A Lecture Delivered at the Department of Philosophy
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
April 1, 1999
The Relevance of
Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics
to Thirty-Six Topics
or Fields of Human Activity*
by
Richard E. Palmer
My paper will address five
key questions. If you are already familiar with hermeneutics, you may wish to
skip the first two or three sections:
I. What is hermeneutics?
II. What is philosophical hermeneutics?
III. What are some key concepts in
Gadamer's hermeneutics?
IV. What is generally meant by the
term "relevance"?
V. How is philosophical hermeneutics relevant to the disciplines?
I. What is hermeneutics?
(outline)
A.
Hermes - Notes from my essay on the liminality of Hermes.
B. Aristotle's Peri hermeneias,
On interpretation, narrowly defined
C.
The theory of interpretation broadly defined, especially of texts, and
especially of biblical texts, laws, literary works, and dream texts
D.
A Hermeneutics Compendium in 6 volumes
The
term "hermeneutics" seems to be related etymologically to the Greek
god Hermes. Hermes, you will recall from the Iliad and the Odyssey,
was the messenger of the gods. He carried messages from Zeus to everybody else,
especially from the divine realm and level down to the human level. In doing
so, he had to bridge an ontological gap, a gap between the thinking of the gods
and that of humans. According to legend, he had (1) a mysterious helmet which
could make him invisible and then suddenly reappear, (2) magical wings on his
sandals to carry him swiftly over long distances, and (3) a magical wand that
could put you to sleep or wake you up. So he not only bridged physical
distances and the ontological gap between divine and human being, he bridged
the difference between the visible and the invisible, and between dreams and
waking, between the unconscious and the conscious. He is the quicksilver god
["Mercury" in Latin] of sudden insights, ideas, inspirations. And he
is also the trickster god of thefts, highway robbery, and of sudden windfalls
of good luck. Norman O. Brown wrote a book about him titled Hermes
the Thief. Hermes is the god of crossroads and
boundaries, where piles of rocks (Herms) were placed to honor him. As
psychopomp, Hermes led the dead into the underworld, so he "crossed the
line" between the living and the dead, between the living human world and
the underworld of Hades. Hermes is truly the "god of the gaps," of
the margins, the boundaries, the limins of many things. He is a
"liminal" phenomenon. In the late 1970s I was invited by the
Philosophy Department to give a talk at Michigan State University at Kalamazoo;
I titled the talk "The Liminality of Hermes
and the Meaning of Hermeneutics." They later published it in their departmental
philosophy journal [full text reprinted here , click title, with permission of
the Kalamazoo Philosophy Department].
Although Aristotle's treatise Peri hermêneias defined
hermeneutics very narrowly in terms of determining the truth and falsity of
assertions, the words hermêneuein, hermêneia, and their cognates were
widely used in ancient Greek to mean interpretation in several senses: first,
the oral interpretation of Homer and other classic texts-the
interpreters of Homer were called "hermeneuts"-second, translation
from one language into another was a hermeneutical process, and third, the exegesis
of texts. This exegesis brought out the meaning, sometimes a hidden
meaning. Hermeneutics as the exegesis of texts of course related in antiquity
to rhetoric, which had a much broader scope in ancient times than it
generally does today, but also it applied to explicating dreams, oracles, and
other difficult texts, plus legal texts and precedents, and literary
and religious texts. Traditions of interpretation of rules for how to
interpret literary, legal, and religious texts have come down from antiquity,
and these furnish the subject matter of hermeneutics broadly defined as related
to the interpretation of texts.
In 1978 I received a summer research grant from NEH to
compile a "Hermeneutics Compendium" that would collect the most
important of these texts. I came up with six volumes and submitted a proposal
to Yale University Press. They respectfully declined the honor on the grounds
that a project of that magnitude would tie up their editorial staff and presses
for years. Today, with computer and information technology, the whole Compendium
could easily be put on the internet. For starters I offer here the table of contents for
the Compendium, which was originally published in an
article that distinguished three major streams of interpretation theory:
"Allegorical, Philological, and Philosophical Hermeneutics: Three Streams
in a Complex Heritage" (see Articles, 1980) the philological or literal,
and the philosophical. For me, hermeneutics is both an endlessly suggestive
liminal discipline taking its character from Hermes and a discipline of the
rules for interpreting various kinds of texts stretching back to antiquity. My
article on the
liminality of Hermes
(click on title for
full text)explains this first dimension of hermeneutics; the table of contents
for the compendium (click on title for table of
contents) spells out the second.
This brings us to our second question: What is
"philosophical hermeneutics"? We know, for instance, that there is a legal
hermeneutics, a literary hermeneutics, and a hermeneutics of religious
texts, even a hermeneutics of dreams, but what about
"philosophical hermeneutics"?
II. What is
"philosophical hermeneutics"?
(outline)
A.
Schleiermacher's "Allgemeine Hermeneutik"
B. Dilthey's Hermeneutik als
"Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften"
C. Heidegger's "hermeneutics of
Dasein," existential interpretive horizon of Being: Historicality,
Authenticity, Response to the Call of Being
D. Gadamer's Wahrheit
und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik(1960)
Hermeneutics in its various historical forms from antiquity
to modern times in general offered methodological help in solving interpretive
problems that arise with certain kinds of texts: dreams, laws, poetry,
religious texts. But in the early 19th century (1805ff.), Friedrich
Schleiermacher wondered whether there could be a hermeneutics that was not a
collection of pieces of ad hoc advice for the solution of specific problems
with text interpretation but rather an allgemeine
Hermeneutik, a
"general hermeneutics," which dealt with "art of
understanding" as such, which pertained to the structure and function of
understanding wherever it occurs. In 1805, he made an aphoristic note,
"What every child does in construing a new word it does not know-is
hermeneutics." (See the posthumous translation of his hermeneutics
fragments.) Following
the universalism of Kant, one might say, he looked for "the universal
conditions" of all understanding in language. Allgemeine can be
translated as "general," but also as "common" to all, or
"universal," so Schleiermacher, although he was a theologian
concerned with the biblical text, was interested in a "universal
hermeneutics." His project and lectures on it did not attract a great
following, but posthumously in 1840 a volume of his writings on hermeneutics
and criticism was published: Hermeneutik
und Kritik. For
theologians, however, the procedures of classical philology and what were
called the "historical-critical method" remained adequate to their
task.
