History Of Hermeneutics Research Paper

The systematization of hermeneutics occurred largely in German-speaking Europe in the course of the nineteenth century, although two earlier thinkers deserve particular mention. Johann Martin Chladenius (1710–59) published in 1742 a general account of interpretation which brought together traditional Aristotelian rhetoric and more recent Enlightenment themes, developing in particular the notion of pointof-view or perspective (Sehe-Punkt), crucial to later philosophy of history and social theory (MuellerVollmer 1985). Second, Giambattista Vico (1688– 1744) formulated the basic principle that our knowledge of what we ourselves have made (individually or collectively) is different from what we have not made. The world of human society and culture is in some sense ‘our’ product.

This distinction, crucial to later hermeneutics and ‘hermeneutic’ social science, between what we know from the inside and what we know because we have learned about it is taken up in a rather more speculative form in Hegel’s differentiation between reason (Vernunft) and the understanding (Verstand ), although the maker here is the world-spirit coming to recognize its own productions (including, ultimately, the world itself ) and its learning processes as rational, in contrast to the essentially contingent states and relations found in nature and described by the mathematical and natural sciences. Something more like Vico’s idea returns again in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Hegel’s concept of objective mind is extracted from its surrounding developmental ‘grand narrative’ and treated more as a descriptive category.

It was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), following Friedrich Schlegel, who consolidated hermeneutics in a systematic form, establishing the term understanding (Verstehen), which had been used by Chladenius and which has survived as standard usage in English-language social science discourse, and making it central to interpretation—understood as a more systematic activity. Interpretation here involves both the linguistic understanding of meaning and a psychological understanding of the author’s intention. Schleiermacher introduced the distinction between technical and more developed or speculative forms of interpretation and formulated the much-discussed principle that it should be possible to understand an author better than he understood himself. Schleiermacher’s contribution was made the central and culminating point of the account of ‘the rise of hermeneutics’ given by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), with whom hermeneutics becomes central to the self-definition of what he called the human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften. In these sciences, as Dilthey put it, the mental activity of humans and of some other animals, and its products, can be understood.

Dilthey and his contemporary, the philosopher of history J. G. Droysen (1808–84), developed what we would now call a research program for history and the other human sciences based on the distinctiveness of human psychic expressions and the understanding of those expressions. In a move that was to become a definitional feature of later interpretive social science, Dilthey, like Schleiermacher, emphasized the continuity between everyday understanding and more formal processes of interpretation. His distinction between the natural and human sciences was developed in large part in opposition to Comtean positivism, which had become influential, even in the German-speaking countries, by the middle of the nineteenth century. In a parallel, but more methodological formulation, two other neo-Kantian thinkers, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, argued that the study of culture is essentially concerned with individual processes and relating them to shared human values, whereas the natural sciences are concerned with general laws about objects which are essentially remote from questions of value. We are interested, for example, in the French Revolution, not just as a member of a class of revolutions exhibiting certain common features (this would be, for Rickert, a natural-scientific mode of approaching it), but as a unique event embodying, and perhaps also violating, certain crucial human values.

This opposition between positivism and methodological dualism, and more particularly between causal explanation, analyzed in terms of universal regularities, and ‘understanding’ comes to structure the emergent human or social sciences, as the term ‘culture’ increasingly gives way to ‘society’ or ‘sociation’ (Vergesellschaftung). There is a fairly strong line of influence from Rickert to Max Weber, both directly and also through his friend Georg Simmel, who discusses our knowledge of the social world in terms that foreshadow social constructionist theory.

Max Weber’s personal development from economic and legal historian to sociologist continues the encounter between hermeneutics and the social sciences which had been a dominant feature of the late nineteenth century, and he also develops a middle position on the issue of methodological dualism, as he had earlier on the related opposition in economic theory (the Methodenstreit) between the pursuit of a systematic laws and a more interdisciplinary and historical approach. For Weber, as he put it in an early essay, ‘the course of human action and human expressions of every sort are open to an interpretation in terms of meaning which in the case of other objects would have an analogy only at the level of metaphysics’ (Weber 1975, pp. 217–8). He therefore later defines sociology, in the first sentence of his major work ‘Economy and Society,’ as a science which aims at an interpretative understanding of action in order thereby to understand its course and its effects. Whether by this Weber means that explanatory understanding is itself a form of causal explanation, or merely complementary to it, the crucial point for him is that explanations of social phenomena must be both ‘causally adequate’ and ‘meaningfully adequate.’

For Weber, then, our access to knowledge of the social world is importantly different from our knowledge of nature. However, it is not, in his view, any less objective. He heroically attempts to hold together Rickert’s principle that our perspectives on cultural phenomena, and our knowledge of them, are shaped by values (based for Weber on ultimately unground-able existential choices), with the idea that the social sciences can attain a bedrock of solid and ‘value-free’ knowledge which would have to be accepted, as he sometimes curiously puts it, ‘even by a Chinese.’

