Inga Römer
One way of unpacking the history of hermeneutics is to unpack it as the history of a controversy over method. Classical hermeneutics was understood as a method of interpretation of particular kinds of texts, which, because of their difficulty, confronted the reader with an extraordinary challenge. It was taken to be the complementary method to rhetoric: while rhetoric taught rules to be applied in order to express well a thought in speech, hermeneutics focused on the reverse process by teaching rules to be applied in order to find the inner speech at the origin of the text. And since hermeneutics thus stood in a certain complementary, reverse relation to rhetoric, its rules were often taken from rhetoric; a famous example is the rule of the reciprocal interpretation of wholes and parts (see Grondin 2009, 14).
The method of hermeneutics first became prominent as a method of biblical exegesis. Widely known is the doctrine of the fourfold sense of scripture, which was named explicitly for the first time by the Christian monk and theologian Johannes Cassianus in the fifth century, and remained dominant throughout the Middle Ages. Not only theology, however, but also other disciplines dealing with difficult texts developed particular hermeneutical methods for interpretation. This holds in particular for jurisprudence. Corresponding to the plurality of disciplines and textual genres, there was a plurality of hermeneutical methods. Each one was a content-related auxiliary science, designed to help the interpreter in the exegesis of difficult and ambivalent textual passages. Hermeneutics at this stage was neither unified nor universalized; it split into a variety of special techniques, and was only relevant in respect to particularly difficult texts.
This dispersion and limited range of application of hermeneutics did not change until the nineteenth century, with Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher unified and universalized hermeneutics. In his eyes, the various special hermeneutics, which only concentrated on the difficult cases, could arrive at no more than an “aggregate of observations” (Schleiermacher 1977, 92). Their superficial and thus scientifically deficient procedure needed to be deepened in the direction of one “general hermeneutics” (Schleiermacher 1977, 75), functioning as the ground for all particular hermeneutics. This unification of hermeneutics goes hand in hand with a universalization of hermeneutics, insofar as Schleiermacher extended its scope of application to all kinds of texts, and even to speech.
The universal extension of hermeneutics is necessary because in the strict praxis of hermeneutics we have to assume “that misunderstanding arises by itself and understanding has to be wanted and searched for at each point” (Schleiermacher 1977, 92). The diversification of hermeneutics has to be unified into a general hermeneutics for all processes of understanding, because we need a unified and universally applied method which allows us to explicitly “want and search” for the understanding, itself always endangered by the misunderstanding that lurks everywhere.
The method Schleiermacher proposes for this is twofold: it has what he calls a grammatical and a psychological moment. The grammatical interpretation inquires into the sense of speech with respect to the language and syntax in which it is expressed; the psychological interpretation inquires into the sense of speech with respect to its being an expression of an individual mind. This methodological opposition is further diversified by the opposition of a historical and a divinatory moment: Schleiermacher requires an objectively historical method in which we explore how speech inserts itself into the entirety of a language as its product, and an objectively divinatory method, in which we have to divine how speech itself might develop the language further. He further requires a subjectively historical method in which we inquire into the way speech is given in mind, and a subjectively divinatory method in which we divine how the thoughts contained in speech will be further effective in their speaker (Schleiermacher 1977, 94).
The historiography of hermeneutics, from Dilthey onward, has recognized Schleiermacher’s particular achievement in the development of the psychological method. Because of this accentuation, Schleiermacher’s conception was understood as a subjectivistic, romantic hermeneutics. By developing hermeneutics as a unified and universalized method of interpretation, Schleiermacher holds on to the classic “togetherness of rhetoric and hermeneutics” (Schleiermacher 1977, 76). He takes hermeneutics to be the reverse of rhetoric and thereby considers texts and speech as the phenomena of expression of their authors. The ultimate end of methodologically guided interpretation is the discovery of the author’s thought and state of mind “behind” its expression. That this end can actually be attained through a psychological and divinatory method is based on Schleiermacher’s romantic presupposition: a divinatory act of congeniality, in which the interpreter reconstructs the author’s process of generating his expression, is only possible if one presupposes a preexisting bond between all individuals.1 If Schleiermacher’s development of a method for a unified and universalized hermeneutics was indeed grounded in the idea of the strangeness of speech to be understood and of the encompassing risk of misunderstanding, and even if he thereby became attentive to the historicity of meaning, he ultimately believed in the possibility of overcoming strangeness and misunderstanding by methodologically guided interpretation—mainly owing to the metaphysical belief in the romantic communion of all individuals.
