts and the Bible but all written works and spoken utterances could be subjected to the sophisticated scrutiny made possible by precisely formulated methods of understanding. In this way, according to Dilthey, hermeneutic theory became available as the basis for the human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften, as the mode of access to meaning in general – the meaning not only of texts but of signs and symbols of all sorts, social practices, historical actions and works of art.
In the second half of his major work Truth and Method and in related essays Hans-Georg Gadamer questions this account of the development of hermeneutics as one assisted by a successive overcoming of dogmatic prejudices and assumptions. What Dilthey sees as the liberation of interpretation from dogma signals instead a fateful “change in essence.”2 Indeed, for Gadamer, the development of hermeneutics extending from Schleiermacher through the Historical School of Ludwig von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen to Dilthey himself unfolds a positivistic misconception that equates understanding with a methodologically secured, “Cartesian” certainty. This “Romantic hermeneutics,” as he refers to it, is therefore unable to grasp either the structure of understanding (Verstehen) or its role in the human sciences. In this initial chapter I want to examine Gadamer’s critique of romantic hermeneutics, showing what it reveals about his own concerns and how it reorients his hermeneutic philosophy. I shall first reconstruct an important distinction he suggests between two kinds of understanding and then turn to his interpretation of the hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, the Historical School and Dilthey. Finally, I shall look at the radical transformation of hermeneutics that he claims was effected by the work of Martin Heidegger.
CRITIQUE OF ROMANTIC HERMENEUTICS
It is common in the philosophy of history and of the social sciences to distinguish between explaining human actions and beliefs and understanding their meaning: between explaining why a given action or belief occurs or occurred and understanding what an agent is doing with a certain set of bodily movements or what belief is represented with certain words.3 These two approaches to the study of action have been differently weighted. Some so-called “positivists” have argued that the understanding of meaning (Verstehen) involves simply an imaginative reconstruction of actor’s intentions or purposes; although such reconstruction can be helpful in formulating a hypothesis that tries to explain the causes of action, understanding cannot count as part of the logic of science itself. The scientific aspect of the study of action consists rather in constructing explanatory hypotheses that can be incorporated into general theories of human behavior and testing them through reliable methods of empirical observation.4 On this view the structure of science is identical in every field of research. It consists in identifying regular sequences of behavior, formulating universal laws and theories and, through them, predicting or explaining the occurrence of events. Verstehende or hermeneutic theorists, in contrast, have argued that history and social science cannot conform to the logic of the natural sciences because of the role an interpretive understanding plays in them. On this view, understanding what a given action or belief is, is itself a scientific task that necessarily precedes explaining why it occurs. This task involves “reading” a situation, placing bodily movements and words within the context to which they belong and hence understanding them in light of other actions and beliefs. Both the construction of explanatory hypotheses and their empirical testing thus turn out to be matters of interpretation: they rest on a specific presumption as to what the event to be explained is and therefore on an assessment of meaning.5
Gadamer’s account of hermeneutic understanding is devoted to examining the conditions of this latter understanding of meaning. Throughout his work, however, he emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing between two forms of understanding: the understanding of truth-content and the understanding of intentions. The first form of understanding refers to the kind of substantive knowledge one has when one is justified in claiming that one understands Euclidean geometry or an ethical principle, for example. Here understanding means seeing the “truth” of something, grasping that the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse, that the validity of Euclidean geometry is relativized by the discovery of other forms of geometry or that murder is wrong. Understanding in this sense involves insight into a subject-matter or, as Gadamer puts it, an understanding of die Sache.6 The second sense of understanding, in contrast, involves a knowledge of conditions: the reasons why a particular person says that murder is wrong or the intentions behind someone’s claiming that a geometrical proposition is true. This kind of understanding thus involves an understanding of the psychological, biographical or historical conditions behind a claim or action as opposed to a substantive understanding of the claim or action itself. What is understood is not the truth-content of a claim or the point of an action but the motives behind a certain person’s making a certain claim or performing a given action.
