主題：
What is hermenetics and why
should I be interested in it?
主持人：
黃筱慧 東吳大學哲學系副教授
主講人：
Richard E. Palmer
日期暨時間：
五月三十日星期日下午三時至五時
地點：
台灣大學哲學系系館一樓會議室（羅斯福路四段一號）
本會網址：http://www.hfu.edu.tw/~cpatw/
本會信箱：chinphil2004@yahoo.com.tw
聯絡電話：（02）29046349 傳真：（02）29088628
本會會址： 242台北縣新莊市中正路510號輔仁大學文華樓413室
What is Hermeneutics and Why is it Important?
By Richard E. Palmer
MacMurray College, IL, USA
Outline
I. What is hermeneutics?
1. Historical Introduction to Disciplinary Hermeneutics
2. Development of a Philosophical Hermeneutics
3. The Contribution of Martin Heidegger
4. The Contribution of Hans-Georg Gadamer
II. Why is hermeneutics important?
[specifically the philosophical hermeneutics
of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)]
The philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer does the following:
1. Redefines hermeneutics
2. Redefines the experience of encounter of
with a text, especially a classical text
3. Offers a new definition of truth in art and in the humanities
4. Lays the foundation for a new aesthetics and poetics
5. Contributes to dialogue and negotiation theory
6. Offers a critique of the limits of method and science
7. Puts forward a philosophical critique of modernity
8. Sets an example for all of hermeneutic openness
for everyone
Opening Remarks
It is a great honor to be invited to give this
lecture. As you know, I am offering a mini-course in hermeneutics here
at this University right now where the matters I
will discuss here
in this lecture under “What is hermeneutics” and “Why is it important”
are explained at greater length. For instance, I gave a whole lecture on the
history of hermeneutics before the emergence of modern philosophical
hermeneutics. And there were lectures on the development of philosophical
hermeneutics and the contributions of Heidegger and Gadamer. What I offer here
is something of a condensation of that course. It is not over, of course. I
will give four lectures next week on Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy, for
which the lectures this week were only an introduction! The best is yet to
come! There is still room for a few professors to join the class and enrich
our discussions.
Now to our topic for today. I will divide it into two parts:
1) What is hermeneutics?
2) Why is it important?
I. What is hermeneutics?
Hermeneutics in its most basic sense is the art of interpretation. In earliest recorded times, oracles and oracle bones had to be interpreted. This developed into a skill practiced by a few people, and if they wrote out rules for that skill in a text, that would be hermeneutics. Another early form of text interpretation was the interpretation of dreams. And as early as 2000 BCE the Egyptians wrote out what dreams of certain events, animals, or body parts would mean. In ancient cultures, dreams that were vivid were thought to be predictive of the future, so they were prized. A story in the Old Testament was about a dream of the Pharoah that the Egyptian experts with their catalogs of symbols could not decipher. But Joseph found the meaning—that it predicted seven years of fruitfulness and seven years of famine, so the Pharoah stored up grains for the years of famine and survived it, and Joseph got a good political job as a reward. The epic poems of Homer had to be recited, and that too was an interpretive process requiring a hermeneut. In Roman times, a constitution and laws had to be interpreted as the conditions changed, so hermeneutics was required. And with the coming of Christianity as a religion of the book, hermeneutics was required to find the meaning of the text. Augustine, for instance, distinguished a literal meaning, an allegorical meaning, and a spiritual meaning, and Dante described four levels of meaning in a famous letter to Can Grande Della Scala: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical, the last being the interpretation that led you up to the heavenly meaning.
I think you get the picture. Wherever interpretation was required, there were forms of hermeneutics to help out. Hermeneutics was both the activity of interpretation and the sets of instructions for solving commonly encountered problems. This was especially true of the Protestant break with the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church had a rich tradition of the Fathers, from Augustine to Aquinas, and when interpreters had difficulty, they could consult earlier interpretations and if that did not work, there were the bishops and cardinals. The Jewish tradition is rich with texts and surrounding interpretation, hallakah and haggada. With the Reformation, Luther proclaimed that the Scriptures were clear in their literal meaning (claritas Scripturae) and sufficient (sola Scriptura) and also applied to me (pro me). So the Fathers were not to be consulted or the hierarchy. He declared his independence and that of the church from the authority of the church. But this generated a proliferation of sects, and with it a proliferation of hermeneutical manuals on how to interpret the Bible.
