Hermeneutics
from 1819
Understanding anything means already having assumptions about it, so interpretation is a circle you enter rather than a ladder you climb.
- Active
- from 1819
- Where
- Berlin, Marburg, Heidelberg and Paris
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
The hermeneutic circle: the whole is understood through its parts and the parts through the whole, and there is no neutral place outside to start from. Prejudice is not the obstacle to understanding but its condition.
What it held
Hermeneutics began as a discipline for reading difficult texts — scripture, then law, then classical literature — and became a claim about understanding as such.
Schleiermacher made the first move by turning a set of rules for particular hard passages into a general theory: misunderstanding is the normal case, and interpretation is what has to be done everywhere rather than only where a text has gone obscure. Dilthey then made it the method of the human sciences, against the assumption that explanation in physics is the model for all knowledge.
Gadamer's Truth and Method is the decisive statement, and its argument is counterintuitive. The Enlightenment treated prejudice as what stands between us and a text. Gadamer argues that we could not understand anything without the assumptions our history has given us — they are what make a question possible at all. Understanding is a fusion of horizons: not escaping your position to reach the text's, but a conversation in which both shift.
Ricoeur added the hermeneutics of suspicion, naming Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as three thinkers who read for what a text conceals rather than what it says, and spent his career trying to hold that alongside a hermeneutics of trust.
How it argued
Working the circle deliberately: revising an initial expectation against the parts, then rereading the parts against the revised whole, with the interpreter's own position treated as evidence rather than noise.
What it was arguing against
The Enlightenment's treatment of prejudice as pure obstacle, positivism's claim that the natural sciences supply the only model of knowledge, and the idea that a text has one determinate meaning fixed by its author's intention.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the fusion of horizons leaves any way to say a reading is wrong — Habermas pressed this hard, arguing that tradition can carry distorted communication that hermeneutics has no leverage against, and Gadamer's reply did not settle it. Whether authorial intention has any authority at all, which divides Gadamer from Betti and Hirsch.
Common misconceptions
That the hermeneutic circle is a vicious circularity to be escaped. Heidegger's point is that the task is to enter it in the right way, not to get out of it. And prejudice in Gadamer's sense means pre-judgement — what you bring — rather than bigotry, and the two senses are constantly confused.
How it began
Biblical and legal interpretation, generalised by Schleiermacher in Berlin lectures from 1819 into a theory of understanding rather than a set of techniques for hard cases.
What became of it
Living, and among the most widely applied philosophies outside philosophy — in law, theology, literary study, historiography, nursing and qualitative social research.
Lasting influence
Legal interpretation, where the circle describes what judges actually do. Qualitative research methodology, where hermeneutic phenomenology is a named method with its own literature. Literary theory, and the whole argument about what a text's meaning is.
Why it still matters
Anyone reading across a gap of time, language or culture is doing this, and the question of whether your own position is a defect to be corrected or the thing that lets you see at all is not going away.
Put another way
A conversation in which neither party ends up where they started.
Where to start
Gadamer's Truth and Method, part two, on the rehabilitation of prejudice. It is the argument the reputation rests on.
The surprising bit
Gadamer published Truth and Method at sixty, having written almost nothing until then, and lived to a hundred and two — long enough to see the book become one of the most cited works of twentieth-century philosophy.
In their own words
The prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgements, constitute the historical reality of his being.
Understanding is always interpretation.
Connections
- Answers
- Lebensphilosophie, Phenomenology
- Opposed by
- Vienna Circle, Structuralism
- Influenced
- Post-Structuralism
- Parallel to
- Evidential Learning (Kaozheng)
The verdict
The tradition that took the thing standing between you and understanding and argued that it is what makes understanding possible.