Hermeneutics
“The method pervading the human sciences is that of understanding and interpretation. All the functions and truths of the human sciences are gathered in understanding. At every point it is understanding that opens up a world. On the basis of lived experience and self-understanding and their constant interaction, there emerges the understanding of other persons and their manifestations of life. Here too we are not dealing with logical construction or psychological analysis but with analysis of interest for a theory of knowledge. Our task is to establish what the understanding of others can contribute to historical knowledge.”
Wilhelm Dilthey, Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason
What is Hermeneutics?
The name of Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods, gave rise to hermeneuein, ‘to interpret', and hermeneutike (techne) is the 'art of interpretation'. It became important after the Reformation, when Protestants needed to interpret the Bible accurately. Medieval hermeneutics ascribed to the Bible four levels of meaning: literal, allegorical, topological (moral), and anagogical (eschatological). But the Reformation insisted on literal or grammatical' exegesis and on the study of Hebrew and Greek. Modern hermeneutics falls into three phases.
1. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the great Protestant theologian and Plato scholar, gave in lectures, from 1819 on, a systematic theory of the interpretation of texts and speech. (Another Plato scholar, Friedrich Ast (1778-1841), had in 1808 published Elements of Grammar, Hermeneutics and Criticism.) The interpreter's aim is to 'understand the text at first as well as and then even better than its author: "Since we have no direct knowledge of what was in the author's mind, we must try to become aware of many things of which he himself may have been unconscious, except in so far as he reflects on his own work and becomes his own reader. A text is interpreted from two points of view: grammatical', in relation to the language in which it is written, and psychological', in relation to the mentality and development of the author. We cannot gain complete understanding of either of these aspects, since we cannot have complete knowledge of a language or a person: we ‘move back and forth between the grammatical and the psychological sides, and no rules can stipulate exactly how to do this.’ We cannot fully understand a language, a person, or a text, unless we understand its parts, but we cannot fully understand the parts unless we understand the whole. Thus at each level we are involved in a hermeneutical circle, a continual reciprocity between whole and parts; a significant 'text can never be understood right away … every reading puts us in a better position to understand since it increases our knowledge'. (It is the range of relevant knowledge, not circularity alone, that precludes definitive interpretation. Our understanding of Hand me my clubs!' on a golf-course is circular, since only the whole utterance disambiguates hand' and 'clubs', but it is definitive and complete.)
2. Schleiermacher's biographer, Wilhelm Dilthey, extended hermeneutics to the understanding of all human behaviour and products. Our understanding of an author, artist, or historical agent is not direct, but by way of analogies to our own experience. We relive past decisions, etc. in imaginative sympathy.
3. Martin Heidegger learned of hermeneutics from his theological training and from Dilthey. Theological hermeneutics considers the interpretation of ancient texts; Dilthey is concerned with understanding in the cultural, in contrast to the natural, sciences, and again mainly, if not exclusively, with the interpretation of the products of past societies. In Heidegger's Being and Time, hermeneutics acquires a deeper and wider sense. It is concerned with the interpretation of the being who interprets texts and other artefacts, who may become, but is not essentially, either a natural or a cultural scientist: the human being or Dasein. Heidegger's phenomenology is hermeneutical, rather than, like Husserl's, transcendental. Our approach to Dasein must be hermeneutical since the fundamental traits of Dasein and its world' are not, as Husserl supposed, on open display, but hidden, owing in part to their very familiarity, in part to Dasein's tendency to misinterpret and obscure its own nature and such features of itself as mortality. Understanding Dasein is more like interpreting a text overlaid by past misinterpretations (or penetrating the self-rationalizations of a neurotic) than studying mathematics or planetary motions. Hermeneutics no longer presents rules for, or a theory of, interpretation; it is the interpretation of Dasein. But hermeneutic phenomenology gives an account of understanding, since a central feature of Dasein is to understand itself and its environment, not in the sense of disinterested interpretation or of explicit assertion, but of seeing the 'possibilities' available to it, seeing a hammer, for example, as something with which to mend a chair: 'All pre-predicative simple seeing of the invisible world of the ready- to-hand is in itself already an "understanding-interpreting" seeing.