The three major streams of interpretive traditions in modern times were legal interpretation, classical philology (literary), and interpretation of the Bible. Protestants were not afraid to come to the classical philologists for their hermeneutic help or to the great tradition of classical rhetoric. Just so the person or manual did not claim authority from God about the right interpretation. Forms of this type of hermeneutics, that is, manuals that offered help to the interpreter in dealing with difficult passages, have lasted right up to the present day, and hermeneutics is a course offered in seminaries. In this form, hermeneutics is a methodology, a way of solving problems. It cataloged different problems and offered principles for their solution, and since these problems arose for texts within a certain discipline, such as ancient literature, theology, or law, hermeneutics itself was divided according to disciplines.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the idea of a hermeneutics that was trans-disciplinary, a “general” hermeneutics [allgemeine Hermeneutik] was proposed by theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. He even gave lectures on this possibility. A book of his writings on hermeneutics was published in 1938, after his death in 1932 or so, under the title Hermeneutik und Kritik, and in 1958 Heinz Kimmerle, a student of Gadamer, gathered together some aphorisms in Schleiermacher’s handwritten manuscripts and a lecture course under the title Hermeneutik, with half a dozen manuscripts and marginal notations. This gave a fairly good picture of his project of a general hermeneutics. He complained that there was no systematic rigor in earlier hermeneutic manuals. They were an amalgam of rules for particular kinds of textual difficulties. He proposed to have a systematically organized hermeneutics that applied not just to theological texts but others as well. No student took up this project, but his biographer in the 1860s, Wilhelm Dilthey, surveyed theological hermeneutics from the Reformation to the 1860s as the second volume of his biography of Schleiermacher, Leben Schleiermachers.
Dilthey saw in this hermeneutics a methodological
foundation for the humanities based on the process of interpreting texts, since
nearly every discipline in the humanities involved interpretation of texts in
various forms. His approach added historicity and life-philosophy to
Schleiermacher’s, and he defined hermeneutics as the interpretation of any
“expression of the experience of life fixed in writing”[schriftlich fixierte
Erlebnisausdrück]. While the addition of the historicity of life was a
major advance, the basis of basing / building /
setting the discipline of hermeneutics on life-philosophy met with
objections because this seems is /
seemed to some to be an irrational basis.
Heidegger was an admirer of the work of Dilthey and
already acquainted with hermeneutics from his background in theology. He
adopted the historicity idea from Dilthey, but he changed it to the mode of
being of Dasein, giving it an ontological status. Also, he found in
“hermeneutic indications” an access to the meaning of existence as realized by
an existing being. In his early, 1923, lectures he explored the possibility of
a “hermeneutics of facticity” as an ontological access to the sense of being of
an existing being. This became a “phenomenological hermeneutics” in section 7
of his masterwork, Being and Time, 1927. Hans-Georg
Gadamer was Heidegger’s assistant in Marburg during the time he was working on
Being and Time (1923-1927) and carried this understanding of
hermeneutics with him, along with the project of Dilthey, to make hermeneutics
the foundation for a new theoretical start in the humanities. He saw the way in
which Heidegger’s ontological approach overcame the problem of subjectivity by
making the description that of being as a process rather than trying to access
subjective consciousness. When he was
attending In Heidegger’s famous lectures in
Frankfurt on “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he found a powerful case for the
truth of art. So he put together Dilthey’s vision of hermeneutics, with
Heidegger’s early vision of a hermeneutics of facticity, and Heidegger’s
argument for the truth that emerges in the work of art to forge a new
philosophical hermeneutics. He was slowed in his project by the upheaval of
World War II and after the war by the impoverished conditions of students, which
he tried to address by editing inexpensive editions of the classics, so it was
only in the 1950s that he turned to putting together his masterwork, Truth
and Method: Elements of a Philosophical Hermeneutics. The goal of this
work was to make a philosophical case for artistic truth, and by doing so to
restore respect for both the work of art and the humanities. In this work he
systematically described the historicity and linguisticalty of consciousness in
the second part of the book after demonstrating in the first part how truth
comes to stand in the work of art. In the third, he tried to develop an
ontological hermeneutics under the leading strings of the way language inhabits
understanding. In Gadamer hermeneutics came into its own as an ontology of
understanding that rehabilitated and legitimated the claims of art and the
humanities to truth. The instrument with which he did this he called a
“philosophical hermeneutics.”
