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Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is the theory — and at its broadest the philosophy — of interpretation and understanding. It began as a set of practical arts for reading difficult texts: rules for expounding scripture, for restoring and construing classical works, for interpreting laws. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries those regional crafts were generalised — first into a single art of understanding any discourse, then into a method for the human sciences, and finally into an account of understanding as a basic feature of human existence. The name descends from the Greek hermeneuein — to interpret, translate, make clear — and carries the association with Hermes, the messenger who renders the speech of the gods into the speech of mortals.

Two questions organise the tradition. The first is the relation of part and whole — the hermeneutic circle, the recognition that a text can only be understood through its parts and its parts only through the whole, so that interpretation moves in a circle rather than a line. The second is the relation of method and truth: whether understanding is a procedure that can be made rigorous and checked for correctness, on the model of the natural sciences, or whether it is something that happens to us — an event, situated and never fully in our control — that no method can guarantee.

On the second question the tradition divides against itself, and the division is its defining one. For one line of thought, hermeneutics is a methodology — the disciplined art by which interpretation is made reliable and the human sciences attain valid understanding. For another it is an ontology — not a method that a discipline employs but the way a human being exists, already understanding a world before any method begins. The two pieces below are the two sides of that fault line: the first follows hermeneutics as method, from the regional arts to the foundation of the human sciences; the second follows the ontological turn and the disputes it provoked.

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Where hermeneutics stops

Hermeneutics is divided against itself on what it is, and the division is not incidental — it is the tradition’s open question. Having moved from a method to a mode of being, it cannot easily recover the standard of correctness that the methodological conception promised: once understanding is situated all the way down and no procedure secures it, the criterion that would distinguish a sound interpretation from a wilful one becomes hard to state — the pressure that Betti, Hirsch, and in another register Habermas keep on it. The tradition holds that there is truth in understanding; it has not agreed on how that truth is checked.

Its field, too, has an edge. Hermeneutics takes the domain of interpretation to be the human encounter with meaning — texts, works, traditions, dialogue — and in its philosophical form takes that domain to be coextensive with language: what can be understood is language, and understanding is everywhere linguistic. This is its strength and its boundary at once. Whether anything that is not a human-linguistic expression can be said to be interpreted or understood — whether the circle of understanding reaches beyond the linguistic and historical world into the non-linguistic, the natural, the sub-human — is a question the tradition mostly does not raise, because its founding move was to locate understanding in the medium of language and the inheritance of tradition. The interpreter and the interpreted are, on its account, both already within the house of language; what lies outside that house it leaves to others to describe.

Persons

Schleiermacher · Dilthey · Heidegger · Gadamer · Ricoeur

See also: Phenomenology · Deconstruction · Structuralism