In Gadamer’s view, understanding in its strongest sense involves the first form of understanding as a substantive understanding of truth. In contrast, the second, intentional, form of understanding becomes necessary when attempts to achieve an understanding of truth fail. In other words, it is when one cannot see the point of what someone else is saying or doing that one is forced to explore the conditions under which that person says or does it: what this person might mean, given who he or she is, the circumstances of the time and so on. Alasdair MacIntyre offers a good example of the difference to which Gadamer is pointing here in claiming that “we confront a blank wall” in trying to understand the aborigine practice of carrying about “a stick or stone which is treated as if it is or embodies the soul of the individual who carries it.”7 Since we cannot make sense out of this practice or see its point, we can understand it only to the extent that we understand the conditions under which the aborigine may have thought it had a point. As Gadamer puts this point:
The genetic formulation of the question, the goal of which is to explain a traditional opinion in terms of the historical situation, arises only where immediate insight into the truth of what is said cannot be attained because reason contradicts it.8
Yet we can be interested in genetic questions even when we accept the truth of a claim. Thus we are interested in the conditions that facilitated the Greeks’ discovery of the principles of geometry, for example, just because we accept these principles for certain purposes and want to know what permitted their articulation in Greek culture at a particular time.9 To this extent Gadamer seems to have overstated his case in claiming that genetic questions arise only when understanding in its strongest sense has failed. Moreover, it also seems to be the case that we understand in a substantive sense when we understand the invalidity of a claim and hence disagree with a claim or text under study. Gadamer himself sometimes makes this point. Still, he tends to associate the strong sense of understanding with an understanding of “substantive validity” and hence with an ability to agree on truth.10 In a crucial passage he therefore writes
Understanding (Verständnis) is first of all agreement (Einverständnis). So human beings usually understand one another immediately or they communicate (sich verständigen) until they reach an agreement. Reaching an understanding (Verständigung) is thus always: reaching an understanding about something.11
We shall have to examine the implications of this emphasis on agreement more thoroughly later. At this point in our discussion, however, we are interested in the way Gadamer’s distinction between two forms of understanding affects his assessment of Dilthey’s description of the progress of hermeneutics. In his own reconstruction of the development of hermeneutics from Schleiermacher through Dilthey, Gadamer tries to show that what Dilthey described as a liberation from dogma is instead a move from one sense of understanding, an understanding of truth-content, to the other, an understanding of conditions of genesis. Despite their differences both Tridentine Catholicism and the Protestantism of the Reformation are concerned with the truth-content of the Bible. The Bible is presumed to have normative authority for everyone and the task of hermeneutic understanding is therefore simply to help transmit the content of its normative claims. Hermeneutics thus has a largely pedagogical task: it is supposed to exhibit the truth that inheres in a given claim so that its audience can understand and learn from it. As hermeneutics develops, however, attention is redirected away from the understanding of the truth-content of a text and toward the understanding of intentions. The aim of understanding is no longer seen as a knowledge of die Sache – a substantive knowledge of claims to truth or normative authority. It is seen rather as insight into the historical or biographical circumstances behind their expression. The question of understanding thus becomes the genetic one: what were the conditions under which agents acted, spoke or wrote as they did? The question of the validity of their words or actions is no longer considered part of the theory of understanding. In his critique of romantic hermeneutics Gadamer traces the consequences of this omission for efforts to specify the logic of social and historical studies. He begins by examining Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics.
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics
In Gadamer’s view, the conceptual distance that separates Schleiermacher from his predecessors becomes clear if one looks at the account of interpretation found in the work of Spinoza and the pre-romantic hermeneuticist, Chladenius. For both of these theorists, understanding is primarily a question of understanding the truth-content of a text and, in particular, of the Bible. Moreover, both suggest that such understanding is for the most part unproblematic. One can usually read the Bible and understand the normative authority of its claims directly just as one can understand Euclidean geometry directly, without the need for explicit hermeneutic procedures. Still, Spinoza does think that an explicit procedure or “art” of understanding is required to deal with certain of the Bible’s claims, such as those about miracles for example, since their truth-content is no longer self-evident. For his part, Chladenius normally associates hermeneutic understanding with an understanding of the subject-matter that a text addresses. Nevertheless, he too notes the need for an “art” or method of interpretation where students are sceptical of their teacher’s account of the subject-matter and this understanding itself has to be justified. In Chladenius’s view, this necessity reflects the effects of the Enlightenment, or at least the fact that students no longer trust their teachers and “want to see with their own eyes.”12 Explicit hermeneutic procedures are thus occasionally necessary because a common set of beliefs and common foundation for understanding has disappeared.13 None the less, despite these occasional calls for an art of understanding, for both Spinoza and Chladenius the primary task of hermeneutics remains that of transmitting a substantive understanding. The method or art of hermeneutics has only a limited scope; it is relevant only where the truth of a claim is no longer clear or a particular substantive understanding itself needs to be grounded. In Schleiermacher’s work, in contrast, the call for hermeneutic methods may arise at any time with regard to any form of discourse (Rede). As he writes:
Very often in the middle of a private conversation I avail myself of hermeneutic operations if I am not satisfied with a customary degree of understanding but seek to discover how in my friend’s reflections the transition from one thought to another has been made, or if I trace the opinions, judgments and aspirations connected with the fact that he expresses himself precisely so and not otherwise with regard to an object under discussion.14
Thus, while both Chladenius and Spinoza see the need for hermeneutics only where the validity of a text or interpretation is no longer self-evident, Schleiermacher no longer associates hermeneutic understanding with questions of validity at all. He does not contrast a “customary degree of understanding” to a better grasp of the subject-matter at hand, as they did. Rather he reserves this kind of substantive understanding for dialectics and contrasts the “customary degree of understanding” to a more detailed knowledge of the train of someone’s thought, why he expressed himself “precisely so and not otherwise.” Indeed, as Gadamer points out, in contrast to Spinoza Schleiermacher thinks that even Euclid must be understood in this way. The focus of understanding is not the validity of what is said but its individuality as the thought of a particular person, expressed in a particular way at a particular time. Schleiermacher thus differentiates two ways of practicing the “art” of understanding:
#15 The more lax practice in the art starts from the premise that understanding arises of itself and expresses the goal negatively: misunderstanding is to be avoided. …
#16 The more rigorous practice starts from the premise that misunderstanding emerges of itself and that understanding must be desired and sought at every point.15
The importance of this distinction between a looser and more rigorous hermeneutic practice can be seen when it is compared to the account of understanding that I cited earlier. As we saw, for Gadamer understanding is primarily substantive agreement with others on truth in regard to a subject-matter. Gadamer thus assumes with Spinoza and Chladenius that people normally understand one another directly, that “understanding arises of itself or can be brought about through further communication. Schleiermacher, however, claims that misunderstanding is the normal case and therefore that a more rigorous hermeneutic procedure is required. On Gadamer’s view, the introduction of this rigorous practice shows that “the task of interpretation has been uprooted from the context of intelligent consensus” and as he continues, “Now it has to overcome complete alienation.”16 Still, Schleiermacher’s and Gadamer’s claims are not really in direct contradiction to one another since the word “understanding” refers to two different processes in each case, indeed, to the two we have already examined. Gadamer is maintaining that we can usually understand the point of what others say immediately, or by continuing to talk with them we can arrive at some kind of consensus about the subject-matter at issue. In contrast, Schleiermacher assumes that we usually have only a partial idea of what may have motivated them to say what they said. This difference signals not only a difference in degrees of alienation but also a difference in the object domain of hermeneutics itself. For Schleiermacher, the task of understanding is no longer that of facilitating a knowledge of the general truth of a claim, but rather that of achieving insight into the unique conditions behind an individual expression of the claim. The focus of hermeneutics thus shifts from general validity to individual creativity and the consequence of this shift is that questions of method move to the forefront of hermeneutic theory.
The reason for this change becomes clear if one reconsiders the original distinction between the understanding of truth-content and the understanding of intentions. As long as understanding refers to a knowledge of the validity of a text or claim – understanding Euclidean geometry for example – the method by which such understanding is accomplished is not important. Indeed, at least one mark of a good geometry teacher is that he or she can teach the same material in many different ways. The criterion of successful teaching in this case is the clarification of theorems, axioms and the like and how one clarifies these depends on the students one is teaching, the problems they have and so on. When understanding refers to the comprehension of claims to truth, it is unimportant how such understanding is accomplished. Once the focus of understanding moves from the truth of a claim to its uniqueness as a particular person’s expression, however, questions of method become more significant, because seeing the validity of the claim no longer indicates the success of the process of understanding. The question now is how to arrive at a correct understanding of others’ intentions and in this case understanding the truth or untruth of their remarks is no guarantee of having understood what they may have actually wanted to say. We do not have any immediate access to the intentions of others and therefore if these are to be the object of hermeneutics we require reliable interpretive methods.
