This is an overview of the development of historicist hermeneutics, circa 1800, as a general theory of interpretation in the intellectual context of early modern philology, romantic historicism, and Protestant religious exegesis, converging in the work of Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher.
From Philology to General Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher
This historical investigation led in the long run to structural offshoots: Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale still has this end (historical investigation) in view; anthropological research such as Frazer's monumental The Golden Bough (1890-1922) also derives from the Romantic historical view. Nineteenth-century linguistics is primarily historical linguistics, and the approach to the modern literatures is above all a philological and historical one.
The sense of the term philology is sometimes restricted to historical linguistics, but originally it had a wider sense which can still be seen in the Spanish usage, or in this definition from the Diccionario de Autoridades:
Issues of textual philology: discovery,
edition and textual study of a medieval or an early modern work.
Establishment of text, study of diverse manuscripts, variants, preferred
readings. (Basic limitation in approach: the assumption that there is
one text which is supposed to be better; modern textual criticism more
attentive to different contexts and uses). . The scholarly edition of
some forgotten work of the past becomes and remains for a long time the
standard occupation of university scholars; a parallel work is being
done in historical linguistics (e.g. The Oxford English Dictionary, 1884-1928; Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1926; Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary; Bradley, The Making of English (1904).
The
scholarly essays as we know them now, the philological reference works,
the handbooks of literature, are a product of the nineteenth century
scholarship; they did not exist before that except in rudimentary forms
in the field of classical philology.
The nineteenth century saw
the development of standard methods of textual criticism: the comparison
(collation) and evaluation of the available texts of a work
(manuscripts, editions); the drawing of a stemma of textual history; the
establishment of text and of supplementary variants to be published;
the intepretation of variants (either as authoritative or
non-authoritative), the classification and interpretation of errors
(author’s, copist’s, editorial transmission, typesetters’, etc.). We
often find one prejudice among textual philologists: the notion that
there is one text to be
preferred on the basis of the writer’s authority (e.g. the assumption
that the last text revised by the author is to be preferred to all
others, etc.). In the late twentieth century textual critics are more
relativistic, and pay more attention to the cultural role of variant
texts. Textual philology is combined with historical research,
paleography, bibliography and book history.
Hermeneutics is the theory or science of interpretation. The word derives from Greek hermeneuein:
to interpret or traslate into one’s own idiom; to make clear and
understandable, to give expression. In mythology, Hermes interprets the
often cryptic messages of the gods to mortals. As a discipline,
hermeneutics began as scriptural exegesis, closely associated to
philology (cf. R. E. Palmer, Hermeneutics).
Christian theologians developed the theory of plurisignification,
according to which a Biblical text could have several senses:
- The literal or historical sense
- The allegorical sense (an Old Testament event or person prefigures a New Testament one)
- The moral sense (a passage is read as a lesson on right or wrong behaviour)
- The anagogic sense (a passage is read as a revelation of the other world)
A
line of thought deriving from the Pseudo-Dionysius was especially aware
of the figural nature of religious language, requiring interpretation,
and insisted on the need to avoid excessively literal readings of
religious language (danger of idolatry, of mistaking the sign for the
thing signified).
Modern theories of hermeneutics arise from the
Protestant reaction to medieval hermeneutics. The Catholic church had
claimed sole authority in the interpretation of the Bible. The
Protestants insist that the holy text is self-sufficient, that it does
not need to be mediated by the Church; it is intelligible. Protestants
exegetes wrote many practical guides to Biblical interpretation. The
Protestant tradition, in confluence with with the philological
methodology of humanistic studies, evolved towards a systematic
methodology of textual interpretation in the work of F. D. E.
Schleiermacher.