Weber insists that it is the intentions and purposes (subjective meanings) of human actors which define their actions and which therefore have to be under- stood by the historian or sociologist, but he moves rapidly to the construction of a system of ideal types of action-orientation less limited than that found in economic theory but still substantially dependent on it.

Weber’s synthesis was pulled apart from both sides in the decades following his early death in 1920. At one pole, there was now a more stridently naturalistic and indeed reductionist variant of positivism: the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle, in whose ‘unified science’ the statements of all sciences should be ultimately reducible to material-object language or to statements in physics; Verstehen was of no more importance, in Otto Neurath’s vigorous formulation, than a good cup of coffee which sustains the social scientist.

From the other direction, Alfred Schutz initiated the tradition of social phenomenology, and what is often loosely called ‘hermeneutics’ in the context of the social sciences, with a book published in Vienna in 1932 with the title The Meaningful Constitution of the Social World. Schutz felt that the problem with Weber’s ideal types was not that they were insufficiently scientific, but precisely the opposite: Weber was too quick to impose them on the phenomena he described, paying insufficient attention to their grounding in acts of typification performed by ordinary members of society. For Schutz, the social scientist is merely constructing second-order typifications based on those already carried out in the life-world. This theme was taken up by the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch in the USA, where Schutz had also settled, and by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967), who finally put the term ‘social construction’ on the map, offering in the guise of a sociology of knowledge a paradigm more directly adapted to use in social research. By the time Schutz’s first book was republished, in Germany in 1970 and in the USA in 1967, the way had been prepared by his own later work and by Berger and Luckmann (1967).

The middle decades of the twentieth century replay many of the debates which had dominated the second half of the nineteenth century. Droysen’s complaint, in a letter of 1852, about the rise of what he called ‘crass positivism,’ and his crusade against it in a course which he taught from 1857 onwards, is echoed by antinaturalist social science just over a hundred years later. Social phenomenology also of course had affinities with the well-established minority North American tradition of symbolic interactionism, which also experienced a certain resurgence in the 1960s with, for example, the republication of the work of G. H. Mead and that of Herbert Blumer, and also the publication of various studies by Erving Goffman. But where the interactionists tended not to spend time on formal critiques of empiricism, Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967) was more aggressive. A former student of the structural functionalist Talcott Parsons, Garfinkel was led by his study of the deliberations of a trial jury to emphasize, like Schutz, the importance of practical reasoning in everyday situations. He showed that our drive to interpret leads us to impute a meaning even to random processes in the social world, as in one of his later experiments in which an interviewer playing the role of a counsellor replied to the clients’ questions by a random ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ leading them into more and more contorted interpretative efforts. The production of meaning is at the same time the production of social order—Parsons’ major concern. Unlike his former teacher, however, Garfinkel insisted that social actors are not simply bearers of their social roles (‘cultural dopes’), but active subjects obliged to practice social analysis in order to function in everyday society.

Social phenomenology found a somewhat unexpected ally in a convergent move within analytic philosophy. Beginning on the margins of the Vienna Circle, Ludwig Wittgenstein came to abandon the simple conception of a picturing relation between propositions and the world, and was drawn into a more sensitive and holistic analysis of the practicalities of ‘language-games’ based on implicit rules and embedded in what he enigmatically called ‘forms of life.’ An important book by the Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch (1958) drew the consequences for social theory, using Max Weber, as Schutz had done, as one of the foils for his argument. For Winch, knowing a society meant learning the way it is conceptualized by its members. He thus revived the central principle of nineteenth century German historicism, according to which every age must be understood in its own terms. Winch directly identified himself with the German idealist tradition by insisting that social relations are ‘like’ logical relations between propositions (1958, p. 126) as well as, more concretely, with an ethnographic field-work approach.

Hermeneutic theory itself also took a new turn with the ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–), whose Truth and Method, published in 1960 and translated into English in 1975, insists, in opposition to historicist hermeneutics, on the practical dimension of interpretation, conceived in Heidegger’s sense of an ‘encounter’ between the ‘horizon’ of the interpreter and that of the text itself. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is thus conceived in opposition to the methodological emphasis of traditional hermeneutic theories and their concern with the accuracy of interpretation. Gadamer’s aim is to describe the underlying process, an existential encounter between two perspectives or horizons of expectation, which makes interpretation possible in the first place. Understanding is not just a matter of immersing oneself imaginatively in the world of the historical actor or text, but a more reflective and practical process which operates with an awareness of the temporal and conceptual distance between text and interpreter and of the ways in which the text has been and continues to be reinterpreted and to exercise an influence over us. This effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte), which traditional historicist hermeneutics tends to see as an obstacle, is for Gadamer an essential element that links us to the text. Our pre-judgments or prejudices are what make understanding possible.