Schleiermacher, in fact, notes two different methodical forms of hermeneutic practice: grammatical and psychological or technical interpretation. In grammatical interpretation, a text or mode of expression is analyzed in terms of its language, that is, in terms of its dialect, sentence structure, literary form and the like. In psychological interpretation, it is analyzed as part of the author’s life history. Thus, whereas grammatical interpretation attempts to identify the precise meaning of linguistic terms, psychological interpretation focuses on the Keimentschluss, the core decision or basic motivation that has “moved the author to communicate.”17 The two forms of interpretation are meant to supplement and check one another in Schleiermacher’s analysis; moreover, he conceives of both as applying the hermeneutic circle of part and whole. Grammatical interpretation attempts to determine the meanings of words in terms of the sentences of which they are a part and the sentences in terms of the work as a whole; finally, it places the work itself in the context of its linguistic usage and the literary genre to which it belongs. At the same time the understanding of sentences, the work, literary genre and linguistic usage is constituted by the understanding of the smaller parts that compose these larger wholes. For its part, psychological interpretation places the work in the context of the author’s life and the history of the time while simultaneously building up a knowledge of these by analyzing individual experiences and projects such as the work being studied. This is also the point at which Schleiermacher introduces what Gadamer considers the most questionable part of his program, namely, the method of divination in which the interpreter “transforms himself, so to speak, into the other and seeks to comprehend the individual immediately.”18 In divination the interpreter identifies with the author whose work is being studied, imaginatively relives the experiences and thoughts that engendered the work and thereby acquires a direct and total knowledge of the individual creation in question.
Gadamer has been accused of overemphasizing the role of psychological divination in Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics at the expense of grammatical interpretation and of failing to recognize the systematic context of divinatory methods.19 It is true that Schleiermacher emphasizes the connection between divination and different comparative methods that proceed by comparing authors to general personality types and singling out their distinctive features. But Gadamer responds that his own emphasis on psychological divination in Schleiermacher’s work is warranted because of its influence on Schleiermacher’s heirs, particularly Dilthey. Be that as it may, Schleiermacher’s inclusion of psychological divination within a system of methods and forms of interpretation does not suffice to resolve the problem Gadamer has with it.
Schleiermacher’s focus on the individuality of a work or expression as opposed to its “truth-content” holds for both psychological and grammatical interpretation. Grammatical interpretation complements psychological interpretation by fixing the exact meaning of the author’s words and eliciting a comprehension of the language as the author knew it, while psychological interpretation complements grammatical interpretation by exploring the life-context in which the work was generated. On both sides of hermeneutic theory, then, the goal is a precise reproduction of the meaning of a work as its author intended it. To understand the meaning of a discourse is to reconstruct the original intentions of writers or speakers by understanding their special idioms on the one hand, and the circumstances of their lives at the time on the other. In this way Schleiermacher severs hermeneutics from questions of truth and, on Gadamer’s view, thereby aestheticizes the object of understanding.20 For Schleiermacher, speech and writing of whatever type become the spontaneous overflow of genius; the task of methodical understanding is to reproduce the original process of production in order to participate in an original creation. Thus, in direct contrast to the (possibly naive) commitment of pre-Romantic hermeneutics to the truth of the texts it studies, Schleiermacher sees them only as “artistic thoughts”21; they are understood when methods are found that bring back to life the creative processes and intentions that engendered them.