Schleiermacher's biographer, Wilhelm
Dilthey, a
half-century later, began to see real possibilities for continuing
Schleiermacher's general hermeneutics project as a "general methodology of
the humanities and social sciences"—an "allgemeine Methodik der
Geisteswissenschaften." As part of a much larger outline of
Schleiermacher's system as philosophy and theology, he undertook a history of
hermeneutics as it developed since the Reformation, basically a theological
hermeneutics, which can be found in the posthumously published volume 2 of
Dilthey's Leben
Schleiermachers
(pp. 595-677). This has not been translated into English, but it is a very
helpful history of modern hermeneutics (although not without debatable
interpretations). Hermeneutics was for Dilthey still a methodology, but now a
general methodology he hoped would become the theoretical foundation for all
the humanities and social sciences. It didn't, but still it represented an
interesting, even noble ideal, an unrealized dream later taken up in 1955 by
Emilio Betti in his three-volume Teoria della interpretazione (also
untranslated into English, but translated by Betti into German in his 750 page Allgemeine
Auslegungslehre, a
1967 publication by J. C. B. Mohr now out of print, but his
pamphlet attacking Gadamer is still available). (See also the Betti inspired critique by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.,
in an appendix to his book, Validity
in Interpretation,
1967.) One
can assume that the liberal and generous Gadamer had a hand in allowing Betti,
his academic opponent, a place at his own publisher. He figured he had nothing
to lose in the comparison, which I think is correct. The Betti volume, so far
as I know, was not even reviewed in German, at least in the philosophical
journals, did not provoke wide interest, and in due course passed out of print.
Maybe the topic of understanding and interpretation is too universal? At least
Betti did go systematically from discipline to discipline to show the
application of his own general theory of interpretation. The problem was that
from a philosophical point of view, Betti's standpoint was a relic of the past.
Interpretation was for Betti the reproduction of the original text, a
point Gadamer argued was impossible. Every interpretation, according to
Gadamer, was a combination of the present horizon and the past, so that the
dream of a meaning coming objective and unchanged out of the past is
impossible.
The next stage in the development of a philosophical
hermeneutics was the articulation of a radical hermeneutics of existential
understanding. Heidegger was influenced by the historically based life-philosophy
of Dilthey, but he was in disagreement with
making consciousness or the life-force the basis of his thought about
interpretation. Instead, he chose "being" as his universal component.
Being, as it occurs in the everyday existence of human beings, he said, is
understanding. Understanding is the basic way for a human being to exist in the
world. To "be" is to understand, it is to interpret the world in
terms of one's own possibilities for being. In his Being
and Time, Heidegger worked out the conditions
for the possibility of human being in the world, and in this sense he offered a
Kantian universalistic analysis. Every human being finds himself/herself to be
a "geworfene Entwurf"‚ a "thrown project." That is
to say, one finds oneself already thrown into a world at a certain time and
place, and one finds oneself always already with a past that cannot simply be
forgotten, since it provides the basis for one's project into the future. We
cannot go here into the authentic call of Being as it constitutes the
conscience of the human being, or the relation of language to understanding and
interpretation. We can only say that hermeneutics took a major step forward in
being once again articulated as a general, universal description of what
understanding is and does, but this time in terms of the being of the being
that is always "there"—somewhere—the Dasein.
I would like to pause here to point out the significance of
Heidegger's contribution to hermeneutics: Human understanding
become the universal door, process, filter, through which all thought of
whatever kind must pass. The being of the world, the being of Truth, the being
of one's own existence are understood. They are "always
already" understood before they are linguistically articulated, i.e., before
they are interpreted. There is a prior having, a prior grasp, and then
a seeing of something as something—the "hermeneutical as"
is the universal element found in every act of understanding in every
discipline in every mundane act whatsoever. Understanding is not a transparent
medium; it is complexly structured, and one ignores this structure at one's
peril. This is a little like Einstein discovering the atom-the universal
structure making up everything else in the physical universe. In the mental
universe, or better, in the structure of being, understanding is the process
present everywhere, the process by which everything is apprehended, placed,
understood as something. Hermeneutics seeks to define this process.
Then a German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who had been
Heidegger's assistant for five years in Marburg, from 1923-1928, while
Heidegger was writing Being
and Time, came to
see in Heidegger's thought-both in Being and Time and in the 1935
essay, "Der
Ursprung des Kunstwerkes"("The Origin of the Work of Art," pp. 139-212 in Heidegger,
Basic
Writings) the basis
for a "philosophical hermeneutics." It was Gadamer who first used the
term "philosophical hermeneutics" in reference to his philosophy, and
indeed this appears in the German subtitle of Truth
and Method, which was dropped in the English
translation! This subtitle reads: Elements of a Philosophical
Hermeneutics—Grundzüge
einer philosophischen Hermeneutik!
I am not sure why ssthey did this.