It is only because Dasein has such 'pre-understanding' that it can interpret alien texts and understand itself in an explicit philosophical way. Heidegger's later works rarely mention hermeneutics, but interpret poetic and philosophical texts in a more traditional sense. His hermeneutics differs from Derrida's: for Heidegger, words 'show' something beyond themselves, namely being, and we need to think about this, not simply about the text, in order to understand what is said. Being and Time influenced Gadamer, and Rudolf Bultmann's (1884-1976) demythologizing interpretation of the Bible.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. Hermeneutics plays a role in a number of disciplines whose subject matter demands interpretative approaches, characteristically, because the disciplinary subject matter concerns the meaning of human intentions, beliefs, and actions, or the meaning of human experience as it is preserved in the arts and literature, historical testimony, and other artifacts. Traditionally, disciplines that rely on hermeneutics include theology, especially Biblical studies, jurisprudence, and medicine, as well as some of the human sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
Within philosophy, however, hermeneutics typically signifies, first, a disciplinary area and, second, the historical movement in which this area has been developed. As a disciplinary area, and on analogy with the designations of other disciplinary areas (such as ‘the philosophy of mind’ or ‘the philosophy of art’), hermeneutics might have been named ‘the philosophy of interpretation.’ Hermeneutics thus treats interpretation itself as its subject matter and not as an auxiliary to the study of something else. Philosophically, hermeneutics therefore concerns the meaning of interpretation—its basic nature, scope and validity, as well as its place within and implications for human existence; and it treats interpretation in the context of fundamental philosophical questions about being and knowing, language and history, art and aesthetic experience, and practical life.
Schleiermacher and the Art of Interpretation
In accord with a common account of the modern historical origins of hermeneutics, recognizably philosophical contributions to hermeneutics originate with Friedrich Schleiermacher. Closely associated with German romanticism, Schleiermacher developed his hermeneutics in the first decades of the nineteenth century. He proposes a universal hermeneutics that pertains to all linguistic experience, and not just to the interpretative concerns of specific disciplines. Schleiermacher characterizes hermeneutics as the art of interpretation, maintaining that this art is called for not simply to avoid misunderstandings in regard to otherwise readily intelligible discourses. Rather, the art of interpretation is necessary for discourses, paradigmatically written texts, in regard to which our interpretive experience begins in misunderstanding. Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is multifaceted but keyed to the idea that the success of understanding depends on the successful interpretation of two sides of a discourse, the ‘grammatical’ and ‘psychological’. By the ‘grammatical’ side, he means the contributions to the meaning of the discourse dependent on the general structure of the language it uses. By the ‘psychological’ side, he has in view the contributions to the meaning of the discourse dependent on the individual author’s or creator’s mind. Whereas the ‘grammatical’ side of a discourse is a matter of general linguistic structures, the ‘psychological’ side finds expression in linguistic forms that would traditionally be associated with style.
Schleiermacher indicates that discourses can be differentiated by whether they are predominated by the ‘grammatical’ or ‘psychological’ and he develops methodological considerations appropriate to these sides. At the same time, though, he recognizes that the interpretation of each side is reciprocally informed by the other. Interpretation aims at the “reconstruction” of the meaning of a discourse, but, in this, the task is “to understand the discourse just as well or even better than its creator,” a task which, accordingly, is “infinite”.
Justification of the Human Sciences
The history of the modern origins of hermeneutics includes distinctive contributions by Wilhelm Dilthey. Whereas Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is closely associated with German romanticism, Dilthey’s considerations may be grasped in connection with historicism. ‘Historicism’ refers to a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual movement that no longer treated “human nature, morality, and reason as absolute, eternal, and universal,” but sought, instead, to grasp these as “relative, changing and particular,” shaped by historical context. Dilthey’s overall (though never completed) project was to establish a critique of historical reason that would secure independent epistemological foundations of research in the human sciences, that is, the sciences distinguished by their focus on historical experience. In this, Dilthey’s concern is to defend the legitimacy of the human sciences against charges either that their legitimacy remains dependent on norms and methods of the natural sciences or, to his mind worse, that they lack the kind of legitimacy found in the natural sciences altogether.
Dilthey associates the purpose of the human sciences not with the explanation of ‘outer’ experience, but, instead, with the understanding of ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis). In an important essay, “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” Dilthey affirms that the understanding achieved in the human sciences involves interpretation. But this means that hermeneutics, grasped as the theory of the universal validity of interpretation, does more than lay out the rules of successful interpretive practice. Hermeneutics clarifies the validity of the research conducted in the human sciences. Indeed, he ventures that the “main purpose” of hermeneutics is “to preserve the general validity of interpretation against the inroads of romantic caprice and skeptical subjectivity, and to give a theoretical justification of such validity, upon which all the certainty of historical knowledge is founded” (Dilthey, “The Rise of Hermeneutics,” Section V).
