Niall Keane and Chris Lawn
If the task of this Companion is to introduce the reader to the various historical and conceptual definitions of hermeneutics as a philosophical discipline, then the first step in writing such an introduction is to clarify the idea of hermeneutics itself so that the reader can start with a comprehensive vocabulary that maps out the cardinal points necessary to understand the historical moments and fundamental questions that the diverse and exhaustive contributions to this Companion pursue.
We would thus like to offer in the following a clarification of the term hermeneutics itself, its origins in ancient Greek, and its development and transformation along the way. The modern term hermeneutics first enters the academic lexicon in Latinate form in the work of the Protestant theologian Johann Conrad Dannhauer (1603–1666). The Latin term hermeneutica is a translation of the Greek hermeneia, which was used not only to designate the activity of interpretation, but also the activities of declaration, explanation, translation, communication, and even artistic elocution. Following its retranslation into Latin with the word interpretatio, the contemporary understanding of hermeneutics is almost exclusively bound up with the activity of interpretation, which is more restrictive when compared to the more polysemic Greek term hermeneia.
If we want to address the nature of hermeneutics as it is used today, we could say that hermeneutics usually refers to three interconnected, although distinct, aspects which need careful unpacking. (1) When we speak of hermeneutics, we are referring to the concrete process of understanding as the task of explicating and assessing our interpretation of texts; (2) when talking about hermeneutics, we should also refer to the historical centrality of establishing a rule for the proper use of interpretation, that is, the concrete elaboration and implementation of what was called the ars interpretandi; and (3) hermeneutics can denote the philosophical theory and method with which we can fix or ascertain the nature, character, conditions, and limits of every possible act of understanding, which is what is found in the works of Schleiermacher, for instance, and in diverse ways in the works of Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur.
As with all schematizations, the three seemingly discrete aspects of hermeneutics outlined earlier do not do justice to the intricacy and intertwining of these elements, that is, to the concrete interplay of these elements in the process of historical understanding and interpreting, elements which are, in fact, enacted in the diverse moments of concrete experience which go to make up the rich tapestry that is hermeneutic reflection in its encounter with and emergence from the history of hermeneutics. For example, returning to the first definition outlined earlier, we can see that starting from the concrete experience of interpretation, we are faced with the problem of elaborating a series of rules that would permit us to solve and resolve the problems of the ars interpretandi, which is the second definition. However, in order to arrive at a philosophical theory of hermeneutics, the aforementioned third definition, which would equip us with the tools to evaluate the various features of interpretation, it is necessary to map out the historical development of hermeneutics itself looking back from the contemporary to the modern and from the modern to the ancient.
In the legal and Christian reflections on hermeneutic interpretation, for example, one can see the evolution of the rules and canons of interpretation, while the theoretical-philosophical discourse pertains to the nature and character of interpretative practice within the philosophical and religious context and the beginnings of modernity.
Yet even when reflecting on this stage in the development of hermeneutics, it is important not to forget that hermeneutics, as a philosophical theory, is rooted in the soil of three traditional experiences: (1) the interpretation of the law; (2) the interpretation and exegesis of sacred texts; and (3) the interpretation of poetic and literary texts. That is, it is rooted in the fields of jurisprudence, theology, and philology. One must also bear in mind that, toward the beginning of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth century, a stronger accent was placed on the role of praxis, which broadened the debate surrounding the human sciences, the so-called sciences of spirit, to include the social sciences.
As the writings of Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and Plutarch attest, the concept of hermeneia was by no means limited to what we now call interpretation and, as mentioned previously, also included explanation and translation. The Greeks knew all too well that the terms explaining, interpreting, and translating had a strong semantic and conceptual bond, while understanding, on the other hand, emerges most fully in the medieval tradition, and in particular with the Scholastics.