Due to the exigencies of war and his non-membership in the
Party, Gadamer did not get a permanent full-time position until 1937, when he
was 37 years old, finally at Marburg, and the next year he was called to
Leipzig, where he spent the years of the war as a Professor of Ancient
Philosophy and chairman of the department. Due to the war and the extremely
hard conditions after the war, Gadamer did not have an opportunity to develop
his project of a philosophical hermeneutics until his Heidelberg period
(1948-1968, but continuing after retirement), working on it piece by piece in
lectures during the 1950s and publishing it in 1960, when he himself was 60
years old. It brought him instant fame—and controversy. Essentially, his life
since that date has been a series of articulations, explanations, further
developments, even changes, in this masterwork, Truth
and Method.
It would be a daunting task to give an account of the
philosophical position put forward in Gadamer's 500-page masterwork, and yet at
least something of the specifics involved are necessary here if we are to argue
persuasively for the "relevance" of philosophical hermeneutics. I
have chosen just to suggest twenty key terms in Gadamer's hermeneutics, and to
define them each in a phrase, so far as possible. This list is basically a
checklist, and clearly incomplete.
III. Twenty key terms in
Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics
1. understanding - Verstehen
and Selbstverstehen - understanding as the univeral link in all
interpretation of any kind, thus what Gadamer calls "the universal claim
of hermeneutics."
2. play - Spiel
as a distinguishing characteristic of the ontology of underst.
3. ontology - takes
it from Heidegger as a method of overcoming the S-O schema
4. Wahrheitsgeschehen - the
eventing of truth in art.
5. Horizontverschmelzung
- fusion of horizons -
6. Wirkungsgeschichte
- effective history -
7. phronesis -
practical wisdom
8. event - Ereignis
and Geschehen - something happens to you
9. Gleichzeitigkeit -
simultaneity or contemporaneity -
10. die Sprache spricht!
- language: the speaking of language -
11. immanent text:
poetry as paradigmatic of language at its most powerful
12. reading as a
paradigm of interpretation - cf. End of TM
13. application as a
moment in all understanding - to understand is to apply
14. experience as
essentially negative, shattering, transforming
15. tragedy as
paradigmatic - the shattering of expectations
16. legal interpretation
as a paradigm
17. conversation and
dialogue
18. eumeneis elenchoi -
the hermeneutical attitude of openness; the other could be right!
19. wirkungsgeschichtliches
Bewußtsein - consciousness in which history is at work, our language
is shaping our understanding
20. Vorurteil/Vorverständnis
- the fruitfulness of prejudgment, of preunderstanding
IV. What is meant by the
term "relevance" in relation to hermeneutics?
The
term "relevance" can have a number of meanings. First, there is the
relevance of a new tool, a new method that accomplishes a purpose you want
accomplished. This is the relevance of a tool that is suitable for a given
task. The term is often used with regard to information—"relevant
information." Webster's Unabridged Dictionary emphasizes
this dimension: "bearing upon or relating to the matter at hand; to the
point; pertinent, applicable, as 'the testimony is relevant to the
case.' " I am sure lawyers have even more stringent rules for determining
relevance of testimony, the "rules of evidence."
I would like to suggest three further dimensions of the
word relevance as it pertains to hermeneutics. First, the German word, Aktualität,
which appears in the title of Gadamer's important essay and little book on art,
Die
Aktualität des Schönen, is translated into English as "relevance" in the title, The
Relevance of the Beautiful (1986).
This German word, Aktualität, which is translated as relevance, suggests
the first of these three dimensions: Aktualität refers to today,
something that is currently meaningful, here and now. The translation of
Aktualität into English is difficult because there really is no
single word in English that captures the multiple overtones of the German word.
Our translator chose "relevance," but I think one misses in the
English word, as I hear it, the dimension of time, of meaningfulness
here and now, that is so important in hermeneutics. But certainly, once one
brings it up, the meaning for today, for people living now, may be considered a
dimension of the word relevance. Let's call our first additional explicit
dimension of relevance-the temporal dimension.
The second of the further dimensions I would add as
associated with a stronger sense of relevance is that of critique. A
critique is especially "relevant" when it calls one's worldview into
question, one's approach, one's presuppositions, so that after it one cannot
see the same topic in the same light.
The third dimension of relevance is that of transformation.
A thing or text we encounter may be relevant if it redefines what we are
doing, such that we understand it and ourselves in a new light, a new way.
We begin to place different requirements on what we do. We do things
differently. We see the value and goals of our work differently. It may smash
our present horizon and force us to form a new one, to become more aware of
ourselves. In this case, relevance is not just the relevance of critique. It
offers an alternative possibility for seeing and doing. It may change our
self-understanding, and the self-understanding we have as interpreters. This is
the transformative dimension.
These last three--current meaningfulness, critique, and
transformation--are dimensions that I have in mind in relation to defining the
meaning of "relevance" in my title,"The Relevance of
Hermeneutics," for to study hermeneutics, I believe, is ;look for what is
meaningful now, not yesterday; it is not antiquarian. It puts our present
approaches in question by its critique of our present horizon. And it
transforms the basic way we see things. It is not just something that supports
a given point of view-not that kind of relevance at all-but that changes it.
One could call this the therapeutic dimension. It does not just
criticize, it offers an alternative to the present perspective. I call this the
transformative dimension of the relevance of hermeneutics.
Of course, these are "claims" that have to be
made good. In a sense, the last two already support the claim of relevance here
and now, for the claim that hermeneutics is relevant in its temporal dimension
is supported or implied by the critique of the horizon that I have now, and the
transformation of my present horizon. Contemporaneity, critique, and
transformation—these are three important dimensions of the "relevance of
hermeneutics" in Gadamer. It could easily be shown that they figure
importantly in several of the twenty Gadamerian themes we have just discussed.