While Schleiermacher and Dilthey are central for the modern historical origins of hermeneutics, hermeneutics has also been shaped by contributions from other figures, such as Friedrich Ast. And hermeneutics has also been influenced by ideas about meaning, history, and language developed in the period by figures such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schlegel.
Contemporary Hermeneutics
Contemporary hermeneutics is demarcated from the modern historical origins of hermeneutics by the influence of a new use Heidegger makes of hermeneutics in his early phenomenological inquiries into human existence. In turn, contemporary hermeneutics remains largely shaped by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics,’ which he describes as an attempt further to develop and expand on Heidegger’s influential breakthrough. Contemporary hermeneutics also receives contour from Paul Ricoeur’s contributions to hermeneutics, from philosophical controversies with critical theory and deconstruction, and from the emergence of postmodern hermeneutics. Further developments include innovations in hermeneutics made by some philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition and the development of hermeneutics in ethical and political philosophy. Most recently, further developments include a renewal of interest in normative dimensions of interpretive experience, and responses in hermeneutics to a recent rise of interest in realism.
Hermeneutics and Existence
The principal impetus for contemporary hermeneutics, then, is a new use Heidegger makes of hermeneutics in his early phenomenological inquiries into what, in Being and Time, he calls the ‘being’ or also, the ‘existentiality,’ of human ‘existence’ (Heidegger, Being and Time, § 7, section C). Heidegger’s philosophy is oriented by the question of the meaning, or, sense of being (die Frage nach dem Sinn des Seins), but as he argues in Being and Time, inquiry into this question itself begins with inquiry into the sense in which human beings can be said to be or exist (Heidegger, Being and Time, §§ 1–4). Heidegger defines inquiry into the sense of the being of human existence as hermeneutical, that is, as a matter of self-interpretation. Within this context, Heidegger leaves behind the idea that hermeneutics is primarily concerned with the methods or foundations of research in the arts and humanities. Rather, as he argues, such hermeneutical research is itself only possible because human beings are, in their very being, interpretive. For Heidegger, understanding is a mode or possibility of human existence, and, indeed, one that is projective, oriented toward the interpretive possibilities available to us in the situations in which we find ourselves (see especially Heidegger, Being and Time, §§ 31–32). Accordingly, inquiry into the sense of the being of human existence is enacted in our own attempts to understand our own being, as we may interpret our being through the course of our affairs.
Heidegger’s use of hermeneutics in the context of his early phenomenological inquiries into human existence can be described as a breakthrough in the historical movement of hermeneutics (Gadamer, Truth and Method, Part II.3). But Heidegger’s considerations also continue to be a subject of considerable discussion, and his insights remain at issue, to a greater or lesser degree, in a range of current philosophers and debates. Heidegger’s later works are important for hermeneutical considerations of history, language, art, poetry, and translation, as well. As Heidegger develops, however, he comes to claim that his paths of thinking can no longer be served by hermeneutics, and his thought comes to be characterized by new and different orientations.
The Hermeneutics of Facticity
Heidegger clarifies the role played by hermeneutics in his early phenomenological inquiries into human existence through a critical reconsideration of Husserl’s classical phenomenology, or more specifically, a critical reconsideration of the aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology that rely on his transcendental and eidetic methods.[4] In this, Heidegger opposes his own ‘hermeneutical’ phenomenology against Husserl’s ‘transcendental’ approach.
Husserl’s phenomenology is guided by epistemological considerations, and his principal concern is to find a priori foundations for research in the sciences. Husserl believes that modern science, despite all methodological and technological sophistication, has failed to account for the basic epistemic foundation on which it relies. He maintains that this foundation may be discerned in consciousness—not, however, in any factual consciousness or ego, but rather in the transcendental ego and its a priori eidetic structures. He argues that phenomenological inquiry into these structures proceeds methodologically on the basis of what he refers to as the ‘epoché.’ The epoché is a universal suspension of the ‘natural attitude,’ that is, belief in the existence of objects. The epoché thereby allows us to redirect our awareness to objects in their appearance as such. In contrast with Cartesian methodological doubt, the epoché is not a doubt about the existence of mind-independent reality, but, instead, a ‘bracketing’ of our belief in existence that frees us to focus on a priori eidetic structures of appearance (see, for example, Husserl, Ideas I, §§ 27–32).
