Chapter One
HERMENEUTICS DUTT: Professor Gadamer, the term "hermeneutics," generally associated
with your path of thinking, was not originally a philosophical
term. When one looks up "hermeneutics" in a dictionary, the definition
is basically "the art of interpretation" [Auslegungskunst art of explication]
or "a teaching about interpretation" [Auslegungslehre]. When hermeneutics
is defined in this way, it has a long history. So could I first ask you to
discuss this history, which can be called the prehistory of philosophical
hermeneutics?
GADAMER: If one goes back to the original meaning of the Greek
term hermeneia, and "hermeneutics" as meaning translation and interpretation,
this depicts quite clearly the situation in which early Christianity
found itself in relation to Greek philosophy, and how Augustine
in the De Doctrina Christiana tried to translate into conceptual terms the
way one was to speak of the Christian message. Homo timens Deum, voluntatem
eius in Scripturis sanctis diligenter inquirit [Man, fear God and
diligently inquire into the Scriptures]. You know this famous text. Now
this idea [of translating Scripture into conceptual terms, as Augustine
did] was accomplished in a different form by the Scholastics in the Middle
Ages through their wonderful intellectual achievement in receiving
and making use of Aristotelian metaphysics. But only with Luther and,
above all, Melanchthon was hermeneutics accorded a new function in relation
to reading the Bible, a function they described in terms of the tools
provided by Aristotelian rhetoric. With this step, hermeneutics [as the
discipline of interpreting Scripture with the help of rhetorical principles]
took its place alongside the explication of the law in the new jurisprudence
of the time. This marks a clear boundary that separates hermeneutics
from the form taken by modern science with its mathematical development.
With the spread of a humanistic reading-culture, hermeneutics
was developed as an aid to the interpreter in understanding sentences
and texts as such.
In the Romantic era Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel showed
that all understanding is always already interpretation [Auslegung, explication].
You will recall that previously, in the eighteenth century, one had
distinguished the subtilitas intelligendi, power of understanding, from subtilitas
explicandi, the power of interpretation. Romanticism, however,
recognized the unity of these two moments in the process, and by virtue
of this the universal role of language. In other words, one should not
imagine that interpretive concepts only enter into one's understanding
subsequently, as if one drew them out of a linguistic storeroom, so to
speak, and applied them as needed to the "thing to be understood." Such
a conception is completely wrong, and there is really nobody today who
holds it. No, understanding does not reach out and take hold of language;
it is carried out within language.
Then, in our century, it was Heidegger who took the decisive step in
thought, following the lead of Dilthey. Heidegger asserted that in all understanding
there is a third moment involved in the process: that of understanding
oneself-Sich selbst-Verstehen; this is a kind of application,
which in the era of German pietism [eighteenth century] was called thesubtilitas applicandi. Following the lead of Heidegger, I myself used this
third moment in order to demonstrate the limits of the scientific concept
of method. For the hermeneutic process involves not only the moments
of understanding and of interpretation but also the moment of application;
that is to say, understanding oneself is a part of this process. Now I
am willing to admit that the concept of Applikation, a concept that is accidental
and offered itself historically, is artificial and misleading. But I certainly
had not anticipated that one could think that, according to it, understanding
should be applied to something else. No, I mean that it is to
be applied to oneself.
DUTT: Along with the moment of application contained in all understanding
you have now indicated an important point which interests
me very much and which I would like to pursue further. Although we
have agreed to speak about some of the results of your work, could we
perhaps take a moment to discuss your presuppositions? You yourself
have mentioned your teacher, Martin Heidegger. In the history of hermeneutics,
the "hermeneutics of facticity," which Heidegger developed
within his ontological standpoint of questioning, signifies an innovation
that has been foundational for your own approach. The writing of the
history of philosophy quite legitimately takes away the novelty of the
sudden appearance of the new by identifying all the preliminary stages
and advance indications. This holds true in the case of Heidegger also,
for whom Dilthey is the most important of the names one could suggest
in relation to hermeneutics. You yourself have also just mentioned him.
Could I now perhaps link my question about Heidegger's hermeneutics
of facticity with the question of your own relationship to Dilthey's analyses
of understanding?
GADAMER: The debate in hermeneutics that is going on today is,
as a matter of fact, dominated by the question of Dilthey and his influence.
How are we to assess this influence in relation to the development
of hermeneutical philosophy? Well, certainly Dilthey's work mediated
essential stimuli to the thinking of the young Heidegger, and he used
these to further develop and reshape Husserlian phenomenology. But
what Dilthey was dealing with was psychology. Only after Heidegger
had developed a hermeneutics of facticity-that is to say, a hermeneutics
of the human being as concretely existing here and now-and published
this in Being and Time in 1927 did the Dilthey school through Georg
Misch begin to be interested in the development of hermeneutics.
Since that time people have even gone so far as to call hermeneutics
the true koine [common language] of philosophizing in our time. Now
why is it that hermeneutics came to have such a special meaning in Heidegger-although
even he later rejected this designation? My answer is:
that Heidegger and only Heidegger opened our eyes to the fact that what
we were dealing with here is the concept of being. Certainly Heidegger
would not have been led to see Being in the horizon of time and, on the
basis of the movement of human existing, to think that the human being
projected its future and came from out of its heritage, without the stimuli
he received from Dilthey, from Bergson, and from Aristotle. So Heidegger
designated understanding as an existentiale; that is, as a categorical
and basic determinant of our being-in-the-world. When we see the
matter from this standpoint, we realize that Heidegger did not have as
his aim either a theory of the humanities and social sciences [Geisteswissenschaften]
or a critique of historical reason, which were the tasks Dilthey
had posed for himself.
Of course, the task still remained of taking the philosophical awakening
of Heidegger and applying it to the Geisteswissenschaften and to show
its validity there. This is the task to which I have tried to contribute.