This brief sketch gives you an idea of what hermeneutics has been since ancient times and is now as a methodology of text interpretation in theology, literature, and law. Then in the romantic period, Schleiermacher tried to forge a “general hermeneutics.” None of his students elected to continue this project, but one did publish a book of his writings on the subject after his death. Our sketch indicated how, decades later, Wilhelm Dilthey, the biographer of Schleiermacher (as his dissertation) took up hermeneutics and by defining it as the interpretation of schriftlichlich fixierte Ausdrucke der Erlebnisausdrucke—“the reading/interpretation of expressions of the experience of life that were fixed in writing”—sought to establish hermeneutics as the methodological foundation of the humanities (in German, die Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of the human spirit). Then Heidegger, in Being and Time, undertook to use hermeneutics as a way to access the meaning of being as understood prereflexively by Dasein, the being [sein] that is there [Da] in the world. It became an “existential hermeneutic of Dasein.” Heidegger abandoned the term by 1930, but his assistant of the 1920s, Gadamer, took up hermeneutics as a means of restoring respect to the Geisteswissenschaften. His Truth and Method, published in 1960 when he was 60 years old, was a major philosophical accomplishment, whose dimensions we will try to indicate in section II, our concluding section.
II. Why is it important?
More specifically:
Why is the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) important?
It is important because of the following eight achievements:
1. Redefines hermeneutics
Before Heidegger and Gadamer hermeneutics was a methodology for understanding texts in religion, literature, and law. It was dedicated to solving problems created by a language gap (in another language), a historical gap (from another period of time), or puzzling expressions that did not go with the rest of the text. With Heidegger, Gadamer redefined hermeneutics as an ontological and existential hermeneutics of Dasein’s own self-understanding. In doing so, he introduced into hermeneutics concepts like historicality, linguisticality, and ontology. But most of all, hermeneutics was connected with an understanding of self, and the event of understanding, a transformative event for the self.
2. Redescribes the experience of encountering a text
Gadamer redescribes and analyzes the experience of
encountering a text. He makes it more temporal and more timely and more
existential as an event. And likewise with encountering an artwork: to
encounter it was a transforming, historical event. Indeed, he provides a
rationale for reading the classics by showing why reading the classics is a
rewarding experience. By making the experience of reading a classic more
rewarding, he also renews interest in antiquity and the classics. (see
lecture 8 on reading a classic text.)
3. Offers a new definition of truth for art and the humanities
Gadamer was one of the few members of the audience in Frankfurt in 1935 who recognized the significance of Heidegger’s description of the encounter with a work of art in terms of an encounter with truth. Truth was redefined by Heidegger as the emergence of truth in the conflict between earth and world. Truth was the unconcealment of the real. Art was the unconcealment of the truth of being-in-the-world in the tension between earth and world. Gadamer saw in this redefinition of truth the chance to restore validity and respect to the arts and the humanities. That was the reason he wrote his masterwork, Truth and Method (1960)—to restore respect to the humanities and the arts. In doing so, he offered a defense of the humanities in an age of science.
4. Lays the foundation for a new aesthetics and poetics
Gadamer in Truth and Method lays the philosophical foundation for a new aesthetics and a new poetics. The earlier aesthetics of Kant had described the encounter with art as an experience of disinterested pleasure in contemplating a beautiful object. It is disinterested in the sense that one did not enjoy the work for some other reason than its beauty. It was a pleasure in the content and form of the work. The work was the product of genius, and fine art maintained a distance from crafts and other forms of art. Gadamer agreed with Kant about the autonomy of the artwork, but he re-introduced the truth of the work of art. He was not the first. Plato made the connection between truth and beauty, and the romantics had reaffirmed this. Hegel had viewed art as the “sensuous appearance of the Ideal,” and thus implied the truth of art. But it was a truth that was also represented in religious symbols and best realized in philosophical concepts. For Heidegger and Gadamer, the truth of the work of art could not be represented in any other way than its presentation in art. It was there that the tension between earth and world emerged with power. Following the lead of Heidegger, Gadamer offers basically a new philosophy of art quite different from others.