Heidegger’s critical reconsideration of Husserl’s phenomenology is guided not by epistemological concerns, but, instead, fundamental ontological ones. Heidegger agrees with Husserl that modern science has failed to account for the grounds on which it relies, and he also turns to phenomenology in order to bring these grounds into focus. Yet, Heidegger believes that phenomenology concerns an origin much deeper than consciousness, the transcendental ego, and its eidetic structures. For him, phenomenology contributes to ontology, first of all, by bringing into focus the being, or, ontological structures, that comprise human existence itself. For the early Heidegger, these structures involve what he calls ‘facticity.’ By this, he does not mean that human existence is a fact. Rather, he means that the ontological structures that comprise human existence are found not in consciousness, but, instead, in our being in the world—or, as he determines this terminologically, being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein) (Heidegger, Being and Time, § 12 ff.). Thus, our attempts to understand ourselves (or, for that matter, to understand anything else) remain bound by structures of being in the world. Specifically, our attempts to understand ourselves (or anything else) remain conditioned by pre-structures that determine in advance which possibilities of a situation we find significant, and by moods that determine in advance our attunement to a situation we are “thrown” into, that is, a situation that affects us even though we have not chosen to be in it (Heidegger, Being and Time, §§ 28–34).
Heidegger, on the basis of his consideration of the facticity of human existence, concludes that it would be a fool’s errand for phenomenological inquiry to proceed on the basis of Husserl’sepoché. After all, the epoché merely allows us to reflect on a priori eidetic structures of consciousness, when what we should be after are structures of our being in the world. Heidegger argues that phenomenological inquiry should begin instead with consideration of these structures of being in the world as they come into view through our own individual involvement in the world. Heidegger’s phenomenology proves to be self-interpretation, as it seeks to clarify the structure of being in the world on the basis of nothing else than our own individual experience of being in the world. Thus, phenomenology unfolds as the explication of the structures of being in the world that, initially at least, we experience more or less vaguely, more or less tacitly, in our own everyday involvements with things and others. In Heidegger’s critical reconsideration of Husserl’s phenomenology, hermeneutics is a possibility of human existence itself and, indeed, a possibility that aims at our explication of ourselves in our very existence.
Difficulties of Self-Interpretation
Heidegger maintains that such self-interpretation of existence is fraught with difficulties. One reason, he believes, is that structures of being in the world are made inconspicuous by the very involvement in the world that they enable. He famously makes this case in the course of his phenomenological considerations of the way we find human existence “initially and for the most part,” namely, in the undifferentiated “averageness” of everyday existence (Heidegger, Being and Time, 43; § 20). In this averageness of everyday existence, Heidegger argues, the structure of the world is given through the purposes we have, the referential relations that comprise the situations in which we attempt to realize these ends, and the things we employ in the service of these ends. In the averageness of everyday existence, our access to this structure is granted not through reflection on it but, instead, through our ordinary affairs, as we cognize the structure indirectly through the things (Zeuge, useful things or tools) that we employ to carry out our projects (Heidegger, Being and Time, §§ 14–18; see also Heidegger, Ontology, § 20). Yet, as he argues, in this form of cognizance, “circumspection” (Umsicht), the structure of the world itself recedes from view precisely by our absorption in those projects (Heidegger, Being and Time, 69).
Heidegger maintains that the self-interpretation of existence is made difficult, moreover, because being in the world always also entails being with others. In this, Heidegger argues that in the averageness of everyday existence, we tend to interpret ourselves not by what differentiates us from others, but, instead, by what can be attributed indifferently to anyone. Such interpretations may be attractive because accessible to anyone, but they come at the price of being distorting and reductive. In the averageness of everyday existence, the sense of self that comes into focus through self-interpretation is not a self in its singular possibilities to be. It is rather a sense of self characterized by circumscribed possibilities, which, for Heidegger, finds expression in the pronoun ‘they,’ or ‘one’ (das Man)—so that we interpret our own possibilities restrictively in terms of what ‘one’ thinks, what ‘one’ does, and no more (see Heidegger Being and Time, § 27; see also Heidegger, Ontology, § 6).