But let's turn now to the final section, a list of three
dozen topics for which I find some dimension of philosophical hermeneutics may
be "relevant." Because of the large number of topics, I will offer
only a few provocative sentences for each.
To be even more
provocative, I will end by listing twelve philosophers who are relevant to
philosophical hermeneutics without specifying in what way. No time, sorry!
V. How is Philosophical
Hermeneutics
"Relevant" to the following 36 topics?
1. The Humanities - Gadamer's hermeneutics is a
systematic philosophical defense of the relevance of the humanities. It
shows why the study of art, literature, and poetry, are important. Here I would
like to the structure a short summary of Gadamer's hermeneutics according to
the logic of the "Four Noble Truths" in Buddhism. The first Noble
Truth, as you recall, describes the nature of the problem, the second the cause
of the problem, the third the solution to the problem, and the fourth, the path
of right belief and living.
A.
In Buddhism
1.
Dukha: Life is suffering -the description of the problem
2.
Trishna: Suffering is caused by neurotic attachment-the cause of the
problem
3.
Nirvana: Liberation, extinction of desires, is possible-the cure for the
problem
4.
The 8-Fold Path: The way to proceed.
B.
In Gadamer's hermeneutics:
1.
Description of the problem: The fine arts, literature, religion,
philosophy, poetry are no longer valued.
2.
The cause of the problem: They no longer are viewed as "true"
because the Scientific Perspective, furthered by Kantian aesthetics, has
pre-empted the definition of truth as what is scientifically verifiable.
3.
The cure for the problem: A transformation of our understanding of truth
by looking as the occurrence of truth in our experience of works of art.
4.
Buddha's 8-Fold Path starts with "complete view" and
"complete understanding." What we need a complete change in thought,
in perspective and understanding about the truth of art. The next two steps in
the Buddha's 8-fold path are "complete speech" and "complete action." Here, Gadamer would point to
the need for a more adequate view of language and art and truth in action and
of their embeddedness in the pragmatic context of our lives. The next steps, of
right vocation and right application suggest the importance of Gadamer of
listening and a right view of application. The 7th step on the path, smriti,
complete recollectedness may with a great deal of stretching suggest the right
understanding of the role of the past in all understanding. And the final 8th
step, samadhi or "right contemplation" is state of mind which
eliminates subject and object, because both come together. It is an important
point of Gadamer's hermeneutics that it claims to be neither "subjective" nor "objective." I
hasten to say this playful set of parallels is my own invention and not
Gadamer's. Especially questionable are the parallels to the 8-fold path, but I
think the first three Noble Truths do help me to suggest the direction of his
approach.
2. Art and aesthetics - Hermeneutics offers a new way to understand the
experience of art as a way that truth emerges. It also offers a carefully
argued critique of "aesthetic consciousness" since Kant. See Truth
and Method, part I.
3. Reading - Gadamer sees the scanning and construing processes
of reading as paradigmatic of the understanding-process in general. I would
direct readers to the discussion of this at the end of Truth
and Method. In spite of his later emphasis on
the spoken word, Gadamer still holds that the processes of reading remain
important. Here, the relevance runs the other way: reading is relevant to
hermeneutics.
4. Poetry - Gadamer follows Heidegger in Ursprung
des Kunstwerkes
("The
Origin of the Work of Art" pp. 139-212 in his Basic
Writings) in
seeing poetry as an "eventing" of truth. Aletheia, the Greek
word for truth invoked by Heidegger refers to disclosure.
5. Theology - Gadamer finds in the structure of
encountering sacred texts important dimensions for all interpretation of texts.
Here he is indebted to dialectical theology (Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann)
for their emphasis on the address of the text to the reader and the claim of
the text on the reader instead of the other way round. In Gadamer's
hermeneutics the priority of subjectivized, subject-centered interpretation is
overcome (even "objective" interpretation is based on the subject's
standards of objectivity and thus is subjectivity-centered).
6. Music - Because hermeneutics traditionally
involves reading a text and in effect vocalizing it as one reads, there is
basically a performative element in the hermeneutical process. One brings a
text to life in the same way a conductor or pianist brings a score to life. I
even ventured to present some ideas on performance and hermeneutics at a
conference on postmodernity and the arts some two decades ago. (See my articles, 1978.) A colleague, Melanie
Jacobson, is exploring the relevance of hermeneutics to choral performance for
her doctoral dissertation at the University of Iowa. There are many connections
between musical theory and hermeneutics.
7. Antiquity - Gadamer's hermeneutics points to the
relevance of classical Greek antiquity-their philosophy, literature, and
language-as food for thought. See his concept of Gleichzeitigkeit
(contemporaneity, simultaneity), where the text from antiquity speaks as if it
were speaking here and now. This is also theologically important (see
Kierkegaard).
8. The Enlightenment - Gadamer criticizes the Enlightenment presupposition
that the beliefs of the past are dogma and reason must be used to eliminate
them. He calls this an Enlightenment prejudice that restricts the scope of our
thinking.
9. Technology - Gadamer goes back to the Greek
interpretation of technê, which refers to using reason to produce
things. But there are limits to such a use of reason, as Aristotle's
discussions of phronesis show us.
10. Modernity - As I have indicated in my boundary 2 essay on
Postmodernity and Hermeneutics , hermeneutics itself represents a postmodern standpoint.(See also
my 1976 Article, "The Postmodernity of
Heidegger.")2 In offering a critique of the limits of
technological reason and Enlightenment arrogance, philosophical hermeneutics
goes beyond the presuppositions and illusions of Enlightenment modernity.
