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Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. Hermeneutics plays a role in a number of disciplines whose subject matter demands interpretative approaches, characteristically, because the disciplinary subject matter concerns the meaning of human intentions, beliefs, and actions, or the meaning of human experience as it is preserved in the arts and literature, historical testimony, and other artifacts. Traditionally, disciplines that rely on hermeneutics include theology, especially Biblical studies, jurisprudence, and medicine, as well as some of the human sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In such contexts, hermeneutics is sometimes described as an “auxiliary” study of the arts, methods, and foundations of research appropriate to a respective disciplinary subject matter (Grondin 1994, 1). For example, in theology, Biblical hermeneutics concerns the general principles for the proper interpretation of the Bible. More recently, applied hermeneutics has been further developed as a research method for a number of disciplines (see, for example, Moules inter alia 2015).

Within philosophy, however, hermeneutics typically signifies, first, a disciplinary area and, second, the historical movement in which this area has been developed. As a disciplinary area, and on analogy with the designations of other disciplinary areas (such as ‘the philosophy of mind’ or ‘the philosophy of art’), hermeneutics might have been named ‘the philosophy of interpretation.’ Hermeneutics thus treats interpretation itself as its subject matter and not as an auxiliary to the study of something else. Philosophically, hermeneutics therefore concerns the meaning of interpretation—its basic nature, scope and validity, as well as its place within and implications for human existence; and it treats interpretation in the context of fundamental philosophical questions about being and knowing, language and history, art and aesthetic experience, and practical life.

1.1 Understanding as Educative

1.2 against foundationalism, 1.3 the hermeneutical circle, 2.1 the art of interpretation, 2.2 justification of the human sciences, 2.3 contemporary hermeneutics, 3.1 the hermeneutics of facticity, 3.2 difficulties of self-interpretation, 4.1 humanism and art, 4.2 tradition and prejudice, 4.3 normative implications, 4.4 language, 5. symbol, metaphor, and narrative, 6.1 hermeneutics and critical theory, 6.2 hermeneutics and deconstruction, 7. postmodern hermeneutics, 8.1 hermeneutics in anglo-american philosophy, 8.2 hermeneutics in ethical and political philosophy, 8.3 the return of normativity to hermeneutics, 8.4 hermeneutics and new realism, other internet resources, related entries, 1. interpretive experience.

The topic of this article, then, is hermeneutics insofar as it is grasped as the philosophy of interpretation and as the historical movement associated with this area. In this, hermeneutics is concerned, first of all, to clarify and, in turn, to establish the scope and validity of interpretive experience.

In hermeneutics, interpretive experience is typically clarified in reference to understanding. In this context, when we say that we understand, what we mean is that we have really gotten at something through an attempt at interpretation; and, when we say we do not understand, we mean that we have not really gotten anywhere at all with our interpretation. For this reason, understanding can be described as a ‘success’ of interpretation (even if, since Heidegger, understanding is more commonly described as a fulfillment, realization, or enactment). In hermeneutics, such success of understanding is not measured by norms and methods typical of the modern natural sciences and quantitative social sciences, such as whether our understanding derives from a repeatable experiment, nor by norms typical of much of modern philosophy, such as whether our understanding has indubitable epistemic foundations.

Now, philosophers associated with hermeneutics describe the success of understanding in a number of manners. However else the success of understanding is described, though, it is typically also described as edifying or educative . Indeed, Hans-Georg Gadamer, the philosopher perhaps most closely associated with hermeneutics in our times, closely connects interpretive experience with education. By education, he has in mind the concept of formation ( Bildung ) that had been developed in Weimar classicism and that continued to influence nineteenth-century romanticism and historicism in Germany ( Truth and Method , Part I.1). [ 1 ] Education, as formation, involves more than the acquisition of expertise, knowledge, or information; it concerns the enlargement of our person through formal instruction, especially in the arts and humanities, as well as through extensive and variegated experience. Accordingly, the success of understanding is educative in that we learn from our interpretive experience, perhaps not only about a matter, but thereby also about ourselves, the world, and others.

That the success of understanding is educative in this manner can be clarified by an example, say, in reading a text such as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War . When we say that we understand this text, we mean that our attempts to interpret it (whether rigorously, as in scholarship, or more casually, as in evening reading) have gotten at something, perhaps: that in politics, prudent reasoning is not always persuasive enough to stem the tide of war. Certainly, we have not arrived at this understanding in result of repeatable scientific experiment or based on an indubitable epistemic foundation. But it is not for this reason any less educative. In this understanding, we have come to something that we can agree or disagree with, something that in any case expands or changes our views about the role of reason in politics (and no doubt then also of public discourse and the causes of war), and, finally, something that can also teach us something about ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves.

Hermeneutics may be said to involve a positive attitude—at once epistemic, existential, and even ethical and political—toward the finitude of human understanding, that is, the fact that our understanding is time and again bested by the things we wish to grasp, that what we understand remains ineluctably incomplete, even partial, and open to further consideration. In hermeneutics, the concern is therefore not primarily to establish norms or methods which would purport to help us overcome or eradicate aspects of such finitude, but, instead, to recognize the consequences of our limits. Accordingly, hermeneutics affirms that we must remain ever vigilant about how common wisdom and prejudices inform—and can distort—our perception and judgment, that even the most established knowledge may be in need of reconsideration, and that this finitude of understanding is not simply a regrettable fact of the human condition but, more importantly, that this finitude is itself an important opening for the pursuit of new and different meaning. In view of this positive attitude toward the finitude of human understanding, it is no surprise that hermeneutics opposes foundationalism.

Hermeneutics opposes what can be described as the ‘vertical’ picture of knowledge at issue in epistemological foundationalism, focusing, instead, on the ‘circularity’ at issue in understanding. In epistemological foundationalism, our body of beliefs (or at least our justified beliefs) are sometimes said to have the structure of an edifice. Some beliefs are distinguished as foundations, ultimately, because they depend on no further beliefs for their justification; other beliefs are distinguished as founded, in that their justification depends on the foundational beliefs (Steup and Neta 2015, Section 4.1). This is a ‘vertical’ picture of human knowledge in that new beliefs build on established beliefs; new beliefs are justified on the basis of already justified beliefs, and these beliefs, in turn, are justified by still other beliefs, all the way down to the foundational beliefs. Inquiry, then, is an ‘upward’ pursuit, one that adds new ‘floors’ to the edifice of what we already know.

In hermeneutics, by contrast, the emphasis is on the ‘circularity’ of understanding. This emphasis is familiar from the concept of the hermeneutical circle. Central to hermeneutics, this concept is not only highly disputed but has also been developed in a number of distinct manners. Broadly, however, the concept of the hermeneutical circle signifies that, in interpretive experience, a new understanding is achieved not on the basis of already securely founded beliefs. Instead, a new understanding is achieved through renewed interpretive attention to further possible meanings of those presuppositions which, sometimes tacitly, inform the understanding that we already have. [ 2 ] Philosophers have described such hermeneutically circular presuppositions in different ways and, since Heidegger, especially in terms of presuppositions of the existential and historical contexts in which we find ourselves. This contemporary significance of hermeneutically circular presuppositions has origins in an older (and perhaps more commonly known) formulation, namely, that interpretive experience—classically, that of text interpretation—involves us in a circular relation of whole and parts. This formulation derives from antiquity and has a place in the approaches of nineteenth-century figures such as Schleiermacher and Dilthey. On the one hand, it is necessary to understand a text as a whole in order properly to understand any of its parts. On the other hand, however, it is necessary to understand the text in each of its parts in order to understand it as a whole.

In contemporary hermeneutics, the concept of the hermeneutical circle is rarely restricted to the context of text interpretation, and, too, the circularity of interpretive experience is not necessarily cast in terms of the relation of whole and parts. Nevertheless, as Grondin suggests, this older formulation can help to illustrate the circular character of interpretive experience (2016, 299). In text interpretation so conceived, our efforts to understand a text have no firm foundation from which to begin. Rather, these efforts unfold always in media res , through an interpretation of the whole of a text that proceeds from presuppositions about the parts; and, no less, through an interpretation of the parts that proceeds from presuppositions about the whole. Understanding, then, is not pursued ‘vertically’ by layering beliefs on top of foundations, but rather ‘circularly,’ in an interpretive movement back and forth through possible meanings of our presuppositions that by turns allow a matter to come into view. In this, the pursuit of understanding does not build ‘higher and higher;’ it goes ‘deeper and deeper,’ gets ‘fuller and fuller,’ or, perhaps ‘richer and richer.’

2. Hermeneutics as Historical Movement

Hermeneutics, taken as a historical movement, is informed by a longer history that dates back to antiquity. The modern history of hermeneutics originates with figures in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German thought, especially Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. Contemporary hermeneutics is shaped, in turn, especially by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, as well as by Paul Ricoeur and others (see Palmer 1969, Grondin 1994, L. Schmidt 2006, Zimmerman 2015).

In accord with a common account of the modern historical origins of hermeneutics, recognizably philosophical contributions to hermeneutics originate with Friedrich Schleiermacher. [ 3 ] Closely associated with German romanticism, Schleiermacher developed his hermeneutics in the first decades of the nineteenth century. He proposes a universal hermeneutics that pertains to all linguistic experience, and not just to the interpretative concerns of specific disciplines (Scholtz 2015, 68). Schleiermacher characterizes hermeneutics as the art of interpretation, maintaining that this art is called for not simply to avoid misunderstandings in regard to otherwise readily intelligible discourses. Rather, the art of interpretation is necessary for discourses, paradigmatically written texts, in regard to which our interpretive experience begins in misunderstanding (Schleiermacher, “Outline,” §§ 15–16). Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is multifaceted but keyed to the idea that the success of understanding depends on the successful interpretation of two sides of a discourse, the ‘grammatical’ and ‘psychological’ (Schleiermacher, “Outline,” §§ 5–6). By the ‘grammatical’ side, he means the contributions to the meaning of the discourse dependent on the general structure of the language it uses. By the ‘psychological’ side, he has in view the contributions to the meaning of the discourse dependent on the individual author’s or creator’s mind. Whereas the ‘grammatical’ side of a discourse is a matter of general linguistic structures, the ‘psychological’ side finds expression in linguistic forms that would traditionally be associated with style.

Schleiermacher indicates that discourses can be differentiated by whether they are predominated by the ‘grammatical’ or ‘psychological’ and he develops methodological considerations appropriate to these sides. At the same time, though, he recognizes that the interpretation of each side is reciprocally informed by the other (see Schleiermacher, “Outline,” § 11, § 12). Interpretation aims at the “reconstruction” of the meaning of a discourse, but, in this, the task is “to understand the discourse just as well or even better than its creator,” a task which, accordingly, is “infinite” (Schleiermacher, “Outline,” § 18).

The history of the modern origins of hermeneutics includes distinctive contributions by Wilhelm Dilthey. Whereas Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is closely associated with German romanticism, Dilthey’s considerations may be grasped in connection with historicism. ‘Historicism’ refers to a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual movement that no longer treated “human nature, morality, and reason as absolute, eternal, and universal,” but sought, instead, to grasp these as “relative, changing and particular,” shaped by historical context (Beiser 2011, 1). Dilthey’s overall (though never completed) project was to establish a critique of historical reason that would secure independent epistemological foundations of research in the human sciences, that is, the sciences distinguished by their focus on historical experience (Grondin 1994, 84–90; Bambach 1995, 127–185; Makkreel 2015). In this, Dilthey’s concern is to defend the legitimacy of the human sciences against charges either that their legitimacy remains dependent on norms and methods of the natural sciences or, to his mind worse, that they lack the kind of legitimacy found in the natural sciences altogether.

Dilthey associates the purpose of the human sciences not with the explanation of ‘outer’ experience, but, instead, with the understanding of ‘lived experience’ ( Erlebnis ). In an important essay, “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” Dilthey affirms that the understanding achieved in the human sciences involves interpretation. But this means that hermeneutics, grasped as the theory of the universal validity of interpretation, does more than lay out the rules of successful interpretive practice. Hermeneutics clarifies the validity of the research conducted in the human sciences. Indeed, he ventures that the “main purpose” of hermeneutics is “to preserve the general validity of interpretation against the inroads of romantic caprice and skeptical subjectivity, and to give a theoretical justification of such validity, upon which all the certainty of historical knowledge is founded” (Dilthey, “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” Section V).

While Schleiermacher and Dilthey are central for the modern historical origins of hermeneutics, hermeneutics has also been shaped by contributions from other figures, such as Friedrich Ast. And hermeneutics has also been influenced by ideas about meaning, history, and language developed in the period by figures such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schlegel (see Grondin 1994; Rush 2020).

Contemporary hermeneutics is demarcated from the modern historical origins of hermeneutics by the influence of a new use Heidegger makes of hermeneutics in his early phenomenological inquiries into human existence. In turn, contemporary hermeneutics remains largely shaped by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics,’ which he describes as an attempt further to develop and expand on Heidegger’s influential breakthrough. Contemporary hermeneutics also receives contour from Paul Ricoeur’s contributions to hermeneutics, from philosophical controversies with critical theory and deconstruction, and from the emergence of postmodern hermeneutics. Further developments include innovations in hermeneutics made by some philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition and the development of hermeneutics in ethical and political philosophy. Most recently, further developments include a renewal of interest in normative dimensions of interpretive experience, and responses in hermeneutics to a recent rise of interest in realism.

3. Hermeneutics and Existence

The principal impetus for contemporary hermeneutics, then, is a new use Heidegger makes of hermeneutics in his early phenomenological inquiries into what, in Being and Time , he calls the ‘being’ or also, the ‘existentiality,’ of human ‘existence’ (Heidegger, Being and Time , § 7, section C). Heidegger’s philosophy is oriented by the question of the meaning, or, sense of being ( die Frage nach dem Sinn des Seins ), but as he argues in Being and Time , inquiry into this question itself begins with inquiry into the sense in which human beings can be said to be or exist (Heidegger, Being and Time , §§ 1–4). Heidegger defines inquiry into the sense of the being of human existence as hermeneutical, that is, as a matter of self-interpretation. Within this context, Heidegger leaves behind the idea that hermeneutics is primarily concerned with the methods or foundations of research in the arts and humanities. Rather, as he argues, such hermeneutical research is itself only possible because human beings are, in their very being, interpretive. For Heidegger, understanding is a mode or possibility of human existence, and, indeed, one that is projective, oriented toward the interpretive possibilities available to us in the situations in which we find ourselves (see especially Heidegger, Being and Time , §§ 31–32). Accordingly, inquiry into the sense of the being of human existence is enacted in our own attempts to understand our own being, as we may interpret our being through the course of our affairs.

Heidegger’s use of hermeneutics in the context of his early phenomenological inquiries into human existence can be described as a breakthrough in the historical movement of hermeneutics (Gadamer, Truth and Method , Part II.3). But Heidegger’s considerations also continue to be a subject of considerable discussion, and his insights remain at issue, to a greater or lesser degree, in a range of current philosophers and debates. Heidegger’s later works are important for hermeneutical considerations of history, language, art, poetry, and translation, as well. As Heidegger develops, however, he comes to claim that his paths of thinking can no longer be served by hermeneutics, and his thought comes to be characterized by new and different orientations.

Heidegger clarifies the role played by hermeneutics in his early phenomenological inquiries into human existence through a critical reconsideration of Husserl’s classical phenomenology, or more specifically, a critical reconsideration of the aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology that rely on his transcendental and eidetic methods. [ 4 ] In this, Heidegger opposes his own ‘hermeneutical’ phenomenology against Husserl’s ‘transcendental’ approach.

Husserl’s phenomenology is guided by epistemological considerations, and his principal concern is to find a priori foundations for research in the sciences. Husserl believes that modern science, despite all methodological and technological sophistication, has failed to account for the basic epistemic foundation on which it relies. He maintains that this foundation may be discerned in consciousness—not, however, in any factual consciousness or ego, but rather in the transcendental ego and its a priori eidetic structures. He argues that phenomenological inquiry into these structures proceeds methodologically on the basis of what he refers to as the ‘ epoché .’ The epoché is a universal suspension of the ‘natural attitude,’ that is, belief in the existence of objects. The epoché thereby allows us to redirect our awareness to objects in their appearance as such. In contrast with Cartesian methodological doubt, the epoché is not a doubt about the existence of mind-independent reality, but, instead, a ‘bracketing’ of our belief in existence that frees us to focus on a priori eidetic structures of appearance (see, for example, Husserl, Ideas I, §§ 27–32).

Heidegger’s critical reconsideration of Husserl’s phenomenology is guided not by epistemological concerns, but, instead, fundamental ontological ones. Heidegger agrees with Husserl that modern science has failed to account for the grounds on which it relies, and he also turns to phenomenology in order to bring these grounds into focus. Yet, Heidegger believes that phenomenology concerns an origin much deeper than consciousness, the transcendental ego, and its eidetic structures. For him, phenomenology contributes to ontology, first of all, by bringing into focus the being, or, ontological structures, that comprise human existence itself. For the early Heidegger, these structures involve what he calls ‘facticity.’ By this, he does not mean that human existence is a fact. Rather, he means that the ontological structures that comprise human existence are found not in consciousness, but, instead, in our being in the world—or, as he determines this terminologically, being-in-the-world ( in-der-Welt-sein ) (Heidegger, Being and Time , § 12 ff.). Thus, our attempts to understand ourselves (or, for that matter, to understand anything else) remain bound by structures of being in the world. Specifically, our attempts to understand ourselves (or anything else) remain conditioned by pre-structures that determine in advance which possibilities of a situation we find significant, and by moods that determine in advance our attunement to a situation we are “thrown” into, that is, a situation that affects us even though we have not chosen to be in it (Heidegger, Being and Time , §§ 28–34).

Heidegger, on the basis of his consideration of the facticity of human existence, concludes that it would be a fool’s errand for phenomenological inquiry to proceed on the basis of Husserl’s epoché . After all, the epoché merely allows us to reflect on a priori eidetic structures of consciousness, when what we should be after are structures of our being in the world. Heidegger argues that phenomenological inquiry should begin instead with consideration of these structures of being in the world as they come into view through our own individual involvement in the world. Heidegger’s phenomenology proves to be self-interpretation, as it seeks to clarify the structure of being in the world on the basis of nothing else than our own individual experience of being in the world. Thus, phenomenology unfolds as the explication of the structures of being in the world that, initially at least, we experience more or less vaguely, more or less tacitly, in our own everyday involvements with things and others. In Heidegger’s critical reconsideration of Husserl’s phenomenology, hermeneutics is a possibility of human existence itself and, indeed, a possibility that aims at our explication of ourselves in our very existence.

Heidegger maintains that such self-interpretation of existence is fraught with difficulties. One reason, he believes, is that structures of being in the world are made inconspicuous by the very involvement in the world that they enable. He famously makes this case in the course of his phenomenological considerations of the way we find human existence “initially and for the most part,” namely, in the undifferentiated “averageness” of everyday existence (Heidegger, Being and Time , 43; § 20). In this averageness of everyday existence, Heidegger argues, the structure of the world is given through the purposes we have, the referential relations that comprise the situations in which we attempt to realize these ends, and the things we employ in the service of these ends. In the averageness of everyday existence, our access to this structure is granted not through reflection on it but, instead, through our ordinary affairs, as we cognize the structure indirectly through the things ( Zeuge , useful things or tools) that we employ to carry out our projects (Heidegger, Being and Time , §§ 14–18; see also Heidegger, Ontology , § 20). Yet, as he argues, in this form of cognizance, “circumspection” ( Umsicht ), the structure of the world itself recedes from view precisely by our absorption in those projects (Heidegger, Being and Time , 69).

Heidegger maintains that the self-interpretation of existence is made difficult, moreover, because being in the world always also entails being with others. In this, Heidegger argues that in the averageness of everyday existence, we tend to interpret ourselves not by what differentiates us from others, but, instead, by what can be attributed indifferently to anyone. Such interpretations may be attractive because accessible to anyone, but they come at the price of being distorting and reductive. In the averageness of everyday existence, the sense of self that comes into focus through self-interpretation is not a self in its singular possibilities to be. It is rather a sense of self characterized by circumscribed possibilities, which, for Heidegger, finds expression in the pronoun ‘they,’ or ‘one’ ( das Man )—so that we interpret our own possibilities restrictively in terms of what ‘one’ thinks, what ‘one’ does, and no more (see Heidegger Being and Time , § 27; see also Heidegger, Ontology , § 6).