Wilhelm Dilthey wanted to develop hermeneutics as a methodology for the humanities, thereby providing them with a scientific method of their own, different from the methods of the natural sciences, but nevertheless securing a level of objectivity analogous to the one attained in natural science. The method of the natural sciences is explanation, the method of the humanities is understanding. The objects the humanities are dealing with are the expressions of singular historical individuals, and their scientific status depends on “whether the understanding of the singular can be elevated to universal validity” (Dilthey 1957, 317). Understanding is defined by Dilthey as the process in which we grasp something inner, something psychical, which is the experience of an author, by way of an exterior sign, given in sensibility (Dilthey 1957, 318). This is possible through an inference by analogy, in which we grasp the experience of another and its expression by analogy with our own experiences and their expressions. Only if it is possible to develop hermeneutics as a method of understanding, enabling the interpreter to find the experience that originally generated the sign, once and for all, are the humanities possible as true sciences. But it is not only a development of Schleiermacher’s psychological method that is important for Dilthey’s project of a methodological foundation of the humanities. He also takes up Schleiermacher’s grammatical method and develops it further into a reformulation of the Hegelian notion of objective spirit. Dilthey understands objective spirit as “the manifold forms, in which the commonality between individuals is objectified in the sensual world” (Dilthey 1958, 208). Not only language, but all forms of culture go to make up a cultural medium in the context of which singular expressions of experiences have to be understood.
Dilthey’s later works broaden its perspective insofar as it situates the methodology of the humanities in the realm of a philosophy of life (see Dilthey 1958a, 131). Because human and historical life is itself a development that constantly interprets itself, hermeneutics is the self-interpretation of life before it is a methodology of the humanities. It is this widened perspective that became central for Dilthey’s immediate successors in the history of hermeneutics. In a short discussion of Dilthey’s correspondence with Count Yorck of Wartenburg, Heidegger claims that Dilthey’s actual goal was “to understand ‘life’ philosophically and to secure for this understanding a hermeneutical foundation in terms of ‘life itself’” (Heidegger 1993, 398 (Engl. 450)). Nevertheless, Heidegger follows Count Yorck in the view that Dilthey’s concentration on the methodology of the humanities had prevented him from properly addressing the historicity of life. Gadamer picks up this Heideggerian line of critique and believes that Dilthey entangles himself in an aporia: His Cartesianism of a methodological search for a universally valid knowledge in the humanities cannot be coherently unified with his conception of a philosophy of life. That Dilthey nevertheless did not see himself confronted with this aporia can, according to Gadamer, only be explained through an idealistic presupposition he makes: Dilthey did not think it necessary to distinguish the historically relative objectifications of and in life itself from the Cartesian, absolutely certain objectifications in the sciences, because he secretly held on to a Hegelianism in which the relative objectifications in historical self-reflection are always already on the way to the Absolute so that the absolutely certain objectification of science can be seen as the perfection of the natural tendency of life itself (see Gadamer 1990, 222–246 (Engl. 213–235)).
Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s critique of Dilthey’s methodological conception of hermeneutics was often understood as a plea for a hermeneutics without method, characterized by a profoundly uncritical attitude. This reception is at least misleading. The critique of method in Heidegger and Gadamer was not directed against method as such, but against a particular kind of method prevailing in the Cartesian tradition of scientific knowledge. Its target was the idea that scientific methodology can overcome the historicity of life and thereby of one’s own perspective. In other words, the heart of the critique was directed against the modern illusion of absolute knowledge and not against method in all its forms. Gadamer’s critique only concerns a “false methodologism” (Gadamer 1990, 480, (Engl. 471)) with respect to the notion of objectivity in the humanities, and Heidegger explicitly claims to be following another kind of method himself in Being and Time.