11. Sociology - Interpretation theory in sociology
and the social sciences should find hermeneutics instructive as a critique of
objectivizing modes of interpretation. There is an affinity here with participant
observation, which makes use of non-objective
criteria in understanding. More recently (1987), see Paul Rabinow and William
Sullivan, Interpretive
Social Science: A Second Look.
12. Nursing and health sciences - Patricia Benner, a professor of
nursing in San Francisco, has applied hermeneutics and phenomenology to her
phenomenology of nursing in her book. The
Primacy of Caring,
and more recently, with Hooper-Kriakides and Stannard, Clinical
Wisdom and Interventions in Critical Care. Gadamer's hermeneutics has clear ties to holistic
medicine in its critique of objectivizing modes of interpretation stemming from
Cartesian views of the body as a machine. But even I was astonished when, in
1993, Gadamer published a book of his essays on the subject of health: Die
Verborgenheit der Gesundheit-or in English, The
Enigma of Health
(1996).
13. Law - A young graduate student from Norway wrote me by e-mail
just this week to ask about programs in the U.S. where he could get a master's
degree that would relate Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and law. I had to
tell him I did not know of any. He was concerned about the climate of
positivism in Norwegian legal interpretation. He reads English, French, and
German. Although Gadamer takes the process of application in legal
interpretation as something that really applies in all understanding, there are
many concepts in Gadamer that could de-positivize legal interpretation. In the
first place, there is no privileged access to the original understanding of a
text, and if there were, it would be most relevant to the time of the original
writing of the text. A Connecticut Yankee, if he time-travelled back to the
medieval court of King Arthur, would understand things by the standards of a
Connecticut Yankee and not the people of that time. Literary critic Hans-Robert
Jauß invokes the concept of an Urpublikum,
but while this can function as an ideal, the claim of the text is ultimately on
our understanding, not that of someone dead long ago.
14. Psychology - Again, the relevance of hermeneutics
to psychology lies first of all in its critique of scientism, but the
existential analysis of Dasein in Heidegger has been applied in psychoanalysis.
Dilthey and Schleiermacher viewed hermeneutics in psychological terms, even
referring to psychological understanding. Heidegger and Gadamer, however, tried
to avoid subjectivism and the terminology of consciousness, although Gadamer
did use it when he could find no other term adequate to his meaning, such as in
his famous term wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein. One of my students
here in the audience, Robert
Zellmann, started his
graduate work in a Seattle University program for Existential and
Phenomenological Psychology, which unfortunately has now been phased out for
lack of students being drawn to the program. Apparently there were not enough
supporters of it other than myself, i.e., supporters within traditional psychology.
15. Psychiatry - Gadamer has an essay,
"Hermeneutics and Psychiatry" in The
Enigma of Health,
but unfortunately
I have not read it. Gadamer does make a remark on psychiatric interpretation in
his debate with Habermas, as not the model for interpretation in general
because the doctor holds a superior power position and is not treating his
partner in conversation as an equal. (See his "Hermeneutics, Rhetoric and
Ideology-Critique," pp. 313-334 in Rhetoric
and Hermeneutics in our Time)
16. Lesbianism - In her book Lesbians
and Lesbianism: A Post-Jungian Perspective New York: Routledge, 1997, 237 pp.), Claudette
Kulkarni attempts to combine a Gadamerian interpretive methodology with a
Jungian practice. Her interest in Gadamer is in his emphasis on dialogue and
not making the analyst the supreme arbiter of a pregiven meaning. "The
methodology I have chosen, hermeneutics, is an interpretive methodology, that
is, a methodology which expects knowledge to emerge from dialogue and in the
form of 'an unpredictable discovery rather thanb a controlled outcome.' "
(149) For Kulkarni, and for many persons in the social sciences, hermeneutics
definitely has methdological consequences, even when as philosophical
hermeneutics it is not itself a methodology.
17. Languages & Translation - The process of translation is paradigmatic for
hermeneutics, and the process of understanding as described philosophically
would be relevant to the teaching of modern languages and to the nature of
translation. Dennis
Schmidt has two very insightful articles on
translations; they are informed by Gadamer's hermeneutics.1
18. Rhetoric - Rhetoric is a very important factor in Gadamer's thinking.
He is especially interested in the broader scope of rhetoric in antiquity. His
essay, "Rhetoric and Hermeneutics," appears in Rhetoric
and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader, pp. 45-59. Also see my contribution to that volume,
"What Hermeneutics can Offer Rhetoric," pp. 108-131. In that essay, I
found twenty points where hermeneutics could offer something to rhetoric, but
Gadamer after reading it, advised me to reduce it to ten by combining some
points. Unfortunately if was already at the publishers and really not practical
to change. But I agreed with him that it would have been more effective with
ten or twelve points rather than twenty.
19. Theater - Hermeneutics is typically
interpretation from a script. It comes to life in oral interpretation. In a
later writing Gadamer also reinterprets the Greek term mimesis to mean
something quite other than merely copying. It produces the meaning in sound and
gesture. In principle the act of reading is a performance of the text even when
the reading is internal, and this reading supplies emphases and meanings not
necessarily evident in the text merely as written.
20. Postmodernity - Gadamer's hermeneutics contains a
critique of the thought-forms of modernity. As such it marks a turn to
postmodernity, as I have pointed out in my article "Postmodernity and
Hermeneutics" in boundary
2 (see Articles, 1977) and elsewhere. A recent conference arranged by
Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago on the topic, "After
Postmodernity" (see the report at www.focusing.org/conferencereport.html) reflected many of the themes of
hermeneutics.