Another, related difficulty of self-interpretation concerns the historical transmission of interpretations. In this, Heidegger maintains that, as interpretations of existence are passed down from tradition, the “original sources” of concrete, existential concern, come to be covered over (Heidegger, Ontology , 59). Indeed, for this reason, Heidegger calls for a “destruction” or, perhaps, ‘de-structuration’ ( Destruktion ) of interpretations of being and the being of existence that have been passed down from the history of Western philosophy (see Heidegger, Being and Time, §6). This, to be sure, is a call that has important implications for the study of the history of philosophy, one that has been influential for philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, John Sallis, and Claudia Baracchi.

4. Contemporary Hermeneutics

Contemporary hermeneutics is largely shaped by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics.’ Gadamer’s approach is guided by the insight that the success of understanding involves a distinctive experience of truth. Consider, once more, the example of coming to understand something through an interpretation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War , namely, that in politics, prudent reasoning is not always persuasive enough to stem the tide of war. When I come to understand this, so goes Gadamer’s insight, I experience what I understand not simply as a novel or enriching idea. Rather, I experience what I have understood as something that makes a claim to be true. Thus, to understand something means to understand something as true. The chief issue of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is to clarify that such a hermeneutical experience of truth is not only valid in its own right, but that it is distinct from, and even more original than, the sense of truth at issue in knowledge secured through the norms and methods of modern science. Indeed, it is precisely this concern that Gadamer’s title of his magnum opus is meant to evoke: his philosophical hermeneutics focuses on a hermeneutical experience of truth that cannot be derived from scientific method .

The point de départ for Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is the concern that the success of the scientific method has alienated us from the validity of the truth at issue in interpretive experience. Philosophical hermeneutics therefore begins with an attempt to recover the sense of truth at issue in interpretive experience by focusing our attention on motifs from the tradition of humanism and on the ontology of art. Gadamer’s considerations of motifs from the tradition of humanism are oriented by Weimar classicism and its legacy in nineteenth-century German intellectual life. His account helps us to recover the validity of an experience of truth that is not measured by scientific method but that, instead, depends on our education, grasped as formation ( Bildung ) through formal education and experience, as well as the concordant cultivation of capacities, such as common sense ( sensus communis ), judgment, and taste (Gadamer, Truth and Method , Part I.1.B).

Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics upholds that the primary example of the hermeneutical experience of truth is found in our encounters with art. Gadamer believes this becomes clear once we overcome modern assumptions about the subjectivity of aesthetic experience, in which the being of art is reduced to that of an immediately present object that, in turn, has the property of producing affects, such as aesthetic pleasure, in a subject. In his hermeneutics, by contrast, the being of art is rather a matter of a realization or “enactment” ( Vollzug ) that we participate in (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 103). The experience of an artwork unfolds as an event of interpretation that, when it is a success, allows us to recognize something that purports or claims to be true.

In Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, the treatment of the experience of art is expansive, but a synopsis of his definitive formulation from Truth and Method is instructive. Gadamer, first, introduces the theme of ‘play,’ or, of the ‘game’ ( Spiel ) to emphasize that the experience of art is an event of interpretation that exceeds the subjective intentions or interests of those involved in it (Gadamer, Truth and Method , Part I.II.1.A). Insofar as we agree to play a game, we give ourselves over to the context of meaning that comprises the game. We allow ourselves to be oriented by the norms that govern, and thus enable but never determine, thoughts and actions appropriate to the playing of the game. Likewise, when we participate in an experience of an artwork, we give ourselves over to the context of meaning that comprises the work, and, thus, allow our interpretive experience to be governed by the limits and possibilities of interpretation appropriate to the work. When we experience a performance of Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s The Island , for example, we allow our interpretive experience to be governed by limits and possibilities of interpretation that have to do with apartheid-era South Africa, Robben Island Prison, and parallels with Sophocles’ Antigone .

Gadamer maintains that in our experience of art, such play culminates in what he calls ‘transformation into structure.’ By this, he means that our experience of art comes to be that of a work, grasped in its ‘ideality’ or meaningfulness, in distinction from the activities involved in its presentation (such as the activity of actors presenting a drama). With our experience of such a ‘transformation into structure,’ the work of art allows us to recognize something as true (Gadamer, Truth and Method , Part I.II.1.B). He describes this interpretive experience of truth as a process of mediation, by which a claim of truth at issue in an artwork comes into view through the repeated projection and supersession of inadequate interpretations, until such mediation becomes sufficient, or ‘total.’ There is, as anyone who has experienced an artwork will confirm, no method to ensure the success of this process of repeated projection and supersession; it depends on the quality of our interpretive work, and, this quality can be enlarged by our formation of our capacities such as common sense, judgment, and taste.

Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics proceeds on the basis of these considerations of humanism and art as an attempt to establish the essential elements of the hermeneutical experience of truth. [ 5 ] In this, the hermeneutical experience of truth is conditioned by tradition and language .

The claim that the hermeneutical experience of truth is conditioned by tradition is not reducible to historicism or the historicist project of determining, say, what an artist or an author took to be true through a reconstruction of the historical context of the artwork or text under consideration. Quite to the contrary, the hermeneutical experience of truth concerns something that holds true for our own existence. Rather, then, the hermeneutical experience of truth is conditioned by tradition in the sense that it is limited and made possible by the historical transmission of meaning. The claim that the hermeneutical experience of truth is conditioned by tradition stresses the sense of the etymological origins of the word ‘tradition’ in the Latin trāditiōn - (stem of trāditiō ), a handing over, delivery or handing down of knowledge ( OED 2020, “tradition, n.”). This claim also stresses the sense of Gadamer’s German term for tradition, Überlieferung , which, translated literally, means a ‘delivering over.’ In this, the hermeneutical experience of truth involves belonging to a historical tradition. Contrary to a common misconception of Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics, traditions are not monoliths. Traditions are more like processes—idiomatic, dynamic, and evolving—that, to borrow from Whitman, “contain multitudes” (Whitman, Song of Myself , Sec. 51). Accordingly, to belong to a tradition is not first to possess an identity derived from a cultural or ethnic heritage; it is, rather, to be a participant in a movement of handing down, delivering over.

In Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, the hermeneutical experience of truth, as conditioned by tradition, is thus a matter of prejudice. Gadamer clarifies the meaning of ‘prejudice’ in reference to the early Heidegger. Gadamer agrees with Heidegger that human existence is characterized by facticity, so that understanding, or, our projection of possibilities, is oriented by ‘pre-structures’ that are a matter of thrownness. Yet, such ‘pre-structures’ are best described as ‘prejudices’ because they concern more than the individual situations that comprise our existence. These ‘pre-structures’ are shaped by the larger context of historically inherited meanings that remain operative, or, in effect, in such situations of our individual existence in the first place (Gadamer, Truth and Method , Part II.II.1.A).

Tradition, so conceived, proves to be a legitimate source of authority for the hermeneutical experience of truth. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics thus comprises a counterpoint to the rejection of the authority of tradition in modern science. Gadamer associates this rejection above all with the “prejudice against prejudice” developed in the European Enlightenment (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 270). In this, the motto of the Enlightenment is that we should think for ourselves, basing our beliefs in our own use of reason and not the authority of tradition, whether this authority is conceived in terms of superstition, religious or aristocratic rule, or custom. Gadamer recognizes that the Enlightenment charge to think for ourselves is legitimate, but he does not believe it follows from this that tradition cannot be a source of truth. He writes,

The Enlightenment’s distinction between faith in authority and using one’s own reason is, in itself, legitimate. If the prestige of authority displaces one’s own judgment, then authority is in fact a source of prejudices. But this does not preclude its being a source of truth, and that is what the Enlightenment failed to see when it denigrated all authority (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 279).

In Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, the experience of truth does not demand that we liberate ourselves from the authority of tradition, but, on the contrary, recognizes tradition as a possible source of our claims of truth. To be sure, tradition is not therefore a foundation of claims to truth. Tradition is, after all, a process of transmission, which is ultimately “ungroundable” and “underivable” (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 254, translation modified). [ 6 ] Yet, even if it is not a foundation, tradition is a legitimate interpretive wellspring, in the sense that it makes possible and shapes all understanding.

The hermeneutical experience of truth is, therefore, governed by the “principle of history of effect” (Gadamer, Truth and Method , Part II.II.B.iv). This means that our attempts to understand are always guided more by tradition, and thus prejudice, than we are able to make explicit to ourselves. This principle, as Gadamer maintains, has important normative implications for interpretive experience. These implications follow from the fact that it is impossible to become completely self-conscious of the prejudices operative in our attempts to understand. As Gadamer puts the point in an ontological register, “ to be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete ” (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 302). Because of this, the experience of truth leads not to self-certainty, but to the insight that we should proceed always with a Delphic self-knowledge of our limits.

Such Delphic self-knowledge should carry over to our assessment of knowledge secured by modern science, as well. For, as Gadamer puts the point, “when a naïve faith in scientific method denies the existence of effective history, there can be an actual deformation of knowledge” (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 301). This is evident first of all from the humanistic study of the history of science. After all, knowledge based on the best results of science today may well have the same fate as the discredited scientific knowledge of past times. It is also evident that we should carry over Delphic self-knowledge to our assessment of scientific knowledge from the fact that scientific inquiry is always guided by more prejudice than can be kept in check by any method: for example, in the selection of research questions, in hypothesis formation, and in any number of metaphysical (or other) assumptions tacitly or unconsciously used to characterize objects of inquiry.

Gadamer maintains that the normative implications of the ‘principle of history of effect’ mean that in our interpretive experience, we should attempt always to expand our horizons. By horizon, Gadamer has in mind the “range” of our capacity to understand (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 302), as this is made possible and limited by the breadth and depth of what we have already come to understand in our lives. In this concept of horizon, it is not difficult to hear the echo of the humanistic sensibility that interpretive experience is educative . Our horizon is the formation we have achieved through our interpretive experience, both from our formal education and from our life-experience. Thus, the normative demand of interpretive experience is always to become more educated.

Gadamer describes the expansion of our horizons as a “fusion of horizons” (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 306). This term is perhaps misleading, however, because it can be mistaken to signify that an interpreter has a distinct ‘horizon’ that is then expanded through the assimilation of another distinct horizon, say, that of a text we are interpreting. Really, though, what Gadamer means is that in interpretive experience, our attempts to understand can and should lead us to recognize that our own horizon is not as insular or narrow as we first thought. Rather, we can and should come to recognize that our horizon belongs to a larger context of the historical transmission of meaning, so that when we come to understand something, we are thereby raised “to a higher level of universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other” (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 305). In this, ‘fusion’ signifies something closer to the verbal form of Gadamer’s Verschmelzung , that is verschmeltzen , to melt together. We expand our horizons through interpretive experience that melts away at the rigidity of our horizon, so that we can see how it melts into and mixes with a larger movement of transmission.

The hermeneutical experience of truth is conditioned by not only tradition but also language. In Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, the relation of truth to language is described in reference to being. Gadamer expresses this relation in a celebrated motto , “being that can be understood is language” (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 474). [ 7 ] According to this motto , language is primarily a ‘medium’ that shows us the being, or meaningful order, of the world and the things we encounter in it (Gadamer, Truth and Method , Part III.1). [ 8 ] Thus, language is only secondarily an instrument that we use, among other things, to represent something, communicate about it, or make assertions about it. The experience of language as a medium takes place in what Gadamer calls “ hermeneutical conversation ” (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 388). The primary example of such hermeneutical conversation is a conversation between interlocutors about something; but, he believes that hermeneutical conversation also includes all interpretive experience, so that the interpretation of artworks and texts is conceived as a conversation between the interpreter and work about the subject matter of the work. In hermeneutical conversation, interlocutors may, of course, use language to represent, communicate or make assertions. More originally, however, hermeneutical conversation concerns the being of the matter under consideration. Hermeneutical conversation is thus an event of interlocution that aims to show something in its being, as it genuinely or truly is.

The hermeneutical experience of truth can be described as the success of conversation so conceived. But, in this, truth is not experienced as a matter of “correctness,” or as this may be clarified, a matter of correct predication (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 406). In the experience of truth as correct predication, truth is typically conceived as the property of a proposition, statement or utterance that suitably connects a subject with a predicate. In the hermeneutical experience of truth, by contrast, the concern is not with predication, that is, the connection of a subject with a predicate, but, instead, with conversation, grasped as an event of interlocution concerned with the being of a subject itself. In such a conversation, truth is reached, if it is reached, not when a subject is suitably connected with something else, but, instead, when the subject is sufficiently shown in its own being, as it truly is. The measure of such sufficiency is established not in advance, but is achieved in the course of conversation along with the claim of truth that it measures.

Philosophical hermeneutics maintains that the experience of truth as correct predication is dependent on the hermeneutical experience of truth. This is because in truth as correctness, the proper connection of subject and predicate depends in part on the being of the subject. In predication, the being of the subject is typically either left out of account or is presumed already to be determined or interpreted. But, the being of the subject—what it truly is—is a matter of interpretation. In illustration, we may consider the fictional conversation presented by Plato in the Republic among Socrates, Glaucon and other interlocutors about justice. In conclusion of our interpretive experience, we may assert the proposition, ‘justice is nearly impossible to achieve!’ But, whether this is so will depend on the being of justice, and the truth of the being of justice will depend, in turn, on an interpretation of it, whether we derive it from Plato’s text or otherwise. Truth as correctness, then, depends on the hermeneutical experience of truth, and such truth, in turn, is a matter of interpretation.

Finally, in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, it is claimed that the hermeneutical experience of truth is ‘universal.’ This does not mean that the hermeneutical experience of truth takes place every time we converse about something. Rather, it means that the hermeneutical experience of truth remains always a problem, whenever we wish to understand something, and even when a conversation culminates in an experience of truth. Each hermeneutical experience of truth remains open to further interpretation (see Gadamer, “The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem”).

Contemporary hermeneutics receives further contour from Paul Ricoeur’s considerations of language, and especially of linguistic forms such as symbolism, metaphor, and narrative. Ricoeur takes orientation from the claim of the early Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology that self-understanding is, in the end, to be grasped in ontological terms: self-understanding is the self-interpretation of human existence, grasped as the enactment of the distinctive possibility of such existence. Ricoeur, however, proposes a hermeneutical phenomenology that, as he puts it in an important early essay, ‘grafts’ hermeneutics to phenomenology in a different manner than Heidegger proposes (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 6). Heidegger believes that for the self-interpretation of human existence, the interpretations of the human condition found in the human sciences are derivative; what is called for is an analysis of the sense of being, or, the structures, of human existence as these are disclosed through our own individual being in the world. Ricoeur criticizes Heidegger’s proposal as a “short route,” or perhaps better, short cut, that bypasses the significance for our self-interpretation of the multiple and even conflicting interpretations of the human condition found in other disciplines and areas of philosophy (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 6). He proposes, instead, a hermeneutical phenomenology that embraces a “long route” of self-interpretation, one that is mediated by passing through hermeneutical considerations of these multiple and conflicting interpretations (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 6).

Ricoeur’s contributions are notoriously difficult to reduce to a specific position or otherwise categorize, in part because he practiced what he preached. In his career, his route to self-understanding was influenced by reflexive philosophy, Husserl and Heidegger, French structuralism, as well as by contemporary Anglo-American philosophy (see Ricoeur “On Interpretation,” 12–15). Moreover, his inquiries range over topics in areas as diverse as religion, anthropology, psychology, history, and literature. His contributions to hermeneutics are perhaps especially characterized, however, by the concern for possibilities of the mediating role of language to establish critical distance in interpretive experience and by his focus on the significance of interpretive experience for ethical and political agency.

In an early formulation of what he has in mind by the hermeneutical ‘long route’ to self-understanding, Ricoeur maintains that the pursuit of self-understanding has to be mediated by hermeneutical considerations of semantic structures of interpretation that are common to research across the human sciences (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 11). In this, Ricoeur’s approach is “organized around the central theme of meaning with multiple or multivocal senses…” or, what he calls “symbolic senses” (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 11). This involves a novel conception of interpretation itself. Traditionally in hermeneutics, the purpose of interpretation is thought of as making apparent the single, unitary meaning of something. Ricoeur, by contrast, stresses that the aim of interpretation also includes making apparent the plurality of meanings at issue in a speech act or text. He writes, “Interpretation…is the work of thought which consists in deciphering the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning, in unfolding levels of meaning implied in the literal meaning” (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 13).

Ricoeur explains that the itinerary of the hermeneutical long route to self-understanding passes through an analysis of a broad range of symbolic forms, such as the “cosmic” symbolism revealed by the phenomenology of religion, the symbolic character of “desire” revealed by psychoanalysis, and the symbolic forms revealed by the study of literature and the arts (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 13). In his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation , Ricoeur describes Freud, along with Nietzsche and Marx, as a master of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’ In this, interpretation, as a ‘deciphering of hidden meaning in the apparent meaning,’ takes on a critical function through the exposure of repressed or distorted meaning that lies beneath the surface of commonly accepted meaning.

Later in his career, Ricoeur’s considerations of the hermeneutical long route to self-understanding shift attention from a semantics of symbols to considerations of metaphor and especially narrative. Ricoeur’s considerations of metaphor build from the claim that metaphor should be grasped not first as the substitution of one conventional name for a different one, but, instead, as a “peculiar predication,” one “consisting in the attribution to logical subjects of predicates that are incompossible with them” (Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 8). Crucial for Ricoeur is that metaphorical predication thus not only concerns what Frege called ‘sense’ but also ‘reference.’ Metaphors are linguistic innovations that allow us to refer to aspects of reality for which words are otherwise unavailable (Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 10).

Ricoeur maintains that narrative, too, concerns both sense and reference, but on a different scale. By narrative, he has in mind “the diverse forms and modes of the game of storytelling” (Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 2) and in his three-volume treatise Time and Narrative , he focuses on the role of narrative not only in literary fiction but also in the recounting of history. He argues that while there are a diversity of forms and modes of narrative, all narratives nevertheless perform a common function, namely, they mark, organize, and clarify temporal experience (Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 2). In this, he claims that in narrative the work of such schematization of temporal experience is achieved by the composition of the plot, or, emplotment. Through narrative emplotment, we make apparent the meaning of persons, relations, and events that comprise human affairs—say, in fiction, those that can happen, and in history, those that have happened. Crucial for Ricoeur is that narrative emplotment is referential; as he makes the point in regard to fiction, “the plots we invent help us to shape our confused, formless, and in the last resort mute temporal experience” (Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 6).

Ricoeur maintains, however, that the referential function of narrative is not simply to assert something about the world but has implications for ethical and political life. In fiction, narrative emplotment not only helps us evaluate the meaning of human actions, but, moreover, contributes to the creation of “the horizon of a new relating that we may call a world” (Ricoeur, “On Interpretation,” 10; see also Ricoeur, “Imagination in Discourse and Action”). In so doing, fiction refers to possibilities of reality that can orient our agency and contribute to our efforts to reshape reality.

6. Philosophical Controversies

The development of hermeneutics since Gadamer forwarded his ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ in Truth and Method has been fostered by philosophical controversies about the consequences of his project. The most significant of these controversies are about the consequences of philosophical hermeneutics in relation to critical theory and to deconstruction. [ 9 ] Although philosophical interest in these controversies is extensive, in each case, discussion arises in close connection with Gadamer himself. In the case of the controversy in relation to critical theory, discussion originates between Jürgen Habermas and Gadamer over the problem of critique, or, more specifically, the critique of ideology. In the case of the controversy in relation to deconstruction, discussion originates between Jacques Derrida and Gadamer. While this discussion is itself layered and gives rise to new questions over time, it concerns, in part, the question of whether the success of understanding genuinely achieves a determination of meaning.

Gadamer’s engagements with Habermas and Derrida themselves are sometimes hailed as examples, or perhaps case studies, of his own conception of hermeneutical conversation. Gadamer has claimed that such conversation proceeds always from “recognizing in advance the possibility that your partner is right, even recognizing the possible superiority of your partner” (Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 36). Gadamer famously puts this belief into practice in his discussions with both Habermas and Derrida, and the legacy of these debates plays an important role in Gadamer’s subsequent thinking.

