Hermeneutics

 

Hermeneutics, in general terms, is the art of interpretation. As such,hermeneutics haservative, critical, radical, and moderate. Out of these strands, the moderate hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer has proven to be the most relevant to educational thought. While many hermeneutic themes speak to educational concerns, four – questioning, world-historical situation, language, and disciplinary knowledge – are especially relevant. Hermeneutics remains an important, if not yet thoroughly explored, branch of educational philosophy.

Hermeneutics refers to the theory and practice of interpretation, where interpretation involves an understanding that can be justified. It describes both a body of historically divers methodologies for interpreting texts, objects, and concepts, and a theory of understanding. As such it concerns making the unintelligible both intelligible and communicable. The history of hermeneutics stretches across epochs, methods and all the disiplines in the humanities, social sciences, and even the natural sciences. Ultimately, hermeneutics is conceived as a theory of communication of information exchange developed from ancient theories of truth to twentieth-century theories of ontology and understanding.

Hermeneutics: Concepts and Tasks

Hermeneutics is a discipline that sets itself upon the task of specifying and justifying a methodology of interpretation, originally of texts, but by extension of many other interpretanda. It has also been called the science or art of interpretation.
The Latin half-neologism ‘hermeneutica’ was introduced into scientific terminology shortly before 1630 by the German philosopher and theologian Johann Conrad Dannhauer (1603–66) as an equivalent of the old Greek term ‘herméneutike [techné]’ (=hermeneutic [art]) that in turn derives from the verb ‘hermeneúein,’ meaning originally ‘to express’ or ‘to translate,’ but since the days of Plato also ‘to interpret’ (cf Jaeger, 1974). Dannhauer's Idea boni interpretis et malitiosi calumniatoris was the first textbook of the new discipline called ‘hermeneutica generalis’ (Dannhauer, 1630).

History of Hermeneutics

It has been a common practice to distinguish between a generalhermeneutics covering all interpreting disciplines and several domain- or discipline-specific subspecies of hermeneutics including, particularly, hermeneutica sacra, that is, bible hermeneutics (cf von Reventlow, 1990–2001), and hermeneutica iuris, that is, legal hermeneutics (cf Schröder, 2001), and also archaeological (Robert, 1919), historical (Bernheim, 1908: Chapter 5), literary (cf Szondi, 1975; Weimar, 1975), art-historical (Bätschmann, 1984), and musical hermeneutics (Dahlhaus, 1975). While general hermeneutics has traditionally been conceived as a philosophical discipline, commonly as part of logic in a wide sense (including methodology and parts of what is nowadays called epistemology), the different kinds of special hermeneutics have usually been assigned to their respective disciplines (bible hermeneutics to theology, literary hermeneutics to literary studies, and so on), although some philosophers preferred to regard the domain-specific arts of interpretation as mere applications of general hermeneutics to a special object.
Since interpretation is a means to understanding, general hermeneutics has two leading concepts, understanding and interpretation, and should, accordingly, consist of two main parts: (1) a theory, or at least a conception, of understanding and (2) a methodology of interpretation. As long as the objects of understanding were restricted to texts, theories of understanding accordingly amounted to conceptions of textual meaning. When the scope is broadened to include other objects of understanding (e.g., persons, actions, and artifacts), more comprehensive theories of understanding are needed. A methodology of interpretation should contain (1) a conception of the aims of interpretation (cf Bühler, 2003; Tepe, 2007) and (2) a system of principles of interpretation, including rules for the critical testing of interpretational hypotheses (cf Bühler, 2003; Scholz, 1999, 2014).

In more recent times, the technical term ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ has been applied to a philosophical program associated with the names of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) that differs considerably from traditional hermeneutics. Early Heidegger had in mind a phenomenology or existential analytic of Dasein (i.e., human existence) that should replace traditional ontology (Heidegger, 1962). Gadamer's project was the more modest one of a phenomenology of hermeneutic experience, with special emphasis on the acquisition of the classical tradition (Gadamer, 1960). While Heidegger boldly appropriated the venerable term ‘hermeneutics’ for the peculiar brand of proto-anthropology he outlined in Sein und Zeit, Gadamer, much more cautiously, tried to use some of Heidegger's ideas to the benefit of philosophical esthetics and the humane studies. In his later years, Gadamer preferred to call his overall project ‘hermeneutic philosophy’ to avoid confusion with classical hermeneutics. Whatever merits Heidegger's and Gadamer's contributions might have, they should not be praised for ‘deepening’ the traditional project of hermeneutics; rather, they should be taken to have addressed, by and large, different questions and pursued different goals. Most importantly, they showed no interest in epistemological and methodological questions concerning interpretation. (The very title of Gadamer's opus magnum – Truth and Method – is meant to hint at its central thesis that truth in art and in the humanities lies outside the control of scientific methods.)

Hermeneutics and Gadamer

Today, ‘hermeneutics’ is frequently used to allude to a loose family of antinaturalist approaches in humanities and social sciences. Besides ‘hermeneutics,’ many social scientists employ terms like ‘interpretive social science,’ ‘interpretive anthropology,’ and ‘interpretive theory of culture’ (Geertz, 1973) or refer, more generally, to an ‘interpretive turn’ or ‘interpretivism’ in social sciences (Rabinow and Sullivan, 1987).

In American sociology, it has been common practice to use Verstehen (Abel, 1929, 1948) or derivative terms such as ‘the doctrine of Verstehen’ (Martin, 1969, 1970: Chapter 8) to refer to a technical use of ‘understanding’ in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), namely ‘empathic understanding,’ and especially to the conception of a ‘verstehende Soziologie’; that is, interpretive sociology, that was inaugurated by Max Weber (1864–1920) and soon became influential in German and American sociology (cf the critical discussions in Truzzi, 1974 and Martin, 2000). In addition, well-known German scholars following Dilthey – inter alia Eduard Spranger (1882–1963) and Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) – called for a ‘verstehende’ (interpretive) or ‘geisteswissenschaftliche’ (humanistic) psychology to counterbalance the dominant research program of an explanatory psychology (cf the critical discussion in Störring, 1928).

The present article focuses on general hermeneutics in the traditional methodological sense and its impact on the humanities and the social sciences. Other so-called ‘hermeneutical’ or ‘interpretive’ approaches are taken into account only insofar as they promise to be relevant for the methodological issues.

Hermeneutic theory itself took a new turn with the ‘philosophicalnhermeneutics’ of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), whose Truth and Method, published in 1960 and translated into English in 1975, insists, in opposition to historicist hermeneutics, on the practical dimension of interpretation, conceived in Heidegger's sense of an ‘encounter’ between the ‘horizon’ of the interpreter and that of the text itself. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is thus set in opposition to the methodological emphasis of traditional hermeneutic theories and their concern with the accuracy of interpretation. Gadamer's aim is to describe the underlying process, an existential encounter between two perspectives or horizons of expectation, which makes interpretation possible in the first place. Understanding is not just a matter of immersing oneself imaginatively in the world of the historical actor or text, but a more reflective and practical process that operates with an awareness of the temporal and conceptual distance between text and interpreter and of the ways in which the text has been and continues to be reinterpreted and to exercise an influence over us. This effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte), which traditional historicist hermeneutics tends to see as an obstacle, is for Gadamer an essential element that links us to the text. Our prejudgments or prejudices are what make understanding possible.