In the late 19th century this became a broader
philosophical theory stressing the crucial importance of interpretation
to most if not all aspects of human endeavor and culture. Through the
impetus of the early work of Martin Heidegger, hermeneutics developed
into a general philosophy of human understanding, with implications for
any discipline concerned with the intepretation of human language,
action or artefacts.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German
theologian, expands the hermeneutic theories developed during the
Enlightenment period. Schleiermacher seeks a general theory of
interpretation which is applicable to all texts, not only to religious
ones. He conceives hermeneutics as the basic framework where all
linguistic understanding takes place. This means that in his work
hermeneutics is no longer an abstruse discipline having to do with
special interpretive techniques to be applied to obscure texts: all
hermeneutical processes are shown to originate from the common ground of
linguistic understanding. Enlightenment theories are divided into a
number of specific fields (law, religion, etc.). Schleiermacher will
speak of a general hermeneutics.
The hermeneutics of previous
authors are also partial in that they take understanding as a matter of
course. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, constantly takes into
account the possibility that misunderstanding is equally possible.
Linguistic
understanding, whether it is used in the exegesis of a work or in
following an ordinary everyday conversation, rests on the same
principles. It involves a negotiation, or a mediation (let us keep in
mind here our conception of interpretation as translation) between a
realm of generality, the linguistic system, and a realm of
particularity, the personal message the speaker wants to convey.
Speaking involves articulating this particularity out of the generality
of language, and understanding involves a similar shift between two sets
of criteria, those of the system and those of the message. Both
speaking and understanding can be said to be hermeneutical activities in
this sense. The ground of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics is the
concrete experience of how we come to understand somebody else's
meaning.
A complete hermeneutical understanding consists of a
play of two different operations, one more objectivistic, the other more
subjectively oriented. Schleiermacher calls these "grammatical" and
"technical" (or "psychological") interpretation, respectiely.
"Grammatical" interpretation interprets a word or sentence as an
instance of general language; "technical" interpretation as an instance
of "style", as the expression of an individual mind and communicative
intention.
Just as every speech has a twofold relationship, both
to the whole of language and to the collected thinking of the speaker,
so also there exists in all understanding of the speech two moments:
understanding it as something drawn out of language and as a 'fact' in
the thinking of the speaker.
These different techniques and aims
coexist in all interpretive enterprises; in fact, they work towards each
other, and "In this interaction the results of the one method must
approximate more and more those of the other" (Hermeneutics: The Handwritten manuscripts 190).
However, one or the other aspect can become dominant, and then we find
different "schools" or kinds of interpretation--the second kind less
subject to polemical discussion, in Schleiermacher's opinion (185). For
Schleiermacher, "technical" (i.e. psychological) interpretation relies
more on divination, on the imaginative projection of the interpreter to
the mind of the author; he came to give more and more emphasis to this
side of interpretation.
There are also two methods to grasp new
meaning: the comparative, by which an author or text is compared with
similar authors or texts, and the divinatory, which involves the
interpreter's intuitive contact with the spirit of language and his
insight into the individuality of the author. Therefore, understanding
is a complex process consisting in a mediation between system and
message, and involving an interplay of linguistic versus psychological
understanding on one hand, and comparison and divination on the other.
The scope of hermeneutics broadens gradually as emphasis comes to fall
on the last term of the opposition. Understanding a word is an
operation closer to the realm of linguistics than to that of
psychology. But the intuitive, subjective and psychological side of
interpretation becomes more significant as the object of our
understanding expands into a text, a work, a set of works, and the whole
personality of an author.
Besides, there is no understanding so
simple as not to require this interpretive negotiation. The whole of
the sentence must be known before we know the precise meaning of the
word; but in order to know the sentence we must know the individual
words. The same circular relationship is established between the
sentences in a text and the complete text. This leads Schleirmacher to
formulate a crucial hermeneutic principle: understanding takes place
through a hermeneutic circle. a part of something is always understood
in terms of the whole, and vice versa.
