Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary (Hardback)

Chapter One

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 the subtilitas 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 to Truth 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...