Schleiermacher’s work thus already gives Gadamer’s Truth and Method its title. On his view, the crucial shift in hermeneutics was not the one Dilthey emphasized – from dogmatic to non-dogmatic and “objective” understanding. This shift rather reflects a deeper one: a change from a focus on the possible truth of a text to a focus on method, from a consideration of the validity of a text to a preoccupation with procedures for understanding an author’s intentions. Now it could be argued that there is nothing as fundamentally disastrous about this transition as Gadamer seems to intimate. Gadamer admits that hermeneutics as Schleiermacher defines it is necessary whenever the content of a text no longer makes sense and the only question that can be raised is what the author intended it to say. His objection, however, is that Schleiermacher raises this question with regard to all texts and thus considers them all simply “artistic thoughts.” But the question is whether there is anything illegitimate about this procedure, given that Schleiermacher ultimately supplements hermeneutics – the study of an author’s intended meaning – with dialectics – the consideration of a subject-matter.
In fact, two questions arise here. First, even if one distinguishes two forms of the understanding of meaning, is an understanding of intentions not still an important part of hermeneutics? Is it not important to ascertain both what an author was trying to say and the truth-content of what is said? Indeed, it would seem that even if one’s ultimate concern is the truth of an author’s ideas one still needs to understand what an author intended so that one knows that the claims one adjudicates are in fact the author’s claims. The second question involves the status of method. Is there anything misguided in the application of explicit hermeneutic operations to the work of understanding and, if so, what? Certainly, methods may become more important if the object of understanding is the intention behind a text as opposed to its content. But if there is nothing objectionable about the new focus on intentions, then is there an objection to the introduction of method? In the remainder of this chaper, I shall begin to address these questions by examining Gadamer’s account of the after-effects of Schleiermacher’s aestheticization of hermeneutics. I shall look first at his criticisms of attempts by the historians, Ranke and Droysen, to apply hermeneutic principles to the study of history and then turn to his analysis of Wilhelm Dilthey’s recourse to hermeneutics as the foundation of the human sciences in general.
The hermeneutic account of history
Gadamer suggests that it was a mistake for either Ranke or Droysen to turn to hermeneutics in their attempts to found the possibility of historical studies. That they may have had a rationale for doing so is clear: just as Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic theory formed the foundation upon which literary interpretation was finally to be released from dogma, the theory was also supposed to liberate history from Hegel. Against Hegel, both Ranke and Droysen insisted that history was an empirical science and had to begin with facts rather than with speculative assumptions about the purpose of history. They therefore argued that history had to be understood on its own terms, independently of a priori principles, and in this they echoed Flacius’s earlier claim that the Bible could be understood on its own, independently of Catholic principles. In addition they insisted that individual historical periods were to be understood as having their own internal meaning as opposed to a meaning deduced from Hegelian teleology. Here they followed Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the uniqueness of individual expressions: each historical period was to maintain its integrity and not to be incorporated into a philosophy of history in general.22 In Gadamer’s view this attempt to transpose the principles of literary interpretation to the study of history ignored the temporal dimension of historical understanding. Indeed, despite its critique of Hegelian teleology, Gadamer thinks that the Historical School exhibited a poorer grasp of the logic of historical meaning than Hegel’s own. I shall look at Gadamer’s criticisms of Ranke and Droysen in turn.
Decisive for Ranke’s failure to comprehend the structure of history, according to Gadamer, is his insistence that although history does not have the unity of a philosophical system, as Hegel assumed, it is none the less “not without internal connection.” On the one hand, against Hegel, Ranke argues that history follows “scenes of freeedom.” No event is determined in advance or required by dialectical necessity. Neither, then, is its meaning contingent upon the end-point or telos of history. Events and actions must be conceived rather as having meaning in themselves apart from philosophical speculation on the course of history, just as texts are seen to have meaning in themselves apart from dogmatic principles. Historical understanding is a means of clarifying the unique “free” character of individual events.