The term explanation, from the Latin explicatio, which can be found in the works of Cicero, often referring to explication, development, clarification, or illumination, but also as a synonym for interpretation, takes on hermeneutic significance only in the mid-eighteenth century, insofar as it is defined not as a synonym for interpretation, but rather as antithetic to it. In fact, it indicates the epistemological process specific to the natural sciences in distinguishing themselves from the human sciences. The beginning of this conceptual separation takes place with Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1844), who for the first time distinguishes between the method of hypothetical-causal explanation utilized with extraordinary success by the natural sciences and the descriptive understanding with which the human sciences operate. It was then Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) who deepened and consolidated such a separation, counterposing—and not only distinguishing—the natural sciences to the human sciences, nature and culture, emphasizing an ontological difference between the two spheres and the need for two methodologically distinct instruments to assess their respective objects of investigation. To explanation, which is proper to the natural sciences, Dilthey opposes understanding, which is characterized by the objectification of spirit and which stands over against the rational order to be found in nature. In fact, explanation is conceived as something extrinsic and is bound up with natural phenomena within a causal nexus, not simply reducible to direct experience, but rather to hypotheses and to the necessary integration of a knowable external reality which is other than the human being.
From that point on, explanation was understood as a method specific to the natural sciences and was taken as pertaining only to scientific-epistemological concerns, which finds its most complete expression in neopositivism and in its leading exponents Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) and Carl Gustav Hempel (1905–1997). One could go so far as to say that the schism between explanation and understanding has both shaped contemporary hermeneutics and motivated contemporary hermeneutic philosophers to resist this absolute bifurcation of method in the name of recuperating the rational unity which underlies the two and which has been damaged in the polemic between positivism and historicism. Much work has been done towards such a reconsideration of the underlying rational unity of scientific-philosophical research by authors working within the analytic tradition, for example, G. H. von Wright, and by exponents of contemporary hermeneutics, in particular, Karl-Otto Apel and Paul Ricoeur. This Companion offers the reader a rich, informative, and detailed account of such reconsideration.
Looking at the related notion of understanding or comprehending, then, it is important to stress that we are dealing with a term, derived from the Latin comprehendere, which is not rooted semantically in ancient Greek and which contains a multiplicity of meanings such as “to take,” “to grasp,” or even “to bring together.” The philosophical-hermeneutic significance of this term emerges first with Cicero and Seneca, who often use comprehendere as a synonym for intelligere. It is to this very term that the Scholastics return in order to elaborate the categories necessary for the resolution of problems pertaining to the “understanding” of divine revelation in order to determine intelligere as rational knowledge or to define it as a specific function that enables the human being to grasp the substantial difference between demonstrative knowledge and the understanding of faith. This scholastic debate is important here if one is to locate the genesis of the distinction between rational knowledge and understanding, which was the defining distinction when it came to the cognitive processes involved in the historical and moral sciences versus the explicative cognitive processes proper to the natural sciences. Understanding hence came to be conceived as a form of inner knowing, as the cognitive familiarity that the self can have with itself, and simultaneously that form of knowing which enables the subject to relate to an object which is other than itself. It is thus fair to say that “understanding” was defined as and reduced to a capacity intimately bound up with lived experience, with the self's concrete relationship to itself and to others in the historical and interpersonal world.
It is precisely this concern, inaugurated by Wilhelm Dilthey, which distinguishes nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers when it comes to the character and nature of understanding. For instance, for Heinrich Rickert it was necessary to connect the form of knowing called understanding to an object with a determinate value, while for someone like Georg Simmel understanding was the capacity to reproduce and to some extent relive the psychic life of another person. However, Martin Heidegger, who emphasized the projective nature of human existence, conceived in terms of existing or living understandingly, opened up a new ontological dimension and pushed hermeneutics in a radically new direction. It is from this insight or breakthrough, and by going back to Schleiermacher, that Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics constructs a universal hermeneutics on the pillar concept of finite and projective understanding, which always takes it start from the pre-enacted understanding of lived experience.
