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The ontological turn and the disputes

This is the second half of hermeneutics — the half in which interpretation is no longer a method but a mode of being. Where the general turn had made understanding the procedure of the human sciences and the interpreter’s distance an obstacle to overcome, this half makes understanding the way a human being exists at all, and makes that distance a condition of understanding rather than a barrier to it. The move provoked a series of disputes — over validity, over ideology, over the very orientation toward agreement — that are themselves part of the subject, because each is a pressure brought to bear on the ontological claim.

The ontological turn

Heidegger changed the question. In Being and Time (1927) understanding (Verstehen) is not a method that one class of sciences employs but an existentiale — a basic way in which a human being exists. To be in a world at all is already to understand it: to find things intelligible, ready for use, charged with significance, before any deliberate act of interpretation. Interpretation (Auslegung) is the working-out of an understanding we always already have. The hermeneutic circle is recast accordingly. It is not a methodological inconvenience but the structure of understanding itself: we never approach anything without a fore-structure — a prior projection of sense from which alone the thing can show up as something. The point, Heidegger wrote, is not to get out of the circle but to get into it in the right way. With this the centre of hermeneutics shifts from the correct reading of texts to the self-interpretation of existence, and the distance the human sciences had treated as an obstacle begins to look like a condition.

Philosophical hermeneutics

Gadamer drew the consequences for the understanding of texts, art, and history in Truth and Method (1960), the central work of twentieth-century hermeneutics. Its title names a tension rather than a pairing: Gadamer’s argument is that the truth reached in the experience of art and history is precisely not secured by method, and that the natural-science ideal of method, imported into the human sciences, obscures the kind of truth they actually offer.

His rehabilitation of prejudice is the hinge. The Enlightenment, he argued, harboured a “prejudice against prejudice” — it treated all pre-judgments as errors to be cleared away so that reason could begin from nothing. But understanding without prejudice is impossible: we always approach what we seek to understand from within a horizon of expectations furnished by the tradition we belong to, and that horizon is what makes understanding possible, not what prevents it. The task is not to eliminate prejudice but to distinguish the productive prejudices that enable understanding from the distorting ones that mislead. Tradition and authority, which the Enlightenment opposed to reason, are restored as the medium in which understanding lives.

Around this turn a set of linked concepts: effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) — we stand within the history of a work’s effects, and our very questions are shaped by a reception we did not choose; the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) — understanding as the merging of the interpreter’s horizon with the text’s into a new and wider one, in which neither party is left unchanged; and application — the insight, taken from legal and theological interpretation, that to understand is always already to apply, to bring the matter to bear on one’s own situation, so that understanding, interpretation, and application are not three stages but one act. Underlying all of it is the claim to universality: understanding is through and through linguistic, all interpretation happens in language, and so hermeneutics is not a regional discipline but a dimension of every human relation to the world — “Being that can be understood is language.”

The hermeneutics of suspicion

Ricoeur widened the field by insisting that interpretation is not of one kind. He named a hermeneutics of suspicion — the practice of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the “masters of suspicion,” who read expressions not to recover a meaning but to unmask one, treating the manifest sense as a disguise for an interest, a will, or a desire it conceals. Against and alongside it stands a hermeneutics of restoration or faith, which approaches the text as a possible disclosure of meaning to be recollected. Ricoeur refused to choose: the two belong to a single conflict of interpretations that the philosopher must hold together rather than resolve in advance.

From this came his distinctive mediation of the old opposition between understanding and explanation. Where Dilthey had set Verstehen against Erklären as method against method, Ricoeur made explanation a stage within understanding — a detour. To understand a text one passes through its objective structure, taking up the explanatory resources of structural and semiotic analysis, and emerges with a deepened understanding on the far side; explanation and understanding form a single arc, not a dichotomy. His later work on metaphor, symbol, and above all narrative — the claim that human time becomes intelligible through emplotment, and identity is configured as a story — carried hermeneutics into a theory of the self and of the “world in front of the text,” the possible ways of being a work opens up to its reader.

Method, truth, and validity: the disputes

The recasting of understanding from a method into a mode of being did not go uncontested, and the disputes are part of the subject.

The methodological objection — authorial meaning and validity. The Italian jurist and theorist Emilio Betti and, independently, the American literary scholar E. D. Hirsch defended hermeneutics as a methodology with objective standards, against what they saw as Gadamer’s surrender of them. Betti restated the canons of interpretation and the autonomy of the object: the interpreter’s task is to reconstruct the meaning the author put into the work, not to fuse it with his own horizon. Hirsch, in Validity in Interpretation (1967), distinguished a text’s meaning — fixed by the author’s verbal intention and therefore determinate and reproducible — from its significance, its changing relation to other things; without a determinate authorial meaning, he argued, there is no way to call any interpretation valid or invalid, and criticism collapses into a contest of preferences. The objection marks the permanent pressure point of philosophical hermeneutics: if understanding is situated all the way down and no method secures it, what distinguishes a good interpretation from a wilful one?

The critical objection — tradition and ideology. Jürgen Habermas pressed the opposite flank. Gadamer’s rehabilitation of tradition and authority, he charged, was politically naïve: traditions can carry domination and systematically distorted communication, and a hermeneutics that grants tradition this authority forfeits the critical distance needed to expose ideology. Habermas called for a critical social theory with an explanatory, depth-hermeneutic moment — psychoanalysis served as his model of an interpretation that unmasks rather than appropriates. Gadamer replied that critique is itself always exercised from within a hermeneutic situation: there is no Archimedean point outside all tradition from which ideology could be surveyed, and reflection does not lift us clear of the history that formed us. The exchange — tradition versus the critique of ideology — became one of the defining debates of postwar German thought, and it remained unresolved.

The deconstructive non-encounter. In Paris in 1981 Gadamer met Derrida in what became a famous near-miss. Gadamer spoke for the good will to understand and the orientation of dialogue toward agreement; Derrida, suspicious that this very “good will” smuggles in a metaphysics of the will and presence, answered with a few questions that largely declined the dialogical frame. They talked past one another, and the failure was eloquent: it staged the divide between a hermeneutics that seeks the fusion of horizons and a deconstruction that attends to rupture, difference, and the breaking of every context.

The reach

Hermeneutics has shaped fields well beyond philosophy. In theology, Rudolf Bultmann’s programme of demythologising and the “New Hermeneutic” of Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling brought Heideggerian interpretation into the reading of scripture. In the social sciences, the Verstehen tradition runs through Max Weber’s interpretive sociology and Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological account of the social world into the interpretive turn of later anthropology and ethnography. Legal theory continues to argue over interpretation and application in terms hermeneutics supplied. Literary theory absorbed both the reception-oriented work that descends from Gadamer (Hans Robert Jauss and the Constance school) and the suspicion that descends from Ricoeur. In Anglophone philosophy, Rorty enlisted hermeneutics for his contrast between an “edifying” philosophy of open conversation and a “systematic” philosophy seeking final foundations. What travels under the name now ranges from a technique of textual scholarship to a general name for the interpretive character of human understanding.