Although Dilthey’s idea that life itself is a historical process that constantly aims at understanding itself paved the way, it is with Martin Heidegger that hermeneutics fully reaches an ontological turn. In a lecture course of 1923, Heidegger presents a conception he calls the hermeneutics of facticity (Heidegger 1995). As Dasein, we are facticity in the sense that we are thrown into a concrete factual life that is each time our own (see Heidegger 1995, 7). The original task of hermeneutics is to help the concrete Dasein to elucidate and understand its own being (see Heidegger 1995, 15). Hermeneutics thereby becomes the self-interpretation of Dasein in its facticity. In order to carry out this task, a particular method is necessary. This method, for Heidegger, is phenomenology: “To speak of something the way it shows itself and only to the extent it shows itself” in intuition (see Heidegger 1995, 71). By choosing this method, Heidegger continues the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology, while at the same time giving it a new direction. In Heidegger’s eyes, Husserl was on the right track when he developed phenomenology as a research practice inquiring into “things themselves,” while leaving aside all prejudices arising from modern sciences or everyday life. Yet he also believed that Husserl’s search for the “pure” phenomena, which were supposed to be able to found philosophy as a rigorous science, fell prey to the Cartesian prejudice of founding absolute knowledge from a historically neutralized standpoint. Because of this critique, Heidegger not only gave an ontological turn to hermeneutics, but he also gave a hermeneutical turn to phenomenology:2 In its own factual life, concrete Dasein is a constant process of self-interpretation, and the question is what the phenomenological method has to be if it is supposed to be able to lead to a self-interpretation that does not miss Dasein in its own being, that does not leave it to its “self-alienation” (Heidegger 1995, 15). How can Dasein develop an “original alertness” (Heidegger 1995, 16) to itself? Already in 1923, Heidegger believes that it is not enough to just want to put aside prejudices and simply look at things themselves the way they present themselves in intuition; rather, he takes it to be a “basic task of philosophy” to carry out a “historical critique” (Heidegger 1995, 75), in which the philosopher turns himself into a quasi-archaeologist by removing, layer by layer, the interpretational frameworks of tradition he himself moves in, each time showing how those frameworks went hand in hand with inappropriate presuppositions and were thus leading away from the phenomena and things themselves. In this sense of a quasi-archaeological method, Heidegger can say: “Hermeneutics is destruction!” (Heidegger 1995, 105).
In Being and Time, Heidegger reached a clearer conception of how what he formerly called the “hermeneutics of facticity” is supposed to lead not only to a novel understanding of the being of Dasein in its self-interpretation, but also to an entirely novel philosophy, a philosophy of being as such. The published, yet incomplete version of Being and Time, contains only two sections, in which Heidegger shows that the sense of Dasein’s being is temporality. Heidegger had wanted to show, however, in a separate third section, that the sense of being as such is time. And once having shown that the horizon of the understanding of being as such is time and thus having equipped himself with a new framework for understanding being, he had planned to compose a second part of the work, in which he wanted to move backward into the history of philosophy in order to show how Kant’s doctrine of schematism, Descartes’ conception of cogito, and Aristotle’s treatise on time have to be “destructed” or “dismantled” in order to reveal the sense of being and the phenomena themselves concealed, even though not completely absent, in their approaches. The whole project was supposed to follow what Heidegger in the title of §7 explicitly calls the “phenomenological method.” Phenomenology as a method, as Heidegger understands it, means “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” (Heidegger 1993, 34 (Engl. 58)). Yet because the phenomena are “proximally and for the most part” concealed, “the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation” (Heidegger 1993, 37 (Engl. 61)). According to Heidegger, we are forever within a hermeneutic circle of interpretation and destruction and have to desist from the idea of ever leaving it. This radicalization of historicity, however, does not go hand in hand with a melancholic resignation, lamenting the loss of absolute knowledge. In Heidegger’s eyes, it would be a fundamental misunderstanding of understanding itself, if we thought the hermeneutic circle was a vicious circle: “What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way” (Heidegger 1993, 153 (Engl. 195)).