One important controversy about the consequences of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, then, concerns whether it offers a basis for the critique of ideology. This concern is raised with emphasis by the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas. Habermas, building on Hegel, Marx and Engels, as well as his original theory of recognition and communication, maintains that an ideology is a nexus of political doctrines, beliefs, and attitudes that distort the political realities they purport to describe. Accordingly, ideologies reinforce equally distorted power relations that, in turn, prevent the openness of discussion that is necessary for legitimate democratic political deliberation and decision-making (see Sypnowich 2019, Sec. 2). In view of this, one purpose of critical theory is to establish a basis to critique ideology. Habermas and other critical theorists sought a basis of critique with the ability to expose even some of our most cherished political doctrines, beliefs, and attitudes as ideological distortions that result from forms of domination passed down from tradition.

Habermas raises the objection against Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics that the hermeneutical experience of truth offers too little basis for such critique (see Habermas, “The Universality Claim of Hermeneutics”). [ 10 ] Habermas raises the objection that philosophical hermeneutics, with its adherence to the authority of tradition, leaves no room for the critique of ideologies entrenched in the historically transmitted prejudices on which our experience of truth relies. Moreover, as we might accordingly worry, what Gadamer describes as the hermeneutical experience of truth might not be an experience of truth at all, but, rather, a distorted communication that is complicit in ideology, since the so-called truth results from a conversation that might not be open, but oriented by prejudices that reinforce relations of domination.

While the influence of Habermas’s objection is extensive, Gadamer has mounted rejoinders on behalf of his philosophical hermeneutics (see “Reply to My Critics”; see also “What is Practice? The Conditions of Social Reason”). The thrust of Gadamer’s argument is, first, that it is actually Habermas’s position, not his own, that remains uncritical, since it is naïve to believe in the possibility of a basis of critique that is somehow not subject to the authority of tradition. And, Gadamer stresses, second, that the hermeneutical experience of truth is no blind acceptance of the authority of tradition. Rather, as he argues, interpretive experience remains critical, in that such experience unfolds precisely though the questioning of our prejudices, and judgment about what aspects of our prejudices remain valid and which have become invalid for matters of concern to us now.

A further important controversy about the consequences of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics arises in the context of Derrida’s project of deconstruction. While the relation between hermeneutics and deconstruction is complex, pivotal for the controversy is whether the success of understanding really achieves a determinate meaning. Gadamer, as we have seen, maintains that the success of understanding is to understand something in its being, as it genuinely or truly is. Moreover, we experience such a truth as a claim, one that we can agree or disagree with, and that purports to be justified by the interpretive experience which first gives rise to it. Yet, as we may now observe, Gadamer’s notion of the success of understanding thereby trusts in the authenticity of our own experience that we really have come to understand something determinate, or, in any case, determinate enough that it makes a claim of truth. Derrida’s deconstruction poses a challenge to this idea because Derrida argues that discursive experience is governed by an operation—or, perhaps better, a structure of inoperativity—that would preclude the possibility of understanding something with such determinacy (see Lawlor 2019).

Derrida clarifies the character of this structure of inoperativity in terms of a number of concepts over the course of his career, but perhaps none are more influential than that of “ différance ” (see Derrida, “Différance”). Derrida describes différance as a twofold structure of difference and deferral. Building on terms from Saussure’s linguistics, différance thus indicates, first of all, that in discursive experience, determining the meaning of something remains beyond our reach because linguistic signs present what they are supposed to signify never per se but always only heterogeneously through signifiers. And différance indicates, furthermore, that since this heterogeneity cannot be superseded, our attempts to determine the meaning of something remain interminably in deferral (Derrida, “Différance”). Because discursive experience is thus imbued with heterogeneity, our attempts to determine the meaning of something are not fully under our control but, instead, remain subject to a free play of signs (see Derrida, “Différance,” “Structure, Sign and Play”).

Derrida’s deconstruction poses a challenge to Gadamer’s notion of the success of understanding as a hermeneutical experience of truth. Gadamer, as we have said, trusts that our experience of truth really involves a determinate claim. Derrida’s considerations suggest, however, that such trust is misplaced. If, in the success of understanding, our experience purports to involve a determinate claim to truth, then our experience of this determinacy must be misguided, since the possibility of determinacy is precluded in advance by différance . As Derrida puts the point during the 1981 initial meeting with Gadamer, “I am not convinced that we ever really have this experience that Professor Gadamer describes, of knowing in a dialogue that one has been perfectly understood or experiencing the success of confirmation” (Derrida, “Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer,” 54). Indeed, in an important early essay, Derrida maintains that the pursuit of success of such a kind is not merely misguided, but a symptom of our suppression, perhaps repression, of an anxiety about the insuperable role of heterogeneity involved in all interpretive experience (Derrida, “Structure Sign and Play,” 292).

Gadamer takes up the challenge posed by Derrida’s deconstruction not primarily as an objection to his hermeneutics but, instead, as an impetus to dedicate renewed attention to the role played by difference in interpretive experience. After all, even though philosophical hermeneutics does not involve the technical notion of différance , Gadamer’s hermeneutics makes space for difference in important regards. First, Gadamer certainly recognizes that every determinate claim of truth remains open to further interpretation. And, second, he recognizes that the hermeneutical experience of a determine claim of truth is itself a legacy of difference, since interpretive experience unfolds in the free play of conversation. Gadamer’s response to the challenge posed by deconstruction unfolds in attempts to expand and deepen these and related considerations of the role played by difference in interpretive experience. Gadamer develops this response in a number of essays, and is led to develop hermeneutical considerations of a number of themes brought into focus by his encounter with Derrida, such as the significance of what he calls the eminent text (see for example Gadamer, “Hermeneutics Tracking the Trace,” and “Text and Interpretation”). Matters of central concern for the philosophical controversy between hermeneutics and deconstruction have also been further developed by several philosophers associated with hermeneutics, such as John Caputo (1987), James Risser (1997), Donatella di Cesare (2003) and others.

The rise of postmodernism has proved to be an important impetus for developments within hermeneutics. While ‘postmodernism’ signifies a number of things, of particular influence in philosophy is Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition , xxiv). By ‘metanarrative,’ Lyotard has in mind foundational stories of modern Western philosophy, especially, as these foundational stories function to legitimate discourses in the sciences (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition , 34). Examples of metanarratives include, say, stories about the objectivity of science and the contribution that science makes to the betterment of society.

Lyotard sees both a danger and a possibility in the postmodern rejection of metanarratives. Lyotard maintains that postmodern incredulity toward metanarratives has resulted, first, in the increased danger that our valuation of knowledge will be reduced to one, totalizing standard, namely, that of an “information commodity” produced and exchanged for the accumulation of wealth and power (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition , 5). But, he believes, the postmodern incredulity toward metanarratives has resulted in a new possibility, too, of liberating the creation of narrative meaning from the need to establish legitimating foundations. Philosophers of postmodernism have sought to clarify such a postmodern possibility for the creation of meaning through the development of hermeneutics (see Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation , Gary Madison 1989, John D. Caputo 1987, 2018; for a creative intervention in postmodern hermeneutics, see Davey 2006). In this, hermeneutics places stress on the possibility of interpretive experience to produce new meaning and shifts away from concerns about truth and existence.

Probably the most influential conception of postmodern hermeneutics is embodied in Gianni Vattimo’s notion of ‘weak thought.’ Vattimo’s hermeneutics is influenced not only by figures such as Gadamer and Heidegger, but also Nietzsche, as well as the important Italian philosopher Luigi Pareyson (see Benso, 2018). By ‘weak thought,’ Vattimo has in mind interpretive practices that incrementally diminish the efficacy of narratives about the purported ‘being’ of things that have been passed down from the tradition of Western metaphysics. Vattimo embraces the postmodern possibility to liberate the creation of meaning from any needs for foundation or legitimacy. Building on Heidegger and Nietzsche, Vattimo argues that despite all postmodern incredulity, narratives passed down about the purported ‘being’ of things continue to be in effect, often tacitly, in a broad range of our current beliefs and practices. What is then called for are interpretive practices that loosen the hold of these narratives, and thus expose that what they have to say about the ‘being’ of things are not eternal verities but, instead, mockups that are subject to interpretive revision. Vattimo, then, defines interpretive experience not in Gadamerian terms of a conversation that brings something into focus in its being, as it genuinely is. Rather, he conceives of interpretive experience as a practice of recovery, even convalescence ( Verwindung ), that weakens the effects of interpretations of ‘being’ passed down from Western metaphysics. Indeed, Vattimo associates the possibility to liberate meaning through weak thought as the pursuit of what he calls ‘accomplished nihilism,’ in that weak thought seeks to unmask every sense of ‘being’ which purports to be more than the result of an interpretation (see Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation , The End of Modernity ).

8. Further Developments

Research in hermeneutics is perhaps more diverse now than at any other period in the historical movement, and has also begun to expand interest in hermeneutical considerations to contexts such as feminist philosophy (see Warnke 2015), comparative philosophy (see, for example, Nelson 2017), philosophy of embodiment (see, for example, Kearney 2015), and Latin American philosophy (see, for example, Vallega 2019). While it is impossible to gather all directions of current research in a short article, some further developments have received particular attention.

Hermeneutics, grasped as a historical movement, is typically associated with continental European traditions of thought and the reception of these traditions in the global context. This reception has included contributions to the development of hermeneutics made by noteworthy Anglo-American philosophers. Hermeneutics has been adopted by Richard Rorty, has been connected with the later Wittgenstein and Davidson, and has also been taken up by philosophers associated with the so-called ‘Pittsburgh school,’ Robert Brandom, and John McDowell. [ 11 ]

Rorty, in his now classic Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , presents a ranging critique of modern philosophy that focuses on epistemology, especially the idea that knowledge is a representation or mental ‘mirroring’ of mind-independent reality. Against epistemology, Rorty proposes hermeneutics, which he characterizes as “an expression of hope that the cultural space left behind by the demise of epistemology will not be filled…” (Rorty 1979, 315). Hermeneutics holds this void open with what he calls ‘conversation.’ In this, conversation pursues not the truth, conceived as a correspondence of mind and mind-independent reality, but, instead, edification (Rorty 1979, 318, 360, 378). Edification, itself Rorty’s proposed translation of the German Bildung (Piercy 2016, 447) concerns not truth, then, but instead the discovery of new and useful possibilities.

Philosophers associated with the University of Pittsburgh have also taken up and developed themes in hermeneutics. Robert Brandom, for his part, has argued that his inferentialist approach in semantics is able to support major tenets of Gadamerian hermeneutics, thereby suggesting that the traditions of inferentialism and hermeneutics can complement one another (see Brandom 2002 and 2004; see also Lafont 2007). John McDowell, in his Mind and World , also introduces a notion connected with hermeneutics. In this text, McDowell wishes to resolve the question of how the mind, ultimately, in the ‘spontaneity’ or freedom of reason, relates to the world. He argues that the question itself is a symptom of naturalism, the idea typical of modern science that immutable laws govern everything in nature. In this, the worry about the place of the spontaneity of reason in nature arises precisely from our reductive conception of nature in the first place. McDowell resolves the question of the relation of reason and nature, then, through the proposal of an alternative naturalism, one that treats reason as a ‘second nature,’ or, a process of the realization of potentials. McDowell draws on notions of tradition and formation ( Bildung ) in order to clarify this second nature. He writes, “human beings are intelligibly initiated into this stretch of the space of reasons by ethical upbringing, which instills the appropriate shape to their lives. The resulting habits of thought and action are second nature” (McDowell 1994, 84).

It is an open question how consistent Rorty’s, McDowell’s and Brandom’s reactions to hermeneutics are with views developed within the historical movement of hermeneutics. [ 12 ] Still, Rorty’s and McDowell’s respective critical stances toward modern epistemology and science, their novel uses of the concept of formation ( Bildung ), as well as Rorty’s novel use of the concept of conversation, place them in a productive exchange with continental philosophical scholars on themes more customarily associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy generally as well as with the historical movement of hermeneutics. Moreover, Rorty’s turn to edification and the discovery of novel possibilities it affords as an alternative to the pursuit of truth places him in proximity to postmodern hermeneutics, in particular. [ 13 ]

Hermeneutics, since Heidegger at least, claims a special affinity with practical philosophy. Both Heidegger and Gadamer, for example, uphold Aristotle’s ethics as an important source for their respective approaches to interpretive experience. [ 14 ] Gadamer, in particular, develops the implications of his hermeneutics for practical life. Although Gadamer provides no systematic ethical or political theory, he maintains the significance of interpretive experience as a counter to the alienation produced in modern, bureaucratically managed society, he develops a hermeneutical approach to the ethical significance of friendship as well as a related approach to political solidarity (see Gadamer, “Friendship and Solidarity”; see Vessey 2005). Moreover, Paul Ricoeur has argued that an important test of the universality of hermeneutics is the extension of hermeneutical considerations to the practical sphere. In this, he clarifies that and how interpretive experience, especially the interpretive experience of narrative, plays an important role no less in practical agency than political critique (see Ricoeur, From Text to Action ).

It is therefore perhaps no surprise that several philosophers have developed approaches and positions in ethical and political philosophy in connection with hermeneutics. In ethical philosophy, for example, Dennis Schmidt has recently argued that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics comprises an ‘original ethics,’ in that Gadamer clarifies normative implications of interpretive experience that, however, are irreducible to any ethical system or principles (see D. Schmidt 2008, 2012 and 2016). In political philosophy, Richard Bernstein’s considerations of human rationality ‘beyond objectivism and relativism,’ and the attention he gives to hermeneutics in this context, has been an important impetus (Bernstein 1983). Relatedly, Genevieve Lloyd has invoked hermeneutic motifs to question norms of rationality from a feminist perspective (Lloyd 1984). Fred Dallmayr’s use of Gadamer’s hermeneutics in his considerations of political theory, comparative political theory, and inter-cultural dialogue (see for example Dallmayr 1987, 1996 and 2009) have been likewise influential. Georgia Warnke has defended Gadamer’s hermeneutics as a middle path between subjectivism and conservatism, and, in turn, she has examined the significance of hermeneutics for democratic theory, theories of deliberative democracy, questions of race and identity, and solidarity (see for example Warnke 1987, 1993, 2002, 2007 and 2012). Linda Martίn Alcoff has also drawn substantially on Gadamer’s hermeneutics in considerations of race and gender identity (see Alcoff 2006). Lauren Swayne Barthold has drawn on hermeneutics to develop a feminist approach to social identity and, more recently, to examine the significance of civic dialogue to foster pluralistic, democratic communities (see Barthold 2016 and 2020).

Recent research in hermeneutics has seen a rise of interest in the role played in interpretive experience by a number of normative matters. In this, some argue that the influence of Heidegger and Gadamer over contemporary hermeneutics has led to a neglect of normative considerations in current debate. To be sure, it is possible to defend Heidegger and Gadamer against the charge that their approaches leave too little room for normative considerations. When it comes to Heidegger, Steven Crowell, for example, argues that phenomenology as conceived by Husserl and Heidegger can itself be grasped as inquiry into a “normatively structured ‘space of meaning’” (Crowell 2016, 238). Crowell, in his consideration of Heidegger, focuses on Heidegger’s analysis of human existence, arguing that Heidegger’s view of the role played by care in human existence speaks to the possibility of being responsive to norms as such (Crowell 2013). When it comes to Gadamer, attempts to defend his philosophical hermeneutics against charges that it neglects normative concerns have played an important role in debate since Habermas first raised objections against Gadamer.

Recent interest in the role played in interpretive experience by normative considerations, though, has also led to a revival of interest in these matters in hermeneutics before Heidegger. Kristin Gjesdal, in her recent Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism , for example, recommends that we return to Schleiermacher in order to focus attention on “critical-normative standards in interpretation” (Gjesdal 2009, 7). Rudolf Makkreel, in his recent Orientation and Judgment in Hermeneutics , argues for the priority of judgment, and with it, reflection and criticism, in interpretive experience. Really, Makkreel’s project is to develop an original position or approach within hermeneutics in its own right, one that takes up hermeneutical considerations in our contemporary, multi-cultural context, and that relies on a broad range of philosophers associated with hermeneutics. But, he develops his view of judgment, and the normative considerations involved in it, in reference to Kant and Dilthey in particular.

Recent developments in hermeneutics have arisen in response to ‘new realism.’ This school of thought is represented especially by philosophers Maurizio Ferraris and Markus Gabriel, and invites comparisons with the ‘speculative realism’ of philosophers such as Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman (see Ferraris 2012, Gabriel 2015, Gabriel 2020, Meillassoux 2008; Harman 2018). The new orientation toward realism is characterized, first of all, by a rejection of a common thesis of postmodern and radical constructivism: the position that our interpretations are constitutive of what we otherwise call reality. To this extent, the new interest in realism is compatible with other forms of realism. Yet, new realism opposes not only radical constructivism but also a basic tenet of metaphysical realism: the idea that reality is comprised exclusively of mind-independent things. One of the most influential approaches of such new-realist opposition against metaphysical realism is found in Gabriel. He makes a distinction between metaphysics and ontology, and argues in his new realist ontology that what we usually associate with mind, namely, our descriptions or interpretations of things, are no less real than what they relate to. Such descriptions or interpretations are rather distinguished by their function, which is to individuate (Gabriel 2015, 9–11).

The rise of this orientation toward realism has garnered significant attention in its own right. Especially important for contemporary hermeneutics, however, is that this new orientation toward realism has been an impetus for new developments. At one extreme, the rise of realism has recently led Gianni Vattimo not only to defend his postmodern hermeneutics against realism, but, moreover to develop a polemical critique of the motivations, philosophical and otherwise, to pursue realism. In this, Vattimo maintains that the rise of realism is motivated, in part, by a conservative reactionism against the consequences of postmodernism. He writes, for example, that among other roots of realism is “the fundamental neurosis that follows the late-industrial society as the regressive reaction of defense against the postmodern Babel of languages and values” (Vattimo 2016, 77).

Other developments within hermeneutics have been much more favorable toward the renewed interest in realism. Some philosophers, such as Günter Figal and Anton Koch, have discerned important affinities between hermeneutics and new realism, and, in turn, have developed positions that they have identified as ‘hermeneutical realism.’ Hermeneutical realism opposes the postmodern view that interpretations constitute reality, maintaining, by contrast, that interpretive experience belongs to reality. Figal, in his hermeneutical realism, develops his realistic approach principally in terms of the phenomenological problem of appearance. In this, he focuses on space, grasped as what first places us in referential relations to objects, and, with this, makes available interpretive possibilities to determine the sense of them (Figal, 2009, 2010 and 2015). Koch, for his part, develops his hermeneutical realism on the basis of motifs found in German Idealism, arguing for the necessity of the subject, grasped in its spatio-temporal, corporeal, and living subjectivity, as what makes things interpretable (as he has it, readable and translatable) (Koch 2016 and 2019). Thus, on his view, while real things are independent of individual interpretations, such things are not independent of being interpretable in general.

Finally, hermeneutical realism has also led to novel research on classical figures in hermeneutics. Whereas Vattimo, for example, sees in Gadamer the seeds of his postmodern hermeneutics (see Vattimo, “Story of a Comma”), Figal, by contrast, brings into focus the realism of Gadamer’s concern for the substantiveness ( Sachlichkeit ) of interpretive experience (see Figal 2010, 2). Moreover, some philosophers have found that hermeneutical realism sheds light on central motifs of the later Heidegger (Keiling 2018).

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critical theory | Derrida, Jacques | Dilthey, Wilhelm | existentialism | Gadamer, Hans-Georg | Gadamer, Hans-Georg: aesthetics | Habermas, Jürgen | Heidegger, Martin | Husserl, Edmund | metaphor | phenomenology | postmodernism | Ricoeur, Paul | Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst | understanding

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank David Liakos, co-author of Liakos and George 2019, for consultation on this entry, as well as Tobias Keiling for consultation, in particular, about hermeneutics and new realism. The author is also grateful to very helpful comments made by a referee in the peer-review process.