Another, related difficulty of self-interpretation concerns the historical transmission of interpretations. In this, Heidegger maintains that, as interpretations of existence are passed down from tradition, the “original sources” of concrete, existential concern, come to be covered over (Heidegger, Ontology, 59). Indeed, for this reason, Heidegger calls for a “destruction” or, perhaps, ‘de-structuration’ (Destruktion) of interpretations of being and the being of existence that have been passed down from the history of Western philosophy (see Heidegger, Being and Time, §6). This, to be sure, is a call that has important implications for the study of the history of philosophy, one that has been influential for philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, John Sallis, and Claudia Baracchi.
See: Hermeneutics, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Twentieth-Century Ontological Turn in Hermeneutics
J. Dyer, in International Encyclopedia of Education (Third Edition), 2010
The philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is influenced by Dilthey’s attempt to re-live the experiences of past human expressions, but he rejects Dilthey’s subjectivism, claiming that the entirety of historical experience cannot be represented in historical self-understanding. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity, presented in his work Being and Time, recognizes that understanding is primarily about practical experience, not conceptual meaning. Heidegger argues that there is no getting outside historial situatedness. The world is made intelligible through our everyday, practical and pre-reflective projections onto the world of our presumptions, expectations, and categories, the horizon of experience that informs understanding. Understanding is neither a methodology nor a realm of experience but the human mode of being, or Dasein, a means of orienting ourselves in the world that is limited by the facticity of historical existence. Reflective interpretation is therefore always already shaped by this horizon of understanding. While understanding discloses the world as a totality in which being is at home, we cannot access anything beyond. Interpretation brings understanding to reflective consciousness by revealing both the facticity of the world and its limits, for there is no understanding of otherness without interpretively appropriating it into our horizon. This is the crux of Heidegger’s hermeneutical situation of existence: understanding and interpretation mediate each other and there is no escaping that mediation. The understanding of our mode of being is mediated by the world, and understanding the world is mediated by our mode of being, how the world is disclosed to us. Dasein has a circular hermeneutical structure whereby interpretations alter our understanding, which is modified by continually re-interpreting the totality of world. Heidegger’s hermeneutics is ontological because it is structured by Dasein. The meaning of things is tied neither to linguistic, propositional truth values nor to the alien historical horizon of past experiences but to the ongoing relational process of the world’s disclosure to us. His hermeneutic circle of understanding and interpretation is existential and productive. However, it fails to address the problem of the unappropriable, unintelligible other.
Heidegger’s difficulty is addressed by his student Gadamer (1900–2002), who asks in his fundamental work Truth and Method what we can do with things that cannot be intelligibly appropriated into our world. Gadamer holds that our understanding is formed by the prejudices of our horizon of understanding, but that these prejudices are the basis of intelligibility, or understanding and misunderstanding. Prior to any reflective identification of meaning there is the world-disclosing interaction of understanding and interpretation revealed through language. That is, we are linguistic beings who recognize, interpret, and change in relation to the world’s self-disclosure to us through language, a process of understanding with four components.
First, Gadamer includes others in his hermeneutic circle of understanding and interpretation. Understanding a thing is a matter of projecting it onto our horizon of experience; prejudice or, better, tradition mediates rather than obscures understanding. To be is to be practically immersed in a tradition of meanings, values, and expectations that shape understanding. Inevitably, however, tradition cannot fully interpret the thing, throwing understanding back to reflectively modify its grounds of intelligibility. Hitting an interpretive impasse reveals that tradition is limited, but flexible. The hermeneutic circle of understanding and interpretation is a process that constantly discloses and changes the limits of intelligibility. That is, the traditions historically handed down as our horizon of understanding bear the potential to be modified, crucial to the possibility of further understanding, and in modifying our traditions we open their potential toward understanding the alien object.
Second, this does not imply Heidegger’s appropriation of the object into our world because interpretation expands tradition by critically reconsidering its limits. Engagement with retractable objects begins a dialog with the other that requires our openness to the unrealized potential effects of history. History has an authority as both part of and more than, preceding and informing tradition such that tradition is a never completely realized basis of intelligibility that is open to change. Gadamer calls it effective history, the continual expansion of tradition that enriches self-understanding; in understanding the other, we change.
Thus, thirdly, Gadamer describes the mode by which we engage with the other as play. Without appropriating the unintelligible, understanding plays with it by submitting to or fully immersing itself in its structure as we would in, say, a game or conversation. Play is an open relation to the other which begins interpretation, suggesting that the process of interpretation and understanding is dialogic and open-ended.