On the other hand Ranke also claims that events follow from events before them and combine themselves into cohesive wholes marking distinct historical periods. Gadamer cites the following passage from Ranke’s work:
Beside freedom stands necessity. It lies in what has already been formed, what cannot be destroyed, which is the foundation of all rising activity. What has been constitutes the connection with what is becoming. … A long series of events – succeeding and next to one another – in such ways bound to one another, form a century, an epoch.…23
Gadamer already sees here the influence of Schleiermacherian hermeneutics. Historical events are supposed to hang together and form a coherent, intelligible meaning among themselves. Indeed the rise of new historical periods itself depends upon “what has already been formed,” upon previous periods. Hence history is itself as internally unified as a text. Having given up Hegel, however, Ranke can no longer make sense out of this unity. History is no longer seen as the working out of a divine plan or the return of spirit to itself, and yet it is still supposed to manifest the consistent unfolding of historical tendencies. On Ranke’s account, the cohesiveness of history is simply a fact; certain events are bound together by historical forces to form an epoch or century and such epochs and centuries lead to others. Still, there is no longer any immanently developing content that connects them to one another. Gadamer argues that there is a contradiction here: on the one hand, “no preconception of the meaning of history is to prejudice its investigation.” On the other hand “the self-evident premise of its investigation is that it forms a unity.”24 But here the Hegelian question re-emerges: if there is no immanently developing content that unifies history what does unify it?
Ranke offers no answer to this question. Instead, because he assumes that unity is simply a fact about history and that history is therefore similar to a text he also assumes that Schleiermacherian principles of textual hermeneutics have direct application. Just as a text has a beginning and an end so too does history; Ranke therefore posits God as the spectator who sees both the beginning and end of history and therefore understands the role each of its individual parts play in the meaning of the whole. Moreover, just as methods of textual interpretation are directed at clarifying the meaning of a text by placing it within the context of the author’s life on the one hand, and the literary tradition to which it belongs on the other, historical understanding clarifies the individuality of historical epochs by placing them within universal history. No historical period is to be judged differently than any other; rather all are to be seen as individualities in their own right, as expressions of the variablity of human life in general. Ranke writes “I imagine the Deity – if I may venture this observation – as surveying all of historical humanity in its totality since no time lies before it and finding it all of equal value.”25 Indeed, for him the legitimacy of historical understanding depends upon the degree to which historians can approximate God’s omniscient point of view by liberating themselves from their own place in history and surveying history as a unified whole. The aim of historical study is therefore a “feeling-with, co-knowledge of everything.”26 In striving for this kind of knowledge historians acquire a priest-like status:
Immediacy to God is for the Lutheran, Ranke, the actual content of the Christian message. Re-establishing this immediacy that existed before the Fall occurs not through the Church’s means of grace alone. The historian participates in it insofar as he makes a fallen humanity in history the object of his research and recognizes this humanity in the immediacy to God that it has never entirely lost.27
For Gadamer, Ranke’s “methodological naivety” lies in his failure to grasp the consequences of his own critique of Hegel. On the one hand Ranke objects to Hegel’s derivation of the meaning of history from a speculative end-point in spirit’s return to itself; on the other hand he locates the condition of the possiblity of historical understanding in an equally absolute point of view. Whereas Hegel assumed knowledge of the end of history directly, Ranke simply substitutes a God with such knowledge and locates the objectivity and legitimacy of historical work in its approximation to this suprahistorical position. Despite his criticism of Hegel’s account of absolute knowledge, the structure of historical meaning thus remains teleological. The meaning of historical events is not an intrinsic essence, a meaning they have in and of themselves; it is rather a function of their relations to other events that come after them and indicate their significance. As Gadamer puts this point:
That something succeeds or not is not decisive only for the meaning of this single act; it does not let it merely have a lasting effect or pass by without one. Its success or lack thereof rather lets a whole sequence of actions and events become meaningful or meaningless. The ontological structure of history is therefore itself teleological even if it is without telos.28
We can elaborate on this elliptical remark by looking at Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History.29 Danto argues that historical “meaning” is necessarily retrospective, that it results from an understanding of the meanings events have in relation to other events that are seen to follow or fail to follow from them. Thus, the description of Petrarch’s ascendency of Mount Ventoux as the opening of the Renaissance presupposes that the Renaissance has taken place and, indeed, that certain events have been seen as sufficiently related to one another to merit their common description as the Renaissance. The description of an event as the end of World War I is similarly retrospective; indeed, nothing can be defined as the end of World War I until the start of World War II and describing a series of events or actions as the start of World War II itself requires placing them in the context of other events and actions that follow. According to Danto, then, historical meaning involves a “retroactive realignment of the Past,”30 that is, it is the outcome of a narrative structure imposed upon events from a position subsequent to them, in light of events that have been seen to come after them.