Copyright © 2020 by Theodore George < t-george @ tamu . edu >

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40 Hermeneutics and the Power of Interpretation: An Introduction to the Hermeneutic Approach

Anthony D’Angelo

I want to dedicate my writing to my highschool religion teacher Rev. Talcott. She first taught me about the word hermeneutics and the power of interpretation when reading texts or having discussions with others. She also taught me a lot about myself and how I should be compassionate while caring for others. Furthermore, she exemplifies putting others above herself and is always willing to listen to people when they are going through tough times.

Keywords: Interpretation, Persuasion, Audience, Process

Throughout the course of history, historians and leaders have relied on the interpretation of specific texts to structure society the way historical figures intended, including ancient scriptures, such as the Bible, or political texts, such as the United States Constitution. Through the use of rhetorical and persuasive practices, powerful societal figures attempt to convince or inform others on how they should interpret these texts and how society can benefit from them. Because of this, it is important to look at the practice of interpreting texts, which is also known as the hermeneutic approach. In order to decipher the relationship between rhetoric and interpretation, giving the audience the ability to recognize the extent to which an experience is being interpreted or inferred is important. With the rise of media and technology in this day and age, the hermeneutic approach can still be utilized, even with the decline in significant ancient scriptures.

Therefore, the hermeneutic approach can be used in any type of rhetorical situation, but it is the most efficient when dealing with the interpretation of a rhetorical message. Doing so is necessary in order to avoid a misinterpretation of what someone is trying to convey, or allowing one to be easily persuaded by specific rhetoric that may not align with the full ‘truth.’ Through my own experiences and research, I have attempted to understand how hermeneutics is intertwined with rhetoric and what it can tell us about how we interpret and perceive methods of persuasion. By allowing an analysis of interpretation through perspective, intent, and translation, hermeneutics can be used to both take part in rhetorical practices. In this chapter, I want to describe what the hermeneutic approach is and its original and intended use, as well as exemplify the interrelationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics and what that entails in terms of whether or not the two terms are interchangeable.

What the Hermeneutic Approach Entails

By interpreting ancient scriptures and texts through a different perspective or lens, the hermeneutic approach entails inferring the original author’s intent or meaning. Although the hermeneutic approach has been used by translators to decipher written texts over the course of history, it is also a useful tool in all methods of communication, both verbal and non-verbal. According to neurologists Friston and Frith, “Hermeneutics refers to interpretation and translation of text (typically ancient scriptures) but also applies to verbal and non-verbal communication” (Friston & Frith, 2015). Early on, translators considered hermeneutics to be specific towards historical or religious texts. This is because hermeneutics takes into account everything that could impact the interpretation of something. For example, when reading a historical piece of literature, translators and historians must consider the time it was written, who it was written for, where it was written, and most importantly, why it was written. To put it in modern terms, one can think about the United States Constitution as an example. The supreme court is tasked with the job of interpreting the constitution the way the founding fathers meant it to mean. However, historians, politicians, and justices continue to argue that the authors did not intend a specific amendment to function in the modern society we live in today. The action of undertaking this process in order to infer the intended meaning is one example of the hermeneutic approach. Religious texts are also constantly being observed and analyzed due to the many different scriptures, time periods, and writers that are all trying to convey the same story. Most ancient scriptures also have to be translated from the original language, which adds another layer to the complexity of trying to interpret something that was written so long ago. Supreme court cases are an example of this being utilized in today’s society. The judges are often tasked with interpreting what the founding fathers intended in the constitution. This can have huge ramifications on people’s lives, and there is no singular ‘truth’ as to how the constitution should be read.

The hermeneutic approach can extend beyond that of interpreting historical texts, for one can take the hermeneutic approach when trying to persuade others or when one is in the act of being persuaded. When speaking to someone or a group of people, a speaker is always making decisions based on the audience, what they are trying to convey, and how the audience will interpret what the speaker is trying to convey. Therefore, one can often find an “interrelationship” between rhetoric and hermeneutics because they are essentially undergoing the same methods of interpretation (Finch, 2004). The audience can also use the hermetic approach when trying to interpret or make sense of the speaker’s message. Hermeneutics also involves the means of persuasion in a specific text. Hermeneutics can act as an interpretative practice by which the interpretation itself is rhetorical.

The process of hermeneutics can involve an effort to persuade others of the legitimacy or efficacy of that interpretation. That can involve a careful analysis of all the different factors that can impact the overall message of the text, such as addressing the time it was written, who wrote it, and who it was intended for. Priests or other religious figures do this when preaching; they take a passage of a scripture and inform the congregation on how they should interpret and incorporate it into their daily lives. In an academic setting, teachers and professors are constantly persuading students when assigning specific readings. The students are expected to interpret it themselves, but they are greatly influenced by in-class lectures in regards to the legitimacy of both the author and the text itself. The hermeneutic approach can also help one understand how the text persuades, focusing on the different structures within the text that make it persuasive to various audiences. Similar to the general study of rhetoric, one can observe the intent of the author, while also recognizing specific instances of persuasion. This can be seen when studying speeches of political figures, such as Martin Luther King Jr. In his speeches, he relies on religious overtones to preach equality; this is done purposefully in order to display the discrepancy in being Christian while also being content with segregation and inequality. During World War II, Adolf Hilter used the rhetoric of fear in order to persuade Germany to persecute Jewish people. He argued that if the Germans did not eliminate the Jewish people first, then Germany would be attacked by Jewish people. Both MLK and Hitler’s rhetoric, although attempting to do the complete opposite of each other, both utilized specific rhetorical structures in order to persuade the audience. The hermeneutic approach can involve analyzing the meaning and legitimacy, as well as how these modes of persuasion are structured in order for the audience to interpret it a specific way.

Hermeneutic and Rhetoric Interrelationship

Hermeneutics and rhetoric are not two terms that are interchangeable, even though they, more often than not, work together in order to persuade or interpret. Not every attempt to persuade involves meaning-making that relies heavily on comprehension and interpretation. Persuasion can be done using any method, such as logos, pathos, or ethos, but not necessarily using the hermeneutic approach. As rhetorical historian Steven Mallioux put it, “In some ways, rhetoric and interpretation are practical forms of the same extended human activity: Rhetoric is based on interpretation; interpretation is communicated through rhetoric. Furthermore, as a reflection on practice, hermeneutics and rhetorical theory are mutually defining fields: hermeneutics is the rhetoric of establishing meaning, and rhetoric the hermeneutics of problematic linguistic situations” (Davis, 2005). Since rhetorical theory and hermeneutics are mutually defining fields, are these terms interchangeable in the sense that both terms represent an interpretation of linguistic communication, both verbal and non-verbal? Rhetorical professor Diane Davis explores the relationship between the two in her studies and she would suggest that “there is also a non -hermeneutical dimension of rhetoric that has nothing to do with meaning-making, with offering up significations to comprehension. This dimension is reducible neither to figuration nor to what typically goes by the name persuasion; it is devoted to a certain reception, but not to the appropriation of meaning” (Davis, 2005). Simply put, not all rhetorical practices involve the process of interpretation. Because persuasive rhetoric is a broad category in terms of the methods used, Davis feels there are situations in which rhetoric does not follow a hermeneutic approach. One could persuade another through explicit facts and ideas rather than leave the intent up to interpretation.

Hermeneutics and its Relation to Interpretation

Although there is not much public discourse on the relationship between hermeneutics and rhetoric, those who study rhetoric practices could argue that rhetoric always involves the method of interpretation and hermeneutics, no matter how one is using persuasion. The reasoning is quite simple: the audience is always interpreting messages and meanings. It really comes down to how broad the definition of interpretation can be used. Anytime I try to use rhetoric in order to convey or persuade, I am taking into consideration all the factors that could impact the audience’s reception to my ideas. For example, where the audience is from, how old they are, and how much they trust me can alter their interpretation of my message. If I am trying to persuade someone using simplistic facts, numbers, statistics, or other objective representations, then how much is really left up to interpretation if the analysis of those expressions is self-explanatory? The way the speaker selects and arranges these facts, statistics, and narratives can also impact the way they are perceived. I still find it hard to conclude that all situations in which rhetoric is utilized, both intentionally and subconsciously, are directly related to interpretation. Hermeneutics and rhetoric are not interchangeable, and neither is necessary for either to take place in persuasive discourse. Rather, although not necessary, in most situations in which rhetoric is being utilized, so is the hermeneutic approach. A rhetorician could make the argument that everything humans do is as social creatures are through interpretation, so I must look at interpretation and the impact it has on rhetoric.

Why the Hermeneutic Approach Matters

I chose to write on the word hermeneutic because of the power of interpretation in our daily lives. Oftentimes, how one interprets another person’s writing, speech, or nonverbal cues can dictate what one takes away from the experience. It is important to learn about the different ways people do interpret different messages, both through the use of rhetoric and personal experience. I find it especially interesting that we rely heavily on how other people interpret different messages in order for us to understand how we might interpret it. The media can play a role in this, as well as family members or close friends. Social media and television can often alter the general public’s interpretation of an event.

For example, if a user sees only videos of Black Lives Matter protests ending in violence rather than the hundreds of peaceful protests, the perception of the movement as a whole is completely different. Because platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Google have the ability to use past user data in order to display articles or pictures that align with the user’s preferences, the media has the ability to shift the users interpretation of events, literature, or speeches. Advertisements use the same algorithm to display products that seem relevant to the users’ daily lives, thus changing the way the users interpret their own lives. Because texts are less utilized in order to seek social coercion, social media has become the new outlet to do so. When user data is stored and used to tailor texts and articles to the user, social media is functioning as a method of persuasion. It is less obvious, however, that one is being persuaded because the information is already closely aligned to the user’s previously held beliefs. This is problematic for the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics because the process of interpretation is already done by the technological algorithms. The spread of misinformation is much more likely because the extra step of interpretation is stripped from the user. Rhetoric is still present, yet the hermeneutic approach is being phased out. It is important for society to recognize these changes, and try to reestablish the focus on legitimacy, interpretation, and persuasion. Without the awareness of rhetoric, detrimental ideologies can be easily spread. As social creatures, we interpret different things based on the preconceptions we may already have regarding the specific message, and these media outlets utilize these preconceptions in order to shape how users interpret the world around them.

In this chapter, I first discussed the origins of hermeneutics and what it can be perceived as today in our society. After doing so, I exemplified the issue regarding the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics. Then, I displayed how rhetoric and hermeneutics are not interchangeable because of the broad qualifications that can fall under rhetoric without the use of interpretation, as well as the power that interpretation has. Finally, I addressed the current implications of social media and the effects it can have on the hermeneutic approach and rhetoric. Every day, we are confronted with methods of rhetoric by peers, professors, and the media in order to persuade us into thinking one way or another. It is important to understand the different aspects of rhetoric and how different approaches can be utilized both to enact persuasion or recognize it in our lives. In order to understand how one is being persuaded through rhetorical methods, one must first understand the intent or meaning behind the message. This can be done through hermeneutics, but can also be done subconsciously by differentiating between hermeneutics and rhetoric.

Works Cited

Adriana Almeida Colares. (2019). Translation and Hermeneutics. Cadernos de Tradução, 39(3), 472–485. https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2019v39n3p472

Diane Davis. (2005). Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 38(3), 191–212. https://doi.org/10.1353/par.2005.0018

Finch, L. (2004). Understanding patients’ lived experiences: the interrelationship of rhetoric and hermeneutics. Nursing Philosophy, 5(3), 251–257. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-769X.2004.00181.x

Friston, K., & Frith, C. (2015). Active inference, communication and hermeneutics. Cortex, 68, 129–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2015.03.025

Hansson, J. (2005). Hermeneutics as a bridge between the modern and the postmodern in library and information science. Journal of Documentation, 61(1), 102–113.

Carol Poster. (1997). Aristotle’s Rhetoric against Rhetoric: Unitarian Reading and Esoteric Hermeneutics. American Journal of Philology, 118(2), 219–249. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.1997.0029

Vlăduțescu,  Ș, Negrea, X., & Voinea, D. (2017). Main Elements of H.-G. Gadamer’s Communication Hermeneutics. Santalka: Filosofija, Komunikacija, 25(1), 135–144. https://doi.org/10.3846/cpc.2017.277

Rhetoric in Everyday Life Copyright © 2021 by Anthony D’Angelo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Hermeneutic Analysis in Qualitative Research

Introduction

What is hermeneutics in simple terms, branches of hermeneutics, what is the difference between hermeneutics and phenomenology, what is hermeneutics research, how do you conduct hermeneutic research, considerations for conducting hermeneutic research.

Qualitative methods and interpretive research often rely on hermeneutic analysis, which carries the assumption that phenomena within the social world can only be understood in the greater historical and cultural context surrounding them. The data analysis resulting from a full consideration of hermeneutics holds great potential in fields such as sociology, cultural and social anthropology, theoretical and philosophical psychology, and more applied fields such as nursing research and education. To unpack this idea more fully, this article looks at the general concept of hermeneutics, its role in informing qualitative methods, and the importance of a hermeneutic philosophy in the qualitative research process.

In its simplest form, hermeneutics emerged as a theory and methodology of interpretation, especially of texts and symbolic content. The hermeneutic tradition, with its roots in ancient philosophical traditions, has evolved to become a cornerstone in the humanities and social sciences. The historical development of hermeneutics traces back to its initial use in interpreting religious scriptures and legal texts. Over time, it expanded beyond these confines, morphing into a comprehensive framework for understanding not only written texts but also oral narratives, cultural phenomena, and even social practices. This evolution reflects the growing recognition of the complexity and multi-dimensionality of human understanding and communication.

Central to hermeneutics is the concept of the hermeneutic circle. This foundational idea posits that understanding a text or a symbolic expression involves a dynamic interplay between the interpretation of its individual components and the comprehension of the whole. For instance, when interpreting a novel, one's grasp of a single chapter is enhanced by the broader context of the entire narrative, and this overarching understanding, in turn, influences the interpretation of each chapter. This circular process underscores the iterative nature of understanding, where each step informs and is informed by the other. It challenges the notion of linear, straightforward interpretation, suggesting instead that our understanding is inherently subjective and influenced by our preconceptions and the specific context of the text.

The contributions of Hans-Georg Gadamer have been pivotal in shaping modern hermeneutics. Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics extended the discipline beyond the realms of textual interpretation, positing it as a fundamental aspect of human existence. He argued that understanding is not a passive receipt of information but an active, dialogical process. This process is inherently influenced by the interpreter's historical context and prejudices. Gadamer's hermeneutics emphasizes the role of history and culture in shaping understanding and scientific knowledge of the social world, highlighting the subjective and situated nature of all interpretation. His work reminds us that our interpretations are always colored by our historical and cultural backgrounds, and thus, understanding is not just about deciphering texts or symbols but also about self-reflection and acknowledging our own biases.

In the broader scope of qualitative research , Gadamer's insights into hermeneutics offer profound implications. His perspective encourages researchers to engage deeply with their subject matter, recognizing that their interpretations are influenced by their own backgrounds as well as the historical and cultural contexts of the phenomena they study. This awareness enriches the research process, fostering a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the complex tapestry of human experience. Hermeneutics, thus, becomes more than a method of interpretation; it transforms into a lens through which researchers can explore and understand the rich, layered meanings that underpin human social and cultural practices. In fields ranging from sociology and anthropology to psychology and education, hermeneutics offers a pathway to delve into the depths of human experience, uncovering insights that are as profound as they are essential for a holistic understanding of our world.

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Hermeneutics, as a field, has branched out into various sub-disciplines, each focusing on specific aspects of interpretation and understanding. These branches reflect the diverse applications and theoretical foundations of hermeneutics in different areas of study. Each of these branches of hermeneutics contributes to the richness of the field, offering diverse perspectives on the complex process of interpretation. Together, they highlight the multifaceted nature of understanding, underscoring the importance of context, dialogue, and reflexivity in the interpretive process.

Philosophical hermeneutics

Philosophical hermeneutics, primarily influenced by thinkers like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, focuses on the philosophical underpinnings of interpretation. This branch considers interpretation as a fundamental aspect of human existence, emphasizing that understanding is not just about analyzing texts but engaging in a dialogical process with them. Philosophical hermeneutics argues that our historical and cultural contexts deeply influence our interpretations. It highlights the subjective nature of understanding and the importance of self-reflection in the interpretive process. This branch has significantly contributed to the development of hermeneutic phenomenology, a methodological approach that combines the interpretive insights of hermeneutics with the descriptive focus of phenomenology to explore human experiences more profoundly.

Biblical hermeneutics

Biblical hermeneutics specializes in the interpretation of religious texts, particularly the Bible. This branch has ancient origins and has evolved to incorporate various interpretive strategies, ranging from literal to allegorical and historical-critical methods. Biblical hermeneutics seeks to understand not only the textual content but also the historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts of biblical writings. It grapples with the challenges of translating ancient texts and applying their teachings to contemporary contexts, striving to balance respect for historical authenticity with relevance to modern life.

Postmodern hermeneutics

Postmodern hermeneutics emerges from the postmodern philosophy, which questions universal truths and emphasizes the plurality of perspectives. This branch challenges traditional notions of objective interpretation, arguing that all understanding is situated within a specific cultural and historical context. Postmodern hermeneutics is characterized by its focus on the role of power, ideology, and language in shaping interpretation. It often involves deconstructing texts to uncover hidden meanings and power dynamics , offering a critical lens through which to examine narratives and discourses.

Objective hermeneutics

Objective hermeneutics, despite its name, is not about achieving an 'objective' interpretation but rather about following a rigorous methodological framework to uncover the underlying structures of meaning in texts. Developed in the context of social sciences, it involves a detailed, step-by-step analysis of texts, often used in qualitative research . This branch is particularly interested in how social and cultural norms are reflected and reproduced in texts, and it emphasizes the importance of systematic analysis in revealing these structures.

Applied hermeneutics

Applied hermeneutics refers to the practical application of hermeneutic principles in various fields, including law, medicine, and psychotherapy. In law, it involves interpreting statutes and legal texts, considering not just the literal meaning of the words but also the intent of the legislature and the broader legal principles. In medicine and psychotherapy, applied hermeneutics helps practitioners understand patients' narratives, considering not only the clinical symptoms but also the patients' personal experiences and contexts. This branch demonstrates the versatility of hermeneutics and its relevance in practical, real-world settings.

Hermeneutics and phenomenology are both influential schools of thought in the humanities and social sciences, yet they differ fundamentally in their focus and approach. Hermeneutics, as previously discussed, is primarily concerned with the art and science of interpretation, particularly of texts and symbolic expressions. It explores how we understand or derive meaning from various forms of communication, considering the influence of historical, cultural, and personal contexts on this interpretive process. The core of hermeneutics lies in the belief that understanding is not a passive act but a dynamic interaction between the interpreter and the text or phenomenon. This interaction is influenced by the interpreter's preconceptions and the historical context of both the interpreter and the text.

In contrast, phenomenology is a philosophical movement that focuses on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience. Founded by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology seeks to explore and describe phenomena as they are perceived by individuals, without recourse to theory, deduction, or interpretation. This approach is rooted in the belief that it is possible to capture the essence of experiences by setting aside biases , assumptions, and pre-existing knowledge, a process known as epoché or phenomenological reduction. Phenomenology emphasizes the first-person perspective, aiming to uncover the fundamental nature of experience and consciousness. It involves a descriptive, rather than interpretive, approach to understanding human experiences, focusing on how things appear to consciousness in their immediacy.

The distinction between hermeneutics and phenomenology becomes more nuanced when considering hermeneutic phenomenology, a term that reflects an integration of these two approaches. Hermeneutic phenomenology, as developed by philosophers like Martin Heidegger and later expanded by Hans-Georg Gadamer, seeks to bridge the gap between the descriptive focus of phenomenology and the interpretive nature of hermeneutics. This approach acknowledges that our experiences are always already interpreted and that understanding these experiences involves an interpretive act that is informed by our historical and cultural contexts. Hermeneutic phenomenology, therefore, combines the phenomenological emphasis on direct experience with the hermeneutic recognition of the role of interpretation, context, and history in shaping our understanding. It offers a more holistic approach to exploring human experience, recognizing that our perceptions and interpretations are inextricably linked and that understanding involves both describing experiences as they are perceived and interpreting them within their broader contexts.