Although Gadamer has often stressed that his philosophical hermeneutics, with its origin in Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology, is distinct from hermeneutics as a technique of interpretation, his approach clearly poses a challenge to more traditional conceptions of hermeneutics. These differences are brought out in particular in Gadamer’s exchanges in the 1960s with Emilio Betti. The alternative conception of the human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften put forward in Gadamer’s work also made it central to Jurgen Habermas’ reformulation of the logic of the social Sciences (Habermas 1983. Habermas welcomed Gadamer’s critique of hermeneutic objectivism, which he saw as the equivalent of positivism in the philosophy of the natural sciences, and also his stress on the totalizing character of understanding. For Habermas, however, Gadamer’s stress on the fundamental nature of language, expressed in his claim that ‘Being that can be understood is language,’ amounted to a form of linguistic idealism. Together with Gadamer’s stress on the importance of tradition and his rehabilitation of the category of prejudice, this suggested an ultimately conservative approach which was unable to deal with the systematic distortion of communicative processes by relations of power and domination. Habermas and Gadamer debated these issues in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Bleicher 1980); more recent theorists have tended to stress the compatibility of hermeneutics and critical theory in a conception of critical hermeneutics (Thompson 1981, Outhwaite 1987). More recently, Gadamer also engaged briefly with the French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose conception of interpretation is more skeptical.

Habermas’ version of ‘critical theory’ can be seen, along with critical realism and Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory, as one of three particularly influential attempts in the final third of the twentieth century to reconcile, as Max Weber had done at the beginning of the century, the rival claims of explanation and understanding in the social sciences. Habermas, along with his close collaborator KarlOtto Apel, argued for a complementarity between an empirical-analytic approach oriented to the explanation, prediction, and control of objectified processes and a hermeneutic approach concerned with the extension of understanding, in an emancipatory model of critical social science, instantiated by psychoanalysis and the Marxist critique of ideology, which aims at the removal of causal blocks on understanding. Much of this remains in his more recent theories of reconstructive science and communicative action.

Critical theory tends towards a dualism of natural and social science, but in an increasingly muted form. The assumption that opposition to positivism also entailed dualism or antinaturalism was however also put in question in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the realist metatheory of science developed by Rom Harre and Roy Bhaskar (1975). Both Harre and Bhaskar, like Habermas, were substantially motivated by the desire to undermine positivistic theories and approaches in the social sciences. Harre and Secord (1972) developed a philosophy for social psychology based on the work of the later Wittgenstein and the analytic philosophy of language practiced at Oxford by J.L. Austin. Ordinary language, they argued, is better suited to the description of the mental processes of social actors than apparently more scientific artificial terminology, and they drew attention to models of research practice of this kind in the work of Goffman, Garfinkel, and others.

Harre and Bhaskar were in any case interested in giving a more adequate account of science as a whole, in a world composed of relatively enduring structures and mechanisms. Some of these could be isolated in scientific experimentation, given the contingent existence of Homo sapiens and Homo scientificus. An important aspect of the realist programme developed by Harre, Bhaskar, and others was a conception of explanation as involving not an essentially semantic reduction of causal statements to general laws but a reference to the causal powers of entities, structures, and mechanisms. Causal tendencies might or might not be outweighed by countervailing tendencies, and two causal tendencies may neutralize one another, as do the centrifugal force of the earth’s rotation and its gravitational attraction, with the convenient consequence that human beings and other animals are safely anchored to the earth’s surface.

This and other features of realism meant that the whole issue of naturalism could be rethought. Human beings could be seen as having causal powers and liabilities, just like other entities; it no longer mattered so much that their relations rarely sustained any universal generalizations of an interesting kind, but only sets of tendencies regular enough to be worth exploring. The fact that many of the entities accorded causal force in social scientific explanations were necessarily unobservable was not, as it was for empiricism, a problem of principle. And the understanding of meaning could, as Bhaskar put it, be seen as in some ways equivalent to measurement in the natural sciences. Finally, it seemed natural to include among the causes of human action the agents’ reasons for acting—reasons which must be understood as far as possible.

The realist critique of traditional epistemology found an echo in social theory, notably in the work of Anthony Giddens, who had become similarly impatient with the residues of positivist social science as well as the more radical contentions of social constructionism. Giddens’ conception of the ‘duality of structure’ was designed to replace the traditional dichotomies between theories of social structure and social change, the micro–macro divide, and between interpretive and more structural approaches. Approaches like these which aim to mediate between pure hermeneutics and more naturalistic conceptions of social science coexist, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, with more explicitly hermeneutic or phenomenological conceptions (see e.g. Soeffner 1989, Muller-Doohm and Jung 1993). Hermeneutics in a broader sense continues to exist as a major research tradition in the humanities, as well as a minority one in the social sciences (Shapiro and Sica 1984). More importantly perhaps, social scientists that would not sign up to an explicitly hermeneutic program have at least accepted the importance of hermeneutic issues.

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