5. Contributes to dialogue and negotiation theory
Gadamer adds to his philosophical hermeneutics an element missing in Heidegger: Dialogue. He gets this element from Plato, on whom he wrote his two dissertations: doctoral and habilitation (qualified to teach as a professor). He also adopted several elements found in Plato’s dialogue: the respect for the other speaker, emeneis elenchoi—the good will to recognize that the other could be right and to love truth more than winning. And most important, the search for a common ground with the other speaker. In his debate with Jacques Derrida, he believed that because they were both followers of Heidegger, they could assess their differences on that basis. Unfortunately, Derrida had not read the writings of Gadamer, misinterpreted them, and the attempt at fruitful discussion broke down.
6. Offers a critique of the limits of method and science
In offering a critique of method in the sciences, he
also offered a critique of the limits of technology and science. In doing
this, he followed Heidegger, who made the more extreme statement that “The
scientist does not think!” (Was heisst Denken, or What is
Called Thinking?) What does the scientist do? He
The scientist calculates. He
The scientist extends the existing paradigm. But
a scientist, if he the person is
also a thinker (and that is possible), brings
something new into being. Gadamer in his critique of method gives support to
the participant observation theory in sociology, where the observer becomes part
of the community to see what is going on. Likewise, the nurse, with dimensions
of caring for the patient, goes beyond the usual distance required by science.
Pat Benner, a nurse, has found hermeneutics helpful in her description of the
action of the nurse. Polkinghorn in his essays on philosophy of science also
finds in hermeneutics a way of breaking out of the enchanted circle of
scientific objectivity.
7. Puts forward a philosophical critique of modernity
While Gadamer is no enemy of science, he does have a keen sense of the limits of modernity. This includes a skeptical attitude toward the technology of modern medicine. He died painlessly in his sleep at the age of 102, although he had suffered a crippling case of polio at the age of 22. He kept fit by riding an exercise bike daily after lunch. Indeed, at age 93 he published a book of essays titled, Die Verborgenheit der Gesundheit (1993)—which was translated into English as The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). He followed Heidegger’s critique of modernity in “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” or “The Age of the World Picture,” and resisted modern subjectivism, which he traced back to Descartes. In Gadamer this is especially evident in his debate with Habermas, where the Enlightenment values of Habermas lead, in Gadamer’s opinion, to a rejection of tradition and its values. The Enlightenment faith in endless progress through scientific reason was something Gadamer criticized. Also, he felt that Enlightenment thinkers rejected religion, for instance, as dogma, since it did not conform to the values of scientific reason. I have gone so far as seeing in Heidegger and Gadamer aspects of a postmodern thinking unlike some of the other forms of postmodernity. (See my webpage for a collection of my writings on the topic of postmodernity and hermeneutics.)
8. Sets an example to all of hermeneutic openness
Finally, although Gadamer is often thought of as a
conservative because of his affirmative attitude toward tradition and because of
his critique of enlightenment illusions of progress, he favors a dialogical
openness that is a model for others. His political attitudes are broad and
liberal, and like most intellectuals during the 1930s in Marburg, he had only
contempt for the racism and arrogance of Hitler. In January of this year, I was
invited to participate in an interamerican conference on philosophy. I
presented a paper on Gadamer’s hermeneutical openness as a form of tolerance.
It is being published in Peru, but on the internet, so you can soon get a copy.
In any case, although he appreciates tradition and ancient Greece, and although
he is a critic of many aspects of modernity, he is also a model of tolerance and
liberal hermeneutic openness to other cultures. I remember a conversation he
had with a classical philologist friend in Heidelberg, which I translated in a
recent book, Gadamer in Conversation (2002),
in which he answers the
scholar of Greek culture classical Greek philologist and
at the end of their conversation with the
admonition that there was much yet more to
be learned from Eastern culture than from the Greeks.
With that example of openness, I rest my case!
Thank you!