While hermeneutics and phenomenology share some common ground, particularly in their focus on human experience and understanding, they are distinct in their methodologies and emphases. Hermeneutics is centered around the interpretive process, considering the influence of context and preconceptions, whereas phenomenology is concerned with the direct, descriptive study of experiences as they are perceived. The integration of these approaches in hermeneutic phenomenology offers a comprehensive framework for exploring human experiences, acknowledging the intertwined nature of perception, interpretation, and context.

Hermeneutics research is a qualitative research method that emphasizes the interpretive analysis of texts, communications, and human interactions. Rooted in the tradition of hermeneutics, this approach is concerned with understanding the meanings embedded within texts, spoken words, social actions, and even cultural artifacts. It operates on the principle that these meanings are not self-evident but are constructed and interpreted within specific historical, cultural, and personal contexts. Hermeneutics research is particularly adept at exploring complex social phenomena, delving into subjects where the subjective experiences, beliefs, and cultural backgrounds of individuals play a crucial role. Unlike quantitative research , which seeks to quantify and measure phenomena, hermeneutics research is inherently interpretive and embraces subjectivity, aiming to provide a deeper, more nuanced understanding of experiences and social realities of research participants. This approach is common in disciplines such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, and history, where the interpretation of human behavior and cultural phenomena is central.

In hermeneutics research, the researcher becomes an active participant in the interpretive process. This involvement is based on the understanding that interpretation is not a neutral or objective act but is influenced by the researcher's own historical and cultural background, as well as their theoretical frameworks. Therefore, reflexivity – the process of reflecting on and critically examining one's biases, assumptions, and impact on the research – becomes a crucial aspect of hermeneutics research. Researchers engage in a hermeneutic circle, moving back and forth between the parts and the whole of the text or phenomenon they are studying, allowing their understanding to evolve iteratively. This process acknowledges that our initial understanding of a text or situation is provisional and subject to change as we examine the context and make new connections. Hermeneutics research, therefore, is characterized by a dynamic and recursive process of understanding, where interpretations are continuously revised and refined.

A notable variant within hermeneutics research is hermeneutic interpretive phenomenology, which combines the principles of hermeneutics with the methods of phenomenology . This approach is particularly concerned with understanding human experiences from the perspective of those who live them, while simultaneously interpreting these experiences within their broader social and cultural contexts. Hermeneutical phenomenology involves a careful and detailed examination of participants' narratives, seeking to uncover the underlying meanings and significance of their experiences. This method is especially valuable in fields such as health research, education, and psychology, where understanding individuals' subjective experiences and perspectives is essential. It provides a framework for researchers to explore not just what is experienced, but also how it is experienced and interpreted, offering rich, in-depth insights into the complexities of human life and social interactions. Hermeneutics research, with its emphasis on interpretation, context, and reflexivity, represents a powerful research method in qualitative research , enabling a profound and comprehensive exploration of the human condition.

Conducting hermeneutic research involves a nuanced and reflective approach, where understanding the social context, interpreting research data , and contributing to human knowledge are central concerns. Researchers must be acutely aware of their own biases and preconceptions, as these influence every aspect of the research, from question formulation to data interpretation .

The process begins with the formulation of a research question that is open to interpretive inquiry. This question typically revolves around understanding meanings, experiences, or social phenomena, and it guides the entire research process. The next step involves the collection of research data , which in hermeneutic research, often comprises textual material, such as literary works, historical documents, or transcripts of interviews and conversations. However, it can also include non-textual data like cultural artifacts, practices, or observed behaviors , as long as these can be interpreted to uncover underlying meanings.

In hermeneutic research, data analysis is not a linear process but follows the principles of the hermeneutic circle. This means that researchers constantly move between understanding the parts of their data (such as individual interview responses or specific historical events) and the whole (the broader context of the study, including cultural, social, and historical settings). This iterative process allows for a deeper comprehension of the data, as each cycle of analysis sheds new light on both the parts and the whole. The interpretation of data in hermeneutic research is not about finding a single, definitive meaning but about exploring the range of possible meanings and how they resonate with the broader context of the study. Researchers engage in a dialogical process with the data, asking questions, forming interpretations, and then re-examining these interpretations in light of new insights. This dialogical process is critical in hermeneutic research, as it acknowledges the complexity and multi-layered nature of human knowledge and experience.

An essential aspect of conducting hermeneutic research is the reflexivity of the researcher. This involves a continuous process of self-examination and critical reflection on one’s role and influence in the research process. Researchers must be aware of how their social, cultural, and historical positioning affects their interpretation of the data. This awareness is crucial for maintaining the integrity of the research, as it helps to mitigate the impact of personal biases and preconceptions. Additionally, hermeneutic research often involves a collaborative aspect, where researchers engage with the perspectives of others, such as colleagues or participants, to challenge and refine their interpretations. This collaborative engagement enriches the research process, bringing in diverse viewpoints and reducing the risk of a singular, subjective interpretation.

Finally, presenting the findings of hermeneutic research requires a narrative that is both coherent and reflective of the research journey. Researchers must articulate not only their interpretations and conclusions but also the process through which they arrived at these insights. This includes discussing the hermeneutic circle, the role of reflexivity, and the interplay between the parts and the whole in the interpretive process. The findings in hermeneutic research are often presented as a rich, detailed narrative that weaves together the data, its context, and the researcher’s interpretation. This narrative approach allows for a deeper engagement with the audience, inviting them to understand the complexities and subtleties of the research. By meticulously detailing the interpretive journey, hermeneutic research contributes to the broader field of human knowledge, offering profound insights into the complex tapestry of human experience and social context.

When conducting hermeneutic research, several critical considerations must be taken into account to navigate its inherent complexities. Firstly, researchers must be deeply conscious of their own biases and preconceptions, as these can significantly influence the interpretive process. The subjective nature of hermeneutic research demands a high level of reflexivity , where researchers continually examine and articulate their own positionality and its impact on the research .

Another key consideration is the dynamic and non-linear nature of the hermeneutic circle, which requires researchers to iteratively move between understanding parts of the data and the whole context. This process can be challenging, as it often reveals multiple, sometimes conflicting, interpretations of the same data.

Researchers must also be adept at engaging with the social context of their study, understanding that texts and phenomena are deeply embedded in specific historical, cultural, and social frameworks. This engagement demands a comprehensive approach to contextual analysis, often requiring interdisciplinary knowledge and collaboration.

Additionally, ethical considerations are paramount, especially when dealing with sensitive subjects or vulnerable populations. Researchers must ensure that their methods and interpretations respect the dignity and autonomy of participants and meaningfully represent their experiences and perspectives.

Lastly, the presentation of findings in hermeneutic research should not only convey the outcomes but also transparently communicate the interpretive journey, including the challenges and ambiguities encountered along the way. By addressing these considerations, hermeneutic research can yield rich, nuanced insights while maintaining rigor and ethical integrity.

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Hermeneutics.

• Georgia Warnke Georgia Warnke University of California, Riverside
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.114
• Published online: 22 November 2016

Modern hermeneutics begins with F. D. E. Schleiermacher who systematized hermeneutics, developing it from a group of disparate disciplines meant to apply to different fields of discourse to a set of procedures applicable to all. Schleiermacher also insists on a methodical practice of interpretation including grammatical interpretation, which attends to an author’s language, and psychological or technical interpretation, which attends to an author’s intentions. In moving to philosophical hermeneutics, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer refocus away from the procedures conducive to understanding and towards the conditions under which understanding occurs: namely, in the context of our ongoing projects and purposes and the interrelations they involve. For Gadamer, these conditions lead to a rethinking of the Enlightenment’s criticism of tradition and prejudice. The context of understanding is a historically developed one. Indeed, Heidegger and Gadamer conceive of the so-called hermeneutic circle of whole and part not as a method for coming to a definitive understanding of a text, as Schleiermacher does, but rather as a reflection of our historical circumstances. We are the result of the effective histories of the very texts and discourses we seek to understand. To the extent that we are, however, we participate in their traditions and are oriented or prejudiced by the assumptions they hand down to us. The problem with a Schleiermachian reliance on interpretive method, then, is that it pretends to an objectivity that it cannot attain and thereby gives up on the possibility of acknowledging and interrogating prejudice. Schleiermacher’s focus on intentions is equally problematic. To the extent that we concentrate only or primarily on the intentions or thoughts behind an author’s or speaker’s expression, we fail to take their expressions up as possible insights or valid claims. In contrast, philosophical hermeneutics asks us to take works of literature seriously with regard to their subject matter, or Sache , and to engage dialogically in a process of clarifying an issue or subject matter for ourselves. In short, we miss much of what we can learn about a subject matter if we look to intentions over content. Likewise, we miss much of what we can learn about ourselves if we look to method and forgo dialogue.

• hermeneutics
• philosophical hermeneutics
• intentionalism
• literary method
• Schleiermacher

Terry Eagleton entitles his 2013 book How to Read Literature and says in his introduction that he hopes it gives readers interested in literary interpretation “some of the basic tools of the critical trade.” 1 In a 1992 article, the philosopher Noel Carroll maintains that those he calls “anti-intentionalists” illegitimately sever understanding in the realm of art and literature from understanding in other domains of human communication and intercourse. In his view, “Though it seems natural to interpret words and actions in terms of authorial intention, arguments of many sorts have advanced for nearly fifty years to deny the relevance of authorial intention to the interpretation of works of art in general and to works of literature in particular.” 2 Eagleton’s reference to the tools of the trade may be more offhand than Carroll’s insistence on the interpretive relevance of authorial intentions. 3 Nonetheless, both claims recall positions that F. D. E. Schleiermacher took on literary interpretation in the early 19th century, and, like this position, both are decidedly at odds with the later philosophical hermeneutics that stems from the work of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

This discussion begins with the problems Gadamer raises with regard to the direction that Schleiermacher sets out for hermeneutics. It then turns to Gadamer’s Heidegger-inspired account of hermeneutics and to its implications for the concern with tools and methods, on the one hand, and with authorial intentions, on the other.

Gadamer on Schleiermacher

Although Schleiermacher published little on hermeneutics during his lifetime ( 1768–1834 ), his posthumously published work on the subject was immensely influential. 4 Much of this influence can be attributed to Schleiermacher’s generalization of hermeneutics from what he calls a “collection of observations” that are specific to particular fields of discourse into a systematic set of procedures applicable to any field. 5 He rejects the idea that separate subject matters, and in particular scripture, require separate forms of interpretation. Rather, a universal hermeneutics is concerned equally with scripture, classical and modern literature, and speech and texts in both one’s own and foreign languages. Moreover, in all of these cases, misunderstanding is a risk, and a universal hermeneutics consequently requires a set of rigorous techniques. Whereas a “laxer” hermeneutic practice assumes that we usually understand one another immediately and only occasionally need to follow explicit interpretive strategies, “the more strict practice assumes that misunderstanding results as a matter of course and that understanding must be desired and sought at every point.” 6

For Schleiermacher, this strict practice includes what he calls grammatical and psychological or technical forms of interpretation. On the one hand, understanding a text requires that we understand the language an author is using; we need to attend to its syntactical rules, linguistic meanings, and possible differences between the way we may currently define certain words and the definition they had at the time the author used them. On the other hand, understanding requires that we understand the context of an author’s expression or utterance and therefore understand it in terms of an author’s life and individuality. Interpreters need two “talents”: a talent for “research into language” and a talent for “grasping … the individual.” 7

Gadamer agrees with Schleiermacher that issues of understanding are the same whether we are dealing with scripture, classical texts, or ordinary conversation. In addition, he calls Schleiermacher’s work on grammatical interpretation “brilliant.” 8 Nevertheless, he is less certain about his focus on misunderstanding. As long as we assume that we understand the claims that other people are making we can devote ourselves to engaging with them in an inquiry into a subject matter. We can consider with them how, for example, a particular virus works, what to do about the economy, or where we should meet for coffee. In contrast, if we assume that we generally misunderstand one another, as Schleiermacher does, then we must devote ourselves to ensuring that we correctly understand what our partner in conversation—or a text—is really trying to say or express. Two consequences follow. First, we will need to discover the methods that can ensure this sort of precise understanding. Second, those methods will focus primarily on trying to figure out the intention or thought behind the author’s or speaker’s expression: what exactly he or she means by, say, a virus or the economy or just which coffee shop he or she has in mind. The turn to method and the attention to authorial intentions thus follow from the same starting point: a presumption of misunderstanding.

In Gadamer’s assessment, this presumption marks a decisive shift from the older hermeneutics of Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich August Wolf, and Friedrich Ast. None supposed that misunderstanding could not arise; clearly, if we want to meet a friend for coffee, we will have to verify that we both intend to go to the same coffee shop. Nevertheless, rather than facilitating understanding in those special cases in which problems in mutual understanding could or do emerge, for Schleiermacher hermeneutics becomes a systematic method for avoiding misunderstanding in all cases and, moreover, a systematic method directed primarily at excavating intentions. Accordingly, Gadamer maintains that despite the attention that Schleiermacher gives to both grammatical and psychological interpretation, his “particular contribution is psychological interpretation.” 9 In attending to speech and text, hermeneutics has as its main aim not the content or subject matter, or what Gadamer calls die Sache , but rather individual expression, or “thought considered as part of another’s life.” 10 Thus, what Schleiermacher says he finds “most neglected and ignored is understanding a succession of thoughts as an emerging element of life.” 11 The result, Gadamer thinks, is that any claim or proposition becomes “an aesthetic construct.” 12

Gadamer suggests that this shift from content to individual expression, part of the Romantic cult of the genius, also effects a change in the “philologist’s rule of thumb” that Kant and Fichte employ, according to which the interpreter understands writers or speakers better than they understood themselves. 13 Kant and Fichte consider the idea a principle of philosophical critique insofar as it is possible to acquire greater conceptual clarity on an issue than a given author’s text may have allowed; Schleiermacher, however, applies the idea to the creative act. Writers and speakers express themselves without being necessarily aware of the grammatical rules, tropes, cadences, and literary forms they are using. The hermeneutical inquirer understands better, then, in the sense that he or she explicitly articulates elements in the process of production that the writer effects unconsciously. Because Schleiermacher sees this understanding as a reproduction of the original production, Gadamer maintains that he also conceives of understanding as “a divinatory process, a placing oneself within the whole framework of the author, an apprehension of the ‘inner origin’ of the composition of a work, a recreation of the creative act.” 14 While the upshot of attending to misunderstanding is a move away from the mutual consideration of a subject matter to the question of an individual’s intentions and requires a methodological approach, the upshot of attending to an individual’s intentions, Gadamer suggests, is that ultimately hermeneutical method is a divinatory process.

To be sure, not all commentators subscribe to this analysis. According to Michael Forster, divination has its roots more in the French deviner , meaning to guess or to conjecture, than it does in the Latin divinus , meaning prophetic. 15 It follows that divination is not to be considered a form of “psychological self-projection,” as Gadamer assumes, but is rather “a procedure of fallible, corrigible hypothesizing scrupulously grounded in, but also reaching well beyond, the limited empirical evidence that is available.” 16 Kristen Gjesdal makes the same point. Divination does not involve placing oneself within the author’s framework of production or recreating the original creative act. Rather it is a kind of “creative hypothesis-making.” 17 Moreover, she maintains, it is not meant to be a method on its own but is, rather, linked with the method of comparison. Under Schleiermachian procedures, one makes a hypothesis about a text or passage and then revises or confirms that hypothesis by comparing it with one’s understanding of other passages and texts by the same author, as well as passages and texts by other authors of the same culture and time.

Gjesdal also objects to Gadamer’s account of psychological interpretation. Insofar as Gadamer takes Schleiermacher to overemphasize it, she thinks he fails not only to acknowledge its partnership with grammatical interpretation but also adequately to portray what it is. As a rigorous method, hermeneutics attains understanding through both “reference to language and … reference to the one who speaks”—in other words, through grammatical and psychological or technical interpretation. 18 In some cases, as in scientific texts, the commonality of language will dominate and, hence, so too will grammatical interpretation. In other cases, as in poetry, the individuality of the use of language will dominate and require an emphasis on psychological interpretation. Nevertheless, both are necessary to understanding. Nor, Gjesdal thinks, can psychological interpretation be reduced to an interest in “the inner origin of the composition of a work” if that origin is meant to be “prior to, independent of, or behind language”. Rather, psychological interpretation concerns the way in which a particular author or speaker maneuvers within a common language. As an example, she points to a possible inquiry into differences in style or individual expression. One might look at “the features that set Goethe’s poetry apart from that of Hölderin or Tieck while also keeping an eye on the shared culture of these and other writers and artists.” 19 In sum, according to Gjesdal, “grammatical and technical interpretation, comparison and divination are four closely related aspects of interpretation, the marks of a critically reflected, as opposed to an unreflected, lax hermeneutic practice.” 20

Against Gadamer, Gjesdal endorses this critically reflected practice. Like Schleiermacher, she and Forster also think that understanding is about understanding others, “be they others who are close to the interpreter, or, more often, those who are temporally or culturally distant from his or her own horizon of experience,” as Gjesdal puts the point. 21 Consistent with his critique of Schleiermacher, Gadamer’s own hermeneutics moves in a different direction. What follows considers his analysis and explores what it entails, first, for a methodologically directed hermeneutic practice and, second, for knowledge of others, or intentionalism in literary theory. Significantly, Gadamer begins with a different question from Schleiermacher’s: not what procedures conduce to understanding in any field of written or spoken language but under what conditions this understanding takes place: How, in other words, does understanding, whether of literature or anything else, happen? 22 He begins by rethinking the hermeneutic circle, which in the hermeneutic tradition describes the codependence of our understanding of the whole of a text on its parts and of our understanding of the parts of the text on the whole.

The Hermeneutic Circle

Schleiermacher applies the hermeneutic circle to both grammatical and psychological interpretation. On the grammatical side, one begins with a skeletal understanding of the whole of the text as an orientation to its individual parts. We take a particular text to be a certain kind of text—an ode, for instance—and thus project a preliminary understanding of its parts as dimensions of the tribute it creates. We then fit these dimensions together to fill in the skeletal understanding we have of the whole. As for the psychological side, Schleiermacher says, “We get this same canon if we begin with the version which involves reconstructing the process of the author. For in every larger complex, the author as well saw the whole before he progressed to the particular.” 23 Here, the interpreter begins with a skeletal account of the author’s life and approaches the ode, say, as a particular element of that life; the interpreter then uses a more detailed understanding of the ode to fill out his or her understanding of the life. Both grammatical and psychological uses of the hermeneutic circle result in a complete understanding for Schleiermacher. Indeed, he thinks they complement each other. The task of interpretation ends when “each side is dealt with on its own in such a way that dealing with the other side produces no change in the result, or when each side, dealt with on its own, completely replaces the other, but the other must equally be dealt with on its own.” 24

How does the interpreter acquire an initial skeletal understanding of the whole, whether of the author’s life or of the text? If our understanding runs in a circle from whole to part and part to whole, how do we get into the circle in the first place? Gadamer’s answer builds on Heidegger’s and is decisive for his hermeneutics: We do not need to discover a means of entering the circle because we are always already in it. On Heidegger’s account, we understand something—whether a text or, to use his paradigmatic example, a hammer—in the context of our ongoing projects and purposes and the interrelations they involve. We do not first come upon an object and then ask what it is—using some method for finding the whole of which it is a part. Instead, we already understand the object as a hammer because we are already involved in that whole, in the activities or projected activities, of which it is a part. Indeed, the hammer is less an object than an aspect of our purposeful field. Things have meaning for us within a web of interrelated assumptions, practices, and activities, which for Heidegger comprise a practical know-how or skillful coping with our world. Hence, he stresses what he calls the “fore-structure” of understanding that consists of a “fore-having,” “fore-sight,” and “fore-conception,” where fore-having reflects our immersion in the projects and purposes that constitute the arena of our understanding, fore-sight signals the perspective this immersion opens up for us on that which we are in the midst of understanding, and fore-conception fixes its range of possible meanings. 25

We revise aspects of this fore-structure if we encounter glitches or disruptions in our ability to get around in our world. What we took as a hammer in the context of our practical activities turns out to be an optical illusion, and we are suddenly brought up short. In this case, we may revise our understanding of the part in order to retain our understanding of the whole, or context, of our acting. In other cases, we may have to revise our understanding of the whole, or context, realizing, perhaps, that we are in a dream. Nevertheless, in neither case do we emerge from the circle of projecting meanings on the basis of preunderstandings rooted in our ongoing practice or what Heidegger sees as our “throwness”. Rather, Gadamer explains: “The process that Heidegger describes is that every revision of the fore-projection is capable of projecting before itself a new projection of meaning; rival projects can emerge side by side until it becomes clearer what the unity of meaning is; interpretation begins with fore-conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones.” 26

Gadamer situates this fore-structure in history and tradition and therefore thinks of it as a structure of prejudice. If our initial skeletal understanding issues from our immersion in ongoing projects and purposes, these projects and purposes have their place within particular cultures possessing particular histories and trajectories. We inherit modes of practice, ways of living, and assumptions or prejudices about our world as aspects of growing up. We know how to hammer, for instance, because hammering is part of the culture in which we live. We also inherit literary traditions; they are part of our cultures and histories before we encounter or read any of the texts that compose them. Moreover, when we do encounter or read these texts, we are already possessed of a historically developed fore-having, or prejudice, that has been handed down to us by previous generations of readers and interpreters. Readers brought up in the traditions for which Shakespeare’s work, for example, is foundational cannot come upon it afresh as if it did not have the status it has come to have in those traditions. Rather, for these readers it is already an exemplar of excellence. The same holds for their introduction to the works of other cultures: These already possess a status that is a result of their own “after-history,” or what Gadamer calls their effective history, in which they are taken up and assessed by their first readers, associated with other works in their own and other traditions, reread, reassessed, and reinterpreted in ways that become part of the legacy of meaning they hand over to new generations.

