A Little Riff on Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is a process of interpretation — a translational, back-and-forth process between knower and known; between the self and the phenomena one is trying to understand.

The more one knows of the external object (often a text of some sort), the more one can know of the self. The more one is able to fit the situated perspective of self — as the “I” who is interpreting the world in the here-and-now — into a contextualized historical perspective, the more one can envision the situated context of the writer of a text from the past. This iterative process is known as the hermeneutic circle, named for Hermes, the mythological messenger/interpreter of the gods.

The tradition of hermeneutic analysis extends to ancient philosophy and is rooted in biblical philology. The focus here, however brief, is on modern hermeneutics through a non-theological lens. Moder hermeneutic thinkers include Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), the ontological turn of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and the subsequent contributions of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas, and Paul Ricoeur, among others. To focus on these thinkers does not deny the influence of others in this tradition: Spinoza, Weber, Marx, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Schleiermacher, Apel, etc. To be sure, this post offers a very limited sample. For more on these thinkers see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) challenged some of his predecessors’ basic concepts in the field. Until Gadamer, to a large degree, Enlightenment-informed ideals held that an autonomous subject (read: scientist) could successfully remove him or her self from the entanglements of history or the subjective context of the present moment. This is the myth of objectivity, rooted in Cartesian (i.e. from René Descartes) philosophy. Humans can not be so objective, Gadamer maintained. To separate the individual from the context of the world is to deny the full scope of who that individual is.

In Philosophical Hermeneutics, Gadamer addresses the scope of hermeneutical reflection and the development of phenomenology, existential philosophy, and philosophical hermeneutics. He pushes away from the rationalist and positivist stance of the natural sciences to develop a humanistic approach to science. This view takes the observer into consideration as part of the whole, rather than as a separate entity removed from influence. Gadamer expands on the work of Heidegger along with other historical relationships between semantics, aesthetics, and the nature of language to establish the interplay of meaning and understanding.

Language, Gadamer suggests, is the fundamental mode of operation for our being-in-the-world. Though modern post-humanists might take issue with Gadamer’s elevation of language as the singular mode of operation or sensual understanding among humans, it does play a fundamental role for most humans in the development of meaning and social relations. A person trying to understand a text is, Gadamer suggests,

…prepared for it to tell him something. That is why a hermeneutically trained mind must be, from the start, sensitive to the text’s newness. But this kind of sensitivity involves neither ‘neutrality’ in the matter of the object nor the extinction of one’s self, but the conscious assimilation of one’s own fore-meaning and prejudices. The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text may present itself in all its newness and thus be able to assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings (Gadamer, 1975: 238).

This passage aptly describes much of what qualitative textual analysis is about. To not simply bracket one’s own biases absolutely, which is ultimately impossible, but to aim for an interpretation with a high degree of critical reflexivity.

A critical approach to the field of hermeneutic interpretation, initiated by JurgenHabermas (1929 — ), takes issue with claims made by both Dilthey and Gadamer, among others. One major critique Habermas has is that Gadamer too easily accepted authority and its traditions. This is untenable, Habermas suggests, as language is itself dependent on social processes which are more than can be summarized by linguistic acuity alone. Invoking a critical stance, Habermas suggests that

…language is also a medium of domination and social force. It serves to legitimate relations of organized power….language is also ideological (Thompson, 1981, p. 82).

As a dialectical social science, the critical hermeneutics of Habermas attempt to balance the objectivity of historical processes with the motives of those forces acting within that process (Bleicher, 1980). In later works, Habermas develops a version of the hermeneutic circle with the theory of communicative action.

The information above is but a very, very small slice of what hermeneutics or the philosophies of Gadamer and Habermas are about. See the references below or follow the links above for more information and insight.

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References:

Bleicher, Josef. (1980). Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as method, philosophy and critique. Routledge & Kegen Paul, New York, NY.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1975). Hermeneutics and Social Science. Cultural Hermeneutics, 2(4).

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1976). Philosophical Hermeneutics. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

Habermas, Jurgen. (1970). Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (The Logic of the Social Sciences; originally, 1967) Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, Germany.

Thompson, J.B. (1981). Critical Hermeneutics: A study in the thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY.