Hermeneutics: the Art of Understanding and Interpreting
by Hans-Georg Gadamer
This is taken from the video of the lecture given on November 24th, 1978 at York University, Toronto. The lecture was delivered at the conference "Hemeneutics and Structuralism: Merging Horizons" which was the same conference from which the DVD "Voegelin in Toronto" was taken. Nicholas William Graham organized the original conference in 1978 and has kindly prepared the transcription for our use here at VoegelinView. Professor Graham is President of the Northrop Frye Society. This is the first part of a two part article.
Part 1
Understanding as a Natural Gift
Well, of course, the first thing I have to say is that I cannot read a paper because my English is too bad and I know by experiences that improvisatory speaking is more tolerable. So you understand that the improvisatory character of my speech is legitimated by my own limitations. On the other hand, I have it easy by the fact that this morning Fred Lawrence1 gave a very comprehensive outline of the background of my own thoughts in combination, of course, with his own interests and thoughts. And so, I think, I can do what you will expect the most in this conference — to speak exactly about literary texts and the task of understanding them.
Well, you know, hermeneutics, as I renewed this word in past years, is the art of understanding and interpreting. And it is parallel with rhetoric. To speak and to understand speech are obviously two corresponding activities and excellences of human beings.
And so, the first we can learn from this quite trivial remark: that is, that understanding and interpreting is not, in the first place, an art in the sense of a scientific art or skill. It is the same as in rhetoric; without some natural talent for speaking and rhetoric, no good rhetoric will come out. And good rhetoric is at least, in a certain sense, a perfection of a natural gift, and not at all a man who learned all the general rules and figures of rhetorical skill, which were discovered especially in the Greek culture, in this culture of the most speakable of all languages of the world, as Nietzsche said in a famous statement.2
And so it is clear that rhetoric, at least, is not first of all an application of general insights to concrete cases. And, I think, we should learn from it that understanding is a natural gift. There are people who have this natural gift of hermeneutics in their own heart as to the use of language — of the use of the word in the late 18th century — proves sometimes people who feel how others are and what they think and what they expect as appeal or as consolation or whatever it may be. This empathy, this natural gift of synesis, in Greek “synesin,” is certainly not a method. And to speak about the method of rhetoric seems to me absolutely no more natural than to speak about a method of hermeneutics.
The subordinated function of the general rules, in both aspects, is absolutely undisputable: it is quite clear; and, obviously, both are the two sides of this natural structure, dialogical structure of human beings: to have speech. To live together on the basis of speech, includes, of course, mutual understanding. And, in this way, hermeneutics has its place very deeply rooted in the anthropological excellences of human beings.
Well, of course, that does not mean that hermeneutics did not accept the special relevance and a special function when culture became something where writing and reading existed. And so, we can indeed see, in the whole history of hermeneutics, we have two quite obvious sections of this history: of course the old Greek and Christian task to appropriate the heritage of the classical and humanistic Greek time and of early Christianity. This is the hermeneutics of medieval times, which as you know was a special system of allegoric and anagogic interpretation, which was connected with the appeal and the function of the Holy Scripture and the message of the Church.
From Rhetoric to Hermeneutic
In the humanistic time, then, we have a new turning and there we have a real transition from rhetoric to hermeneutic. It was with Melanchthon3 and you know, of course, why in this 16th century the art of reading and the art of writing had a new relevance. It was the Reformation; it was the discovery of printing; it was the widespread skill of reading; and the religious function of it in the universal priesthood of the Christian men in the various interpretations of the Holy Scripture and, of course, for very, very many other reasons it was quite clear that in the late humanistic era writing and reading became more and more the dominant form of the art of speech.
And so, it is not by contingency that Melanchthon in his lectures was talking about rhetoric. In his three books of rhetoric he forgets in the ongoing discourse of his teaching, forgets completely that he is speaking about rhetoric, not about the interpretation of writings. And in this way, indeed, hermeneutics is the natural continuation of the art of speaking in our literary times.
Of course, it is needless to develop what I said very often and is now, I think, quite common that in this Protestant evolution of the development of theology, of the Holy Scripture in the rejection of Tradition: sola scriptura sui ipsius interpres and in the parallel fact that the modern states needed in the ongoing process of economic development, an equalizing, a homogenized jurisdiction in the place of the traditional forms of law and punishment, and so on. And that was the paradigm of the Roman law which motivated new efforts to adapt the Roman law to the home laws of the European states in the same period.
And so we have two streams of hermeneutics that were recognized: the theological hermeneutic and the juridical hermeneutic, both going on from that time until today. It is clear that there are two concerns: the Bible written in two different foreign languages and the Roman law with its own historical and political involvements. Both, of course, needed interpreters and adaptation to the concrete demands of the time.