For Gadamer, this analysis means that we need to rethink the Enlightenment’s rejection of tradition and prejudice as sources of knowledge. The cultures and historical developments from which we acquire the fore-structure of our understanding constitute the interpretive traditions to which we already belong or in which we become acculturated. To the extent that this fore-structure is a structure of prejudice, the possibility of understanding is rooted in tradition and prejudice. The Enlightenment’s insistence, then, that prejudices always reflect either undue haste in coming to an understanding or the imposition of subjective and biased views is too radical. Here, Gadamer notes that in German law, a prejudice is a provisional legal verdict, a prejudgment rather than necessarily an unfounded one. Equally, the prejudices that we inherit from the traditions we inherit or adopt amount to resources for understanding that orient us toward our world and can either prove suitable or fail to work out. In understanding a text, the initial assumptions we hold about a text, our skeletal understanding, may not allow us to integrate its parts into a coherent whole, and we may have to resort to other frames or orientations for what we are trying to understand. Nevertheless, Gadamer insists, “That the prejudices determining what I think are due to my own partiality is a judgment based on the standpoint of their having been dissolved and enlightened, and it holds only for unjustified prejudices.” 27

Accordingly, Gadamer maintains that the Enlightenment demand that we eliminate all prejudice is impossible to meet. If our further experience dissolves and enlightens certain prejudices, it does so only in the light of others that we continue to hold. Suppose, for example, our initial prejudices about a text fail to work out. We may be prepared to be moved and edified by Cordelia’s actions in King Lear , for example, but come to conceive of her as either a moralistic twit or someone who, despite the love she has for her father, has remarkably little patience for his idiosyncrasies. According to our new understanding, the tragedy she sets in motion stems not from her integrity in speaking truth to power but from either her exasperation or her posturing in being unwilling to follow standard protocols that allow for insincerity in ceremonial occasions. Nonetheless, if we do find Cordelia to be impatient or moralistic, we do so not as a matter of enlightened reason but in light of other valuations we inherit from our tradition: for instance, that love involves bearing with a loved one’s eccentricities or that standing on principle has a time and a place and that a ceremonial occasion is neither. Moreover, these valuations are a legacy to which Shakespeare’s works and their effective history have themselves contributed. Indeed, despite the possible category mistake in Cordelia’s initial response to her father, her subsequent actions reflect ideals of love to which we continue to hold and that continue to influence our judgments.

To be sure, this analysis may make it unclear how understanding can be anything other than an endless rehearsal of what the tradition already thinks and says. If we are always already not only affected but also effected in our judgments by the past we seek to understand, how can we ever say anything new about it or about the texts it hands down to us? Why is the hermeneutic circle not a vicious one? Gadamer’s answer looks to historical finitude. The effective history of texts is an ongoing one; texts connect up with other texts that had not yet been written when they first appeared, with criticisms that had not yet been formulated, and with events and ideas that remained in their future. This consequence adds another dimension to the “philologist’s rule of thumb” that Kant and Fichte employ. If we can understand a text better than its author did, it is not only because we might be able better to elucidate his or her point but also because we know some of the future of that point. Given the historical experience of the Holocaust, for example, we can no longer understand the figure of Shylock or Portia’s triumph in The Merchant of Venice in the way the play’s original audiences may have. Given the attention to gender and transgender issues highlighted by 20th-century struggles for recognition, we are attentive to gender swaps in Shakespeare in new ways. 28 Equally, interpreters in the future will necessarily understand a text differently from the way we do. History continues on without us. Hence, whereas for Schleiermacher the hermeneutic circle ends in a complete understanding of the text, for Gadamer its involvement in history means that it cannot.

The same holds not only of interpretations historically distant from one another, however, but also of contemporaneous ones. We can draw on feminist criticism to think about what Ophelia’s role in Hamlet says about the play and women’s lives, or draw on Marxism to claim Hamlet’s bourgeois individualism as a key to the text, or interpret Hamlet as a Confucian hero and see the play as a political allegory. Although each of these interpretations might succeed in offering an understanding of the whole in terms of the part and of the parts in terms of the whole, each will also emphasize different scenes and roles and fit part and whole in different ways. It follows that no interpretive horizon will have a monopoly on the perspectives that can illuminate a text, and no text will have a determinate meaning. Rather than providing canonical interpretations, then, the contents of our understanding are contributions to our interpretive traditions, understandings from a particular perspective that provide new understandings to be handed down as resources to new generations of interpreters. Gadamer therefore maintains that “[t]radition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it for ourselves.” 29

The result of Gadamer’s analysis of understanding is to rehabilitate tradition and prejudice, on the one hand, and to affirm the indeterminacy of meaning and the incompleteness of understanding, on the other. If Schleiermacher shifts from a lax practice of hermeneutics to a more rigorous method and from written or spoken content to an author’s intentions, rehabilitating tradition and prejudice allows us to rethink the first of these shifts while affirming indeterminacy and incompleteness allows us to rethink the second. We can look at both reconsiderations in turn.

Critique of Method

In Schleiermacher’s view, the need for method arises from the ever-present possibility of misunderstanding. Like Schleiermacher’s predecessors, Gadamer does not deny that misunderstandings sometimes arise. Nevertheless, he thinks the supposition that a methodological approach will allow us to resolve them ignores the place of prejudice and tradition in our understanding. “In relying on its critical method,” he writes, “historical objectivism conceals the fact that historical consciousness is itself situated in the web of historical effects. By means of methodical critique … it preserves its good conscience by failing to recognize the presuppositions … that govern its own understanding”. As he continues, “In this respect, historical objectivism resembles statistics, which are such excellent means of propaganda because they let the ‘facts’ speak and hence simulate an objectivity that in reality depends on the legitimacy of the questions asked.” 30 The problem with method, then, is that it pretends to an objectivity that tries to disown the orientations, assumptions, and interests—in short, the prejudices—that already guide it, and it thereby simply allows those prejudices to reign behind one’s back, as it were. To the extent that our reliance on method allows us to refrain from acknowledging our prejudices, we can neither expose nor interrogate them.

In contrast, Gadamer points to the significance of the questions on which the supposed objectivity of method rests, a significance he says we have learned from Plato’s Socrates. Here, he maintains that Socrates’ genius in asking questions stems from his awareness that he does not already know the answer. His questions advance the discussion of a topic because they issue from a genuine desire to know, and this desire comes from knowing that he does not know. For philosophical hermeneutics, what Gadamer calls the “consciousness of effective history” accomplishes the same outcome. This consciousness does not propose a new interpretive or genealogical method that would, for example, attempt to trace out all of the historical influences on its understanding of a particular text, historical event, or action. Such a method would itself be oriented and directed by prejudices developed through the effective history of that which it is trying to understand. Rather, once we are conscious of effective history, we can recognize that all understanding is effected and affected by its participation in a history and tradition. We thereby acknowledge that any understanding we have of a text, action, practice, or the like is partial in two senses. First, it is never the whole “truth” of the text, action, or practice but only a partial understanding to be supplemented, expanded, challenged, and so on as history continues. Second, our understanding is biased in certain ways by the history it inherits. To the extent that we recognize the partiality of our understanding, however, we recognize our Socratic ignorance and give ourselves the chance to ask questions of a text or others, as Socrates does, because we assume that we have something to learn. 31 In other words, we open ourselves up to the claims of others and of texts.

What results is a dialogue in which we may not only clarify die Sache but also challenge the previous assumptions we held about it. “A person trying to understand a text is prepared for it to tell him something,” Gadamer writes. 32 Indeed, he suggests that the only way we can begin to compensate for our double partiality is to acknowledge it and to engage in ongoing investigations and interrogations in which we sift through archives, listen to the testimonies of others, and engage in conversations with them. By so doing, we discover other ways of understanding that challenge our own and from which we may be able to learn. In this way, our questioning of others and texts glides into their questioning of us.

This conclusion brings us back to Gadamer’s worries about Schleiermacher’s attention to psychological interpretation and about intentionalism in literary interpretation, in general. In Gadamer’s view, an understanding that claims to know an author’s intentions comes at the expense of the mutual questioning through which we illuminate both a subject matter and our own prejudices.

Critique of Intentionalism

When Truth and Method first appeared in 1960 , English-speaking intentionalists were appalled. In his 1967 book, Validity in Interpretation , E. D. Hirsch considered Gadamer’s text a version of nihilism, one that denied “the author’s prerogative to be the determinator of textual meaning” and thereby allowed a text to mean “whatever we take it to mean.” 33 In the 1980s, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels were equally dismissive for reasons identical to Hirsch’s. They write, “There is no necessary relation between the meaning the author intends and any one of the meanings the author’s words can have in the language—except the one the author intends.” 34 More recently, moderate intentionalists, hypothetical intentionalists, and actual intentionalists have revised and updated intentionalist claims. 35 Noel Carroll attempts to do so while trying to allow for the legitimacy of the kind of historical changes in the understanding of texts that Gadamer endorses. His analysis of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island is a case in point.

The novel narrates the experiences of a group of Union prisoners and loyalists who escape from Richmond during the Civil War by means of a hot-air balloon but are blown off course in a tempest and eventually land on a remote Pacific island. Among the group of castaways are the engineer, Cyrus Harding, and his freed slave, Neb, who refused to leave his former master and even traveled to Richmond when he heard his master had been captured by the enemy. According to Carroll, the novel presents Neb as “superstitious, naïve, docile, and childlike.” 36 For example, he refers to Harding as “master” throughout the book and becomes close to the monkey that the colonists adopt as a pet. Carroll writes, “The inference from Neb to the idea that Verne is portraying African Americans as docile, naïve, and rather close to the simian origins of the human race seems irresistible.” 37 At the same time, Carroll claims that the novel’s meaning is pro-Union and pro-abolitionist. Harding is an abolitionist and the novel exhibits no sympathy for the Confederacy. Indeed, the settlers name their new colony “Lincoln Island”. Consequently, Carroll maintains that Verne did not intend his portrayal of Neb to be a racist one but meant it, rather, as a depiction that could advance the case for treating African Americans humanely. To us in the 21st century, of course, the portrayal seems racist. How, then, Carroll asks, are we to understand The Mysterious Island ? Is it racist or antiracist?

Carroll concedes that if the logic of intentionalism in literary theory forces us to understand the novel as a nonracist one, we may be tempted to dismiss intentionalist theory. Linking the novel’s meaning to Verne’s antiracist intentions for it does not allow us to attribute “racist biases” to it, and, as a consequence, we might be tempted to think that an intentionalist interpretation “should be forsaken.” 38 Yet Carroll insists that such a move would be too quick. As long as we recognize the difference between intentions and results, what he considers a political interpretation of The Mysterious Island as racist is fully compatible with an intentionalist one that understands it as nonracist. Although Verne may not have intended to depict Neb in a racist way, he did intend to portray him to as naïve, docile, and childlike, and in doing so he produced a result that is undeniably racist.

According to Carroll, “When speaking of intentional activity generally, there is no problem in admitting that in doing something intentionally under one description, one may be also doing something else under another description, even though one is unaware of the applicability of this alternate description.” 39 He goes further. Not only is a political conception of Verne’s depiction of Neb as racist compatible with an intentionalist account of the depiction’s meaning as nonracist, but the former also depends upon the latter. For if we are to call the depiction of Neb racist, we have to attribute certain intentions to Verne—that he means for Neb’s actions and, in particular, his behavior to the person he calls “master” to be sincere:

We proceed under the supposition that Verne was not being ironic—that Verne did not intend us to take his writing to signal that Neb in particular is not and that African Americans by extension are not docile, naive, childlike and even somewhat simian. For, of course, had Verne intended irony—had he intended that the character be understood to be not docile and so on—then political criticism of Mysterious Island of the sort attempted above would be inappropriate. 40

In other words, in order for the political interpretation to make sense, it must presuppose an intentional interpretation. Verne intended for Neb to be nonironically “docile, naive, childlike and even somewhat simian,” and this intention forms the basis of our contemporary political judgment of the novel as racist.

Nevertheless, suppose we ask what leads us to understand that Verne intended for Neb’s speech and action to be sincere. Surely, here the answer is not a “supposition” or the attribution of certain intentions but the novel itself; there is no evidence in the text from which to infer that Neb’s actions are insincere. He does not say “master” while rolling his eyes or with a drawn-out inflection. To the contrary, he is, for example, inconsolable when he thinks that Harding is dead, and he exclaims “My master, my master” with almost religious devotion when he discovers him alive. Thus, we need not go outside the text to mine its author’s intentions in order to understand its view of Neb. Indeed, we decipher what the author’s intentions are only through the text. Carroll makes the same point. “The text or the artwork itself,” he says, “is a primary source for our hypotheses about what the artists intended in writing or composing.” 41

In another article, he denies that authorial intentions are private mental events separate from the works attributed to them. Instead, an intention is a purpose internal to or, as he puts it “manifest” in the work. As he continues:

Searching for authorial intention is … not a matter of going outside the artwork, looking for some independent, private, mental episode or cause that is logically remote from the meaning or value of the work. The intention is evident in the work itself, and, insofar as the intention is identified as the purposive structure of the work, the intention is the focus of our interest in and attention to the artwork. 42

Yet as long as intentions are evident in the work, as its purposive structure, why need we talk about intentions at all? Why can we not simply talk of the work? If talk about intentions amounts to nothing more than talk about the purposive structure or meaning of the work, then what is the difference between reading The Mysterious Island intentionalistically and reading it nonintentionalistically?

Carroll suggests that we need to insist on a difference in order to absolve Verne of racism. Carroll’s argument is that the purposive structure of the novel indicates that Neb is not acting ironically but, rather, behaving sincerely in a childlike way; in addition, because the text also supports the Union cause, Verne’s intention in depicting Neb in the way that he does must be to convince whites to treat African Americans humanely. On this analysis, our reaction to the novel’s depiction of Neb as a racist one is an external understanding and even, perhaps, one that illegitimately imposes contemporary values on a text that is possibly antiracist for its own time.

Gadamer actually makes the same point that Carroll does about the difference between intentions and results in his criticism of R. G. Collingwood’s logic of question and answer. For Collingwood, understanding a text or a historical event involves reconstructing the question to which it is an answer, where we necessarily read the question off of the answer. His example is Admiral Lord Nelson’s plan for the Battle of Trafalgar, a plan that, in Collingwood’s view, we can understand only by examining the course of the battle. 43 Without appropriate answers or successful actions, we cannot discover what the intent might have been. Yet as Gadamer points out, this interpretive procedure assumes that where a battle is won it seamlessly follows the original—in this case, Nelson’s—plan. However, this assumption holds good only under the ideal and rare conditions when everything goes exactly as we had imagined it would. In ordinary circumstances, our plans and intentions intersect and may be at cross-purposes with those of others so that what actually happens differs from what anyone intended. We intend to turn left, and those in an oncoming car intend to drive straight ahead. As neither of us intended to crash and yet crash we did, it is hard to see how we might read our intentions from the result.

Nevertheless, despite his similar separation of intention and result, Gadamer moves in the opposite direction from Carroll in conceiving what it is we understand when we understand. If we apply Carroll’s intentionalist understanding of texts to actions and events, we will understand those events or actions in terms of agential intentions. We will understand our car crash in terms of our intention to turn left, and the event itself will be an unfortunate but external result, just as the racism of The Mysterious Island is. If we move in a Gadamerian direction, however, we will understand our car crash as a crash, and our intention will be a secondary matter. Verne may have intended to portray Neb sympathetically, as someone deserving to be treated “humanely,” as Carroll writes. By extension, Verne may have wanted us to treat all African Americans humanely. All the same, his portrayal of Neb has an after-history in which it intersects with the long history of the African American fight against a misplaced paternalism and for civil and political rights. It also intersects with struggles for recognition on the part of African Americans and other groups for full inclusion in American institutions and practices, not in spite of but because of who they are. Given these intersections, Verne’s equation of humane treatment with nonracism becomes questionable. Ethical human beings treat animals humanely; they treat their fellow citizens as equals.

Interpretation and Dialogue

From the point of view of philosophical hermeneutics, the most important facet of our engagement with a text such as The Mysterious Island is the way it encourages reflection on issues in which we take an interest: in this case, just what racism is and how it is expressed. In reading The Mysterious Island , we may appreciate Verne’s sympathy for African Americans, but the depiction he gives of Neb nevertheless shocks us in a way that leads us to consider aspects of racism we may not yet have adequately understood. Understanding literature is a dialogic affair. We come to the text with certain orientations and presumptions that we have inherited from the history of which we are a part but of which we may remain unaware. Confronted with Verne’s depiction of Neb, we are pulled up short and forced to ask questions of the text, as well as of our own orientations and presumptions. Is Verne’s depiction of Neb a nonracist one? What does it tell us about kinds of racism? What are the forms in which racism comes?

In insisting that in understanding we understand die Sache , philosophical hermeneutics directs our attention to what we learn in reading literature. Reading is less a reexperience of the genesis of a creative act than an engagement with ideas, questions, and issues that offers the possibility of going beyond ourselves and of recognizing and reflecting on our prejudices. In reading, we converse with a text about matters of common interest. We are confronted with the insights of others, and to the extent that we take them up, ask questions about them, and listen to answers, we can consider their validity for us. In this way, philosophical hermeneutics asks us to take works of literature seriously as claims to truth with which we engage dialogically in a process of clarifying an issue or subject matter for ourselves, a clarification that we hand down to the next generation to do with what it will.