Fourth, this means that playing with the unintelligible productively opens our horizon of understanding or prejudices to another’s. It enables a fusion of horizons. The hermeneutic circle is now an interplay of effective history and responsible interpretation that neither absorbs the other into one tradition nor denies the possibility of new understanding. In this respect, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is an indefinitely ongoing process of dialogical transformation of both object and subject, or text and reader. Like Heidegger, Gadamer’s account can be considered idealist because it deals only with the human world. But Gadamer’s is also a practical philosophy of enriching our world.
Gadamer’s hermeneutical ontology was rejected entirely by Emilio Betti (1890–1968) who charges Gadamer with destroying the classical hermeneutical ideal of objective understanding by denying the independent objectivity of the object. Texts, for instance, are objective representations of an author’s intentions with only one true meaning that is not connected to the interpreter’s subjective horizon. Returning to Schleiermacher, Betti insists that interpretation must recreate the author’s intended meaning. Similarly, E.D. Hirsch (b.1928) argues that Gadamer ignores the possibility of right and wrong interpretations. Gadamer, however, is not engaged in distinguishing intepretation rules but in analyzing the structure of understanding. His hermeneutics is ontological, outlining the structure of being itself.
Jurgen Habermas (b.1929) critically considers Gadamer’s hermeneutics with reference to the problem of validity. Habermas’ famous debate with Gadamer concerns Gadamer’s emphasis on the authority of tradition at the expense of critical judgment. Habermas holds that hermeneutics requires a distinction between distorted and true communication found only in the standards of validity of communicative reason. Gadamer responds that hermeneutics is universal because situatedness in a tradition is the possibility condition of any intellectual inquiry and the revision of tradition is thereby critical. Still, Habermas insists that because inquiry is also always directed by sets of interests (practical, technical, or emancipatory), no theoretical inquiry is universal. Intellectual inquiry which aims for self-knowledge must engage in a critical hermeneutics to account for ideological distortions of tradition. This is the critique of ideology found only in the critical social sciences because they have the goal of emancipation. The critique of ideology questions the traditions it takes up, exposing and amending distortions. Karl-Otto Apel (b.1922) shares Habermas’ concern with the emancipatory character of the critical social sciences; Apel calls for an ideal communicative community similar to Habermas’ complete communicative competence, namely a regulative ideal of freedom underlying the critique of ideology that questions history’s authority. Without a critical hermeneutics, Gadamer’s fusions of horizon can be an unrecognized fusion of misunderstandings.
Excerpt from The Hermeneutic Transformation of Phenomenology
by Daniel L. Tate
The intersection of phenomenology and hermeneutics in the twentieth century creates a new trajectory within contemporary continental philosophy. But although we speak of the departure of hermeneutics from phenomenology, we must recognize the phenomenological impulse of hermeneutics as well. During the 1920s, Martin Heidegger redirects Husserl's phenomenology toward a "hermeneutics of facticity that examines the concrete, historical life of human being rather than the eidetic structures of transcendental consciousness. This hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology comes to fruition in the existential-ontological analysis of Dasein in Division I of Being and Time. The radicality of this hermeneutic thrust is most pronounced where Heidegger articulates his ontological conception of understanding in relation to the "hermeneutic circle." Moreover, the hermeneutic implications of this analysis carry deep into Division I of that work, where Heidegger uncovers the temporality of Being-there as "Care" and the "historicity" of authentic existence. Hans-Georg Gadamer takes up the banner of hermeneutics later abandoned by his mentor. By drawing out the implications of Heidegger's ontology of understanding for the human sciences, Gadamer lays out the basic traits of philosophical hermeneutics in Truth and Method. Pursuing further Heidegger's emphasis on the historicity of human being, Gadamer places a new emphasis on the belonging of understanding to tradition. This insight challenges the concept of historical understanding as the acquisition of objective knowledge. Conceived instead as a mode of historical being, understanding is more deeply characterized by its participation in tradition as an event of transmission. Influenced by Heidegger's later linguistic turn, Gadamer stresses the import of language as the medium of tradition and its transmission and thereby completes the "ontological shift" of hermeneutics expressed in his formula "Being that can be understood is language." This survey of the hermeneutic development of phenomenology concludes with a brief review of Gadamer's exchanges with his contemporaries (Betti, Habermas, Ricoeur, and Derrida) highlighting the key points of contention in these debates.
See: The History of Continental Philosophy, Volume 4 Phenomenology: Responses and Developments
The Hermeneutics Reader
“Even the loftiest of mountains begins on the ground.”
