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The general turn and the human sciences

This is the first half of hermeneutics — the half in which interpretation is understood as a method. It runs from the scattered crafts of textual exegesis, through their unification into a single art of understanding, to the claim that this art is the methodological foundation of an entire family of disciplines. Its question is epistemological: how is valid understanding achieved across the distance that separates an interpreter from a text, an author, or an age not their own?

The regional arts and the general turn

Before hermeneutics was a philosophy it was a plurality of disciplines, each with its own occasion and its own rules. Biblical interpretation was the oldest and most developed: the patristic and medieval doctrine of the fourfold sense of scripture — literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical — and the Reformation’s countervailing insistence that scripture interprets itself (scriptura sui ipsius interpres) and is clear in its essentials, which forced Protestant readers to derive meaning from the text’s own grammar and context rather than the church’s authority. Alongside it ran classical philology — the textual criticism and construal of ancient works — and legal interpretation, the construing of statutes and their application to cases. The Latin term hermeneutica was given currency by Johann Conrad Dannhauer in the seventeenth century, initially for sacred interpretation. Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) pressed a naturalistic, historical reading of scripture — interpret the Bible from its own history and language, as one interprets nature from itself — that fed the later historical-critical method. By the turn of the nineteenth century philologists such as Friedrich Ast and F. A. Wolf had articulated the circular relation of part and whole and the task of recovering the “spirit” of a work.

The decisive step was to ask what these arts had in common. Schleiermacher proposed that beneath the regional rule-sets lies one thing — the act of a mind bringing thought to language and another mind understanding it — and that interpretation is therefore a single, general art of understanding, applicable to any discourse whatever. He gave that art two complementary sides: grammatical interpretation, which construes an utterance through the shared language it draws on, and psychological interpretation, which construes it as the act of a particular author. And he inverted the common assumption about understanding: misunderstanding, he held, is what occurs of its own accord, so that understanding must be willed and sought at every point. With Schleiermacher hermeneutics became general; the question was what to do with the generalisation.

Hermeneutics and the human sciences

Dilthey answered that the general art of understanding is the methodological foundation of an entire family of disciplines. The natural sciences explain — they subsume events under causal laws, Erklären. The human sciences — history, philology, jurisprudence, the study of art and religion and society — understand, Verstehen: they grasp meaning from within by reading the expressions in which human inner life is deposited. This contrast, Verstehen against Erklären, made interpretation the proper method of the Geisteswissenschaften and set Dilthey’s lifelong problem, a “critique of historical reason” — an account of how a historically conditioned mind can attain valid knowledge of the historical world. Lived experience comes to expression in everything human beings make and do, and understanding is the movement back from the expression to the life it expresses.

Hermeneutics here is still epistemology. Understanding is a method — the procedure proper to one family of sciences — and the difficulty is to secure its objectivity against the distance between interpreter and object, with that distance figuring as an obstacle to be overcome. It is exactly this framing that the next generation would refuse. Dilthey had laboured to ground understanding as a way of knowing, on a footing with the natural sciences but by its own means; the ontological turn would deny that understanding is in the first place a method at all, and would treat the situatedness Dilthey fought as the condition that makes understanding possible. That is the seam at which the second half of the tradition begins.