Interpretation and translation are two distinct, yet intimately related, ways of existing in the world that have their root in the polysemic nature of the Greek word hermeneia. When we speak of interpretation, we more often than not refer to the activity of clarifying or disentangling something; rendering something that was opaque accessible to thought. Translation instead exists because of the desire to mediate between different linguistic worlds and to mediate within one's own acts of speaking and listening. Yet when one speaks of interpretation, one ought to take cognizance of the ambiguity present in the Greek hermeneia, which is evident in the works of Plato and Aristotle. Plato conceives of hermeneia as an art that borders on the divine, or at least one that mediates between the human and the divine, while for Aristotle it comes to have a more precise definition in terms of the expressive capacity of linguistic signs or symbols to affect the soul. In his work Peri hermeneias, more commonly known in its Latinized form as De Interpretatione (On Interpretation), Aristotle addresses the relationship between linguistic signs, thoughts, and things in the world. When it comes to Heidegger's and Gadamer's contemporary hermeneutic projects, however, one could say they are working with a slightly more Platonic than Aristotelian notion of hermeneutics, one that emphasizes the interpretative and mediating nature of interpretation, going back to the god Hermes, messenger of the gods and the inventor of writing, the messenger who plays the intermediary role of bringing divine truth to human beings, albeit a truth that is always veiled and obscure.
When it comes to Gadamer's brand of philosophical hermeneutics, it is important to note that the relationship between historical existence and hermeneutic understanding is established on the basis of a prior understanding which is not merely existential, but also related to the historical effective consciousness of human existence. What we mean by this is that Gadamer explores the question of historical consciousness as a consciousness not only of the conditions of the existence of understanding, but of all those factors that impact decisively on our historical understanding, and which delimit the relation between our current situation and the historical past as it makes itself felt in the present.
Gadamer suggests that our preunderstanding is not only existential, but that it is fully inserted into a cultural tradition, which constitutes the true historical horizon of all understanding. Our prejudices or preunderstandings are not something abstract or purely existential, but are produced by a history that is, in effect, the history and effective transmission of tradition. And to engage in this historical tradition, one needs to recognize those elements of tradition which are both present to us and mediated by us.
It is also important to stress that the centrality of language to hermeneutic thought is perhaps one of the main reasons that hermeneutics has established itself as one of the leading methodologies in the humanities, not to mention one of the main means of bridging the gap between analytic and continental thought, insofar as hermeneutics is mindful of the role language plays when it comes to outlining and delimiting the nature of the philosophical act and its conditions of possibility. In this way, hermeneutics, as a reflection on the nature and ubiquity of language, has been central to the reassessment of the activity of philosophy as a rational, interpretative enterprise. Hermeneutics is understood thus as the enactment of a philosophical way of being that takes its start from the lived and dynamic experience of asking questions and seeking answers to those questions that belongs to the tradition of philosophy itself. As such, one of the great breakthroughs of hermeneutics has been its indefatigable attempts to bring the activity of philosophical reflection together with the sense of the enactment of life as seeking, striving, and questioning. What one finds in hermeneutics, then, is not the insistence that philosophical reflection allows thought to step back from the history of tradition, but instead that philosophical reflection emerges from and is shaped by the tradition to which it responds. This does not, however, amount to a form of reflection which is enslaved to the biases of tradition, but simply the recognition that reflection is not the impartial or neutral other of tradition. Hence, it is vital that we resist the temptation to understand hermeneutics as a philosophical method that reduces understanding and interpretation to tradition. In fact, if one examines the concrete activity of understanding and interpreting, one soon realizes that this is impossible, insofar as understanding and interpreting are necessary when it comes to making sense of and giving sense to tradition. Again, what is stressed by hermeneutics is the fact that understanding and interpreting are historically mediated and addressed by tradition and, because of this, the dialogical movement or fluidity of tradition, not its permanence, is the condition of hermeneutics.
Hence, hermeneutics, initially understood as a set of rules and procedures for the interpretation of canonical texts, developed into broader philosophical reflections on the nature of lived interpretation itself. In time, from the end of the nineteenth century onward, hermeneutics shifted from being a series of interpretive practices and philosophical positions to becoming a tendency or movement within the broader tradition of what is now referred to as “continental” philosophy. Both the founding triumvirate of modernist hermeneutics and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors worked almost exclusively within the German cultural tradition. It was only in the latter part of the twentieth century that hermeneutics gained any purchase in Anglo-American culture. The gradual acceptance of hermeneutics in the wider world beyond continental Europe is a complex story well beyond the scope of this introduction, but some of the influential factors are outlined here.