21.Phenomenology - The question of phenomenology is
inseparable from the development of hermeneutics. Gadamer was Heidegger's
assistant from 1923 to 1928, during precisely Heidegger was making a double
move of using phenomenology to free himself of life-philosophy and
neo-Kantianism and at the same time adding jibes in class about Husserl. Here,
his logic lectures of 1925, recently translated, are relevant. For the view of
their split from Husserl's perspective, see the recently published volume 6 of
Edmund Husserl's collected writings in English from the period 1927-1931, Psychology
and Transcendental Phenomenology: Husserl's Britannica Article, Amsterdam
Lectures, and Marginal comments in Being and Time and Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics. (1997).
Also, see G. B. Madison's view that a phenomenological hermeneutics is the
solution to the problems of postmodernism (see his Web page). It is significant
that Dermot Moran's Introduction
to Phenomenology
includes a 48-page chapter on Gadamer. Gadamer's thought is phenomenological
and inextricably intertwined with the development of 20th century
phenomenology. (See his conversation on phenomenology with Alfons Grieder in JBSP (published May, 1995), which will
be included in my forthcoming Gadamer in
Conversation
(Yale, 2001).
22. Ontology - Gadamer's hermeneutics in Truth
and Method follows the lead of Heidegger in
making hermeneutics an ontology of understanding. This avoids both the
subjectivizing involved in making interpretation a psychological process, and
an objectivizing which omits/denies the interpretive moment in the reader.
23. Existential
self-understanding
- Gadamer also follows Heidegger in defining understanding as
self-understanding. While Gadamer avoids the terminology of existentialism, he
continues to take the view that understanding is not just of an external object
or subject but rather involves a moment of self-understanding as one
understands. To understand in a way that transforms one's view of the world and
oneself, as often happens in encountering a great work of art, also results in
an enhanced self-understanding.
24. History - The ongoing discussion in
hermeneutics from a methodological point of view is regarding the claimed
objectivity of historical understanding. Along with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and
Habermas, Gadamer in his philosophical hermeneutics argues that there can be no
disinterested understanding or even presuppositionless understanding of
anything. Nietzsche even seeks for the interest-guiding factors in
interpretation, as Habermas has noted in his collection of Nietzsche's Erkenntnistheoretische
Schriften (o.p., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1968) and carried over into his own
theory in his Knowledge
and Human Interests
(see especially the appendix on three major types of knowledge-guiding
interest). What separates Heidegger and Gadamer is Gadamer's concept of wirkungsgeschichtliches
Bewußtsein, a consciousness in which history is always at work. For Gadamer
there is no escape from history or from prejudices, although one must
continually become aware of them. But they are the basis of our understanding
at all, so "prejudgments" are always already there. Habermas and
Gadamer are not so antithetical as some Habermas followers assume. Habermas
used Gadamer's hermeneutics in critiquing the logic of research in the social
sciences. See my article published in 2000, "Habermas
versus Gadamer? Some Remarks."
25. Literary Criticism - The process
of literary criticism presupposes the understanding of the text, which
is the arena of hermeneutics, yet American literary critics frequently assume
what philosophically must be described as an Aristotelian realism, as Neal
Oxenhandler points out in an article from the 1950s. In the concluding
manifesto in my book, Hermeneutics, I mention some 25 dimensions of relevance in an
effort to trace out the significance of hermeneutics for literary
interpretation. My original hope in studying hermeneutics was to develop an
existential/ontological literary criticism that would sense the way of
being-in-the-world that comes to expression in the text. While I did not find
in Gadamer's hermeneutics a method of textual analysis, it did unfold the
ontological being-for-me of the text. Also, the "hermeneutical quartet at
Yale" (as I called Geoffrey Hartmann, Paul deMan, Harold Bloom, and J.
Hillis Miller in an unpublished lecture I presented in Tennessee in the seventies)
all have an interest in hermeneutics, though not always of the Gadamerian kind!
While hermeneutics focusses on the problem of understanding what
is being said in the literary text, literary criticism goes beyond this
to compare it with other texts and to apply standards of literary value,
literary history, etc. Yet in all this, literary criticism must presuppose
the understanding of the text, thus both literary criticism and literary
theory cannot escape hermeneutics, and theorists sometimes refer to the philosophical
hermeneutics of Gadamer (especially Geoffrey Hartman [see his collection, A
Critic's Journey: Literary Reflections, 1958-1998 and many earlier books, but also
Stanley Fish's Is
there a text in this class? and Doing
What Comes Naturally).
George
Karnezis explored the debate between Hirsch
and Gadamer in his dissertation.
26. Understanding - As I have
noted above, understanding, like Being, is ubiquitous. The process of
understanding is a prerequisite process in all disciplines. It may seem that
understanding takes many different forms, each determined by a particular
discipline. But the fact is that the philosophical analysis of understanding
should have priority over all disciplinary hermeneutics. To ask what
understanding is in general and universally is to ask a qustion that affects
all questioning in every discipline. Like philosophy itself, hermeneutics is
truly universal. Thus Gadamer controversial essay, "The Universality of
the Hermeneutical Problem." (included in Continental
Philosophy: An Anthology
(1998), pp. 186-193.)
27. Method - It is a mistake to see Gadamer as
the arch-enemy of method. Method is basic and indispensible to every area of
human investigation. He recognizes this. The problem arises when method is
viewed as the best and only avenue for obtaining knowledge. Here, hermeneutics
attempts to show through philosophical analysis the limits and liabilities of method, its non-universality. It is hermeneutics which is universal, according to Gadamer,
not method. Methodically generated truth closes the investigator to other forms
of truth, and thus Gadamer's title, Truth
and Method. And
even the universality of hermeneutics is a major point of contention in the
debate with Jürgen Habermas. [See Hermeneutik und Ideologie-Kritik, Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1971, o.p.]
