Hermeneutics

Origins of Modern Hermeneutics

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) provided the foundation for modern hermeneutics. Because he saw hermeneutics as a science for understanding any utterance in language, hermeneutics moved from a concern with the analysis of texts from the past to the problem of how a person from one culture or historical period grasps the experiences of a person from another culture or period (known as general hermeneutics).

For Schleiermacher, understanding has two dimensions—grammatical and psychological. Grammatical interpretation corresponds to the understanding of language itself. Psychological interpretation attempts to recreate the act that produced the text and involves placing oneself within the mind of the author in order to know what was known and intended by this person as he or she wrote. Schleiermacher argued that the interpreter, as an outsider, is in a better position than the author to grasp and describe the “totality.”

From its background in scriptural and other textual interpretation, hermeneutics came to be seen as the core discipline for understanding all great expressions of human life, cultural and physical. The instigator of this transition, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), argued that the study of human conduct should be based on the method of understanding (verstehen) to grasp the subjective consciousness of the participants, whereas the study of natural phenomena should seek causal explanation (erklären). He rejected the methods of the natural sciences as being appropriate for the human sciences and addressed the question of how to achieve OBJECTIVITY in the human sciences. He set out to demonstrate the methods, approaches, and categories—applicable in all the human sciences—that would guarantee objectivity and VALIDITY. Whether he produced a satisfactory answer to the question is a matter of some debate.

In his early work, Dilthey hoped that the foundation of the human sciences would be based on descriptive psychology—an empirical account of consciousness devoid of concerns with causal explanation. He believed that psychology could provide a foundation for the social sciences in the same way that mathematics underlies the natural sciences. All human products, including culture, were seen to be derived from mental life. However, Dilthey came to realize the limits of this position and eventually moved from a focus on the mental life of individuals to understanding based on socially produced systems of meaning. He came to stress the role of social context and what he called “objective mind”—objectifications or externalizations of the human mind, or the “mind-created world,” that are sedimented in history, in what social scientists now call culture.

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