In the middle of the twentieth century, hermeneutics came to the fore in German debates concerning the role of positivism and the epistemological status of the social sciences. Critical theory harnessed to hermeneutical practice revealed the inadequacy of marshaling the procedures of the hard sciences for a reflexive understanding of society. In the English-speaking world, social theorists and political philosophers introduced hermeneutics into the debates in the 1970s about the role interpretation plays in the “sciences of man.”
Gadamer's Truth and Method was a seminal work in bringing hermeneutics to the attention of an English-speaking audience. Published in Germany in 1960, it was not translated until 1975. Prior to this date, philosophical hermeneutics filtered into Anglophone theoretical debates through E. D. Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation and the earlier journal article on which it was based. Although Hirsch was critical of Gadamer, accusing him of the subjectivization of meaning by neglecting the regulating role of authorial intent, he contributed to the growing awareness of hermeneutics within literary theory and philosophy.
Hermeneutics came to the attention of Anglo-American philosophy principally via the writings of the pragmatist Richard Rorty. By no means a strict follower of Gadamer, Rorty acknowledged a huge debt to philosophical hermeneutics in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a critique of representation and many of the working assumptions of the modernist philosophical enterprise. Using hermeneutics as a kind of crusading slogan, he adopted the ideas of groundless or nonfoundational conversation and the rejection of linguistic mimesis to further a stand against the foundationalism of the Descartes to Kant lineage. This facilitated Rorty's conception of philosophy as both metaphor and conversation, again ideas culled from a rather loose and impressionistic reading of Gadamer's hermeneutics. Although Rorty never fully endorsed Gadamer—for they have widely divergent conceptions of the nature of truth—hermeneutics was an abiding thread in the development of neopragmatism.
Another philosopher in the analytic tradition who embraced hermeneutics is Rorty's student Robert Brandom, who speaks of “Gadamerian platitudes.” Platitude here is not meant in a pejorative but a complimentary sense:
The denial of certain sorts of authority to the author of a text … the relativization of meaning to context in a very broad sense, the model of dialogue, meaning pluralism, the open-endedness and mutability of semantic perspectives—I propose to call these by now familiar ways of talking “gadamerian platitudes.” By calling them that, I do not mean to impugn their originality, but rather to mark that they have, thanks to Gadamer's work, become platitudes expressing a select set of the framework attunements of hermeneutic theory.
(Brandom 2002)
Other English-language philosophers whose work has received inspiration from hermeneutics are John McDowell from within the philosophy of mind and Alasdair McIntyre in ethical theory. There is an increasing realization from philosophers working within the analytic tradition that hermeneutics sidesteps the aporia of foundationalism, relativism, and skepticism.
As to Gadamer's intervention in the debates around literary theory, he achieved notoriety in the English-speaking academy by the influence of his seminal debate with Jacques Derrida. Billed as a head-to-head confrontation between deconstruction and hermeneutics, Gadamer and Derrida met in a famous encounter in 1981 in the Goethe Institute in Paris. From this time onward, hermeneutics established itself as a significant voice in the controversies about “theory” so dominant in the 1980s and 1990s in the English departments of North American and other English-speaking universities.
Hermeneutics currently is still dominated by scholarship gravitating around the ideas of its central figures, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, and their intellectual progenitors. The present volume is a genuine contribution to that scholarship. However, there is another aspect of the wider influence of hermeneutics, and it is the part it has played in its practical application beyond the world of the academic cloister. Questions about method and interpretation operate at the level of abstraction, but they also have application to reflection on procedures and practices within everyday life. For this reason, the subject of “applied hermeneutics” is a relatively new and fertile area of study. Law, theology, and psychology were from the early beginnings of hermeneutics both contributors to its formation and recipients of its insights for their own activities. In recent times, the interpretive dimension to hermeneutics has played an increasingly important role in the theory and application of qualitative research in such activities as business, communications, and information systems. Counseling, medical practice, and nursing have also turned to applied hermeneutics in examining the interpretive dimension to their activities. The dialogical aspect to hermeneutics advanced studies in areas as diverse as education, international relations, and the closely related topic of conflict resolution. Despite this proliferation of studies and research, evident in professional journals, it is questionable whether hermeneutics, that is, hermeneutical philosophy, has this strongly practical dimension. There is a sense of this when Gadamer (2004) speaks of a possible misunderstanding of his intentions in mapping out the terrain of philosophical hermeneutics. Far from teasing out the practical implications of hermeneutics, his real concern “was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.” This statement can be read as something of a rebuke to those who seek in hermeneutics not philosophical insights but rules of procedure.