In effect, then, Gadamer reverses Carroll’s claim with which this article began, namely, that only intentionalism in literary theory can link understanding in the realm of art and literature to understanding in other domains of communication. 44 While for Carroll it seems natural to interpret words and actions in terms of authorial intention, the opposite turns out more nearly to be the case. Normally, when people speak to us, we try to understand not what they intend but what they are saying. Understanding literature, in the view of philosophical hermeneutics, is no different. We engage with what a text means, with what insights or claims it is asking us to consider, and in doing so we enter into a dialogue with it. Moreover, pace Terry Eagleton, Schleiermacher, and others, this is not a dialogue we can methodologically control. Indeed, its value lies in where it takes us and what we can learn. As Gadamer puts the point:

We say that we “conduct” a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are far less the leaders of it than the led. No one knows in advance what will “come out” of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us. Thus we can say that something was a good conversation or that it was ill fated. All this shows that a conversation has a spirit of its own, and that the language in which it is conducted bears its own truth within it—i.e., that it allows something to “emerge” which henceforth exists. 45

Further Reading

• Barthold, Lauren . Gadamer’s Dialectical Hermeneutics . Lanaham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.
• Caputo, John . Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
• Carroll, Noel . Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays . Edited by Noel Carroll . Port Chester: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Di Cesare, Donatella . Gadamer: A Philosophical Portrait . Translated by Niall Keane . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
• Dostal, Robert J. , ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Foster, Michael N. “Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics: Some Problems and Solutions.” Harvard Review of Philosophy 13.1 (2005): 100–122.
• Gadamer, Hans-Georg . Philosophical Hermeneutics . Translated by David E. Linge . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
• Gadamer, Hans-Georg . Hermeneutics, Ethics and Religion . Translated by Joel Weinsheimer . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
• Grondin, Jean . Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
• Heidegger, Martin . Being and Time . Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson . San Francisco: Harper, 1962.
• Hoy, David . The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
• Malpas, Jeff , and Hans-Helmuth Gander . The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics . New York: Routledge, 2014.
• Palmer, Richard , and Diane Michelfelder , eds. Dialogue and Deconstruction . New York: State University of New York Press, 1989.
• Ricoeur, Paul . The Conflicts of Interpretation: Essays in Hermeneutics . Translated by Willis Domingo et al. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974.
• Szondi, Peter . Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics . Translated by Martha Woodmansee . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Vilhauer, Monica . Gadamer’s Ethics of Play: Hermeneutics and the Other . Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.
• Warnke, Georgia . Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987.
• Warnke, Georgia . “The Hermeneutic Circle vs. Dialogue.” Review of Metaphysics 65 (September 2011): 91–112.
• Warnke, Georgia . “Experiencing Tradition versus Belonging to It: Gadamer’s Dilemma.” Review of Metaphysics 68 (December 2014): 347–369.
• Weberman, David . “A New Defense of Gadamer’s Hermeneutics.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60.1 (2000): 45–65.
• Wright, Kathleen , ed. Festivals of Interpretation: Essays on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Work . Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

1. Terry Eagleton , How to Read Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 10 .

2. Noel Carroll , “Art, Intention, and Conversation,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays , ed. Noel Carroll (Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 157–180 , 157.

3. The relation between textual meaning and an author’s intention is, of course, a large topic in analytic aesthetics, with formulations and debates over hypothetical intentionalism, moderate intentionalism, moderate actual intentionalism, and the like. See, for example, Donald Davidson , Truth, Language, and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ; William Irwin , Intentionalist Interpretation: A Philosophical Explanation and Defense (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000) ; Gary Iseminger , “An Intentional Demonstration,” in Intention and Interpretation , ed. Gary Iseminger (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992) , and “Actual Intentionalism vs. Hypothetical Intentionalism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54.4 (1996): 319–326; Michael Krausz, ed., Is There a Single Right Interpretation? (University Park: Penn State University Press); Jerrold Levinson , “Intention and Interpretation in Literature,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 175–213 ; Paisley Livingston , Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) ; and Robert Stecker , “Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64.4 (2006): 429–438 .

4. See F. D. E. Schleiermacher , Hermeneutics and Criticism: And Other Writings , ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998) .

5. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism , 6.

6. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism , 22.

7. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism , 12.

8. Hans-Georg Gadamer , Truth and Method , 2d rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshal (New York: Continuum, 1989), 186 .

9. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 187.

10. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 185.

11. Cited in Gadamer, Truth and Method , 186.

12. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 187.

13. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 95.

14. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 187.

15. Michael N. Forster , “ Hermeneutics ,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy , eds. Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 30–74 , p. 36.n. 29.

16. Forster, “Hermeneutics,” 36.

17. Kristin Gjesdal , Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 168 .

18. Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism , 161.

19. Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism , 167.

20. Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism , 168. Forster’s and Gjesdal’s points are debatable. In addressing differences in individual expression, Schleiermacher is arguably talking about grammatical rather than psychological interpretation: “If we objectify the language,” he writes, “then we find that … every individual is only a place where language appears so that in relation to significant writers we direct our attention to their language and see a difference of style in them.” Moreover, in the part of Schleiermacher’s manuscript that introduces the idea of divinatory reconstruction, divinatory replaces the word “prophetic (profestiche),” which Schleiermacher has crossed out. Indeed, as a preparation for divination, Schleiermacher maintains that “one must put oneself in the place of the author.” One does so on the “objective” side “via knowledge of the language as he possessed it” and on the subjective side “in the knowledge of his inner and outer life” (Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism , 24). Gadamer concedes that Schleiermacher applies divination first to creative productivity, to poetry as opposed to science, say. Yet because Schleiermacher also thinks that language always expresses individuality, the line between the creative and the noncreative is fluid. Gadamer thus concludes: “The ultimate ground of all understanding must always be a divinatory act of con-geniality” (Gadamer, Truth and Method , 189).

21. Gjesdal, Gadamer and the Legacy of German Idealism , 160.

22. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 295.

23. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism , 28.

24. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism , 11.

25. See Hubert Dreyfus , Being in the World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 18 .

26. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 267.

27. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 278–279.

28. In the introduction to their edited book, Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2007), Terrence Hawkes and Hugh Grady borrow Gadamer’s point: “We cannot make contact with a past unshaped by our own concerns … By the same token our experience of the ‘present’ is shaped and determined by the past and so to some degree only realizable in and on its terms” (p. 3.) While Hawkes and Grady refer to Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, rather peculiarly they do not refer to Gadamer.

29. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 293.

30. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 300–301.

31. Here, Gadamer differs from Hawkes and Grady. They advise “deliberately employing crucial aspects of the present as a trigger for … investigations” and call for “a heightened degree of critical self-awareness and for a committed engagement with the developments in critical and cultural theory that have taken place since the 1980s” ( Presentist Shakespeares , p. 4). Gadamer does not see how we could not be oriented by our own concerns, whether consciously or unconsciously, but he notes that we read texts to find answers to those concerns. A methodical attempt to seek out those concerns in order to trigger answers to the meaning of the text cuts short precisely the learning about our own concerns—and even learning what our concerns are—that hermeneutic understanding facilitates.

32. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 268.

33. E. D Hirsch , Validity In Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 9 .

34. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels , “Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction,” Critical Inquiry 14.1 (1987): 49–68 , 57.

35. See note 3.

36. Noel Carroll, “Anglo-American Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism: Intention and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” in Beyond Aesthetics , 180–189, 186.

37. Carroll, “Anglo-American Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism,” 186.

38. Carroll, “Anglo-American Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism,” 186.

39. Carroll, “Anglo-American Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism,” 187.

40. Carroll, “Anglo-American Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism,” 189.

41. Carroll, “Anglo-American Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism,” 189.

42. Carroll, “Art, Intention, and Conversation,” 160.

43. R. G. Collingwood , An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 58 .

44. See also David Weberman , “Reconciling Gadamer’s Non-intentionalism with Standard Conversational Goals,” The Philosophical Forum 30.4 (1999): 317–328 .

45. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 385.

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Naturally Occurring Data: Conversation, Discourse, and Hermeneutic Analysis

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Simulation provides unique and individual learning experiences. Research methods that assist in understanding such experiences can be particularly beneficial for those developing simulation curricula, as well as understanding the student experience. Conversation analysis reveals subtle nuances which govern how people use language to interact. Discourse analysis facilitates understanding of why people act and respond in the ways that they do, particularly focused on how power and knowledge operate. Hermeneutic analysis allows understanding of the lived experiences of individuals in different contexts. These approaches are all underpinned by the view that there are multiple legitimate truths or perspectives in any given situation.

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McKenna, L., Stow, J., Livesay, K. (2019). Naturally Occurring Data: Conversation, Discourse, and Hermeneutic Analysis. In: Nestel, D., Hui, J., Kunkler, K., Scerbo, M., Calhoun, A. (eds) Healthcare Simulation Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26837-4_20

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Hermeneutics and Phenomenology: Figures and Themes

Saulius Geniusas and Paul Fairfield (eds.), Hermeneutics and Phenomenology : Figures and Themes , Bloomsbury, 2018, 238pp., $114.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781350078024.

Reviewed by Frank Schalow, University of New Orleans

This collection of essays, edited by Saulius Geniusas and Paul Fairfield, provides a retrospective glance at the philosophical methodology whose development would transform the landscape of 20 th century continental thought. In their introduction, the editors pose an important and provocative question as to the connection between hermeneutics and phenomenology, indeed, how the two philosophical approaches within the tradition of Continental philosophy intersect, and, perhaps at certain junctures, also diverge. "While much of the landscape of twentieth-century continental philosophy is shaped by phenomenology and hermeneutics, the relation between them remains puzzling" (1). Yet, it is equally case that the precise synergies and differences between the two methodologies have been increasingly taken for granted with the subsequent evolution of Continental philosophy in the twentieth-first century, that is, from its early German roots in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Martin Heidegger. The editors summarize the key thrust of their project in this way:

Questions regarding the relation between hermeneutics and phenomenology are of central significance for contemporary philosophy in general and continental philosophy in particular . . . How one conceives the relation will depend on what one understands to be the meaning of the relational terms as well as where one is situated in either or both of these traditions. A multi-perspectival volume on hermeneutics and phenomenology -- one that illuminates how the relation is viewed from both hermeneutical and phenomenological standpoints -- is thus much needed. Only on the basis of such a re-evaluation can one further reassess the significance of both traditions for contemporary philosophy. (2)

To provide a road map for this "re-evaluation," they divide the volume into three parts, comprised of fourteen essays. The first part includes essays on the origins of phenomenology and hermeneutics in the 19 th century, focusing on the contributions of G.W.F. Hegel and Wilhelm Dilthey. Both Part II and Part III are more extensive, incorporating several essays addressing the complementary angles of "Phenomenology in Dialogue with Hermeneutics" and "Hermeneutics in Dialogue with Phenomenology," respectively. To this end, the editors draw upon a diverse range of topics written by a contingent of internationally recognized scholars, including Jean Grondin, Dermot Moran, and Lawrence K. Schmidt. The attempt to organize and present the themes of this volume houses a self-referential problem. Specifically, the task undertaken therein is already an interpretation, that is, harboring its own set of presuppositions ( Voraussetzungen ), thereby borrowing from and implicating the insights of the hermeneutical method. The essays are themselves "interpretations" in the broadest sense, and are in their formulation and practice implicitly owing to hermeneutics. The self-reflexivity that is implied in this overall project, however, does not undermine its importance, as much as provides impetus for further questioning. After all, one of the primary insights of hermeneutics, going back to Heidegger, is that is necessary to begin somewhere, to provide a point of departure from which to proceed. What is crucial, on the other hand, is acknowledging these presuppositions.

To offer a historical perspective, Heidegger was the first philosopher of the twentieth-century to establish the link between phenomenology and hermeneutics. As an assistant to the phenomenologist, Husserl, the "youthful" Heidegger also immersed himself in Dilthey's hermeneutical writings, only to discover that the interpretation is grounded in the fundamental ontological structure of what it means to be human as Da-sein. This insight was the first step in a "breakthrough" by which Heidegger would forge a new philosophical method by combining phenomenology with hermeneutics; he embarked upon an original pathway (Denkweg ) via a "hermeneutic phenomenology," in contrast to his mentor Husserl's brand of transcendental phenomenology.

In seizing upon the question of being as the foremost philosophical concern, Heidegger presented an innovative view of what for Husserl initially constituted the phenomenon or the "thing itself." If the phenomenon coincides with being ( das Sein) , and, to paraphrase Heraclitus's characterization of physis , "loves to hide," then what pervades the manner of the self-manifestation of the phenomenon is precisely the opposite, namely, that it does not show itself but rather withdraws into concealment. If the phenomenon has this inherently elusive character, it cannot be approached "head on" or straightforwardly, but rather can only be addressed by proceeding along a circuitous path. Enter hermeneutics. In retrospect, Heidegger devises a strategy that can address the elusive character of the phenomenon, which can attend to and reconcile with this tendency toward concealment, in order that its opposite or unconcealment can prevail. Hermeneutics then becomes the entryway into phenomenology, which can transform the latter by introducing de-construction as the strategy to confront the concealment of the phenomenon, i.e., in order to expand the circle of inquiry so that being can be brought to self-manifestation. Rather than proceed in a linear way, phenomenology, through the direction of hermeneutics, addresses the phenomenon along an elliptical path, which must "question-back" to the origins as the prerequisite for proceeding forward, and thereby retrace its presuppositions in order to broaden the horizon of what is understandable and can be philosophically understood.

As the key to his "breakthrough," Heidegger recognized that phenomenology must become hermeneutical, if it is to address the topic of being in a concrete manner. Perhaps in hindsight he did not emphasize as strongly the flipside, namely, that to become philosophical , hermeneutics requires phenomenology, in order that its interpretive strategies do not become free-floating, merely literary and textual inventions divorced from human experience (and "ek-sistence" as well). Even in the case of his Biblical hermeneutics, Rudolf Bultmann, Heidegger's colleague at Marburg, recognized that the self-understanding of the believer in his/her concrete existence is required in order to demythologize Christianity.

Hermeneutics guides the shift in phenomenology as a presuppositionless science in Husserl's sense to an enterprise that is immersed in and seeks to reclaim its presuppositions. Certainly, within the 19 th century, Dilthey paves the way for the development of hermeneutics, as Hegel first did for phenomenology, by introducing that term into the philosophical lexicon as endemic to his dialectical method. In "Dilthey's Path," Jean-Claude Gens outlines the historical background from which Dilthey developed hermeneutics as the key to grounding the human sciences. "The demand to ground the human sciences in this original experience plainly brings Dilthey back into proximity not as much with Humboldt as with Schleiermacher's thesis, according to which it is 'feeling,'" which provides access to the 'immediacy' of human experience. (28). Understanding as Verstehen is predicated anew upon such experience, which adds a new level of concreteness from which the meanings relevant to our humanity can be developed, pre-understood, and interpreted.

In "Phenomenology and the Givenness of the Hermeneutical Circle," James Mensch addresses this development in three major figures of continental philosophy: Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Following Dilthey's lead, Heidegger recognized originally that understanding ( Verstehen ) requires presuppositions. But understanding always precedes from what is pre-understood, entailing a set of presuppositions, which must be unraveled in the process of rendering that which is understandable, that is, in an act of interpretation. The "back and forth" movement of understanding, which for Heidegger is grounded in ecstatic temporality, proceeds along a circular path, giving rise to the hermeneutical "circle." According to Mensch, the existential, ontological grounding of human understanding defines only one aspect of this circularity. Heidegger's student, Hans-Georg Gadamer, appeals to the 19 th century thinker, Friedrich Schleiremacher, in order to resurrect the importance of the "relation of part to whole" to define the trajectory of human understanding (69). This relation becomes explicit through the reciprocal process in which the interpreter and his/her tradition become mutually determining, thereby situating understanding within its pre-given, historical-cultural horizon. The circle of understanding thereby extends to the relation between the Western tradition and the interpreter, thereby separating interpretation and history from their exclusive dependence on their ontological origins. "Implicit in the above is a radical historization of our understanding of texts" (69).

Gadamer's reaffirmation of hermeneutics as focused on texts takes another turn in Paul Ricoeur's attempt to mediate "conflicting" interpretations, which occur across multiple fields of science and literature, theology and psychoanalysis. Appealing to such thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, Ricouer identifies a "hermeneutics of suspicion," which is inherently self-critical. The self-critical character of interpretation honors truth, not by trying to monopolize it on ontological grounds, but by allowing for a "plurality" of interpretations that must always be open to revision (71). Ricoeur reaffirms Heidegger only to the extent that ontology still requires hermeneutics, that is, insofar as the emphasis is always on the "meaning of being" ( Sinn von Sein ), rather than on being as an ideational concept (71).

Despite the German roots of both phenomenology and hermeneutics (as well as their marriage), we must also acknowledge the evolution that occurs in such French thinkers as Merleau-Ponty, as well as Ricoeur. John Arthos addresses this development in his essay, "Ricouer's Unrecognized Debt to Merleau-Ponty." On the surface, Ricoeur's diversification of hermeneutics on different fronts seems to bypass the phenomenological focus of the problem of embodiment that defines Merleau-Ponty's thought. Yet, as Arthos argues, Ricoeur's emphasis on "meaning" and its inscriptions in various discourse, e.g., from theology to psychoanalysis, must still be anchored in the pulse of emotion, feeling, and exposure of the "flesh" that characterizes the overall pathos of human condition. This connection becomes evident as far back as Ricoeur's famous declaration in Fallible Man that the human being "is the joy of the 'yes' in the sadness of the finite." As Arthos states: "Then there is the shared attitude that I have called pathos. . . . Between action and passion, production and reception, we are creatures of the in-between, shuttling back and forth endlessly" (119).

In "The Hermeneutical Turn of Phenomenology in the Young Heidegger's Thought," Sophie-Jan Arrien identifies the germ of a new methodology through Heidegger's development of formal indication. Heidegger's breakthrough hinges on recognizing that "meaning" cannot simply be conceptualized through theoretically derived categories, but must instead originate through the enactment of lived experience, specifically, the significations that accrue to the temporal, lived-through enactment of human facticity. Arrien summarizes the evolution of Heidegger's hermeneutics in this way:

The significances ( Bedeutsamkeiten ) of life are lived; they express themselves and are always apprehended in this life. From a phenomenological-hermeneutical standpoint, this immersion of worldly significances in the primordial mobility of life, which they necessarily express, precludes the possibility of 'freeze-framing' this or that lived experience of meaning. Thus, grasping them cannot result from a pure eidetic intuition, from a pure vision. It rather necessitates a comprehensive intuition, or, more precisely a hermeneutical intuition . (145-146)

Formal indication then becomes possible as a way to employ the example of individual experiences to implicate universal, ontological structures. Specifically, the lived instance of the individual's facticity implicates care ( Sorge ) as the being of human existence, along with the grounding of its "meaning" in temporality, and, reciprocally, the self-questioning of what it means "to be" grants the inquirer access to the phenomenon, i.e., being ( Sein ), to what shows itself, via his/her factic life experience .

In the penultimate essay, "Traces of Endings: The Time of Last Things," Felix Ó Murchadha asks the question as to the "meaning" that the concern for the " eschaton " can have in a secular world, which for the most part discounts the possibility of a transcendent presence impinging itself within the temporal realm. This is a major problem for any phenomenology of religion, which seeks to establish an experiential basis in order to render meaningful the manifestation of the Divine to the human. Any promise of ultimate fulfillment, under the auspices of what Immanuel Kant called "hope," seems to imply a linear vision of a perfection that can only be idealized but never given. Murchadha argues that the hermeneutical detour around this predicament lies in outlining the temporal modality of a dispositional shift, which allows the ecstatic moment to serve as a proxy for an eschatological transformation. This dispositional shift is the human capacity to be awakened to and overtaken by the power of love, thereby "catching up," as it were, to the entirety that time has to offer in an instantaneous flash. Through the facticity of the believer, a rift occurs in this linear progression of time, breaking open a nexus between finitude and eternity. "Events of ending are momentary, reflected in the instantaneous change of the affective shift of disposition toward the world as such" (186). As insightful as this account may be, more could be unpacked, as to how a hermeneutic, phenomenological vision of the eschaton can successfully transform the metaphysically-based grammar of traditional religious discourse.

Geniusas and Fairfield have assembled an exceptional collection that frames a key problem about the relation between hermeneutics and phenomenology, and reopens this topic on multiple fronts. Indeed, I have the highest praise for this volume. Its contribution could, perhaps, never have been more timely than today.

Apologetics

Scott oliphint, church history, peter lillback, todd rester, new testament, brandon crowe, vern poythress, old testament, stephen coleman, iain duguid, jonathan gibson, elizabeth groves, pastoral theology, john currie, rob edwards, alfred poirier, systematic theology, mark garcia, david garner, hermeneutics: examples i.

by Vern Poythress

Dr. Vern Poythress lectures in his New Testament course on biblical interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary.

Art: Raphael, The Baptism of Christ, circa 1517

Hermeneutics is a branch of knowledge normally dealing with the interpretation of literary texts such as the Bible or philosophical works. Knowing what hermeneutics is and how to apply it to your study of the Bible will be key in understanding Scripture and proclaiming it to others.