When we consider the task of interpretation with this principle in mind, we have to say that our increasing understanding of each sentence and of each section, an understanding which we achieve by starting at the beginning and moving forward slowly, is always provisional. It becomes more complete as we are able to see each larger section as a coherent unity. But as soon as we turn to a new part we encounter new uncertainties and begin again, as it were, in the dim morning light. It is like starting all over, except that as we push ahead the new material illumines everything we have already treated, until suddenly at the end every part is clear and the whole work is visible in sharp and definite contours. (Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: the Handwritten Manuscripts)
The
hermeneutic circle defined by Schleiermacher could be described as this
constant movement from part to whole as we try to intepret something,
which also involves a constant shift from one aspect of interpretation
(grammatical and technical) to the other, from one interpretive strategy
to another. This conception is very suggestive and it would be
interesting to compare it to present-day theories of discourse
processing, such as the opposition between "top-down" and "bottom-up"
strategies. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics has the additional merit of
being oriented towards much larger prospects. It deals even with
children's acquisition of language, which according to Schleiermacher is
also a hermeneutic process.
We see then that the image of the
hermeneutic circle is not wholly appropriate. We move from part to
whole through the help of analogies and divination; and then from whole
to part. But now that part is no longer the same: it is transformed by
our better understanding, and it will provide a firmer grasp for another
assault on the whole. We see, then, that the famous hermeneutic circle
is really a spiral. Only those interpretations which do not produce
new meaning are circular.
Given this spiralling definition, it is
not surprising if perfect understanding can never be attained. Indeed,
from the moment a work is considered as a part of a larger whole, the
interpretive movement starts again; it is easy to see that trying to
read the text of culture embarks us into an ever-expanding interpretive
process.
Heinz Kimmerle's thesis is that Schleiermacher shifted
from a language-oriented hermeneutics towards a more subjectivist and
intentionalist one. Schleiermacher's definition of understanding is, in
fact psychologistic: it is "the re-experiencing of the mental processes
of the text's author." Even though this assertion is borne by the
amount of attention given to each side of interpretation in
Schleiermacher's early and later work, respectively, the conclusion is
not so easily drawn. We have already observed within the very structure
of hermeneutical development as conceived by Schleiermacher a movement
from the objective to the subjective side: it is not far-fetched to
suggest that as his hermeneutical outlook broadened, the later emphasis
on technical interpretation was only natural.
A tendency of
Schleiermacher's hermeneutics is pointed out by Kimmerle. His emphasis
on understanding as such, understanding as a universal process, led him
to play down the element of historicity in both the object and the
subject of interpretation. This is not to say that he does not take
into account the existence of such a difference; far from it, "For
Schleiermacher, the historical text is not addressed directly to the
present interpreter, but to an original audience. The present
interpreter is to understand that original communication in terms of its
historical context." Indeed, the emphasis is so great that it is
placed completely on the retrieval of that meaning, leaving aside the
question of its application to present-day circumstances. The latter
falls outside hermeneutics for Schleiermacher: in his view, hermeneutics
is not the art of applying but the art of interpreting. And it is
precisely this conception of a pure and disinterested retrieval of
meaning which is objected to when Gadamer opposes the tradition opened
by Schleiermacher.
In this tradition, understanding is pure and
uncontaminated by the aims of the interpreter. Pure comprehension must
precede application of the universal principles it reveals, of the
moment of judgment. His attitude to historicity is utopian: he assumes
that the interpreter can leap over historical distance and acquire the
perspective of the contemporary audience, be absorbed in the view of
past people. However, we must take into account that Schleiermacher is
presupposing an initial community of shared experience or interests at
the root of his theory (Hermeneutics 180).
A problem that is
left unsolved by Schleiermacher is whether attention to the process of
composition affords a better grasp of the finished text. His
hermeneutics seem to endorse this conception, which is challenged by
twentieth-century interpretation. Certainly, for him one of the aims of
hermeneutics is to understand the "intimate operations of poets and
other artists of language by means of grasping their entire process of
composition, form its conception up to the final execution"
(Hermeneutics 191).
—oOo—
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