Yet Heidegger himself was confronted with certain difficulties when trying to “come into the circle in the right way.” The reason for his project of “Being and Time,” the way it was originally planned, remaining unfinished probably stems from the fact that he did not succeed in developing a notion of the temporality of being as such that was sufficiently detached from the temporality of Dasein. If an analysis of the being of Dasein was supposed to provide the conditions of possibility for all further inquiry into being as such, the challenge was to avoid a subjectivism of being. If the understanding of being necessarily depends on the understanding of concrete Dasein in its facticity and historicity, the threat seems to be a subjectivistic idealism, in which the sense of being is reduced to a sense engendered by a concrete, historical Dasein.
Heidegger struggled with this problem after 1927, and one solution he offered in his later works was grounded in the concept of language. The earlier idea of a framework of interpretation projected by Dasein was replaced by the idea of a language speaking to us. In the famous opening passage of the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger formulates that “language is the house of being” (Heidegger 2004, 313); the sense of being is language, and language is not something human beings create, but rather something in which they dwell. Being and language are neither identical nor independent and opposed terms. When carefully listening to language, we may realize what it is that language is saying, what it is that is to be thought and said, and what it is in respect to which its words fail (see esp. Heidegger 2003). With this conception of language as the sense of being, Heidegger avoids the “Cartesian” illusion of a historically neutralized standpoint just as much as his own earlier tendencies toward a subjectivistic idealism: it is being itself that is to be said, but as being it is itself historical because of its intertwinement with language; and if we try to say it by listening to language, we avoid projecting subjectivistic interpretational frameworks onto being. During this later period, Heidegger opposes the sciences, on the one hand, having a method that subdues their subjects, to thinking, on the other, in which there is “neither the method nor the subject” (Heidegger 2003, 178). However, these kinds of pleas against method are first and for the most part directed against the methodological attitude effected by the “Cartesian” illusion—and it would be rather misleading to read them as pleas against method as such.
Hans-Georg Gadamer continues this late Heideggerian line of thought in his philosophical hermeneutics. In Truth and Method, “method” is so much the opposed term to “truth” that Ricœur wondered whether this work should not rather have been called “Truth OR Method” (Ricœur 1986, 107). But, analogous to Heidegger, Gadamer’s critique of method is only directed against the modern understanding of method in the humanities that forgets the historicity of understanding, in Gadamer’s words, that has a “prejudice against prejudices” (Gadamer 1990, 277 (Engl. 274)). Indeed, Gadamer also has a positive conception of method. The notion of method he relates to affirmatively is the Greek notion of method in the way it was used by Hegel at the end of his Logic: true method, says Gadamer, is the “action of the thing itself” (das Tun der Sache selbst) (Gadamer 1990, 468 (Engl. 459)), and not an independent catalog of formal rules used to deal with any kind of content. It is not an outright exaggeration to understand this statement on method at the end of Truth and Method as containing in a nutshell the entirety of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. But between this Hegelian sense of method and the critique of the modern scientific sense of method, Gadamer might be said to have developed procedural guidelines for hermeneutics as well, which he, however, never calls “method.”
Following Heidegger in his positive conception of the hermeneutical circle, Gadamer rehabilitates the notion of “prejudice” by giving it a positive meaning. We need to become aware of the fact that prejudices are not only impossible to eliminate wholly, but that they are even the conditions of possibility for understanding. Nevertheless, this rehabilitation of prejudice does not imply pleading for an uncritical understanding wholly determined by traditional prejudices it cannot eliminate. Gadamer names a procedure that is supposed to allow us to critique prejudices. Our consciousness is genuinely a consciousness implicated in history (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein), which means that it is so genuinely marked by tradition that it can never wholly separate something past “the way it actually was”—to use Ranke’s formula—from the history of its reception in which the interpreter stands. Nevertheless, consciousness can work toward becoming aware of the history in which it is implicated, of how and to what extent it is determined by it, and of how its own horizon of understanding is different from past horizons. Consciousness implicated in history is not only characterized by belongingness (Zugehörigkeit) to tradition, it can also distance itself from its own belongingness, though never fully. Gadamer believes that the temporal distance (Zeitenabstand) supports this process of distancing oneself from “unverifiable (unkontrollierbare[n]) prejudices” (Gadamer 1990, 302 (Engl. 297, German added by me)) because it is easier to become aware of prejudices with respect to things past, which personally concern us less, than with respect to things that have had an immediate impact on our lives.