28. Reception aesthetics
- One of the
consequences of phenomenology, and also hermeneutics, is the aesthetics of
reception. This focuses not so much on the text as rather how that text is
perceived/received. In America we have the "reader response"
criticism of Norman Holland (Dynamics
of Literary Response
and 5
Readers ReadingJane
Tompkins (Reader
Response Criticism: From Structuralism to Formalism, and Stanley Fish (cited in
#25 above) among others. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics sees in
reception-aesthetics a step beyond the Aristotelian realism of the New
Criticism (although Aristotle's analysis of tragedy in the Poetics is an early example of
reception-aesthetics) in that the aesthetics of reception realizes that the
happening of the work occurs in the reader and thus it is pointless to exclude
what the perceiver brings to the act of encountering a work of art. But
hermeneutics articulates this happening ontologically as an event of disclosure
of truth. What hermeneutics can offer reception-aesthetics, then, is a
philosophical basis that goes beyond subjectivism. Philosophically speaking,
reader response criticism does not solve the problem that hermeneutics tried to
solve, namely the perception that art is an untruth, the tendency to view art
in a utilitarian way as a pleasurable "experience." But many
experiences can be pleasurable, such as eating ice cream. Gadamer's
philosophical hermeneutics, with its claim that works of art and poetry bring truth
to stand, can enrich reception aesthetics without contradicting their point
that the happening of art in in the perceiver.
29. Deconstruction - There is no denying the power of deconstructive literary interpretation.
It has an entirely different philosophical basis than reader response literary
criticism. Poststructuralism puts forward a theory of language and a
hermeneutics of suspicion that reads between the lines for where the action
going on contradicts the words. We see this illustrated with particular
brilliance in Barbara
Johnson's great essay
on Melville's "Billy Budd." In my article comparing four
texts of Gadamer and four of Derrida (see Articles, 1994), I conclude that the two
approaches to the phenomenon of reading and of interpretation are
supplementary, not mutually exclusive. Both offer light on the event of
understanding that we would not otherwise have.
There are some who regard deconstruction as a passing fad,
but the tremendous fruitfulness of Derrida's writings witnesses to its
philosophical insights into the logocentrism of structural linguistics, the
structure of writing as having what Rudolf Gasché calls an
"infrastructure" of presence and absence, and a link with Heidegger's
critique of Platonic metaphysics. Nor, on the other hand, do I see hermeneutics
as a fad that has been superseded by poststructuralism. It is a hermeneutical
principle of Gadamer that one's interlocutor could be right, and should be
treated with appreciation and respect. Like Socrates, one seeks the truth that
resides in the arguments of one's critics. But as Gadamer's efforts at dialogue
with Derrida, another follower of Heidegger, have shown, Derrida regards the
structure of dialogue itself as presupposing a common ground that does not
exist. (See Dialogue
and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter 1989.) But as those seeking to
evaluate the contributions of both, I would say that hermeneutics has been
misunderstood by most American deconstructionists. In this respect, the book
that best deals with these contrasts is James Risser's The
Voice of the Other: Re-reading Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics (1997).
There are some literary critics who argue that hermeneutics
is irrelevant, because deconstruction and French literary theory, especially
Foucault, have gone far beyond it (see Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics). After all, Truth
and Method dates from 1960. Or, one can
disregard hermeneutics as basically a German phenomenon, anyway, so don't
import it. We have done perfectly well without it so far, so why bother us? We
have all the methods we need, so why waste time on methodology? In reply to
this, I would say, first, that you can't know what you're missing till you've
tried it, and most of them have not. Hermeneutics is not a fad; it is not going
to fade away. It is the composite of theorizing and rules about interpreting
texts dating back thousands of years, plus valuable philosophical insights into
understanding as a process and event that have been offered by Heidegger and
Gadamer. As for hermeneutics being some sort of methodology, this is a
misunderstanding. It may be hermeneutics as defined by Emilio
Betti, but it is not
methodology in Heidegger's analysis of existential understanding; and in
Gadamer hermeneutics is a critique of methodology. That is why Betti is so
upset with Gadamer. Gadamer has redefined hermeneutics as philosophy of
understanding and interpretation, not as an interdisciplinary methodology of
interpretation. Unfortunately Betti's compendious Allgemeine Auslegungslehre
of 1967 is long out of print, but see Verena
Essmann's book on it.
30. The "Hermeneutik und Poetik Arbeitsgruppe"
- The German
"Hermeneutics and Poetics Workgroup" has been in existence since about
1960. Its biennial volumes are an interesting collection of speculation by
literary researchers from universities all over Germany. One would expect them
to take Gadamer as their mentor, but they have seemingly chosen Hans
Blumenberg, who is more of a social theorist than a philosopher. They could
learn a great deal from Gadamer, but they have chosen not to do so. I mention
them here only because you may have the impression that Gadamer's hermeneutics
is being carried forward by in Germany by this group. In his conversation on
"aesthetics" with Carsten Dutt in his little book, Hans
Georg Gadamer im Gespräch Gadamer reproaches members of this group with having misunderstood his
concepts even when they tried to apply them. His hermeneutics is being carried
forward by individual critics outside that group, such as slavist Horst-Jürgen
Gerigk at the
University of Heidelberg, especially his Unterwegs zur Interpretation: Hinweise
zu einer Theorie der Literatur in Auseinandersetzung mit Gadamers Wahrheit
und Methode (1989) and Die
Bruder Karamazov
(1997) but not so much by the Hermeneutics and Poetics group, who define
hermeneutics in its more general sense as the interpretation of texts, in this
case, literary texts.