Between research involving exegetical studies of the key figures of hermeneutics and the domain of practical application, there has emerged a quite definite political turn in hermeneutics, one to radical politics. In some ways, this is a rather unexpected development. Neither Heidegger nor Gadamer espoused leftist political radicalism and, in fact, on one reading, Gadamer's legacy was to give hermeneutics a quietistic acceptance of the status quo. Hermeneutics lacked a critical edge as there is, by Gadamer's account, no way of escaping tradition, no way of critiquing the cultural framework which inextricably binds us. A radical turn in hermeneutics comes from the work of the Italian philosopher and political activist, Gianni Vattimo. Although a student of Gadamer, Vattimo takes hermeneutics in a new direction, seeing in it what he terms its “nihilistic vocation.” In recent times, he claims, it has become part of the Zeitgeist, a universally accepted truism, to stress the interpretive dimension to understanding; we live, says Vattimo, in “the age of interpretation.” In both the Anglophone tradition of philosophy, by way of the insights of Wittgenstein, Davidson, Quine, and Rorty, and in the hermeneutic or interpretative tradition, after Nietzsche, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Derrida, and Gadamer, the priority of interpretation over an already given world is now taken for granted and is part of the wisdom of the age. Hermeneutics, Vattimo claims, needs to be overhauled and developed to revive its more revolutionary task; its appreciation of the groundlessness of things. Taking his cue from Nietzsche on the inescapability of interpretation, Vattimo advances the novel concept of “weak thought,” a dialectical move beyond hermeneutics. Weak thought (il pensiero debole) is what one gets when any attempt to ground truth in something foundational is dropped. Vattimo has advanced his notion of weak thought into the political realm and devised, along with his coauthor Santiago Zabala, what he has called “hermeneutic communism.” In a work of the same name, Vattimo boldly reimagines a weakened communism by revising some of its central tenets. The class struggle is the agonistic conflict of paradigms; not a violent struggle to be superseded and resolved by a cataclysmic reorientation of property ownership, but rather a ceaseless dialogical exchange. The idea of the classless society “must be re-interpreted as (a society) without domination” (Vattimo and Zabala 2011). In other words, the vocabulary of orthodox Marxism must be revitalized but effectively “weakened” in a manner appropriate to an age of interpretation.
It would be fanciful to give “weak thought” the last word (in hermeneutics there can be no “last word”). There are many other directions hermeneutical studies take, and this Companion is an important analysis and overview of the current state of affairs. Established international scholars and newer voices alike here demonstrate the sheer diversity of areas of concern included under the general rubric of hermeneutics.
In the sections “Hermeneutics and the History of Philosophy” and “Major Figures,” there is ample evidence of important new scholarship around the ways the traditional canon of Western philosophy both influences and is influenced by hermeneutical thought. In the sections on “Themes and Topics” and “Key Concepts,” and elsewhere, the claims of hermeneutics to offer insights into all the central areas of traditional philosophical study are clearly exemplified. In “Philosophical Intersections and Encounters,” there is, inter alia, evidence of endless overlaps with the many tendencies, schools, and movements occupying central places in the pantheon of contemporary thought.
Hermeneutics, once a rather specialist area within textual interpretation later playing an important but little-studied formative role in the creation of continental philosophy, is now center stage in the wider province of cultural and philosophical studies. There can be no doubt that this Companion is an important and timely contribution to those studies.