At this point, it would be helpful to walk through how to explain passages using other verses. As a result, let’s look at Isaiah 52:11-12 and 2 Kings 14:1-20 as examples.

Isaiah 52:11-12

We’ll start with Isaiah 52:11-12, “Depart, depart, go out from there; touch no unclean thing; go out from the midst of her; purify yourselves, you who bear the vessels of the Lord. For you shall not go out in haste, and you shall not go in flight, for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard.”

You would try to discern the basic message of these verses through exegesis and through rhetorical analysis, where you’ll try to understand how the passage as a whole fits together. Here’s what you want might come up with as a summary — depart from the unclean for you will be protected by God. And then you also have to head toward application.

Now, this is an area where I want to focus a little more because it’s one of the most challenging areas to do for the Old Testament in particular.

How a Bible Cross-Reference System Works

A good starting point in Cross-Referencing for the Old Testament in particular would be either redemptive history or topical relationships. This starting point I would cross-reference is quite valuable, and here, I’m showing you a page from the reference edition of the ESV Bible.

The ESV is not alone in including a cross-reference system. This list of verses will be in the margin or, in some additions, it will be at the bottom. Many Bible editions use this method to connect similar verses and facilitate greater understanding. Knowing how this system works is key to hermeneutics.

Essentially, there are superscript letters in the text that refer to the margin, where related verses are listed. For example, the letter “w” in this edition is attached to the first word “depart.” The verse numbers are also in the margin to help you find the references.

And then, you’ve got a list including Isaiah 48:20 and some verses from Jeremiah. Now, we have a picture of how this passage fits into a larger context. The verses are often related in terms of the overall, broad scale of historical time.

How to Examine Cross-Reference Verses

Let’s take a closer look at the related verses of this hermeneutics example and how they can help us understand Isaiah 52:11-12.

Isaiah 48:20

Isaiah 48:20 says, “Go out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea, declare this with a shout of joy, proclaim it, send it out to the end of the earth; say, “The Lord has redeemed his servant Jacob!”‘

You can presuppose this verse by saying that the depart language in Isaiah 52 is referring to departing from Babylon. Where do I get that? There’s nothing in the context, immediately, that says exactly where we are departing from. So, this preceding verse helps and you can see the language of redemption is associated with this physical departure.

If you are starting from ground zero, this verse is a significant clue to understanding the salvific significance of these verses in Isaiah 52.

Jeremiah 50:8-9

Now let’s take a look at Jeremiah 50:8-9: “Flee from the midst of Babylon, and go out of the land of the Chaldeans, and be as male goats before the flock. For behold, I am stirring up and bringing against Babylon a gathering of great nations, from the north country. And they shall array themselves against her. From there she shall be taken. Their arrows are like a skilled warrior who does not return empty-handed.”

This is a prophecy of the Medo-Persian Empire and Cyrus. Of course, you have to fill it out historically. But there’s actually a conquest of Babylon. So, the departure turns out to be departing from that, which is being judged by God. This is also significant when we eventually come to apply this verse to the New Testament era.

Jeremiah 51:6-8 and 51:45

Jeremiah 51:6-8, “Flee from the midst of Babylon; let every one save his life! Be not cut off in her punishment…” You didn’t get that out of Isaiah, but it’s contrasting more in black and white terms. You see what it means to remain in the community of idolatry.

The verse continues, “for this is a time of the Lord’s vengeance, the repayment he is rendering her. Babylon was a golden cup in the Lord’s hand, making all the earth drunken…” So, the judged are used by the Lord to judge others. It goes on, “the nations drank of her wine; therefore the nations went mad. Suddenly Babylon has fallen and been broken; wail for her!”

And then, Jeremiah 51:45. “Go out of the midst of her, my people! Let every one save his life from the fierce anger of the Lord!” Similar point, isn’t it?

Zechariah 2:6-7

Okay, let’s look at Zechariah 2:6-7, “Up! Up! Flee from the land of the north, declares the Lord.” The context is Zechariah’s post-exilic prophet.

The context is going back from Babylon. “Flee from the land of the north,” — from the standpoint of Israel, you get to Babylon by going up north, not straight across the desert —”For I have spread you abroad as the four winds of the heavens, declares the Lord.” That is in exile.

“Up! Escape to Zion, you who dwell with the daughter of Babylon.” Okay, there’s specifically the location.

“For thus said the Lord of hosts, after his glory sent me to the nations who plundered you, for he who touches you touches the apple of his eye: ‘Behold, I will shake my hand over them, and they shall become plunder for those who served them. Then you will know that the Lord of hosts has sent me.’” So basically, it’s the judgment on Babylon and deliverance for God’s people.

2 Corinthians 6:17

Now, go back to the cross-references. It says sighted in 2 Corinthians 6:17. This is significant because the other verses have thematic relations, which you can clearly see. This one is an actual citation according to the editorial judgment. I think they’re right, but it’s a bit of a free citation because it’s combined with other things.

For context, the general theme is the distinctiveness of a Christian and not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. The verse says, “Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing.” That’s clearly from Isaiah 52:11. “Then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.” This material is taken from other parts of Isaiah.

Now, this is very important because it’s a New Testament application, and eventually, you want to reckon with that. It shows the relationship between physical departure from Babylon, the spiritual issue of the land of idols that is going to receive the Lord’s punishment, and spiritual redemption out of darkness into light, out of the power of Satan into the power of God, are other contrasts that Paul brings out.

Let’s start with 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?” So, it’s all these contrasts.

You’ve already got a significant hint about where you’ll go over the application of the necessity of Christians to act in accord with the holiness that is fitting for God’s people. Now, you don’t want to go directly there, lest your sermon just be a moralistic lesson about being pure. But you’re given this New Testament connection, which you certainly want to reckon with.

Revelation 18:4

Let’s take a look at Revelation 18:4. “Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, ‘Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues.”

What’s the context? It’s the Babylon of Revelation, the woman, the prostitute. It’s a significant clue because it ties in with the themes of Christian purity and the temptation of involvement in the immoralities of the world. Babylon is a picture of the sexual immorality of lust for power and money. So, this stuff goes into that picture of Babylon that needs to be in the reckoning of Christian people.

Revelation 18:4 is not a quotation directly from Isaiah 52:11. It’s probably more directly pulled from Jeremiah 50:51, which has an extended discussion of the fall of Babylon. Some other parts of that are picked up in Revelation 17:18.

Okay, so that’s the end of our list for the theme of departing. But that isn’t the only cross-reference.

Cross-Referencing “You Who Bear the Vessels of the Lord”

The next one is marked with the letter “x” — “You who bear the vessels of the Lord” — which you can find in the margin. We will use the same process as above to explore this line.

Ezra 1:7-11

Ezra 1:7-11 is a rather extended discussion of the vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem. Cyrus brings them out, they are given to Mithredath, the treasurer, and then they are ported back to the land of Palestine as part of the return.

So, what’s the relationship here? Well, it’s pretty straightforward, in this case, that the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled in Ezra — even in detail, that they are going to be vessels that the Levites are going to be carrying. And so Ezra is just following that, historically, what is from this standpoint of Isaiah, is prophecy looking forward. You also need to reckon how Ezra is related to the Christian era.

Examining “For You Shall Not Go Out in Haste”

The next cross-referenced line is Isaiah 52:12, “For you shall not go out in haste…” Let’s take a look at this section based on the verses in the margin.

Exodus 12:11 and 33 and 39

Exodus 12 is about the last of the plagues and the celebration of the Passover. In Isaiah, you’re dealing with the second exodus. If you didn’t realize that at first, then these cross-references would clue you in.

Exodus 12:11, “In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord’s Passover.” Well, just that part, you shall not go out in haste, that’s the point. So this exodus in Isaiah is superior to the first exodus. I think that’s part of the point.

The other verses from Exodus 12 — 33 and 39 — make similar points about haste:

• Verse 33: “The Egyptians were urgent with the people to send them out of the land in haste.”
• Verse 39: “And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had brought out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not wait, nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves.”

So, with this much information, we really ought to go through all the rest of the cross-references, but I think you see how it works.

Drawing Conclusions

With the information from the cross-references, we’re ready to draw conclusions about some of the structures and logical structures that relate Isaiah forward to the Christian era.

The departure in Isaiah is a physical return from Babylon. It’s related to several elements, including:

• The exodus.
• The purification at the first coming of Christ where John the Baptist says, “Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire of purification.”
• The Second Coming, related to the fall of Babylon in Revelation 18.

The purification of the First Coming is also related to the way Christians should be living, mentioned in 2 Corinthians 6.

When we gather all these elements and put them in a structure of Redemptive epics, we’re on the way to appreciating how the Book of Isaiah is analogically related to several different things at once.

Now, we can understand the theme of clean and unclean things in the Pentateuch because that is there in Isaiah 52, “Don’t touch what is unclean.” Of course, we know that’s symbolic for sin and righteousness now, and we don’t have to work our way through Leviticus, especially.

So, how now does this fit into the rest of Isaiah with its various themes, such as the polemic against idols and the picture of comprehensive salvation? Well, Babylon is a land of idolatry, so you want to take that into account.

The picture of comprehensive salvation is such a wonderful image that is unpacked in Isaiah 40 through 66. And you can look backward to Isaiah 52:7-10 for still further connections, or forward to Isaiah 52:13. This is a gold mine because Isaiah 52:13 is the beginning of the suffering servant passage. We think of it as Isaiah 53, but it actually starts in 52:13, right after our passage.

So, the things you see in these verses help you look forward to the New Testament in pretty obvious ways. This passage itself is actually quoted by Paul in 2 Corinthians 6.

The application is going to be in personal individual separation from sin. That’s undoubtedly part of what 2 Corinthians 6 has in mind. But also, potentially, ecclesiastical separation. The temple of God versus the idols of the heathen. Social and cosmic dimensions of purification.

In the new Heaven and new Earth, there will be perfect purity. Now, our job is not to kill non-Christians before the time, right? We’re evangelizing them and they will undergo spiritual death and resurrection if they receive the Gospel. But this gospel has cosmic dimensions and there will be a final judgment and a final comprehensive cleansing.

So, that gives you just a taste then of how you would work through a particular passage and uncover connections that would help you proclaim the passage in a Christian context.

2 Kings 14:1-20

I’ve deliberately, with this one, picked a passage that’s not so promising. It’s probably a slow start:

“In the second year of Joash the son of Joahaz, king of Israel, Amaziah the son of Joash, king of Judah, began to reign.”

Already, we’re picking up in the middle of a narrative and you have to reckon with the fact that, ever since the separation after the death of Solomon, the rest of 1 Kings and all of 2 Kings follows the interweaving of the northern and southern kingdoms. So, this is the start and you date one through the reigns of the other, which is what’s happening here.

“His mother’s name was Jehoaddan of Jerusalem. And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, yet not like David his father. He did in all things as Joash his father had done. But the high places were not removed; the people still sacrificed and made offerings on the high places. And as soon as the royal power was firmly in his hand, he struck down his servants who had struck down the king, his father.”

In chapter 2, verses 20 and 21 there was a conspiracy and they killed Joash, the preceding king, the father of Amaziah. So that’s what it’s talking about.

“But he did not put to death the children of the murderers, according to what is written in the Book of the Law of Moses, where the Lord commanded, ‘Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. But each one shall die for his own sin.’

Then Amaziah sent messengers to Jehoash, the son of Jehoahaz, son of Jehu, king of Israel, saying, ‘Come, let us look one another in the face.’

And Jehoash king of Israel sent word to Amaziah king of Judah, ‘A thistle on Lebanon sent to a cedar on Lebanon, saying, ‘Give your daughter to my son for a wife,’ and a wild beast of Lebanon passed by and trampled down the thistle. You have indeed struck down Edom, and your heart has lifted you up. Be content with your glory, and stay at home, for why should you provoke trouble so that you fall, you and Judah with you?’

But Amaziah would not listen. So Jehoash king of Israel went up, and he and Amaziah king of Judah faced one another in battle at Beth-shemesh, which belongs to Judah. And Judah was defeated by Israel, and every man fled to his home.

And Jehoash king of Israel captured Amaziah king of Judah, the son of Jehoash, son of Ahaziah, at Beth-shemesh, and came to Jerusalem and broke down the wall of Jerusalem for four hundred cubits, from the Ephraim Gate to the Corner Gate. And he seized all the gold and silver, and all the vessels that were found in the house of the Lord and in the treasuries of the king’s house, also hostages, and he returned to Samaria.

Now the rest of the acts of Jehoash that he did, and his might, and how he fought with Amaziah king of Judah, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel? And Jehoash slept with his fathers and was buried in Samaria with the kings of Israel, and Jeroboam his son reigned in his place.

Amaziah the son of Joash, king of Judah, lived fifteen years after the death of Jehoash son of Jehoahaz, king of Israel. Now the rest of the deeds of Amaziah, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah? And they made a conspiracy against him in Jerusalem, and he fled to Lachish. But they sent after him to Lachish and put him to death there.

And they brought him on horses; and he was buried in Jerusalem with his fathers in the city of David. And all the people of Judah took Azariah, who was sixteen years old, and made him king instead of his father Amaziah. He built Elath and restored it to Judah, after the king slept with his fathers.”

How to Interpret This Passage

So, what do you do with this passage? Part of the difficulty of this passage is that it is not a clear moral lesson. If you want to do moralistic exemplary preaching, this is not a good place to start because Amaziah is clearly the chief character and he’s not completely good or completely bad.

The narrative starts out saying he’s basically a good king, though the high places were not taken away. There’s a lot of work to be done about the historical environment because people were worshipping on the high places, and in my judgment, that was okay until the centralization of the altar in Solomon’s time, although Solomon is now dead and gone. The temple is the one place where you ought to worship, but the people kept on doing this stuff.

Amaziah didn’t prevent it, though there’s no hint that he did it himself. And he starts out with a good beginning because he puts the murderers to death. America has deep reservations and scruples about capital punishment, but the Mosaic law says that it’s the right penalty for first-degree murder like this.

I think that is the just penalty. He did it and the writer makes a point of the fact that he didn’t put the children to death, which sometimes happened, by the way, in the ancient Middle East. You can see some stuff in a little of Hammurabi that’s quite unjust, that does this kind of thing, but Amaziah didn’t. So far so good, right?

But then you come to this episode with Jehoash. What do you do with that?

The Bible Leaves a Lot Unsaid

The Bible leaves unsaid a lot of things that modern American readers are curious to have answered. A classic example is wondering what was going on in Abraham’s mind when he was taking Isaac up to Mount Moriah to sacrifice him. And we have all these interests, all these psychological speculations, like how it must have been awful for Abraham, but the book is just silent.

This silence is part of a strategy that modern literary theorists call show rather than tell. You show what happens rather than fill the narrative with commentary about its significance, and the reader is supposed to pick things up. One of the ways you pick up information is through moral evaluation.

There are exceptions, but these narratives often do not explicitly evaluate the moral failings or successes. Even with this thing about the Law of Moses, you have to infer it’s a good thing.

It’s pretty easy to say, “Well, if he’s keeping the law of Moses, that’s a good thing.” But the narrator doesn’t say in so many words that it’s a good thing. In many cases, you find out if an action is good or bad because of the consequences.

Finding the Divine Narrator’s Point of View

Sometimes, there will be speeches that, though they’re not technically inspired speeches, they show, as it were, the divine narrator’s point of view. Jehoash, who is the king of Israel, is not a particularly righteous king. In fact, none of the northern ones are all that good. But in this case, I think he virtually becomes a mouthpiece for God. Why else is there this rather long speech?

You have to get clues from why something is included. Well, it’s included because it happened, right? But there are lots of details that happened that aren’t included. So the fact that something is included is significant.

And in view of the result with Amaziah, I think there are significant clues that he should have listened. Verse 11 even says “But Amaziah would not listen.” That is a kind of turning point before the climax.

You can analyze the verses to figure out the meaning. The climax is the battle, right? The resolution is Amaziah’s defeat, which is a tragic resolution in this case because you’re seeing things from the point of view of the southern kingdom and Amaziah. But that’s a turning point.

This result implies, presumably, that he should have listened, which also makes me think that Jehoash at this one point in his life put his finger on what was actually happening, which is exceptional because he’s not actually a good king. He basically tells Amaziah, “You’re proud because you defeated the Edomites. But now, why get yourself in trouble?” It’s actually good advice, but Amaziah wouldn’t listen.

Now, we’ve got a kind of moral evaluation. Even though Amaziah is, in many respects, a good king, this is one point at which he fails. If he was really a good king, he could have tried to consult a prophet, right? Or consult his wise men.

There are other things he could have done. But it’s not as if it’s a gross and obvious violation of the Mosaic Law, like some of the other kings get into. It’s a failure in wisdom. He has one failure, and it has consequences that extend for the rest of his reign.

The Passage’s Moral Lesson

This passage is about life. I mean, it doesn’t work as a moral example, right? It’s life because you can live a comparatively good and peaceful life and sometimes make one mistake, and it’s devastating. Or maybe God is merciful, and you don’t suffer a lot from it.

You want to wrestle with the texture of this particular passage. Think about what it means for somebody like Amaziah and his subjects. Because here, they’ve had a modicum of Justice. They’ve had reasonable things from Amaziah. And then when he does this, it’s not simply that he fails, but people doubtless die in battle. It doesn’t say how many.

Jehoash breaks down the wall of Jerusalem, which is basically leaving the city exposed. It’s like killing off police officers.

He takes all the gold and silver, including the vessels that were found in the house of the Lord. So, Amaziah also brought shame to the name of God, and things happen to the dedicated vessels that should never have happened. Again, God lets it happen, but it is a clear failure in the sight of God as well as a failure with the people and hostages.

Also, think about what Jehoash taking hostages means. If you are a prominent citizen in the southern kingdom, it’s you and your family that Jehoash goes after, right? He takes a daughter or a son back to Samaria and puts them with some of the other people from the northern kingdom, and you have no guarantee you’ll ever see your child again.

It is just tragic. And the point of the hostage is, if the southern kingdom ever attacks or becomes obstreperous with relation to the northern kingdom, the northern kingdom says, “Stop it at once or I’ll slaughter these sons and daughters that are here under my control.” So you never know when that son or daughter is going to be slaughtered.

It’s such an agonizing situation. And why did it happen? Because of Amaziah. Part of the power of this passage, I think, is precisely that it is this mixed situation, in such a way, it’s kind of like our situations. When I read it, I think about a young woman that I knew years ago.

I knew her years ago and she was a single woman. She got pregnant through a boyfriend. She hoped that they would get married. The guy was a total jerk and she was left high and dry. She repented. She was a Christian woman. She repented and she didn’t get an abortion, praise the Lord for that. Okay, so she had the child, a nice little daughter. But who’s going to marry her?

Alright, single woman, with a young child. And she suffered the consequences of one sin. And not a particularly grievous sin. You can understand, you can sympathize, though sin is sin. But you can understand the situation where she’s with a boyfriend and she gets tempted and one sin. And this is life, you see. And God forgives her, praise the Lord, right? But that picture, that young woman, is a picture of all of us in some respects because sins have consequences. Life is serious in that way.

How 2 Kings 14:1-20 Points to Jesus

And now, you can connect the passage to Christ by saying that what you need is not only a good king, but a perfect king who makes no mistakes. Salvation comes through a perfect king who doesn’t leave this trail of things that have to be set right in his wake. He’s the one who is setting things right.

The young woman is still living with the consequences. As far as I know, she’s still alive and eventually got married. But you know, it was just years and years later.

This is a passage, I believe, that points forward to Christ. But it points forward to Christ in a complex way of your seeing the struggles with the tragedies and burdens and agonies of life in these hostages.

It’s just terrible continuing suffering when you think about it. And for us, we are all, in a sense, hostages of the devil until Christ redeems us. He has broken the power of death. He has broken the power of evil. Even though we still struggle with it to this day, we’ve come to a point where our king is no longer Amaziah.

Read More On application , evaluation , exemplar , Interpretation , isaiah , Salvation

Dr. Poythress (PhD, Harvard; DTh, Stellenbosch) is professor of New Testament interpretation at WTS.

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