31. Yale Hermeneutics Series - The interest in hermeneutics is not something new at
Yale University. Geoffrey Hartmann, Paul DeMan, Harold Bloom, and others have
found things they could use, but the fascination with Derrida has eclipsed for
the time being the influence of Gadamer. Still, Yale University Press is now
offering a series of books in hermeneutics, such as Gerald Bruns' Hermeneutics
Ancient and Modern
and Rhetoric
and Hermeneutics in our Time: A Reader (1997), and various books by Hans-Georg Gadamer, which promise to
continue making the hermeneutical tradition more widely known. And this
includes the forthcoming book on Gadamer in
Conversation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Practical Philosophy, the Greeks,
Phenomenology, and the Nazis (2001).
32. Postcolonial
literature - The
task of understanding other cultures is a "hermeneutical problem" and
hermeneutical reflection sheds light on this task. A major factor in this is
the invisibility of one's own cultural presuppositions. Here, encountering
other cultures helps to shed light on one's own prejudices-if one is
hermeneutically open to this. Again, we need to be more aware of how our
prejudices condition our judgments, and hermeneutical reflection makes us aware
of this need. Gadamer has drawn a great deal of criticism in arguing for the
fruitfulness of prejudice, or I would prefer the term "prejudgments,"
but his point has been misunderstood. We cannot approach any problem totally
free of prejudice or prior judgments on a subject, for this is where our
questions come from, this is the reason we may have an interest in asking
questions at all. We cannot understand anything new except on the basis of what
we already know, and this causes us to have certain expectations which may be
contradicted by what we encounter. Gadamer by no means is arguing we must make
our prejudices the measure of everything we perceive-that is the precisely the
problem with method! Method usually already has its questions and standpoint
constructed, and the inquirer only to substantiates or refutes a theory given
in advance. Gadamer's approach is one of dialogical openness, trying like
Socrates, to learn the truth, even if it contradicts his own expectations.
33. Asia - It is probably no accident that the author of the definitive
bibliography of Gadamer's writings (Gadamer-Bibliographie, 1994) is Japanese—Etsuro Makita—and
a great deal of Gadamer's and Heidegger's writings have been translated into
Japanese. Nor is it without significance that Gadamer has been invited to speak
in Japan several times, and accepted the invitations. Gadamer is not arrogant
about Western philosophy. He acknowledges that Asian philosophies, especially
Chinese and Japanese, but also Indian, perhaps have a great deal to teach us.
34. Education - As
a teacher, Gadamer is himself in the business of education, so it is not
surprising that he has commented occasionally on the task of education. But
there is more to it than that. Hermeneutics deals with encounters that shatter
horizons, and educational experiences, when meaningful, leave one's
understanding transformed. That's what hermeneutics is all about and that is
what education is all about, too: growth and transformation. Here, I would
refer you to the collection, Hans-Georg
Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History translated by Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss, and
more especially the 400-page book by Shaun Gallagher, Hermeneutics
and Education
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
The role of interpretation
in education is one of Gallagher's topics, and of course an educated person
senses the interpreted character of all he or she is learning.
35. Communication Theory
- I would like to enter
into dialogue with communication theory people. It may be that such things as
Gadamer's emphasis on dialogue or his criticisms of the ideal speech situation
in Habermas, or his emphasis on living language, might be of interest. I should
also say that Gadamer did not stop developing his theory with Truth
and Method. On the contrary, he entered into
dialogue with all kinds of fields. His 1981 encounter with Derrida might be of
interest, where he continues to defend the claims of living language against
Derrida's assertion of the priority of written language as showing us how language
works. I need to do more reading to pick up possible connections.
36. Historic Sites - Although books interpreting
historic sites in America and abroad generally do not specifically make a
connection to hermeneutics, Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is very
relevant to their task. To interpret a site is not just to explain objectively
what happened there, who was involved, etc. It is also to sense why we should
find it significant today. Hermeneutics definitely relates to the problem of
understanding monuments and historic sites. It is not just about texts,
although the problem of understanding a legal, literary, or sacred text can be
relevant to understanding an historic site. And as Ricoeur notes, it can
interpret events and actions as well as texts and works of art.
- - -
P.S.: Twelve Philosophers and the Relevance of Hermeneutics
Another topic of interest would be what different philosophers
have contributed to contemporary reflection on the interpretive problem,
and how hermeneutics would be related interpreting their thinking. I will defer
this discussion to another time, but I will list twelve philosophers I
immediately think of in relation to this topic:
1. Plato
2. Aristotle
3. Hegel
4. Husserl
5. Heidegger
6. Wittgenstein
7. Adorno
8. Habermas
9. Derrida
10.
Foucault
11.
Rorty
12.
Davidson
*Just as I was putting this on the web, Jon Awbrey called my attention to a senior honors project in applied hermeneutics directed by Shaun Gallagher at Canisius College. This project looks at the potential practical applications of hermeneutics. The web page for seeing the results of this project is http://www.canisius.edu/~gallaghr/ahnf.html.
1. Dennis Schmidt, "The Hermeneutic Dimension of Translation" in Translation Perspectives IV, edited by M. G. Rose (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988): 5-17, and "Some Reflections on Translating Philosophy" in Perspectives: Selected Translation Papers II (1984): 28-34.
2. See also my "Towards a Postmodern
Hermeneutics of Performance" in Performance
in Postmodern Culture, ed. Michel Benamou and Charles Caramelo (Madison, WI:
Coda Press, 1978), 19-33, and "Postmodern Hermeneutics and the Act of
Reading," Notre Dame English Journal [now Religion and Literature ] 15 (Summer 1983): 55-84; both are in Articles, 1978 and 1983