For Gadamer, understanding always takes place in a “fusion of horizons,” a mediation of different horizons that happens without being actively produced by subjects. The happening of this fusion means that the language of the other was successfully translated into our own in such a way that understanding occurs. This understanding, for Gadamer, is a happening of truth. It is something, a “thing” we are understanding, and not the intention of another mind. But this thing is not an identical, eternal “thing in itself,” which we then see from different horizons; rather, as Gadamer says in an explicit analogy with Husserl’s analysis of the spatiotemporal object, the world itself is nothing “behind,” nothing different from the views, from the “lingual shadowing” in which it presents itself (see Gadamer 1990, 451 (Engl. 444–445)). If truth happens in the fusion of horizons, it is because something is understood in a new way through the mediation of two perspectives into a new one; but what is understood is not something that was already there, but something that was not there before and is nothing independently of its linguistic apprehensions, even if irreducible to them.
Gadamer’s famous claim is that not only is understanding always structured by language, but “[b]eing that can be understood is language” (Gadamer 1990, 478 (Engl. 470)). In order to see the difference between Gadamer’s affirmative conception of “method” and the Hegelian one, two things have to be emphasized here. First, for Gadamer, language and being are not fully identical even though intrinsically interwoven and, second, he believes that language has an essentially dialogical character. Hence, if he states that method is the “doing of the thing itself,” he does not refer to a logic of concept in which being is fully mediated; but he refers to a happening of truth, in which being shows itself through the dialogue carried on and out in language, between different horizons of understanding, fusing ever and ever anew and always differently. With Heidegger and Gadamer, hermeneutics finally not only undergoes an ontological turn and a distanciation from an illusionary kind of methodological self-understanding, but also a turn toward objectivity (in the sense of the German word Sachhaltigkeit and opposed to the neutral “objectivity” of the modern sciences). While Schleiermacher and Dilthey emphasized the psychological method because they held fast to the romantic idea of a congenial reconstruction of another’s mind, Heidegger and Gadamer believe that what hermeneutical understanding is directed at is being.
Paul Ricœur follows Heidegger and Gadamer in their ontological reorientation of hermeneutics—but deepens hermeneutics further by what we might call a critical turn. According to Ricœur, it is an unsolved question in Heidegger, “how to account for a critical question in general within the framework of a fundamental hermeneutics?” (Ricœur 1986, 105). And he poses a similar question to Gadamer: “How is it possible to integrate some kind of critical instance into a consciousness of belongingness, that was explicitly defined by the rejection of distanciation?” (Ricœur 1986, 109). Ricœur’s search for the development of a critical instance of hermeneutics is equivalent to a rehabilitation of method in a rather Diltheyian sense. He wants to integrate the presumably lost Diltheyian problem of method, and with it all the methodically operative humanities, into ontological hermeneutics, without falling back into the “Cartesian illusion” rightly criticized by Heidegger and Gadamer. Instead of Heidegger’s “short route” (voie courte) to being, which presupposes that the being of Dasein can be directly described in an analytic of Dasein, Ricœur finds it necessary to take the “long route” (voie longue) to being, leading through the objectifications of experience in language and thus through a never-ending process of interpretation (Ricœur 1969, 14). Only by integrating the method of the long route of interpretation into hermeneutics can we “resist the temptation to separate the truth proper to understanding from the method operative in the disciplines arising from exegesis” (Ricœur 1969, 14–15). Ricœur’s fundamental claim, which he directs against Heidegger and Gadamer, is that there is a fundamental dialectical tension of belongingness and distanciation, in which distanciation is intrinsic to belongingness, not per se alienating, but rather opening up the indispensable long route of interpretation. However, it is not so much a critical ontological hermeneutics, but rather a critical hermeneutic phenomenology, that Ricœur developed, and this becomes clear if one considers his starting point.