German Romanticism and Hermeneutics
And so, I think, it is not surprising that at the end of the 18th century, when the Hellenic, Greek tradition, broke down at the beginning of the movement of the Enlightenment, with the French Revolution, and with the expectations at the time of the Rationalism, I think it is quite comprehensible that at this time the German Romanticism reestablished hermeneutics as a universal discipline. Because, when the alienation is universal, then also, the task to overcome the alienation is universal.
And so, Schleiermacher 4 was the first to introduce the general task of hermeneutics as appropriation, as overcoming misunderstanding, as finding agreement in social life as well as against the tradition and the texts.
Later, for reasons I will not discuss at the moment, the heritage of Schleiermacher became more and more literary. Heritage means that his impulse was resumed and continued by thinkers of the Historical School, of the new Humanities, the Geisteswissenchaften as we Germans learned to call it. And in this line, Dilthey5 then was the representative figure who worked out a hermeneutics as the special, methodical core for understanding the humanities. (August Böckh,6 that great philologist, collected the whole tradition before Dilthey did it in a representative form.)
And then, I think it was in our century that the narrowness of this foundation of having hermeneutics' task to interpret the text becomes a game, and irrelevant.
It was the special merit of Heidegger7 to expand the view of Dilthey and to base the skill of understanding and interpreting in the existential structure of human beings. So it is just our own excellence to be futurists by definition, to be projecting towards our own possibilities and to experience the limitations of our self-projecting in the future. And it means, of course, the limitations of our heritage of the past.
I think this temporal structure of human beings, to be projecting and to be “thrown” in their own life conditions, was a new, deeper foundation of the whole task of hermeneutics.
And you see immediately in this newer foundation, it became absolutely clear that hermeneutics is not the renewal of idealistic dreams of the identity of the object and the subject, of the full transparence of the resistant reality for the human mind. It was quite clear, in the first attempt of Heidegger, that it was a finitude of human beings and therefore the restricted and limited character of all our interpretation of facticity which makes our own efforts what they are.
In this line, my own contribution consisted especially in the attempt to elaborate the structure of the Dialogue as the living source of language, of communication, and of understanding. And in this context, I developed in a certain continuation of things that were done by Collingwood: the logic of question and answer.8 But not in the trivial sense in which it was simplified in the description of Collingwood who described the technique of his own discoveries as one of the leading historians of Great Britain. He describes in a very convincing way how he made first his considerations about the lines [tracks] made in Roman Britain and how one could expect them to be at such and such a distance, one from the other, places [where] a new castle could be expected; and so formulated the question before he began his excavations and then the tremendous success of them.
Though it is a very simple illustration, I think in our field the situation is much more complicated, because it is here not so clear in the case of Texts. Who is the first speaker? Who is the first questioner? Who gives the first answer? There seems to be an ongoing process of exchanges and the life of the humanities, of the human condition [that] consists exactly in the ongoing process of questioning and answering and answering and questioning.
That seems to me — so far — a contribution. And I tried then to develop this model of dialogue and of linguisticality as a basic structure of human word experience, so it is no longer a special methodology of the humanities; but it is the basic approach we have to our world, because nobody has his experiences in splendid isolation, without learning first a language, and by learning the language, learning the word.
The Literary Text
But now, to our Subject!
Of course, one can say a text is nothing else than written communication. It is true that very often the use of the art of writing consists just in conveying information from one to the other, or even for an exchange of views between one and the other. Then, of course, the written is a form of speaking; it is a form of conveying what we would do also in a living form of speech.
And that means that there we have indeed a continuation of the dialogical situation. Every [piece of] information I receive refers to the sender of it and I am the receiver; and I am then the answerer; so the process of communication goes on: even through the form of the written text. Of course, with some new conditions: it is a loss and it is a gain, in the written form of communication.
The loss is obvious: that all that modulates, that makes persuasive by gesture, by modulation, by the occasion, and all that, is no longer helpful in conveying or transmitting our opinions. Certainly, therefore, to write a letter is a little more difficult than to make small talk; but obviously this loss of the combined modulation by our gesturing attitude is compensated in a way by the fixed form and the idealized form of written texts.
So, we are not only exposed to our reconstruction of the speaker and writer but we are also exposed to the meaning of the text in itself — I mean — by an anonymous writer, by somebody who wrote it down, and we can nevertheless understand it, i.e., these writings. But you see, a real problem is not involved in this modification of writing from a hermeneutical point of view; it remains, as a matter of fact, the continuation of this interaction between the questioner and the answerer, and, I think, it remains true that we would never understand the letter we receive without immediately presupposing: Why does he say it? What is the question he answers?