What I tried to do, following Heidegger, was to see the linguisticality of
human beings not just in terms of the subjectivity of consciousness and
the capacity for language in that consciousness, as German idealism and
Humboldt had done. Instead, I moved the idea of conversation to the
very center of hermeneutics. Perhaps a phrase from Hölderlin will make
clear to you what kind of turn this move involved. Because Heidegger
could no longer accept the dialectical reconciliation with Christianity
that had marked the whole post-Hegelian epoch, he sought the Word
through Hölderlin, whose words "Seit ein Gespräch wir sind/Und hören
können voneinander" [Since we are a conversation/And can hear one
another] inspired him. Now Heidegger had understood this as the conversation
of human beings with the gods. Perhaps correctly so. But the
hermeneutic turn, which is grounded in the linguisticality of the human
being, at least also includes us in Hölderlin's "one another," and at the
same time it contains the idea that we as human beings have to learn from
each other. We do not need just to hear one another but to listen to one
another. Only when this happens is there understanding.
DUTT: In your masterwork Truth and Method of 1960, both strands
of your work that are indebted to Heidegger are represented: your discussion
of understanding in the humanities and social sciences in the second
part and in the third part of that work, your grounding of hermeneutics
in a theory of language. The first part of your book developed a
hermeneutical perspective on the experience of art. With your permission,
I would like to put this general structure aside and take up the part
that has found the greatest international resonance, that is, the part on
the humanities and social sciences. In relation to this the introduction toTruth and Method announces that it will undertake "the quest for an understanding
of what the humanities and social sciences [Geisteswissenschaften]
really are beyond their own methodological self-awareness and
take up what links them with the totality of our experience of the world"
(GW 1: 3/TM xxiii). Could you explain what change of perspective you
are suggesting? How would it differ from the present methodological
thematization of these disciplines?
GADAMER: The term "method" in the title of my book already
points toward this difference. I was not trying to do what Betti in his debate
with Croce and Gentile tried to do, namely, to extend the methods
originally belonging to theological and juristic hermeneutics into other
disciplines in order to ensure that the concept of method had the widest
possible scope of application; no, on the contrary, what I sought to show
was that the concept of method was not an appropriate way of achieving
legitimation in the humanities and social sciences. What is involved is
not just a matter of using certain procedures to deal with a certain region
of objects. The humanities and social sciences, whose honor I am trying
to defend by offering a more appropriate theoretical justification, really
belong in the same line of succession, and have the same heritage as philosophy.
They may be distinguished from the natural sciences not only
through their ways of proceeding but also through the preliminary relationship
they have to their subject matter; that is, through their participation
in the heritage that they renew and articulate for us again and
again. This is the reason I have suggested that the ideal of objective
knowledge which dominates our concepts of knowledge, science, and
truth, needs to be supplemented by the ideal of sharing in something, of
participation. We participate in the essential expressions of human experience
that have been developed in our artistic, religious, and historical
tradition-and not only in ours but in all cultures; this possible participation
is the true criterion for the wealth or the poverty of what we produce
in our humanities and social sciences. One could express this in another
way by saying that philosophy is deeply embedded in all the humanities
and social sciences, but this is never completely conceptualized.
DUTT: Your critics have seen in your argument a rejection of
methodology in general. Some of them have interpreted the title of your
book to mean "truth versus method."
GADAMER: This interpretation conveys the one-sided impression
that I think there are no methods in the humanities and social sciences.
Of course there are methods, and certainly one must learn them
and apply them. But I would say that the fact that we are able to apply
certain methods to certain objects does not establish why we are pursuing
knowledge in the humanities and social sciences. To me it seems self-evident
that in the natural sciences one pursues knowledge ultimately
because through them one can stand on one's own feet: one can orient
oneself and through measurement, reckoning, and construction eventually
gain control of the surrounding world. By doing this we can-at
least this is their intention-live better and survive better than if we just
confronted a nature that is indifferent to us. But in the humanities and
social sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] there can be nothing like such ruling
over the historical world. The humanities and social sciences bring
something different into our lives through their form of participation in
what has been handed down to us, something that is not knowledge for
the sake of control [Herrschaftswissen], yet it is no less important. We
customarily call it "culture."
DUTT: What you are talking about is a thinking that goes way beyond
the methodological self-understanding of the humanistic [geisteswissenschaftlichen]
disciplines .
GADAMER: . to their philosophical content. Which relativizes
the concept of method but does not cancel it out.
DUTT: This clarification is important.
GADAMER: Of course, otherwise we are faced with false alternatives.
As tools, methods are always good to have. But one must understand
where these can be fruitfully used. Methodical sterility is a generally
known phenomenon. Every once in a while, for instance, we find
tried and true or merely fashionable methods applied in a field where
they are simply unproductive. What does the truly productive researcher
do? What does an Ernst Robert Curtius or a Leo Spitzer do? Are they
creative because they have mastered the methods in that field? Applying
method is what the person does who never finds out anything new, who
never brings to light an interpretation that has revelatory power. No, it is
not their mastery of methods but their hermeneutical imagination that
distinguishes truly productive researchers. And what is hermeneutical
imagination? It is a sense of the questionableness of something and what
this requires of us.
By the way, the question of whether there is also a hermeneutics appropriate
to the natural sciences needs to be taken seriously. In the philosophy
of science since Thomas Kuhn this point has been widely discussed.
I think this is above all because natural scientific methods do not
show us how to apply the results of natural scientific work to the practice
of living life in a rational way. As Kant has said: There is no rule for how
one learns to apply the rules correctly.
DUTT: Indeed, one finds a hermeneutic structure in the way the
fields of the natural sciences are formed.
Continues.