One of Ricœur’s initial inspirations was Husserlian phenomenology. In his first major work, Philosophy of the Will, Ricœur wanted to broaden Husserl’s phenomenology by analyzing the phenomenon of the will. Within this study, he came across the problem of the evil will, which, in his eyes, could not fully be treated within the realm of Husserlian eidetic phenomenology. Since an eidetic analysis of the evil will is impossible, we have to turn ourselves toward a hermeneutics of the symbols of evil and explore their richness of sense. Ricœur’s hermeneutic reorientation of phenomenology is to be found in his book The Symbolism of Evil. This initially limited scope of hermeneutics was soon to be broadened. In his study on Freud, Freud and Philosophy—An Essay on Interpretation, Ricœur develops a fundamental twofold strategy of hermeneutics, which would remain characteristic throughout his later works. The object of hermeneutics is no longer solely the evil will, but it is the unconscious, which is only indirectly accessible through the phenomena of its expression. Ricœur thinks that it is not enough to understand the richness of sense in these phenomena of the unconscious, thereby trusting the “teleology of sense”; in his eyes, it is just as necessary to try to explain within an “archaeology of the subject” what the mechanisms might be that led to these meaningful expressions. Yet this Freudian moment of explanation has itself to be understood as only another kind of interpretation and not as a theory that could “explain away” the teleology of sense. Thus, in the study on Freud, Ricœur did two things: He broadened the scope of hermeneutics to include the unconscious, and he differentiated between two types of objectification, one understanding, the other the explaining of the unconscious. By requiring, on the one hand, the long route of interpretation, and by integrating, on the other hand, explanation into his hermeneutic phenomenology, Ricœur gave the latter its full critical reorientation. In his later works, he extended the scope of his hermeneutics further to experience and life as such, to be interpreted by its manifold expressions in signs, texts, and actions; yet his basic methodological insights remain the same.
Ricœur is often said to be a great mediator, and in this sense something like a “mild” Hegelian. Regarding his position in the history of hermeneutics, this characterization seems to be quite apt. He mediated Dilthey’s idea of a hermeneutic method with Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics, by developing a new method within the realm of the fundamental dialectic of belongingness and distanciation. He can further be said to have mediated in a certain respect the romantic idea that hermeneutics is about understanding a subject, with the phenomenological idea that hermeneutics is about understanding the thing in question. Ricœur is indeed not so much inspired by romantic hermeneutics; but he was initially just as much guided by Jean Nabert’s philosophy of reflexion as by Husserlian phenomenology, and this origin can still be found in his later hermeneutics of the self (see Ricœur 1990). For Ricœur, understanding is very much a thing in question, but understanding is always also a self-understanding. Because of this, Ricœur’s whole thinking has the character of a philosophical anthropology, which, at the limits of theoretical understanding, is framed by ethics. And finally, Ricœur has mediated hermeneutics and the critique of ideology. There was a famous controversy between Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, in which Habermas suspected Gadamerian hermeneutics of uncritically falling prey to tradition. Thanks to the method developed in his study on Freud, Ricœur was able to integrate the “masters of suspicion,” Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, and thus structuralism as a whole, by giving critique of ideology an essential place in his hermeneutics: “The critique of ideologies is the necessary detour, that the understanding of the self must take” (Ricœur 1986a, 131; see also Ricœur 1986b).
Yet Gadamer was confronted with another challenge as well, which also became one for Ricœur: the challenge of the so-called “deconstruction,” formulated by Jacques Derrida. The challenge was twofold. On the one hand, it contained the suspicion that hermeneutics was not sufficiently able to account for the alterity of the Other or, more generally of that what was to be understood. It remains a question whether Gadamer and Ricœur were able to satisfactorily respond to this challenge.3 On the other hand, Derrida challenged the hermeneutical idea according to which language refers to being, truth, experience, life, or the self, by emphasizing that all understanding necessarily remains within the realm of language, in which words do not refer to things, but only to other signs. Neither Gadamer nor Ricœur accepted this Derridean thesis. Ricœur always held on to the claim that language refers to something that is not itself language, even if it shows itself only through language.