But now, and this is, of course, our topic — Literary Texts. I am sorry I cannot entertain any doubts concerning the excellence of literary texts. They are standing texts. We feel it immediately when a text goes beyond this occasional function of information. And perhaps it is also clear that the art of writing which is demanded for literary texts is a much higher standard of use of language and ordering of ideas, so that the text gains its own unity and life, just by linguistic means.
I like to refer to the authentic meaning of “text.” “Text” means something where the different lines of the text creator are no longer visible but they are now a new unit of textual material. In the same way, I would say in a literary text the lines and letters of the text are no longer visible evidence of the words and especially sounds. But the text is speaking in the moment in which the melody of the whole and the meaning of the whole is captured by the reader.
That seems to be a new situation, of course; especially, for my own hermeneutical schema of the dialogue and the dialogical logic of question and answer. How is it with these standing texts? Against some trends of today, I would say that texts are works. And, you know, a work is something that is detached from its maker; even the craftsman is not sovereign over against his fabrications. The consumer of it: he can use it and abuse it; he can treat it correctly; he can destroy it quickly.
And so, indeed, that is an old Platonic insight: the user is more sovereign than the maker. Well, in the case of a literary work, literary works are works of art. I know it is all very, very doubtful: how far the dimension of “art” is, in a way, a well defined one. One can say, of course, that there are transitions from ordinary language to the art of writing, and then to reading, and understanding has a similar continuity from the lowest to the highest degree.
That may be right, but nevertheless, I would say there are some quite clear traits. To be a literary text is not self-evident, just by the effort of the writer. And, when he has the illusion (and I think any poet, or such a man has, of course, the illusion) that it is for eternity what he writes down: and, certainly, it is correct to say that he means not merely an immediate address to contemporary people:
“Who is of today? Who is of tomorrow? Many people of tomorrow are from yesterday.”9
And so, the author, of course, realizes that he has to give to his writing a stamp. And it is well known that there are many, many forms in which he can give it: can make it so that the structure as you see meanwhile, 60 years after he said it, that the structure of a text — that is a term of Dilthey — that the structure of the text is indeed unified and unifying and bringing together the manifold facets of appearance, surroundings and meanings, the melody, the statements involved. All that is obviously functioning and the text is, in a way, representing it.
Well, this I think is a fact. It is a work. And I think we have good reason, that by this closed structure of any work; it is, in a way, a world. It is not embedded in the ongoing world without traces of the passing of time. It has a certain simultaneity through the ages, in some excellent cases at least. It is unique. And even its maker should agree with us theoreticians that he is not privileged as an interpreter of his own text.
That, of course, is not very novel. At least the Kantian idea of the genius, who was defined by this excellence, that he did not apply pre-given rules and did not make something in conventional patterns of regularity but that he did it so as if nature inspired him to find out new rules, so that a new crowd of imitators can follow his own original creation.10
So, indeed, genius — you know it’s a religious term, which means in the end that there is no real bridge from the application of rules to the success of it. But there is something like religious inspiration in all the Romantic feeling that is well known is related to this term of genius. I am not a very good friend of this term, because it obscures many things in later literary aesthetics.
But for the first approach, I think it is a good illustration for my point, that interpretation, at least, has nothing to do with the intentions of the writer.
The art of writing, of course, is a special point. And just when an author reaches this autonomy of a living and speaking text, one will class it as literature; and you know even great historians or some great other scientific writers can claim to be classified as a literary work, because they have such evocative power in their own use of descriptive, scientific prose, that it is in a way a self-fulfillment of the presentations which are involved by their own descriptions. So that we prefer a great historian, like Gibbon, at least for my taste, to the newest volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History, because it has so much more life. Well, these are things you are well acquainted with.
If it is so, then, I think the literary text is a partner; a partner for an ongoing dialogue. It is a partner, not least because it is not a question of something alien and un-understandable, that one can overcome by means of information, research work, etc. That is all involved but it is not the central thing. The central thing is obviously the difference between a literary text and an ordinary text. When I read an ordinary text, I know what’s being said and I have done with it, and put it away. 
[This is the first part of a two part article. Part two may be read HERE.]
NOTES
1. Frederick Lawrence of Boston College
2. KGW II/4 (Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke abbreviated as KGW); see Christian Emdem, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body, 2005, p. 14
3. Philipp Melanchthon (1479-1560)
4. Friedrich Schliermacher (1768-1834)
5. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)
6. Phillip August Böckh (1785-1867)
7. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
8. R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943)
9. Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, Part 8, quoting Goethe.
10. Emanuel Kant (1724-1804); the idea of genius is found in the
Critique of Judgment