Gianni Vattimo was, in this respect, closer to Derrida. Within hermeneutics, he radicalized Gadamer’s dictum “being that can be understood is language” toward the meaning “being is language,”4 and defended the claim that everything is interpretation. In order to avoid self-contradiction, he does not formulate this thesis as an eternal truth; but he also does not take it to be merely one random interpretation among others.5 Hermeneutics, according to Vattimo, can show how the history of philosophical interpretations has led to nihilism concerning fundamental truths and why hermeneutics, as a thinking that regards everything as interpretation, seems to be the most appropriate interpretation for our times, while not claiming to be more than an interpretation itself. In the realm of his “weak thinking,” Vattimo speaks of a “nihilistic vocation of hermeneutics” (Vattimo 1994). Within this, there cannot be any method for searching after being or truth, and not even one for searching for a relation to the “inexhaustible,” a notion Vattimo’s teacher Pareyson had put at the center of his thought;6 the only “method” hermeneutics can and should employ is that of showing the coherence of a certain line of interpretation, leading to nihilism and making hermeneutics itself the most plausible interpretation for our times.
Richard Rorty, with whom Vattimo felt an even stronger affinity than with Derrida, radicalized Gadamer in a similar direction. In the context of American neo-pragmatism, Rorty wanted to substitute the epistemological view of philosophy as a “mirror of nature” for an “edifying hermeneutics.” Referring to Gadamer’s chapter on humanism, Rorty believed that Gadamer was “not so much [interested] in what is out there in the world, or in what happened in history, as in what we can get out of nature and history for our own uses” (Rorty 1979, 359). “Edification” is Rorty’s transformation of Gadamer’s term Bildung, and he defines it as the “project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” (Rorty 1979, 360). Edifying hermeneutics “is not a ‘method for attaining truth‘”, it rather “aims at continuing a conversation” and cannot “do more than send the conversation off in new directions” (Rorty 1979, 357, 373, 378). Objectivity, in Rorty’s eyes, is nothing more than an agreement (see Rorty 1979, 337).
It seems, however, that in the latest developments within the hermeneutic tradition there is what might in a very general sense be called a new turn toward “Sachhaltigkeit.” Younger authors have claimed, against the preceding generation, that understanding in language does indeed refer to something other than itself and is not doomed to circling within its own realm. The Canadian philosopher Jean Grondin continues Gadamer’s thought by focusing on the notion of the “verbum interius,” which for Grondin is what our understanding is directed at (see Grondin 1991, esp. preface and conclusion). He has developed this idea further into a hermeneutics of life, claiming that it is the sense of life itself that we are seeking to understand, while not being in a position to create it (Grondin 2003). The German philosopher Günter Figal is working on a hermeneutic phenomenology of objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit), claiming that the hermeneutic experience is fundamentally an experience of the objective (des Gegenständlichen) (Figal 2006). Since it is the objective that hermeneutics has to reflect upon, it should be first of all a theory of things and of knowledge about objectivities, before being a practical theory of self-understanding. And in France, Claude Romano has developed what he calls an “evential hermeneutics” (herméneutique événementiale) and also defines it as a “descriptive realism” (Romano 2010, 111). Inspired by Heidegger, Romano conceives the event as a world-generating instance, standing in a hermeneutic circle with the “happening” subject (l’advenant), becoming itself only through its relation to the event. What understanding refers to is the world, generated by the event, which is “‘more real’ than all reality, ‘more exterior’ than all exteriority” (Romano 2010, 42).
These recent developments seem to open up new possibilities for a hermeneutics in which method is neither abolished nor reduced to an instrument designed to find an ahistorical truth, nor understood as a guideline for proceeding within a realm of interpretations or dialogues without exteriority. The kind of method suggesting itself here, however, seems to be the phenomenological method, formerly employed by Heidegger, differentiated by Ricœur, and designed to let what shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself—through our language and within our patterns of interpretation.